At Eberhard’s we sit outside his mom’s place on a rickety bench with our backs against a stone hut, by the walnut tree. He uses a tree stump for a small table with a crude table top balanced on top and a piece of bark to shimmy it into place. But it’s not level and putting your drink there is risky business. I balance my radler beside the rusty church key and Eberhard uses an old tin can for an ash tray. There are bottle caps in the grass, along with his gray cat Mitzi, who sits beside us purring. And then we just sit there on the bench with the backs of our heads touching the gutter, cars going by every few minutes. Each time we wave, sometimes they stop.

Getting through the night in Eberhard’s dead aunt’s abandoned house is a mental challenge but I’ve done it before and can do it again, if I don’t think about the different levels of the house I haven’t explored and what weirdness might be there. Instead I sleep on the foldout sofa in the sparse front room, with mirrors leaned against the wall and an ample collection of blankets Eberhard’s arranged. It’s so hot you don’t need a blanket but I use one more for protection, to make myself invisible and hide.

In the morning I return across the street to his mom’s to make coffee, and sit on the terrace overlooking the valley as a thunderstorm rolls through. It’s just me and Eberhard’s ashtray, a pair of his shoes that are on the table for some reason, and all the dirty cat food plates with smiley faces and bits of uneaten food. It appears no one has used the kitchen in the traditional sense (to cook) for years. It’s just stacks of empty jam jars, bottles of wine, a strip of fly paper in the corner, rubber bands, a plate full of euro coins, a spider dangling by the sink, a dead fly in a brandy glass. It could really use a woman’s touch.

At the Naturfreund house the night before Eberhard buys dinner and drinks, explains the proper way to toast when you’re drinking Hefeweizen: always touch the bottom of the glasses, not the top. Just like the woman, he says: you push it down. It’s more on the crude side of our joking but I laugh and mom pretends not to hear or can’t.

When Eberhard talks he winces like Robert DeNiro; every word is cut the way one might chop vegetables, each in measured strokes. And that’s because he’s speaking English, which he always does with us; there’s occasional German but it’s probably too frustrating to keep repeating himself and to hear us mangle the language. Words like Dorle where you have to roll the R and hit the “le”just right are a major production and often end in a fight. But if I get enough phlegm at the end of a word like Raibach he’ll elbow me and say ja, genau.

Eberhard teaches me the phrase for heat lightning, and that’s what I go to sleep to, occasional flashes and the sound of him talking to his neighbor across the street, drinking wine on the bench by the hut. I’ll admit I’m glad for the sound of their voices to distract from whatever I might hear in the abandoned house, which is cluttered with random stacks of things left behind by Eberhard’s dead aunt, or from his mom’s house or his apartment, in Freiburg. It’s more the mysterious smell coming from the downstairs that’s worrisome. It’s like concentrated moth balls.

On the drive over mom says she thinks the reason Eberhard has stayed with her even after she tried to break things off is that maybe mom is like the other things Eberhard hoards, he just can’t get rid of anything. I can’t tell if that’s because he’s sentimental or cheap, maybe both.

It can take more than two hours to get to and from Eberhard’s but this time it takes just 51 minutes because we are now following the navigator on mom’s iPhone and no longer the crap GPS in her glove compartment that hasn’t been updated since 2013.

Eberhard greets us at the door and looks amazed we’ve arrived so soon. He quizzes me on the route and if I took the way he told me. Then he says ja, but if you go the autobahn, this is 20 kilometers longer. I say it’s worth it.

After the rain has passed in the morning the puffy clouds are pink, there are smashed plums in the street and cocks crowing, and I think on my walk it’s Monday, so strange I could be working again a week from now, how all this will be resigned to memory.

At the end of his street there’s a house under construction and in the late afternoon several cats are sprawled out in the driveway on their sides, warming themselves on the pavement. They have the look of workers on break, except cats don’t really work. The one with the black nose steals Mitzi’s food, Eberhard says. The rest just look back at us and glare.

It breaks my heart to leave Eberhard’s, just like it does when anything ends now. When we pack up at the end of a family vacation, or say goodbye to Lily from the driveway when she heads back to college.

Tomorrow I’ll take the 16:17 out of Besigheim back to Frankfurt, and it will be the same route in reverse. The countryside blurring, replaying these scenes, imagining myself back home. Last night I made a plum torte for mom with fruit I picked off the trees near Eberhard’s, and this morning we’ll see how it tastes.

Thanks for reading this series of posts, written from my mom’s house in southern Germany. The last post is planned for Wednesday (Mittwoch).

Categories: Memoir, travel, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, travel