Dresden Weihnachten

by Edward von Behrer

  Fortunately, the grocery store came to my rescue, and Dieter gave me a dazzling smile that clearly said welcome back. “Ah, bacon and cinnamon. What, ah, mean things does the single man cook that needs bacon and cinnamon?”

  “How on earth do you know I’m a single man?” I asked.

  “This is very easy. You do not buy food for two people. But until this time you buy food that makes meals, not as this time when you forget something you need.”

  I laughed. “You got me there.” Then, at his puzzled look, added, “Typisch American, meaning you are absolutely right.”

  “And you are cooking…?”

  I pointed to the cinnamon. “Apple pie.” And to the bacon. “Veal stew.”

  “And will they be mean?” he asked with a look that could only be described as saucy.

  It was the almost-come-thither look that made me say, before I thought, “Come over and try them for yourself, then you let me know.”

  “Really?” he asked. His face lit up like a kid on Christmas morning, looking at what Santa had put under the tree. “Truly, you are inviting me to your home to eat? This is very generous of you. But is this joking or true?” He suddenly looked unsure.

  “I’m serious; you’re welcome to come have dinner, but what time are you done working?”

  He looked at the clock over the outside doors. “I am already over my allotted hours. If you can wait for five minutes, I can go with you.” He motioned for another clerk to replace him and disappeared into the back.

  Five minutes to the dot (the Germans really are a punctual Völk), Dieter joined me, minus his grocer’s apron, sporting a very elegant-looking soft leather jacket over his white shirt. His grin was pure delight. “This shall be very much fun. I know it,” he said. “And it is very generous of you to do this thing. Thank you.”

  Then he did something I found incredibly appealing and also confusing. He linked his arm through mine and squeezed my arm with his other hand. In the U.S., when a man did that with another man, it means, “I’m gay, you’re gay, I’m glad.” But I knew that wasn’t necessarily true in Europe at all. Men walk arm in arm, and it just means they’re buds. Dieter didn’t wear a wedding ring, but that didn’t mean anything. Did I hope he was gay? Yes, probably. Even thought he was a lot younger. Then I thought, Daniel, chill. Enjoy this and don’t try to figure it out or make it go anywhere. Enjoy the rest of the afternoon and evening.

  “Veal you said?” Dieter’s voice cut through my whirling brain.

  “Yes, veal. And apple pie.”

  “Just one moment. Please.” He untangled his arm from mine, leaving me feeling rather cold and alone, and darted into a wine shop. I was a little concerned when I noticed what shop it was. It was on the expensive side, and they simply didn’t have much in the way of wine that I would ordinarily drink because of the prices. But then I thought, Daniel, chill. Dieter’s a Dresdener. He knows what shops are like a lot more accurately than you do. You’re not his father. He’s an adult.

  A few minutes later he popped out of the shop, face glowing, and linked his arm back with mine, the other arm cradling a plastic bag.

  “You live close by, I think, but where?”

  “Just here,” I said, turning us into Obergraben, then into Number 18.

  “Ah. Very nice. This building suits you.”

  I let that slide and opened the door to my apartment. And, I must say, if I had to pick a time to introduce Dieter to my home, it was a great moment. The warm afternoon sun was streaming through the patio doors into the living room, giving everything a golden halo. The cooking I’d already done had put delightful smells into the air, and the CDs I had not yet shelved spilled from opened boxes, making an inviting mess. It was my home, and he was my first guest.

  “Let me take your jacket,” I offered as I tossed the bacon and cinnamon on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room.

  He shrugged it off and slowly turned in a circle, surveying the room, taking in everything. “Amazing. Simply amazing,” he said.

  “What’s amazing?” I asked, hanging up his jacket and moving toward the kitchen.

  He started to say something, then stopped, and said slowly, “I thought you would live in a place like this. Very beautiful, but also comfortable. Not too much.” He walked up to me and put his hands on my shoulders. “Thank you for bringing me here. But I don’t know your name.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m Daniel. Daniel Richardson.”

  Something obviously clicked in his mind. He suddenly looked very… watchful, as if my name was significant for some reason. “Daniel,” he said slowly, almost trying it out. He made it three distinct syllables and made the last “el” sound like “ale.” It was utterly charming.

  “And you are Dieter…?” I asked.

  “Wunderlich,” he said.

  “One of my favorite singers is named Wunderlich,” I said, curious if he would know of the great German lyric tenor Fritz Wunderlich who died tragically in 1966 at the age of thirty-six.

  “Alas, no relation,” Dieter said, seating himself on one of the high stools at the counter. “We have always been Dresdeners and he was not. But, yes, he is a great favorite still. You do have excellent taste. Especially for an American,” he added impishly.

  We chatted comfortably while I got the stew ready to simmer. He came over and stood very close, watching what I did but didn’t comment except to occasionally ask the English word for something I used, prompting me to ask, in turn, what it was called in German. It seemed quite natural that he often touched me lightly, or rubbed my back when he made a joke about something. He accepted my offer of a beer and made the sarcastic remark I expected about me keeping the beer in the refrigerator “just like an American.” But when I offered him a room temperature beer from the stash in the pantry he refused, staying with the cold brew.

  Once the stew was slowly cooking, I pulled out the wild rice and the carrots, onions, beef bouillon cubes, and bay leaf I would need for it (God bless Julia Child) and then took a pull on my beer and said, “Okay, we have veal stew, and I’m making wild rice to go with it. We’ll have apple pie for dessert. What vegetables would you like? Squash? Carrots?”

  I was looking to see what else I might have when he said, “I think this is already a wonderful meal. Just these things. Why would you want more?” He seemed to have gone very still all of a sudden, as if what we were saying was suddenly of great importance.

  “Well, you’re company, I’d like there to be more.”

  “There is,” he replied, again with that deadly serious tone of voice.

  I looked at him, puzzled.

  “There is you. There is your generous sharing. Your home, yourself. What could be more than that?” He walked up to me and hung one arm on my shoulder. “As your American song says, ‘Who could ask for anything more?’”

  Well, two could play this game, I decided. “That depends on what you really want,” I replied, giving the back of his neck a quick squeeze, and then I moved toward the living room. “Do you mind if I open the patio door a bit? It’s going to get very warm in here with the pie cooking too.”

  He nodded and perched again on the stool. “Would you like some music?” I asked, and when he agreed I put on the stereo. I rolled out the piecrust on the counter where he sat, and we listened to Ella Fitzgerald sing her way through the Rodgers and Hart Songbook. Occasionally Dieter would comment on a song that was popular in German, but for the most part we just listened and enjoyed sharing the experience. I noticed he really listened intently. He wasn’t thinking of other things with the music as background; he was savoring Ella’s phrasing, the way she pronounced the words, the way she molded the music to point up a line. He would laugh or smile at a humorous line and look at me to make sure I had gotten it as well.

  It was a marvelous way to bake an apple pie, I decided, but I was suddenly afraid it might not be too good. So at the end of Ella’s first CD, I commented, “This is the first tim
e I’ve baked since I got to Dresden, so I’m not sure how this is going to turn out.”

  “It will be very fine,” he said simply.

  “How do you know?” He had no way of knowing what kind of cook I was.

  “I watched you. As I often have watched my aunt who is a master baker. So is her husband. What you did was much as they do, so why should the pie not be good?”

  He gave me a look I was coming to think of as “the Dieter look.” It was a combination of “so that’s all there is to it,” and “gosh, this is fun” mixed with more than a little flirtation and a wee bit of clever-boy smugness. It was certainly infectious, but I was still feeling a little at sea. Back home I would be assuming this was a date, given all that had gone on, and I would be thinking about doing a little making out. But even given Dieter’s openness, I wasn’t at all sure he was gay, and it seemed beyond crass to ask. Nor did it seem quite right to make a pass, so I decided to just flow with the ambiguity. To return his occasional physical closeness and touching, to match him flirt for flirt (as I saw it) and see what happened. If nothing else, being around him was fun, and fun like I hadn’t had in a long time.

  I cleaned up the pie mess, looked at the clock, and asked, “Would you like some cheese and crackers or bread? It will be about an hour and a half or two hours before dinner is ready.”

  “This sounds very good. Do you mind if I look at your CDs? I have been—what is your American expression?—dying to see what you have.”

  I waved him toward the open boxes and partially filled shelves and, a few minutes later, brought out munchies, along with two more beers and put everything on the coffee table. Dieter looked like a kid in a candy store. He kept examining CDs, shaking his head, putting them down, looking at another, and occasionally saying, “Amazing.” I smeared some Gorgonzola dolce on a couple bits of bread, took one over to him, and then started putting CDs on shelves.

  Dieter thanked me and dove back into the box of CDs. It was about ten minutes later when he came up behind me, rested his chin on my shoulder, and asked, “May I make a request?”

  “Of course,” I said, savoring his touch of his body against mine.

  “You shall probably think this is silly, but when I saw you had this CD, I felt I wanted to hear it even though the time is not right. Not exactly.”

  I didn’t want to move and break the connection our bodies had, so I didn’t face him. I just asked, “Which CD?”

  His left hand reached around to show me the CD. His right hand circled my waist and rested on my stomach. It was Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, a classic recording conducted by Karl Richter. The tenor soloist was Fritz Wunderlich. I leaned back into him a bit and said, “One of my favorites. Who says we have to wait a few weeks?” Then I turned and gave him a kiss. No tongue, but not a quick peck, either. Just an affectionate but definite press of my lips against his.

  He sighed, put his arms around my neck, and returned the kiss; then he laid his head on my shoulder. We stood like that, holding each other. “I like this,” he said. “You feel good, just like I knew you would.”

  I reared back to look him in the face. “How did you know how we would feel together?”

  He hesitated and then said, “It is complicated, and I… my English is not enough to explain. Not completely as I must. But this is good,” he added with a smile. “Yes?”

  “Very good,” I said, and I gave him another kiss.

  We put the Bach Christmas Oratorio on the stereo and sat close together on the sofa, touching each other and occasionally eating some cheese or feeding each other an olive until, at the end of the first section, I realized if I didn’t start the wild rice we would never eat. We alternated puttering in the kitchen and semi-necking on the sofa until the meal was ready.

  While setting the table, I suddenly realized what it was that had been trying to get my attention for the last hour or so, the thought that had been nudging the back of my mind. This was unlike any “first date” I had ever had. There was a comfort level between us that argued we had done this before, that we knew each other far better than was rationally possible when, in fact, we had done nothing but chat briefly a few times in the grocery store and spend a couple hours cooking and listening to music. God knows I was hot to trot. Dieter was a very attractive young man, and the more I was around him, the more desirable he became—and the physical evidence was obvious if he looked at my crotch, as he had several times, giving me a satisfied smirk. But ironically, I was in no hurry to rip his clothes off and explore his hot, tight German body. Part of me knew when the time was ripe we’d go at it like a couple of satyrs in heat; that somehow was a given. He knew it and I knew it. But for now, we let the sex simmer in the background like the veal stew. For the first time ever, that ambiguity was fine with me. I discovered I didn’t have to be in charge and have it all mapped out. What was developing between us was enough, just as it was.

  The meal turned out marvelously. “For sure, a most mean meal,” Dieter said in approval. The wine he had bought was a local Saxon red that went with the veal perfectly. When I confessed I never realized Germany made red wine, too, he promised we’d take a trip to the vineyard so I could meet the winemaker, a friend of his. The idea left me even more confused about who, exactly, he was. In New York grocery store cashiers aren’t too likely to be friends with high-end winemakers.

  We were dawdling over the last of the apple pie (and savoring the B&B he had bought to go with it—again making me concerned about the money he had spent) when I finally asked him the question I had wanted to all evening: what on earth was such a bright, creative, personable, and obviously well-educated young man doing working as a cashier in a chain grocery store?

  He threw back his head and laughed heartily. “I am sorry. You seem so comfortable in Dresden I sometimes forget you are new here. I thought when you learned my family name you understood.” At my blank expression he actually looked embarrassed. “We own the grocery store. Several hundred of them, all through Saxony. And these last years now in Thuringia and Sachsen-Anhalt, too, a little bit,” he added, naming two of the German states that border Saxony.

  “The Wunderlichs have run grocery stores for many generations. Someday my two brothers and I will be in charge, but for now my father is the head. He insisted we all go to university and explore other things, but food is in our blood. We all started by sweeping floors and putting food on the shelves. I was sent to your store because the sales were not what they should be, so my father said I should work as a cashier and watch what people bought.”

  “So it really was your business to notice I had bought two cans of a new brand of soup.”

  He nodded.

  “And you could take off today and come have dinner with no problem.”

  “Ah, no. I do have the hours to work. And the boss’s son must set an example, so I always work more than my own hours. But not today,” he added with a pleased look on his face. “Tomorrow, though, I am on duty all day and evening. So I must go, but only with many regrets.”

  “You are welcome to spend the night.” I couldn’t help myself, I really, really had to say it.

  If I live to be a thousand years old, I will never forget the way he looked at me then. Part utter pleasure, almost bliss; part anticipation; part genuine regret; part… well, “recognition” is the only word that fits. He was certainly pleased by the invitation, but I knew he was not going to accept. “Soon,” he said softly, and he reached across the table for my hand. “Soon.”

  * * *

  I floated through the next week. Nothing much bothered me, until I got an e-mail from Jason Solloway. It summoned me, and the rest of the branch managers in Europe, to a “strategy meeting” in New York. For reasons known only to the big boss, it was set for Thanksgiving week. Maybe he thought he was doing a favor for the Americans, bringing us home for the holiday, but all I could think of was the hassle of traveling during that hectic time, the disruption to our Dresden office it would cause and—to my surpr
ise—how much I did not want to be so far from Dieter. Especially right now.

  Given the impending time out of the office my schedule got absurdly tight, as did Dieter’s in preparation for the Christmas holidays. In Germany it’s not just Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that’s important; they have a whole string of festivities, most of which involve food. And they take them very seriously, indeed. But we managed to have coffee a couple of times, and during one of them I suggested he come with me to New York. “Come on, it’d be great to show you the city, and you could experience Thanksgiving too!”

  “Daniel, just because I am the boss’s son does not mean I can suddenly leave work for a week at this very busy time. But it would be fun,” he said wistfully. “Not only to go to New York and see it with you but also to be with you for a whole week.” He looked into my eyes, and we both were imagining exactly what we would be doing together during those long New York November nights. He smiled softly. “When you get back, very soon, I think is the time.” I knew exactly what he meant. And I knew he was right. But, damn, was I going to miss him.

  * * *

  I’ve always adored New York City with a passion that only comes from someone born elsewhere who adopted the Big Apple as an adult. I’ve heard that wherever you chose to live when you were in your twenties and starting your career is where your real home is. In my case, there was never a doubt that was New York City. Cole Porter’s songs “Take Me Back to Manhattan” and “I Happen to Like New York” were my personal anthems; they made my blood zing, and, as far as I was concerned, they were absolutely true.