The Sommelier

She meets me at the door of a small flat above a launderette in Hamburg and the first thing she says, before hello, is: “You had coffee at the station. And you are nervous.”

I had, and I was.

Margit Kessler is seventy-three. For thirty-one years she was employed by a company that made air filtration systems for hospitals, in a role that appears on no organisational chart and had, at its peak, four holders worldwide. Her job was to smell things that had been declared odourless and say whether they were.

She was, in the flat and unglamorous language of her employer, a Referenznase. A reference nose.

The training

It began, as these things do, by accident. She was twenty-two, working in quality control, and she kept rejecting batches that had passed every instrument in the building.

“They thought I was difficult,” she says. “For two years they thought I was difficult. Then they built a better instrument and it agreed with me, and after that I was a genius.” She makes a small gesture with her cup. “It is the same in every profession. You are difficult until the machinery catches up.”

The training that followed took eleven years and she describes it the way a musician describes scales: relentless, unglamorous, and the entire basis of everything afterwards. Skatole. Indole. Hydrogen sulphide. Methanethiol. Dimethyl sulphide. Hundreds of compounds, at descending concentrations, until she could name a molecule at a part per billion in a room with the windows open.

“People think it is about strong smells,” she says. “It is the opposite. Anyone can smell a strong smell. The work is at the edge. The work is the thing that is almost not there.”

What she can do

I ask her, eventually, the question I have come to ask, and I ask it badly.

She is not offended. She has been asked before, by better journalists and by worse.

“Yes,” she says. “Of course. It is the same chemistry. There is nothing in the human body that is not on the list.” And then, because I have clearly been hoping she would elaborate and she has clearly decided to let me suffer for a moment first: “Sulphur is diet. It is protein, mostly, and it is what the bacteria did with it. Very little sulphur, and someone has been eating rice and being sad about it.”

Can she tell what someone ate?

“Sometimes. Not the way you are imagining. Not ‘you had the fish.’” A pause. “Although once, yes, the fish.”

Can she tell if someone is unwell?

Here she puts the cup down.

“This is the part I do not enjoy talking about,” she says, “so I will say it once. Yes. There are things the body makes when something is wrong that it does not make otherwise, and some of them I know, and I have known them about people who did not know them about themselves.” She looks at the window. “Twice I said something. Once I was right and the man is alive. Once I was right and the man is not. I do not think I have ever done a more difficult thing than say it, and I am not certain I would say it again.”

“Everyone wants to know what it is like to smell everything. Nobody asks what it is like to be unable to stop.”

The cost

The flat is very clean and almost completely bare. No flowers. No candles. The launderette below, she says, is the reason she took the place — forty years of other people’s detergent has produced a kind of permanent white noise that she finds restful, in the way a person from a loud family finds a quiet room unbearable.

She has not worn perfume since 1981. She eats, by preference, plainly. She has been married once, briefly, and when I ask about it she says only, “He smoked,” and refills the coffee.

She does not go to restaurants. She does not go to concerts, or cinemas, or anywhere with three hundred people in a sealed room and a ventilation system built by people who did not consult a Referenznase.

“You are thinking this is a sad life,” she says, and I say something evasive, and she waves it away, entirely unbothered.

“It is not sad. It is a narrow life. Everyone’s life is narrow. Mine is narrow in an unusual direction, so people notice.” She shrugs. “A cellist cannot go to a bad concert either. Nobody writes about the cellist.”

The last question

At the door I ask whether, after thirty-one years, any of it is beautiful. Whether there is anything in that entire terrible catalogue she is actually glad to be able to smell.

She thinks about it properly. It takes her a while.

“Rain on a road that has been hot,” she says. “Everybody has that one. But I have it more, and I have had it more for seventy-three years, and there are perhaps four hundred of those days in a life.” She opens the door. “So no. Not sad. Not once, on those days.”

I go down the stairs past the launderette and out into a street that smells, as far as I can tell, of absolutely nothing at all.