Malcolm James Thomson - TheodoraLand

My aunt’s sometimes devious form of discretion meant that it took me a long time to complete the jigsaw of rumour and gossip and to conclude that there was more to her joking about ‘young boys’ than just provocative badinage. At the time Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had been almost ten years her junior. Then he had a luxuriant mane of long wavy hair. By the time I came to know him the remnant of this shaggy glory existed only as a frieze surrounding a pink and bald pate, although vanity demanded that what endured should be tied back, like mine at the nape of the neck, with a scrap of black ribbon. It took a little while for me to learn that almost all of Aunt Ursel’s dalliances were with younger men. It’s a predilection I have not yet (unlike Eleanor of Aquitaine) found compelling, with a couple of exceptions.

In truth Dirk Seehof was a month younger than me. But is his case the gauge of time was less significant than other measurements. I think Ursel Lange disbelieved my that big fisherman’s gesture. ‘Hung like a horse’ I had blurted out to one of the girls I had studied with at the end of one of our drunken girls-only get-togethers in Munich.

Since I gave no advance notice of my arrivals in Weinfelden and Frau Steinemann could not be given cooking instructions, Ursel and I had the habit of dining out on the first day of my visits. The Wystübli wine bar was next to Brunnenbach Bücher on what passed in the town for a central square. I was not good company. Three books in the big bag with my skateboard lashed to it, propped up in the corner of my room, pre-occupied me.

But the plat du jour , whitefish with saffron and capers, was delicious and the local white wine helped me to relax.

“When the people who know me here in Weinfelden started dropping like flies about twenty years ago I let it be known that… while I might send flowers… I no longer attend funerals.”

Aunt Ursel was nothing if not frank.

The people who know me … not the people I know … a hair I might have split myself. But those who know me , or think they do, have a knowledge which is neither profound nor comprehensive and to a large extent constructed by me. I have kept in touch with half a dozen of the girls from university, meeting up with them from time to time. In one respect their knowledge of me is accurate; I can hold my drink. But otherwise none of us, even when pissed, give much away. Most of us had gained our bachelor degrees in Amerikanistik. Interdisciplinary American Studies are the academic examination of a culture little more than two centuries old, its society, its language, its literature. By the end of the second year I was fed up. The only American literature I enjoyed reading had been written in Paris.

In a paper I had suggested that the Americans should number their years from the signature of the Treaty of Paris which confirmed their sovereignty as an independent nation. As precedent I cited the Islamic calendar which counted from the year of the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina and gives us the current Hijri year 1433. This allows commentators with a certain agenda to imply that Araby is living through its own Dark Ages. I postulated that those living between Maine and Hawaii were thus experiencing the year 229. That year, 229 AD according to a different calendar, saw the renewal of Greek philosophy through the formulation of Neoplatonism. Rash and with gusto I wrote that outposts of the mighty Roman Empire were under threat in 229 with Germanic tribes marauding southwards, even as far as Bavaria!

I was on a roll, of course. Equate Washington with imperial Rome. Throw in allusions to Tigris and Euphrates.

“Ridiculous, Thea! The Romans counted from the foundation of the city, ad urbe condita . Welcome to their year 2765… in which your paper is a miserable fail,” my tutor had admonished. As an American he had found my aspersions offensive. He was a man few of us took seriously, so Ivy League that he had a first name which sounded like a surname. Huntingdon was an invitation to abbreviation and subsequent consonantal alliteration. Only a semester of not infrequent blow-jobs changed the Hunt the Cunt’s mind about my grade. I passed the oral.

That story I didn’t tell to the other girls of our little group. In general I think we mostly lied about our sex lives. Our erotic fantasies were preferable to the our honest recollections of the mostly mundane and were far more entertaining. We did profit from our studies to the extent that we followed much of what was happening in the United States with a smugness that being in Munich permitted. Most of us were for Obama, although Franzi played devil’s advocate by appearing to agree with Fox News from time to time, both then and now.

Studying law and pre-destined for an early partnership in her father’s highly respected Munich law firm, Franzi also informed us that in the year of the American Declaration of Independence the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society was founded. In more modern contexts the name refers to a purported organization which is alleged to mastermind events and control world affairs through governments and corporations to establish a New World Order. Franzi was, I thought, straying rashly into Dirk Seehof global conspiracy territory.

Three years after graduation Astrid was the only one married, something she thought she regretted, and had become an English teacher, which she regretted even more. She tried so hard not to look like an English teacher but failed. Her husband taught French and it was assumed that he had that Gallic approach to marital fidelity.

Franzi, who had been the cleverest of all of us, had greatly disappointed her father. She insisted she totally loved her job delivering parcels for UPS, smugly reminding us that her shit-brown van was electrically powered. Franzi didn’t laugh, she cackled, she was unpredictable and mostly fun to have around. A big girl, she was equally likely to turn up in deep-house grunge or Palm Court vintage. She had a boyfriend, Leonard, whom none of us ever met and who may or may not have been a professional musician.

Heidi did not have long blonde braids since she had been born in Ethiopia before being adopted by a couple who were devout Catholics and proud Bavarians. She had flirted with the idea of rebelling by joining an abstemious Evangelical Christian sect but we had saved her, reminding her of her predilection for Chardonnay and Chablis and other Bacchic deities. Neither her sexy style of dancing nor her casual amorous conquests would please the ‘born again’ crowd. Now she worked at a five-star hotel where her back skin and brown uniform harmonized with shiny granite and soft suede of the hotel’s dramatic lobby.

Hannelore Ibbs was known as Lore. Her much older brother, Janis, was a typographer with an irresistible sense of mischief to which I succumbed for six autumnal weeks. Janis had decided that his sister should be called Lore Ipsum . This appellation Hannelore sometimes used in her cunning manipulations of the German social benefits system. To this source of income she turned with regularity when yet another of her highly imaginative business ideas turned out to be a fanciful non-starter.

Jenni found herself so captivated by the hyper-American mystique of Route 66 that she became passionate about highway building and dropped out to study civil engineering instead. To be candid, she quite quickly became a mono-thematic bore. She developed Tea Party leanings but was clever enough to keep quiet about it. To our relief she rarely joined our group’s bar-hopping extravaganzas any more.

Astrid, Margrit, Heidi, Hannelore and I, five fellow travellers on the yellow-brick road of Amerikanistik, all of us too cowardly creatures to exit the highway when we saw that it led, if not to hell, then to a certain dead end even after passing the toll-booth manned by Hunt the Cunt.