In Germany, we were always operating under a cloud of ignorance, not quite understanding things going on around us. Things weren’t remarkably strange, they were just a little bit “off”, slightly disorienting, although all it takes is a minor misunderstanding to result in some appalling misadventure. An example of this fog of unknowing, although without the dire results of some of the confusions that beset us, was Angelica’s and my visit to the Speise Kabinett (“The Food Chamber”) at the Masonic lodge, called the Mozart Saal. On our first night in Hamburg, and a couple of times thereafter, Angelica and I walked along Moorweidenstrasse, past some odd intersections configured like stars with radiating lanes to a major street, Rothenbaumstrasse, a north-south boulevard lined with expensive shops and restaurants. On the route to Rothenbaumstrasse, where we ate at a Spanish tapas place one night and, later, at Shalimar, an Indian restaurant, we walked past a noble-looking edifice looking across the lane to the university’s library and some laboratory buildings. This was the Mozart Saal, a freemason lodge, housed in a dignified white structure with tall, bright windows under pointed pediments, a high door opening from atop a lofty exterior flight of stairs, and pale pilasters rising four stories to support the place’s complicated roof comprised of various vaults and arches and flattened steeples. The first night we strolled past the place, limousines were lined up outside and four umbrellas, open like great flower-blossoms, were inserted in the screen of shrubs in front of the building, awaiting deployment by several porters standing along the iron fence who were assisting people disemboguing from the columns of sleek back cars. The people were elegantly dressed, couples with men in tuxedos and long frock coats and women wearing furs with jewels studding their rather extravagant cleavages. It looked like an impossibly expensive gathering in a remarkably refined setting and I remarked to Angelica that it didn’t seem that we would be visiting the place’s in-house restaurant anytime soon. The rain hadn’t yet started and so the umbrellas had more of a decorative function than otherwise. I think we ate at the tapas place, octopus and shrimp served on beds of saffron rice, and, then, went to the grocery store on Rothenbaumstrasse, a place that Angelica quarried for nigiri, sushi, and various exotic kinds of chocolates and potato chips. (Germans have wheeled bags that they use for shopping. The idea of buying food for more than two days is unknown to them. They buy food for their evening meal and a Brotchen for breakfast, a sesame roll or Franzbrot that is “cinnamon roll”, and produce – the vegetables and fruit in German grocery stores is invariably plump, perfectly ripened, and fantastically fresh, dewy as if just plucked from the vine. Near Hamburg, there’s a fertile plain where a million fruit trees grow – the south-facing terraces along the Elbe are warm and relatively temperate and grapes used to make wine grow there. This vast produce or truck-farming territory is called “Altes Land” – the “Old Land” – and this is where the vegetables and fruits are grown and harvested for sale in Hamburg grocery stores.) On our way back from the grocery, pulling our wheeled bag over the cobble stones, we passed the Mozart Saal again; the limousines had been replaced by police cars and guards were standing on the sidewalk under the white terraces of the lodge and the rain that had fallen while we in the restaurant and, then, grocery store, had ceased so that the white globes outlining the tall door to the lodge were now enorbed with pale foggy mist, adorned by the drizzle in the air. The four umbrellas remained open like vinyl shields stabbed into the wet shrubs in front of the place.
We walked by this enigmatic place a dozen times and, one afternoon, I paused to peruse the menu posted next to the steps leading up into the lodge. The food on offer at the Speise Kabinett seemed surprisingly affordable and, so, on one of our last nights in town (Martin had gone back to Fargo), Angelica and I marched through the falling sleet – it had become much colder – to eat our supper in the Mozart Saal.
The huge weighty door was carefully balanced and opened easily and without a sound and the restaurant was up a short flight of stairs along a corridor that led into the lodge’s interior. The ceilings were very high and the rooms had a spacious aspect, very clean-looking and austere, and the café, as it were, was also a bit stern-looking with big windows opening out onto the sidewalk and the grassy lawns beyond, now pale with snow, and the library at the University where solemn shadowy throngs of books were visible under glass, volumes shelved close to the windows beyond the park. The two waitresses wore tight-fitting white blouses and black slacks and they had a vaguely depraved look, glittering eyes as if they had both been smoking dope with the cooks somewhere in an interior courtyard within the lodge. A group of old men were seated at a table in the corner, away from the windows, drinking cognac and whispering conspiratorially to one another. There were about five old men and they all had distinguished-looking beards and a vaguely piratical appearances and each of them – and this seemed strange to me – were carrying leather briefcases. The briefcases had an official appearance, like the sort of valises you see chained to people’s wrists in spy movies. Sometimes, one of the old men would fish around in his breast pocket, extract a large, moist-looking cigar, and, then, depart from the table to some hidden room where smoking was allowed. Another couple of old men came in, not together, but as humid isolates with a little dandruff of sleet on their shoulders. Each old man had a briefcase in his hand and, after looking about the dining room, suddenly smiled at their brothers seated at the table near the bar and went to take a place there. The old men rose to greet one another, embraced, and kissed each other on the cheeks, all the while clutching briefcases against thigh or ribs. Two tables of matronly ladies glared at us when we entered the restaurant – their looks, like daggers, said something like: “How dare they?” The women were clad in fur coats and their white hands glittered with rings and necklaces.
I tried to order in German but to no avail. The girl heard my accent and immediately, as if by reflex, switched into English. Angelica had a Fanta and some kind of potato casserole garnished with mushrooms (“champignons”) in cream sauce. I ordered “Zander filet” with Weinkraut and fingerling potatoes. I asked the girl “Was bedeutet ‘Zander’?” She answered in English: “It’s a kind of fish.” Of course, the obvious next question was “What kind of fish?” But I didn’t think that would be a useful inquiry. Rather, it would be liking asking what “tuna” means – it’s a name and means “tuna”, or what is the meaning of the color “blue.” So I nodded as if I understood completely, although I did not, and waited for my Alsterwasser (or “Diesel”) as it is sometimes called: that is, Lager beer mixed with lemonade, a drink that the people in Hamburg like, although, perhaps, not in Winter – whenever I ordered this stuff, people looked at me with odd dismay and, sometimes, the waiter would say: “Surely, you know that its beer with lemonade” as if no one but a person from Hamburg could ever possibly enjoy such a peculiar beverage.
I continued to watch the old men at the table by the bar. One by one, they got up, apparently ambling into some interior chamber in the cloister to smoke their cigars (all of them had big cigars tucked in their breast pockets) and, then, returning to a table that had grown in its census since they had departed, several more old fellows present, in suit and tie and clasping onto their briefcases – these encounters involved more handshakes and more kisses on the cheeks.
The “Zanderfilet” arrived and it was, as advertised, ‘Zander’, whatever that means, a sweetish white fish in a white sauce. There was a perfectly shaped dome of purplish sauerkraut on the plate. The sauerkraut was the color of diluted red wine. I took a bite of the kraut and winced: it was incredibly tart, almost stinging to the taste buds, and I thought that this sort of food couldn’t be good for you and that it was really too intense to eat. But I took a second bite and that was better than the first bite and, then, a third bite that tasted better than the second and, before I knew it, I was working my way with gusto through the bowl-sized heap of Weinkraut on the table.
A few minutes later, a young man entered wearing a red velvet cape. The young man had a leather “student” cap on his head, a sort of flattened beret with a short brim. I knew the outfit – the young man was a member of a Burschenverein – that is, a student or “lads” club. The youth’s hat had a red lid over the back of his head and he wore an armband decorated with an oak leaf. I pointed out the lad to Angelica and said, as a joke, “he’s a member of student fencing club but I don’t know where his sword is.” This was a flippant remark since I had no idea what the outlandish costume signified. The old men with their mysterious briefcases ignored the student. Then, the first youth was followed by another and another, similarly outfitted, and, indeed, each of these men were carrying swords sheathed like pool cues in their hands. In fact, it was an academic dueling club and I scrutinized the faces of the young men as they entered for the beauty mark, that is, the Mensur or dueling scar.
After dinner, I paid and walked toward the table where the briefcase brothers were assembled sipping cognac from diamond-like snifters. I looked down the corridor and saw that there was a rococo hall with cherubs gamboling over doorways in terra cotta bouquets and a round cameo-shaped ceiling, offset by white plaster concentric rings painted pink; the oval cameo in the ceiling was tinted light blue like the sky just before dawn. The duelists were nowhere to be seen. I expected to hear the strains of an aria by Mozart sounding in the distance – indeed, the whole place looked a bit like a set from The Magic Flute.
Outside the lodge, on the sidewalk, there were stanchions set up to control a crowd that didn’t seem to have materialized. No one was nearby. Several squad cars of Polizei and two ambulances were blocking traffic on the one-way. A half dozen girl cops with dark eyes and hair, apparently of Turkish extraction were loitering by the bushes. It had warmed enough to convert the snow to a dismal drizzle pecking away in the trees and branches.
So it was at the Mozart Saal in Hamburg at the end of the month of November, 2023.
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