From the Desk of the Damned
The quota was on the desk before I sat down at it, in a folder the color of a burnt tongue. Today's assignment is a house in Germany, in a Westphalian spa town whose entire history is a footnote about salt. I taught comparative religion for thirty-one years and I am now required, by a supervisor whose name I have never been given, to sell things. The irony was explained to me once, slowly, painfully, and with several metal tools I was sure were originally created for sculpting marble. I understood why I was given this assignment before those tools came out.
The house stands in Lockhausen, a quiet quarter of Bad Salzuflen, and it was built in 2011 by someone who took the word "thorough" seriously. There are six bedrooms, more than I have had conversations this century, a pool in the garden, and a front door that opens to a fingerprint rather than a key. The water is heated by heat pump and, separately, by a fireplace, a feat of modern engineering and architecture, I'm sure. The blinds are electric, even on the skylights. Somebody thought about the skylights. I respect that as I respect a well-footnoted dissertation I will not bother to read through once, much less the two thorough examinations it likely deserved.
The listing is the work of Dennis Halstenberg of Immobilien Klemme, on Osterstraße in the old town, and it is a model of the form. It contains not one exclamation point. And if that doesn't scream "German" I truly don't know what would.
It gives the equipment as a list, in order, like a decent catechism, so that a reader who does not care about the water softener may skip it without being lied to. If the copy leans on the word exklusiv more often than I would, that is the market's doing, not his. He has to sell the thing. I only have to describe it, and even that I am doing under supervision (read: chastisement.)
And on to you. You are the man who will show guests the fingerprint scanner before you show them the kitchen. You have already decided that the pool will be used daily, in Westphalia, where summer is a rumor that arrives in July and leaves before your morning coffee is finished brewing. You should already know that the sixth bedroom becomes, within a year, the room where all the clutter will end up. All the new exercise equipment to get yourself into shape, the cameras, lenses, tripods, ring lights, and effluence for that new podcast you're definitely going to start, and whatever other meaningless expenditures you've made for your next side gig/hobby/hope that you'll make a mark on this world. You won't. You also will not read this far or will chose to ignore it in order to keep your fragile, male ego intact. I am disappointed in you in advance, though not without hope, which is the most I can say for anyone, myself included.
The town deserves better than you, as do we all, and it has had worse. It enters the record between 1036 and 1051, when Bishop Rotho of Paderborn gave a salt spring at Uflen to the Benedictine monks of Abdinghof; the name means roughly the clearing up in the wood, with Salz bolted on later so that no one would mistake the point. It received town rights in 1488, and by 1550 its salt was paying five times the imperial tax of Detmold, the capital. A physician began bathing patients in the brine in 1818, the Bad was added in 1914, and the town has been persuading people to breathe salt ever since.
The ErlebnisGradierwerk at the Kurpark gate, finished in 2007 where a graduation tower had stood since 1767, is a wall of blackthorn brush down which brine trickles; you walk inside it and inhale, the only industrial relic I know that was converted into a lung. The Katzenturm on Turmstraße is the last of three fifteenth-century wall towers; it has nothing to do with cats, the name being an old word for a rampart, and it once jailed petty thieves at street level, an honest use of a monument. The Buchhandlung Emil Maschke on Osterstraße has sold books since 1876; most of the authors it stocked have been forgotten while it has not. At the Kaffeerösterei BO, in the half-timbered Haus Backs on Obere Mühlenstraße, Beate and Oliver Langer roast their own beans. And the VitaSol Therme on Extersche Straße keeps its brine pools open until midnight on weekends, for those who prefer their salt water communal and warm rather than private and, in Lockhausen, largely theoretical.
Dante is told, in the seventeenth canto of the Paradiso, that he will learn how salt is the taste of another man's bread. I eat no bread here, but I know the taste. Naaman the Syrian, in the second book of Kings, is told to wash seven times in the Jordan and is offended, since the rivers of Damascus are better rivers; he goes in anyway, and is clean. Bad Salzuflen has spent two centuries on that modest proposition, that water may repair what arguments cannot. The pool in Lockhausen will cure nothing. You will get in anyway. When you do, contact Herr Halstenberg, who has earned his commission more than you have earned the house, and tell him a dead man sent you. He likely will not know what to do with that. Neither do I.
