I was startled out of my dreaming when I felt her touch on my shoulder. I turned around, almost stared at her in surprise. She was a totally different person than the one I had seen just minutes earlier, her head held high, no trace of tears, and her long hair neatly combed. She smiled and offered me some cookies on a plate.

      "So you have come to learn what love is," she said, still smiling.

      She didn't talk about money, or make any requests for money, or even hint that she was in trouble, as it appeared she was.

      I talked with her about Erica some more and that Erica was studying love as a scientific discipline like someone would study physics, but who could still not move with its demands from a certain point on. We didn't talk about the flower garden anymore.

      "You were lucky that your friend was able to move as far as she did," said Helen. "Most people crawl into themselves much earlier and close the door. Obedience has been the curse of humanity for more than a thousand years of the dark ages. People were obedient slaves, lesser beings, humble and stupid. All this changed in the middle of the 1300s. That's when people began to discover themselves with a new vision, and with it, discover their true riches."

      Helen suggested that we sit down in the "good room" to talk about this. She put the cookies down on a small side table next to the sofa where she asked me to sit. "Would you like some port?" she asked. But she didn't wait for an answer. She went to a nearby wall-mounted miniature buffet and brought two glasses out.

      Helen stood tall on high-heeled shoes. Her long dark hair covered the top of her dress, though the top of the dress was way below her shoulders. Her dress was black. She wore black sheer stockings. They were not seamless stockings by design. An artificial seam ran from her shoes all the way up as far as one could see, in a perfectly straight line.

      She put the glasses down and smiled. As if nothing had happened, she looked away from me. She looked away quietly and smiled. No torrent of words flowed from her lips in protest of my incursion into the privacy of her world. She went back into the kitchen. As she turned around momentarily at the door, she was still smiling.



      "Do you like Portuguese port?" she called back, as if this was an important question.

      She brought out a large bottle of Portuguese port that had never been opened. She showed me the bottle.

      "There are too few occasions when this is appropriate," she said and opened the bottle with a high tech corkscrew. She filled the glasses herself. She crouched down during the process, but carefully avoided eye contact as if the resulting connection would pose a danger to the portal that was beginning to open; though her smile remained.

      "It's a nice color, this one," she commented, as she handed the filled glass to me.

      The color of the port was as dark as port is, almost as dark as her stockings that were even more prominent in the crouched position in which she tasted the port.

      "It will do," she said, then forced the cork back into the opened bottle. She handed the bottle to me. There was eye contact, brief as it was. It was a contact with her Soul so it seemed. It was a glimpse of a world that existed beyond the portal. It strengthened the view; it widened it.

      The whole process of this voiceless communication became rather rich, erotic, like an exciting ceremony of a distant culture that one barely understands, but that one can identify with as though one had been born into it. At least that's how the unfolding atmosphere appeared more and more in the way it touched a chord deep inside me that had receded so deep into the background that it appeared almost foreign now as its presence was felt again. It felt like a type of celebration that was gradually and slowly 'erupting' into life. But what were we celebrating? Were we celebrating just being alive?

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Stories about  Love from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche