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Saying goodbye
It is a grey Monday afternoon, the rain has been soaking through my black coat for a long time. I'm still standing in the cemetery staring at the gravestone. Cold and empty it stands there, a few silver letters form the name of my grandmother, but I cannot remember her here, she isn’t present in this place any more as she was in her lifetime. She never wasted her time in the cemetery. She was on the road, she travelled the world.
That's why I too move on, leave the cemetery through the wrought-iron squeaky gate and walk through the streets of the small village. I stop at a big house in the small street called Main Road. The house is more than a hundred years old, and yet it looks very modern between the adjoining farmhouses with large stables and barns, because it is only a residential house. Its bright, even façade normally shines opposite the gloomy half-timbered houses next door, but today the white plaster façade has absorbed the rain, so that now a wooden timbre structure also faintly appears. Nevertheless, one can see that this house does not really want to stand here, between the cowsheds and a small slaughterhouse, but that it belongs to the city.
I take refuge from the rain under the overhanging shelter in front of the entrance door, and everything is so very familiar. This is where I grew up, this is where I spent a large part of my childhood, and suddenly all the memories are back. I feel it surrounding me and at the same time I am seized by a great joy and a deep sadness. I stroke over the handle of the heavy wooden entrance door and froze at the thought of entering this house probably for the last time.
I enter the far too narrow vestibule, where one has to squeeze a little under the fuse box to close the huge door again. As it falls into the lock, the whole staircase echoes and I suppress the impulse to shout "Hello!" to my grandmother, as I have always done, but I secretly expect the sound of the upper door to open. But of course that isn’t happening.
I push the heavy dark curtain a little further to the side to take the first small staircase up. Actually, it only hung there in winter when the staircase needed to be heated. But this spring nobody was there anymore to take it down, so it is still hanging here although it’s early autumn.
Here on the ground floor is actually my great-grandparents' apartment, but I only know it as it is now. Living room and bedroom have become playrooms and storage rooms, only the big kitchen is still as it must have looked in 1930: On chessboard-like black and white tiles stands an antique stove, which is still fired with wood and in winter prevented ice flowers from forming on the windows. No matter how much my grandma hated this stove, the Christmas goose was always roasted in its old stovepipe at Christmas, because it was simply too big for the modern stove in the upstairs kitchen.
At the same time the palm trees and other sensitive plants from the backyard were allowed to winter here in the kitchen slightly heated by the stove, which is why this room was always like a small jungle for me as a child. The only witnesses of this are on and under the big heavy oak table, which at some point was only used for gardening: flowerpots, watering cans, gardening gloves lie around. Clumps of earth lie scattered up to the back door, as if my grandfather had just manoeuvred the big palm tree through the door frame to the outside.
I turn around and climb the creaky stairs up to the upper floor. My grandmother's treasures stand on the landing in a motley jumble: a garden gnome stands on the floor, red, pink and orange flower pots crowd the windowsill. The plants in it used to be an equally varied mess, but now they have withered and only the scrawny stems are reminiscent of the blooming colourful past.
When I open the front door, the familiar and unique scent rises to my nose, as every apartment has, even long after the inhabitants have left. It smells of perfume and gravy, of heating oil and leather.
The smell of leather comes from the many shoes and coats that bury the wardrobe so far underneath that only the small space for the lime-green receiver telephone remains. The clothes don’t seem to fit here: Two extravagant fur coats are there, wide leather jackets in the style of the 80s and on the floor - similar to the flower pots in the hall - red, pink and orange high heels are piled up, of which one cannot imagine that they were ever worn in the dusty village street.
But they were. As long as I can remember, my grandmother always - always - wore high heels and bright colours. Like a ‘bird of paradise’, she danced between the neighbours' dung heaps, got into the orange VW Scirocco and confidently parked it backwards out of the much too narrow driveway, so that the men in the village stretched their necks, but no one dared to say anything about women and driving.
The handbags made of crocodile and snake leather, which she always carried with her - matching to her shoes of course - would probably have blown up the small wardrobe in the hallway, which is why they had their own cupboard in the bedroom.
Not the large double bed, but the bright red plush stool in front of the dressing table seemed to be the centre of this room. On the mirror cabinet in front of it, perfume bottles, make-up stuff and jewellery boxes were piled up, but on the open shelves behind the bed laid her real treasures: Asian vases and oriental glasses, African masks and Caribbean shells, all souvenirs from the many countries she had visited. When I was a little girl, I always listened to the sound of the sea through the largest shell. She told me about the first time she had tasted crocodile meat and how incredibly hot it was in the desert.
I listened to the stories in amazement until I fell asleep in the soft feather pillow.
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