It’s as if it were still summer: the outdoor terraces are open, the geraniums are in full bloom in the window boxes everywhere. I’m in Münster today. I’m sitting at an outdoor café on a cobbled pedestrian street, reading Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, close to a monument to the Holocaust showing a Jewish woman on her knees, cleaning the pavement with a toothbrush. I order a cup of ice-cream and red-fruit compote (Rote Grütze). The waitress, an East German woman in an embroidered white apron, trips against a chair and the cup falls on the stones. Catching the supervisor’s eye, she apologizes in a panic and goes down on all fours to clean up the red mess. In Münster Cathedral, bombed by the Allies, a stone from Coventry Cathedral, “destroyed 4 Nov. 1940,” and the notice “Forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.” I find in this an almost malicious irony, with a feeling of boasting on either side. George Meredith in Modern Love: ’Tis morning: but no morning can restoreWhat we have forfeited.
