Vernal Amours: Short Fiction

By Ursula W. Schneider

Eleven short stories are united by the common theme of a woman's journey. Her voyage begins with a repressive childhood in an authoritarian, war-torn society and continues through periods of awakening and self-discovery in which she finds the hidden strength to support herself in new worlds and raise a family.

Although the stories are quite different in time and place, in mood and color, there is a thread that connects the main character with each happening, each new encounter, each mishap and each joy.

The tales show a woman enamored with the ideal of love yet unable to understand and enjoy sex. It is a woman who adores men but is afraid of their physical power, their superior muscular strength, a woman who had many lovers, not to mention two husbands, but was unable or unwilling to hold on to them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 14, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595781355

Ursula W. Schneider

Ursula W. Schneider-Hazarian was born and raised in Germany and received a doctorate in Comparative Literature from City University of NY. She has taught at Hunter College, the World Trade Center and Montclair State University, NJ. She lives in Florida where she continues to teach and write.

Book preview

CONTENTS

The Rape of Renate

A Birthday on Lincoln Road

Five Days on St. Martin

West Point

Sigrid’s Lover

A One-Night Stand

Kene Mahlet

A Funeral in Elkton

Wahni

A Swim on a Summer Afternoon

Life with Lawrence

About the Author

For Helge and Elisabeth

Suddenly Innokentiy grasped a wonderful fact: nothing is lost, nothing whatever; memory accumulates treasures, stored-up secrets grow in darkness and dust, and one day a transient visitor at a lending library wants a book that has not once been asked for in twenty-two years.

—Vladimir Nabokov, The Circle

Acknowledgments

(of Vernal Amours)

Once more David J. Mitchinson has been of invaluable help in reading the eleven short stories of uneven lengths that comprise Vernal Amours. I cannot thank him enough for his patience and commitment. As I mentioned before, English is not my native tongue. I can only aspire to and mostly be intimidated by a genius like Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, foreigners who mastered English with such perfection. But they too, like me, had to learn English word by word, by expression after idiomatic expression and by innumerable syntaxes that were so different from their own languages, Polish and Russian.

Also, I would like to thank a kindhearted German high school teacher, now undoubtedly dead, who had encouraged me to write after I had handed over my first composition to him. I was fourteen then and attended a demanding Real-gymnasium in Mannheim, Germany.

Many years later as a graduate student at City University New York, Mary Ann Caws, still very much alive and writing better than ever, receiving accolades from the United States and Europe, rendered me the same service. Apart from Henri Peyre, Sterling Professor of French at Yale University, who was one of the most inspiring teachers I ever encountered, Dr. Caws was the only instructor who allowed me to work creatively in a small, tightly tailored graduate seminar for 19th and 20th century French Literature. Instead of handing in the usual required term paper at the end of a semester, I submitted unannounced four stories, written in French and roughly based on Lautreamont’s, Les Chants de Maldoror. I had taken a risk trying to produce a pastiche of the bard’s provocative prose poem. Strict academic regulations normally do not allow for such escapades. But I was lucky. Dr. Caws liked what I had written and graded my stories most generously.

I also would like to thank once more my friend, Sabine Sweeney, always willing to console me when I see the world in bleak colors. And last but not least, I am once more indebted to my son and daughter in New York and their little ones of whom I am very proud and who bear with me when the going gets tough. I could not do what I do without the support of my family, (my sister, my brother and his family in South Africa and Australia, a loyal stepmother in Germany) and half a handful of close, dedicated friends.

Florida, October 16, 2004

The Rape of Renate

"They were wonderful eyes indeed, with pupils like glossy inkdrops on dove-gray satin."

—Vladimir Nabokov, Revenge

What is Sadomasochism and Sexual Assault?

For seven years East Africa was my home. I got married there for the first time and my son and daughter were both born at the Princess S’ahay¹ hospital in Addis Ababa. Their father was Armenian, raised in Ethiopia. Their mother was born in Germany where she was brought up as a typical product of WWII and its harsh aftermath. The marriage was not a happy union.

Those seven years, spent mostly on top of a magic mountain whose thin air impeded breathing, are in my blood; they were indelibly imprinted upon my brain. When something greatly disturbs me, I return in my mind to the Horn of Africa, this big, still many secrets holding country, where I lived when I was young, foolish, full of energy and was considering myself indestructible. It was a bizarre immortality whose strident, yet bleak colors did not appeal to me. Like an abstract landscape the future stretched in front of me in a meaningless, amorphous form.

Ethiopia, one of the highest inhabited countries in the world, with the Great Rift Valley walking through its lofty heart, exists to a large extent of magnificent mountains. Ras Dashan in the northwest rises to over 15,000 feet. But there are hardly any roads.

Traveling is difficult in the Land of Prester John as the Horn of Africa is sometimes called and, for lack of sufficient highways, many areas still cannot be reached without the help of a donkey or a sumpter mule. Reluctantly, and often to the sound of a whip, the straggly-furred beasts tread along sheer precipices while their lovely, soft ears nervously twitch back and forth. And more than once did I read fear in the big eyes of an ass, which for a moment held my minimized, deformed reflection. With each careful step a burro or a mule took as it daintily put its hooves on loose stones and debris, the animal’s thin, leathery tail switched across its hindquarters in a futile attempt to chase off ever-present flies.

Ethiopia possesses not only lofty mountaintops, where few people except hermits and old monks live, but also big deserts. The Danakil in the north of the country is such a depression. It is an unbearably hot hell where once the waters of the Red Sea had inundated the sand, leaving behind vast deposits of salt. Only one poorly paved road, constructed under great difficulties, leads through this wasteland. Yet even here a tiny, enigmatic and nomadic tribe that exercises in the savage custom of cutting off male genitals and presenting them as a wedding gift to a young bride, ekes out a living.

In this adverse environment the camel replaces donkeys and mules. One behind the other, the tall creatures march with seemingly slow, measured steps through burning gravel. The nose of one animal is connected with a rope to the tail of the camel in front of it. Often issuing a sharp, prolonged groan and never changing their pace, the big beasts of burden rock up and down like vessels at sea. On one particularly stifling morning I heard them utter desperate, raspy cries of protests when they were forced to get up and work again for endless, feverish hours. The camels were still resting on the dusty, hard ground, exhausted from a previous day of hard labor, when the driver had yanked on a thick metal ring that was inserted in their sensitive nose. Crying pitifully and displaying their long, yellowish teeth, ready to bite, one animal after another got up by unfolding first its long, spindly hind legs and then its front ones, kneeling on them for a wobbly moment. On their backs they carried huge, square slabs of the salt which constitutes part of Ethiopia’s wealth. Wealth ought to be taken as a relative symbol in this instance since the Horn of Africa is considered one of the world’s poorest countries. And one of its most war-torn ones. Walking all day and a large part of the night, without food or water, the camels transport the salt from the mines, where convicts and political exiles work under terrible conditions, to the sea.

Later that day, after I had driven about a hundred miles on the poorly maintained desert road, and after the sun had quickly, profusely shed its blood into the far edge of the wasteland, I spotted the chained herd and its driver again. Like phantoms from a different, hostile world, the camels were silhouetted against the horizon that had turned rapidly into a black, velvety cloth. After an hour, a full moon hung huge and eerie in the sky and like a medieval, cone-hatted alchemist metamorphosed sand into snow. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but a glittering, white, frozen sea. At night, in one hundred and twenty degrees, the camels still crossed the Danakil, this horrifying, enormous emptiness, which is lower than the Red Sea that had once dominated the utterly desolate space.

Since highways are scarcer than gold at the Horn of Africa, the French built a railway that runs from Djibouti in Somalia to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. Over hundreds of miles, the small, one-track train covers some of the most forbidding territory from desert sands to steep, rough ridges. An asthmatic engine huffs and puffs across a few stretches of flat earth where long-horned, emaciated cattle graze, although I have hardly ever seen grass growing on the stone hard, deeply fissured ground. Otherwise there are only a few small airports scattered throughout the country. Instead of building proper runways for which no funds were available, engineers had tried to reinforce high lying, harshly terminating, grassy slopes. For about half of the year these make-believe runways are functional, although the pilots do not have much time to become airborne before the grass patches end abruptly in an abyss. But during the rainy season these steep, short mountain meadows turn so slippery that no plane dares to land or take off. A red flag, perched on the edge of a precipice, warns the captain who approaches one of those tiny, forlorn airports, to remain in the air. Once, during one of my frequent flights through the interior of Ethiopia, when I happened to look out of the window of a DC-3, I froze in terror as I watched the small aircraft barely managing to take wing across the deep pit that had suddenly opened its ugly mouth full of foul teeth below us. As I held my breath, I knew that if we had stayed a few seconds longer on the soggy soil, we would have plunged to our death. On the muddy, rain-soaked terrain, mules, donkeys and the small, sturdy Gala horses that two centuries ago have crossed the border from Kenya, become the only means of transportation.

In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s noisy, dirty and utterly fascinating capital, cars still compete heavily with the many animals. Horses and two-wheel buggies, horseback riders, their leathery, black phalanges wriggling in silver stirrups, and mules continue to be a common enough sight. The symbiosis between the four-legged creatures and their caretakers creates sometimes strange and cruel relationships. I have watched more often than I care to remember as a barefooted Ethiopian, dressed in smelly rags, lost his temper and mercilessly beat a howling horse that was unable to escape from the cart to which it had been harnessed.

During market days the streets of the hilly city were congested with large flocks of sheep and goats that ran in aimless confusion and fear in the middle of the road. They were bleating loudly next to an army truck or an overloaded, filthy bus that swayed heavily from side to side on old tires as it climbed a steep road. A bluish-black banner of exhaust gas trailed behind the large vehicles and poisoned the air. The goats and sheep were poked and beaten with supple sticks by their nervous and hard breathing owners who wild-eyed scuttled after their livestock, their only possession. While the men hopped, skipped and swung long, thin poles, they yelled one insult after another at the scarred animals and frightened them even more.

Trotting along crowded city streets, mules and small horses were so thin that each rib was clearly visible under their grimy, patchy, flea-bitten fur. One day, I again watched in horror as an old, tired and skeletal mule, pulling a cumbrously loaded cart, was thrashed with utter cruelty. The animal kicked, screamed and tried desperately to break loose. But bound to its cross, it could not run away and its sadistic proprietor treated it all the more savagely until his rage was spent.

Watching helplessly as the animal was being horsewhipped until fur flew and its skin opened and blood started to trickle, the thought that the maltreated mule might have felt masochistically inclined, never crossed my mind. But the image of the tortured beast and its emaciated keeper, foaming at the mouth and thrusting his lash, remains with me. It was not just the brutishness of the scene that shocked me, although its violence and cruelty had the strongest impact on my nerves and quivering emotions. But I also felt caught by a sense of imbalance, which bothered me greatly. I clearly remember being upset that the power had been completely one sided. The unfortunate, tied-up mule, although far stronger than its tormentor, had no advantage. It could only submit to a vicious fate it did not deserve. Was that masochism? I kept asking myself ad nauseam as I walked away.

Later, when I began to reflect more upon the depravity man is able to inflict at any moment upon a domestic animal, the depressing picture widened into a grotesque exhibition of paintings of the highest quality such as Goya’s, where I saw man not only hurting beasts but also his next of kin. The analogy between a tormented animal and a tormented man, woman or child came, as analogies often do, apparently out of nowhere. I was only aware that there are many ways a man can, and often will, demonstrate his control over another. The madness of war would be a splendid example here. But even without war, brutality, utter cruelty and sexual assault, not to mention death were, as I had come to understand, among the oldest and most blatant means to exercise power.

Of course, rape is more complex than beating a horse or a mule. Yet whether animal or human, there is nearly always total submission to pain and humiliation. On one side only. Mixed with the sense of utter helplessness on the part of the tortured person are dimly, but constantly conceived vibrations that death is the ultimate goal the aggressor has in mind. This terrifying realization haunts the heart of the struggling victim even if the image of death exists only in its most subconscious form. Opposed to some of these vaguely perceived impressions, which are thinner than a fraction of a hair, stands the rapist’s short-term goal: Total possession of a weaker opponent. His purpose can only be achieved by complete destruction, either on a physical or a symbolic level. The sexual tormentor, his penis bulging, seeks to obtain something that even in his most ambitious daydreams is vague. With his ill-functioning brain he attempts to penetrate a thousand layered patina with which civilization has so inadequately covered the hairy ape in man. Yet in spite of genitals swollen with blood and semen to the bursting point, power and snarling hostility are the major drives of the rapist, not sex, as he momentarily believes when he commits his atrocious act. If a rapist were able to think clearly during his assault, or to think at all, he would know that. But he is literally out of his mind, caught in battering fury when he commits his brutal violation.

I do not know the heart of a rapist. But I have seen his face more than once. I have smelled his hideous breath and was forced to listen to his revolting rattle, his kaleidoscopic obscenities soaked in spit. I have felt his cruel, sweaty hands all over my body as they squeezed and pulled and tore my clothes apart. And I have stared at his eyes that were bloodshot and insane with violence and hate. If there was desire, I could not see it. I suspect that amidst the red, mauling madness of the molester, especially if the assault is prolonged, fear, disgust and the delight to hurt alternate. During the savage act of ravishment, during the monstrous desire to take by force what is not given freely, the aggressor must experience sensations that are similar to those we associate with pure, raw delight in evil. History has many examples of evil being exercised in its most refined abhorrence and frequently controlled by one man. Tiberius, Caligula and Nero quickly come to mind. In retrospect, trying to decipher who the men were that attempted to rape me, I can think of no simpler example for their venomous and degrading act than Nero. I have no idea why I’m plagued by the image of this particular Roman emperor. Perhaps the aesthetic distance of two thousand years that separates me from this man appeals to me. All I know is that I see a young Nero at his most mad and bloodthirsty moment. Namely the day on which he, according to strong rumors, burned half of Rome. More than one historian has pointed out that the demented Caesar thought he needed a city in flames as a backdrop for his recitation on the fall of Troy. Nero, the murderer and torturer par excellence, visualized himself as another Virgil. Which shows you better than anything else how absurd the despicable young man was².

But it is true that in his more lucid instants, Nero saw himself as an artist and omnipotent poet. Not to mention that he wanted also to be a musician. And he seemed to have felt that only a tragedy on a subhuman level could inspire him. The fires of Rome, he imagined, and the horrible death of thousands of trapped men, women and children, would transport him above his fellow men.

A rapist, too, who can be a lover, a husband, a father, or a brother and who is always a son, apparently believes that only through a major upheaval that takes place in a subterranean stratum, can he get satisfaction. By violating a person, his deranged, foul-smelling ego tries to reach for unobtainable heights. In his hour of boundless savagery, as he beats and rapes a human being weaker than himself, the attacker, foaming from the mouth, imagines that he possesses and destroys an entire city of people. That’s what I read in the eyes of my aggressor. He did not just want to rape me, but all women he despised or couldn’t have. Inspiration and fulfillment of the lowest instincts in Nero and the common rapist are only achieved by a vulgar mind and battering devastation. The difference between the two is their social status. One was a youngish, depraved emperor.

When man subdues another man, as he does in hand-to-hand combat or in certain athletic competitions that are substitutes for war, he follows one of his most ancient predispositions: to kill his frail opponent.

Sexual assault is another form of this impulse. A rapist disciplines a woman or, as it is often the case in prison, a man. In the worst scenario he even picks a child. But rape is a far more perplexing act than war because sex is involved. And sex is a psychological quest, which for the more fortunate man and woman among us can lead to the evolved form of erotic love. If rape is achieved to the fullest satisfaction of the aggressor, physical death is not necessary since a metaphorical murder has already occurred.

A woman submits to rape only if her life or irreparable bodily harm are at stake. Yet even in the United States, which prides itself in being today the most civilized country in the world, some police records still claim that rape gives a woman a certain amount of masochistic enjoyment. Such an assumption never fails to infuriate me and the image of the beaten horse in Addis Ababa or Romans being burned by the hands of a mad emperor appears in front of me. The truth some of those false reports contain is a terrible one: He who accuses the assaulted woman of sexual arousal during rape invariably is a sadist himself. Otherwise he could not so awfully misconstrue the abused woman’s feelings. His claim clearly shows that he does not have a clue about the victim’s mental make-up. Such a man is at best dimly aware of his own sadistic inclinations. Incapable of putting his desires into thoughts and much less into words, I always imagine that bloodily mauled horses or the scent of burnt flesh float through the soul of a rapist. Even if it is just at night, in his dreams.

Rape is a symbolic murder. Just as in a brutal combat when man aims a knife at his enemy’s heart, the seat of life, the rapist targets the womb where life begins. Yet the molester soils and destroys his own beginning as well. Sexual assault does not only mean the woman comes close to death, but it also seems to signify that the murderer thinks of his own extinction as well. Whereas a soldier, who is a man ordered to kill, hopes to stay alive unless he is wounded so badly that his pain becomes unbearable, the rapist desires his own destruction.

Now I must ask: When our little, psychotic emperor watched Rome burning, did he, at the end, want to be consumed by the fire himself? Was he masochistically inclined? Did the poor Ethiopian mule enjoy being whipped? And did the Romans laugh as they burned? Hardly, I would think.

But then how does the masochistic or rather sadistic enjoyment become involved with rape? Sadism seems to be by far the stronger impulse of the two closely connected instincts. Otherwise our society would not often have a police officer or a judge accuse women of actually looking forward to being raped, of provoking the assault by wearing a short skirt or by wriggling their hips.³

Rape is linked with sex although psychologically it has nothing to do with it. But because rape still exists in innumerable variations, far too many women continue to connect sex with pain and humiliation. The fear of rape is not only present in third world countries or some forgotten mountainous European hinterland but it also includes American women who live in major metropolitan centers.

Ideally, sex should only be thought of in connection with love. But in reality it often is not.

For example: A five-year-old girl loves her father. But she also fears him because he has limitless control over her. And he is physically far stronger than she. She knows a blow with his fist could kill her.

One day while taking a bath, the small girl breaks her father’s reading glasses. It was an accident. Her father forgot that he placed his gold-rimmed spectacles under a bath towel. As the child reaches for the fabric, the glasses drop to the tiled floor and shatter. Although the little girl is innocent, she knows that father, who sits at his mahogany desk in the study, will be furious when she tells him about her mishap. Not daring to move, she remains bound to the spot. She anxiously glances at her face whose contours a foggy mirror barely reflects.

As she knows from painful past experience, when she has been naughty her father, a believer of the biblical myth spare the rod, spoil the child, will spank her. He is going to take her into the master bedroom where he tells her to bend over the top of a black polished dresser. He then will raise her dress and use a cane. As she is bent over, she is aware that her father sees her bare legs and the partly exposed buttocks under her thin cotton panties. As little as she is, this realization makes her feel ashamed and her face starts to burn. Slowly, methodically, the father applies each stroke. Far from being pleasant, the spanking is excruciatingly painful. Her intense soreness quickly overcomes her degradation. She no longer cares how much she squirms and puts herself on view. She screams in agony and begs her father to stop. Listening to her terrible sobs, he tells her calmly, almost without anger, yet in a strangely bewildered voice that the punishment hurts him more than it does her. And regardless of the torture he knowingly inflicts, he continues the caning. The child thinks she is going to die. For several days after her horrible ordeal, she is unable to sit down without pain. So you will remember, father tells her, putting the cane away. His voice is still thick and distorted by some obscure emotion she can only sense but not define.

As she grows older and the corporal punishment continues, the girl realizes that spanking not only is not painful for her father but in a strange way he seems even to enjoy his daughter’s torment and humiliation.

In the bathroom as she dries herself, the five-year-old girl thinks about her father. The tension between having to admit to the broken glasses and her fear of the consequences this confession will have and as she remembers the pain of past beatings and her incapacity to make a decision, all of this becomes so strong that she has—without knowing at the time what it is—an orgasm. One moment there was great anguish and the next she experienced a new silent pleasure so strong it rendered her oblivious to her surroundings. Staring vacantly ahead and unable to lift a hand, she remains standing in the middle of the bathroom. From this moment on sex is connected with pain, fear and guilt. Love has little to do with it.

The child’s first consciously experienced orgasm did not occur because of a spanking but only in anticipation of it—based on the memory of an actual beating. Orgasm was achieved by mental images only. There was no physical help. The small girl did not know yet that it had a clitoris.

When a woman is accused of submitting to rape, her sexual fantasies may sometimes lead her to believe that where fear and humiliation are predominant and linked with sex, rape is somehow connected with achieving an orgasm.

Although such a woman is occasionally reproached for enjoying rape, it is strictly her visualization of being raped that may have led to an arousal. Pleasure does not occur during the actual rape. Rape is similar to the way we think about death. Imagining death, our mind tends to take us to a vague country beyond the uncrossable void. And even though the country we see is death, in our spirit we like to think of it as being beautiful. We have to paint a heaven full of large-winged angels because otherwise we cannot bear the thought of total disintegration, or the idea of ashes floating in the wind, of maggots nibbling at our flesh. We need religion to survive the tragic parts of life and to prepare us for the inevitable. But unless we are unconscious or in a deep sleep while we die, the actual act of dying is not pleasant at all because we are far too terrified and often in great pain.

I

.. .between two worlds of dust.

In 1955, ten years after the Second World War, general living conditions in Germany were still rather rough and ugly. Fear and frustration clung in visible form to old and even to a few young faces. Renate Schmidt sometimes thought that despair had turned lips, especially those of an elderly person, into two thin, parallel running, pale lines. Over the configurations of the mouth, the nose was fixed in a vertical, straight and often unexpectedly elegant manner as if a wood-carver had an afterthought. These geometrically opposed delineations established a severe expression that seemed to reach back to Gothic statues, the same that still stand guard next to the high portals of a cathedral in Europe.

Looking below their stony feet, the thousand-year-old sculptures had watched the burning of heretics, dissidents and witches in the marketplace. The elongated toes of the statues were closest to the onlooker who stared up to them. Feet and toes had remained immaculate under a thick patina of dust, soot and dirt. Long and wide, the square spread in front of the exquisite marble figures. It always left enough room for a scaffold to be erected in a short time. The habit of suddenly setting up gallows lasted well into the 20th century.

About eight hundred years later, the facial features of these stony descendants of the dark ages, the survivors of fires, pestilence and wars, had evolved into nearly lipless mouths and thin, straight noses. Their faces had turned into wood and this strange metamorphosis rendered the eyes larger than they were if one had measured them. Dreams, or what Renate thought of as dreams, in the otherwise stern and masculine countenances of most men and certain women and even some little girls, who had their blond, straight hair cut short, which made them look like boys, floated on the surface of the eyes. Those eyes touched Renate. They were the only part of the silent, stilted, yet very much alive silhouettes, which surrounded her day after day, she could identify with.

Heads, attached to shoulders and invisible or rather unnoticed bodies, swirled about her while she hurried to work through the congested streets of M., a city overburdened with factories. The wooden traits resembled more perpetual carnival masks than the features of living, warm-blooded creatures. Faces ranged from intellectual ones with high, gleaming foreheads formed by receding hairlines to the weatherworn and wrinkled features of laborers. The latter were mostly honest, hard working and simple men who loved to watch soccer on a Sunday afternoon. Holding a beer bottle in one hand, they gesticulated with the other as they loudly and crudely made their comments about a specific player.

A large part of factory hands had left school at the age of fourteen. From then on their minds depended on radio, television and tabloids. The most read parts of a newspaper were the comic strips that appeared on almost every page. Among the rigid faces of the intelligentsia and the shriveled ones of the proletariat and peasants whose women still wore black kerchiefs that did not show a single strand of hair, moved the ironclad, prematurely fat figures, the limousine-chauffeured heads of corporations and private industries.

Through mostly concealed windows, Renate saw at best eyes that appeared to be staring at her. Although she was frightened of big-bodied, muscled, male figures, eyes, regardless of their shape, color or an occasional menacing expression, did not intimidate her. Eyes, with their opaque or scintillating irises, were reminders of half forgotten childhood days. Some of those had been like quick laughter rippling across the rainbow colored spray of a sea cove.

Renate was in her late teens. She was a Backfisch. A Baked fish! ‘What a silly German expression,’ she often thought. No one had ever explained to her from where the label had originated and she hated it. Especially since it was applied only to half-grown girls. ‘Boys at my age are called young men. At worst they are labeled Halbstarke. But either expression is far more appropriate than Backfisch,’ she would muse. ‘Why were young women referred to as something edible? Something that is swallowed by someone stronger!’ Angrily and confused, she closed her eyes for a moment to shut out reality.

For the past few minutes she had been standing motionless on the last platform of a yellow streetcar where a crowd of loud-mouthed young men, wearing blue overalls, had pushed her into a corner. Heavy-boned, full of energy and healthy in spite of the lack of food they had suffered during and after the war, they were apprentices of various trades or machinists in stifling factory boiler rooms. Six days a week they labored long hours in manufacturing plants that crouched in ugly clusters along both shores of the Rhine.

It was shortly after 7:00 o’clock in the morning. Streets and alleys were still wet from the night’s rain. The sky was invisible under the mist and fog that clung like glue to the outlines of rooftops and brick walls.

In the streetcar the boisterous workers exchanged jokes mixed with mild obscenities. Except for a gray-haired, tiny woman, Renate was the only female in this section of the tramway. Elbows and shoulders framed the elderly lady’s face. Among the sleeves of rough woolen coats and oily rain gear her eyes glanced half anxiously, half curiously about her. She reminded Renate of a cat looking through a wooden fence.

The young men who were brimming with raw, unused life exchanged remarks in rapid sequence. They were showing off in front of Renate, each trying to outdo his comrade. Having nothing better to do, the boys, egged on by their newly acquired testosterone glands, ceaselessly bragged in front of the lovely young girl. She was painfully aware of it and usually played her part in this type of game she detested. But this morning instead of responding with a rapid smile, whose meaning would be totally misunderstood by her daring onlookers, she could not camouflage her sullen mood. Her spirit was in silent harmony with the landscape that floated in solid grays past her.

Of course, her unchanging, serious countenance exposed her even more to the crude jests that were flung at her. After a while the merciless bantering of the uncouth laborers seemed to take more and more concrete shapes until each word seemed to turn into one of the different sized pebbles that cover the beaches of the Rhine in such abundance. She felt the impact of each spall. Caught among the dense crowd of passengers, there was no escape unless she got off the streetcar.

One worker’s face especially intruded painfully upon Renate’s world. He spoke even faster and more coarsely than his friends. Grinning at the girl, he opened his mouth wider than the others and exposed strong, healthy, yellowish teeth. His pink tongue darted back and forth among them. ‘Like a small, fat, poisonous snake,’ Renate thought. He was a husky, handsome fellow who had just returned from a trip to Italy of which his boasting bore ample evidence. So did his tanned, symmetrical features.

As often before, Renate thought again how strange it was that Germans were irresistibly pulled across the Alps, drawn beyond the snow-capped mountains that barred their way toward the south. No one could explain properly why. Like newly hatched sea turtles heading across a deadly stretch of sand toward the pounding surf, her country men were lured back into the Mediterranean Sea from where they once had come.

Suddenly, the streetcar came to a sharp, unscheduled stop. The tram’s breaks screeched as a large, heavily loaded truck slithered to a standstill, its front wheels locked across the tracks. Renate’s head was thrown against the shoulders of the brazen-mouthed youth. For a moment she inhaled the smooth skin that covered his full cheek and neck. There was the pleasant smell of a lemon fragrance that mixed with the boy’s natural, healthy odor. The shock of the impact and faint sensual scent excited the young girl far more than she would have admitted had someone asked her. But no one did. Sex was the forbidden subject. No member of her family acknowledged experiencing sexual impulses. Not even the most innocent ones. There was no such thing as a chaste sexual urge. Sex was something the young girl from a good family did not discuss. And far less did she experience it. Sex was the big, unknown specter that loomed at the horizon until the wedding day.

As they collided, both young people blushed. Renate looked quickly at the young laborer’s strong, graceful profile that had invaded her privacy. Then, for the rest of her commute, her eyelids remained directed toward the ground. The bragging working man, as if Renate’s unexpected closeness had completely changed his mood, stopped teasing her.

‘The girl is prettier than hell,’ he thought. He could not take his eyes off her dark lashes and eyebrows that contrasted sharply with her light hair. And he liked her high, smooth cheekbones that had turned crimson.

If I only had the guts to ask her for a date, the young man mused, irritated with himself. Frustrated, he tapped his heel against the floor of the tram. Then he threw back his shoulders to make himself look even taller. But a dame like that will not go out with me. And if she does, she will only poke fun at me. I know her type. She’s a teaser. You never know what’s going on in her mind. She wouldn’t let me touch her in a million years, he argued with himself.

His fear of rejection made him rigid and he kept chewing at his lower lip. His neck looked strained and quite scrawny as he held his head as high as possible.

For a moment after Renate’s cheek had brushed against the young laborer’s, she saw lemon blossoms among thick, darkish-green foliage. They did not grow naturally but were the poetry-inspired thoughts of 18th century German writers and Taugenichte who jumped off and on horse drawn carriages headed for Italy. She knew what her mind was doing. It did it every time she felt desire. Not allowed to indulge in sexual longings, she tried to escape into literature or the arts. I would have made a perfect nun, she had often thought. For a long time the young girl stared at the dirty floor of the streetcar. After the removal of the jack-knifed truck, the engineer, muttering angrily to himself, had started his crammed vehicle again.

The young girl, as if waking from a dream, realized how tired she was although it was only early morning. Listlessly, she did not look forward to a meaningless job. The brief impact between herself and the young man was already fading. By the end of the day that seemed to drag on forever, she had forgotten what he looked like. She no longer remembered the keen pleasantness of her momentary arousal. And gone was her desire to be held by his strong arms and nestle against his shoulders.

Shortly after the near collision between streetcar and truck, the young laborer and his friends arrived at their stop. Noisily they stepped off the streetcar, which had stopped in front of a huge chemical factory. Its entire compound of nearly two thousand acres was enclosed by a high, iron wrought fence. An enormous chimney, too close to the tram to see its thick, gray-white fumes that billowed day and night from its tall apex, rose between innumerable long, low, red-brick buildings. As Renate looked at the back of the young man, a sigh of relief escaped from her lips. Why do men have to be showing off all the time? He might have been rather nice without his constant swagger, she silently reasoned with herself. Unlike Renate, the machinist could not get the young girl’s face out of his mind. He looked for her on his way home and the next morning. But there was no sign of her.

Almost two years before, Renate had begun an apprenticeship at a large, modern pharmacy. The shop occupied most of the ground floor of a new, spacious apartment building in L. The eight-story, gray stone house was one ofseveral that had been rebuilt after World War Two. Set deep in the ground, its structure included an enormous, shelter-like cellar, which was used for storage. The heavy, red, roof tiles of the buildings formed steep angles that pointed toward the Friedrich’s Platz in L. The dwellings traced two half-circles, which enclosed an expansive, empty square. Across it ran two sturdy, silvery blinking streetcar rails. The tracks were part of a net that connected most major streets of L. and her sister city M. The streetcars passed along the endless iron fence of the BASF and crossed a massive bridge under which the Rhine flowed. Its once transparent waters had turned brown from industrial waste. And Wagner’s golden-haired, white-bodied Rhine daughters could no longer live among the river’s polluted, fast-gurgling current.

Renate hated her job. To work in L. had been her father’s idea, not hers. But obedient to his wishes, she hurried back and forth between her parent’s home in M. and the pharmacy in L. She worked six days a week. Mornings and evenings, usually with her head bent slightly, she daydreamed in the corner of a crowded streetcar where she seldom managed to get hold of a seat. Closing her eyes halfway like a sleepy cat, she wanted her thoughts to be as little distracted as possible from the colorful images her mind was capable of conjuring at a moment’s notice. Losing herself, sensuous feelings, whose origins she declined to define, soon invaded her. Sometimes, to make herself deliberately odious, she pretended to be a smelly beetle enclosed by rose petals. Nobody could see or touch her. That way she was perfectly safe. No one was able to tell her what to do. If her father saw her sitting sluggishly at home while she listened to a program on the radio or read a magazine, he called her a narcissistic idler. And unless he had to go somewhere, he prodded her to do something useful like making her bed or cleaning the bathroom where she had left the soap swimming in a dish full of water. It made her furious and she hated her father then with an intensity she did not know she was capable of. But outwardly she was acquiescent. She had no choice. She still lived under her parent’s roof. And her father often reminded her of that. He also made it clear that she earned too little to get her own apartment.

The name of the store she was headed for was the same as her own without her being in the least related to its owner. It reminded her unpleasantly that Schmidt was one of the most common German names and could be spelled in at least four different ways. This meant that it was constantly written wrong. The misspellings did not make it easier for her to grow fond of a name she thought did not fit her.

This dislike of an inherited name her parents, particularly her father, were proud of, did not help her find her identity.

Schmidt, at best, reminded Renate of the soot-covered abode of Venus’ lame husband where he brooded over his wife’s infidelity. Only occasionally did her memory evoke an open-aired smithy that was located near the center of a tiny village slightly north of F. The communal baking house stood next to the smith’s workshop. It was built in the middle of the only dirt road that led through the hamlet. On bread making days whenever a plump, full-skirted farmer’s wife slowly opened the oven door, the smell offreshly baked loafs floated through half the village. Its delectable, unsurpassed scent always made Renate’s mouth water. Her love of bread lasted all her life.

As a child during the war, she had been evacuated to this place, along with her mother, brother and sister. The farmers of the village were too poor to own but a few horses. In June slow oxen and cows pulled high, hay-covered, open rag-wags past farmsteads with their tall barns that were built from mud, twigs and heavy rafters. In the fall and spring sturdily made wagons carried manure to carefully cultivated fields that started behind the last shed of the village. The farm vehicles rattled and jolted across a little stone bridge of the Nidda. The small river meandered through meadows and orchards. Its waters were mostly shallow and sparkling clear. Seldom did a sudden deep pool gurgle under the low hanging branches of a willow tree. She soon learned about those dangerous spots and in warm weather the lovely current invited her to wade along its green shore. Here a soft rug of dandelions competed with the thick, juicy leaves of sorrel. Always hungry, the child picked those and chewed them by the ravenous mouthful, humming a lullaby. While she amused herself idling the hours away, the peasants labored at their land from sunrise to sunset. She never grew tired of watching the busy men and women and would follow them into the fields where the grass was cut with a long-handled scythe. Lingering in the shade, she was delirious with joy when a farmer, a quick grin running over his hot and sweaty face, took pity on the lonely child and held out a rake for her.

Every so often a horse did need a new shoe, and Renate watched in awe as Hephaestus, wearing a heavy, black leather apron, lifted a huge horse’s foot and hammered seven nails into its hoof. The strong smith showed no sign of resemblance with Venus’ crippled husband. The beautiful animal kept swishing its long, black tail back and forth and its brown coat rippled in glimmering chocolate shades from a thorough grooming. Its proud owner held it on a short rein and spoke soothingly to the horse, his best friend and most priced possession. Renate soon learned that the steed of a poor farmer often ranked higher than his wife, especially after her once rosy cheekbones had faded and a net of deep, dirt-brown wrinkles covered her face burnt by the sun.

Quiet, boy! It won’t hurt. Keep still! The smith spoke to the animal as if it were human. But the big, well-nourished beast shook its heavy mane and neighed nervously. Its ears were bent backwards. The child was afraid and thrilled at the same time. She remained glued to the spot while her nostrils contracted from the sharp stench that rose when red-hot iron mixed with horse hoof.

This morning, as Renate was jammed as usual in a crowded corner of her streetcar, she had for no obvious reason become more painfully aware that the faces around her resembled wooden masks. The powerful visualization made her long for Italy where she had just spent a brief vacation. Irresistibly, she felt drawn back to the gentle shores of the curvaceous and hilly Riviera.

While the blond-skinned, young girl headed for work, her heart was still filled with images from a sun-flooded beach in Alassio. She saw herself lying on her stomach and felt her toes, like fleshy independent bugs, voluptuously bury themselves in the sand, so rare for the coast of the Côte d’Azur where pebbles are the norm. As if she were playing with small tin soldiers, her mind lined-up brown-bodied, bikini-clad women and men around her. Their limbs were smaller and had a smoother skin wrapped around their bones than those she was surrounded by since birth. Dreaming in the teeming tram, she let herself glide back deeper and deeper. Her eyelids half closed, she watched as out of a dark sea a full moon slowly emerged.

A few minutes later, as she looked through the window, she suddenly experienced a sense of nausea. It was caused by the steep, sharply declining roofs of the houses that semi circled the Friedrich’s Platz. To divert her mind, she compared these roofs, built so snow and rain could run off easily, with the flat ones of Southern Europe. In Italy she had seen rooftops that were used as an extension of the house. Families enjoyed them. On a warm, humid night a paterfamilias would guide his guests there for a social gathering. In the Northern bred mind of Renate the South existed only as a sensuous, colorful metaphor. She saw nothing but mansions walled in by pine trees, cypresses and wild roses. Her eyes hungrily fed on myrrh groves and fields ablaze with the blue gold of lavender. And beyond splendid gardens high hallways always led to rooms whose locked doors held secrets she would have liked to unravel.

From her house to work Renate had a two-hour, one-way commute, which she spent daily, except for Sundays, on an overloaded bus and streetcar. Seldom getting a seat and unable to read, she had ample time to led her soul wander.

Her father had just allowed her for the first time to take a trip to Italy on her own. But not before he had made sure that her room in a small, white villa, was on the second floor. He did not consider first floors safe for his eighteen-year old daughter. A middle-aged, obese, short-breathed Signora with black triangles under her sleeveless armpits and a mustache that followed unhindered the contours of her upper lip, ran the house. She was an accomplished cook who soaked her dishes in olive oil and drowned Renate in a flood of sharp, guttural sounds when she was late for one of her meals. The lovely estate was tucked halfway into a secluded, wooded hill of Alassio. Like a luxurious boat, the house was moored in a large, mostly wild growing garden. Giant green plants and flowers, whose carnal blossoms the young girl knew only from greenhouses and botanical gardens, loomed everywhere. On certain evenings the face of a white-toothed, laughing Italian, more handsome than she had ever dreamt of, appeared among the luscious jungle. The air was fragrant with unknown, overwhelming scents. On the upper floor of the casa the windows of her room had no screens. At night she fought myriads of mosquitoes. The insects voraciously suckled her skin and left her arms, legs and face covered with round, swollen, red, itchy insignias she hated.

Renate’s father was a stringent believer in security and fresh air. None of his children were allowed to sleep with closed windows. Summer and winter the solid balcony doors of his daughters’ bedroom were left open. Sometimes, during a cold night snow drifted silently into the room and covered part of the floor and rug. Their bedrooms were never located on street level. Only once had there been an exception. That was about a year after WWII. An unmarried American army officer, who lived with a huge German shepherd, had requisitioned their home. Renate’s mother, one of few German women who had been able to save most of their furniture during bombing attacks, was particularly upset about the soldier’s canine attraction. She had forgotten that sleeping with dogs was an old habit of warring men. Frederic II, the great Prussian, who put Germany on the map, often indulged in this custom when he fought his endless battles.

That man lets his filthy, flea-bitten dog sleep in our beds, Renate’s mother moaned as she visualized the large animal snuggling between her clean bed sheets. With no notice of a pending evacuation and only allowed to take a few personal belongings, Renate’s family of five had been forced to scramble for new accommodations. After two days of a frantic search, Renate’s father finally was able to locate a ground level apartment in the suburbs of M. Here only a heavily barred bathroom window was left open at night to provide the cherished air. The place was small, dark and damp and quickly proved to be an unfortunate experience for the family, particularly for Renate who was terrified of the dark.

Even as an eleven year old schoolgirl Renate’s nights were still filled with childhood fears. Except during a short and often rainy summer, on most days, as soon as it grew dark, she was sent to bed. You need your sleep, little girl! You have to get up early, her father would tell her. But the moment she lay down and turned off the lights, she was transformed into a Red Riding Hood who tried to appease a huge, black wolf staying under her bed. All night he was waiting for her feet to dangle toward the floor. The fall and scream of a stray cat in search of food changed into a fiend. The poor feline had tried to jump through the obstructed and finely wired bathroom window and got hurt. Only by pulling her knees up to her chin and by turning herself into a prickly hedgehog whose spines deterred the preying predator from attacking her, did the child feel less threatened from the monster’s momentarily deferred attacks.

It made perfect sense to Renate that the animal always chose her side of the bed and not her sister’s to crouch under. Her half of an old convertible couch with broken springs was closest to the window. She felt like a human shield that needed to protect her sibling because she was two years younger and more vulnerable than her sister. The nights were cruelly long because it was inconceivable for the child to leave her bed. If she had, the waiting beast would have snapped off both of her legs. Hungrily, the monster would have chewed her limbs as if they had been nothing but thin, dead tree branches. Trembling with bladder pain and having to go to the bathroom badly, Renate drifted in and out of sleep until the first rays of dawn chased the horrid brute away. In the morning after the sun was up and she finally dared to look under her bed, only a pair of old, almost completely worn-down, wooden clogs, she wore around the house, were there. At school Renate was drowsy from lack of sleep and a growling stomach. There was no such thing as breakfast. She had to wait until noon when she got her only hot meal of the day in form of the Hoover Speise⁴.

It was shortly before eight o’clock in the morning when Renate Schmidt entered the spacious, elegantly laid-out pharmacy that was only partially lighted and still very quiet. The young girl did not like the shades that, especially in the winter, lingered in somber corners of the store. The pharmacy then seemed to harbor RRaubtiere⁵ in anticipation of an early meal. She was glad when the first customers arrived. They were mostly rambunctious workingmen and women who were on their way to factories, offices and schools. Housewives and young, loquacious mothers, their toddlers in tow, came later during the day.

Trying not to make any noise Renate slipped quickly past an open door that led to a newspaper kiosk. Walking fast, she heard Tante Anna speak with one of her long-standing customers. At six every morning except on Sunday, she opened her booth. It was a narrow, high-ceilinged chamber cluttered with cigarettes, cigars, magazines, lottery tickets, newspapers, lollipops, chewing gum and with dozens of clean glass jars filled with black and red licorice, butterscotch candies and chocolates. At night Tante Anna did not close her crude, overstuffed cubicle until 7:00 o’clock. She was thirteen hours on her feet. She ate her lunch standing up and went to the bathroom as fast as her short, stout legs carried her. Already short of breath before she started to run, she usually called out to Renate or another apprentice: Keep an eye on things. I’ll be right back. And she was, breathing even more heavily than before.

Early in the day when Renate passed Tante Anna’s cubbyhole, it sickened her to see the merchandise piled from floor to ceiling. The crammed smallness of the place reminded her of humid bomb shelters where she had spent countless, fearful hours as a child. Reaching even beyond the open window, Tante Anna’s commodities continued to spread frenziedly along the exterior wall like some exotic, uncontrollable, constantly growing plant. There was scarcely any place left for the woman’s small, rotund, large-bosomed figure whose ageless smile every child in the neighborhood knew.

Before Tante Anna had started to exchange newspapers, cigars and sweets for coins, she had been a member of the Schmidt household for about thirty years.

Hired as a maid by the mother of Philip Schmidt, Anna Maier helped raise Mrs. Schmidt’s only child. Her husband was killed during the First World War. In the adoring eyes of his young widow and Anna Maier, the young soldier remained a twenty-two-year-old war hero. His memory, reinforced by large, expensively framed photos, eventually became a sacred relic the two women did not cease to worship. Anna Maier never married and gradually evolved into fat, kind-hearted Tante Anna who spoiled little Philip rotten and tirelessly worked for the well being of the small family. Mrs. Schmidt had quickly expanded into a matronly, somberly dressed figure. Her almost floor length, floppy skirts attempted to conceal broad hips and thick ankles. She remained a feisty dowager for the rest of her life. And as Germany after World War Two struggled, with the help of the American Marshall plan, to its feet again and slowly grew wealthy, so did Mrs. Schmidt.

The two women’s memorized image of Mr. Schmidt as a warrior had little to do with the real man. But the idealized picture was held up as a model to his tiny son. Philip was brought up believing his father was special. Just like his mother and Anna, the small boy endowed him with superhuman qualities. Over many years Mrs. Schmidt never failed to reinforce the son’s hero worship of his deceased father. Philip identified himself early with the dead idol. While other boys unconsciously chose a Greek soldier like Odysseus or Achilles for their dreams and in doing so created an aesthetic distance between their egos and an ideal, Philip looked at his father. By taking this shortcut, the youngster eliminated any lofty