Advertising executive Daniel Richardson is offered a huge promotion, though it means uprooting himself from his comfortable life in Manhattan and moving to Dresden, Germany. As he adapts to his new situation, he discovers what a delight it is to live in the gorgeous baroque city, though sometimes simply buying groceries can be a challenge.
At his local grocery store he meets an adorable something checkout clerk named Dieter. One day, on the spur of the moment, Daniel invites Dieter to dinner. There is something about him Daniel can’t quite explain, a comfort level between the two men that goes deeper than their causal interactions would explain.
While Dieter leads Daniel through Stollenfest, the centuries-old celebration of Christstollen on the first Saturday in December, he confesses he has often been able to see into both the future and the past. What Dieter tells Daniel goes against everything he has been taught to believe, but it oddly dovetails with a deeply upsetting experience he had in a museum shortly after arriving in Dresden. What does this bizarre revelation mean for the two of them?
So I was pretty preoccupied during my first dozen or three trips to the chain grocery store. Preoccupied making sure I had something I knew I could eat, while I bought my way through a variety of things that might be interesting, or that I might end up taking to my German lesson the next morning for explanation -- much to the amusement of Fräulein Müller. But even so, it eventually got through to me that more often than not the same young man was the cashier at the express lane. The same attractive young man.
During my next shopping trip, it finally registered that Dieter was written on his name tag, that he looked to be in his early or mid-twenties, that his intelligent face was rather elfin looking, boarding on impish, with a deep cleft in his chin, and that his eyes were the most marvelous dark-chocolate brown, a color matched by his boyish floppy (but neatly cut) hair. And his smile was simply devastating.
Maybe it was the fact there was no one in line behind me just then that made him ask in English, “Do you like the two soups you bought recently?”
“I’m sorry?” I shook my head as if to clear it.
“The two soups you bought last week --” he raised his eyes to the ceiling as if a list was written on it, “-- one is, ahhh, how you say, barley? And one is asparagus. You have eaten them, yes?”
“Yes,” I said, and gave him a big smile because 1) I remembered having the soup and 2) he really was a sexy looking guy. “They were good. I think I liked the barley more than the asparagus, but then, I’ve been known to make a mean asparagus soup myself.”
“A mean asparagus soup. This I am not sure of. It must be an typisch American saying.” But he grinned.
“Typisch, yes. It’s a way of boasting my asparagus soup is very good. Sometimes. But how did you know I’m American?”
Dieter laughed. “Your accent. And when you talk German, your grammar is usually wrong -- it is like the American grammar I studied in school. But what you want to say, this is very clear. I think you know German mostly from taking with Germans, not so much from school studies.” Well, Fräulein Müller might not take that as a compliment, but I certainly did.
“How did you remember I bought a can of barley soup and a can of asparagus soup?” That really did amaze me.
He gave me an inscrutable look for a moment then said, in a rather arch manner, “I always remember what you buy. It is part of my job. And also, these soups were new for us, so it is interesting to see what customers say of them. I notice you have not bought anymore.”
“Only because I’ve not been in the mood for soup. Not because the soup was bad,” I hastened to assure him.
“We are coming soon to the winter times and you should have soups in your kitchen, I think. Perhaps some cold and wet day you should enjoy to have some and you will not want to take the time to cook your, ah, mean soup.”
A lady was bustling toward the express lane, so Dieter pushed my bag of groceries to the end of the counter, then winked at me, before turning to ring up his next customer.
I walked home with an absurdly warm feeling inside, rather as if I’d cooked a mean asparagus soup and eaten it all up by myself. It felt good that someone in Dresden had been noticing what food I was buying. I didn’t care that he was doing market research and more than likely trying to up his sales of soup for the month. I very much liked our connection, tenuous though it was. But why, I pondered as I let myself into my new home, was a simple cashier doing market research?
