It is a curious phenomenon that what we call our memory is given to storing a selection of obscurely arranged objects encountered in early life. While our own lives may end abruptly at any time or fade to some hopefully kind goodnight, these items of apparent mental jetsam remain in sharp profile until the last. This is because they had once announced, but have not yet fulfilled, their promise to fully decipher our as yet unknowing but increasingly grounded existence, or, as the vagaries of experience may eventually reveal to us: because we could not at that time grasp their 'moment'. And so it was too with my own rediscovery, during my dealings with my friend Franzl, of a cumbersome, insistent and yet peculiarly familiar contraption.
Franzl was born in the 1950s to Italian parents who had migrated to Germany from Trieste. His parents called him Francesco, and were proud to see their only child rise through the German educational system to receive a PhD in Theoretical Physics. They were consequently surprised when he gave up higher research in his chosen field to attain a further degree in Medical Biology, which is why Franzl now works at a local clinic and not at the particle physics laboratory at CERN, into which prestigious harbour his parents had imagined him sailing.
Franzl lived in what had been, since his childhood, a quiet residential street in a small town in the Swabian Alps – that is, until the house next door was converted by the municipality to provide a halfway house for homeless ex-convicts. In fact Franzl welcomed his new neighbours. He liked the nine men well enough, only he could not abide their noise: their yard-based metal workshop set him on edge until late almost every evening. To make things worse, his neighbour on the other side, an obsessively active pensioner, devoted his ample free time to building garden sheds. After enduring disturbance from both sides for what seemed a lifetime Franzl resolved to reengage with theoretical physics and reopen a path to the serenity he had once enjoyed. Swabia, so they say, is a land of inventors.
