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"Tell me," I asked her, "what prompted you tonight to take your nightgown off?"
She grinned. "It was necessary! If you could have seen yourself, you wouldn't ask. You needed it off. But more than you, I needed this done. For most of my life I had hid beneath my wedding veil. Frank was everything to me, but it wasn't because this union was the pinnacle of my existence, as I told myself it was, but because there was nothing else. When the PA system announced in Vancouver that we had only fifteen minutes left to live, my whole world was suddenly empty. I needed Frank, but Frank wasn't there. Suddenly the whole airport erupted into a mad scramble. Everybody rushed about to get on a plane, any plane, to get away! People were crushed to death. Can you imagine what this was like? Then someone taps you on the shoulder. A stranger stands in front of you with a yearning to appreciate one final moment to live as a human being. Paul, in those moments before you die, you don't think anymore, you react by reflexes, you live by what's deep inside you. I embraced this man, can you believe this. The experience changed my life!"
I didn't know how to respond. I didn't know whether to shake my head or nod.
"Paul, when it became evident later on, that we were going to survive, Frank came to mind, and with it a feeling that I had done some great wickedness to Frank. I felt ashamed for it, but out of the depth of my soul came another message, a deep-seated protest. What should I be ashamed of? Ones feelings aren't the domain of another. My feelings are mine, not Frank's! In reacting to them to what flows from the depth of my soul, how could I possibly hurt Frank, unless he regarded me, indeed, as his property, which I was sure he never had."
"It felt so good being myself at last," she said. "It overwhelmed me. In this tumultuous overturning I saw myself no longer as Frank's wife, but as simply me. I saw a person standing on her own two feet, though still deeply in love with Frank, except this love was suddenly richer. Now, this new dimension of love has expanded to also include you, fully, and the world," she grinned.
"When you landed in Vancouver, there was hope again. You were the last plane coming in with people on board, except you came without Frank. I felt a numbness setting in, an utter hopelessness. I stood there in tears, as you know. But if this had happened ten minutes earlier I might not have been moved by my love for Frank, as I had been then. I might have felt totally empty inside, as if, with Frank gone, there remained nothing left of my life. This brief episode at the airport during the moments of chaos and an unfolding love for a man who might have struggled against similar barriers, had somehow taken away the wedding veil and given me my life back in which I could love Frank for the wonderful person he is and always will be."
I could only stare at her as she said these things. "I had no idea," I said.
"It really feels great being my own master again," she added. "I feel a freedom now, that I can't even define, that I've just begun to explore. I feel so different, so rich!"
My mouth hung open. "I thought you and Frank had the most wonderful marriage anyone could possibly have!"
She nodded and smiled. Her smile was as gentle, just as it had been all evening. "Paul, I wasn't referring to that when I spoke about the wedding veil. I was referring to the veil itself, which one creates in one's own mind, which isolates one from the world. Frank had not done this. I had created the veil. Humanity had created it. A veil hides, you know. It hides and hints at something mysterious, and by that it takes away from what there really is. That's what I'm free of. That's why I had to take the nightgown off which you had bought me. It had become an impregnable veil. This beautiful thin nighty suddenly appeared to me like another wedding veil, if you believe that. It had to come off. I'm free of those myths now that I have lived under, the mythology that forces a person under its spell to behave like a different human being. It dawned on me during the moments of great crisis when I embraced the Russian soldier that I really wasn't any different than I had always been. I was the same person that I had been before Frank and I were married. The veil of the mythological was gone, that separates people. It has separated the sexes into two isolated camps, and I had been stuck in such a camp for so many years, but I am no longer. This doesn't mean I won't wear your beautiful nighty again. I will gladly wear it, but not as a veil. I will wear it as a token of your love for me. I will wear it proudly, whenever it can be worn proudly, when it is no longer a veil, even if it is so thin that it won't hide anything."
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Stories about
Love
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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