christmas shopping, hotel hessischer hof, frankfurt, beginning of december, 2002

When i had finally encouraged myself to get out of the bathtub, i saw the message from R: 9 o clock. It was six now. Three more hours. I could do that. I had to. I lay down and even slept a little. Then i hurried to his room. 

He had bought me a present. An ipod. "You like it? I have already put some songs on it for you. You like music so much, i think this is good for you." I loved it. I had always enjoyed my Walkman, when you hear a song whilst walking, it feels as if you are in your own videoclip. Every street you pass, the people you see, you decide the close ups or the wide angles, the pace, and no one knows they are being filmed by your eyes. 

R. started to explain the i-pod, how you could shuffle songs, or choose just one artist, or a genre. how you could scroll through it. He showed the songs he had already put on: the beatles, the police, lots more eighties stuff, and one song by duncan browne: the wild places. 

I thanked him. It truly was a marvellous gift. The white sleek design, and the music too. He looked genuinely happy when i stroked  the ipod. Sitting there with him, i finally started to feel safe. 

I asked him how he was doing, if everything was all right, why he hadnt called for me yesterday. 

"Why, did you miss me?" He got up, and went to his suitcase. He started rummaging through the paperwork. "Where are my glasses, here." He did not put his glasses on but went to the bathroom instead, locked the door, and let the tap run. He unlocked the door.

 "Do you think i am a selfish man? I mean, do i strike you as selfish? I always thought that being a bit of an egotist is the root of all happiness but i wonder." 

He looked at me for some kind of validation.

 "Lately there seems to be this kind of ambivalence in me..... Do you know what that word means, ambivalence?“ 

„Oh, but i know many words.“ 

"Yes, you do. That is what you are here for, to give me your words. And put them in a nice order, so that they make sense. I never seem to make sense as soon as i leave my work. The negotiations and the numbers, I can trust them. My thoughts, i don´t want to have to worry about.“ He laughed shortly.

 "Do you have any favourites, you know, number one words?" 

I had to think about it for a while, but then i said: "Sometimes i like certain words. Like a good song, On occasion i think I can fall in love with a word, the sound, the meaning, the subtlety or just the very directness of it. Lament..  i like lament, and lethargic for instance. Especially the combination of both in one sentence should be something i could try to use soon. And how about tragic, tearjerker and teetotaller, ah, that would be an interesting one too. But they don´t automatically have to be words that start with the same letter. Mildew and vomit can also have their charm, when you think of it. It is all about how i would use them, how i would mold them into something new, something that could surprise me. Pneumonia was one of my all time first favourites. A real high school crush so to speak.  I remember tasting the sound and the meaning of it, i must have been about fourteen. I could imagine that this would be my cause of death, it had such a romantic feel. Much better than cardiac arrest or clogged arteries for all i cared. hmm.. filigree, mayhem and preposterous. ah, i just will linger on those three for the rest of the evening i guess."

R. laid his head back on the pillow. He gestured to me to throw him a cigarette, and lit it. He inhaled deeply. 

"for me, ambivalence will just do fine."

 I asked him why he was so interested in that specific word. 

"We are not turning this into some kind of session thing are we?" 

I said that i did not know. 

"You know, were i tell you my hearts desire, i dont even think my heart desires something. it just pumps the blood real good. That´s all there is. Better leave it with the storytelling, is much more relaxed if you do that.  So what will your story be about this time? And can you remind me that I need to buy Christmas gifts for my wife and kids tomorrow. Maybe you can do a Christmas story for me. Have you seen that market at the river? Real bad taste. But i can tell them it is genuine German Christmas galore i got them. Or could you get them something?" 

" I dont think i am good at buying gifts for anybody, and i dont know your family, why dont you get them ipods either?" 

"That is a good idea, leaves the wife. Can you buy her some jewellery for me, that would be good. I dont have the time. so, a Christmas carol can you do that?" 

"I dont know, i am not so much the Christmas kind of girl." 

"You never celebrated Christmas at home, with your folks?" 

I told him we had. But most memories of the festivities had grown dim. The last couple of years i had made it through those days being high or downed on whatever i could score. My family noticed i was so much more relaxed. Three whole days i would spend in a complete daze, enjoying the lights, the music, in my very private bubble. I would giggle a trife too loud and long at the obligatory jokes my father would tell, i would even sing along to "silent night", then, at appropriate hour, i would dress up, take my gifts with me, and go party. This way i managed. It was never Christmas which i really liked, sober or doped out, there wasnt a big difference. Even when i was still a little girl it was like this. I did like the smell of the cookies my mother would bake, i loved the tree, but somehow my family always arranged the night to corrode into the worst kind misbehaviour:  "divorce" was shouted out loudly, but never seen through. "hatred" was whispered through every sentence unspoken. Once, I must have been eleven or twelve years old, my mother got badly drunk and lay down under the glass table we had, calling out for me  to come lie down next to her. My father and brother would just ignore her and go on discussing whatever they thought more important. My mother would laugh out more and more hysterically, i became sure she had lost her mind, or was at least on the verge of losing it, and that nobody noticed, or worse, cared. so i just sat beside her and tried to convince her she should at least lie under the tree, on the rug, so much nicer than a glass table. "If you were a lawyer, like your father or me, you would understand why a glass table is so much more suitable." She barked laughing at me. Our cat got nervous, hissed at my mother, and ran away. I just sat next to my mother that whole night, watching her laugh out and making jokes which had no pun what so ever, her incoherent soliloquy went on for hours. I tried to stroke her hair, but she would not let her touch me. those were my childhood Christmases. Sometimes my brother would get drunk, and smash a  hole in a door with his fist. My father never drank. He said Christmas was a marketing tool of the fundamentalist Christians. This remark would be neglected by the rest of the family, so my father would go upstairs, into his study. That was the time I lost my belief in Christmas. A couple of years later my beliefs would go into an entirely different direction: I became completely fixated by german female terrorists, and Christiane F. The only Christmas story I could conjure up for R. was this one:

the waldorf astoria, Christmas, new york 2000

my good friend Flo and i were broke beyond repair one Christmas. we both are very talented shoppers, making money on the other hand is not a a part of our character that  is highly developed with either of us. 

last year things had gotten so out of hand that it had almost become  a competition between the two of us who´s debt was larger. we would brag about it, laughing our worries away: 'my rent is due for 5 months already', one would say, the other remarked: 'yeah but my dentist bill was 900 euros, and i still dont have the implant!' you can imagine what fun we had. Didn´t stop us from shopping though. we are so good at discovering nice items in shops that we cannot live without. the 'souvenir de paris' table lamp i bought was just as necessary as the winged pig teapot that Flo took home one afternoon. We tried window shopping at night, to look at things but not buy them, it was useless. we would remember the shops anyway and just go the next day. as far as debt goes we approximately ended ex aqueo that fall, but that didnt make the burden of debt and the friendly debt collectors coming by to say hi! any less. those collector guys actually quite  liked us. when they would come at the door, we mostly had the money for them and made them coffee as well.

At the beginning of december our situation hat deteriorated into abyss size proportions, so we decided to go down gracefully and really spend all the credit card credit we had left.

we booked a flight to new york and a room at the waldorf astoria. for two nights. Christmas eve and the one after that. Christmas! new york! the waldorf! 

we got ourselves a double room and checked in. the hotel was so over the top Christmassy decorated that we really thought we had found winter-wonderland at last. we were just not quite sure which one of us was Alice. Tinsel everywhere.

the room for that matter was a huge disappointment. no Christmas what so ever. just a room. that sucked. i mean a mini bar can only be interesting for a short period of time, and believe me, the selfdestruct rollercoaster mood we were in did not make this last for more than an hour or two.

completely drunk, we started to walk the manhattan streets and went to central park. boredom started to overcome us big time. so this was new york. as seen on tv. nothing could surprise us. we had seen all the buildings, we knew central park, all the images had been fed to us ever since we were little. tv generation, that is what we are. and we are ashamed to admit this. so, here we were in our own sit-com but had forgotten to give ourselves a nice premise.

action was what we needed, adventure. but mostly, we had to have a Christmas tree. There were still a couple of trees for sale in manhattan, but they were so expensive, and cash was not really something we had in abundance. then Flo remembered a new york friend of his had told him he always got his tree in Brooklyn and that a  tree came much cheaper there. 

Flo called his friend to ask for directions and on the subway we hopped. this was going to be the best Christmas ever. we would at least save ten dollars on the tree. and, as the main law of shopping states, you should never say no to a bargain.

we took the subway and went on. station after station. i am a coward, but flo is not. after a couple of stops the tube started to get rather empty and i suddenly didnt mind the manhattan Christmas tree variety. but flo wanted to go. so on we went. he knew which station we had to get off, his friend had explained everything very carefully.

at last we were there. i think it took more than an hour. now all we had to do was find the street the friend had suggested and we would have our tree. 

there was nothing dickenishes about the area. we walked underneath the subway rails and we got cold. i was starting to opt for going back to the warm and cosy minibarhaven, but flo just wanted the tree. 

at last we found the spot. it had a couple of trees, and they didnt look bad. we decided on a rather big one. it came from Maine the salesman said. good. i like Maine. never been there, but read about it in john irvings books. so that was quality enough for me. 

flo managed to get a couple of dollars discount and then we went back to get the tree into the hotelroom.

we walked back to the subway station and we really thought that we were being funny, we even bought a ticket for our tree. the tree had become our new bestest friend, and we named him Roger.

so there we were, me, flo and roger, in the subway station. when the train came in it was the first time we realised that our tree might actually be a bit on the large side. we hardly got it in through the carriages doors. a lot of pushing and shoving it took us. we were laughing, but soon realised that no body was laughing with us. this was a joke that had no pun for anybody else heading down town.

i tried to get flo and roger into singing Christmas carols but soon noticed that this was not appreciated by our fellow travellers either. so there we sat, the three of us. feeling very very much out of place.

at last we arrived at our station and got of as quickly as we could. the tree got stuck in the carriage doors again, but this time we just hurried and pulled it out. it lost a couple of branches.

then, up the stairs, that did not do our poor roger a lot of good either. roger slowly but surely turned into a very sad tree, or mostly, the remnant of a tree. 

we dragged our beloved tree behind us until we arrived at the waldorf. and there, they just blankly refused to have us take roger up into our room. we tried to negotiate and we tried begging. i must admit i even tried to cry, but to no avail. they would not budge. we were very welcome to admire the waldorf Christmas tree in the lobby, but it was under no circumstances allowed to take a real tree up into a smoking junior suite.

we got the feeling that asking for the management would only deteriorate the situation. so there we were,

Christmas eve

a tree

and no place to put it.

in the end we carried the thing to central park, and planted it there. we hung some of the empty minibar bottles in it and sang our Christmas song. somehow roger started to feel like the baby Jesus to us. nobody had wanted him either.

it sure was a strange Christmas night.

....

frankfurt, beginning of december 2002, hotel hessischer hof

Frankfurt, hotel hessischer hof, beginning of December 2002. 

The whole evening i spent in my room,  waiting for R. to call me. He did not. I went to the reception desk half past ten, to see if maybe he hadn´t checked in. But he had. There was no message for me. He usually left a note when he would be late. I inquired whether they knew if he was in his room. The man at the reception said that R. was indeed in his room, he had ordered something to eat at nine o clock, and said not to be disturbed furthermore.

Well, then, i would not disturb him either.

I went back to my room. There was always the option of calling him on his cellphone. I looked at his number, and did not dare to dial it. 

I waited until midnight, then gave up. He never called for me this late. 

I took a bath, had some tea. Checked my phone. No message.

I sat on the windowsill and looked at the street for some time. There was nothing to be seen. An occasional car would drive by. There was a tiny park in front of the hotel, and behind it loomed the enormous grounds of "die Messe". 

Without R., i had absolutely no reason what so ever to be here. in Frankfurt of all places. i had never been in this city before, only passed it by train back in the eighties a couple of times.  Frankfurt was about money, industry, punctuality, i don´t know why i would describe it like that but i think that comes closest to how i felt about it. This city to me had always been the centre of complete lack of content. A punctual well organised world that did not fit into mine. 

Finally i fell asleep, watching a tv channel which was called: die schönsten bahnstrecken europas, it was brilliant: a camera was put in the locomotive of a train, and it filmed the railtrack ahead of it. That was all. nothing more than that. A train, sometimes halting at a station, sometimes speeding up. An occasional tunnel, a railway crossing. The train rolled on and the sound of the motions lulled me to sleep.

I woke up at about eight o clock. I had slept four hours at most. He had not called. No sms.  I went to reception and asked if there were any messages. None. He had left the hotel at seven thirty. I decided i would have breakfast, it was the first time since we had begun travelling that i had not overslept. I took some bread, an boiled egg. Tea. chewing and swallowing the bread was extremely difficult, my mouth was dry. The tea was way too dark, nearly black, bitter. The egg had been boiled into a green state of solidity. There were only businesspeople in the breakfast room, men, in duos, threesomes. Except for the waitress there was no other woman beside me. The men ate hurriedly, some of them were discussing matters in a low volume, others read their newspapers. at 8.45 sharp the whole crowd dissolved.

I walked the streets, crossed the river. There were new buildings next to old ones, spread out in an erratic pattern. I thought it could have to do with the war. New buildings had been erected on the premises where the old buildings had been bombed. The ruins which must have been on almost every housing block of this city suddenly seemed visible to me: The new buildings became transparent and revealed the burned-out carcasses that had once been homes.  I made it into a little game for myself, to count the buildings i passed: bombed, not bombed, blown up, bombed. Some new office buildings maybe were just put there by real estate developers who had torn the old buildings down.

Every road seemed to lead to a windy square. On each square was a bar or a restaurant, styled to look homely good old fashioned German, in a new building. 

A Christmas fair was being built at the riverbank. Wooden sheds with flickering electric lights. Loud music was played, German folk songs with a house beat pasted underneath them. One barn was already open, it sold sausages. There was this solid black steel wheel with a spiral of sausage on it. It rotated over a fire. The smell of the grease travelled all the way to where i was standing. 

I decided i would go to the museum. Someone had told me it had one of the Vermeer's, so i gathered, this would be time well spent.

The Vermeer was simply beautiful: The geographer. A young man is leaning over his desk, looking out of the window. he is measuring a map. He looked so inquisitive, optimistic, it made me feel slightly better. I dwelled through the rooms. Ruysdael, Rembrandt, the 17th century. 

Manet, Munch, Courbet, the 19th. When i made my way to the 20st century room i passed a mirror. I had not looked into the mirror that morning and thought that i still might have my make-up on of the day before, leaving stains all over my face. It quite often happens that i forget to check how i look in the morning, realising some time late in the afternoon that i still wear yesterdays make up, smeared all over me. There was a smudge of black under my left eye. I wiped it away with my fingers and some spit. My eye got caught by a disturbing painting hanging on the opposite wall:   two women, one dressed in black, the other in white, and a man who was lighting a cigarette, sitting at a table in bright sunlight, surrounded by flowers. The woman´s white dress was covered with bloodstenches. In her hand she held intestines. Both the women and the man were smiling most euphorically. I turned around to look at the picture. It was a Renoir,  but there was no blood, no innards. She held a small vial of sorts. I looked at the mirror again. I could make out the red stains in the reflection. I walked to the painting, and looked at the mirror from that angle. Again, red stains on the dress. I tried to find out if there was some light in the ceiling which could cause this aberration. Nothing. I paced through the room to see if the other paintings had a similar effect in the mirror, but i could not detect anything. A group of students entered the room, and i rushed out, i did not want them to see me behaving oddly.

I took a taxi to the hotel, it was not even three o clock. I started to panic. What if R. would not want to see me tonight either? I had no credit card, i would not be able to book myself an earlier flight back home, i had hardly any cash with me, and the magnetic strip of my bankcard did not work. I wouldn't even be able to take a train. I would be a hostage in this hotelroom for two more nights, i dared not go back on the street. I had no idea how it could have happened that i saw the blood on this woman´s dress. it had looked so real. And it had not disappeared after i saw the real picture. The mirror had kept showing the same image to me. 

I set the alarm at 7 p.m. R. would not call before that time, and went into the bathroom to have another bath. I kept adding hot water and bathfoam, kept refreshing the water, as if i wanted to rinse the echo of that distorted image out of my skin. 

believe the locals when they tell you not to got to olavsvik. hotel sacher, winter 2003.

R. laughed when i told him i had no crayons. „never mind, girl, did you really think i was going to buy a screwdriver today?“ i actually had, but decided not to tell him that. „i mean, no way i would make a drawing just like that i can just draw a cow i think, or a cloud. man, it is so cold today, dont you think it´s cold, i am freezing here. I must turn the heater up higher. Are you cold? Are you allright? You are quiet.“ I started telling him about the tiles i had seen and wanted to feed him the numbers of the value of all the Klimt paintings, to have his mind digest them, but he interrupted me. „i dont like second world war stories. They depress me. I want to feel ok. Do second world war stories make you happy?“ i said that of course, they didnt. „That is good. They dont make me happy either.“ I tried to explain that it might be of interest to him, as it was a tale which did include a lot of math, he could add up the estimated value of each single painting, and then subtract the money Austria was prepared to pay. I could not let go of the thoughts i had had that afternoon, nor did i want to just step over it and go tell him another superficial story. It was too demanding. But he just kept on going, without even noticing that i was trying to connect to him, maybe even confide in him, to once, be myself around him. „And what we want here, is happy, light, and relaxation. Ok?“ I said ok. „well, if you are ok, then i am ok too.  But i need a story that will warm me up nicely. It is so cold.“  He walked to the climate control and started punching the dial franticly. „how come you are not cold? This thing is not working at all.“

For an instance, i felt like answering in a different way than i did. I wanted to tell him that he should call his wife if he needed warming up.

„Have you ever been  this cold?“ i said that i could not know how cold he was, as i was not. „i mean really cold, i can start to shatter my teeth here if it helps you to take the point. Give me a cold cold story. To warm me up. A Dickens one. All the poor people suffering next to the stove. You know, when they don´t have enough money to buy any more coals, and one of them gets very ill and nearly dies, or maybe he does, i can´t remember that part.  But no made up fairytale. I want to know when you were cold and what you did. Go completely little house on the prairie on me.“ He went to his bed, slipped under the duvet, and shivered.

I said i had been to Iceland once, and asked him if that was cool enough.

 

believe the locals when they advise you not to visit Olavsvik.

i was in Iceland, early spring 2000. it was my second visit, and it was my birthday present to my boyfriend of the time. boyfriend had to play soccer the weekend i had picked out for us, and no, he was not a pro player, so it really was a lame excuse and therefor the end of our affair.

having booked the trip, and not being able to get a refund, i decided to go there. by my self. four days of Iceland could be nice, i reckoned, time to contemplate whilst enjoying the surreal landscapes i had come to love so much on my previous visit.

on that first trip i had done most of the usual touristy stuff: the geysers and the gulfoss waterfall, thingvalyr and thorsmork. now i wanted something special. and i remembered that Jules Verne had situated the beginning of his book "journey to the centre of the earth" in a cave of snaefellsjökull, the volcano near that town.

I had no idea where to go all by myself, so i decided that finding the entrance to that cave would be my mission.

on the plane i started talking to a man from Iceland who hated his country very much. he was a surgeon and lived in Canada. the solitude of Iceland had nearly driven him insane as a boy, he was so glad to be living in a much more populated country now. the birthday of one of his aunts forced him to go back to Iceland for the weekend. he said that he hated his family even more than he hated his old home. he asked me what i was going to do, if i would see the gletchers and the blue lagoon. i answered that i would do no such thing, my ventures would lead to Olavsvik. The surgeon was quiet for a couple of seconds and stared at me rather blankly. "you should not go to Olavsvik." he paused again, for some considerable time and then said: "the blue lagoon is so much nicer." and he was silent once more. i started asking him about the most blood ridden operation he ever had to perform and our conversation became a bit more lively again.

At the airport, i took a taxi to Reykjavik, wanting to experience the moonlike landscape all by myself. the female driver was about fifty years old, and told me interesting local news at about every second bend in the road. her hair was dyed red in a colour which seems to be  an absolute favourite with many women over a certain age. it shone a very artificial crimson in the sunset. she pointed out the blue lagoon. "you should really go there, it is so nice and relaxing." i told her i had different plans, that i wanted to stay clear of all the holiday highlights, that i wanted to see the real Iceland, Olavsvik the prime destination. the taxi driver looked over her shoulder at me. "what do you want to go to Olavsvik for, there is nothing there." i explained the whole Jules Verne set up again, but she didn't seem convinced.

the next morning i met the surgeon again at the breakfast buffet of my hotel. i wished him luck with his aunt, and he said he hoped i would have a nice stay in Iceland and by the way had i considered thorsmork, it was such an enchanting Forrest. i didn't dare mention that i already had checked the post-bus schedule and was about to go to Olavsvik.

i walked to the busstation and set course to my destination. The bus left at 8 something in the morning, would arrive at Olavsvik at 11 and would return there at five in the afternoon to drive back to Reykjavik. There were not too many people in the bus. only two tourists, good. they were Germans and they had ski´s with them. There was a group of women who chatted to one another, and a father with his retarded son. the bus drove on and on, past plains which looked like sceneries of a John Ford western, drove down a tunnel connecting the two peninsulas. at every stop someone would get off the bus, and at every stop the outside world became more desolate. Perfect! this was the true Iceland. At the last stop before Olavsvik the Germans got off, and indeed, it had started to snow. we went down another tunnel. the retarded boy started to make gurgling noises, louder and louder. his whines became a long scream. the father made some gurgling noises back, probably to soothe the boy, but it had no real effect. more tunnels followed, and every time the shrieks of the boy gained volume. the landscape changed, the weather recovered and the boy got a can of dr. pepper from his father and finally calmed down. half an hour later i was where i wanted to be and got off the bus. the boy waved at me from his window seat. i half-heartedly waved back.

i had six hours to find the cave, sturdy and warm walking boots, a thermos flask of tea, and sandwiches. i looked at the town. there were three buildings on the side of the road. one was a gas station annex fast food restaurant which also rented out videos. the second house was a toy shop, but it was closed till 1.30 p.m.. the last house was empty. the three houses had their backs to the ocean. dark blue was the water, seagulls flew over it. no path lead to the water, there was no shore. there was just the road the bus had driven on, a cliff, and the ocean. on the other side of the road i counted about 15 houses. two streets. it were prefab houses, each looked exactly like the other. every one of them had a dish-antenna. They all had the same gates around them. the windows had shutters, and most of these windows were shut. A man walked passed me. He went to the car in front of his home, got in, and drove to the gas-station where he parked his car, locked it, and went in. I panted upto the end of the road. i needed to find the route to the cave. there was a meadow full of sheep shit, which seemed to have a trail, so i started following it. it became broader, and could, with some imagination be called a path. this made me enthusiastic; it must be the right track to the Jules Verne cave! the path went uphill rather steeply, and became more and more like a gravel road. I picked up a round stone. Maybe there was an amathyst hidden in it. I climbed up, the road got steeper. it wound itself around a hill, now being parallel to the road where the bus had been. i saw the ocean again from above, and noticed that there were even more seagulls here. They shrieked as i walked by. Some of them flew up for a little while, to land a few inches from where they had lifted off. about five hundred meters further ahead i saw a road-sign. it was bright fluorescent yellow and it had a lot of Icelandic words written on it. every fourth or fifth word was followed by an exclamation mark. i got a bit of a goofy feeling, but decided i would walk on a bit more, the road was really wide, there was no snow on this hill, so the chance of being hit by an avalanche was really minimal. after 50 meters or so i turned back: not only was there more than just a flock of seagulls in front of me, it was a whole nation of those birds. they were scary enough by themselves. the real problem was the stench of rotten fish. it all of a sudden penetrated me so thickly that i nearly vomited. it was physically impossible to go on.

i returned to the village, to find out that just a bit more than an hour had passed. i looked at a map of the area at the gas-station, in the hope to find another road. this was the only road. there was no where else to go. i would have to wait for the bus to return. so i sat down in the fast food restaurant. it was quite crowded in the place, it being a Saturday noon time. i sat at a table near the window overlooking the road and the fifteen houses. everybody stared at me. i ordered a tea and some French fries. after i had gotten them, the people returned to their conversations or to their pinball game. t i had no book with me, all the magazines the gas-station sold where in Icelandic and the toy shop next door was only due to open in another hour and a half.

i bought a gossip magazine, so that i could at least look at the pictures. i kept looking at the clock, waiting for the toyshop to open, so that i could at least kill 20 minutes there, if i tried really hard.

just after one thirty, i went to the toystore. it also had household equipment and it sold paint, nails, and hammers. every item in the store was still in its original wrapping. none of the items was from after 1984. it felt like a museum of unwanted belongings. i found a stationary section and bought a little booklet and a pen. the pen was bright orange, and so was, as it turned out, the ink.

after my shopping spree i walked passed the two streets of Olavsvik once more, and even took a stroll over the meadow. i sat down on a rock, and had some tea, so as to at least have a bit of a feel of adventure. this is when i took the photograph.

after that, i came to the conclusion it was best to return to the gas-station. there was nothing else to decide.

inside it was even more crowded than before, it were mainly men. they all stared at me again. i somehow managed to get back to my spot at the window and ordered another tea and another portion of French fries. i convinced myself that this would be an excellent time to write my good-bye letter to the ex boyfriend, thus spending my time at least a little bit useful. so i wrote the letter with the bright orange ink.

The waiter turned on the tv. it was a was ten past two. two and a half more hours, then i could go out and wait for the bus for fifteen minutes. the whole crowd started talking animatedly and cheering the screen. there was someone singing. some comments, and then a jury vote. Then a guy playing the piano and singing to it. this was the national song contest, deciding who would go to the eurovision song contest. the songs went on and on, there must have been i don´t know how many songs, each and every one in Icelandic, long discussions between the members of the jury, and some kind of tele-voting as well. I thought that maybe  the villagers were watching together because one of theirs was taking part in the contest, but they responded the same to every song. every half our or so the waiter came to my table and made me order another cup of tea. or something else. but i was not hungry, so i settled for the tea. the people in the restaurant stared at the screen and sometimes stared at me. i feigned to be completely taken up by my writing the letter. at half past four i couldn't take it anymore, and went out. the toystore had closed by then. i just sat on a bench at the side of the road and counted the minutes until the bus finally arrived. the whole journey back i was the only passenger.

 

i went to bed, completely exhausted. the next day at breakfast i did not encounter the surgeon anymore, he must have stayed at his aunts place. that afternoon i took the bus to a safe expedition, i went to the blue lagoon.

 

R. shivered a little, as if to make a point of still being cold. He was still under the duvet, he had wrapped it precisely around him, it made him look like a mummy. It was very warm in the room. I went over to the desk to make myself some tea. I asked him if he wanted some too. He was silent and nodded. Whilst i was making the tea, neither of us said a word. But he scrupulously watched my every move. Before i could think i blurted out if he got off on watching me making the tea for us. „Why would you think that? You asked me if i wanted some, and i just said yes. You are still here, though your job is done for today, you could go to your room and have some there. If i wanted to make you out, I would have, right? Are you having second thoughts about the deal?“ I nearly started to sob. I felt so embarrassed. Here i was in this room, with this man who would not share one private thought, gushing out mine, on demand. „Have i crossed you, i didn't mean to annoy you. It´s just so hard travelling all the time, and you seemed so right to lighten things up a little, but if it is too much you just say it. I don´t want to kiss you, i think i made that clear by now. I thought it would be fun for you too, travelling to places, you hardly make any money as it is with your movie thing. Could inspire you for some documentaries, the places i take you to. I want nothing but a little distraction, why do women always think i want more of them, is it my money? There are so many guys richer than me. Or do yóu want to be physical, is that it, am i insulting you by not making a pass, i really dont get it.“ 

I just stared at my teacup. I noticed that at the bottom the dried out liquid had formed the shape of a whale. I showed him the cup and said: „ A whale“. „Dear girl you have one twisted mind working for you there. Better watch out you dont jump into that cup with your imagination, and someone cleanses the stain away before you are ready to get back into the real world.“

He sniggered. Then he sighed.

„Do i strike you as simply logical?“ 

„Well, yes.“

„So why would i like hanging out with you then?“

„We are not hanging out. You pay me. I cannot ask you any questions.“

„Go ahead. Ask me one, ask anything.“

I asked him why he really wanted me to go along. 

„I told you before. I just hate travelling all by myself. I sometimes would get so lonely my brain felt like it was eating me up all those thoughts that just pop up from out of the blue, hitting you like crazy, they go on and on. They melt my mind into a complete chaos. You know what i mean, it gets so bad, that you can feel the pain of the brain?  The thinking. The staring at the wall. Being here. Or there or wherever. It really hurt. Sometimes I would just take painkillers to fake to make it stop. Moments like those, I have to shut down. At some point I just started doing the equations, it helped. The numbers always soothe me. And you do too. You are so funny. So lost. I never thought you would do it, you know, come along. Tell me stories. I thought you would freak out in sheer fear. And then i reckoned i see how long you stick to it. And you do. That really amazes me. Now you tell me: is it the money, do you need the cash so desperately that you go along?“

His question somehow took me by surprise. I could not think of any valid reason why i joined him on his travels. 

I still had my teacup in my hands. I told him that some people use the tea stains to predict the future. But that i thought that with his logical mind he would probably not go for that. “You are absolutely right. Now, when you leave, can you turn the heater off, i am warm enough.“