Читать книгу TheodoraLand - Malcolm James Thomson - Страница 8

Four

Reiß had left early, claiming a crack-of-dawn flight to Frankfurt the next morning, after thanking me for what he pronounced to be the best asparagus he had tasted this year. Then the incriminations began.

“Bea, you were flirting with him… quite openly,” said Dirk.

She and Reiß had chatted as he examined my bookshelves. I would not be buying a further Billy unit now that I had the ManduvelPlus e-book reader app on my cellphone. Quite why my friend Bea had drawn the attention of Rudiger Reiß to a certain category of my shelved volumes I hadn’t understood.

Palindromic Polysexuality by Kane Archibald I hadn’t even had the courage to finish.

The business with the three books of more immediate concern had been discussed. Bea and Dirk heard about the funeral, about the strangeness of wanting to take something to read into the hereafter, about Louie Lessinger’s two lovers.

That it had been my Aunt Ursel who had prompted her good friend Lessinger to admit me to the Manduvel trainee program was duly noted.

But Dirk Seehof was right. His fiancée now blushed. Now this I had never seen before. Colour! The girl has a pallid complexion, longish ashen hair most often held back with an Alice band. She always dressed in shades of beige and grey which do nothing to contradict those who call her the ‘greige ghost’. Her style might be called preppy, her appearance that of the conservative daughter of a good family. If she could have afforded it there would be a triple-strand pearl necklace to emphasize the stringent respectability of her dresses, blouses, skirts, sweaters and cardigans. Bea Schell does so not do jeans.

For the Munich diner en blanc in July last year I had persuaded her that white could be seen as palest beige. Wittelsbacherplatz had been transformed into a sociable wonderland, even in the shadow of the word headquarters of the Siemens concern. The picnic I had packed was delicious and the wine more than enough to ensure that a taxi would be needed to get us to our homes afterwards. It had been great fun and we planned to be there for this year’s edition of the flash-mob event.

Bea generally claims to be a junior bookkeeper in her firm’s accounts department. It is tacitly accepted that she is rather more than that. She has serious computer coding skills, although her appearance and comportment put her far away at the very opposite end of the spectrum from the cliché of the unsavoury digital nerd. Granted, she wears geeky glasses when working at the computer, but the thick frames are not black but almost translucent tortoiseshell. Bea is finicky, self-effacing, often asked to repeat herself since her whispering speech is often unclear. Her one hobby is obscure. She dismisses it as experimental digital fabric design but the show leaves us speechless when she lets her creations (psychedelic fractals swirling and resembling Paisley or Jacquard patterns) be displayed on my big screen.

On the other hand, Dirk insists that Bea is also formidably competent in a range of martial arts skills.

“My employer, Segirtad GmbH, specializes in security of all kinds, including advanced niche areas of cyber expertise.”

I do think it had come as a surprise to Rudiger Reiß when he saw with what expertise Bea had dealt with the bong which had been brought to the table while I was making our espressos. She knew where I kept it, in the second oven under the long granite kitchen worktop, one never used for baking. Yes, that’s where the books were, too, tucked beneath the lowest baking tray.

Segirtad Home Security - Safe As Switzerland

The lock on the door of my loft, that of the gate at the bottom of the drive at Säntisblick, Aunt Ursel’s home in Switzerland, were all products of the firm which was well on its way to become a leader in the field. But there were corporate divisions whose clients were not simply prudent home owners. Bea had always been reticent about that, even when she had smoked.

“I wasn’t flirting. I was just more talkative than I sometimes am here at Thea’s place.”

Getting high together was a second major pillar of my friendship with Dirk and Bea. The three of us shared an appreciation of good marihuana. Bea and I also shared a respect for Dirk’s qualities as a lover, my esteem of his prowess restricted, of course, to that brief affair a year earlier.

I was, to put it bluntly, hesitant about whom I welcomed into my personal space.

No man is an island.

Maybe not, but I’m a woman, Master Donne. My isle floats sovereign and free where I will it to be, TheodoraLand, its beach as rarely trod by any Man Friday as Crusoe’s.

Those invited to make up a dinner foursome in my loft were chosen for their immediate entertainment value. Hardly any would ever show up twice. This was in part because my flat was for me still something of an embarrassment. A twenty-four year old Gelernte Buchhandelskauffrau was not customarily the owner of what had once been the studio of a famous painter on one of the best streets in the bohemian Schwabing neighbourhood of the Bavarian capital.

Thank you, Aunt Ursel!

When I thought I could get away with it, I’d swear that it was the atelier where Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky had once painted. It was a claim made by many owners of similar properties in the neighbourhood. Some rooms on the same top floor had long ago been converted to become a separate self-contained apartment. In six years I had five different neighbours with whom I exchanged little more than nods of greeting. What remained of the studio, what I own, is the atelier itself. Its ceiling is over four metres above the floor, there is a huge north-facing window and in the corner a tight spiral staircase leading to a hatch giving access to the roof. Had I made a bit more of an effort with the furnishings and decoration (had I not settled to a large extent for Ikea) my home could have qualified for a photo story in a lifestyle magazine.

Loft living in Munich.

My bed is not hidden away. It is neither two metres wide nor is there a mirror on the ceiling. It is well positioned for watching the Sunday night thriller on television and sex is much more often on the screen via the web than on that mattress.

When I am asked about the wall painting I do not take the trouble to dissemble. Anyone grievously shocked shouldn’t count among my friends or even acquaintances. That the giant mural adding vivid colour to one of the three walls (the others remained pristine white) is a faithful rendering of my own pudenda was a fact I made no effort to deny.

The same does not hold for the dog.

The Mighty Quinn.

It is a painting of a dog, a slim and tawny hound with perfect posture, forelegs straight and a strange look in its eyes. It sits erect, watchful, surrounded by an ornate Baroque frame. It might be said to be life-size but only if it were a very big dog indeed.

I explain, with brevity, that my grandfather had been very attached to his dog. Then I can steer the conversation back to the banal and much less complicated, confessing to a modicum of exhibitionism in my comportment.

“Makes sense of a kind… puppy on one wall, pussy opposite!” A frequent conclusion.

Bea concentrated on the bong.

“Talkative, sure. And always bringing the conversation back to sex!” Dirk insisted, more bemused than annoyed.

Bea’s flush had subsided. She held the sweet, aromatic Alaska Thunderfuck smoke in her lungs for an eternity before exhaling.

Dirk Seehof was not wrong. And it was odd to hear Bea being so single minded in conversation that she was speaking quite distinctly rather than whispering or mumbling. Not that she spoke of any sexual quirks or improprieties of her own, she just recited a few of mine.

That the narrow door to the bathroom (dissimulated in the fleshy folds depicted in the mural) would spring open when the shiny clit was hit…

I had gazed into the distance and decided not to whip up a quick dessert…

That the fidelity of the representation could be verified quite often in summer when I ventured forth nonchalantly knickerless…

I had taken off my belt so that Comme des Garçons permitted no such confirmation…

That image-matching software could be used to find on the interwebs photos of me which were both deliciously and explicitly indecent…

I had begun to consider an interesting idea…

That the roof on which I sunbathed was overlooked by the staff-room of the Technical College…

I had pointed out that any plumbing or electrical problems I had in the flat were resolved by experts from the Berufsschule which backed onto my building. Whether instructors or trainees they were polite and efficient. But my idea was developing. I would mention it when Rudiger Reiß left.

“Okay, you were using Thea as a reference, but it was you talking about sex! And Reiß found you fascinating! He didn’t even glance in Thea’s direction!” Dirk concluded, still miffed.

Not quite true. Before Dirk and Bea arrived (while I was instructing Rudiger Reiß in the fine art of peeling asparagus) I am pretty sure my sitting position was such that he noted my fading ink.

Ex Libris Lessinger.

I am, I suppose, a child of the raunch culture. The very first photo I took when I got my first cellphone with a camera was a blatant nude self-portrait. In that respect I know I am by no means alone.

“Image-matching software… that could be very helpful!” I declared, loud enough to cut short the minor bickering between Dirk and Bea, my back turned to them as I took from the refrigerator another bottle of Saran Nature.

And from the lower oven I took out three books.

The cover with the Helvetic cross, scanned in on my MacBook Pro, generated no direct matches even when Bea ran the software she herself had improved. But there were some close results. The format, the typography and the texture of the cover, field grey but with a coarse linen finish, was that of many bound volumes in various Swiss national archives. The title, Projekt Fortezza, meant nothing to any of us. And there was also what Grigor had suggested was a ‘cellphone number’.

“Civil engineering… archaeology… something along those lines,” said Dirk after flipping through a few pages.

“Makes a change to be dealing with a tangible mystery, not a virtual binary conundrum,” Bea whispered, pushing her glasses up from where they had slipped to the tip of her nose.

The Nazi emblem produced thousands of hits. But I suggested that none would be helpful. What I had in my hands had once been an album of blank pages. These were now filled with dense handwriting in the old Germanic style, the Suetterlin script no longer taught after the war. They would demand time to decypher although Bea thought that there might be an OCR program which could help.

Notre-Dame de Champbasse.

The image of the Magdalene again returned thousand of approximate hits.

“A hundred and eighty Black Virgins in France! But none in the tiny village which was once known as Champbasse,” said Dirk. He was using his own smartphone to consult Google and Wikipedia.

Bea looked disappointed. But I assured her that it was real progress to determine that the Swiss volume was some sort of official record.

“Switzerland… are these books quite soon going to be on their way to your aunt?” Bea Schell wondered.

I though that might be a very good idea, particularly if others in Munich apart from Rudiger Reiß and I were taking an interest. We had not been the only persons sufficiently curious about the contents of the coffin of Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger to seek out the Transylvanian mortician. I re-filled empty glasses with Saran Nature.

“Cheers!”