Uwe Timm

It's been a good twelve years since I ate my last curried sausage at Mrs. Brücker's stand. The food stand was on Grossneumarkt, a square in the harbor district: windy, dirty, and paved with cobblestones. There are a few scrubby trees on the square, a public toilet, and three stands where high-school kids meet and drink Algerian red wine served from plastic containers. To the west, gray-green, the glass façade of an insurance company, and beyond that St. Michael's church, whose spire casts a shadow on the square in the afternoon. During the war that part of the city had been virtually destroyed by bombs. Only a few streets were spared, and on one of them, Brüderstrasse, an aunt of mine used to live. I often visited her as a child, although secretly, my father having forbidden me to go there. The area was known as Little Moscow, and the red-light district was not far off.

Later, whenever I visited Hamburg I used to go to that district and walk through the streets, past the building where my aunt, who had been dead for years, once lived, so that finally - and this was the real reason - I could go to Mrs. Brücker's food stand and eat her curried sausage.

"Hello there!" said Mrs. Brücker, as if she'd seen me only the day before. "Same as usual?"

She was busying herself with a large cast-iron frying pan. Now and again a gust would blow drizzle under the narrow awning: an army tarpaulin, mottled gray and green, but so full of holes that it had been covered with an extra sheet of plastic.

"Nothing doing here anymore," said Mrs. Brücker as she lifted the sieve of french fries out of the bubbling oil, and she would tell me about all the people who had meanwhile died or moved away from the area. Names that meant nothing to me had had strokes, shingles, late-onset diabetes, or were now lying in Ohlsdorf cemetery. Mrs. Brücker still lived in the same building as my aunt once had.

"There!" She held out her hands to me, slowly turning them over. The knuckles were gnarled. "It's gout. My eyes aren't what they used to be either. Next year," she said, as she did every year, "I'm going to give up the stand, for good." With wooden tongs she fished one of her pickled cucumbers out of the jar. "You used to like these even as a youngster." She had never charged me for the pickle. "How in the world can you stand living in Munich?"

"They have food stands there too."

That's what she'd been waiting for because then - this was part of our ritual - she would say: "Ye-es, but do they have curried sausage too?"

"No, at least not as good."

"You see?" she said, sprinkling some curry powder into the hot pan. Then with a knife she sliced some veal sausage into it, adding "Weisswurst, horrible, and then sweet mustard! It's enough to turn your stomach, isn't it?" She gave herself an exaggerated shudder. "Brr," then plopped some ketchup into the pan, stirred, shook a bit more black pepper over it, and finally pushed the sausage slices onto the crimped paper plate. "This is the genuine article. Has something to do with the wind. Believe me. With a cold wind you need hot stuff."

Her stand really was set up on a windy corner. The plastic sheet was torn where it was fastened to the stand, and now and again a strong gust would tip over one of the large plastic cone-shaped tables, advertising ice cream, at which you could stand as you ate your meatballs and, of course, that absolutely unique curried sausage.

"I'm going to close the stand, for good."

She said this every time, yet I was sure I would see her again the following year. But the following year her stand had disappeared.

As a result I stopped going back to that area, scarcely ever thought of Mrs. Brücker, except occasionally at a food stand in Berlin, Kassel, or somewhere, and then, of course, whenever connoisseurs began arguing about the place and date of origin of curried sausage. Most of them - almost all of them, in fact - claimed it had been the Berlin of the late fifties. At that point I would always bring Hamburg, Mrs. Brücker and an earlier date into the conversation.