BY Al Drinkle
This past April, winegrower Andreas Adam and I made a short drive to the village of Leiwen for dinner. Upon leaving the main road, I noticed a building alongside the Mosel river that conjured several memories for me. "Has that hotel and restaurant closed down?” I asked. After all, Andreas was the one who had recommended it to me so many years ago. He lamented that their doors were indeed permanently closed, and over dinner I recounted the following memory.
About a decade ago, my wife took a sabbatical from her teaching job and spent three months exploring Europe. I joined her for a comparatively brief portion of the trip, beginning in Germany. I especially wanted to show her the Mosel Valley, a region that every wine lover — and probably every wine lover's significant other — should experience for themselves. Upon Andreas's aforementioned endorsement, I booked a hotel in Leiwen that combined the enviable virtues of spacious, comfortable apartments; affordable tariffs; and an on-site restaurant with a decent wine list. Like many villages in the Mosel, Leiwen is an exceedingly unthreatening place. Should you be settled into bed wondering if you remembered to lock your car or not, you would conclude that it’s a decidedly moot point.
Our landlord was a soft-spoken and slightly eccentric man with culinary proficiency but only a modest command of English, and needless to say, my German was even worse a decade ago than it is now. He was five or six years my senior, and in order to conceal his real name, let's call him “Carl”.
One morning, my wife and I came down to breakfast to find the usual appetizing spread of delights — coffee, tea, juice, hearty bread, pastries, cheese, charcuterie, fruit, yoghurt, soft-boiled eggs, etc. Excited to eat, I bid Carl a distracted guten morgen to which he mumbled an indistinct response through suspiciously bruised and puffy lips. Only then did I notice that he looked like absolute shit. His hair was dishevelled, his skin an indeterminate shade somewhere between grey and green, one of his eyes was swelling and encircled by purple, his protruding lips showed marks of dried blood and he shuffled about as if each movement was torturous.
Not wanting to reinforce Carl’s very obvious bedragglement — but now awkwardly holding his gaze — I said, “so… um, how are you doing?” His answer was almost unbelievable. Limited English found its way through his abused lips, and he shared that sometime around 3:30 in the morning he was walking home from a “tasting” in the cellar of a local vintner. This alone is quite hilarious, considering that within a few short hours he would have to be preparing breakfast for the guests of his hotel! But it gets better…
As he was fumbling with his keys, Carl heard noises in the tiny parking lot. Upon investigation, he found that three teenaged miscreants were ineffectually but determinedly attempting to break into the vehicles of his guests. Upon confronting them, and despite his exhaustion and inebriation, things turned violent with the three juvenile delinquents — surely the only ones in Leiwen, and perhaps the entire Mosel Valley itself.
“However,” he slowly relayed, “I am a martial arts master, so it was no problem". I don't know which style he held mastery over, but it was yet another reminder that almost all human beings are full of surprises.
Despite taking his lumps, Carl allegedly kicked the asses of his three adversaries until they were all on the ground, debilitated by various injuries. I wish I could have seen it! Conceding to their vanquishment, they began to pull themselves to their feet, this time with the intention of flight. In recounting the story, Carl looked me directly in the eye and, in a thick Mosel accent, shared what he calmly told them next: “If you want the pain to stop, stay down on the ground and move not". One of the injured youths called his bluff by attempting to crawl away from the scene, and as promised, Carl responded with the imposition of additional devastating martial arts moves. When they finally all remained still (one of them bawling, I was told), Carl calmly took his mobile phone from his pocket and called the police.
When the police arrived fifteen minutes later they found three bloodied and immobile teenagers writhing on the ground, and one exceedingly wasted hotelier-cum-vigilante supervising their movements. All four were escorted to the police station for questioning and Carl was released just in time to prepare a morning meal for my wife and I.
Breakfast was very, very good.
