A Woman by Choice - Part 1

Jimmy had never been so confused in all his life. The object he was staring at looked like the real thing, yet Katrina had told him, not thirty minutes earlier, that it was not. In fact, she had even said that she was not the real thing. She had told him that she had been born in 1933, the year that Hitler had come to power in Germany, and that from the day of her birth until 1970 she had been called Karl.

‘Ich bin eine künstliche Frau’, Katrina had said. Jimmy’s German was excellent, so he knew fine well that Katrina had said that she was an artificial woman. And that set his mind racing. It was the second time that day he had been told something similar. But he didn’t believe it the first time.

‘Yes,’ Jimmy had answered, ‘I know that. I’ve just finished reading one of your masterpieces.’

‘You’ve misunderstood,’ said Katrina. ‘I said “künstliche” not “künstlerische”, and there is a big difference. Jimmy understood the difference between artificial and artistic, but he chose pretend otherwise.

Katrina had been on the scene for about three months in the summer of 1975, when she had arrived in West Berlin from Wiesbaden. She was staying with two Irish musicians who lived in the same tenement building in the northeast of the city. Their apartment was a hub of musical activity every day from late afternoon, when they surfaced, until they left for gigs in the centre of the city.

It was on one of these afternoons that Jimmy had first noticed Katrina. He was jamming with half a dozen other musicians, and there were as many people again sitting around drinking or smoking. Jimmy looked up when a newcomer entered the room. She was in her late twenties, had long blonde hair and was wearing a floral dress that indicated she was a hippy.

The newcomer stood beside the door staring at him until he made eye contact, and then she looked away. When the session ended, Jimmy looked over towards the door, but the girl was gone. He packed away his guitar and went into the kitchen to get a beer. Katrina was sitting at the table sharing a bottle of wine with two other women, one of whom introduced him to Katrina. She greeted him coolly and then left the kitchen.

Over the next few months, Jimmy met Katrina a number of times, but the meetings had always been tense. The first incident between them erupted when Katrina had ignored the telephone protocol, the rules of which were pinned up over the telephone. A call had come in for Jimmy, and Katrina had answered it. According to the rules, Katrina should have told the
caller that Jimmy was out and that she didn’t know when he would be back, but that she would pass the message on to him when he returned. Instead, she told Barbara that Jimmy had left a few hours earlier with a girl she had not seen before.

When Jimmy had gone to see Barbara later that evening, she had confronted him and sent him packing. Jimmy had gone straight back to his friends’ place to deal with whoever had shopped him. Katrina had immediately admitted it and said that she would not lie to facilitate his intricate love life. From that moment on, things had been tense between them and Jimmy did his best to avoid Katrina.

Now, with no medical knowledge and despite not having spoken a word to Katrina for more than two months, here he was examining her most intimate organ. This has got to be, thought Jimmy, the most bizarre day of my life.

The day had started with loud banging that he at first thought was coming from inside his head. When he realized it was his door and it was just seven o’clock, he got up cursing. His two Irish neighbours were standing there with broader than usual grins on their faces.

‘We’re off now. We’ll see you in a month,’ they chorused.

‘Thanks for waking me up to say goodbye,’ he said, ‘but didn’t we do this last night in the pub before you two buggered off early? ‘

‘Yes, we did,’ said Patrick ‘but we’re mates so we thought we’d say it again.’

‘Bollocks!’ said Jimmy. ‘Now, bugger off and let me get back to sleep.’

‘Speaking of bollocks,’ said Liam, ‘we thought we’d better warn you.’ He burst out laughing and couldn’t continue.

‘We know what you’re like,’ smirked Patrick. ‘While we’re away, you are bound to have a crack at Katrina. And if you do, you are in for a big surprise.’

‘Bollocks!’ said Jimmy again.

‘Yes, exactly,’ said Liam. ‘Bollocks. And he knows all about them.’ He grinned as he nodded at Patrick.

Jimmy went to the refrigerator and took out two beers and an orange juice. He gave the orange juice to Liam, one beer to Patrick and opened the other for himself.

‘We weren’t going to tell you,’ said Liam. ‘We were going to let you find out the hard way, like your man here did in Wiesbaden.’ He was giggling hysterically as he indicated Patrick with his thumb, ‘

‘I was pissed, you bastard,’ said Patrick, ‘and she doesn’t have any bollocks. Not now, and not then, anyway.’

‘Oh we were all pissed that night, Pat, but you were the only one who tried to lay Katrina.’

Jimmy hadn’t a clue as to what they were talking about, and his hangover was starting to turn brutal, so he said, “Stop talking in fucking riddles and come out with what you want to say or piss off.”

‘We’ll talk about it when we get back, I’m sure,’ said Liam. And with that, they went giggling down the stairs and on their way to southern Europe.

Jimmy rolled a joint, drank another beer and went back to bed. He slept solidly until around noon, when knocking on the door woke him up once again. He ignored it. But it continued, so he got up and moved toward the door.

On his way through the kitchen to open the door, Jimmy slipped on an envelope that had been lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. He picked it up, noticing it had his name on it but neither address nor stamp. Hand delivered, he thought, as he opened the door, surprised to find Katrina standing there.

‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it,’ she blurted out. ‘Can I have the letter back?’

Jimmy was still half asleep, and couldn’t figure out what Katrina was talking about, but he reacted when she tried to snatch the letter out of his hand.

‘What do you want?’ he asked, stepping back into the kitchen.

‘Can I have the letter back?’ she asked. ‘I was confused when I wrote it; I didn’t mean what I wrote.’

Jimmy looked at the envelope. ‘You wrote this?’

She nodded. ‘Can I come in?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve just got up and I’ve got to practice.’

‘I need to be with someone, I need to talk,’ she pleaded. ‘Let me come in. I won’t disturb you.’

‘I told you, I’m going to practice. I need to be alone.’

‘Please don’t open the letter?” she begged him. ‘I wasn’t myself when I wrote it.’

‘I wasn’t going to read it,’ he replied. ‘But now I’m intrigued. Perhaps I’ll read it later.’

‘If you let me in, I’ll explain.’

Jimmy shrugged and turned into the main room. Katrina followed him in. ‘The bed’s the only seat I’ve got,’ he said, ‘apart from that, and I’ll be sitting there when I’ve had a piss.’

He went back into the kitchen and took a key from a hook beside the door, and left the door open as he went out and down to the toilet that was located on the landing between floors. The smell of filtering coffee greeted him as he climbed back up the stairs a few minutes later to find Katrina washing mugs in the kitchen sink.

He picked up his guitar, tuned it, and started with a few finger exercises. Katrina put a mug of coffee down on the desk reached out to grab the letter. Quick as a flash, Jimmy slammed his hand down onto it.

‘Can I have the letter back?” Katrina pleaded. ‘I regretted it the moment I pushed it through your letter box. I’ve been trying to retrieve it with a long piece of wire all morning, but it didn’t work.’

‘No, you can’t have it,’ he said. ‘It’s addressed to me and I’m going to read it.’

Katrina threw herself on the bed and buried her head in her hands. Jimmy opened the letter. He was stunned when he started reading. It opened with a claim to know what he was thinking. Then it continued with a string of serious accusations that were way off the mark.

‘What the hell is this,’ he said, as he read aloud: ‘I have seen the way you look at me, stripping me with your eyes. You lust after my body. You want to conquer and ravish me. I am weak now, but soon I will be strong; and when I am strong, I will take you, possess you, and use you for my own satisfaction.’ He was laughing out loud as he read the letter. ‘What the hell is this, an attempt at the Nobel Prize?’

Katrina sat up and burst out crying. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t help it. I’ve been here for almost three months now and I haven’t had a meaningful relationship. You’ve got two regular girlfriends, and everybody else has to cover for you when one of them calls. You act like a sultan with a harem of women at your beck and call. How do you think I felt every time the phone rang?’

Jimmy put the guitar down and, ignoring the coffee, went into the kitchen to get a beer. Katrina sat up and stopped crying when he came back in.

‘Life is easy for you,’ she said. ‘You know who and what you are. You’ve never had any doubts and you behave naturally, without thinking and without fear. It’s different for me. I have to be on guard all the time.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ asked Jimmy.

And that is when she had said, ‘Ich bin eine künstliche Frau.’