ADVENTURES IN A DIFFICULT WORLD (CHAPTER EIGHT)

Slowly the mechanical sound of the street outside begins to whisper to the consciousness, coaxing it back from the furthest reaches of a sleep like death.
Finding ourselves entangled like the double helix of life, our bodies reluctant to part, sliding against each other like lazy magnets. Genital honey-smells merge in the nostrils and strike at the back of the throat. We are awake...
We had finally fell to sleep at first light -- watching its grey threads snake gently through the windows, slowly burning out the shadows of my room. Now the autumn sun was high and shining through the barrel of a gun.
Once more I run my hands over the silken sabre curves of Astrid’s entwining form, causing the organ in my head to bristle with images of the night's magic hours.
Suddenly, and I mean suddenly, she violently comes to life, breaking the bonds of my arms, rolling on top of me, and with surprising strength pinning me down. Looking into my eyes she says,
‘Rig, you’re a sex maniac!’
‘It takes two to tango my little fever frau!’ I parry, laughing.
‘How’s your head?’ she asks.
‘No idea!’
Smiling so beautifully she says ‘That’s bad -- that means you’re not going to understand when I say, breakfast, or hungry -- aren’t they great ideas?’
‘Ho, I understand hunger my dear,' I say trying a mock escape.
‘You wolf!’ she shouts, ‘you wolf!’
We laugh together – she releases my arms, and kisses my sore – from-kissing-- mouth. She holds on to me for a long time like a drowning sailor.
‘Do you have something to do today,’ she asks.
‘No’, I say, then remember Ralph and his marijuana harvest. Without using names I tell her the whole deal, and describe my visit to his place. She laughs like a loop throughout the whole story.
‘Rig.... Rig.... it’s so typical of you.... you’re such a bohemian heart’. Between her peels of laughter she says, ‘You seem to have a love of fog strange angles, and then she adds, ‘but I really love it...’
So, I tell her I would go to Ralph’s later, and so, I was free all day. I ask what she must do, and what about Detlef... Before she has a chance to answer I suggest we go out for breakfast. ‘No,’ she says, Detlef is no problem -- she is also free all day. Then she suddenly springs from the bed saying she could eat an albatross, and she would take the first shower, and could she use my toothbrush.
I remain lying on the bed turning things over in my mind. Feeling somehow more intensely myself -- stimulated by the sensuality – tossed madly by waves of emotion on a sea of senses. I think of Astrid, and the night before. I think of Detlef, I think of my last affair, and the pain of loss when it was over. And all this is stuck in the revolving doors of my mind – going around and around. Astrid, the night before, Detlef, and my ex...
*****
We step out, arm in arm, into a candy-chill air, under a skinned sun crossing a periwinkle blue watery sky that threatens to tip on top of us.
Joking -- escaping into the freedom of laughter – we stroll along the Kasteinian Alley beneath its impressive, sun-fired, golden metallic chestnut trees. My head seems to float like a balloon, buoyant on the tide of my heightened delicious feelings. The birds are hysterical – what is it with birds?
We eat a breakfast of cheese, salami and hot bagels like wolves, while looking out of the large windows of the Schwarz Sour. When I look at her I can't stop trying to penetrate her brown hypnotic eyes, to read her mind. What is she thinking? What, if anything, had last night meant to her? Had it been no more than a spontaneous, inebriated lust-whim? And what did I want? Here I am, a man arriving at my middle years without a lasting love relationship. I’ve seen a lot of weather.
That pessimist Aeschylus said: ‘who acts undertakes to suffer.` Well, acted I have... And now this morning – this new morning – she is somehow making my whole being ache for her. She seems to have entered all the nooks and coigns of my thoughts. But she’s Detlefs wife, I argue inwardly. It would be foolish to presume that she could want... but then, it would be foolish to presume she couldn’t. I could just ask her; what she thought the night before was all about. I decide not to. I think I'll just go with it. But I mustn’t let it zigzag me. But at least today the gods are with me.
We take advantage of the sunshine -- strolling up the hill in the Mauer Park, along what’s left of that infamous, ridiculous wall, which the kids make much better use of with their great imagination and colour spray-cans.
She talks of her job and how boring it is. She just doesn’t have the mentality for it, or for the people she works with. ‘It makes you want to leap at the walls.’
‘When you do something which is so shallow it automatically corrupts you... your own motives have no value.' She would rather do something imaginative,‘like these kids.’ She remembered how free she had felt when she was studying graphics in Cologne -- not realising then how few interesting jobs were available, and how many soul destroying jobs she would finish up doing, even as a freelance.
We sat on a bench while she smoked a cigarette, and told me how as a child she had spent all her holidays in England with her parents and her younger brother.
Her father had been studying Languages in England when the War broke out. He hated the Nazis, and so rather than go home he had gone to Switzerland, where he continued his studies, and met and married her mother...
His time in England had made him a complete Anglophile, and he had hoped to return after the war. But after going back home his heart had gone out to the suffering of the people. He had wanted to help, so he took a job at the Cologne University, and he and her mother had done all kinds of voluntary work.
So when she and her brother were growing up, every holiday was a chance for him to visit his sib home on the island. There were friends to visit, theatre, and museums in London, poetry in the Lake District, etc. Her father had adored all things English.
‘Even the food’ I laugh.
‘Yes, even the Food’, she smiles. Her words spin from her lips in little absorbing orbits. ‘Crumpets, English breakfast, buttered scones, and even kippers for breakfast in Scotland...’
As teenagers these visits had become ever more exciting. Her brother George, who she had always been so close to, had married her best English friend who lived in Kent. They now live in the South of France with ‘a mob of kids.'
I ask something about Detlef – something about how they had met, but she slips into another subject so elegantly that there is no trace of a join. I am captivated and absorbed in her presence. I had never seen this side of her. She has me wrapped around her long white delicate fingers. I don't want to be just another of her fuck affairs!
I’ve always thought being in love is like going to sea. It’s wonderful when you have the wind in your sails and the sun is shinning – plain sailing – invigorating. But being an old sailor, I know the power of the storms that can blow up and sweep you off course, the dangers of a leaky boat, the doldrums, the dreaded shipwreck, which could leave you swimming for your dear life... or clinging desperately to anything that floats to keep from drowning. But in the end you must decide to set sail or not. For me, to stay in port seems a coward’s option – for we surely were born to sail. And as some poet said, 'We are more able in life when we love.' And I want to be washed away by those unique waves. Only tenderness seems to sooth the pain of being human, and tenderness shows we understand the other. And love takes us beyond the borders of the self, and into that other. I want no more from a woman than for her to be her self. And Astrid is a woman in every place. Yet, there is something in her, which is beyond a woman. So let me take my chance, even if I run aground between her thighs.