The stuff of dreams

When I had said yes to going to Freiberg, little did I know what was in store for me... and then it all began to happen... and before I knew it I was drawn into that rabbit-hole like little Alice in Wonderland...What happened to me in those days in Freiberg was an illustration of the statement, 'The secret, Alice, is to surround yourself with people who make your heart smile. It's then, only then, that you'll find Wonderland.'

First the quaint corner house on Lomonossowplatz with its seven apartments (seven, it must somehow always be seven, mustn't it?) -- I was installed in an apartment on the ground floor with views in both directions -- a lovely affair with flowers on the table and cherries to snack on. 'Come up when you have rested and unpacked, and feel like a chat,' my friend told me. Latest by the time when he opened the door to reveal the bright and spacious gallery-like room with a long and sleek Ruscheweyh-table running through it and the exquisite paintings by his artist father adorning the walls. I knew I had walked into a dream. 

That was only the beginning. 

A little later a couple walked in... The man was a writer and he had already written several books. And he was writing his magnum opus for the last seven years -- on a typewriter, he told me, because 'Typing is better for the personal creative process.' I asked him if he would let me read a few pages... He said he would, but before that he quizzed me about my father and about Assam, and about this, that and the other, till it was time to go for lunch in a lovely restaurant beside the lake along the city walls. The wife is a hugely successful consultant in her own field, she let her husband do most of the talking. It was amazing to see how supportive she was of her husband's various projects even while working hard to keep her own end up. She was reading up all about AI those days she told me, as she would soon need to advise her clients about how to make the best use of the technology that will become available.

It was easy to chat with the writer and we quickly struck up a routine of his coming to my apartment around 8 each morning, with a few more chapters from his book (and always a little something more, like a bottle of water, a cup of coffee or a packet of tea bags), and our talking about his book and anything else that came up till time was up, and either my friend came to take me for the next activity of the day or I took off on my own to explore the quaint and old part of beautiful town-centre dating back to the Middle Ages. The writer, as a person, had an out-of-the-world quality about him that is difficult to define... And believe it or not, there I was, a person from the Orient, talking to this full-time writer, very much from the Occident, every morning in Freiberg.  After roaming the world, the couple had moved to the city five years back; they had no other reason for being there but that they both liked Freiberg! Seemed like too many inexplicable or at least highly improbable strands were coming together... as was possible only in dreams...

Then there was Karina and Stephan, who also lived in the house next door. The same house as the other couple. Stephan was a journalist and worked in Chemnitz. Karina worked in the local hospital and was the one who had so tastefully and thoughtfully furnished and decorated the apartment I was staying in. I struck a bond with Karina and Stephan immediately because they are simply lovely people, warm and friendly, curious and open to all kinds of new thoughts and ideas. And since they wanted to know more, and I wanted to share more, we chatted for long...

It felt as if I had been adopted by this group of five friends simultaneously as soon as I arrived. For there was not a time when I returned to the flat and did not find something waiting for me at the door -- some flowers, a pot of home-made jam, some freshly picked strawberries, a bottle of water, and also some fresh chapters to read from the indefatigable writer. And if that was not enough, invitations for lunch, dinner and breakfast kept pouring in. I had only one friend when I arrived in Freiberg. And all at once I had five! 

What had I done to deserve them all, I asked myself.  Was I making them up? Was this also part of this Alice in Wonderland sequence? For real life is never so bountiful. 

This group of five friends had bigger dreams too. Given the location of the house next to the statue of Lomonosov, the Russian polymath, the writer and my friend were already toying with the idea of formalising their loose association into a kind of  Künstler-Dichter-Denker Kreis (the writer is adamant it has to be named the Lomonossow Dichter Denker Kreis, no discussion, period). They would meet, say once a month, to exchange thoughts and ideas and talk about the deep mysteries of the universe. 

Sounded very good to me.  But do such things still happen? Perhaps they do only in enchanted places like Freiberg...

The grand Silbermann Organ at the Cathedral in Freiberg

The facts first: Freiberg, not to be confused with its more famous almost-namesake Freiburg in the south of Germany, is a mining town in Saxony, not too far from Dresden, and is known for its very old Bergakademie, the mining school, established in 1765, for its world famous collection of minerals from all over the world, and as the home of the famous, beautiful and grand Silbermann organs. As luck would have it, the Bergstadtfest, the biggest and oldest such festival in that region,  would be taking place in precisely the week I would be there and my friend insisted that I stay at least till Sunday when the big ceremonial parade through the city would take place with all the miners from far and near coming together, dressed in their ceremonial best. I needed no further persuasion. More of the fairy tale stuff was going to happen that day I was sure.

The scenes that were to seen on the streets of Freiberg that Sunday morning did not need any conjuring -- the fact was that everyone on the streets had decided to go back to a world a few hundred years ago, dress up as they would have in those times and celebrate the day by reliving their past together... and have fun together in the process. It was like some medieval festival come to life.  

As we looked down onto the miners marching by from the roof top window of Karina and Stephan's flat, I realised that to be happy at that moment one needed little more than just being able to watch that colourful spectacle together with dear friends -- friends who would not mind if you were happy. 

The story with the quaint house had begun some years ago when my friend, who worked in Freiberg but did not live there, had bought that old run-down hundred year old building with the hope of repairing and renovating the building to create a few modern apartments.  With some support from the state, and by taking the help of plumbers, masons and other technicians for the bigger jobs, he did most of the renovation work himself to convert the house into an apartment block with seven units. He had put in a lot of work, one could see, in getting them finished so nicely. Four flats were already done and rented out, the fifth was almost ready. It needed just a few more days. Who would think that a professor of mathematics, that too one that did pure mathematics at the highest levels of abstraction, could be so good with his hands? But there was much more to him than just that, some of which I already knew, some of which would be revealed to me during the course of my visit.

For on that last Saturday, when he took me on a little excursion out of town, I discovered more about him that I would have never known otherwise. That wish of buying an old building and doing it up with his own hands had been a long time dream of his. On our way he stopped to show me a couple of the properties (read huge mansions with large estates) that he had toyed with the idea of buying at some point in the past, before he had found that house in Freiberg. Looking through the shattered windows of the ruins of what must have been a magnificent villa once upon a time, it was hard to know where reality ended and fantasy began. And as the days went by, he came up with various other associations, coincidences, cross connections that seemed all too fantastic to be true. I guess he had a special eye for spotting certain things, being his father's son....At other times I would have dismissed most of them as pure 'quatsch', but during those enchanted days they all seemed to fall in place as part of the dream sequence where nothing was impossible.... I loved the quirkiness of it all...

The decor of the traditional restaurant called Kartoffelhaus was pure fantasy 

The days went by quickly -- if it was not going to a concert at the Cathedral where one heard the beautiful Silbermann organ (my friend was also deeply interested in music and very proud of the Silbermann organs that his beloved city boasted of), it was spending time looking at the rich collection of paintings that my friend's very gifted and almost 'visionary' father had left behind. Getting to see the way his father used colour in his paintings, it became clear to me why my friend had this special talent for the visual and the colourful, even in his mathematics. But since his retirement, he had taken upon himself the onerous responsibility of  digitising and going through the rich wealth of paintings, letters and other documents that his father had left behind, get his work assessed by an art historian and come up with a definitive biography of the man -- the part that had to do with the man himself had already been done by a historian who was interested in the history of the area, but the art-history part was still left to be done.

Trying to make sense of his father's art had also strengthened my friend's contacts with other artists and artistes of the area and it was sheer luck that he had an invitation to a Vernissage of an art exhibition of a pretty well known artist from that area Raimund Friedrich on the Saturday afternoon,  in a little picturesque town called Meinersdorf behind Chemnitz. And he asked me if I would join him. I happily did. The paintings on show at the exhibition were very striking, most with very long and political titles. After the inauguration of the exhibition, there was a garden party in the artist's lovely home in the middle of the woods but commanding an exceptional view of the whole valley. Beer and sausages would be served to all who cared to come, we were informed. And there would be music by an amazing 'Akustikduo Lena and Scotty' (Lena Zipp and Holger Gottwald) from Halle. 

Many of the guests made it to the garden party. A colourful lot they were too, many suitably dressed for the occasion. I knew no one except for my friend but that did not matter -- they were all nice and friendly people, everyone wanted to spend a nice afternoon together. As we sat there that afternoon among the flowers, the stones and the bees, listening to the husky voice of female singer singing 'Besame, Besame mucho' or Leonard Cohen's 'Suzanne', eating pickled cucumbers and sausages, and watching evening set in behind the hills in the deep valley, I asked myself if there was anything more that one could want from an afternoon like that...It was almost as perfect as perfect can be... So perfect that somewhere along the way I could no longer tell whether I was awake or dreaming...whether that evening had really happened or I had just conjured it all up... 

Were the flowers in that enchanting garden really so colourful or had I just painted them in those vivid hues?... Was the music really that enchanting that evening or did I just hear what I wanted to?... And was that a painting in front of me -- the glowing evening sky against the deep but welcoming valley... and did I see a rabbit wearing a large hat just disappearing into that big hole...? And look at that other one munching sausages... weren't rabbits supposed to be vegetarian?

Fairy tales are made of other stuff, I know.  But those days in Freiberg made me feel like a little happy child who was astonished by everything, loved by everyone and to whom little lovely miracles kept happening one after the other and where I experienced a kind of childish delight and joy that I had long forgotten I was capable of... Now you tell me, what kind of  a tale is that if not a fairy tale?