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; although when he talked to me 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 was the chosen topic between him and me and visiting him was my alibi when I went out to play. After Schlemiel’s death, already in her eighties, frail and walking almost in 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.

My mother was her youngest and in 1946 or 1947, an allied officer fell in love with her. The first time they laid eyes on each other was at the cinema when she ushered the soldier with a torchlight to his seat. There followed a bit of stalking on my father’s part, my mother noticed, and 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. It is the moment when most babies learn to gratify their parents for their round-the-clock services with a little peal of laughter. There is more to the old schoolmaster than meets the eye. I do remember to be wheeled about in the 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. From the time before I’ve heard anecdotes.

The winter in ‘49 was murderous and 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 it off, break it 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 noticed, and, as friendly servant to the public, he offered a hand to carry the pram. The moment he lifted it 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 man looked up to her, kept quiet and continued helping the women down the stairs.

Our home had once been a baron’s city mansion. Along a windowless corridor, we and six other families occupied rooms with tall ceilings and stucco ornaments of seashells and chubby little boys. The loo was outdoor 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 dust out of your carpet is a rather therapeutic activity – much better than hovering or the couch of 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 flower bed fringed with bricks set in a jagged saw-pattern. I fell down these stairs and hit my head on one of those pointy bricks. When I came around the chauffeur living upstairs was already driving me in his delivery van to the doctor. I received stitches on my forehead, the scar is now barely visible.

My earliest out-of-house memory is a sports event my father took me to. I still have a sharp visual image of a boxing ring and two guys in olive green shirts throwing punches at each other with something, at the end of their forearms, that looked to me like the brown earthenware vessel my mother used for storing her salt and honing her kitchen knife on the vessel’s rim. I had never seen a boxing glove before. I don’t recall protective head gear.

The light in the ring was harsh and the cheering all around never stopped. The seat must have been close to the ring; I had a good view of the faces and to my right my father repeatedly jumped up and shouted something. 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. This was years before I went to school, I must have been four or even younger! Another recollection from the time when I just had emerged from the amnesia of infancy – why is it that we don’t remember our earliest years? – was the towering height and the not exactly pleasing smell of Shantih, and the bristles on his furrowed skin.

My grandmother hadn’t yet teamed up with Schlemiel at the time and was working for the local Zoo. On weekends I was brought out to visit her. One of the elephants was employed as a people carrier and lumbered along with hordes of squealing kids on his back. My mother was talking with somebody when I, standing closer to the elephant, 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. Shantih 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 transferred to a base in Bavaria and I entered primary school.

On the public holidays we used to watch the Catholics follow in procession 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.”

On 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 causes changes in the local air pressure and many people have a headache on such day. 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 hospital 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 angel; this one, he blows the horn,” my mother said. My father didn’t bat an eyelid; I thought of the chubby little boys with tiny penises on the stucco ceiling in Berlin.

In those days they didn’t terrorize kids with “preschool” and at school 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 sometimes heard voices shouting at me. I looked around, but there was nobody. The episode ended after I had managed to finish my first book at the age of seven. It was Cooper’s Deerslayer.

I began perusing my parents’ rather odd collection of books, most of it unsuitable for children, except for a 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 allowed to carry a camera and 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 enormous and most of it was not meant for children. It comprised a translation of the Völsunga Saga; the Edda, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the Legends of King Charlemagne, mixed with often lewd legends from the crusades, Musäus’ ironic and dry Legends of Rübezahl, and Gottfried August Bürger's Wondrous Tales of the Campaigns and Adventures at Sea and Land of Baron of Münchhausen, all in one mighty tome. The death of Bayard, the battle charger of Count Raymond, a horse of miraculous strength, is still with me.

When the seditious count finally surrendered to his liege he was required, to kill this horse as a penance. The king’s retainers hung millstones around Bayard’s neck and feet and pushed the steed into the river. Bayard emerged from the water, turns the head, and crying out for his master. The eyes of the horse and of the count meet, and the horse gaining strength struggles back on dry land. So the King orders Count Raymond to look away next time. They burden the horse with even more millstones and push it back into the water. Again the whinnying Bayard surfaces from the deep waters. This time the weeping count turns his back to the scene. Bayard realizes he is abandoned, loses strength and drowns. The scene left me in tears.

I also had my first lesson in cosmology and 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. A story very similar to the stories of the Babylonians and the Canaanites and even of the Bible.

During exile the same bigots who kept whining and swearing over “worshipping in high places,” had replaced the original creation story of the Bible with the domesticated story of a busy squire who forms out of chaos Heaven and Earth, attending to trees and plants and the fishes in his pond. The editorial purges were not as thorough as the rabbinical editors may have wished for; it left enough traces in the texts to reconstruct the original beginning of the Bible, telling us of a primeval conflict between "Tehom" (Gen 1:2) the dragon of water-world and the tribe of the Elohim (a plural but not the Pluralis Majestatis) in high heaven. Tehom threatened to drown all the Elohim. So the warlike "Yahweh," the god of thunder, mounts his chariot of fire and assails Tehom with hail and lightning, slaying Tehom’s son “Leviathan,” and cutting to pieces an unidentifiable "Rahab" (Ps. Ps. 74:14-15; 89:9-10; Isaiah 51:9-10). Yahweh shouts in triumph and the waters subside. The Elohim then shape the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars from the slain carcass. They stretch out the skies like a tent cloth (Job 9:7-8, 26:13), thus hiding behind a veil the abyss beneath and their secret dwellings above the waters of high (Job 26:5-10). Moon and Sun are set to divide the seasons, separating day and night. And the stars are singing in a chorus (Job 38:7-8). From the “Edda” and the mythology of classic Greece we know that even the gods live under the constant threat of darkness and chaos. So the state of panic when the Elohim issued Adam’s deportation order – lest “men become one of us” (Gen 3:24) – is making perfect sense. Yet even in exile away from Eden the immortals indulge themselves, abducting the daughters of the human race and take them for their wives (Gen 6:4).

When I was nine I read the Bible from cover to cover; out of sheer curiosity, nobody asked me to. God’s command not to “boil a kid in his mother's milk” struck a sympathetic chord, but Jesus’ curse of the fig tree left me singularly unimpressed. It still does. The thing is naively presented as an example of miracle working and where it can get you if you have faith, as if destroying a tree isn’t something everybody can do; make it bloom and yield, that would have been the miracle.

Of course it didn’t yet occur to me, but on our job applications we are asked for our qualifications, and I wouldn’t allow a plumber to lay hands on my appendicitis. Even my dentist in London told me he trusted only a colleague in Newcastle: "But I am supposed to trust you?" – "Of course, you don't know shit," he said. So when it comes to our “immortal soul,” shouldn’t we ask for qualifications as well? An autistic refugee, sought for murder by the Egyptian police, a charismatic carpenter living off the married women in his retinue, or a merchant and highwayman poisoning water-wells in the Arabian desert – how do they fill the blanks? The Hohenstauffen emperor, Frederick II (1194 – 1250) and his opposite number, Sultan Al-Kamil had a good laugh at “the three conmen, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed.”

Bavaria was (still is?) a catholic country with a capital "C" and no anti-clerical traditions whatsoever. The intensity these lederhosen people attached to religion was pretty scary. On every wall there hung a crucifix, at school, in the shops, at the crossroads. The schools segregated the denominations, I was the odd kid out and for lack of a better alternative they did put me together with the Lutherans. So I guess my crush on Buddhism at the age of 8 or 9 was a reaction to all this. It ended in yawns over the endless litanies to prevent suffering by dissociating yourself from your attachments. My attachments define who I am. If I suffer for it, well, that is the price for being anything at all. The motto on the Sympsons’ coat of arms is “nil desperandum,” never give up, and not: “Better don’t try.”

My next book was Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in bed, hidden under the cover, with a flashlight, I read 600 pages in one sitting over night. After my second small pocks vaccination, I ran a high fever and became delirious. In panic my mother called our practitioner from across the street, Dr. Löw. I insisted on reading Dickens' Oliver Twist and it made me feel awful. I still find the gloom in Dickens overpowering: “These tumbling tenements contain, by night, a swarm of misery, breed a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards, and coils itself to sleep in maggot numbers where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever, and sowing evil in every footprint” (Dickens, Bleak House). Many years later I made the acquaintance of a London spinster; she was in her twenties and just came back from a trip to Central-America; mosquito bitten and suntanned. We all have seen her, the bony type with a shrill laughter under a head of wiry blond hair. I am fairly tall but she could look down on me with ease. This woman had an uncanny eye for the little ticks of each and everyone and from my window she pointed out a whole collection of Dickensian characters parading underneath. Mr. Podsnap is still working on the stock exchange and during the latest recession his flourish has come in handy. My friend’s crash course in Dickensian typology, however, didn’t do much to diminish my reservations.

The skies in Dickens’ world are hidden in a “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.” Reading this makes me all the more hanker for the open blue and the sleepy heat of a Mediterranean summer at noon. A nodding donkey is hitched to an olive tree. He must have a naughty dream. “Look at him!” my wife cries out. The donkey’s ears twitch in alarm, and the offending extension between his hind-legs disappears; embarrassed the animal looks away from us.

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, I mused over Plato’s archetypes, a sort of transcendental cookie cutter. Best of all, I liked Plato’s tale of universal inundation in Timaeus. Unlike the one off event in Genesis, Plato speaks of for ever recurring floods, survived only by the illiterate herdsmen in the mountains, while “those who live in the cities are swept into the sea.” So “just when the nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the requisites of civilization, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those alive who are destitute of education; and so we have to begin all over again like children.” The idea of previous civilizations and of more advanced people gone extinct without a trace is not entirely absurd. The layers of sediment on the ocean floor give evidence to eight ice-ages in the last 700,000 years.

You may have guessed it by now, I liked reading, but even more I liked to be out with the other kids. We used to be away from home all day and 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. 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 thirty meters into shallow water, 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 and in late afternoon turned around rolling down the falling altitude with almost no pedaling.

On weekends I was allowed to stay up late and father and son bonded over a common interest in astronomy. Pretty early in my youth I came to an understanding that this Universe is a tad to vast for God's – any god's – DIY shop. Of course the world could be much younger than we think it is; theoretically there is no logical contradiction in the idea that the world – complete with fossils and false memories – was created yesterday, or even five minutes ago, when I believe to remember that I was typing at this essay. And of course, the Old Potter in this example has to do more than make things just look as if they are ancient. "He" needs to produce something that works even after leaving the maker's shop. The laws of nature fully apply. Who knows; although creation is supposed to have occurred on Sunday, the 27th of April, 3877 BC., it may have taken eons of trying and testing his toy before God released it to the public? Did the Old Potter already foresee the roses in my garden?

Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the only one holding water, would be an empirical – not a logical – proof, that things cannot work on their own, but need – operative word! – the intervention of an external agent to help it along; an intervention that is contravening the laws of nature (otherwise you can't tell whether there is any intervention at all). Proclaiming the “existence” of a non-interventionist god merely sitting on the fence and twiddling his thumbs while things everywhere proceed at their own pace, is merely abusing semantics for one’s own spiritual comfort. Which I can understand – especially in old age one tends to yearn for a last supper under the pergola – but it has no bearing on the question, whatsoever. Our understanding of nature of course is far from complete, but in the areas where we have turned the stones – so far at least – no space is left for arbitrary intervention. Apparently it is the element of time which is causing a bit of a problem here, raising questions about the odds of things to happen. Partly this is, because most of us have a poor understanding about the nature of chance. When you play the lottery your chance of hitting the jackpot is a long shot of one to seventeen billion or worse, but the larger the number of players participating, the better are the odds that somebody is going to win – somewhere in the area of one to thirty or better. In other words, the doubts, expressed by the critics of evolution, are based on the same anthropocentric bias that has threatened Copernicus and Galilei with injunctions and thumbscrews and caused Giordano Bruno to get himself burned alive. I never understood why the world out there just has to be the one for our own benefit. Granted, that things turned out in our favor, does this mean along the way to the present stage this was at any point a foregone necessity? I don’t think so. Despite of Immanuel Kant’s contention that the essential attribute of “existence” is that something must exist, and is not just here by accident, what difference does it make for my presence here and now, whether it was "necessary" that a single cell organism three billion years ago has been evolving through many stages to become me or the roses in my garden? Suppose it was an accident?

My father was an engineer with a healthy disrespect for academic baloney; engineering has to get it right or the wheels won’t spin. So it was a real disappointment for the old man that in the end my interest in the classics got the better of me. Virgil’s elfin world of nymphs and fauns in the Georgics has become my inner island of tranquility. C. Schneider’s hymn on the Hellenistic world in two mighty tomes, (Kulturgeschichte des Hellenismus, 2 volumes, Munich 1967 – 1969) has never lost its lure, even now when this glow lingers on only a nostalgic memory. In the last year at college, 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 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 guys 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 fire 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.

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. The brew by one of my colleagues truly deserved the name “infernal.” The very first cup left me stunned; literally. 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 felt lurking dryads peeking at me; they became very real. Sometimes I flinched from the imaginary swipe of fluttering hair on my face. How I found the time to engage in a study of Immanuel Kant is now a complete mystery to me; most of my reading was done while commuting on train and bus. I think Kant’s philosophy is still holding up.

It was a time when we students engaged in “doublethink” and “newspeak,” without actually living in a dictatorship. This was still the Cold War. Everybody’s language was infected with socialist terminology like a dog with fleas, and spewing sociological gobbledygook counted for having a social conscience. People were actually capable of taking terms like "consumer terrorism" seriously. I read the classics of Marxism. It didn’t make me reject capitalist economy – my preferred philosopher is Mandeville – but I did realize that capitalism is not a free lunch, the wished for utopia of unstoppable progress. The beast comes for a price and especially the lower incomes time and again are the ones to pay with layoffs and misery in the inevitable downturns of cyclical boom and bust. In my opinion Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England should be required reading for everybody. To escape the squalor in those days, the rural surplus labor flooded in to Manchester seeking a better life, a journey from poverty to badly paid misery. Something I later had the opportunity of observing first hand in the early days of the “special economic zones” in China, which, after Chairman Mao’s death, began replacing China’s Stalinist war-economy and started the biggest boom in Chinese history. I placed the Capital somewhere where I could be sure never to find it again, when in the course of my studies, I came across a collection of letters from the 5th century, written by the Roman senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (340 – 405 AD.). It has never been translated, except into French, and still is a rare book. Up until then, I was your average agnostic, personally rejecting the comforts of religion as “opium for the common folk,” yet not really with an axe to grind. I was young, I didn't yet fully appreciate the need for comfort, and on the other hand still shared the common perception that over the centuries the Christian church had been instrumental in the preservation of our civilization. (Remember the naked little boys with tiny penises.) Symmachus’ letters opened the window to a very different perspective. When a dwindling half of the ancient population was still Gentile, the majority of the Christian half followed the non-Trinitarian creed of the Presbyter Arius. Today the Trinitarian dogma is the common creed across the denominations, even if they disagree on everything else. When in a belated attempt the physician Michael Servetus begged to differ and in Geneva sought asylum from the Inquisition, the reformer Calvin, himself a refugee from the Inquisition, had him arrested and burned alive, apparently without losing sleep over it. Do people who end their prayers with the formula of the “father, son and holy ghost” actually know that this creed is the product of a political coup, and I don’t mean the intervention by Emperor Constantine on the assembly in Nicea? That it was a minority group overpowering a majority of non-Trinitarian Christians? A Coup that inaugurated 1,500 years of systematic persecution if you begged to differ? Of inquisition, of murder, of genocide and of censorship? In the early centuries even classic learning was persecuted. It was Catholicism who provided the ideological premise – including the idea of “limpizza de sangre,” (pure blood) – for hunting and killing Jews. These facts are not hidden in the archives; it is all out in the open. The period’s legislation is a matter of record, the correspondence of the key players is in the public domain. They figure as “saints” on the Catholic calendar.

During the last semester I assisted in Yugoslavia to excavations of a “Mithreum” – a chapel of Mithras – the bull slaying redeemer of the Roman soldier, and then joined up with a team in Tunisia and Morocco, dusting and photographing Roman epigraphs for a new survey. A veteran of the French legion assisted the team and liaised with the authorities and the natives.

In his youth he had been enlisted the old-fashioned way; he was seventeen when French recruiting officers in civvies 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. The reception was friendly. I became a bit uneasy when I was led to a man-sized cauldron on 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. The actual cleaning was done by an assistant with a couple of missing teeth in his smile and, as I soon realized, with 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 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; use bread and chew it slowly! The meal ended with tea in tiny thimbles, the kind of tea that enables you to speak fluently in fourteen languages at once.

A good visit for the project, but for me it did not become the beginning of an academic career. I had some experience in chemical analysis – DNA profiling was still in its infancy – and a manufacturer of chemical products offered 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 time and again tabulated dozens of substances according to their “radicals” (the little dot to the right of the symbol). Most scientists don’t bother with philosophy. If they absolutely must, their darling is Sir Carl Popper and his principle of “falsification,” a neat way of rationalizing the scientific method. The falsification of wrong leads was still in full swing when my stint was over, and I finally got ready to do what I was hired for.

My first assignment was to a client in Czechoslovakia, still under the communists then. Almost at midnight I entered the outskirts of Prague in my company car. I knew that a hotel room was waiting for me, a moldy time capsule of gilded elegance in scarlet velvet. The maids, instead of dusting and changing sheets, would rather have coffee with the head waiter. Guests were invited to join. I was still miles away from such invitation, threading my way through the suburbs. Not really a difficult task; the lights of the city’s approaching downtown floated assertively across the windscreen. Underneath these lights, I knew, socialist tourists from East-Germany were making themselves obnoxious. They used to feel like the communist elite in those days, everywhere strutting about with a big chip on their shoulder. The area I was driving through, however, was pitch dark and suddenly I was caught in 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.

Asked to wind down the window, I got a nose full of exhalations from a cigarette accompanied by a 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 with the secret police as extras on his set. Most of them were in it more for the American cigarettes and the cans of pineapple than the sinister suspicions of the regime. Time and again Milos had to remind his American crew to “forget logic! This is Checkoslovakia.” Actually Forman used the wrong word. It was not the lack of logic that was worrying me. The next day, my contacts directed me into a haze of sulfuric dust. It came from factory stacks and burning dumping sites which surround Prague in a ring, like a circle from Dante’s hell.

After Prague I was sent 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. My firm thought I was ready to represent them in Los Angeles. I landed in New York and decided to travel the distance by car on the Interstate 80, seeing something of 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. It 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. After my arrival in L.A. I lined up to open a bank account and after presenting my passport received from the girl at the counter a lecture that in America only the drivers license is a “proper ID.” This settled, I went out for lunch. There was a humble hot dog stand where the rich and beautiful used to gather, eating and licking their fingers while reclining in their Lincolns and Porsches, with relish and mustard dripping on their diamond rings. The weekend was scheduled for a much anticipated trip to Nevada.

From the distance and at night, Las Vegas was a mysterious mirage. I had retired the Cad and in a Buick Skylark, red as a fire engine, drifted through Nevada’s nocturnal void, with patrol cars lurking left and right to catch you speeding. On a good day, a car studded with antennas, like a porcupine with spikes, would overturn you, tailgated by an entire convoy inviting you to fall in with them. The porcupine in front carried illegal radar detecting equipment. Gradually, something, that looked like a fully lit airstrip, was filling the windscreen from left to right. For a long time it hovered there, motionless.

That night I was determined to make 10,000 at the roulette. That was my target. Oh I was good, I could set myself targets. I started with five hundred and in a very short time I piled up stacks of chips before me, worth a trifle more than 5,000. It should have been the signal to leave and had I done so I probably would still be gambling. I didn’t.

The croupier and I were the only people at this table. My target was ten thousand. 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 stacked jetons 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 is admiring 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 I can’t deny that for a moment it got me thinking. The offer came from a mild mannered man with the looks of Mahatma Gandhi without the loincloth. Kirby his Doberman was positively worshipping the man.

Gandhi owned five houses with a Jaguar (the car) in each garage and 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. They all were living within a mile’s distance helping each other change diapers and buy dresses for parties. 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 better of the offer and stuck with my employer. He sent me on new assignments to South East Asia and China. That's where I met my wife and decided to settle down, teaching and studying.

China inflicted a bit of a culture shock. At moments the surrounding suddenly shrank to 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. But 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, with countless tentacles dangling 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 home was quiet. Chinese families are a noisy 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 in China.

A Jesuit helped me to find my way through the Chinese classics. A period of quiet content. “That which befalls men befalls the beasts and man has no preeminence. Wherefore nothing is better than to rejoice in your own works” says Kohelet (Ecclesiastes 3:19-22). The one Chinese writer I consider as a an absolute must read is the Han historian Ssu-ma ch‘ien (145 – 90 BC.), a stupendous story teller with the temperament of an anthropologist. His emperor gave him a rough deal. When Ssu-ma stood up and defend the integrity of a colleague in office, they castrated him.

Ssu-ma’s work was written 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. In fact it would be difficult to rubricate Ssu-ma under any philosophical school. He was a sensitive individual with loyalty high on his agenda. Status and influence however came for a price, it was a life under tight supervision. The court officials were confined in dormitories and given leave only once every five days to wash their 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, but he could not bear the thought to leave his work unfinished. He certainly is deserving of our admiration. 

It was around nine o’clock in the evening after rush hour. The street under the windows of my apartment block was empty and barely lit. My wife should have been home for some time by now, and I decided to walk into the direction from which I was expecting her arrival. About a kilometer further down the road it became utterly desolate except for a parked pickup with a load of protruding scaffolding poles. The poles extended towards what seemed a large puddle of axle grease on the tarmac. I noticed the crumpled wreck of a red Vespa on the sidewalk. My brain refused to register what the senses reported so loud and clear. Then I suddenly realized I’d stepped into the puddle.

Later that night, a friend – the chief surgeon of the local university clinic – helped searching for my wife in the hospitals and morgues up and down the city. We found her and when I was asked to identify her they kept her upper body covered; they said it would be better not to look at her face if I could help it. In 1991 I returned to England.

In 1997 I began a correspondence with the person who became my sweetheart and whom I have to thank that this website ever materialized. If the reader wishes to thank her, do feel free to drop an email. 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 in Kent. We first moved into an apartment overlooking the River Thames. Only a hundred yards away from my desk was the crypt where Pocahontas is laid to rest. This desk has now moved to a place deeper in Kent where we have purchased property, surrounded by green and trees and a quiet life.

The best piece of advice I’ve ever received? My aunt insisted that there is nothing, nothing at all, that cannot be said in plain language so that everybody will understand it.

A wish? I would like to end my life in France, in the light and smells of the South, the Occitanie, the ancient land of the troubadors and the Cathars; or perhaps at Avignon, where the dust is resting lightly on the car’s bonnet.

© – 3/24/2009 – by michael sympson, 7,900 words, all rights reserved

to be continued