From My Notebook

It’s my last day in Hellefeld and the neighbours are throwing me a party. I think it’s supposed to be a surprise; my hosts Kathi and Thomas haven’t said anything, but while I was packing, the doorbell rang at least 5 times, and Thomas has been carrying chairs and salad bowls out into the street for the last hour. I catch him on his next trip and he tries to hide two huge trays of uncooked sausages behind his back.
“Alles gut? Kann ich dir helfen?” Asking if I could help was one of the first things I learned when I got here; Kathi and Thomas are always preparing a meal. Thomas pretends he’s not holding enough meat to feed the village, and tells me my German is getting pretty good.
“I can see the meat, dummkopf. Let me help carry it.” Thomas doesn’t say anything and I guess he’s trying to decide whether it’s worth coming up with a lie about the meat and then translating it. Apparently it isn’t: he hands me one of the trays and tells me to put it on the table outside.
Right in the middle of the street is bonfire and a Schwenker, a BBQ on a tripod, already piled with onions. Thomas hands me a beer and the neighbours, already sitting around the fire, wave hello. Their kids play in the field and I watch them, look past them to the dark smudge of forest, to the low hills. That those hills, those pines could be somebody’s backyard is still beyond me and I stare at them with unabashed awe.
Regine from across the street made schnapps with plum and she pours me glass after glass; her husband, whose name I could never remember, teaches me to wrap salty dough around a stick and hold it over the fire to make Stockbrot. Now the moon is high and yellow, shrouded by wispy cloud. The air is beginning to bite. The neighbours ask for a story and I tell them: Thomas has an Italian sports car and he took me out in it to the Autobahn, where we flew past a glittering lake at 230km/h. With Kathi I climbed 18m into a pine; watched, from its branches, wild pigs snuffling at its root. We drove to Berlin one morning, stopped at the side of the road at 4am for coffee, danced the tango on the banks of the Spree 24 hours later under a string of lights and a haze of schnapps. Ricarda next door invited me over yesterday to watch her 4-year-old daughter Emma play the piano; we have the same name and the same level of German, Ricarda joked, but I know more swear words. The people on Auf der Heide have become, unexpectedly, friends, and it is with a pang that I realise I will miss them.