now I don’t want you to get too excited

All my life people have been telling me not to get too excited about things. They say, “I don’t want you to be disappointed.” And the truth is the thing I have so vehemently looked forward to almost never resembles the picture I have built in my mind. It’s often disappointing. But it feels like I experience the same thing twice: in glorious living freshnicolour in my own imagination, and then the worldly version, frangible in a different way, that arises through weather, and temperament, coincidence and sheer human effort.

This afternoon we went out of the house and walked into the forest. There is ice on the ground. It’s all two colours: the listless copper of dead leaves and the warping green of moss. My favourite plant, each mound of it a tiny city. Tramping in silence we passed several small clumps of people with their dogs. My tramping companion who by now knows me rather well asked casually, “What would you have preferred this afternoon? Walk in the forest? Or a nice coffee shop.” “Oh!” I said, “I would love to go to a nice coffee shop.” These while plentiful in Berlin are thin on the ground in the outback towns. “What if I told you there was a coffee shop in the forest? Would you like to visit there, on our walk?” “A coffee shop? In the forest?” This has been a dream of mine for a long while, I always complain there is no coffee shop when we are out walking. I began to imagine what it would be like. “Maybe it’ll be like a little ski chalet, with an open fireplace where you can toast marshmallows on long sticks.” I was hopping with excitement. “Actual sticks, and then when the marshmallow’s toasted you dunk it in your hot chocolate. The hot chocolate comes in steins.” My partner gave me an old-fashioned look. I said, “Maybe there’ll be Swedish girls with white-blonde hair, wearing ugg boots and onesies. Maybe they serve Glühwein!” I grabbed his arm. “I’m so excited about the coffee shop I can hardly breathe.” “Do you want to see some old ruins, an old castle?” he said. “It would mean putting off the coffee shop a while longer. About a half an hour.” We cut across the main path and took a winding way uphill. As we rose up from road level we could see a couple of triangular German houses built under a clump of willows, with a little brook running past in front. “That’s where the hobbit-folk live,” I told him, “and in the warmer months they put up a maypole and dance around it by moonlight. Those fields are where they grow their magic beans.” “How can you tell?” “Oh,” I said, “you can see it just by the look of the houses.”

The castle is actually an eighth-century farmhouse built within an acre of fields, the whole pasturage surrounded by high stone walls on a hilltop, with round look-out posts on all its corners. The dry stone walls have worn away and remain in only three or four places, but a large sign on the path up the hill shows how it once would have been. It was so cold on the hilltop, with a view of the green countryside all around. The ground was slushy. The wind was icy. The path downhill was treacherous. Not far now to the coffee shop, I thought. “Maybe they’ll serve tankards of ale, warmed by a red hot poker.” “A poker?” We were speaking in English. “It’s kind of a stick made of metal. You heat up the poker in the fire til it’s glowing hot, and then you just plunge it into your mug, to heat the ale.” “Really?” “Yes, in medieval times. Because otherwise, it was so miserable, living in these drafty stone houses. No heating. Dressed in stinking animal furs.” He stopped, grabbing a tree branch to prevent himself careening down the hill. “Look: try not to get too excited about it. I doubt they serve tankards of ale. And they might not even be open.” Indeed the buildings looked medievally dingy and unlit. There is a very deep stream that rushes by in front, with an old earthern bridge trampled over an arch of stone; the mill wheel stands motionless and the water pours past fast and loud. A granary or old barn built on the other side displays its mullioned windows. We went round the side of the third building, which had a series of unlit lamps stationed in its tiny ground-level windows. It looked like an old wayside inn. The side door had thick panes of glass let into it and from inside a faint light was beckoning.

An overweight nun was taking coffee with her family. Our dog growled at their dog. A few growling Germans were seated outside in a kind of glass atrium that had been thrown out of the stone wall and clad, inside, with green plastic astroturf. They were smoking with gusto and beers. There was no one else about, but from the kitchen out the back a sound of clashing pans and shouting came through the green-painted door. It all seemed to have been redecorated with great enthusiasm in the mid-90s. We sat down at a long table made from fake wood and after a leisurely interval one of the men smoking out in the gardenhouse came and asked us, “Was darf’s sein?” He had filter coffee, teabag tea, and apple strudel, served with a distinctly canned custard. There was a real fire burning, in one of those glass-fronted cast iron stoves. I guess it should have been rather disappointing; I guess if I learned to rein in my imagination I would have only the stolid reality to endure, and never the wraithlike phantasy. On the other hand many’s the time the world in its unreachable immediacy has blown my own thought-pictures aside like so many dull orange leaves. I watched the dogs on our way home to the car park sniffing and prancing at each other; the little dozing houses; the burbling stream. I couldn’t work out if it was reasonable to expect myself to apply the control of imagination that I use, say, when someone’s describing a painful operation over dinner and I need to keep eating, to random coffee houses in the German woods. Castles collapse in forests, you know, as well as in the air. All I know is that that chalet with its steaming mugfuls of cocoa is mine and nothing short of Alzheimers can ever take it away from me.