a small town in West Germany

We came today to a small town in West Germany to stay with family, my out-laws, who are champion collectors. Outside the door stands the Christmas tree, an actual tree cut at the throat and still wrapped in its net bedding, because as mother-out-law promised, “We left it for you both to decorate the tree.” Two years ago we were here for the first time, my first time, and she broke the ice – that winter, actual literal ice – by leaving it to me to coordinate decorating of the tree. The old spun and woven and blown decorations came out in their plentiful boxes. These people live in a house that’s been theirs for generations, something hard for me to imagine, and they have filled it with stuff. I asked the son of the house, my beloved, what the name of their strange street meant. It is the last road before the fields and we saw a pheasant bent forward and clucking to himself crossing worriedly from one shorn side to the other, as though pursued by tax collectors. “Ah,” he said. “Well it means an old execution place of the Germanic peoples; in the forest.” “Gosh, well I am so glad I asked about that. What a bummer it would have been if I had Forgotten to Ask.”

A couple of hours into our visit after plates of breads and cheeses (three kinds of bread, two of cheese, and five kinds of preserved meat) I began to nudge him and wheedle with my toes until he finally realised, “Oh! Wir gehen gerne auf den Weihnachtsmarkt, we’d love to go onto the Christmas market, might just run in there on their second-last night, ok with you? Mamma can I take your car?”

The Weihnachtsmarkt for me is the entire point of our trip. It’s the reason I am in Germany. This is what my partner used to twist my arm into the winter again, when we could have been lying in our hammock in the sweet greasy green southern hemisphere, feasting on mangoes as they fell off the tree overhead. We drove in, on the wrong side of the road, round errant curves each festooned with the needle trees dark and sore which never lose their leaves despite the cold. Several times I asked, “Where are we going?” just to have him answer, patiently, humouring me, “I think we’re going onto the Weihnachtsmarkt.” We walked onto an old town so medievally beautiful that the first time I was brought here through the old arch I burst into tears. As we explored the golden stone lit by street lanterns I forgot the crowded family house where in manoeuvring my suitcase through the door I joggled an unevenly-built shelf and three different hair dryers and four hairbrushes fell to the floor. I forgot all family obligation. I forgot all junk everywhere. We were in the beauty, in the ages, in the kings. Once more. People, mainly couples, drifted dark as feathers down the narrow winding streets, arm in arm. Golden lights, bottle-end window fixtures, deep restful casements and star-bright lanterns. Windows lit with all kinds of crafts and art. Rounding a final corner we came into the burst of flame that is the yearly Christkindlmarkt, market of the little Christ child: people gathered, people standing, people laughing and drinking and stamping their feet. This year it’s not all that cold, I think I must have imagined that last bit. The stalls hung with lanterns wound all round the little cobbled streets where no cars go and people ordered salmon smoked over the flame, white forcemeat sausages and star-shaped bread rolls, gingerbread hearts, eggnog “mit Schuss” (with a shot – of rum, or amaretto); Glühwein. Everyone was jolly and, this not being Berlin, they couldn’t care how cool or uncool they seemed, they were just having a simply uproarious time on the close-packed stones, throwing their heads back, wearing their Santa hats. So much conversation, all in German, some few leafless trees bestowing their shadows underneath the venerable church.

“That one was built in 800 AD,” he said, as I lit into the dream and did not come back. Anyway where is there to come back to? only the eternal present, whereas old Germany presents a time immemorial, something I had forgotten and feel now coming alive along my veins as though fishing lights dipped into me and brought the life swimming to the surface, every Christmas I have had “in which” (I told him) “we ate salad” now fell away and the stars we cut out of quartered paper made sense, the blobs of snow we’d stickytaped on strings hanging from the ceiling in the tropics – cotton-wool snow – all of a sudden had a purpose, everything fell clear. A quintet of young men with brass in their mouths were playing and it was a song I recognised, “no,” I thought, still in my trance, “that is not a song, that is a hymn.” My partner asked, what is the difference, and I sang it to him then could not stop: O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him… it’s not so easy to write a melody that good. “I’m going to be singing that all the way home, I warn you, it is so beautiful like an old wine in the throat, so if you’ve any complaints let us hear them now and then you’ll hold your peace.” “No complaints at all,” he said, bending tenderly round me as though I had been a bell.

I noticed on every unfolding gold-lighted stall that the Germans love kitsch, they just love it! “Don’t you have kitsch in Australia?” “We have junk. Plenty of junk, and trash. But your trash has a kind of sentimentality to it that is all your own.” He laughed low in his throat. We jounced home slowly, gently, through the medieval town under the tall pink facade of the building that more resembles a cake, past the outer streets where cars travel on the cobblestones as rippingly as though they had, or so it sounds, each four flat tyres. I remembered the word and reefed it out, “Reifenpanne,” a flat tyre, and the resurrection of this long-ago-acquired German word touched me and blessed me, as though there were endless space in my mind, as though life stretched on eternally.