Earlier this week my sister and I received an email from our former boss, who sent birthday wishes to my sister and briefly caught us up on his life. It made me feel a lot better, because I've been quite lonely lately.
The fact that a weekly Friday work meeting that I was dreading has been postponed, also helped me feel more mellow on the weekend.
*
The first part of Saturday was dedicated to the 1980s historical experiment, rather loosely.
Aside from wearing a striped red t-shirt and a flowered, pastel-coloured Laura Ashley dress indoors, I bought the New York Times (international edition) and went to the street market, where I bought turnips, spinach, creamed honey, and incense sticks from India.
I also bought leather gloves, not because they're Eighties but just because I wanted them. I didn't have any mittens or gloves of my own: my mother was figuratively tearing out her hair over this. Generally I tap my fingers against the bicycle handlebars when out on cold winter days, but it's still uncomfortable and people do look at me a bit funny when I'm revisiting the 5-finger exercises from my piano lesson days while transiting.
Besides I sat down at the typewriter again. In my touch-typing lessons booklet I have reached the rather dreary exercises where I need to type out a paragraph, identify the words where I'd made mistakes, and then type out the word dozens of times until I get it right. Then try to type the paragraph again, this time without a mistake.
Because it would have felt tactless to do so for the sake of a mere experiment, I didn't try to mark the events of Chernobyl in any way, but of course that was a notable event in 1986. Also one that doesn't feel too far in the past considering how the question of nuclear safety has been revived in Ukraine lately.
*
But I returned to 2022 early in the evening. Last week my voice coach had asked me if there's anything I actually do for fun, purely for fun, outside of work — without worrying about doing it well or getting it right. It has Made Me Think.
So I read mass market genre novels, and watched two kitschy but nice Christmas films (three words: Royal Christmas Nanny).
Besides I followed along a 1/2 hour of ballet warmup exercises. My right ankle seems to be strained at present, so jumping on it was not a great idea, but at least I stretched it out to try to relax the muscles. The ballet slippers were also good at keeping my feet warm: my room is probably usually below 15° Celsius now.
***
In the end I woke up well past 11 a.m. today. It was later than I'd like, also not typical for the 1700s period that I am researching on Sundays these days, but it was also a lovely sign that I am actually using the weekend to relax. Rather than attempt to dress up in attire that's historically accurate for the year 1705, I plunged into cooking and eating.
For our late breakfast/noon-day meal I made a Swabian pancake recipe that's thick and plummy like the southern Kaiserschmarrn, from the book of Baroque cooking. 375 g flour, 4 eggs, 1/2 litre milk, plus butter for frying and cinnamon-sugar.
We had it with coffee, croissants from the bakery, and in my case with an apple juice-sparkling water mix that I pretended was ale.
Later in the day I cycled (i.e. rode my trusty steed) to the southwestern part of Berlin that used to be a village until imperial-era academics took over and it eventually transmuted into the Free University in post-war western Berlin.
It has the medieval church in which my parents were married, with its wooden tower that looks a little like a Wild West palisade, and field stones gemming its walls.
It took me a while to find the church. Its tower is low and my orientation in Dahlem isn't great. Amongst other things I mix up the Podbielskiallee with the Pacelliallee.
Along the way I passed the graveyard where Ferrucio Busoni, Marlene Dietrich, and Helmut Newton are buried. This I didn't know at first, but after spotting the archway I had to go and investigate. The yard was busy as women and men were tending the graves and Berliners were taking advantage of the sunshine for a Sunday promenade today.
The boxy graveyard's character is distinctively 19th century, I think. It also has quirky brick buildings that in my view reflect the Victorian Age fascination with death and medievalism. But most of the birches, beeches and other trees on the site are relatively young, apart from an oak that I'm sure must date from 1900 or the 1870s. Rows of flat, tilted, dark grey gravestones lying on the ground mark the graves of around 170 people who died during World War II. At least two of the gravestones just say 'Unknown' ('Unbekannte' or 'Unbekannter') instead of a name and I guessed, perhaps wrongly, that they must have been found in rubble of bombed houses. Later I also discovered knobbly, paler grey standing crosses, also identical to each other in form, that marked graves from the period of World War I — this time they all had men's names on them and I presumed they were soldiers who had fallen in battle.
(On the way back home from Dahlem, I revisited the graveyard, and found Busoni's grave, and paused there a moment.)
In Dahlem itself, I entered the churchyard and I sought out the grave of my grandfather's uncle and aunt (or, cousins-removed?), who'd died young in a car crash in the late 1920s. It was quite moving to think of their children being left behind — which was also the reason why I looked for the grave: the deaths were hard and shocking for the whole family and I wanted to help make sure the couple wasn't forgotten.
Walking very near the walls of the church, I faintly heard an organ, and I think soprano voices, so either a church service was happening or the choir was practicing.
Back outside the churchyard, there is a street median with an 18th-century ice cellar and a later monument, but they were fenced in. So instead I turned to the buildings of the Dahlem farm, which are currently hosting a Christmas market.
While I was vaguely curious about visiting the Christmas market, it was overfilled also with families and elderly people who were waiting to get in. Rather than barge past my frail human brethren for the privilege of inching past market stalls and testing my hard-acquired Covid immunity, looking at purchasable items with only 3.50 Euros in my pocket which in any case I'd have had to relinquish as the cost of entry, I walked a little further to the farm shop. There, to my surprise, I found a single bottle of mead, a drink that has been the object of a long search ever since I began researching the 1700s.
Back at home I cooked a soup of dark roux, onion, caraway seeds and salt according to another Baroque recipe, and sautéed white turnips with their greens and with chopped onion. We ate it accompanied by an organic Pils, also from the Dahlem farm shop, which was one of the best beers I've ever had.
The turnips tasted good, but were otherwise the most embarrassing dish I've ever made. I'd wrongly assumed the greens didn't need careful washing. ... The greens were still sandy. Worse, I found in my own portions a grub and a fruit fly. I warned my family off taking any more.
Then we celebrated the First Advent Sunday by eating gingerbread, Spekulaties, and Dominosteine. I opened up the bottle of mead.
Generally, now that I'm an adult, there are few things that, cleanly prepared, I will not eat or drink. So it was perhaps refreshing (for lack of a better word?) to dislike something. In this case, mead, which to me smelled and tasted like a witchy brew of cabbage, raw alcohol, and honey syrup, and genuinely nauseated me. My mother and brothers — who all found the mead quite tolerable — 'didn't know what I was on about,' to quote the favourite phrase of a British colleague, so maybe it was my mug or a mixture with the remnants of the beer that made it more awful?
In the evening I played the harpsichord again, Advent songs from 1705 or earlier. In the early afternoon I'd played more worldly songs like the admittedly much older song "Greensleeves," and "Greensleeves" formed a poignant soundtrack in my mind during the visits to graveyards later in the day.
It was a relief that there were a lot of songs that I knew, or at least could play, that were already composed by 1705.
Last week I'd mentioned to uncle Pu (the violinist) that I wondered whether tuning the harpsichord would be historically accurate. He drily remarked that people already had ears in the 18th century, and that whether an instrument is well-tempered or not is a different matter. So today I did adjust the strings where most badly needed, and of course the music sounded better.
No offence to Henry Purcell, who in his orchestral works does anticipate the imagination and feeling that I like so much in Antonio Vivaldi, but I'm still impatiently waiting for Bach to finally begin composing properly. Bach is twenty years old in 1705, but nowhere near old enough yet to produce the cantata "Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben", a song that was stuck in my head today too. (At least Händel has already begun composing operas.)
In the early evening, I sat on the stove in the living room holding a mid-1950s clothbound edition of fairy tales, and read a few of Charles Perrault's 17th century stories. They're pretty brutal, needless to say, even if you ignore "Bluebeard": take his short version of "Little Red Riding Hood" and his long version of "Sleeping Beauty" (the prince has a cannibal mother who impedes the Happy Ever After).
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