The call came at 7:12. Martha Kellner was standing in the ice cream parlor's bakery on Cathedral Square, her hands white with powdered sugar, and knew immediately that something was wrong. Her husband never called at this time. Never.
"It's the bank," Friedrich said. His voice sounded thin, as if muffled. "They're terminating the loan. Effective immediately. We have four weeks."
Martha hung up. She looked around the bakery, which had been her world for thirty-three years. The copper kettles that Friedrich's father had salvaged from East Germany. The recipe books with their yellowed pages. The old ice cream machine that hummed every morning like a contented animal.
Four weeks. Then it would all belong to an investor who would turn it into an office or a branch of some chain that churns ice cream from powder and calls it "artisanal."
She wiped her hands on her apron and went back to work. There was nothing else to do. The waffle batter had to be mixed, the fruit purees prepared, the cream whipped. Whether you close or not—the ice cream won't wait.
Outside, it was gray. It had been gray for weeks. Erfurt lay under a blanket of clouds that had settled over the city like a wet cloth. Five degrees, six degrees, drizzle. People hurried through the streets with their heads down. No one stopped. No one thought about ice cream.
For the past three months, Martha hadn't sold a single cup on some days. Not one. The rent still came in. The electricity bill for the refrigeration still came in. And now the loan.
She mixed the pistachio batter and thought of her father-in-law, who had started making ice cream in 1974 in a two-room apartment in Erfurt-North. Secretly, after work, with smuggled vanilla from Hungary. The neighbors lined up in the stairwell. The ice cream was so good that even the block warden kept quiet.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he had opened the shop on Cathedral Square. "Kellner's Ice Cream"—hand-painted on a wooden sign that still hung above the door. Three generations. And now it was over.
On Saturday morning, Martha woke up and something was different. She lay in bed and felt it before she even opened her eyes. Warmth. A light filtered through the curtains, a light she hadn't seen in months. Not the pale gray of the past few weeks, but something golden, resolute.
She got up and drew back the curtain. The sky over Erfurt was blue. Not a little blue, not almost blue—blue. As if someone had replaced the city overnight.
Friedrich was already sitting at the kitchen table, looking out the window. He said nothing. He held his coffee cup in both hands and stared out, as if he couldn't believe it.
"Fifteen degrees," he finally said. "The weather app says fifteen degrees."
They drove to the ice cream parlor. The city was already awake, in a way Martha had forgotten. People were walking differently. Slower. They weren't wearing hats. Some had their jackets draped over their arms. A man on the Merchants' Bridge had his sleeves rolled up, as if it were July.
Martha opened the shop at ten. At ten-seven, the first customer arrived. An old woman with white hair and a dachshund pulling on its leash.
"Stracciatella," the woman said. "Two scoops. And one scoop of vanilla for Helmut." She gestured to the dachshund.
By eleven, the line stretched all the way to the cathedral steps. Martha counted the heads and stopped at forty. Friedrich came out of the bakery and stopped.
"Martha," he said.
She saw it herself. The line now stretched halfway across the cathedral square. Children tugged at their parents' hands. Couples stood close together. A man read a newspaper while he waited, his shadow falling long and sharp on the pavement. It was the first shadow in weeks.
At noon, Friedrich called her son Jonas, who actually had the day off. "Come," he simply said. Jonas came.
By one o'clock, the line stretched around the corner into Market Street. Martha estimated it was a hundred meters long, maybe more. It was absurd. It was grotesque. People were taking pictures of the line and then joining the back. A girl sat on her father's shoulders and kept calling out, "Strawberry! Strawberry!" The father laughed, and Martha thought she hadn't heard that laugh in a long time. Not in this city, not in this spring that hadn't really been a spring.
The three of them were working. Martha at the counter, Friedrich making more ice cream, Jonas at the cash register. Their hands ached from scooping. The ice cream machine hummed, as if to prove it was far from finished.
In the afternoon, a man in a gray suit arrived. He didn't order anything. He stood at the edge, watching the line, which now stretched all the way to the Merchants' Bridge. Martha noticed him between orders. Something about him made her uncomfortable. The way he was scrutinizing the building. Not the ice cream, not the people—the building.
The man pulled a business card from his pocket, placed it on the counter, and left.
"Kettner Real Estate – Your partner for commercial properties in Thuringia."
Martha turned the card over. On the back, written in ballpoint pen, were the words: "Interesting property. Give me a call. We'll find a solution."
She put the card in her apron pocket and continued working.
At seven o'clock, Martha closed the door. Every single tub was empty. Not a single scrap, not a spoonful. For the first time in thirty-three years, they were completely sold out.
Friedrich sat on the chair behind the counter and rubbed his hands together. Jonas leaned against the wall and drank water from a bottle. No one spoke.
Martha took out the cash register and counted. She counted once, then again. Then she looked at Friedrich.
"How much?" he asked.
She told him the number. Friedrich was silent for a while.
"That's more than we made in the whole of last month," he said.
“That’s more than in the last three months,” Martha said.
Jonas looked from one to the other. He knew the situation; he didn’t need to be told. Sons sense these things.
“One day,” Friedrich said, shaking his head. “Just one day.”
Martha reached into her apron pocket and took out her business card. She placed it on the counter, under the light. Friedrich read it. Jonas read it.
Then Martha took the card, tore it in half, and threw the two pieces in the trash.
“It’s supposed to be seventeen degrees tomorrow,” she said.
Friedrich looked at her. For the first time since the call from the bank, she saw something in his face that she had almost forgotten. Not hope—that would be saying too much. Something smaller. Something that precedes hope, just as the first warm day precedes summer.
Jonas put down his water bottle. “I’ll call Lisa,” he said. “She can help tomorrow. And her brother, too.”
Martha nodded. She went into the bakery and began cleaning the kettles. Tomorrow she would make double the amount: pistachio, stracciatella, strawberry, vanilla.
The last light of day streamed through the window. It was still warm. Somewhere in the cathedral square, someone was playing guitar, and the sounds drifted through the bakery windows like a memory of something that hadn't yet passed.
Martha unscrewed the ice cream machine and began cleaning it. The machine was old. So old that no one could find spare parts for it anymore. Friedrich's father had bought it secondhand in 1989 from an ice cream parlor in Jena that had gone out of business. It had survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, two floods, and a pandemic.
It would survive this, too.
Martha dried the individual parts and reassembled them. She knew every part by heart, every screw, every seal. Her hands did it automatically.
When she was finished, she paused for a moment. On the counter in the bakery, next to the copper kettles, stood a framed photograph. Black and white, the corners yellowed. It showed her father-in-law in his two-room apartment in Erfurt-North, in 1974. He was wearing a white apron and holding a spoon up to the camera, as if to say: Try this.
Behind him, in the hallway, the neighbors were lined up.
Martha turned off the light and went home. Tomorrow was Sunday. And the sun, she was told, would shine.
S.
Your support keeps ideas alive — and stories in motion. 👉 https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5NGG6XB67BZ4N 🙏
🇩🇪 My lyrical thoughts between two book covers: blau pause zimmerlautstärke - lyrik über die zeit - zurzeit
BoD Bookshop: https://buchshop.bod.de/blau-pause-zimmerlautstaerke-stefan-noir-9783695118779
Amazon-Shop: https://amzn.eu/d/1TvOBUO
🇺🇸 / 🏴 / 🏴 My lyrical thoughts between two book covers: blue pause room volume: poetry about time – currently
Amazon (English edition): https://amzn.eu/d/3b3GUF4
Comments