Love's Tempests

There's a certain sound that a door makes when it closes and locks behind you. When you are on the outside of your apartment door with your child, signing for a package from DHL at the building entrance, and you hear that click, and the DHL guy hears the click too and looks up wide-eyed from his electronic signature device and asks with concern whether you have your key with you, and you and your child are standing there, both in sock feet, and you say "um, no, but, um, we'll be OK"--that's when you're grateful for a neighbor like Frau Ht.

Our apartment building has one or two apartments on each floor. In the two months we've lived here, I've seen a grand total of six neighbors, four of them just once. Frau Ht. is our first-floor neighbor, so we see her somewhat regularly in the back yard. We invited her over for a glass of wine two nights ago, and because she is generous with foreigners, she insisted we abandon siezening right off the bat.

So today, after the door locked behind us, we paid Frau Ht. a visit, and she kindly took us in and kept us entertained for the next three hours. (Stefan had forgotten his cell phone, so my increasingly desperate phone calls to him at work were being received across the hall in our living room). Halfway through our pleasant, wide-ranging conversation, Frau Ht. paused and introduced us to (bestill my beating heart) "Glotze"--German soap operas.

The show we watched today (Sturm der Liebe, episode 923) had it all: the Dumped on Good Woman and the Evil Rich Woman with the Heart Defect (switched in the neo-natal unit as babies!); the Kind-Hearted Pretty Young Thing who was still attractive even when poutily miffed at her Sympathetic Boyfriend the Aspiring Hotelier; the Manic Depressive Who Wouldn't Take Her Pills; the Simple Bavarian Country Couple who served as a foil to all those nasty rich people and showed what it meant to be a loving family (who needs money and hotels anyway?); the Blossoming Bavarian Country Daughter, who, despite her simple attire, radiated with natural beauty; the Handsome but Geeky Blond Guy who had such an obvious fondness for the chaste Blossoming Bavarian Country Daughter that he happily spent an evening playing card games with her family next to the Kachelofen (tile oven) in the small wood-paneled living room with deer antlers and handmade regional pottery lining the walls and then (ha ha) spent the night on the sofa despite the Simple Bavarian Country Couple's hopeful insinuations that maybe tonight would be the night he would finally deflower the Blossoming Bavarian Country Daughter; the Ruggedly Handsome Doctor, who romantically danced in the woods without music with the Dumped on Good Woman (who resisted the temptation to answer her cell phone) but appears to be in cahoots somehow with her enemy the Evil Rich Woman with the Heart Defect (who is the mother of the Sympathetic Boyfriend the Aspiring Hotelier); two Power-Abusing Male Hotelier Elders, one of whom switched those innocent babies so many years ago (oh, how could he?) and the other of whom was once the lover of the Manic Depressive Who Wouldn't Take Her Pills.

Most educational for me was the iciness with which the Dumped on Good Woman and the Evil Rich Woman with the Heart Defect siezened. For his part, Elias learned that every time a phone rang, the music changed and you could expect the character answering the phone to dash out of the room without finishing his prosecco.