Physically, she stood tall with a long graceful neck, and a smile warm enough to melt a glacier. I had been more than tempted to steal a kiss, almost right from the moment we met. However, this didn't happen. There also stood this great gulf between us and a world of lesser differences. Nevertheless, I found it exciting to be with her, to watch her reactions to my fears and hopes. Evidently, she too, was in love with her humanity as an individual person, though she would not likely ever see it that way or admit to it. Nevertheless something seemed to be troubling her. Whatever it was, it cast a thin shadow over everything. As a means for keeping the conversation going, resorting to politics offered an escape to what seemed like safer grounds, or perhaps a stage to say in a long round-about way what appears to be impossible to say otherwise. A long detour might well be the shortest route when there is no other route available. As a trained diplomat I was well aware of the concept.

      I was also struck by her great kindness and the deeply honest caring in her manners that would have made it impossible for any other man who was sensitive to see the beautiful things of our humanity, not to fall in love with her as I had. I felt so close to her in the dimension of that love that I believe I felt freer in those moments than I ever felt before towards a woman. I found myself to able to talk with her about anything, mostly within the context of politics, of course. Nor was it hard to draw her attention away at times from the politics of the conference, unto some rare, higher levels of thinking even of sex that any 'smaller' person would have walked away from.

      After we were finally called to our table that night, we covered many subjects, subjects that I had never dreamed of that I would talk about with a woman over dinner in a restaurant. We talked about everything from women's lib, abortion, flying airplanes, to the demise of the dollar, and of course, my experiences as a diplomat, and later on before the dinner was over, we entered once more, daringly, the domain of sex.

      We talked about everything and through this maze, the subject of the conference proceedings drifted quickly back into the background. The conference didn't seem important anymore when more profound things lay before us. I even told her about Tara and Olive, and about Ushi and some more about our beach project. I also told her about Erica and her metaphor of the garden filled with a profusion of flowers that a married person lives among, but is not allowed to touch or even look at for his entire life, in order to favor but one single flower. We laughed about it. I also told her about Helen and Helen's perception of universal love, including her lateral lattice of hearts and her perception of it that unfolded from it that she called the universal kiss.

      Anton reacted openly to these metaphors, even before I suggested that they have a political significance.

      I explained that the East/West confrontation stands in total denial of Helen's lateral lattice of hearts that she beheld as a visual image of the reality of our being as human society. I told her that Helen saw a vast array of human hearts all interlocked laterally by stands of love that appeared like strands of light, and that she realized that this resulting lattice comprises us all so that nothing exists outside of it even though we tend to deny its reality.

      "This denial has become a cold war in many respects," I continued. "This tells me that the East/West Cold War confrontation has no historic foundation, but is purely a construct of a constantly recreated denial of the reality of our humanity. The real history bears this out, because America and Russia have had a long relationship of cooperative support of one-another. Those cooperative ties, like threads of light, had lasted right through World War II, and right through to the death of Franklin Delanor Roosevelt. We were lateral partners, and that changed only when the fondi's empire and their minions around the world created the Cold War division as a political stage that drove a wedge between this lateral relationship. The wedge of denial split our two nations apart into adversarial positions that nearly destroyed the world."

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