Kitabı oku: «Mahler in love with Monroe?», sayfa 2
After a while, I was about to pick up the rake to harvest the last potatoes, Steffen appeared with the stranger from yesterday.
"Hello, Mary Lou!" He greets me. "Where's Golie?" I was a bit strange about his rudeness in not introducing myself to the stranger, which he actually noticed right away. The fascinating sight of the stranger quite in front of me took my breath away.
Steffen was sometimes a bit rude and took me by surprise. But then he made up for it with spontaneous warmth.
"Oh, sorry, that's Mr. Grinder. He came in the red Paco with his driver last night. He is a young musician and had heard that an organ still works here with us. We want to play together now and need Golie to kick our bellows. Where is he?" Steffen was way too fast again, but also Mr. Grinder was just as little sensitive. Having recognized me again, the gray stranger hit his other hand with his riding-stick and gave me a deep look into my eyes without saying a word.
I felt like a real, obsequious woman, being in the picture to fall in a disastrous love with an unknown man. The feeling was not negative. The aura of the stranger turned it positive and more than that super.
I needed some time to get clear.
"I gave him the flute this morning that you gave me last spring, Steffen. I hope that's okay for you. Now he is up and away with it. I do not know where he is."
And with a proud reference to the paper with the staff, I added: "That's what he showed me this morning and claims he wrote that."
The stranger glanced at it and croaked a rough voice: "That's from Bach, the theme of the D minor toccata." "... I had practiced yesterday on the organ" Steffen admitted quickly. "Should the tot have grasped the staff so quickly? He had asked me holes in the stomach, the whole time already, because of the five lines and the points with flags on it. That would be phenomenal!" "A second Mozart" grunted Grinder. Why Steffen introduced me to the stranger as ‘Mr Grinder’ was unclear to me. Did he come from England or even from the USA? Spellbound by him I did not dare to ask for.
Suddenly Grinder saw my poster with the well breasted blond. He was fascinated, could not turn his eyes away, stuck and than I saw, that he read the signatures name. It was like a love on the first climbs.
I was jealous! I hated her! Trying to keep calm I made some remarks about the weather. The two men said goodbye and left my flat.
When I saw them turning the corner, I let my feelings out and cried against the poster: “You bitch, you slut” and some more ugly words. Finally I tore the poster off the wall and burned it in my oven.
Wien, St. Marx
Herbert Gerstenmayer was angry. He got up very early today to be in the lab for the meeting scheduled 8:00 am with his boss. It was a long way there from the seventh district, where he lived in the Myrthengasse in an old house ruin. Since there was no public transport after the catastrophe here in the Austrian capital, it was tedious every morning to walk to the Ring and then head towards the Rennweg through the ruins. But he had done it in time today, and now the boss was not there yet!
His assistant Christiane was released from these meetings, in which every fortnight the new project steps were defined. Herbert then had to translate these into concrete daily work units for her.
It was spooky in the huge molecular biology laboratory deep underground, which had moved into a ten-story deep, nuclear-safe bunker just before the catastrophe. Only a few people worked here. The supernatural new buildings of the old biocenter had not survived and collapsed completely. But the science in the underground, which had made great progress shortly before the catastrophe by close cooperation of the University of Vienna with some major US investors, could be maintained, though not all projects had survived. The investors saw a particularly strategic location of the old k. u. k. capital as a gateway to Eastern Europe and pumped billions of dollars into ethically disputed cloning projects. To protect against the resistance of groups such as Greenpeace, which crippled more and more aggressively entire research facilities, it was decided therefore to move the research down into the earth in a bunker and secretly continue to work in perfect stealth, while in the supernatural Biocenter to camouflage was switched to harmless green biotechnology. All environmental groups could could be deceived perfectly. The secrecy worked excellently. However, no one had guessed at the time that the nuclear research of some emerging nations had progressed so far that it could have come to disaster. By this way biotechnology survived in Vienna, and research continued to flourish.
Herbert fumbled with his lab notebook and looked at his latest results, which he had recorded in his exact scientific writing. Previously he had written everything with the computer, but today the valuable computer capacity was strictly regulated. The weak electric light that illuminated the lab was already luxury enough in the aftermath. It was only thanks to the extraordinary commitment of Prof. Baum, Herbert's boss, that the emergency generator was coupled with several wood gasifiers and so the necessary energy for the operation of the computers and laboratory equipment in the bunker could be generated. A whole crew of heaters worked there. However, just in the transitional period, a major bottleneck had prevailed, and some projects had to be discontinued. "Why doesn’t come the old man today?", Herbert wondered, as Christiane, his assistant, rushed into the lab with a song on his lips. It was already 9:30 am, and she was surprised that Herbert was not putting his heads together with the old man - as usual on Monday. "What's going on?" She asked in surprise, tying her brunette curls to a hair tie she held between her teeth, which made the words squirt out a little crushed and Herbert did not understand. "What did you mean?" He asked. "Where is the old man today?", She formulated again and put on her clean yellow lab coat.
"No idea," replied Herbert. "I'm pissed off because today, for once, I was punctual. Ironically now the old man seems to be late." "Delayed?" she mocked. "When did you meet?" "At 8 o'clock, as usual," answered Herbert, and his answer sounded mildly worrisome. "Then this is no longer a delay," she added. "I know, but what should we do?" "You used to be able to call in these cases, even with a cell phone! But today, life is just waiting and racing, "she tried a joke. "Well, I've had enough of the 'wait' now, so I'm going to 'race'," he countered. "Do you know where the old man lives?" "Not exactly, but somewhere in the direction of the Danube Island, I think. Maybe we should wait. He's always so reliable and I'm sure he'll show up soon." "You're welcome to help me feed the new stem cells. Last week you gave me a huge experimental approach, I almost can not do it; and if I do not dilute the cells in time, they go hops, you know that too. What have you dug up again for great genomes that we need so many cells right now?" "You know, the old man does not tell me that either! But before I look after him, I'll help you better. Maybe he will come then too. "Herbert put on his yellow coat and threw on the two sterile benches. These are tables with a plastic case, open at the front, where sterile air is constantly being blown from behind. For the cultivation of cells in appropriate sterile culture vessels, these devices, also called 'flows' in the laboratory chargon, are absolutely necessary, so that the cell culture when opening the vessels can not get through the many small creatures that always fly around in the air into the vessels. The sterility of the tables must be checked regularly with a wipe test, which Gerstenmayer has just carried out to measure the hopelessly non-existent contamination, while Christiane placed the containers with the embryonic stem cells out of the incubators on a thermally insulated cart and slid on the two flows. Herbert fetched the bottles of fresh nutrient media and both scientists began work. It was amazing that such research was "after" still possible. Unfortunately, bottlenecks in reagents or consumables often occurred, and everyone had to improvise. But the bottom line was that they were very successful, even under commercial aspects. If the old investors had survived the catastrophe, they would have rubbed their hands and made huge profits on the stock exchange that no longer existed. Only vaguely, the two guessed what their boss did with the fertilized Humanzellen in times when children really could not be born naturally. Every expert knew how delicate the human act of procreation was from a purely biochemical point of view, and how sensitive he was to radioactivity, not to mention interpersonal complications. Almost every day, the finished cells were picked up and taken away with a special Paco. He had even a kind of freezer in the back to get the cells. At noon, they were just finished feeding the cells, a call came through the in-house telephone network, which also worked. Christiane and Herbert already thought, now the old man came back, but it was not him, but one of the gatekeepers, who informed Herbert that an unknown gentleman wanted to speak to Professor Baum.
"Prof. Baum is not here. We miss him. He wanted to be there by 8:00 this morning, but he did not come. That is very unusual! What does the Lord want?" "He does not tell me. Perhaps you will come to me better and talk to the stranger yourself," answered the porter. "I go quickly to the gate, Christiane." Herbert reported to her, took off his coat and went to the staircase, not without secretly looking at Christiane again. He liked what he saw: her full-bodied, almost baroque body and her full breasts, which were clearly visible even in the waisted, high-necked lab coat. He could not rationalize what he felt for his colleague, but in his stomach he always registered butterflies at their sight, and that indication should actually be a clear statement of his unconscious. He was sure to hold back his feelings because he did not feel he could land with Christiane. Especially lately it was very repellent and at times it smelled strangely ‘fishy’ when it rustled in the morning and they came very close together carrying the heavy containers together. He always had the fantasy that she did not have time to take a shower in the morning or that she did not want to lose that smell as a reminder of the previous night. Actually, he did not know anything about her except that she was a reliable and creative employee. At the top, a man stood in a dark, long leather coat and black hat in the entrance and strolled up and down tense. Gerstenmayer spoke to him, but the stranger behaved extremely strangely and impolitely. He did not give his name and immediately wanted to speak to the professor. It was very important, even vital, he said hectically. He spoke with a British accent. When Gerstenmayer tried to make it clear to him that the boss had not yet appeared in the lab today, and even dropped an agreed appointment, the stranger became white-chested and quickly tried to get rid of Gerstenmayer in order to get away. "If he shows up, please try to contact me as soon as possible. Please tell Café Servus about the Haydn memorial near the former Maria Hilf church and just say that you have a message and tell me where to meet the professor. "He then struck put the coat together in front and let Gerstenmayer stand like a poodle. "Unfriendly contemporary," he growled. Instead of going back to the lab, he asked the porter for the phone and informed Christiane that he wanted to look at Baum now. Gradually Gerstenmayer worried. There was really only one explanation that explained his boss's behavior, except for the one that claimed disaster again. But he wanted to make sure and made his way to Baum's apartment near the former United Nations City.
A lovestory after
Marietta and Hannes initially lived in a well-preserved ruined house in Maua near Jena. Once upon a time, the A4 motorway was lost and made life unbearable with the constant traffic noise. From time to time, a dull Porsche or even a Ferrari had joined the deep, regular hum of the trucks, and all this had been overshadowed by the high purr of a Ducati or a Kawa. But those times were over! The huge double bridge, one part of yellow Saale sandstone from Hitler's time, while the other was built only a few years after the millennium to allow a six-lane expansion, just this long viaduct was completely destroyed. In the background were huge elongated rubble heaps to see: The old East German prefabricated housing from Lobeda had not survived the disaster and were collapsed like card houses thanks to their always lacking fabric. The two were not Thuringians, but had learned from a secret source that the radiation exposure in Thuringia should be particularly low. That had been the reason for them to settle there. The couple originally came from Upper Bavaria, and after Hannes, as the international manager of a world-famous Bavarian car brand, could not jettify to Spartanburg in the USA or Oxford in England to pass on his knowledge from Munich's headquarters to others after the dissolution So, when suddenly the cultivation of everything edible had become more important, they had decided to leave Bavaria.
They were a dream couple: he was muscular, of normal size and with his heart in the right place, freehand climber, who kept himself in shape through constant exercise; Marietta, however, the female counterpart with long mittelblonden, strong hair and many natural curls. Her face was wide with full lips and strong cheekbones that gave her face a Slavic touch. Her eyes looked feline, reminding of Madame Chauchat's eyes as they were described in the Magic Mountain. Her nature was dominant, but unlike the lung-sick Russian, she did not need to throw doors in to attract attention. She entered a room and immediately filled it with her person. Her beautiful figure drew everyone's attention. When her deep, slightly smoky voice helped with a greeting, she immediately took each one for herself.
She had been my closest friend in Polling, and I had mourned her for a long time when she left with Hannes and our dream couple left the community. Marietta had entrusted to me as her best friend that they both would like to have a child. But, as with almost all couples, the catastrophe had no hope of reproduction. Marietta herself was a non-medical practitioner and knew well in medical matters. She knew that the complex processes of human reproduction by radioactive radiation were disturbed in many places. Even the regular implantation of an egg in the uterus was disturbed in her as in almost all young women, so that could be no more talk of regular cycles. But when, in fact, coincidence helped and a male sperm encountered a fertile egg, the rate of confluent sperm was so low that it almost never came to fertilization.
It was a blessing for me to have found my Golie as a foundling and thus to be able to live up to my purpose as a woman - although I always reckoned and constantly asked myself how this healthy child could even have come into the world. It has always been a mystery to me, a mystery, and or perhaps that's why I was so attached to this kid. In the many conversations that evening with Marietta, I clearly heard her complaint that even with the luxury of being able to rely on a reliable partner, she would also like to have a child. Her grief that it was by no means as easy to conceive a child as it was before time zero made her very desperate, and I was always helpless, holding her in the arms and not comforting. That's how it went for days. One day, however, Hannes came back with a message about a hike from Munich that sounded almost too unbelievable to be true. There should be a kind of clinic somewhere in Thuringia near Jena. Healthy young women could undergo artificial insemination there. This takes place in a large, old bunker system where the radioactivity is lowered to a threshold level due to the depth of the mountain, as it was normal before the disaster. If the eggs were accepted, then the women spend their pregnancy there in the mountain. It all sounded like a fairy tale. In the evening Marietta came running to me and told me with great enthusiasm about it. I knew immediately that I would soon lose a very good friend, because I saw my adventurous girlfriend in the next few days ready to leave with her Hannes marching through the village. The farewell came quickly. Golie, my baby, and I had hugged them for a long time and waved to them. Silently I had allowed both of them to have a child too, as they had been such a beautiful couple!
Over the Danube
In Vienna, Gerstenmayer laboriously scoured the ruins of the Rennweg in the direction of the northeast. It was a cold autumn day. Luckily it did not rain even though the sky was full of gray clouds. In the rain, it was particularly dangerous to move outdoors. Depending on whether the clouds came from the west from the Atlantic or rather from the south of the heavily contaminated Mediterranean, the precipitation brought strong new amounts of radioactivity. On the following days, the grave-diggers had a lot of work again, because mainly older people died like the flies after the recent fall-out. "In the previous days it was much warmer; the accompanying continuous rain must have come from the south," speculated Gerstenmayer to himself. There used to be hourly weather forecasts, but that was once. Now they had to make their predictions from a few perceptible observations of their own! Why did this Middle East conflict escalate to such an extent and, of all things, completely ruin the eastern Mediterranean? The more Gerstenmayer put together these facts, the more angry he became. Had it caught the boss now? What would become of her jobs when he should not be there anymore? He was the sole bearer of knowledge! He who led her so successfully through this lousy time. How many times had he allowed the workforce to stay in the basement, even to stay for days, when a warm steady rain descended from the deadly southeast wind? Only when the wind turned and came from the west and the still little strained Atlantic rain had flushed the radioactive dirt back into the gullies, they went again into the open air. Even if their homes were looted because they had not guarded them in the evening, they had gained a bit of life again.
Gerstenmayer awoke from a daydream when he came to the Danube. The large, heavy bridge that had once led the subway and the highway across the river was destroyed, hanging in two places into the water and was impassable even for experienced climbers. Instead, there were small barges on the shore that could be rented for something edible. The ferry business was entirely in the hands of the Chinese, and a kind of Chinese mafia dominated the scene. Time and again they heard about protection and murderous slate-eyed ferrymen, though it was not clear that this was an unnatural consequence of the inflexible being forced by the organization to drink contaminated water, or whether it was the normal fall-out after a warm south rain. Who could distinguish this today? A police force in a deserted city like Vienna was written on paper, but the technical highs of forensics had gone down with the catastrophe. Screaming little Chinese with long, tousled beards stormed Gerstenmayer and wanted to offer him their ferry services. Thank God he had not eaten his breakfast sandwich today! One half and one half apple were sufficient for the first river crossing. The rest he needed for the second ferryman behind the Danube Island and the way back. The little, old ferryman wrapped the food down right away, then Gerstenmayer sat down and was stopped over. So he had always imagined ‘Vasudeva’, the ferryman from the Indian world of the inventor of the Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse, of which he had once read. This one, however, had slit eyes and was no Indian. Would the contaminated river still tell him something? Daily measurements of radioactivity? For other considerations there was no time in this present time.
Could one trust this ‘Vasudeva’? River crossing was always a risk, as there were cases where dishonest ferrymen robbed their passengers in the middle of the river and threw them overboard, which meant a safe ray death in the face of the existing pollution of the Danube waters. Some ferries were dressed in lead, as was the barge that Gerstenmayer had chosen. This offered the passengers, but also the ferrymen some protection against the radioactive radiation. Otherwise, the life expectancy of these river-Chineese was not very high. Nevertheless, Gerstenmayer was glad to have reached the other bank swiftly and safely. Over there, the high debris dumps of the former UNO City on Wagramer Street awaited him. The high skyscrapers had all been particularly affected by the disaster, especially since Arab suicide terrorist commandos had already blown up the IAEA headquarters, the headquarters of the International Nuclear Control Commission, with a small neutron bomb. It looked devastating. Gerstenmayer followed the narrow paths through the ruins and was now near the spot where he suspected the apartment Prof. Baum. It had to be somewhere between Bernstein Street and Bruno-Kreisky-Square? It had been a long time since Baum had asked him to come home to hand him an article written by a biochemist before the catastrophe.
The area was deserted. Gerstenmayer had the idea to ask someone, but he did not find anyone. Further away, a man in a black leather coat looked over at him. "Have not I seen him before?" He asked himself, walking up to him. But the next moment the man had walked around an advertising pillar. When Gerstenmayer arrived there and stepped behind the column, he saw no one else. "Did I dream?", He asks himself again and started looking for Prof. Baum's apartment where he thought he should remember. The first door to which he knocked was not opened, no one answered. The door was not locked, he pushed it open, and a torrent of corpse smell came to meet him. On a kind of sofa lay two old people, holding each other's hands. The rats had already begun their recycling; especially large specimens with smooth, shiny fur. Gerstenmayer forced himself to take a closer look at the man. Could that be Professor Baum? He visually scanned the dead body, but found no positive matches. Disgusted, he closed the door again and moved to the next. He pushed it open and was astonished: The apartment was completely ransacked. Everywhere leaves were scattered. Cabinets and drawers were not in the apartment, but a lot of boxes that had once been neatly and safely stacked with a system. Everyone was criss-crossing. Obviously someone was looking for something here. Gerstenmayer could not imagine that his boss should live in such a mess. Obviously, Baum had not been in his apartment for a long time. Where was he? To answer this question, Gerstenmayer took off his coat and scarf and took a closer look at the remaining papers lying around. Maybe he found a clue here. But he found nothing. Suddenly he came across a copy of a letter that made him speechless. He sat down, read again, and suddenly a light came on. Could that really be true? He was so fascinated by his discovery that he completely forgot the missing Professor Baum and only followed his discovery. Gradually it was getting dark, and Gerstenmayer found reading in the dark apartment difficult. He looked at his watch and started. "I should be on my way home. You should avoid the ferry-Chineese in the dark," he thought to himself, gathered up the most important papers, put on his clothes and left, still baffled by his extraordinary discovery.
