Beautiful sunset over Berlin today: pink, stippled like wet sand, and spacious. The man in the wine shop made me laugh. They were listening to Bob Dylan, who is now, would you believe? a Nobel laureate. So I told him: I keep misreading the name of your store. For a long time I translated it to, “Emergency Burgundy.”
Ah, he told me. We were going to go with that. But then we thought: let’s take that as a given.
After an exceptionally difficult night and a day of doing difficult work, I said: I need to go out. Let’s go someplace we can have a glass of red and a plate of food. I had in mind Italian but the restaurant was closed for some sawing and hammering, we ended up at a Swiss place run by a Swiss man who aired his Swiss accent to amuse us.
The wine was nice, the food was ok and the atmosphere thriving and red-checked. People came in from the cold in little gouts. We had a basket of bread and the waitress brought a little marble slab like something chipped out of a wall with a scrape of herbed butter splayed onto it. In the flickering candlelight we talked about his work and mine. I kept picking up the white enamelled wooden pepper mill and holding it in my hand, for the consolation.
Is it true the Swiss eat apple tart with lavender-scented soft cream? These Swiss do. I remembered the word I had made up to describe the natty fellows in late middle age circling the lake in Zurich in their roll-top cars, who had pink and lemon coloured cashmere jumpers knotted round their shoulders and some of whom were wearing mint green pants: immaculate contraception. We whined a little, pleasurably, about the music, which was one of those wan girls who spoons the stuffing out of twelve or fourteen formerly robust intricacies (The Cure, baby, the Rolling Stones) so that you feel faintly perturbed by the recollection: hey, didn’t I once used to know this song? More than the Queen, she was the opposite of punk. Feeling warmed inside and far more unwound we paid our bill and walked home across the hardening snow, and it had grown so terribly cold during the evening I started to tremble inside my duvet jacket and we both became nauseous with chill.
I went into the bottleshop and found the most approachable face. A guy from Canada. I told him, I only drink red. Ordinarily it’s cheap. But I want to spend maybe four dollars more and buy a wine that’s gonna make me go: That is why people spend money on wine.
His eyes lit up. An enthusiast. He asked me what we were eating tonight and what kinds of wines I liked. He guided me down to the back of the shop. Underneath the shelves of botrytis they had an opened box. This, he said, this you will like. It totally over delivers.
At the counter I got talking with his colleagues about how I was trying to educate my palate. The blonde girl shook her head. That’s a great idea, she said, except… You were happier before? I guessed. She said, brushing his arm, We were just talking about this. How learning to appreciate French champagne ruins your palate for ~
I interrupted. Ruins your life? Yes! she said, nodding emphatically. Or, I suggested: short bursts of happiness interlarded with long eras of works you don’t want to… Yes, she said, that too.
Outside the shop the night had ripened like a blue-veined cheese. I passed a heavily-muscled man who wasn’t short but looked it, because of his thickened build. I was dressed in a long wool skirt over my pajama pants and he was wearing gym shorts. As we came towards each other we both tipped our heads back to see the sky, its golden flukes, its beckoning well of pale blue. Its sense of light being backed by the dark, like a painting on velvet.