Читать книгу Mahler in love with Monroe? - C.-A. Rebaf - Страница 8

Marietta and Hannes initially lived in a well-preserved ruined house in Maua near Jena. Once upon a time, the A4 motorway was lost and made life unbearable with the constant traffic noise. From time to time, a dull Porsche or even a Ferrari had joined the deep, regular hum of the trucks, and all this had been overshadowed by the high purr of a Ducati or a Kawa. But those times were over! The huge double bridge, one part of yellow Saale sandstone from Hitler's time, while the other was built only a few years after the millennium to allow a six-lane expansion, just this long viaduct was completely destroyed. In the background were huge elongated rubble heaps to see: The old East German prefabricated housing from Lobeda had not survived the disaster and were collapsed like card houses thanks to their always lacking fabric. The two were not Thuringians, but had learned from a secret source that the radiation exposure in Thuringia should be particularly low. That had been the reason for them to settle there. The couple originally came from Upper Bavaria, and after Hannes, as the international manager of a world-famous Bavarian car brand, could not jettify to Spartanburg in the USA or Oxford in England to pass on his knowledge from Munich's headquarters to others after the dissolution So, when suddenly the cultivation of everything edible had become more important, they had decided to leave Bavaria.

They were a dream couple: he was muscular, of normal size and with his heart in the right place, freehand climber, who kept himself in shape through constant exercise; Marietta, however, the female counterpart with long mittelblonden, strong hair and many natural curls. Her face was wide with full lips and strong cheekbones that gave her face a Slavic touch. Her eyes looked feline, reminding of Madame Chauchat's eyes as they were described in the Magic Mountain. Her nature was dominant, but unlike the lung-sick Russian, she did not need to throw doors in to attract attention. She entered a room and immediately filled it with her person. Her beautiful figure drew everyone's attention. When her deep, slightly smoky voice helped with a greeting, she immediately took each one for herself.

She had been my closest friend in Polling, and I had mourned her for a long time when she left with Hannes and our dream couple left the community. Marietta had entrusted to me as her best friend that they both would like to have a child. But, as with almost all couples, the catastrophe had no hope of reproduction. Marietta herself was a non-medical practitioner and knew well in medical matters. She knew that the complex processes of human reproduction by radioactive radiation were disturbed in many places. Even the regular implantation of an egg in the uterus was disturbed in her as in almost all young women, so that could be no more talk of regular cycles. But when, in fact, coincidence helped and a male sperm encountered a fertile egg, the rate of confluent sperm was so low that it almost never came to fertilization.

It was a blessing for me to have found my Golie as a foundling and thus to be able to live up to my purpose as a woman - although I always reckoned and constantly asked myself how this healthy child could even have come into the world. It has always been a mystery to me, a mystery, and or perhaps that's why I was so attached to this kid. In the many conversations that evening with Marietta, I clearly heard her complaint that even with the luxury of being able to rely on a reliable partner, she would also like to have a child. Her grief that it was by no means as easy to conceive a child as it was before time zero made her very desperate, and I was always helpless, holding her in the arms and not comforting. That's how it went for days. One day, however, Hannes came back with a message about a hike from Munich that sounded almost too unbelievable to be true. There should be a kind of clinic somewhere in Thuringia near Jena. Healthy young women could undergo artificial insemination there. This takes place in a large, old bunker system where the radioactivity is lowered to a threshold level due to the depth of the mountain, as it was normal before the disaster. If the eggs were accepted, then the women spend their pregnancy there in the mountain. It all sounded like a fairy tale. In the evening Marietta came running to me and told me with great enthusiasm about it. I knew immediately that I would soon lose a very good friend, because I saw my adventurous girlfriend in the next few days ready to leave with her Hannes marching through the village. The farewell came quickly. Golie, my baby, and I had hugged them for a long time and waved to them. Silently I had allowed both of them to have a child too, as they had been such a beautiful couple!