to any photographic likeness.
Her drawing was similar to the ones I had made at an age when Dads are always unconditionally loved by their daughters.
We see people not as they are, but as we are. At least for a few years.
My mother was also a strong woman. Ursel had never elaborated on how she and Dad had come to marry. But Christine’s strength was obstinacy. She was self-centred, self-obsessed, just plain selfish. She had hung around until I was eight and installed in a grim German boarding school whose fees were paid by Aunt Ursel. Then Christine Lange buggered off with a wealthy Swiss yachtsman of no fixed abode and a preference for the waters of the Caribbean. Oddly enough I did see my Mum a few years ago. She and her sailor were still together, they were holding hands and answering the questions of the television reporter on their boat moored in the luxury Renaissance Marina on the island of Aruba. I remembered that the waters were deep blue. The reality series had something to do with escapist fantasies. Aruba is a very small island only twenty-seven kilometres north of the coast of Venezuela, a hundred-and-thirty east of Colombia, its Dutch colonial past preserved in the name of its capital, Oranjestad. It could be a great place for getting away from it all.
Christine Lange was a long way from Baden-Baden.
That had been the last city where we had lived in the years when we were what passed for a family. My parents had moved home twice before. I was lonely. I wanted a dog for companionship.
When my mother decamped, our household effects went into storage. It was only when I set up home in Munich that I picked out from the detritus of family life my father’s armchair, his old vinyl records of the pop and rock of the sixties and seventies and that old painting of a dog which had belonged to Heinrich Lange, the painting, not the dog.
The Mighty Quinn.
My dog in Munich which needs neither feeding nor being walked.
The upshot is that Weinfelden still feels something like home, even after my university years and Manduvel apprenticeship, The Mighty Quinn and my loft notwithstanding.
My affection for my great-aunt is not expressed in hugs and kisses, but I think that each of us derives satisfaction from the presence of the other, reassurance that the alpha-matriarchal line (notwithstanding my mother’s deplorable dereliction of duty) remains intact, resilient and eccentric.
We seldom share confidences.
For instance, Ursel has no idea who deflowered me or when. I think she presumed that my loss of innocence coincided more or less with the onset of puberty, maybe because for her this had been the case. Indeed I had planned to cede my virginity (make a Christmas gift of it in fact) to Hans-Peter Danner ten years ago. But it was not to be and my virtue remained unsullied for several years more.
My aunt’s sometimes devious form of discretion meant that it took me a long time to complete the jigsaw of rumour and gossip and to conclude that there was more to her joking about ‘young boys’ than just provocative badinage. At the time Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had been almost ten years her junior. Then he had a luxuriant mane of long wavy hair. By the time I came to know him the remnant of this shaggy glory existed only as a frieze surrounding a pink and bald pate, although vanity demanded that what endured should be tied back, like mine at the nape of the neck, with a scrap of black ribbon. It took a little while for me to learn that almost all of Aunt Ursel’s dalliances were with younger men. It’s a predilection I have not yet (unlike Eleanor of Aquitaine) found compelling, with a couple of exceptions.
In truth Dirk Seehof was a month younger than me. But is his case the gauge of time was less significant than other measurements. I think Ursel Lange disbelieved my that big fisherman’s gesture. ‘Hung like a horse’ I had blurted out to one of the girls I had studied with at the end of one of our drunken girls-only get-togethers in Munich.
Six
Since I gave no advance notice of my arrivals in Weinfelden and Frau Steinemann could not be given cooking instructions, Ursel and I had the habit of dining out on the first day of my visits. The Wystübli wine bar was next to Brunnenbach Bücher on what passed in the town for a central square. I was not good company. Three books in the big bag with my skateboard lashed to it, propped up in the corner of my room, pre-occupied me.
But the plat du jour, whitefish with saffron and capers, was delicious and the local white wine helped me to relax.
“When the people who know me here in Weinfelden started dropping like flies about twenty years ago I let it be known that… while I might send flowers… I no longer attend funerals.”
Aunt Ursel was nothing if not frank.
The people who know me… not the people I know… a hair I might have split myself. But those who know me, or think they do, have a knowledge which is neither profound nor comprehensive and to a large extent constructed by me. I have kept in touch with half a dozen of the girls from university, meeting up with them from time to time. In one respect their knowledge of me is accurate; I can hold my drink. But otherwise none of us, even when pissed, give much away. Most of us had gained our bachelor degrees in Amerikanistik. Interdisciplinary American Studies are the academic examination of a culture little more than two centuries old, its society, its language, its literature. By the end of the second year I was fed up. The only American literature I enjoyed reading had been written in Paris.
In a paper I had suggested that the Americans should number their years from the signature of the Treaty of Paris which confirmed their sovereignty as an independent nation. As precedent I cited the Islamic calendar which counted from the year of the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina and gives us the current Hijri year 1433. This allows commentators with a certain agenda to imply that Araby is living through its own Dark Ages. I postulated that those living between Maine and Hawaii were thus experiencing the year 229. That year, 229 AD according to a different calendar, saw the renewal of Greek philosophy through the formulation of Neoplatonism. Rash and with gusto I wrote that outposts of the mighty Roman Empire were under threat in 229 with Germanic tribes marauding southwards, even as far as Bavaria!
I was on a roll, of course. Equate Washington with imperial Rome. Throw in allusions to Tigris and Euphrates.
“Ridiculous, Thea! The Romans counted from the foundation of the city, ad urbe condita. Welcome to their year 2765… in which your paper is a miserable fail,” my tutor had admonished. As an American he had found my aspersions offensive. He was a man few of us took seriously, so Ivy League that he had a first name which sounded like a surname. Huntingdon was an invitation to abbreviation and subsequent consonantal alliteration. Only a semester of not infrequent blow-jobs changed the Hunt the Cunt’s mind about my grade. I passed the oral.
That story I didn’t tell to the other girls of our little group. In general I think we mostly lied about our sex lives. Our erotic fantasies were preferable to the our honest recollections of the mostly mundane and were far more entertaining. We did profit from our studies to the extent that we followed much of what was happening in the United States with a smugness that being in Munich permitted. Most of us were for Obama, although Franzi played devil’s advocate by appearing to agree with Fox News from time to time, both then and now.
Studying law and pre-destined for an early partnership in her father’s highly respected Munich law firm, Franzi also informed us that in the year of the American Declaration of Independence the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society was founded. In more modern contexts the name refers to a purported organization which is alleged to mastermind events and control world affairs through governments and corporations to establish a New World Order. Franzi was, I thought, straying rashly into Dirk Seehof global conspiracy territory.
Three years after graduation Astrid was the only one married, something she thought she regretted, and had become an English teacher, which she regretted even more. She tried so hard not to look like an English teacher but failed. Her husband taught French and it was assumed