Turning Danger into Performance - Nylon Stockings and Floodlights

Lara's grandmother read a book from the Catholic lending library every Sunday, even though she was Protestant. She wouldn't even stop while feeding the chickens. Supposedly there was nothing she could die from. She died anyway. People kept chickens and rejoiced over every egg. They rejoiced that there was no war. That nobody stole the chickens. Their own eggs didn't taste of fishmeal the way the eggs from the state grocery store did.

By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread. Lara's sweat smells like Lübeck marzipan. That smell is my strongest ally in the major undertaking of getting Ariane out of my head.

We meet in front of the Institute of Physical Education, the terraced complex a modern temple — consecrated to the cult of the body. The sacred cannot be dethroned by the secular spirit of the age. Lara tugs at her shorts. The combination of bouncing hair and beautiful legs cannot be surpassed — at least not for someone whose sexual initiation began on sports grounds and in locker rooms. Like Abebe Bikila in Rome in 1960, Lara steps up barefoot.

Abebe Bikila! Do you remember Abebe Bikila? He won looking completely rested and proved it by doing gymnastics afterward. I could still jump for joy at the thought of Abebe Bikila.

Holbein Bridge

Lara talks about football. She misses the stadium atmosphere and that hometown rough-pitch eroticism, with the game as foreplay and the consummation sometimes already happening in the car or in the shed behind the club pub. You yourself aim for bigger things, you have plans for your life, but the companions left behind still matter as witnesses to an upright youth. Watching Bundesliga football is part of Lara's weekend routine.

We set off on a triumphal run along the grand arteries of Frankfurt's urban spectacle. Everything that makes Frankfurt feel intoxicating to me is concentrated along the Main river promenades. Architectural hypertrophy. A storm of lights like Times Square. Lara and I stretch on the Holbein Bridge in a scene fit for the movies. We touch one another the way satellites narrowly miss each other. I search for the sublime moment, Lara for her sense of ease. I follow her impulses; she follows them too.

Lara wants to enjoy things at a distance. Every now and then she mentally turns her back on the situation. My sense of smell rifles through the pockets of her body. The nose separates wheat from amusement. It's all a question of skin, says Heiner Müller.

Lara wears nylon stockings with decorative tops; she had once been a fashion-show beauty. Those legs. A revelation.

"You turned out incredibly well," I say.

"You think that about yourself."

The white collar is a shoreline on the black river of the dress; Lara enters life like a virginal pastor's daughter. The dress captivates me. I want to play with it. To distract myself I talk about my coated battlefield of puberty. No posters on the wall — I was a purist. My typewriter had defects. Some keys wouldn't spring back into place after striking. I was under the spell of Fritz Steuben's Tecumseh, the Flying Arrow. My sympathies belonged to the French trappers who did not see themselves as the vanguard of settler depravity. Tough loners, the dress flies into the corner. Lara wears nylon stockings with decorative tops; she had once been a fashion-show beauty. Those legs. A revelation. The machine's writer's block was as bad as damp gunpowder. I sat there with blackened paws. Lara pushes me away.

"I just want to kiss your stomach."

"You call that my stomach too?"

Lara never stopped claiming a humorous advantage.

"Could you please stop laughing?"

"Could you please stop making a fool of yourself?"

"Reading is thinking with someone else's brain." Jorge Luis Borges

*

"The (losers) are usually of the opinion that they are morally and culturally superior to the (winners), that they are better than them." Adam Zagajewski

Peggy/Frankfurt 1985

Peggy is on the alarm-dyed short-hair trip. She wrestles with words and picks up the scrap metal of the present. Her observations hide the question of why, in her life, all the doors to love are sticking. She advertises herself and doesn't believe a word of it.

Although short-haired colorfulness is not something I would normally consider, it still happens one night in the Burgschänke. Dishes are left standing around, a little dip bowl (Hessian: "Dippchen") half full of music (for Handkäs). Music is a mixture of onion and vinegar—you have to explain things like this to you strange non-Hessians. From the kitchen drifts a calorie-heavy haze. A hint of remoulade over a nourishing floor covering teeming with mice.

Hours later I discover myself in Peggy's one-room cave with a balcony and an open view of the main cemetery. I know many kinds of writing places: the desk by the window, the orderly gathering of paper and obsolete writing instruments on a standing desk, the solid electric typewriter in the kitchen. Peggy has a thing that doesn't demand a fixed place. It looks like a shell and has a memory. Accustomed to striking keys firmly, the letters run away from me in columns. The keyboard demands an unfamiliar, gentle touch.

"Please, just think of yourself," Peggy says. I immediately understand what she wants. She wants to be taken along on a journey through the climate zones of my desire. We know each other so well that nobody, unprepared, performs the confession of their lust in a stranger's apartment at night. That's completely normal in the circle I move in. Sometimes I think we're all insane, then I find us completely normal again. Everyone has a job, everyone is getting by, some drink more than is good for them, but that will sort itself out again.

I have to ease my way in; I can't just launch straight in. Never could. I need to first get a foothold on the shifting ground of trust. Tomorrow we might look at each other differently; regular meetings are also to be expected. When we meet next in the Burgschänke: what will it be like? What if I arrive with Lara, or leave with her? Or maybe with Ariane again?

"You're thinking too much," I tell myself. Suddenly it becomes clear to me that I've been picked up. That Peggy engineered the situation... that she wanted me in her grasp. I struggle briefly with this realization, then I surrender.

Peggy sleeps on a mattress. I undress so that no romance can even arise. Peggy seems to have expected nothing else. I know her bikini figure from the outdoor pool and from sunbathing on the Lohrberg. There, it always had a kind of attraction as uncertain as a distorted long-distance phone call (back in landline days—this as a later clarification). A gentle fullness that demands attention. A compact "arse-pear." Nothing peach-sweet. Nothing that can be ignored.

I've already held that backside in my hands three times—once while dancing blues at fifteen, and twice in adult neighborhood excess mode. Each time I had followed Peggy's invitation, within the framework of an informal kissing game that can arise in the most absurd constellations, just before real derailments and bouts of vomiting. Once I had the feeling Peggy was aiming for an orgasm, in her convoluted simplicity. I wasn't sure; she pressed herself against me, encouraged me to hold her firmly and kiss her intensely, and after a while she detached herself, retreated behind social pleasantries, and drifted off again. She never demanded commitment, not even in our ritual pub gatherings.

In the end, everyone has probably checked everyone else's tongue at least once. Peggy's full, hanging breasts still surprise me with their bare presence. A bit of fabric on top does a lot.

"You're about to have your eyes fall out of your head," Peggy says kindly. "That makes me happy. You have no idea how long I've been wanting to fuck you. Don't worry, I don't expect a reciprocal confession."

As I said, we are in the 1980s. AIDS is not yet over—indeed, not even understood. I'm used to sex without protection and only just beginning to adjust. Peggy is already further along. She keeps condoms under her mattress in stock. I sense a routine that surprises me—and even unsettles me.