About Me

 

My mother was the daughter of a Holocaust victim. She was what the Nazis called a “mischling.” Her mother, too, had problems to certify as a person of an Aryan pedigree; she was raised in an orphanage in Baden, a spa in the South of Germany. Granny was tenacious and indestructible and very loud. When I slept over in her place, she was living with a Polish refugee, a rabbi and tailor of fine clothing. Why everybody was calling him “Schlemiel” is not quite clear, I don’t recall his first name. When the two of us talked, it was always about the shaggy mare he’d left behind in Poland. How her head used to vigorously nod up and down with every step. Horses were the chosen topic between him and me and visiting him was my alibi when I went out to play with the other kids in the rubble of the ruins. After Schlemiel’s death, already in her eighties and bent over her cane almost at a right angle, granny still made her own arrangements and traveled unaccompanied to India, the country of her honeymoon and years of happiness, before her first husband, old Cohn, had made his fatal decision to repatriate to the fatherland. It gives an idea of her mental toughness and how she managed to keep her three surviving daughters away from the unwanted attention of the Nazis.

After the war, in 1946 or 1947, her youngest daughter fell in love with an allied officer. The first time they laid eyes on each other was at the cinema where she worked ushering the people with a torch to their seats. After five weeks the two did something that was strictly against the rules in occupied Berlin. They fraternized. In 1949, this became the cause for my existence.

According to Aristotle, we are not yet fully human before the fortieth day after birth, the moment when most babies learn to gratify their parents with a little peal of laughter. I do remember been wheeled about in a pram, but this was of course later, when I already was a toddler and grew up to become this insufferably cheerful boy on the photographs with blond curls and ringlets running down to the shoulders – I absolutely hated to have a haircut. I once overheard my mother talking of the winter in ’49. The cold was murderous and tore off the flesh from your bones. There was nothing money could buy to heat the home. So my mother and her friend, Frau Nolte, went out on a pillaging spree. The friend was a neighbor living in a studio further down the corridor. I still recall a very tall woman, smelling of marzipan and mothballs; now and then she gave me a drop of milk in a tiny demitasse and our dog once stole a fish from her. The two women had to travel some distance before they found a fence with enough planks left to tear off, break and kick the wood to size and pack it underneath me into the pram. My contribution was to lie on top, swaddled in blankets, and look cute. My first career-move as a thief! It was a long way home and the two women lugged the pram down the stairs to the underground. A cop, wearing this shako with cockade and batch, approached, and, as the friendly servant to the public, he offered a hand to carry the pram. The moment he lifted his end of the pram he realized of course that something here was wrong. Our neighbor saw the change in his face: “Yeah,” she said, talking down on him with a booming voice, “it’s a heavy baby, isn’t it?” The law looked up to her, kept quiet and continued helping the women down the stairs and then departed with a curt salute.

Our home was once a baron’s city mansion. Along a windowless corridor, we and five other families occupied rooms with tall ceilings and stucco ornaments of seashells and chubby little boys. The loo was an improvised affair outdoors in the backyard.

From time to time some kind of hiss, a drizzle from somewhere behind or inside the wall would send a reminder that the structure was crumbling. Nobody heeded the warning until one day a patch of stucco fell from the ceiling and missed my mother’s buttocks by a hair’s breadth as she bent over at the stove. I saw it from my high chair by the window. Behind the house the court for drying the laundry and beating the dust out of the carpets opened to a weed infested bombing site. Beating the stuffing out of your carpet is a rather therapeutic activity – much better than a session on the couch with Dr. Freud. My mother took down the carpet at least twice a week for a comprehensive thrashing; I could hear the thumping echo ricocheting in the narrow confines of the backyard. Towards the bombing site, at the bottom of an improvised and rather steep stairway, there was a flowerbed fringed with bricks set in a jagged saw-pattern. I fell over on these stairs and hit my head on one of those pointy bricks. When I came around I woke up with stitches on my forehead; the scar is now barely visible.

My earliest out-of-house memory is me dangling my feet from a seat close to an elevated podium with ropes all around and two man facing each other in the middle, both dressed in olive green tricots that leave the shoulders bare and reveal some of the hair on their chests. The light was blindingly bright and the guy on the right threw a punch at the other’s face, I could clearly see that his nose was dented on the ridge. Without flinching the recipient was swiping his brow with the thing on his hand that looked to me like the brown earthenware vessel my mother used to store her salt and hone her kitchen-knife (a worn blade, more like a paring-knife) on the vessel’s rim. In the ring, there was such an earthenware vessel on every hand (I don’t recall a referee); this was the first time I was confronted with boxing gloves and I had no idea. The two tried to land a hook to the adversary’s body at the same time and the two gloves meet halfway, I imagined with a loud clang, no doubt it must have been earthenware vessels, what else could it be? I turned my head to the man sitting on my right. He jumped up shouting something and snapped his fingers at the two guys in the ring. This man was my father. A younger, less pudgy father than I use to remember: this fellow here had coal-black hair and the toned limbs of a boxer, one that is coming at you from below, head first and determined to get through to your short ribs, come what may. That I remember. For me, my father was and always will be remembered as a fighter. He was a member of his unit’s boxing squad and he also played ping-pong. He had ambition and a good forehand while I only play a so-so backhand and somehow lack the killer instinct. Still standing, my father looked down to me, smiling but also with a strangely calculating look, as if he tried to figure out something. I saw him moving his lips, but what was he saying? Whatever it was, the noise all around us – initially distinct screams and calls suddenly uniting in a throaty roar and then ebbing away in single calls and screams – must have drowned out what my father was trying to say. I only remember the boyish smile. Unfortunately I can’t tell you how the bout had ended. But I still like to watch a good bout. When Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay he was truly a picture of grace, and fast, unbelievably fast. It’s a pity that they don’t show the old black and white reels more often. When my father took me to this event I must have just crawled out of my infantile amnesia. So strange! Why is it, that we lose all our memories from the first four years of our lives? What is the function of this incomplete amnesia? Yes, incomplete: we don’t need to relearn how to walk or brush up on our toilet training, thank you very much; we already know how to speak! Or is it the speaking that is adding a new dimension to our faculties of remembering, the element of time – past, present and future? The next recollection is I on an improvised child’s seat screwed to the frame of my father’s bicycle. We were pedaling homewards through a city in ruins.

The day was overhung and the odd raindrop was hitting my face. My biggest impression from this period had a surprisingly stealthy gait for the gigantic size of his legs; legs like the pillars of a temple. His name was Shantih and he had bristles on his furrowed forehead and slightly smelled of urine. My grandmother had found work at the zoo, and I was brought out to visit her. 

We met at the elephants’ enclosure and the women were talking when they brought out Shantih and geared him up for the day ahead. The animal was employed as a people carrier, lumbering along with hordes of squealing kids on his back. Standing close to the elephant, I reached out and began to pummel his enormous leg with the palm of my hand. Suddenly I felt a tight grip around my chest, lost ground under my feet and was lifted up towards an inspecting eye. I was too surprised to feel fear and Shantih had a good hard look at this bundle of stunned petulance before he gently set me down again. He and I became friends. For the rest of the season I saw him almost every morning and he lifted me up to his back and patiently listened to what I had to tell him. I liked to pull at his bristles and his ears. He didn’t mind. One day his handler didn’t allow me to get near. The animal was in the must and incessantly weaving from side to side. The smell was intense; it was the last time I’ve seen Shantih. My father was transferred to Bavaria and I entered school.

Bavaria was (still is?) a catholic country with a capital "C" and no anti-clerical tradition whatsoever. Well, that is not quite true. Johann Adam Weishaupt (1748 – 1830) was born in Ingolstadt. Weishaupt was the founder of the Illuminati; Johann Adam Freiherr von Ickstatt (1702 – 1776), a prominent figure of the Enlightenment in Bavaria, was his godfather and educator. So many names, so many unknowns, I am afraid, but the man has left a mark on our world and the great George Washington knew it. He said: “It was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am,” and very well he might – the first president of the United States was a Free Mason and Illuminati himself. After Weishaupt went public with his intention, “to do what the heads of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities ought to have done by virtue of their offices,” and “at a time, when there is no end of abusing and making game of secret societies, I shall make use of this human foible for a real and worthy goal, for the benefit of people,” he was forced to leave Bavaria and settled in Gotha, half an hour’s walk away from the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Weishaupt published a Complete History of the Persecutions of the Illuminati in Bavaria (1785), and An Apology for the Illuminati (1786). Of course none of this ever filtered down to us kids in school. Nor did anybody mention the strict Catholic upbringing of many top Nazis coming from this region, like Heinrich Himmler. The intensity these lederhosen people habitually attached to religion could be pretty scary. On every wall there hung a crucifix, at school, in the shops, at the crossroads. I guess my crush on Buddhism at the age of nine was a reaction to all this. The infatuation ended in yawns over the endless litanies to dissociate yourself from your attachments and so shield yourself from suffering.

My attachments define who I am. If I suffer for it, well, that is the price to be paid for existing and be somebody, anybody at all. There is no such thing as a free lunch. The motto on the Sympsons’ coat of arms is “nil desperandum,” never give up, and not: “Better don’t try.” I think what really had put me off was this underhanded way of labeling as “suffering” what makes it a joy to be alive: food, girls, the arts, thinking, and just pottering about.

On the public holidays my parents and I watched from the window the Catholics walk in procession behind their priest, a balding man decked in heavy brocade. He seemed to be hiding his face behind the monstrance, a reliquary with nothing but a wafer in it, supposed to be the Christ’s living flesh. When the procession had past, the road was clear to cross over to where our car was parked and like almost every Sunday we set out for – what was the expression? – “a spot of motoring.”

Along the way we stopped for lunch in the towns surrounding the area. Towards the South you could see the Alps looming, sometimes letting through the Sirocco from Africa. It affects the local microclimate and many people have a migraine on such day, the hospitals even suspend surgery. Only many years later I discovered that our weekly excursions – by whose design I cannot tell – more or less followed the itinerary of Monsieur Montaigne who’d traveled the very same region some four hundred years earlier. His book made me realize the changes this once hospitable region of Bavaria had undergone since the religious wars. After eating we indulged my mother and stared at the loud colors and histrionic displays of the local Baroque churches. Well, they are pretty. “Look at this flatulent cherub; this one, he blows the horn,” my mother said. I thought of the chubby little boys with tiny penises on the stucco ceiling in Berlin. I think it was in 1959, when my father went to a jewelry shop to buy my mother a ring. The shop belonged to the goldsmith from the ground floor of the same apartment block where we were living; a man with a ruddy complexion, watery blue eyes, and as soft-spoken as a hummingbird. The patter of small talk over the merchandise on the counter took a turn to politics and this neighbor dropped the unguarded remark that “next time there will be not that many left.” My mother overheard this, and she made a fist – not threatening just squeezing the thumb underneath the fingers – something I have often seen her doing, when she felt insecure or uncomfortable. We left the shop rather suddenly. Later my father found out, that in a former life, the hummingbird had been an SS-Hauptsturmführer. (This was the only time ever I saw my father uncertain of what to do next. My habitual indecisiveness is not a trait I've inherited from him.)

School was not my favorite thing. I assimilated letters rather slow and with dyslexic quirks in the “q,” “p,” “g” and “d” department, and not just when writing longhand. These letters are still my most common typos. I later learned that this is somehow related to my difficulties of spontaneously working out that “left,” means going left and “right” going right. Sometimes I heard voices shout at me. I turned around, and there was nobody. The episodes ended at the age of seven, after I had finished reading my first book. It was Cooper’s Deer Slayer.

After entering Grammar school I shook off all my learning handicaps virtually from one day to the next. Don’t ask me how. I developed a habit of doing my homework in the last ten minutes of the previous lesson, shielded from sight by a barricade of books. My desk was at the back of the classroom. Naturally the teacher was craving my attention and bombarded my desk with a well-aimed piece of chalk. But I really couldn’t help him here; I had to finish homework. Nevertheless I was asked to transfer to a desk in front. Guess what: I was suddenly in a zone of calm and peace and could work on my homework undisturbed. Everything was right under the teacher’s eyes, yet he was far too occupied supervising the unruly desks at the back – a valuable lesson in the art of misdirection.

I began perusing my parents’ rather odd collection of books, most of it unsuitable for children; my father was a voracious reader of mysteries and crime stories but his absolute favorite were the Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester (1899 – 1966). Until his dying day he returned to them time and again; I read them, too. There was also a disheveled Youngster’s Encyclopedia from 1928, with photographs from the interior of a gigantic zeppelin and blueprints for a winged box kite of about my own size that carried a camera and could do aerial photography. Mind you, 1928! A little later I read Emil and the Detectives. It was followed by Tintin’s Adventures in the Jungles of the Andes, a comic book. The next book was an enormous tome, and most of it was not meant for young readers. It comprised a translation of the Völsunga Saga; the Edda, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the Legends of King Charlemagne, Musäus’ ironic and dry Legends of Rübezahl, Gottfried August Bürger's Wondrous Tales of the Campaigns and Adventures at Sea and Land of Baron of Münchhausen, mixed with often lewd legends from the crusades – I got erections over Monica in a story of a ménage à trois. The death of Bayard, the battle charger of Count Raymond, moved me to tears. Bayard was a horse of miraculous strength; he could carry all four of the brothers who resisted Charlemagne in their castle of Monte Alban. In the end the seditious brothers had to yield to overwhelming force.

The terms of surrender demanded the horse to die. With millstones around neck and feet, the stallion was pushed into the river. Bayard struggled to the surface, turned his head and looked for his master. The eyes of the horse and of the count met, and Bayard gained the strength to clamber back on dry land. So the King ordered Count Raymond to look away next time. Burdened with even more millstones the horse was pushed back into the river. Again Bayard emerged from the water. He looked for his master and whinnied. Count Raymond wept, but turned his back to the scene. Bayard knew he was abandoned and drowned.

The “Völsungensaga” was my first lesson in cosmology. I learned that the world was created from the corpses of the first sentient beings, a giant and his wife, killed by the gods of “Asgard,” the celestial fortress. (And where did the gods come from? A goat had licked them out of a block of salty ice. Sounds about right!) The Babylonians and the Canaanites have told similar stories; traces of these are preserved in the Bible. "Tehom" (Gen.1: 2) the dragon of water-world threatened to drown the tribe of the Elohim (a plural but not the Pluralis Majestatis) in high heaven. So the warlike "Yahweh" the god of thunder, mounted his chariot and assailed Tehom with hail and lightning. He slew Tehom’s son “Leviathan,” and cut to pieces an unidentifiable "Rahab" (Ps. 74: 14-15; 89: 9-10; Isaiah 51: 9-10). Like the gods of the Völsungensaga, the Elohim then shaped the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars from the slain carcass, stretching out the skies like a tent cloth (Job 9: 7-8, 26: 5-10, 13). This inaugurated the heroic age of intercourse between the immortals and the daughters of men (Gen. 6: 4). I was nine, when I read the Bible cover to cover out of sheer curiosity, nobody asked me to.

God’s command not to “boil a kid in his mother's milk” (Ex. 34: 26) struck a sympathetic chord, but to see the Son of God curse a fig tree for not yielding fruit out of season still leaves me singularly unimpressed. Everybody can destroy a tree; make it bloom and yield, as Dionysus has done with the grapes of wine that would have been the miracle. Centuries ago already, Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstauffen (1194 – 1250) had shared with Sultan Al-Kamil a joke about “the three conmen, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed.”

After my second small pocks vaccination I ran a high fever and became delirious, holding on with both hands to a copy of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. In panic my mother called our practitioner from across the street, Dr. Löw. With some difficulty she pulled the book out of my hands and I never finished it. I still find the gloom in Dickens overpowering, this “soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun” (Dickens, Bleak House). At the age of twelve, I began reading my first real philosopher, Plato, and developed a habit of sleeping in the buff under open window curtains. In the light of the stars I dreamed of suntanned Greeks debating ‘arete’ and ‘eros’ under marbled porticos and a blazing blue sky. I mused over Plato’s archetypes, a sort of transcendental cookie cutter. I still sleep in the buff, but my infatuation with Plato has faded since I’ve discovered why he was the Nazi’s favorite Greek: Plato was a proponent of star chambers, censorship, mandatory cadet schools, marching bands and the breeding of the blondest. I moved on to Bernard Mandeville (1670 – 1733), Confucius (551 – 479 BC) and Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527).

After school and during the holidays we kids used to be away from home all day long. I often missed the curfew and got a good talking-to.

One day, already running late, I was about to cross the street and had no eyes for the lorry rushing at me from the left. It would have squashed me to pulp had not from behind the hand of a stranger grabbed my arm. A matter of split seconds – I came sooo close, I could feel the vehicle’s slipstream pulling me towards the road. Then the anonymous hand loosened its grip and the hyperactive boy scooted across the street without even looking back or saying a word of thanks. I never told my parents. But should the person who saved my life read this, I extend a belated, a very belated, “thank you.” Bless you Sir, or Madam. May you live long and prosper. Thankfully there were not too many inquiries about my whereabouts.

Almost every day our gang used to meet on the river under the weeping willows. The girls were at least as intrepid as the boys. As a test of mettle we crossed an out-of-town bridge on the outside of the handrail; lose your grip and you drop ninety feet into shallow waters, the rapids running only inches over the rocks. Not that we didn’t appreciate the danger. One of us, and it wasn’t one of the girls, looked down and froze and it took some coaxing to get him to the other end. With our bicycles we toured the hamlets, straining upwards towards the Alps. Late in afternoon we turned our bicycles around and trundled down the falling altitude, barely stepping into the pedals. On weekends I was allowed to stay up late and father and son bonded over a common interest in astronomy.

My father was an engineer and was never shy to express a healthy disrespect for academic and metaphysical baloney. Engineering has to get it right or the wheels won’t spin. So, pretty early I came to the realization that this Universe is a tad too vast, to be “created,” although the element of time may raise questions about the odds of things to happen, even if it is a very old Universe. Partly this is, because most of us don’t understand the nature of chance.

When you play the lottery your chance of hitting the jackpot is a very, very long shot, but the more players participate, the odds for somebody to win shrink in inverted proportion. In other words, the critics of evolution base their doubts on an anthropocentric bias. So, before we get all giddy over some or other “anthropic principle” – the alleged “fine-tuning” of the Universe to our needs – somebody better explains why he thinks it is not we who are fine-tuned to given conditions. My father began seeing in me a budding engineer. It was a real disappointment for my old man when in the end classicism got the better of me. I fell under the spell of C. Schneider’s hymn on the Hellenistic world in two mighty tomes (Kulturgeschichte des Hellenismus, 2 volumes, Munich 1967 – 1969), the book has never lost its lure, even now when this glow lingers on only as a distant memory.

In the last year at grammar school, four of us graduates began pooling funds for an old Mercedes. We planned to take the route through the Balkans, Anatolia and Iran to Katmandu, then sell the car and from the proceeds pay for the flight home. That was before the Russians had invaded Afghanistan.

On the way we stopped at the ruins of Persepolis, the old capital of King Cyrus (580 – 529 BC). A barren plane, the sun beating down on solitary columns and the denuded "cella" of the royal audience hall; in the cloudless sky a huge bird is drawing circles. Once floor long silk curtains, translucent and flapping in the wind, had shielded the King of Kings from the glare, the dust and the heat. The people here were poor but hospitable and always up in arms over some age-old feud, trading bullets from rooftop to rooftop because once upon a time the one guy's granddaddy had had the temerity of leering at the other guy’s granny when she was washing her face; a story without a happy ending. The village elders invited us to a meal and our guide motioned to the roofs to cease firing and let us pass. They had cooked a sheep’s head and offered the best part – the eyes – to the guest of honor: me. Soon after, I fell ill and had to say good-bye to my companions and take the plane from Kabul. I never made it to Katmandu.

Back home I first went into advertising and then studied French history before I dropped my somewhat superfluous thesis on Cardinal Richelieu and after consultations with my professor switched to Roman archeology and English literature. At night I worked shifts as a subeditor for a tabloid, helped along with uncounted cups of strong coffee. Psychologists on the campus paid me a fee for serving as guinea pig in their studies on sleep deprivation. I saw spider webs in every corner and expected the walls to warp under my touch. In the foliage of the trees and in the grain of my wooden furniture I saw elfin beings peek at me; I flinched from the imaginary swipe of fluttering hair on my face.

During my final semester I assisted in Yugoslavia at the excavation of a “Mithreum” – a chapel of Mithras – the bull slaying redeemer of the Roman soldier, and then joined a team in Tunisia and Morocco, mapping and photographing Roman epigraphs for a new survey.

A veteran of the French legion assisted the team, liaising with the authorities and the natives. In his youth he had joined the Legion the old-fashioned way; he was seventeen when recruiting officers had shanghaied him from a coal mine across the border. That was his story and he stuck to it. Now he looked forward to retirement and a little home in the Loire Valley. He introduced me to a sheikh (or “Amenokal”) of the Touareg. They call themselves the “Imouhar,” the free people. A formal visit was arranged; I showered and in my best outfit drove to the camp, accompanied by the veteran as the interpreter. The reception was friendly and I was invited to have a bath before the meal. I said, I had already showered, but what the Veteran translated as my reply made these people smile. I was led to a man-sized cauldron with a blazing fire underneath and was asked to undress. Was I to become the meal’s main course?

Water is on a premium in the Sahara, and only a shallow puddle steamed at the bottom of the bathtub, practically singeing my testicles. A man with a couple of missing teeth in his smile helped me clambering into the tub. As I soon realized, he had a pair of very strong hands.

Without using soap he began massaging the dirt out of my epidermis. It was a humbling experience, even with the excuse of an hour’s drive through the desert in an open jeep. I thought I was clean, but the man collected from my skin a ball of gunk the size of a walnut. The following meal was a spicy affair, but the legionnaire’s experience got me through this: don’t try washing down the heat in your mouth with water; instead ask for bread and chew it slowly! The meal ended with tea in tiny thimbles, the kind hat enables you to speak fluently in fourteen languages at once.

After graduation I had to make a choice. A manufacturer of chemical products offered a position with the opportunity for worldwide travels on expense account. I took it.

Before I could go on the road my contract required me to do six months in research and development. So I donned a white smock and checked in into the laboratory on a Tuesday. Chemistry had always been my least loved subject before an informal chat with a physicist (sic!) had opened my eyes. Chemists never speak about electrons on the outer shell of an atom. But chemistry, it seems, is all about the right number of these electrons when atoms interact. The researchers in the lab were after a new photosensitive compound and by trial and error the team tabulated and tested dozens of substances according to their “radicals,” the little dot to the right of the symbol, and this over and over again. I was ready to do what I was hired for.

My first assignment was a client in communist Czechoslovakia. In my company car I entered the outskirts of Prague almost at midnight. I knew that a hotel room was waiting for me, a moldy time capsule of gilded elegance in scarlet velvet. Nimbly threading my way through the suburbs I approached the lights of the downtown when suddenly I was caught on a crossroad that seemed to receive one-way lanes from every possible direction. It was eerily quiet.

Prague is the hometown of the writer Franz Kafka and the moment gave a whole new meaning to the word "Kafkaesque." I tried backing out, but I already knew what was going to happen next. There would be a cop waiting to give me a ticket. And so it was.

Motioned to wind down the window, I got a nose full of exhalations from a cigarette and the sour scent of stale beer. The man steadied himself with one hand on the roof of my car. The law clearly was in need of a shave, but he was the authority, and I understood that there was no point in protesting my innocence. So I paid and didn’t ask for a receipt. Lost in thoughts the man continued holding on to the roof. I waited. At last he took off his hand and gave way. The film director Milos Forman used Prague as location for his film Amadeus. Most of the extras on his set came from the secret police. They were in it for the American cigarettes and the cans of pineapple. Time and again Milos had to remind his American crew to “forget logic! This is Czechoslovakia.” Actually Forman used the wrong term. It was not the lack of logic that was worrying. The next day, my contacts directed me into a yellow haze of dust. It came from factory stacks and burning dumping pits, which surround Prague with a ring of sulfur, like a circle from Dante’s hell.

My assignment in Prague was followed by travels to Italy, Portugal and Spain. In a restaurant in Madrid I shook hands with a man in an expensive suit, a bit on the stocky side, well fed, soft skinned, articulate, a handshake like a wet sponge. He arrived in a motorcade and introduced himself under a generic name – “Senior Muños.” Everybody else in the room knew him as the king’s chief of security. Before the soufflé he passed around the table his identity card and his Beretta. The document showed his photograph and a number with an endless row of zeros followed by a six at the end. This seemed to be the point. Only the royal family had figures that low on their ID. The Beretta was a macho thing. They do this in those countries. After this encounter my firm thought I was ready to represent them in Los Angeles. I landed for a stopover in New York and decided to travel the remaining distance by car on the Interstate 80. I wanted to see America. A friend provided me with an old Cadillac. She was put together from two wrecks from the fifties and although the paint was not great – I would lie if I said it was pink – the tail fins were as flashy as ever. She got me safely across the continent, although the handwritten license plate on a piece of red cardboard in the rear window raised more than one patrol officer’s eyebrow; but it was perfectly legal.

In Los Angeles, I lined up to open a bank account; I presented my passport to the girl at the counter and received a lecture that in America only the driver’s license is a “proper ID.” This settled, I went out for a quick lunch. What seemed a humble hot-dog-stand turned out to be a gathering of the rich and beautiful; reclining in their Lincolns and Porsches, they ate, dripping relish and mustard on their diamond rings.

I retired the Cad for a Buick Skylark, red as a fire engine, and scheduled a weekend for a much-anticipated trip to Nevada.

Colleagues had warned me of patrol cars lurking to catch you speeding. Yet on this night a car studded with antennas, like a porcupine with spikes, was overturning me, tailgated by an entire convoy tooting their horns to fall in with them. The porcupine in front carried illegal radar detecting equipment. From far away Las Vegas floated on the horizon like an illuminated airstrip. Our convoy arrived in Vegas at about ten o’clock. That night I was determined to make ten thousand dollars at the roulette. That was my target.

Oh I was good! I understood the game. I knew the percentages; I could set myself targets. I started with five hundred and in no time I’d piled up stacks of chips, worth a trifle more than five thousand. It should have been the signal to leave and had I done so I probably would still be gambling. I didn’t of course.

The croupier and I were the only people at this table. I had a target. The croupier looked at me and barely noticeable shrugged his shoulders when I placed my next bet. Two hours later I left the Casino without my American Express card. Cold turkey. Never again the clinking of chips and the nervous patter of little thuds hurtling across the crap table. No more sympathetic noises from the young man next to me who says he admires my game. A typical night on the strip. The trance of neon lights, people sliding by in their cars like in a fluorescent fish tank. The chills after the adrenaline crash when stepping out into the street. The aimless walk before backtracking to the car park. A drop of water from some air-conditioner hitting the face. I still had a car key and a car fitting to the key. Back in L.A., I was offered a career change and for a moment it got me thinking. The man offering had the looks of Mahatma Gandhi – without the loincloth.

Gandhi owned five houses with a Jaguar in each garage. He was married to a woman in her first pregnancy; there was a blonde mistress and her just born baby, and a Japanese ex-wife, the mother of an already married son, who was serving with the Marines.  There was Kirby, the Doberman. They all were living within a mile’s distance of each other, helping one another changing diapers and buying a dress for the party tonight. Gandhi’s firm was registered in Switzerland. Most of his business he conducted from his fax machine in the bedroom. Do you need a tank or a fighter plane? Gandhi is your man. For handguns go to Walmart.

In the end I thought the better of the offer and stuck with my employer. He sent me on a new assignment to South East Asia and China. I met my wife and settled down, teaching and studying.

China inflicted a bit of a culture shock. At moments I found myself lost in the streets, surrounded by a chaotic congestion of screeching traffic, of shop signs I couldn’t read, of disintegrating concrete and an unspeakable, roach infested ugliness in the utilitarian architecture. Yet after midnight the city was able to exude an intoxicating magic. We toured the abandoned streets on our scooter, a red Vespa, the drifting dust from the numerous construction sites had settled, and despite, or perhaps as an effect of the polluted air, the krypton lights disseminated the gentle luster of a gigantic jellyfish hovering in the greenish, slightly hazy, translucence of the sky, dangling countless tentacles onto the empty playgrounds. Now and then we stopped there for a moment on the swings; from the chains our hands rubbed off the slimy sweat of the big city. At this late hour even the home was quiet. Chinese families are a noisy and temperamental affair; the headlight over the door to your room is left open, the clan would be very unhappy should one of their own drift out of earshot. In the eighties privacy was still a foreign concept for China.

Among the colony of expatriates I made the acquaintance of a Jesuit from Australia. He helped me to find my way through the Chinese classics. I learned to respect the Jesuit’s touch in these matters. Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong SJ (1912 – 2003) is a book I return to, time and again.

The one Chinese writer I consider as an absolute must-read is the Han historian Ssu-ma Ch‘ien (Sima Qian, 145 – 90 BC), a stupendous storyteller. His emperor gave him a rough deal. Ssu-ma stood up defending the integrity of a colleague in office and was neutered for his temerity. Ssu-ma wrote before the innovation of ink and paper. With untiring patience, his clerks singed signs with read hot needles onto uncounted slabs of bamboo, 1,500,000 words altogether. Ssu-ma was not your typical Confucian gentleman, uptight, polished and slightly bigoted. He was a sensitive individual with loyalty high on his agenda. His was a life under tight supervision. A court official was confined to a dormitory and given leave only once every five days to wash his hair. He did not think of his treatment as an injustice; by standing up for Li Ling, who was not even his friend, Ssu-ma knew he had it coming, and his refusal to commit “honorable” suicide marked him as an outcast in the eyes of his peers. Yet he could not bear the thought to leave his work unfinished.

My favorite Chinese poet is Su Tung-po (1037 – 1101) – his penname; his real name is Su Shih – a free spirit as far as this is possible in China. He also was the political adversary of the economist and reformer Wang An-shih (1021 – 1086). Wang achieved the rare feat of being hailed as a political forerunner on both sides of the Taiwan Straits. His intrusive paternalism was right down the lane of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung. Yet instead of easing the burden for the peasantry, his measures achieved exactly the opposite and the impoverished farmers abandoned their fields causing a countrywide famine. Wang retired from office. 

It was nine o’clock in the evening after rush hour.

The street under the window was empty and barely lit. My wife should have been home for over an hour; I decided to take a leisurely walk into the direction from which I was expecting her arrival. Half a mile down the road, the street was utterly desolate, except for a parked pickup with a load of protruding scaffolding poles. Behind the pickup was a large puddle on the tarmac that looked like axle grease. I noticed a mangled Vespa on the sidewalk and suddenly realized I'd stepped into the puddle.

A friend – the chief surgeon of the local university clinic – helped searching for my wife in the hospitals up and down the city. We found the morgue holding her remains; her upper body was left covered; they said it would be better not to look at her face.

In 1991 I returned to England and settled in Neasden, London, where H.G. Wells says the Martians had landed. In 1997 I began corresponding with the person who is my sweetheart and whom I have to thank that this website ever materialized. Dawn and I first moved to Florida and in the year after 9/11 we went back to England, and, with the blessing of the immortals, we shall live happily ever after.

Our first apartment overlooked the River Thames, a hundred yards away from the crypt where Pocahontas is laid to rest. We now live in a place looking out on tall trees fringing the road with the squirrels leaping across between the treetops.

© – 1/1/2010 – by michael sympson, 7,150 words, all rights reserved

To be continued – perhaps