The Eternal Nazi by Nicholas Kulish

Author:Nicholas Kulish [Kulish, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53244-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 36

Tano Pisano never expected to have much of a relationship with Rüdiger Heim, the slightly withdrawn young man he got to know a little in Florence. Where the Sicilian painter was a radical and an artist, Rüdiger mostly liked to talk about tennis. He wore shorts, wristbands, and a headband to keep his long blond hair away from his face. The two men moved in some of the same social circles, and many of the people they knew in common were American students. Rüdiger was friends with one of Pisano’s girlfriends, a Frenchwoman, and would tag along sometimes when the couple went out to dinner or to an event.

At one point Pisano asked Rüdiger where he was from, and he answered that he came from Germany and was supposed to study medicine at Pisa. To Pisano’s eyes it did not appear that his acquaintance was spending very much time at the university at all. Pisano found himself asking more questions, a spark of interest forming in the quiet young man. He learned that Rüdiger was good at languages. They spoke Italian together, but the young man could also speak French and English as well as his native German. He had a serious interest in photography and, Pisano thought, some talent as well. He had a good sense of light.

Still, Pisano did not believe they would stay in touch when he moved from Italy to Denmark, part of his restless wandering between northern and southern Europe and a symptom of his own conflicted feelings about painting and the art market. He rankled when an art dealer told him one style or another was selling and that he should make more of those paintings. He stopped making art and opened a restaurant instead.

Pisano’s restaurant was an idyllic, peaceful place in a tiny yellow cottage on a gentle sloping hillside facing the Øresund Strait in Charlottenlund, north of Copenhagen. The unassuming little gatekeeper’s house of a nineteenth-century spa was a historic landmark, built by the famous Danish architect Gottlieb Bindesbøll, better known for churches, town halls, and the Thorvaldsens Museum in the capital. The spa was gone, and the house had been used as a kiosk in the summer for selling food to beachgoers before Pisano and his wife received permission to turn it into a year-round restaurant.

Den Gule Cottage, or the Yellow Cottage, as the restaurant was called, was “a missionary place,” in Pisano’s words, an effort to bring Mediterranean cooking to the still relatively narrow Scandinavian culinary environment. Pisano would buy whatever fresh ingredients he could find at the market and create the sorts of meals he had grown up eating. He perplexed his diners the first time he served artichokes because most did not know what they were.

In the end it was tennis that brought Rüdiger and Pisano back together when Rüdiger showed up in Denmark to play in yet another tournament. He mostly played in Italy, in Palermo or Padua, but traveled to Belgium and Denmark for matches as well.

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