(from May 2009)
Four idle days in Munich: lovely. Well, the truck is idle, but I’ve sneaked off to Nuremberg – to meet “The Munich man-eater”. Bettina is a girl I met a couple of years ago in Canada’s remote Queen Charlotte Islands, just below the Alaskan border.
She texts me before I arrive: ‘no snoo-snoo’, which apparently means ‘no sex’. Do I have a reputation then? I hadn’t even thought about it, let alone suggested it – we’re friends – yet the matter has been pre-empted. Kissing her on both cheeks, we sit down for a beer and some catching up. Or that’s what I thought would happen.
Within four minutes she announces that she’s already spoken to her boyfriend, asking for permission to have a steamy night with me. Now, I haven’t even agreed to this, so I’m about to put my foot down, and tell her in no uncertain terms that I need to be seduced gradually, when she says, ‘but Eddy said no.’ Oh.
Well, because it is now “verboten”, I quite fancy the idea.
Nuremberg – or just Nurnberg if you can find an umlaut on your keyboard – is a beguiling, manageable-sized city, awash with medieval history. Also here, in this former centre of the Holy Roman Empire, stand the largest Third Reich buildings in the world. Hitler, that infamous megalomaniac, blighted eleven square kilometres of the city with his monumental building projects.
But Nuremberg is not only famous for Hitler’s rallies in the Zeppelin field. The War Crime Trials were held here – the Nazi leadership was proven guilty before the eyes of the world.
Well, that’s enough history. Still bemoaning the prospect of a yummy cuddle, only to have it palpably dashed, I’ve popped down to the flea market instead. It is held twice a year, for a whole 24 hours, and covers the entire centre of the city. Oh goody, I’ve always wanted a ribbonless typewriter and a broken tennis racket.
Who actually buys a Casio keyboard with broken keys? Or a scratched Abba record? Or ubiquitous earthenware so biliously adorned that even a great aunt would discard it? I return to Bettina’s flat empty-handed. Eddy is there, and we bond immediately, no trace of awkwardness from Bettina’s forthright request.
We go out for dinner, and discuss Eddy’s mature studentship in economics, and how it is funded. ‘The good thing is that Eddy’s father had died,’ says Bettina, in her frightfully Teutonic manner of speech. Unabashedly stuffing a garlic naan into her mouth, her bald statement simply explains how Eddy’s fees are met. In England one might tread more delicately over the matter of parents expiring. That said, I do keep reminding my father that his current spending on travel is rather eating into my inheritance.
‘Do you want to meet three gay men?’ she then asks, perhaps the finest example of a non sequiteur that I’ve ever encountered. I shrug noncommittally, and
so we mince down to the Hans sachs bar. As it turns out, we’re not just meeting gay men, but entering a gay pub, a marked difference that fact may have affected my answer. When Bettina excuses herself to the toilet, the gayest of the three sidles up. ‘Do you live with your husband?’ he asks me, before realising his mistake in English. I smile, wondering whether or not I’m flattered.
Back at the flat, while Bettina nurses a Temazepam and Marlboro Light, I get my instructions for the morning. She has a little English-speaking project for me, it seems, on a computer with fingerprint recognition software. ‘You need my finger tomorrow, or shall we turn on it now?’ Now is probably best. Oh, she means turn on the computer. Sorry, my mind was elsewhere for a moment there..