Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

“So they’re back again, I see. Forty years ago we decided to stop looking for answers. For a while we had become obsessed. I had a tiny black-and-white television set in 1972, but I had missed a lot of the live broadcasting of the Olympic Games in Munich. The coverage of the killings by the Palestinians… that I saw. I was almost fifty at the time. I thought that was very, very old.”

“Not old at all,” I exclaimed, for a moment concerned at my aunt’s forlorn, almost fearful look.

“Louie… Herr Lessinger… had just turned forty. We both reckoned that we were nevertheless far too young to die. Enough lives had been lost, you know.”

I didn’t think she meant the unfortunate Israeli athletes.

Aunt Ursel played with the remote control. I saw her features relax when the big screen was filled with yellow-and-black jerseys as a goal was celebrated with a boisterous homoerotic group hug. Well, maybe the strapping lads were just cold. There was snow on the ground around the pitch; it must have been the recording of a mid-winter game.

I shivered.

Every now and then, not looking away from the television, Ursel divulged disjointed fragments of forty year old memories. Later, when I wished her goodnight, there was no reply. Maybe she had fallen asleep.

SATURDAY 9 JUNE 2012

Two days of foul weather discouraged us from venturing beyond Säntisblick. I was fascinated by the way that Bea Schell, in spite of her new persona, seemed to fit in well with the lifestyle implied by staying in a grand mansion. Frau Steinemann treated her with deference, in contrast to her ill-concealed distaste for the man she could hardly accept as a fitting fiancée.

Dirk kept himself busy speculating with biting sarcasm on the news from Spain. His blog post would assert half-seriously that the huge bailouts of Hispanic financial institutions could mean that certain regions of the Costas should be annexed as German extra-territorial states, given that the financial aid was coming via Frankfurt.

Over meals Aunt Ursel had nuggets of background information for us.

In the early seventies Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had been a travelling man, often absent from his tiny one-room flat in Munich for long periods. In pursuit of his incunabulae he was often in Paris where there were many collectors among the bouquinistes who shared his passion.

“Everybody knows about Gutenberg’s Bible, but many, many of the first printed books were not only secular but bawdy, lewd, scurrilous and… as far as Louie was concerned… the more licentious they were, the better.”

At the time his commercial dealings in antiquarian books were very profitable as a result of his bold forays into countries of the Eastern Block. Cracow proved very lucrative, as did Prague.

“He was quite daring, you know. Daring and dashing. Didn’t care much for niceties such as export restrictions, customs formalities or things of that sort.”

And he spent a lot of time in Weinfelden.

I pictured Lessinger translating from the Latin juicy passages of fifteen-century purple prose, stanzas of coarse erotic verse, reading them to Ursel Lange. A bit like spending an evening nowadays watching amateur porn on the internet with a special friend or two.

Although they corresponded and even had the occasional telephone conversation, Lessinger never came to Weinfelden again after 1972.

“We spoke on the cellphone for the last time just after he had been given… the bad news of his prognosis. He was sorry he could not join you to celebrate the completion of your training.”

Bad timing in every sense. Gelernte Buchhandelskauffrau a month or so prior to redundancy. We did celebrate after the final oral examination, almost a dozen of us and several from other Manduvel branches in Munich. There was a lot of sympathy expressed for my predicament, suggestions that a transfer to another branch would be the ideal solution.

Trinity Place had been my home for three years. But the Bookshop closure should not weigh too much on my mind, I was told.

We all got quite drunk. There were three girls for every boy in our little group. But I chose to ignore the possibility of a quickie with Christian, whose apprenticeship had been at a strait-laced Christian book store and who had detected an absence of anything of note underneath my Stella McCartney shift. Not that I was in a bad mood; I am Teutonic enough to appreciate having a qualification rather more useful in the real world than my degree in Amerikanistik.

But our training had not given me the slightest clue about dealing with books like the three lined up under Aunt Ursel’s television.

Dirk’s shoulders were deemed broad enough to carry the heaviest rucksack, the one loaded with all that would be needed for a copious Brotzyt picnic which would mark the half-way point of the day’s hike. Knowing Ursel, the way back would not re-trace our earlier steps. She preferred tours which involved no repetition but constant new discoveries.

Nor would we be heading south to the more serious mountain trails. The Seerücken is a range of gentle hills between the valley of the River Thur and Lake Constance to the north. Dirk and Bea would not be over-taxed, Aunt Ursel promised. I suspected that we would take the route would which included the former gravel pit, now full of rain water, where skinny-dipping was forbidden but practiced by young and old, nonagenarians not excluded.

Aunt Ursel and I practiced a kind of reciprocal respect when it came to direct questions. If interrogated she would go off on a tangent and expound at length on something to do with football or tell some tale of the activities of the music charity which was her other pet theme.

“We had the Amriswiler Stadtmusik playing Smoke On The Water with the guitar parts played on alphorns. Quite memorable, and a wonderful way of getting young people to take a second look at our musical tradition…”

This flummoxed Dirk, who thought of himself as a passing good interviewer. He had only asked how Ursel Lange first became involved with our three books.

“ Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple, released in 1972,” Bea interjected to my astonishment. She went on to add that the college band had played it at football games.

1972, I thought.

“College band? American football?” Ursel asked with a small frown.

The Fightin’ Aggies Marching Band, composed of over three hundred men and women from the Corps of Cadets of the Texas A&M University, is the largest military marching band in the world. Although I was no longer sure what to believe when Bea Schell was generous with information. Had she studied in America before joining Segirtad GmbH, the software firm in Munich’s south? At a college where, as I discovered later, military training is part of the curriculum?

Bea had been assigned a slouchy sun-hat, found on a shelf in the Säntisblick cloakroom, which advertised a Swiss discount supermarket. In hiking shorts with multiple pockets and an old sweatshirt which shouted ‘A&M’ rather than ‘A&F’ Bea two-pont-zero cut a good figure. Her legs, previously never revealed above the knee, were slim but well muscled.

Dirk’s baseball cap was emblazoned with the initials LAPD. He was not often without some sartorial allusion to his fascination with the netherworld in which thrillers are set.

“It was the tune the German defence minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg requested for his military farewell from office, played by the brass band of Berlin’s guard battalion,” said Ursel, warming to her theme.

“Well played, too, considering that they had only two days to practice it!”

Bea sang the riff a couple of times at the top of her voice, to the consternation of a pair of walkers who were descending the path we were climbing and who likely expected a companionable Gruezi rather than strident seventies heavy metal.