The hippy along with his hurt because of the premature interruption drove off further into downtown; Denis and the student got off. He lit a cigarette on the last step of the bus and looked around the stop while buttoning his jacket. Was she there? Just as he was deciding quite disappointedly that he was going to the concert alone, Mary stepped into the light of a street lamp from the darkest corner of the stop, from beneath a tree growing, as it were, straight out of the asphalt.
‘So, where is this church of yours?’ she continued his metaphor, though she knew where they were actually going. When that morning their conversation again safely sank beneath the roar of the bus engine, Denis put one of his Walkman earphones to her ear and explained that it was a concert and she really had to see the band. Leaving the stop, he offered her a hand, but she didn’t take it. She put both hands in her pockets to warm them, and he did the same. Although there were still quite a few people outside the hall, you could hear the concert had already begun. He again saw the student from the bus on the steps by the entrance: of course, she had been on her way here. Most of the band’s fans were probably female university students who cared about things. Mary seemed impressed by the impressive stairway adorned with large stone columns and sculptures rising towards the hall entrance; it looked more like a museum or opera house entrance than an entrance to a rock venue. The stairway conveyed the image of a dim passage between two worlds in counterpoint to the somewhat mournful and melancholy rock ’n roll pouring down on them. She slowed her steps a little, as if suspecting that when she crossed over and entered the hall the needle on her compass would completely change the direction it had steadily held for all those years; Denis had to wait at the top of the stairway for a moment or two for her to overcome her hesitation and move on. Just at that point, the opening riff of a song Denis immediately recognized reached the high ceiling. The instrument sobbed as if the guitarist was choking it. ‘Let’s get closer to the stage!’ he yelled, grabbing Mary by the hand, and making his way through the swaying bodies. They stopped somewhere in the middle, where they could clearly make out the figures on stage. Her eyes fixed on the woman at the keyboard.
‘That’s Margita! Once she was a piano prodigy, but on the way to the conservatory in Russia she joined a rock band!’ he yelled in her ear.
‘She chose freedom over people’s expectations.’
He sensed how the woman on stage, and especially her story, which Denis had telegraphed to her in hollers, captivated Mary. She didn’t take her eyes off of her for even a second. He noticed an uncanny similarity between them.
‘What’s the song about?’ It was Mary’s turn to yell in his ear.
He stepped behind her. With his left hand he moved her long hair from her ear. It slipped through his fingers for an endlessly long time. Then he took her by both hands and translated the words into her ear.
‘The shine in our eyes is deep and unreal, we’re travelling in words and thinking in steps, you and me, you and meeee! Stand by me, stand by me…’
He sensed how the words he was sending into her ear shot through her body and reverberated in her finger tips, intertwined with his. The charm ended with the final beat of the song. She dropped his hands, turned, said, ‘I’m sorry’, and started making her way through the crowd to the exit. He went after her, although he in fact didn’t intend to stop her. When she got out of the hall, she ran off into the fog. He ran after her a few steps, then stopped, said, ‘Damn it!’ and turned back to the hall. Mary the escaped Mormon was all that interested him from that point on, even though the Berlin Wall was already in ruins, students lay dead on Tiananmen Square, and the east of his country was in threatening convulsions.
MARY
Mary walked around the flat again, observing the emptiness he had left behind. Most of the things were still here; he hadn’t taken much with him: his clothes, quite a few books, disks, and records – nothing of the sort that would be sorely missed and provide a loud reminder of his departure. She agreed with it and contributed a good deal to it, but she nonetheless feared the parting moment. It had been a long time since she was last alone. If it still seemed to her a month or so ago that they were constantly in each other’s way, depriving each other of air, that if one of them didn’t halt the downward spiral they would be at each other’s throats, she was now asking herself whether they had really tried everything and perhaps had thrown in the towel too quickly. As he was leaving, he carefully packed paperback copies of Kerouac, Roth, and Auster into his suitcase… he had patiently built his collection over the last few years, finding the books exclusively in small, barely surviving bookstores. He had already read them all, and she could hardly believe he would pick them up again. On the other hand, he didn’t take any of the photo albums from their trips. That hurt. As if he was afraid the photos, in which they were almost without exception happy, would shake his resolve to leave. Those frozen moments of happiness taken in different parts of the USA were now all hers, to instil in her nostalgia and doubts. Despite their plans, they never made it to Europe. Not together.
A photo taken on a trip to California two years ago came to mind. They were standing in an embrace on the large, dark rocks under the Golden Gate Bridge. A young surfer in a wet suit of whom they had asked the favour just a second before he waded into the very uninviting sea bloated with waves, had pressed the shutter the instant Mary was trying to tame her long hair, which the strong bay wind had tousled like bunches of unmown grass. She had just managed to remove them from her face, allowing the picture to capture her smile, which had always attracted male as well as female attention. Lately, looking at the photo, she would often wonder how their relationship could have gone downhill so quickly that they weren’t able to seize on it and save it, although they both certainly believed it was worth it. That windy day in San Francisco they went to visit the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, which was the heart of the hippy world at the end of the 1960s. They walked uphill under a thick net of tangled trolley wires past the colourful facades of townhouses and tried to catch traces of the summer of love that after forty years might not yet have completely gone cold. They found a bit with a street guitarist who was playing all the hits you would expect from the time with the silent accompaniment of an aged Afghan wolfhound stretched out in true hippy style next to an open guitar case. Mary was moved by nostalgia, despite the fact that she had not even been born when these hills teemed with colourful hippies. They stood at the small street concert long enough to hear Janis and her ‘Bobby McGee’ and Scott McKenzie with flowers in his hair. Then, after throwing a few coins in the open case, for which they got a casual wink from the guitarist, they headed back to the hotel. After a few beers in the hotel bar and a joint at their room window, they made love long into the night before falling asleep in an embrace, exhausted and perspiring from successive climaxes.
‘So, I guess this is it,’ said Mary.
‘Yeah, I guess so,’ he said.
And that was that. She closed the door and was left alone. A month before she had turned forty. There was a totally failed attempt to celebrate, which was the final, plain-as-day sign of their sinking relationship. Today was evidently the first day of her life’s second half. She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her handbag, but a touch told her it was empty. She ran her index finger through it to make sure, then let out a loud ‘shit’, crumpled the empty pack, and threw it on the table, only a small part of which served for eating. Carefully stacked issues of the New Yorker and other magazines, a lot of envelopes that had clearly been opened without a knife, and two books of Leonard Cohen’s poetry covered at least half the table. She would have paged through one of the two had she found, instead of emptiness, a cigarette in the pack, and lit it. Most people enjoy a cup of coffee or tea with a cigarette. But Mary usually enjoyed a poem or two by Cohen with her dose of smoke and nicotine. She always read poetry her own way, without making pencil scratches between the lines, without searching for the meaning of individual verses. She simply let herself go to the rhythm and mood of a poem, as if listening to Wes Montgomery’s smooth jazz, while the cigarette burned down. Since she was missing those several minutes of Zen that she so needed after the farewell at the door, being without cigarettes sent her thoughts in a completely unexpected direction.
Just as the small