C.-A. Rebaf - Mahler in love with Monroe?

Marietta and Hannes initially lived in a well-preserved ruined house in Maua near Jena. Once upon a time, the A4 motorway was lost and made life unbearable with the constant traffic noise. From time to time, a dull Porsche or even a Ferrari had joined the deep, regular hum of the trucks, and all this had been overshadowed by the high purr of a Ducati or a Kawa. But those times were over! The huge double bridge, one part of yellow Saale sandstone from Hitler's time, while the other was built only a few years after the millennium to allow a six-lane expansion, just this long viaduct was completely destroyed. In the background were huge elongated rubble heaps to see: The old East German prefabricated housing from Lobeda had not survived the disaster and were collapsed like card houses thanks to their always lacking fabric. The two were not Thuringians, but had learned from a secret source that the radiation exposure in Thuringia should be particularly low. That had been the reason for them to settle there. The couple originally came from Upper Bavaria, and after Hannes, as the international manager of a world-famous Bavarian car brand, could not jettify to Spartanburg in the USA or Oxford in England to pass on his knowledge from Munich's headquarters to others after the dissolution So, when suddenly the cultivation of everything edible had become more important, they had decided to leave Bavaria.

They were a dream couple: he was muscular, of normal size and with his heart in the right place, freehand climber, who kept himself in shape through constant exercise; Marietta, however, the female counterpart with long mittelblonden, strong hair and many natural curls. Her face was wide with full lips and strong cheekbones that gave her face a Slavic touch. Her eyes looked feline, reminding of Madame Chauchat's eyes as they were described in the Magic Mountain. Her nature was dominant, but unlike the lung-sick Russian, she did not need to throw doors in to attract attention. She entered a room and immediately filled it with her person. Her beautiful figure drew everyone's attention. When her deep, slightly smoky voice helped with a greeting, she immediately took each one for herself.

She had been my closest friend in Polling, and I had mourned her for a long time when she left with Hannes and our dream couple left the community. Marietta had entrusted to me as her best friend that they both would like to have a child. But, as with almost all couples, the catastrophe had no hope of reproduction. Marietta herself was a non-medical practitioner and knew well in medical matters. She knew that the complex processes of human reproduction by radioactive radiation were disturbed in many places. Even the regular implantation of an egg in the uterus was disturbed in her as in almost all young women, so that could be no more talk of regular cycles. But when, in fact, coincidence helped and a male sperm encountered a fertile egg, the rate of confluent sperm was so low that it almost never came to fertilization.

It was a blessing for me to have found my Golie as a foundling and thus to be able to live up to my purpose as a woman - although I always reckoned and constantly asked myself how this healthy child could even have come into the world. It has always been a mystery to me, a mystery, and or perhaps that's why I was so attached to this kid. In the many conversations that evening with Marietta, I clearly heard her complaint that even with the luxury of being able to rely on a reliable partner, she would also like to have a child. Her grief that it was by no means as easy to conceive a child as it was before time zero made her very desperate, and I was always helpless, holding her in the arms and not comforting. That's how it went for days. One day, however, Hannes came back with a message about a hike from Munich that sounded almost too unbelievable to be true. There should be a kind of clinic somewhere in Thuringia near Jena. Healthy young women could undergo artificial insemination there. This takes place in a large, old bunker system where the radioactivity is lowered to a threshold level due to the depth of the mountain, as it was normal before the disaster. If the eggs were accepted, then the women spend their pregnancy there in the mountain. It all sounded like a fairy tale. In the evening Marietta came running to me and told me with great enthusiasm about it. I knew immediately that I would soon lose a very good friend, because I saw my adventurous girlfriend in the next few days ready to leave with her Hannes marching through the village. The farewell came quickly. Golie, my baby, and I had hugged them for a long time and waved to them. Silently I had allowed both of them to have a child too, as they had been such a beautiful couple!

In Vienna, Gerstenmayer laboriously scoured the ruins of the Rennweg in the direction of the northeast. It was a cold autumn day. Luckily it did not rain even though the sky was full of gray clouds. In the rain, it was particularly dangerous to move outdoors. Depending on whether the clouds came from the west from the Atlantic or rather from the south of the heavily contaminated Mediterranean, the precipitation brought strong new amounts of radioactivity. On the following days, the grave-diggers had a lot of work again, because mainly older people died like the flies after the recent fall-out. "In the previous days it was much warmer; the accompanying continuous rain must have come from the south," speculated Gerstenmayer to himself. There used to be hourly weather forecasts, but that was once. Now they had to make their predictions from a few perceptible observations of their own! Why did this Middle East conflict escalate to such an extent and, of all things, completely ruin the eastern Mediterranean? The more Gerstenmayer put together these facts, the more angry he became. Had it caught the boss now? What would become of her jobs when he should not be there anymore? He was the sole bearer of knowledge! He who led her so successfully through this lousy time. How many times had he allowed the workforce to stay in the basement, even to stay for days, when a warm steady rain descended from the deadly southeast wind? Only when the wind turned and came from the west and the still little strained Atlantic rain had flushed the radioactive dirt back into the gullies, they went again into the open air. Even if their homes were looted because they had not guarded them in the evening, they had gained a bit of life again.

Gerstenmayer awoke from a daydream when he came to the Danube. The large, heavy bridge that had once led the subway and the highway across the river was destroyed, hanging in two places into the water and was impassable even for experienced climbers. Instead, there were small barges on the shore that could be rented for something edible. The ferry business was entirely in the hands of the Chinese, and a kind of Chinese mafia dominated the scene. Time and again they heard about protection and murderous slate-eyed ferrymen, though it was not clear that this was an unnatural consequence of the inflexible being forced by the organization to drink contaminated water, or whether it was the normal fall-out after a warm south rain. Who could distinguish this today? A police force in a deserted city like Vienna was written on paper, but the technical highs of forensics had gone down with the catastrophe. Screaming little Chinese with long, tousled beards stormed Gerstenmayer and wanted to offer him their ferry services. Thank God he had not eaten his breakfast sandwich today! One half and one half apple were sufficient for the first river crossing. The rest he needed for the second ferryman behind the Danube Island and the way back. The little, old ferryman wrapped the food down right away, then Gerstenmayer sat down and was stopped over. So he had always imagined ‘Vasudeva’, the ferryman from the Indian world of the inventor of the Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse, of which he had once read. This one, however, had slit eyes and was no Indian. Would the contaminated river still tell him something? Daily measurements of radioactivity? For other considerations there was no time in this present time.