As fellow blogger and office mate Laurenne Sala so nicely put it (check out her humansarefunny.blogspot.com and spit up laughing), one of the greatest gifts the advertising industry gave me was witnessing the creation of The Illusion, which is pretty much making people buy things - not love, not kindness, not friendship, but things - they don’t really want or need. The pundits at Chiat-Day call it The Disruption, but let’s face it folks, it’s The Illusion, or maybe, The Delusion. It’s magic really, being a Professional at Creating Desire, but how can you not feel a little soulless by the time you call it a day at the office. Our sole drive at the dawn of every workweek is to sell you cars/hamburgers/cream to make old ladies feel like they can avoid Death. Too bad at that. All it takes is a sprinkle of Photoshop and a soundtrack, sexified cinematography, and consumers are suddenly swiping their credit cards, increasing their personal debt or their blood sugar levels. And what’s amazing, it works brilliantly.
So how does this connect to Cologne? When we arrived to meet my friend Birgit and her husband Stefan, all the taxis lined up at the train station were Mercedes Benzes.
In fact, the Mercedes Benz in Germany is like the Ford of America – practical, prevalent, and just part of your standard life purchase like the gorgeous stainless steel knife set that glints with precision in every German kitchen right next to the hand-painted tiles. Everyone driving on a cloud is normal. Damn these people. It made me reflect on the Mercedes Benz ad campaign in the US and its perception of the elite driving those vehicles around the streets of LA. Bah. The silly LA people have bought into The Illusion, because y’all are actually driving German taxis. And it gets worse– if you’re an Audi driver you’re actually driving more or less an equivalent of a Volvo, and if you are driving a BMW, you’re really driving a Honda by German standards.
As we took 20 minutes to load our ten suitcases and bags (the Nordakh family of three was carrying a load for twelve – I guess we’ve truly morphed into an Indian family) onto a minivan Mercedes Benz taxi, the towers of the Cologne Cathedral loomed above us in the rain and windswept square, as in, to truly instill grandiosity and awe. This was the Costco of Christian cathedrals. Everywhere you looked, symbols of Christianity were packaged in bulk. There were dozens of saints in the entire Pantheon of Sainthood positioned like sardines in the arches. These guys wanted to sanctify them all. Apparently, it’s a scientific fact astronauts in space can peer out of their plastic head cases and see these two towers peaking through the area of land designated as Germany. It took around 900 years to complete and obviously a lot of money to do so, which may have been pretty easy to secure given God’s hold on the faithful’s manual resources. Imagine all those little metal hammers clinking on the stone surfaces to create every chin, eyebrow and regal crown. When the bells from its towers bellowed across the square, I could envision the soundwaves bursting all the way to France.
On top of its impressive structure, secured in its marble heart are relics from the Three Wise Men, preserved in a reliquary made of copper and gold and carved with beautiful 3D iconography on all of its sides. Yup, the three guys who discovered Jesus in a haystack. And here I had grown up thinking the legacy of the Three Wisemen was just another Peanuts cartoon during Christmas. I asked Birgitte how the Christians managed to find a tooth or finger or knee bone from them and keep those things preserved for two millennia, since I keep losing some precious item (like a camera or ruining some expensive piece of clothing with soy sauce) over a period of only a year. The tale, like so many others, was one of those Holy Unanswerables that took on such a force of its own, the heads of the church managed to secure a ton of expensive metal and pay homage to it in a box. A big box, since it’s the biggest reliquary in the world.
When we visited the interior of the Cathedral, my son used his tummy to wax the floor and plant his lips down on the beautiful marble mosaics. I have noticed it is becoming a little too habitual for him to clean the floor with his stomach in spacious interiors like airports and cathedrals. You have to adore Motherhood.
(Photo: Here is my son gathering sacred cathedral dust on his stomach. Planting his lips on such saintly ground did not translate into changing his naughty behavior. I wish it did.)
It was of course a real treat to see my friend Birgit again after 18+ years. We had first met during a summer through our parents when I was 16, where we played raucous card games with screaming and hi-fives in the basement of their home in Lahr, with her twin brother Ralf, who was a freckled goof. We spent the August nights watching asteroid showers while lying in the soft fields of the Black Forest, counting them off until we lost track altogether. I had gained 15 pounds that summer eating the three fresh cakes her mom had provided us every night. I wish this could be an exaggeration. One was always a Black Forest cake, a fruit cake, and a fluffy cake. My cheeks ballooned out and never fully recovered for months.
Every winter she had sent me a card with Christmas greeting from Germany, and being German, every card had lovely things like forest cottages surrounded by dense pines, or silver stars with painted sparkles very elegantly streaming across a holiday sky encased in semi-transparent layers of vellum and handwriting in silver ink. I could never understand why her number “1’s” looked like fishhooks, until I realized that every German writes their number 1’s that way. For a couple years I did not receive cards from her, and to be honest, I had never sent her one, until I got a wedding announcement from her two years ago. She was marrying a blond German named Stefan, who had a cute, bespectacled smile in his photo.
(Sidenote: Let me tell you, wedding gift shopping for a German friend is a lost cause at an American mall. Anything top quality, whether salt and pepper shakers, salad prongs, or knives, have the stamp ‘Made in Germany’. Germans, being industrialists, make their salt and peppershakers look like sleek pistons that belong in a BMW. They won’t ever degrade, and you could probably use your German saltshaker to ward off a mugger.)
Birgit had really grown beautiful when she picked us up at the train station; she had red highlights tinting her hair, and she was still tall and regal. Of course, most of the German women I know usually have femurs the length of golf clubs. Her cheeks were accented nicely with very light freckles, and had none of the teenage angst that I felt from her when I last saw her. Back then she was trying out cigarettes as a teenager and had a propensity to dress in black. Now she was dressed in an elegant black coat whose length was at her knees, and helped us shift our bags out of the station. She had bought us multi-colored gummy candy in the shape of the Cathedral towers, which Aamir promptly started chewing on and spitting out, one by one, slowly caking the interior of our luxurious Mercedes Benz taxi with dribble of colored sugar.
Birgit lives in a spacious 3-story apartment near the heart of the city that they rent from Stefan’s parents. The main living room was painted in a soft, subtle shade of lavender with deep purple accents in the pillows and vases, and opened onto a manicured garden. She had hung the off-white wood letters CARPE DIEM above the couch, which was overbaked in my mind after watching Dead Poet’s Society so many times, but I didn’t mention this. The ceilings in the apartment were very tall, and the interior furnishings were proportioned according to the height, so their cabinets and refrigerator had normal widths, but were 2 feet higher than average.
The overall impression, aside from every wall and domestic object emitting marital happiness, was that I felt like a midget - a real midget, aside from being short enough in Germany. Until we got to the basement to wash our clothes, where their washer was a wee white cube with a circular window fashioned for a submarine. When Birgit was throwing our dirty socks in, she admitted she thought this part of the house was haunted with a ghost, and couldn’t stay down there for long times at night.
Climbing the curved stairs up to our room was steep, and Aamir did a one-two shuffle on the narrowest part of them – because the tiny part of the stairs was of course made “just for him” - before taking a tumble. Mom instincts always made me catch him mid-air. The stairwells were lined with charming photos Birgit had taken on her travels around the world, from Italy to Brazil. She put us on the highest story, in a room with slanted walls because it was right under the roof, with a beach theme. Even the blue towels had shell accents that matched the color of the walls and the pictures on the walls, and the actual shells on the white shelves. When I entered the bathroom, it was also accented with white shells, on top of having the most stylish toilet flush I’ve ever seen. Those Germans. When a culture has gone so far to make toilet flushing elegant, you are in the Good Lands.
The first evening of our stay, Birgit and Stefan treated us to one of the more famous drinking caverns in the city called Stur. This place was classically German in every possible way: rooms and subrooms and siderooms with mini-bars and cellars for brewing beer, storing beer, drinking beer and musing on beer, paintings of faded bucolic scenes on the walls, decorated handcrafted ceramic tiling, warm wood stain, handblown colored glass alternating in the windows, tall wood partitions and thick wood tables, and classic chandeliers hanging from every room. With every nook emitting a glow and scents of thick meat and beer, I thought it tragic we didn’t trudge in from a blustering snow storm.
Instead of a waitress emerging with braided coils to serve us, we got a joyously rude, pudgy waiter with circular spectacles and strong arms who made raucously loud jokes. Cologne beer in slender glasses was immediately served, which was very light and bubbly. I ordered beef with apple slices and apple sauce and huge chunks of potatoes. Really, all they did was cut a large potato in half, and serve that portion. I felt full after 5 bites. Abbass, adhering to Muslim standards of halal, was a little miserable with his narrow choice of fish and asparagus, a local specialty. The fish was served cold and felt a little scaley. Abbass pretended to like it, but I knew he wasn’t completely satisfied, given he didn’t even allow himself to drink the beer. The poor guy was at real religious odds in this bastion of pork and alcohol. Aamir bit down on some thick fries before insisting on running outside again and playing in the puddle-filled streets next to the massive cathedral. I chased him with an umbrella, which was completely futile in preventing his pants and bottom from becoming sodden with rainwater.
[photo: That's meat.]
The next morning Birgit proved that she could be just as stellar a host as her mother by providing us a breakfast from Olympus. The table was littered with packets of American cereals, Nutella, boiled eggs in cute handmade ceramic eggcups, fruit salad with Muesli and yoghurt (her recipe), cheese and meat slices, German sausage deliberately served cold, tea, coffee, juice, fresh breads and croissants, honey, and jams. Aamir wasn’t really that hungry. I could have shaken that little man by the shoulders, but what kind of mother would do that to her two-year old? Instead he played with his new red German toy car from Stefan in the living room, and pulled off German philosophy books from the bookshelves, while I wolfed down every single combination of food item possible. I secretly pined for the pork sausage while momentarily considering divorce from my husband, then topped it all off with a slaps of Nutella.
Birgit’s husband Stefan was a real kick who always made the effort to tease his new wife with adoration. He works in copyright law with 10-16 hour work days, but has a sense of humor that goes beyond the straightforward bylines of the profession. Like those I envisioned in law, his blond hair was always neatly combed, his sweaters elegant, and his coat well-fitted, topped off with trim-metal specs. He and Abbass hit it off when he came back a little sweaty in his field hockey suit from the neighborhood park. Before hitting Stur, he tried to coax Abbass into a lovely before-dinner drink, which he classified as a bit of “heaven”, but of course, even in the middle of Europe with no one watching, Abbass was a pooper and politely refused.
Evening-time, I was rearranging some items in our suitcase, when Stefan came downstairs to turn off the lights in the kitchen. He spotted me in my nighties in the hallway. I was caught wearing dark green plaid pants and a dull gray REI sweater that’s probably about a decade old. “Ah,” he said. “You know, Birgit has the same pants. Very erotic!” With a wink he padded upstairs.
I told Birgit the next day. She sighed. “It’s over,” she said. “He thinks he can return to the way it was before.” We had a good laugh. After more than a decade, we had crossed the bridge, falling in love, gotten married, and now were both undergoing the motions of marriage. During our visit, I was lighthearted with the fact that 18 years could pass, and I never really lost the one melody with someone living a continent away. Both Birgit and I had finally shifted into round 2, growing into women, but the melody was the same. She had traveled around the world and had other visitors come to her in return. She talked about how hard her father continued to work in printing despite his age, the trials of ending her first engagement, how she cried after visits with Stefan’s in-laws, but it all worked out in the end. The entire trip to Europe was like that. You see friends in brief but significant chapters. You always hope to share one more glass of wine with them in celebration of life, as it was, and as it is.
More chapters of Cologne coming up.
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