Day 6: Utrecht
Utrecht is biked through — dinner and beer
My mattress shared the living room with their little black fish. In the morning I set out on my flaneuring walk. Yami had once told me that every year in Utrecht the entirety of the pavement's flagstones was taken out to be relaid. Figuratively speaking? I would see none of that, but on my outings I encountered manifestations of that spirit, daily seeing acts of maintenance: jambs being repainted, a vehicle with a rigid hose watering the raised flower beds encircling lamp posts, a man raised on a crane before a house's facade. Not counting the complete overhaul of a road or the renovation of a building, nor the mowing of the grass growing between pavement tiles, I had not seen in eight years of living in Berlin as much maintenance as I saw every single day I was in Utrecht. Perhaps this negligence contributed to that subletter from Munich's remark about Berlin feeling ghetto. When a few years earlier I saw in Paris across the street an older gentleman repainting the black ironwork outside a ground floor window, I found it quaint.
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Upon my return Yami was already away at work. I sat talking with Shaked about life in Utrecht, in The Netherlands. She told me she had never imagined in her youth that she would ever leave Israel, not even putting a proper effort to learn English. She shared an anecdote; a while after she had graduated her program in Utrecht, her former classmates wrote her that they were passing by her house on a visit to town, suggested meeting. The program was in English, and naturally it was the language spoken when any international students were around, but when Shaked came down to meet them, she was informed (again that Dutch directness?) that they were going to speak Dutch, and that if she didn't understand something, she could ask. She couldn't follow the conversation. Enough time had passed feeling apart —enhanced by her being the only one eating among the beer drinkers— excluded, left to her own ruminations, for her to wonder if she was invited out of spite. When asked she told them that recently she and Yami had found an apartment in Utrecht. She, the foreigner, had gotten an apartment while they were left to bemoan the difficult housing situation. Already on the defensive, when she was asked where it was, she lied that she couldn't remember —because the area was considered nice? I can't remember— and they asked her how come she couldn't remember.
As the others continued ordering beer, the Shaked's view changed as she took in her mind the greater context, the café where they sat, well known to her. From feeling a stranger excluded by the Dutch, suddenly it was her tablemates that did not belong. She had already lived for years in that multicultural city, while they came each from their respective countryside, and behaved the part, like drunken villagers on their first visit in town. She left on some excuse.
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Shaked and I went out on foot, wandering the pedestrian area of the old city center. By the Domtoren, the Cathedral Tower, she told me that when David Bowie died, the belfry played his songs in tribute. They came to listen. Reporters approached Yami for a comment, the worst person, Shaked said, they could have picked.
My shoelaces had been already worn out in their midst, threatening to snap at any moment, when I left Berlin on my Odyssey. I had had spare laces at home, but relacing I discovered they were too short. The Rossmann on my block, my go-to for laces,1 had closed permanently around Easter so I went to the DM across the street where after a few passes I did find shoeshining implements but not shoelaces. Only one employee was present, operating the cash register before which a queue longer than my patience trailed. On my request Shaked and I entered a corner cobbler shop with clogs hanging garlic braids like beside the entrance. The shop was small, the owner came from behind the counter to assist. After taking a gander at my shoes he picked out one of the shades of brown from a rack of shoelace packages. It was one of few sizes, either the 60cm or the 75cm ones. I briefly gazed at it in doubt. Perhaps I didn't want to cast distrust in that little shop, mostly I didn't want to bore Shaked; I decided to dispense with my usual overthinking proclivities and paid for the shoelaces, assuming that a professional like himself who went through dozens of pairs a day would know what length goes with what shoe. While Shaked and I sat on a bench by Janskerk, which we had unintentionally intercepted from an ambulant Broodje Carlo eating girl, waiting for Yami, I relaced my shoes, whereby my proclivities were reaffirmed. There was not enough lace left to properly tie a standard knot, to say nothing of a double slip knot aka Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot which I usually went by. Boo.
On what would have been his lunch break had he not taken half a day off work, for my sake, Yami came out The Institute of Linguistics of the Utrecht University that overlooked Janskerk square to join us. At the edge of the square was an automated bike rental station where we got me one. The talk was about getting a Broodje Mario (est. 1977) or one of its clones, the staple Utrechtian street food. The idea was dropped, so my knowledge thereof has been picked from the internet: the Broodje Mario is a hamburger without the burger, cold cuts instead of hot patty and a different vegetal combination. As I understood years earlier from Yami's horror stories about his colleagues' lunch at work, if German cuisine was nothing to be proud of, Dutch was barely a cuisine at all. In Israel Yami had taken a cooking course, worked at a restaurant, and had at one point the dream of opening up a joint (a dream that appeared also in that “first chapter” excerpted above), irrelevant, so he said, where gustatory culture was lacking.
We biked around, sat down outside a bio café, eyed the menu unimpressedly (or at least I and Shaked?), set off again, and ended up at Michael's Mad House, where we got a Surinamese treat, satay in tandoori bread, to eat sitting on the edge of the canal. Sometimes you live for years in a city yet see for the first time a phenomenon seemingly so emblematic to the place precisely when a friend from abroad is visiting: a little barge propelled by a single man on a mounted stationary bike. When life gives you bikes and canals.
Thence biking a while to a café overlooking a canal, "Koffie Leute", where we sat at a pleasant spot between outdoors & indoors, not quite a terrace nor porch, but a frontal room whose external wall was missing. The day was hot and sunny, calling for ice coffee, or, as they write, ijskoffie.
Outside the café, Shaked wanted to go home, and did. Yami told me of the various neighborhoods as we continued to bike around. The infrastructure's adaptation to accommodate bike-faring had begun in the 60's, when a movement to prioritize it over private car usage rose, and was still ongoing. Cycling paths were ubiquitous, generous, well paved and made for a stressless experience. During my visit I saw how comfortable cyclists there were: eating a sandwich, smoking a cigarette, trailing a suitcase behind, two lovers on two bikes holding hands. I used to rather scorn complainers of bike lanes in Berlin, but see that they do have a valid claim. The Berlin lanes are about a meter wide, often pass on the sidewalk and often unasphalted. The quantitative in Utrecht made for a felt qualitative difference, whereby one could bike without constant vigilance, whether to safeguard one's own life when biking between the anvil and hammer of driving cars on the left and parking cars —with their potentiality for exiting or door opening— on the right, or that of others in the form of unmindful pedestrians. I find the pleasure of biking through Berlin only late at night, when I can bike carefree on the empty roads. For a nation seemingly so efficient to the point of lacking gusto, at least one thing the Dutch effort to enjoy.
On our way back Yami and I caught up with bike rush hour. In Berlin, in the busiest roads, it took the form of a queued clump before a red light, in my own experience was merely an amount exceeding a single biker beside me, while in Utrecht rush hour was a lane-clogging traffic. We passed through the super-market, where I eyed what would have been unusual in Berlin, namely mussels. Yami cooked them for dinner. He asked Shaked to make the sauce. She was lounging on the couch and before she could make up her mind I volunteered eagerly in. On my request he gave basic instructions but added that one cannot go wrong there. With free access to their cupboard, I improvised as I always do when making dressings. Though one could not go wrong, I felt proud when it was praised.
After dinner one of them suggested going out to have a beer, or bringing it in. The immediately following consensus was rather against it. The post meal lethargy, perhaps. It was late and I myself felt lazy but wanted to sit with them and so encouraged it, in a way despite my own inclinations.
We biked. At least when we arrived to the bar, which was not far, it was dark. We sat under the awning. The beers on the menu were all small sizes. Yami told me of the Dutch culture of drinking many different beers in a sitting. We sat, drank, chatted, went home.
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Day 7: Utrecht
A visit to Stedelijk Museum — a walk around Amsterdam
Yami worked the entire day. Shaked and I planned to go to the Van Gogh Museum, but as I looked up tickets I found that it was overbooked days in advance. We settled on the Stedelijk Museum instead, likewise in Amsterdam.
We left in the arvo and reached Amsterdam by train in less than an hour, needing another 55 minutes with the metro to get to the bathtub shaped museum. At the first exhibition hall we shortly discussed the matter and decided to allow for splitting up. What I had in my mind was a long memory, which my father subsequently recalled several times, of being in a museum with my parents and commenting on the way they rushed through the paintings, to which he answered along the lines of having seen all those things before. I didn't want to hamper Shaked. And indeed, making such allowances, I lost Shaked who went ahead.
What I remember: a small room with magnetic black walls and heaps of beer caps visitors used to write and illustrate with. On the other end of the room was a “water slide” with discarded plastic bottles for water, out of commission during that day; A retrospective of an artist whose name I can't recall, who painted simple flat abstracts with simple geometric shapes; Posters exhibition; Objects made of upcycled material; A display of a technological innovation, printing on stone with grass (or moss).
Shaked texted me when she was out on the lawn. I joined her forty minutes late, having spent a little more than two hours there overall. We sat a while on the grass, eating what we had brought with us. Later, with Yami, it would be Shaked's idea to compare the photos we had taken in the museum. One coincided: Jacqueline de Jong's 1964 Rencontre accidentel.
We set out on foot. Stopping on the way to drink, standing, I lost grip of my bottle, its cap broke against the pavement. The bottle was designed thus: there was the cylinder of its body and a bottle-wide cap. The cap had a frontal button that released a latch mechanism which lifted its clear plastic hood and popped out the thick silicone mouth piece connected to a straw that dipped into the bottle. It was off the clear plastic hood that a big piece broke, taking with it one of its hinges, without which the mouth piece would not fold down and the bottle would not seal. I drank the contents of the bottle and put it back in my bag (a little chic one I had borrowed from Shaked) with the illusion, not yet materialized, that I would fix it one day. A few years ago I would have suspected that my motives were thrifty, but now that for me such an expense is nothing to even mention, I know it's purely the unwillingness to carelessly contribute to the unending plastic waste out there in the world. I should tape the fragile hood of the other bottle precautiously.
At my request we walked towards the strudel heart of Amsterdam, crossing one canal after the other. The streets were crowded, mostly by tourists, I suspected, a feeling perhaps starkened by the uncompromising edgeness of the water. I could hardly imagine myself baring to live in an area so teeming. A shop-window with delftware, pottery and tiles. A story of Shaked's, about a friend who had bought a piece with a regrettable end that I no longer remember: it broke on transit? She later found the same thing elsewhere much cheaper, i.e. away from the touristic center that was Amsterdam? Perhaps neither of these.
At the Dam Square, before the Royal Palace, we stopped briefly for a deliberation. Naturally, being abroad on a trip, I wanted to look around, but Shaked was tired and/or wanted to go home. She said I could go on and return home alone, but I decided to go with her (I was thinking of my nap). We went towards the central station, continuing our walk. We veered from the crowded canal sidewalk into a parallel, all pedestrian, street, in which we came across what I assumed to be a touristic honey trap: a shop, fairly large, dedicated exclusively to candies. We walked in, Shaked wanted to get candies for herself and Yami. I looked around, Shaked made her collection and we came out with her unsatisfied. She wanted to find one of those candies popular in Israel, at least in our youth, a lollipop that is dipped into a powder that then crackles in the mouth, and so we entered another candy shop, big kiosk sized, where we found what she sought.
From there to the train station and home. Shortly after our arrival, I turned to take my nap. When I got up, Yami and Shaked were already having dinner. I supposed that it was our dietetic discrepancy that led them thus to begin before me. Yami was of the very few, maybe the only one beside my parents, who had heard of it when I decided, two years and a half earlier, to transition to a so called ketogenic diet & intermittent fasting, and in Utrecht had been updated that it was still going on. I don't remember what else they were eating, but there was a bowl of tahini on the table which made me crestfallen; I had planned, after a week of carrying it around unopened, to bring out the raw tahini from my backpack and treat them. I took out out of the fridge some of what I had bought in the supermarket, to which Shaked remonstrated that had she known that that was coming up she wouldn't have eaten so much, all the more puzzling given that I didn't have anything that merited such desire.
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Day 8: Utrecht
Monument — dipping in the North Sea at the Zandvoort — banished to the shore by authorities — abduction by a seagull — umbrage taken under a parasol — lekkerbekje is enjoyed with four sauces — a bicycle goes out of commission
On my morning walk I discovered a little monument not far from their house. A matte finished marble polar bear, standing on all four, looking forward. Situated in the middle of a park's green lawn, its oblong pedestal surrounded by living white flowers. I thought it commemorated our dying earth, the ensculpturing of the climate change symbolic image of the polar bear on a last floating piece of ice. I crossed the grass and, brushing aside the florescence, revealed the inscription "TO OUR LIBERATORS" and, underneath, "1945". It saluted the British 49th Infantry Division who, earlier in the war, in Iceland, had adopted the polar bear on drift ice as their insignia. After Germany's capitulation they entered Utrecht, followed by Canadian troops, liberating the city.
Yami had been long wanting to go to the amusement park, to Efteling I suppose, since Shaked didn't like it and he wouldn't go alone. I would have loved to go, too, thinking myself more courageous than I had been in the past. But decisions were made in consensus. The three of us decided to go to the Zandvoort beach, on the North Sea.
Yami's remark about the amusement park was just that; the exchange about it was brief. Was merely a lament on Yami's part, as much as his temperance could permit. Both Yami and Shaked are calm and quiet persons, non-standouters, making little demand on the world, though their respective temperances manifest themselves differently. Yami's resignation is true to that piece of text I had translated on the previous chapter, mute like a tombstone in the rain. You wouldn't know if Yami was happy to, willing or merely resigned himself to your proposal. You would have to ask, but why would you. So you don't. It's easier when all around you does as you wish and with the least complaint. He once told me, or wrote me, about having, if anything, the problem of ‘being too much in control’ over himself. I intuited what he meant, but I pondered at the impossibility of it. How could control over the self present a problem? I've occasionally thought about it over the years, recognizing the similar in myself. An uncompromising check of the mind over the body: uncompromising since the body has not a whole advocate to fend for it, only a mind divided with the prosecutor. An idiotic2 non-separation of power. Which results in the person feeling forbidden from making demands on the world. But even “forbidden” seems to carry too much of the social in its meaning, while the incapacity of the self-controlled is immediate, like those presented by the perception of the laws of physics: you don't jump off the cliff because you know your bones would smash to pieces. Even if your friends are cheering you. Even if your friends have splushed into the water before you. Thus, at least, I experience it: a solid fear of rejection by the world at the first sign of my wants. So instead of acting it out, I make bids in words, when after much remunerations I decide that I may. A whole Bundestag in the head. But these words cannot substitute the eyes, the hand, the being there, not the least of which many reasons is that the words define and bequeath officiality. If I call the thing by its name, prospectively, the other would need to accept it. Both the recognition and the admission. But without the words the thing wouldn't have had “its name” any more than any other experience that could be perceived in myriad of ways. But having given the prospect a name, it sticks. And if it gets rejected by its first given name, so are all potential experiences that bear any semblance to it. The opposite of a prophecy that fulfills itself, the ironic request, a bidding that nullifies its realisation. It's a kind of violence of words. To make it concrete, I bring an example, not quite directly of the phenomenon, but of the wording dependent attitude towards an eventuality. I once asked Yami, that was before Shaked had come into his life, if he wanted to join me and Alex to Abu Hassan for hummus. He declined. I followed up with an alternative invitation, asking if he would mind if Alex joined us. He said yes and the three of us went, each handling the Msabbaha accompanying onions in his own way: Yami teared and spread it on top, Alex intermittently snacked on them, and I separated the layers and scoop with.
For, in fact, we are all capable of suffering more than we admit. We don't begrudge the kisses of our aunts on Christmas. We've borne them, scarcely protesting, playing a part in the play. If we would have been asked, ‘Can I kiss you?’ we would say no. Don't ask for permission from your niece and nephew, just kiss them. Or: we easily accept the smaller half, every day in thousands of tacit interactions. But being asked, or even told, ‘I'm giving you the smaller half,’ would call for justice. Why the small half? For what reason?
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Shaked, on the other hand, dismisses with a backwards hand wave, saying pseder, ‘ok’. A resignation that fully expresses it being so, an utterance of unhappiness, discontent. The way normal people do, I suppose, yet somehow in our context stands out in its power.
I wonder now at the difference between “acceptance” and “non-acceptance”. Does it reflect in words only, or also in behavior? Can we accrue to our credit all that we do as part of a cooperation, allegedly unwilling because we had complained about it? Putting a minus sign and letting the equations do the rest. A kind of extortion. The quotidian negotiation.
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I wonder, too, what role this difference of styles played in the overall dynamic. It hadn't felt like any one of them was “in charge”, but Yami had a stoic way of arguing in favour, merely presenting things as a possibility where Shaked would enthusiastically call ‘let's do’, or laying down the pros and cons where Shaked would conclusively dismiss with some pathos. The manner in which she would get tired, fed up, early, as if she didn't have the patience of being out very long throws my into notions from sexist times par excellence, when various inherent traits were ascribed to the members of the “finer sex” (including the capacity for “hysteria”, derived of course from Ancient Greek hustera, “womb”) and consequently called for differential dealing with, including different expectations and assignment of responsibility. I wonder if it's not the case that the causality had gone both ways: having been delegated to second place in authority, not having a say on important matters, women had to recourse from direct statements to indirect influencing like in some highly codified medieval Japanese court, or to fall back to such measures as, to take an extreme example, developing a prompt indisposition, a severe migraine or stomach problem, whenever the oppressive in-laws were about to visit.
Needless to say, any possible average differences in disposition notwithstanding, sex scarcely helps in predicting a person's behaviour outside the realm of sexual relations and some cases of social relations, but still such expectations are expressed. I remember when a former flatmate's friend —both were Serbian— moved temporarily into her room because she had trouble finding an apartment. The friend was supposed to stay for a week or two, during which time the flatmate stayed at her boyfriend's. Soon after she moved in I caught her about to clean the bathroom. It deserved cleaning —and I had planned to give it to it— but not by her, as I told her. When she answered she made a remark about “flatshare of guys,” referring to me and the third flatmate. I knew it was hogwash, the idea that men were less kempt than women, but I didn't say anything, seeing it not in my interest to make a contradiction to dissuade her planned action. I regret it, if only because truth was not told. As for the miss, even though she ended up staying for nine months in my titular flatmate's room, lodged for free, her first was also the last time she bothered to clean anything in the apartment. So much for.
As for early retirement for the day, It's easy for me to recall examples with the sexes swapped, as it were. The following happened on an Xmas party of the institution where I had done my master's, which I and much of my class attended even after our graduation, every year on the Wednesday the week before Xmas proper. People were petering out along the evening. It ended with just three: Robert the program's coordinator, Nina a friend and former classmate, and I. After cleaning up we sat down around the fire in the patio and chatted until 03:00~04:00. I'd become aware that the fact that I had not been then employed allowed me such extravagance, though I'd like to believe that even had it been otherwise, I'd have stayed that late, so long as I was engaged in a nice interaction, despite the expected costs the next morning, keeping in mind what was important in life. Calling it a night was eventually prompted by Robert's tiredness. I walked Nina to her place, just around the corner, where she lived with her husband. She invited me to stay over as it was late, raining (only slightly, I answered) and I was on my bike. She felt like hosting somebody. It was mostly the clutching to my habits that held me back, but under her insistence I relented and followed her. And then— but no, I was incidentally contradicted by my journals. It happened another time:
It was Nina's birthday. She wanted to have beers at Monbijou park. I brought along two bottles of Hungarian wine. It was a gift from the next house neighbor, whose wine grape vine grew from his garden to clutch and climb over our tree and wall, in a gesture of thanks for the access he received to our garden. It had to do with internet infrastructure, a part of his wall that had to be drilled from our side. I asked him about the secret of his lush green grass; our own was a heathland of seasonal wild weeds. You had to clear the soil, the elderly Klaus told me. Indeed, whenever I dug into our yard, to bury composted kitchen refuse, I encountered debris: stones, glass and ceramic shards. Rubble from the war?
We were four altogether in Monbijou, exactly those of the invited who Nina actually wanted to come. A beggar approached us, said he would tell a joke for a euro. Helge paid him, commenting after he was gone that the joke, whose German I didn't catch, was somewhat homophobic and not worth the euro. I suffered quietly thinking about my bank account balance that amounted to 10 euros at the time. We got up when it was getting dark. I felt in a sweet spot of tipsiness. I said that I didn't want this to end, that I had another bottle. Nina sided with me. Helge went his way; Nina and I dropped Viktor at the metro station. It felt improper for me to suggest coming to her place. I brought up her husband, asked how the Germans pronounced his name. After her answer I made my suggestion; she said yeah, added that he would be happy. And then— on the way she lamented about Viktor, with whom the two had used to go out a lot, who since a year had gotten boring, no longer willing to stay out late. Viktor had decided, since he was behind on his academic duties —like all of us, to a greater or lesser extent— to pull himself together, though he was still procrastinating a lot. What a bummer it is when loved ones are quick to disappear or fail to appear. Says Mark, the regular absentee.
In their kitchen, Nina apologized to her husband for my manner of speaking. He said it was difficult for him when the language switched mid-sentence, that is, from Russian to English. I continued in Russian only, telling of the ten sonnets I had been composing to one lass I came across on Bumble, that Tinder variation, prompted by a tweet of hers about Neruda having written 100 love sonnets to his wife while she couldn't even get a partner for acro yoga, ‘idgi.’ Nina's husband left us, returned, then retired to bed. Despite promises we made ourselves to the contrary, we continued chatting. Summer solstice was approaching, outside it was brightening before 4:00. She came downstairs with me to open the back gate where my bike was parked. As she was moving back in, she blew me a kiss. The streets were empty, offering a nice ride home.
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If you humour me I hope I'd humour you with what I admit to have little to do with the rest, beside having to do with words and the sexes, and with Nina. A few years ago I decided to learn to type Russian. My Russian had always been somewhat funny. Literally my mother tongue, the language I speak with my parents, for most of my life I spoke it only at home. My peak Russian happened, of all places, in the US, during a year or two when I was part of a tightly-knit Russian speaking clique in college. Reading in Russian is something I never did. I tried to read once a Chekhov story, Спать хочется, ‘wanting sleep’ (been translated as "sleepy"); I felt out of breath after one page and gave up. Naturally writing was no better; very young I wrote my parents cards on their birthdays, but over time, perhaps becoming conscious of how formally wrong they were, I stopped. Nonetheless, in Berlin I decided to learn to type the language, encouraged by the phone's autocorrection's ability to put good form to my initial attempts and teach me thus, gradually, spelling.
As part of my practice, I texted Nina daily. I could say that to an extent there was a wish to be able to communicate with Nina, a then close friend, in writing the way I communicated with her in person, but the motivation was more general. I had then more or less (less) learned German, was making my first tentative venture into learning Spanish, and, moved by a comment from my father, I felt that Russian merited attention, expecting much gain by little investment. Which is why I regarded my texting rather like an opportunity, and I felt ashamed when Nina would later say, in a small group, that my messages to her were nice to receive. Ashamed as if I wouldn't have written her had I not been practicing Russian.
In parallel to phone texting, I wanted to be able to type Russian on the computer keyboard, that is, blindly. Whoever has ever tried to learn a new keyboard layout knows what a great and exciting pleasure it is; those who haven't might intuit it through its comparison to learning to write with your off hand, with the paper on your knee, as a passenger in a badly driven car.
The best seasoning is hunger, they say, and so I decided to spice things up, huh, by transcribing Russian Wikipedia pages about sexual topics. This was not an unprecedented technique. One day leading to the Carolingian Renaissance the Franks and their boys realized that they only mistakenly thought that they had spoken Latin all this time. Scarcely any of them could make sense of their holy scripture. This was embarrassing, to say the least. God spoke Latin and did not heed if you addressed him as ‘Horse’ instead of ‘Father.’ Think of all the poor souls whose nails were plied out perpetually in hell fire just because the priests had mispronounced the incantation on their baptism. As if the doctor prescribed you Plavix, Prozac or Celexa instead of Paxil, Proscar or Celebrex — but with eternal consequences. The boys had to hit the dusty library, for who wrote the Roman language better than the Romans? And here the next embarrassment arose, for these pagan classics not only wrote about damned idols, but about unspeakable affairs between men (and women). Therefore one was instructed, when reading and copying Marcus Valerius Martialis, Gaius Petronius Arbiter, Decimus Junius Juvenalis or Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis, to mind their grammar only, to do it without pleasure and without reading too much into such sample sentences as “Mary may wonder if John cheats on her.”
Aestus erat, mediamque dies exegerat horam; adposui medio membra levanda toro. pars adaperta fuit, pars altera clausa fenestrae; quale fere silvae lumen habere solent, qualia sublucent fugiente crepuscula Phoebo, aut ubi nox abiit, nec tamen orta dies. illa verecundis lux est praebenda puellis, qua timidus latebras speret habere pudor. ecce, Corinna venit, tunica velata recincta, candida dividua colla tegente coma— qualiter in thalamos famosa Semiramis isse dicitur, et multis Lais amata viris. Deripui tunicam—nec multum rara nocebat; pugnabat tunica sed tamen illa tegi. quae cum ita pugnaret, tamquam quae vincere nollet, victa est non aegre proditione sua. ut stetit ante oculos posito velamine nostros, in toto nusquam corpore menda fuit. quos umeros, quales vidi tetigique lacertos! forma papillarum quam fuit apta premi! quam castigato planus sub pectore venter! quantum et quale latus! quam iuvenale femur! Singula quid referam? nil non laudabile vidi et nudam pressi corpus ad usque meum. Cetera quis nescit? lassi requievimus ambo. proveniant medii sic mihi saepe dies!
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The heat was intense, and the day had passed its midpoint; I lay down on the bed to rest my weary limbs. One half of the window was open, the other half closed; Such is the light that forests usually have, Or the kind that shimmers when the sun is setting, Or when night has passed, but day has not yet dawned. This light is what modest maidens should be offered, So that they can hope to have a place to hide their shyness. Behold, Corinna comes, her tunic loosely wrapped around her, Her neck covered by her parted, snowy hair— Just as it is said that the famous Semiramis went to her chambers, And Lais was beloved by many men. I stripped off her tunic — which did not offer much resistance; Yet it struggled to cover her. As it resisted, as if it did not want to win, It was defeated by its own treachery. When she stood before our eyes, her veil cast aside, Not a single flaw could be found on her body. What shoulders and what arms I saw and touched! Her teats were so well-shaped and suited to be pressed! Her stomach was flat and smooth beneath her chaste breast! How broad and youthful were her hips and thighs! Why should I recount each detail? I saw nothing that was not praiseworthy, And I pressed my naked body close to hers. Who does not know the rest? We both rested, exhausted. May many such days come to me in the midst of my labors!
Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Elegy V above was enough to terrify the clergy; I dare not bring forth Gaius Valerius Catullus 16, with which I anyhow disagree, holding that while the devote poet doesn't have to be chaste himself, his verses should be.
One evening around this time I was invited to come for tea at Nina's. As I was getting up to leave, Nina recited, ♪Ich wisch dich weg und tanz dabei♫ (‘I wipe you away dancingly’). And explained. It was from a song, “Essig auf Zucker” (vinegar on sugar), which she had been listening to a lot at the time, by Mine (Mee-neh). ‘Mine?’ I asked. Though there was indeed such a German word, meaning mine (as in landmine), it didn't strike me as one and I asked about its spelling. She answered that it was spelled exactly like it sounded. It sounded vaguely familiar; I asked if it was French, and whether it did not have a silent t at the end, ‘like minet.’ ‘Minet?’ she repeated. It was only a moment later that I realized why it sounded familiar, and that I had literally not known what I was saying. The Russian Wikipedia, though never as saucy as the Latin classics, did have such explicit pages as минет, a word that I first learned upon my typing practice, which meant —unlike the French minette4 from which it is indeed derived— blowjob. I became embarrassed, said never mind and was soon on my way home.
For completion: another evening at Nina's. Though I had appreciated them for years already, for whatever reason I became that day especially excited about Sigor Rós and I wanted to play her a song. On my phone I found the music video for Gobbledigook, eagerly showing it to her. I had seen the video before, but once and long ago, and was not prepared for three minutes of men and women running through the woods wearing nothing but sneakers. Oops.
∗ ❦ ∗
Within this Utrechtian dynamic, an invisible eye is turned to Mark, who is only caught here and there in the mirror. Who knows what he was up to, moving around, saying things. It's not easy, hosting a person. A regret as a guest comes to my mind. In summer 2010 I visited my aunt and uncle: my flight from the US to Israel was connected via Zürich, so a visit was arranged. A week, maybe two. It was the first time I had met them, the daughter of the more celebrated Neznansky writer, her husband and their daughter. It felt Swiss: the mother worked at the bank, her daughter interned at a rival bank, and the father introduced me to an array of cheeses I still remember and eat: Gruyère, Appenzeller, Tilsiter. I think he no longer held a job, for health reasons. Heart, maybe. The muscle or its conduits.
My cousin was scarcely around; because she worked, my remembering self thought, but no: I was lodged in her room, I slept in her bed like Goldilocks. I don't remember what I was told at the time —itself a kind of hint— but I now suspect an understated generosity. It was summer, who knows what was up, but Nica wasn't somewhere way off travelling because I did meet her, and it's only at the distance of dozen of years that I see clearly what my idiocentric self was blind to: that Nica had accommodated herself away from home to allow me the visit. My heart warms up to this gesture that I recognized not only retrospectively, but wholly incidentally, on the way to another story:
I was to use one of the days to go to Geneva. The day before, my uncle, Boris, asked me to help him in the garden, instead. They lived at an upper floor of an apartment building, but had a garden on a balcony. I don't remember it much, I mean at all, that locus of shame. I remember sitting on the sofa and looking towards the window above it, already feeling prospective regret. My help was requested such that I could refuse, but not offhandedly enough for me not to carry the refusal with me. In fact, I remember a kind of sombre gravity to his request, and wonder if it might not have been my aunt Irina's invisible influence that excused me.
Nothing attracted me to Geneva beyond its name, the big letters in which it was denoted on maps. An arbitrary destination, except that I was nearby and therefore “an opportunity.” Relatively nearby: the train ticket was costly. I have a surprising memory for numbers and seem to recall that it was 135 francs, though the figure doesn't matter. For me it was a big expense and it was at the wicket, paying for it, that I first signed the back of my debit card, prompted by the Swiss official.
I had a miserable time, the time of the miser. It was a day trip, I was not one to get a hotel room. For me a hotel, like a restaurant, had been only called for on celebrated occasions. The previous time my family, that is, I and my parents, had gone on a vacation abroad, on a vacation anywhere, was nine yeas earlier — to Germany, as it happens. To visit my aunt Galka, my father's cousin, in Berlin, then still living in the dignity she deserved, before the wreck that the not yet dreamed of scheming and lying second wife of her son, mother of her second granddaughter, would bring upon her; to tour Germany; to visit my mom's cousin Ida and her husband; to visit another cousin and her husband, in Herzberg am Elster, with which we had no common language, but whose proffered cold bottle or can of coke I understood and still remember; to visit my grand uncle, Friedrich, Irina's father, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Our preceding vacation, to the UK and Ireland, a few years earlier, was my first abroad, and my parents' second since having immigrated to Israel. Hotels, in my eyes, were a great luxury, perhaps still are.
A great deal of my one day trip was therefore passed on the train, but what should have been the pearl was anything but. I arrived on a gray day, hungry. I added a sin to a felony, as they say in Hebrew, by compensating, as it were, for the train ticket. Or was I? The most dramatic, but untrue, would be to say that I was punishing myself, knowing I had wronged my uncle, and feeling indebted allowed myself no further excesses — where it was precisely a grand time that would have justified my refusal to help; I think it's not even true that by having spent much on the one side, namely the ticket, I felt like I needed to compensate elsewhere by saving. I think it was more trivial and all the more piteous for that: I was behaving along long instilled thrifty habits. Losing the dimes by taking care of the pennies. For, naturally, by minding the proportionally small I made the whole sum a waste. Like the wineskin the burst, silently, at the very beginning of my present, that is, 2022, trip. How far I go and yet nowhere at all. The only thing I remember from Geneva is the little stretch of sidewalk before the bakery where I had been making up my mind about the scandalous acquisition, to quench my hunger, of two filled buns. My first and last expense in the city. Buns that were too sweet and which left my fingers irreparably sticky. Already then, in real time, in the city, I was wondering why the hell I had come there, not knowing what to do or what I might have wanted to be doing. And now I wonder what I had been imagining, before my arrival, to be doing there; that is, I wonder what my motives were to go at all. Perhaps, ironically, I not so much as spontaneously wanted to go but was driven to take Irina's suggestion by Boris' request. Perhaps I so much as, and only so much, fled helping Boris. Because I didn't want to feel “taken advantage” of, as a visitor? Neither was I interested in gardening, as if it was about those plants and not about spending time with family. Is this all true? That much I can reconstruct, weave into a coherent narrative, from the bits of memory that have remained with me.
Years later, and more exactly three years before the present trip, Irina and Boris visited Tel Aviv, renting an apartment close to the sea. I was in Berlin and of this visit I heard little more than a slight complaint from my father, though a second conversation suggested I had misunderstood him. The two Swiss visitors didn't want to do anything, were not attracted to, excited by, curious about, anything, which presented difficulty to my father who always enthusiastically drove and showed guests from elsewhere around. Surely Boris' declining health —he died shortly afterwards— was one part, but I wonder if it was not also Irina's mode of communication, rather than inner inclinations, that expressed this disinterested effect, a mode that I now imagine a commonality of with Yami's.
I'd have suspected that I project Yami's attitude retrospectively upon my aunt, if it was not for a few other instances of checked expression. There was a tablet of chocolate (Lindt, another unforgettable Swiss discovery) which I, having grown up in Israel, put in the fridge. ‘Who has put the chocolate in the fridge?’ she asked, knowing perfectly well who it was. An expression of norms without finger-pointing at whom had broken them. She also told me how at the bank one often had to write recommendation letters for the not so commendable. A code was employed by which the subject's faults were communicated through expressions that on their face were anything but lauding. Not real examples, but roughly their spirit: ‘Ms Müller is nice,’ meant ‘Ms Müller has often showed up late’, or ‘Mr Meier's desk was always tidily organized,’ meant ‘Mr Meier has not lifted a finger in the office since arrival.’ This kind of indirect expression is not the same as a complete check on expression, muteness, but the two nonetheless share their subtlety.
∗ ❦ ∗
Yami prepared jakhnun —the full deal, including rubber-boiled eggs and grated tomatoes— for our outing. I have no idea when he had had the time to do so, as they cook slowly, perhaps the day before while Shaked and I were out? I borrowed sea-trunks from him. Shaked made sure to bring along a book of Hezy Leskly to read from, as we did on a trip to Jerusalem years earlier.
Inside the multi-leveled concrete bike parkage next to the central station I took out my phone to film as I steered one handedly. On foot Yami caught me. The parking had been reviewed in every news outlet in the world, more or less, Yami told me. I said every generation had to remake and redo. Having ascended into the open air, we crossed the sunny square directly to the mall, where electronic billboards announced the five months long celebration of 900 years since the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich V's grant of city rights to Utrecht, to look for a parasol. We entered a big hardware discount store, German according to Yami, though I had never encountered such before. The only parasols they sold were big ones for use as permanent fixtures in gardens.
We tried again at a little Amsterdam central station store. We didn't find anything at all. I suggested asking one of the employees. Neither was for it. So I did so myself, perhaps with excessive inner enthusiasm to reprove their submissive attitude, employing which language I'm not quite sure. The lady took me, us, to the corner where were beach parasols.
Later we were at a smaller shop, trying out caps and sun glasses for kicks. I think we were after sunscreen lotion. Shaked made a remark that implicitly took credit for something that one of Yami and I, not she, had done. I can't remember what it was. Might have been finding the parasol.
∗
Zandvoort. The sandy beach long and wide. Businesses arranged accommodation in the stretches before them: seats, tent-chair hybrids, shade. A drone flew in the air. A red tractor passed, trailing a fast-food counter, Geef het door... eet haring van floor on the sign, brandishing a puzzling array of national flags: Dutch and Spanish in parallel at the back; Mexican, USA, Brazilian and Argentinian along the roof. We found a spot on a blank interval, settled with our mats and parasol. Seagulls, the most terrible and anti-social of birds, were snatching food from the uncareful. A little skeleton of a vehicle, a kind of tugged rack on four more-tyre-than-wheels mounted with red banners advertised the “banana boat” seen towed on the water, yellow cucumber like. Soon a parasol followed, quickly somersaulting along the shore, chased cartoon like at a distance by a woman in a dress running vigorously in sneakers and a child in swim-trunks.
We wanted our stuff to be always watched, so I went for a swim alone. It was the first time in more than a decade that I bathed in the sea. I swam long. A helicopter and motor-boats boarded by orange vests appeared above my horizon. I ignored the active diminishing of bathers. Until I met one of the boats. A man cried to me in Dutch, the hand said it all. As I started back I wondered if it was about me having swam too deep into the sea. Towards the shore a jellyfish stung me.
Back on the mat, Yami told me that a child had been lost. The bay watch was evacuating the waters to facilitate the search. Having earned it, as it were, I arranged my Yemenite lunch on a sturdy paper plate whose division perfectly matched the meal. While distracted by the plight of others against nature, a seagull abducted a piece of my presliced jakhnun. I must have quickly reacted with a scare since it dropped the piece nearby in the sand. Luckily jakhnun is a layered pastry, so all in all I suffered merely an easily peelable piece.
We read from Leskly. While Yami was gone swimming for a second time, this time alone, our parasol was uprooted by the wind. Also for the second time. While I worked on setting it back Shaked gave me advice. The matter was whether the pole should be shoved down or screwed, or whether it had to be deep or could be steadied with sand heaped around it. I had had the notion, that I associate with my father, that people who try to do something should be let do it their own way, and so I suggested in response, perhaps petulantly, that she executed her suggestions herself. She declined and added that she had felt unappreciated. By Yami and me? By me?
I would not have remembered any of these little utterances on their own had they not formed a pattern that would come in my mind to the fore by the bitterness that I would, despite the sympathy, feel about the way my visit ended. A bitterness that would first make me wonder whose visitor I was.
I cannot say what made her say that then, and what she had really meant —surely it was not just about the manner by which to steady a parasol— but it turned my attention to that issue, onto which I cast an eye as an outsider inside their household. Yami had a job as well as did or had done freelance work as a programmer. Shaked didn't. Neither did she study. She had a rented studio where she did her art —I've never seen it myself, not since high-school anyway— but wouldn't apply for grants since she found the process stressful and the prospect of working under schedule to be unappealing. Yami did all the cooking. Since Shaked didn't speak Dutch, and Yami did, having learned it since their arrival, I suppose he also did the greater part of handling bureaucratic matters. Whereby a person merits to be appreciated? In no way am I privy to their intimacy. Neither of them ever talked to me about their relationship or at all talked about the other. I had no doubt that Yami's consent to their arrangement was not an act of charity but of love. But what is love? Not an absolute state of being, as Stoner, of the eponymous novel, came to know; who now strikes me as baring some similarity, perhaps, to Yami.
We packed up and left. Shaked and I waited for Yami outside the cabina where he changed to civilians. I had already changed on the beach like a shameless German. I suppose Shaked stayed in her swimsuit under. Directly up the stairs to the promenade was a stand selling fried fish. Yami told me that this was the typical Dutch thing to eat at the beach, and so, wanting to experience the visited country, not hungry but as ever capable of eating more, I went over and got myself a lekkerbekje with four types of sauce.
∗
On the way back home from the Utrecht Station I picked up speed and biked ahead. I knew their customary route home, but on my morning walks I learned of a slightly longer way which I found more pleasant. I neither wanted nor expected them to tag behind me. I hoped they trusted that I would find my way on my own, but Yami caught up close behind me. I crossed a traffic light, looked behind me, went back: Shaked had arrived to the crossing walking her bike. Her chain had jumped in an immediately irreparable manner. She told us we could bike ahead but of course we walked with her. Along the nice Maliebaan avenue.
I felt guilty. Ultimately the issue was with the bike —and, pleading a certain exoneration I add that perhaps it was best that it had its breakdown close to home, unhurried and in company— but I felt that by making her bike faster than she would have otherwise, I occasioned the failure and that it was thus my fault. And I felt she must have felt the same, though she didn't in any way allude to that.
At home I napped. I suppose we had supper. Thereafter Shaked suggested that perhaps my visit should come soon to an end. As in, I understood, as soon as possible. On the morrow Yami was working, Shaked was going to the studio. I had vaguely had the idea of making my way back to Berlin the way I came, i.e. with a series of local trains, but tired and urged I hadn't the inspiration to plan it. And so I began around midnight, significantly past my bed time, to look for direct train trips.
∗ ❦ ∗
Day 9: Utrecht – Berlin
Wrong train is booked — strained night — Rotterdam trip plans are made — train rebooked — chattel assembled — helter skelter on a bike to the central station — a packed train ride east — home
On a trip booking website I found a ride. Reaching the check-out page they threw an additional “booking fee” at me. It was not an exorbitant sum, but neither was it peanuts (as the CEO of the Deutsche Bank, then Hilmar Kopper, called in 1994 the sum of 50 million Marks). Just the amount that, presumably, people who had already gone through the motions of ordering a ticket were ready to pay. Less due to the charge itself than a principle indignation at this slight of hand, I looked for another booking service. At the very next I found the identical itinerary: same stops, same hours, same name, same basic price and no surprise fees. I booked it. When the confirmation email came I first saw that the trip I had booked was for the 12th of August, a day late. I muttered a cuss to the air. It was a quarter past. I got messages from Shaked, already in bed with Yami:
Shaked Ben-ya'ar, [11/8/2022 0:16 ] Mark everything's alright? Shaked Ben-ya'ar, [11/8/2022 0:16 ] It seemed to me that you said something Shaked Ben-ya'ar, [11/8/2022 0:17 ] Maybe I imagined... returning to sleep
She couldn't have more than intuited what prompted my exhalation, but I felt as if she knew exactly, catching me failing to execute her request, like a micromanaging boss, which transformed the on the face of it sympathetic question into passive-aggression. And then again, she dismissed her question immediately, dropping it before I could voice any concerns, such that altogether the effect was akin to the racketeer's compassionate ‘such a nice shop, it would be a pity if anything happened to it.’
I answered:
⭐, [11/8/2022 0:19 ] I expressed surprise and a lack of satisfaction ️⭐, [11/8/2022 0:19 ] Only at the moment that I reserved the ticket I saw that it was for Friday ️⭐, [11/8/2022 0:19 ] Now I'm looking whether it's possible to move it to Thursday
Really I had no hope, nor energy. Shaked “reacted” to my last message with a thumbs up. At :26 I sent a message to customer support:
[...]
I have seen the equivalent trip for the 11.08. Erroneously I just booked the trip for the 12.08. I'd be glad if it were possible to exchange my 12.08 ticket for an 11.08 one.
Many thanks and best regards,
Mark Neznansky
I went to bed at one o'clock. Woke up at half past six, before the rest, went for a walk. Yami answered me as soon as I wrote him; I joined him after my walk as he was having breakfast. I reported him the mishap of ordering the ticket for the next day. He told me it was not a big deal, suggested I could make an excursion to Rotterdam, and left to work at 8:30. Waking up I felt done with my trip, but by the time Shaked got up I had gotten myself excited about Rotterdam, decided on the Maritime Museum in favour of an art museum, as the museum with the big Rembrandt collection was closed for renovations — when in Rome, do as the Roman, and when in the largest port in Europe, go look at ships, I thought. Shaked emerged in the kitchen/ living-room where I was sitting with my laptop at the dining table and asked what was up with my train ticket. I told her that I had sent an email, and that their phone support line was only opening at 10:00. I supposed that I wouldn't get a reply earlier than, if not much later; I assumed that such a booking website was making marginal profit and that its operations were mostly automatic, with little available manpower to tackle individual cases. I must have mentioned the Rotterdam idea but it did not turn into a topic of discussion. Shaked sat before her Mac book, not looking at me, scrolling without seeing and peevishly voicing her need for me to be out of her presence. Her plan had been to go to to the studio, which she now couldn't do, allegedly because her bike was out of commission. I was at the awkward position of having to wait; I couldn't go out lest my train trip was suddenly switched. She was aware of her bad temper, expressed the fact that her problems had nothing to do with me being there and yet she couldn't do anything about it. I understood the fact that sometimes a person's presence attracted irrepressible attention, and with it vexation. I understood the fact that sometimes you want to go to Rotterdam but you cannot.
At a minute to 10 o'clock I got an email, to my surprise and partial disappointment, announcing my ticket for the morrow's train was canceled. I might as well recommend the booking service website, Trainline. I booked a new one for 11:21 and scrambled to pack my belongings. I didn't think it would take long but when I first minded the time, when I was done, it was already 11 if not past. On my phone I took a look at the buses, saw there was no way I'd get on time. The world shrunk at me in a panic. Shaked, sitting at the dinner table with her laptop, made a comment to the effect that it would still be ok, which I took in dudgeon, as if her best wishful thoughts had anything to do with the presiding reality. I announced I'd take the bike, and left.
Riding the bike wearing my backpack turned out to not be a problem. Luckily we had gone the route to central station, virtually straight the entire way, enough times that even I could make it without referring myself to the map. While peddling I dialed Yami, feeling like a car chase scene in a low stakes action movie, and asked him to pick up the bike from the station. My plan was to leave the key with it, but, having locked it, my quick inspection found no obviously good caching space, and concerned that on top of everything it might be stolen, carried the key with me.
I arrived at the platform some minutes in advance of the train. Yami appeared. I handed him the key, apologized and thanked him. We chatted briefly before he returned back to the work from which I had extracted him.
∗ ❦ ∗
The trip consisted of two trains. With the first I reached Amersfoort, a major railway junction. Gray and empty, the only people around were the ones alighting from my train or waiting for the one to Berlin. I had a quarter of an hour for my mission. It was occasioned by events happening on the previous few days. One day I was alone in the kitchen, probably making cacao, when I happened upon a jar of Pindakaas, “peanut cheese,” as the Dutch call peanut butter; 100% peanuts. The consistency of tahini but browner, I didn't restrain myself from infringing and tasted a spoonful. I loved it. The following day I orchestrated a little spectacle, as if discovering the jar in the cupboard, expressing interest, being offered, lauding the stuff as if tasting it for the first time. I decided to get some of these, and in my hurried departure I couldn't but begrudge the prevented supermarket visit. On the map the Amersfoort shops were not reachable in due time, and the one platform store on one of the following short stops had nothing alike. After, per Yami's advice, having looked for the thing at the bio section of a supermarket in Berlin I would order three 1 kilogram buckets through an online Dutch expiate store.
Announcements on the platform said the train to Berlin was overcrowded and bid passengers to Hamburg to take another train. I had put some thought into it, supposing that the extreme cars of the train would be less full, like the tails of the normal distribution, deciding that the anterior one would be better then the posterior, when I thus came through the worst entrance I could choose. The car I entered made me think of trains in British colonies a century earlier. In my memory it was all dull orange. The aisle was replete with standing people, at my corner was a tower of heaps suitcases, it was hot, the smell of sweat dominated the air. I felt disillusioned, regretted ever leaving the realm of the regional train.
Having reached the next, air conditioned and modern car, I discovered that the first was an anomaly. I left my backpack behind to make a reconnaissance trip, percolating through the humanity, stepping over floor sitting youth by the toilet cabin, side-stepping bikes, in search of empty seats. Then back and again with my backpack, arriving too late to get what the scouting had spotted. Sitters were uprooted by passengers with seat reservations. I tentatively resigned myself to standing all ride long, going through my Anki decks on my phone. I liked standing anyhow. Several times a conductor spread the rumor that at the very other end of the train were plenty of seats. Many stations into the journey I reached the ultimate car which was indeed sparser — nobody was standing and some people even sat alone. Some were not appealing to sit next to, one refused me the empty seat with some excuse. A woman at the very end of the train offered me the seat between hers and the window. I took it. What I journey I had made! A journey within a journey.
We spoke on and off throughout the trip; she, too, was going to Berlin. A German herself, we switched into English after a while. Her name, which I learned far in the middle of our session, I have forgotten. She worked in a medical adjacent field, we talked about issues of information access and sharing between hospitals. She had lived a while both in Sweden and Poland, but I can't remember the order. I think she first lived in Poland where she met her future husband with whom she moved to Sweden. Lived there several years until their separation when she returned, relatively recently, to Germany.
I was curious to hear about perceived cultural difference between these and Germany, things she had missed, or at least that was as much as occurred to me to ask based on what she had told me. With regards to Poland, I expressed with reserve my negative views of the cultures of Slavic countries, of former East Block countries, based on the spite my father had expressed mostly of the USSR. Perhaps thinking of antisemitism in Poland as well. What she had to say was very different. She told me the Poles were very hospitable in comparison to the Germans. I can't remember where exactly she reached, and under what circumstances; what I imagined was a suburban locality where she, perhaps along others, almost a stranger, was taken in by a family. She told me how even when guests were strangers, even when they arrive unexpectedly, even when there was not quite enough as it was, still they would share their food. After a stay of a few days, the hosting family gave her/ them gifts. With shame I recalled arriving empty handed to Utrecht.
Like those people who queue up the gate at the airport even before it's open, for the benefit of sitting longer in the comfort of airplane seats, my companion got up and assembled her stuff in advance, waiting at the vestibule as the train was flying over the high rail in Berlin. Seeing the familiar landscape, I recalled what my friend Brayan once told me, that when he was in Paris he missed Berlin, and when in Berlin missed Paris. I, too, felt anxious to be home and joined her in the enclosed space for a silent interval. Have we exchanged any words? Perhaps. When the doors opened she darted out, making less leave-taking than I felt was merited by our hours long chat.
My room was in the state of slight disarray left by the organization's last moments. Found a well ripened camambert forgotten in a paper bag I ended up not taking with me.
∗ ❦ ∗
-The End-
I wonder to what extent it was Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine that informed me about shoelaces' availability in drug stores.
i.e. pertaining to a single individual, as in idiosyncratic, idiocentric, idiolect or, indeed, idiot — the ancient Greeks did not view the person unconcerned with public affairs favourably.
Translated by the diligent ChatGDP with a few uneducated but informed corrections.
n. female kitten, as well as young lady and cunnilingus.