In the Mating Flow

For as long as anyone can remember, a poker has hung in the House of the Stone Piglet as a piece of forged ornamental ironwork, suspended from the circular sweep of the hearth built one hundred and fifty years ago by Johnson & Davidson. The cast-iron successor stoves, including a whole parade of generations of kitchen ranges, were not preserved beyond their heyday with any particular reverence.

In this manor house, Madeleine Gerster lives with her parents. We have already spoken of her. She is Ederthal’s tourism coordinator and works in the town hall, on a floor shared with her aunt, the mayor, Atlanta Gerster.

Have we ever talked about the town hall? About the intricately turned handrails? They are an attraction in their own right and end in a sphere that is accessible to the public only by prior arrangement. Popular speech refers to them as the “Chambers of Horror.” The sensational ring of the phrase is no exaggeration. Two rooms in the town hall contain the interior and equipment of a documented torture chamber.

The humiliating interrogations of the Inquisition also took place in Ederthal, despite the Protestant rulers of the territory (ever since Philip the Magnanimous). Madeleine has known the scene since childhood. I can list them: a kneeling stool, a rack, various pincers and neck irons, as well as the sword of the “Marschbach Headsman” — an ensemble of horrors (see Ederthal in the Mirror of History by Diana von Pechstein, funded by the “Worldwide Hesse” Foundation).

The headsman is said to have been a seventeenth-century fanatic for justice who operated on his own initiative. The territorial executioners came from Kassel to Ederthal to behead or hang people. More complicated transitions from life to death were carried out elsewhere, before larger audiences.

Alongside the chamber of horrors, a shed contains a monstrosity from the department of fairground curiosities. Stories of bog-body discoveries acquire vividness through naïve illustrations. There is a display case containing clasps, fibulae, combs, and blades, and there is the chair of the Novgorod traveller, dated 1412, a carving impossible to comprehend within mere hours.

For centuries, the ballad-like tale stood in St. Mary’s Church as an uncomfortable possession for the descendants of a man of the world. Until television arrived, the community’s memory stretched deep into the past. There was a certain Ederthal man named Gotthilf who, while almost still a child, followed travellers all the way to Stralsund. He found a livelihood at sea. He became a member of a Hansa (not the Hanseatic League of merchants and cities). Hansa is a Germanic word meaning community. To lose one’s membership was to be verhanst — cast out from the fellowship.

Gotthilf gathered herring in the Kattegat, where the fish appeared in such abundance that one could seize them with one’s bare hands. He returned home with a bear trained to locate wild honey. The bear may also have been a large dog.

Gotthilf taught the hunting of valuable fur animals with blunt arrows in the Russian-Scandinavian manner. In his account, magnates appeared in garments made of Mongolian silk, brought via Venice to Pomerania. Gotthilf belonged to those who, armed with a letter of privilege from the Dukes of Mecklenburg, had harmed Denmark — the maritime great power (and principal heir to the Varangian expansion) — in the Baltic Sea. Their warships were called “peace cogs” by the Hanseatic sailors.

Diana von Pechstein, a private lecturer at the Ederthal Landgrave Philip University, tells this and much more in her lectures. She is also Madeleine’s cousin.

Tenderly, the finger of my attention traces the legendary relief carved into the chair. Playful hands follow the contours of a man in a buttoned coat. He wears a beret and poulaines. His beard, reaching down to his belt, is divided and braided.

A character who cannot be molded into shape; who survives every attempt at elegant formulation and evasion. Someone from whom no feuilleton can be made. I see Kaspar von Roßbach.

Defiantly upright, the retired airline captain sits on his handmade bicycle. Handmade according to the ideas of a genius of his craft, produced in a workshop in Edertal. Madeleine cannot understand why her great-uncle needs so much surrounding space for the finest means of transport in the region. In his place, she would have secured eternal goodwill and the best service far and wide with a purchase from Zweirad Zeisel.

Day-trippers who photograph every cloud formation as proof of their abundance of leisure probably perceive Captain Kaspar as the archetypal baby boomer retiree. Always with the white shirt discreetly unbuttoned one button too far. The Breitling Bentley Mark VI at the ready.

An innate urge to move forward propels Kaspar. He belongs to that breed of people who constantly demand something of themselves. He would have more fun with Gunda von Schmalsund if she were more competitive, or at least more interested in alpha fantasies.

Gunda guides Kaspar to an abandoned favorite spot: a cove protected by reeds, with a decaying jetty. She strips off her clothes in a flash. Kaspar struggles awkwardly out of his garments. Every movement reveals how conscious he is of his age and how difficult public nudity is for him. Shame is written across his forehead.

Kaspar lacks the naturist freedom absorbed with his mother’s milk. As Gunda learned fifty years ago, she immediately and completely surrenders herself to the cold. Kaspar, by contrast, relies on gradual acclimatization. He does not realize that Gunda is introducing him more deeply into her world. The naked baron withstands her most critical gaze. Everything is there in this man.

Kaspar has found his form in old age. He is solvent in every sense, equally suited as a grand seigneur and as a lover of gardening, and additionally possesses a down-to-earth sense of humor. At this moment, he is searching for his relationship to Gunda’s body. Before him stands a fifty-four-year-old woman so firm and elastic that one could make a “fit in old age” film about her.

For Kaspar, the issue is not merely taking care of oneself. Gunda and Kaspar belong to those who are helping to change our ideas about growing old. I too feel Gunda’s attraction. There is still sex in the cupboard. The exhausting friction of sexual tension still rubs and burns. There is still the salt of tears and the balm of wounds. Yet contentment is already making itself felt everywhere. If I were in Kaspar’s place, I would not consider such an expensive watch sufficiently hidden beneath a sandal sole.

Naturally, the ridiculous royal-child behavior of the fabulously wealthy does not go unnoticed. Hidden in the undergrowth lurk Aiko and Aslan. They have just quietly taken care of themselves like Native Americans of old on the warpath and now stare in amazement at the audacity of the elderly couple. Gunda casually raises the pilot’s penis to half-mast. That has to be enough. It is enough.

Gunda had already had sex here more than thirty years ago. Out in the open air, “flower-and-romance sex” takes on another meaning. In the descriptions of fauna and flora, the path leads from the animalistic to the appropriate. Further on site, camouflaged like a woodland-and-meadow goblin, is Hein Hagrich. The master locksmith bears a telling name. “Hag” refers to an enclosed place, while “rich” touches upon rīhhi — realm, dominion, princely power. Heinrich is one of Gunda’s rejected admirers. He retaliates with smartphone snapshots before taking himself in hand and seeking his own gratification, with the quiet routine of an experienced masturbator.

Heinrich is married, but that hardly means anything anymore. For more than twenty years he has lived in a camper beside his birthplace, the consequence of a marital agreement: If you want me to stay, stay out of my sight. The harsh demand never troubled Heinrich for a moment. He is sufficient unto himself and does not feel badly treated by fate, even as a scavenger of fortune.

Countess Gunda gives herself over eagerly. Not passionately — I ask that one not ruin a realistic depiction with exaggeration. Kaspar has sex with Gunda as vigorously as he possibly can. He manages to make her forget how sadly the wrinkled sack between his legs hangs there. She moans from the heart. To him, that is both compliment and satisfaction.

Heinrich’s eyes widen. Aiko and Aslan, too, are stimulated by the shepherd’s hour of the dignitaries. They arrange themselves as best they can, as gently as possible, amid the cracking undergrowth. I focus on the overall picture.

Heinrich stands there with his mouth open and his trousers lowered, forgetting himself in lustful amazement, masturbating frantically. Again and again he loses his erection, then it returns. Nearby, Aiko and Aslan make love, trying to keep their rhythmic sounds below the threshold of birdsong. They do not always succeed. The flow of coupling demands its price. Fortunately, Gunda and Kaspar are also reaching their peak.

Heinrich’s semen emerges only in drops. The intensity of his orgasm approaches zero, due to an enlarged prostate. Yet this only makes the eroticism of the mind more intense. To need to come psychologically but be unable to do so physiologically — that is part of the agenda of aging.

With Kaspar, things look better. His climax, arriving very soon, will not resemble a funeral for pleasure. In the final moments, Gunda helps herself. She reaches between her legs, seeking the maximum gain from his reasonably firm organ and the self-stimulation of her pearl. At the crest of this manageable wave, an involuntary, lovely moan escapes her — almost a small cry — and receives an entirely unexpected response, in every sense, including phonetically.

The image exceeds my abilities; I withdraw here. Twilight lies like a veil over the Lower Hessian prairie. Why not recognize paradise within it? Heinrich disappears, the young people discreetly withdraw. I follow them. More about Gunda and Kaspar later.

For Aiko, Aslan is a gift from the universe. Lavender, wild grapevine, islands of moss on stone… among blooming peonies they make love as they did on the day of their first intimate encounter, almost religiously. The feminine and the masculine in ideal forms and within an ideal space.