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Bohr said no more after this. He looked me in the eye and studied my reaction. "Albert was a bit like you, in a way," he said moments later. "You have no compassion for humanity either!"
His answer shocked me. How could he say such a thing? I felt the very opposite to be true. Before I could refute him, he turned and gestured that I follow. He treated me to a brief tour of his museum, which he said he had built for his own benefit to trace the history of mankind. He took me to the far side of the building, along a narrow aisle to a workstation where I expected to receive the by then overdue, deeply reasoned explanation as to why he felt I lacked compassion for humanity. I was disappointed again. Without saying anything he showed me a sealed glass dome under which two bearing shells were mounted. What in heaven's name was this supposed to prove that he had my test version of the bearings I had built for our five generators? He looked at me and grinned. He didn't even say how he got them, nor anything else, but abruptly excused himself. "I'll ask Odessa to look after you," he added as he left me standing.
Odessa appeared to be one of his female staff who more than compensated for Bohr's apparent rudeness.
As I found out later, Odessa wasn't from Russia as her name might suggest, but from the Amazon basin, from a small village of central Brazil. Her name seemed more linked to the word odyssey than to anything else. Being touched by her became an odyssey into a whole new universe of loveliness. She bid me welcome to the planet and said that she would take me wherever I wanted to go. I told her that I didn't know anything about the planet, but would love to see her home to get a feeling for the lifestyle the planet allowed. She smiled ever so softly and said in perfect English; "It's not far from here. We will have lunch there, if you like."
Her home was on top of a riverbank where the river sharply turned. The river skirted a mountain, then flowed into a gorge towards a sea, as she explained. The house stood on a plateau covered with wild grasses and groups of flowering trees, some bearing red and yellow fruit. The edge towards the river was carved into terraces that were overgrown with dozens of species of flowers that made the landscape appear as though painted with broad daring strokes, outlining the path of the river with bands of color.
We sat outside in the sunshine, in recliners from Sweden, on a marble platform from Pag Yugoslavia. We ate crepes filled with marinated sweet fruit, collected fresh from Bohr's planet. Instead of dessert, however, which was definitely not needed, she gave me a tour of the grounds.
Although our bodies never touched on any occasion, I felt intimately close to her, in a way that I had not felt towards any other human being. I could feel her warmth wherever we went, her sex linked to the deepest part of myself, to her satisfaction with living that shone gently in her eyes and struck a long dormant chord. As we walked in the garden I could feel her presence reflected everywhere. I was even reflected in my soul, in my entire being, as though we were one.
Evidently, she could sense how she affected me, perhaps by my unreserved responding to her all-pervading presence.
"What you feel shouldn't puzzle you," she said after long period of silence. "You are touched by another facet of that new reality that you had not known before. Living isn't physical, it's spiritual. You are beginning to discover your spirituality." She touched my hand. "What is this?" she asked.
"It's my hand," I said.
"Of course it is, but is it flesh and bones?" she said. "It's Spirit in manifest form. But that takes a long time to come to terms with."
"Spirit?" I repeated.
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Stories about
Love
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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