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Oh, these words were music to my ears.
"Does my association with 'other women' bother you when we sleep together?" I asked her in a ski hut in Austria.
"Bother me? It's exciting to realize that I still measure up to the best of the universe!" she replied in Cuzco, Peru, after thinking it over for a week.
"If you had a choice to start all over again," I asked her in Mazatlan on the beach, "would you still marry me as you did, even if you knew that all this would happen?"
She nodded and answered yes, and did it again in Istanbul after a thorough consideration, and squeezed my hand. "I would most certainly marry you gain, and I would do it because of what has happened, rather than in spite of it."
At times Werner would join us for an hour or two, or Martin, or both of them together, especially when there was a chance to stage a lavish dinner. Martin loved Paris. Sometimes even Mahesh joined us, together with Cira. They came with Olaf and Odessa when a great symphony concert was on the agenda. On one of these occasions Mahesh brought his own instrument along, a rare instrument from Virtus on Gamma Point Eight, a folk-music instrument, which he called the "Pragoa." He said that the Pragoa was the first twelve-string instrument ever created on his planet and that its unique echo chamber had never been duplicated anywhere in the universe. It was played with a bow, similar to a violin, which also made it one of the most difficult instruments to play. He persuaded the music director during the all-Bach concert that we came for, to allow him to demonstrate the instrument as a part of the concert. He performed a Bach fugue, playing solo, during the intermission, and he performed it with his own personal enrichment added. He said that Bach was too easy to play, so he added two additional voices to the fugue without changing the principle of the composition. He said that Bach himself had done this kind of thing when he re-composed the old hymn, Jesu Meine Freude.
Mahesh's recital became as sensational as Odessa's floating car had been to the people in Leipzig in which he, Olaf, Cira, and Odessa had arrived for the pre-concert dinner. Martin and Werner had arranged a special dinner for the occasion at one of the finest "hole in the wall eatery" that he could find, as he said. The entire evening became one of great fun and excitement, even comical when we discovered the frustration that a would-be thief had endured who tried to steal Odessa's car and could not make it work. Even more comical was his expression when Natalia and Jill, who had joined us for this dinner, took over from the thief and zipped away in the car. Olaf and Mahesh invited everyone for a drink and dessert after the concert. Ther Mahesh gave another private recital before they all said good night and took off in Odessa's floating automobile bound for Bohr's planet.
"It seems that since you don't want to join us, we'll have to join you," I commented after everyone was gone back home.
She just smiled and shook her head.
In Vienna, a week later, I ventured to ask her again if she might not want to consider a visit to Bohr's planet. She shrugged her shoulders.
In Calcutta, she told me that she really had to think about this offer some more.
In Djakarta, she finally said a 'definite maybe,' and added sadly that there are far too few places left on Earth where one could feel save to meet anyway, as we had met.
"Save from a nuclear war?" I asked.
She shook her head. "From people!"
I knew what she meant. We met twice more after that. Once in Rio de Janeiro where we got robbed twice, shot at by mistake, and propositioned by a pair of sex seekers, all in the same day.
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Stories about
Love
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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