Interlude

Sep 24, 2023

At the beginning of August, I realized that 10 years of accumulated credit-card points would cover my flights and just over a week’s worth of hotels, all of which would cost me just $10.99 apiece. I didn’t really have time to go anywhere. But I was about to snap, so I decided to disappear instead. I filed all my articles and flew to Paris, then a delayed train caused me to miss a cascade of connections into the heart of the Black Forest. But eventually my train to Strasbourg arrived and I set off, racing through the old battlefields of Europe under skies so low they almost kissed the ground.

I worked some, Zoomed into a few meetings, wrote very little, walked everywhere, wandered in and out of churches and art museums. I wrote in my journal only a handful of times.

Wednesday, August 16, Gengenbach, Germany

It’s nine in the morning and already heat is settling over the town, stilling everything. At the train station, every patch of shade is occupied. I am sitting in the dark quadrangle cast by an advertisement for Sonne, Sauna und Sommerfrische holidays (the appeal, at the moment, is somewhat limited), weeds tickling my legs, looking across the tracks at an abandoned building with shattered windows, the kind you find outside almost every city in Central Europe. A casualty of the war or a casualty merely of time and neglect? It looks like a boxer, empty-eyed, with a mouth full of broken teeth.

The town is about the size of a postcard, and as picturesque. Walk out in any direction and you find yourself ascending through vineyards in to the Black Forest.

Yesterday, I hiked for hours, meeting no one, and tipped myself into a strange reverie. You look down to one side into ever-deeper darkness and on the other side, you look up toward the light, threading a narrow path between the two. Meanwhile, it's so quiet you can almost hear the sap ooze. Every quarter hour, faraway church bells ring out, an equivocal summons. It’s impossible to imagine descending, for any reason. What salvation?

Unfortunately, I’d forgotten something: euros. I had a little pocket change left over from a past trip, but I expected to put everything on my credit card. Germany had other ideas. I’ve seen every variation of credit-card rejection at this point: no credit cards, no credit cards under some ungodly sum of money I’d never spend, no VISA, yes to VISA but no to American VISAs. So I was rather hungry for the three days I spent in Germany, subsisting on the hotel’s big breakfasts and olives from the grocery and energy bars I’d brought with me.

Nothing wrong with sitting in beautiful Baroque squares eating olives, though, even if a kebab would have been nice.

It’s a pleasure to speak German again after so long, to find words I thought I’d forgotten spilling out of my mouth. At the ruins of a castle in Hausach, I meet an old woman who grew up under the French occupation, who talks to me about growing up in the shadow of a war she doesn’t remember.

In the Stadtkirche Sankt Marien, every surface has been painted. The church is full of dried flowers, whose scent performs the church so that its cool shadows smell sunbaked.

In Freiburg am Breisgau, I talk to a friendly crossdresser at an overlook where the town stretches out below us.

The Münster is an immense Gothic church with a sprightly, airy tower and a dark cavernous interior where Saint George slays the dragon alongside a fabulous red curtain, as though dragon-slaying were something he did every day at noon for the benefit of an audience, where dragon pups snuggle up against the feet of saints. And there is Eve, with her legs coyly crossed, and martyrdoms rendered in cheerful pastels. Every kind of strange creature makes an appearance: warthogs, chameleons, meerkats, lions as docile as eunuchs, spaniels with exquisite curls, even—somehow—Alf?

Back across the border, in Strasbourg, my quality of life improves: I can buy sandwiches and pastries! I feel dumbfounded by my good fortune. That useless strip of plastic works again!

But it’s also stupefyingly hot. The grip melts off my camera before the heat of the day even strikes. And my French is suffering, having been unseated for three days by a language I know much better.