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Prologue
What happened may have
been predetermined, it may have been accidental, it may have been of my own
doing. We don’t know and those who think they know could be wrong. Besides, I
am now all right with that Mona obsession and with the other girls and
everything that happened. It has become a story. It makes me think that I
have not missed out on anything. You really don’t want to be regretting the
past and thinking that you missed out on things in your younger years. This is not how it all started, but it is a good way to start. Monika
was drunk when I met her at Mutter
Leidike. She had consumed too
much of the pub’s renowned gooseberry wine. People drank the stuff like
juice. It tasted like juice. Some people placed the full bottle on their lips
and by the time they took the bottle off, empty or almost empty, the waiter
had placed another bottle in front of them. Monika was twenty years old, but
looked like fifteen. It was a Saturday night which had started like so many
other Saturday nights. I had just popped in at Mutter Leidike to see if I could spot a familiar face. Monika, with a bottle of wine in one hand, walked
right into me. “Excuse me”, she said. Well, not exactly. We are
reflecting here on an event that happened in Berlin. Accordingly, what Monika
really said, or most likely really said, was something along the following
lines: Entschuldigen Sie bitte. Hoppla! (I am not so sure about the Hoppla.
This word is used more widely in the south of Germany. It means whoops!) Then, all of a sudden, Monika’s legs gave up
on her. If I hadn’t caught her, she would have crashed to the floor. The
place was so crowded, people might just have stepped on her or fallen over
her. She asked for a lift and since I was bored and had
nothing planned for the rest of the night, I agreed. This, as I realized retrospectively, was my
mistake. Or maybe it was okay. The price I had to pay was small. A bit of
emotional pain. Easily hidden and denied. Stay away from drunken women. Don’t
pick them up. My mother could have told me that. In my car I asked the girl where I could drop her
off. She said she would prefer my place. That wasn’t what I had meant. She lived with her parents and told me about a silly
argument with her father and that she could not go home. This didn’t sound too bad. Can happen to anybody. I didn’t mind her spending the night at my place,
but it was only ten o’clock, much too early to go home. What now? She
suggested that I could do whatever I liked and she would curl up on the back
seat of my VW and whenever I drove home I could wake her up. I didn’t like
that idea either. It was winter and cold and I didn’t want to find her frozen
in my car. Hell, how would I explain that to her father and her
mother and the police and to my father and my mother and so on? Drunk was bad enough. Drunk and frozen would have
been really bad. We agreed that she needed a strong cup of coffee and
after that we would go to the Bellevue, a cinema that showed slapstick movies
every Friday and Saturday night from eleven o’clock till one or two in the
morning. I thought this would cheer her up. But once in the cinema Monika
fell asleep within minutes and I did my best to drink her gooseberry wine and
enjoy Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin on my own. There
was also a jazz band on the stage. Many people smoked and some had brought a
bottle of wine or Schnaps along and
shared it around. As far as I know, the Bellevue was the only cinema of that
kind in Berlin. In any other cinema they would have gone berserk, called the
police and threatened to arrest you if you smoked and boozed and farted and
swore and whatever else people did in the Bellevue. There was a good atmosphere. The place reminded me of Paris: of locations I had
read about in Henry Miller’s Quiet Days
in Clichy. After the movie I carried Monika to my car. She was
so slim and so light, I was worried that the wind may just blow her away. She
still insisted that she wanted to spend the night at my place. “You hardly
know me,” I challenged her. “You look all right,” she said. I didn’t argue with this. At the time I lived in a little apartment in
Kreuzberg, just around the corner from where the painter Kurt Mühlenhaupt had
his atelier. Monika spent the night on my sofa. The next morning we had
breakfast together. It was a bit like in one of those old Rock Hudson and
Doris Day movies. I had a good fire going and she walked around in her
panties and a blouse and nothing else. It was actually much better than in those stupid
movies. We made love and Monika’s bohemian appearance reminded me of Mona,
one of Henry Miller’s characters that he had modelled on his muse and wife
June. I was fascinated by Monika’s body. She was so
slim, so perfectly slim. Before I had met her I would not have thought it
possible that such a slim female body could stir up such tremendous sexual
feelings in me. Monika was very down to earth and had a great sense of
humour. She phoned her parents and returned home a few days later. We had more sex. Then, one day, she told me that she had fallen in
love with someone. She asked if I wanted to meet the guy. I didn’t. Why would I want to meet him? I realized that my search for a muse – my Mona
– would start again. We phoned each other a few more times before we lost
contact. After that I never picked up a drunken girl
again. Not because I wouldn’t. It just never happened. This was a once in a
lifetime experience. She was there. I was there. She was too drunk to stand.
I caught her. She asked for a lift. This is how these things sometimes
happen. Click here for Sample TWO: He mentioned Hemingway,
casually and unexpectedly Click here for Sample THREE: I can still see you |