Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

Beware the Ides of March.

By the end of the month some of us had became aware that the prognosis was gloomy, that Herr Lessinger had weeks at most to live. But my only visit to the clinic had been before that terrible news came.

“Check those three books out for me, Theodora. I’ll let you know when I want you to bring them to me in this depressing place.”

But no such summons ever came. And after learning that his condition ruled out any hope of survival I never went to visit him again. I knew it was cowardice. At the end of April, when there were the first new leaves on the trees, I had summoned up my courage. I had a friend ink a simulated tattoo, Ex Libris Lessinger, so positioned that even a very unwell old man might be momentarily cheered by the sight. And, although he had not asked for them, I had the three books in the bag ready to deliver. But I got cold feet at the last minute.

The tattoo hasn’t altogether faded even today, although it is now little more than a shadowy smudge on my mons veneris.

“What are you thinking, Thea?” Rudiger Reiß asked after a while.

That I liked his after-shave, Dior’s Eau Sauvage. I had accepted his offer to drive me back to where I lived.

“About asparagus,” I said.

“Asparagus?”

“Yeah, easier to think about asparagus than about the significance of books with the Swiss flag, the Nazi symbol and the Madonna on their covers. And about who else might have been as interested as we were and just a bit quicker off the mark!”

At the open-air market there was organically grown asparagus, the grand cru . I bought enough for four. The ham from a neighbouring stall was presumed to come from pigs who had been deliriously happy prior entering the slaughter-house. Rudiger Reiß seemed quite happy to accept my invitation to supper.

“I am moderately intelligent. I am very opinionated and tend to provoke in a variety of ways. But I am such a good cook that even Bea is prepared to put up with me. She’ll like you.”

Bea Schell needed to be explained. Dirk Seehof’s fiancée often disliked any fourth person invited to my table. Granted, the pierced punk who was also a sensitive poet and had been in raptures after a dinner at the beginning of the Spargelzeit had been odd. He quoted Proust, who claimed that asparagus ‘transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume’, and was the kind of person the fastidious Bea would usually cross the street to avoid. The anarcho-rastafarian albino musician had proved a tedious table companion, his efforts to disguise his thoroughly middle-class origins pathetic. Then there was the graffiti artist, Zachary. His grunge-erotic work would permanently embellish one of the walls of my flat. The lingering acetone whiff of his colour sprays had spoiled the delicate aroma of the loup de mer on that occasion. And then there had been the film student whose sole topic of conversation was pornography. I found some of his work really great. Bea did not. She suspected that if I had been asked nicely to appear before his camera I might have said yes. Which was quite perceptive of her.

Bea assumed that all of these occasional guests had not only shared my table but also my bed, including the jolly lesbian who had entertained us with stories of the adventures of her ‘dykes on bikes’ sisterhood. That evening we had enjoyed baked oysters. But Bea Schell was quite wrong. Bea knows me quite well, but only up to a point. My sex escapades were mostly at his place, where I would be the one delivering the exit line. Dirk had been an exception.

“To Bea you will appear normal and unthreatening. She will be reassured!”

As we reached the fifth floor and while I fumbled to find my key (Rudiger Reiß carried the shopping) I wondered where I had stashed those three damn books.

Reiß had left early, claiming a crack-of-dawn flight to Frankfurt the next morning, after thanking me for what he pronounced to be the best asparagus he had tasted this year. Then the incriminations began.

“Bea, you were flirting with him… quite openly,” said Dirk.

She and Reiß had chatted as he examined my bookshelves. I would not be buying a further Billy unit now that I had the ManduvelPlus e-book reader app on my cellphone. Quite why my friend Bea had drawn the attention of Rudiger Reiß to a certain category of my shelved volumes I hadn’t understood.

Palindromic Polysexuality by Kane Archibald I hadn’t even had the courage to finish.

The business with the three books of more immediate concern had been discussed. Bea and Dirk heard about the funeral, about the strangeness of wanting to take something to read into the hereafter, about Louie Lessinger’s two lovers.

That it had been my Aunt Ursel who had prompted her good friend Lessinger to admit me to the Manduvel trainee program was duly noted.

But Dirk Seehof was right. His fiancée now blushed. Now this I had never seen before. Colour! The girl has a pallid complexion, longish ashen hair most often held back with an Alice band. She always dressed in shades of beige and grey which do nothing to contradict those who call her the ‘greige ghost’. Her style might be called preppy, her appearance that of the conservative daughter of a good family. If she could have afforded it there would be a triple-strand pearl necklace to emphasize the stringent respectability of her dresses, blouses, skirts, sweaters and cardigans. Bea Schell does so not do jeans.

For the Munich diner en blanc in July last year I had persuaded her that white could be seen as palest beige. Wittelsbacherplatz had been transformed into a sociable wonderland, even in the shadow of the word headquarters of the Siemens concern. The picnic I had packed was delicious and the wine more than enough to ensure that a taxi would be needed to get us to our homes afterwards. It had been great fun and we planned to be there for this year’s edition of the flash-mob event.

Bea generally claims to be a junior bookkeeper in her firm’s accounts department. It is tacitly accepted that she is rather more than that. She has serious computer coding skills, although her appearance and comportment put her far away at the very opposite end of the spectrum from the cliché of the unsavoury digital nerd. Granted, she wears geeky glasses when working at the computer, but the thick frames are not black but almost translucent tortoiseshell. Bea is finicky, self-effacing, often asked to repeat herself since her whispering speech is often unclear. Her one hobby is obscure. She dismisses it as experimental digital fabric design but the show leaves us speechless when she lets her creations (psychedelic fractals swirling and resembling Paisley or Jacquard patterns) be displayed on my big screen.

On the other hand, Dirk insists that Bea is also formidably competent in a range of martial arts skills.

“My employer, Segirtad GmbH, specializes in security of all kinds, including advanced niche areas of cyber expertise.”

I do think it had come as a surprise to Rudiger Reiß when he saw with what expertise Bea had dealt with the bong which had been brought to the table while I was making our espressos. She knew where I kept it, in the second oven under the long granite kitchen worktop, one never used for baking. Yes, that’s where the books were, too, tucked beneath the lowest baking tray.

Segirtad Home Security - Safe As Switzerland

The lock on the door of my loft, that of the gate at the bottom of the drive at Säntisblick, Aunt Ursel’s home in Switzerland, were all products of the firm which was well on its way to become a leader in the field. But there were corporate divisions whose clients were not simply prudent home owners. Bea had always been reticent about that, even when she had smoked.