After the storm
After the storm, their daily pattern has settled down to the essentials: their studies, the ritual nude morning exercise (now in May with the double balcony doors wide open), their bike rides along the Fließ, the ice age stream that is a wild tributary to the lake, early dinner, mostly at home and mostly cooked by Paul, and the erotic games preceding sleep. Solange is the expert and innovator on the latter. As they gain experience, and discover what really pleases both of them, she has overtaken Paul, more timid, and a little afraid of her wild ambitions.
Search for truth
Julian, Sarah, and their own adventure, Paul and Solange have come to admire them both, the one for his writing talent and indefatigable search for truth, the other for her steadfast loyalty to a husband in love to a cloud of others. Sarah and Phillip come together to see them, and stay a few days, quite often. Paul confides to Sarah that he’s pleased with the growing intimacy between his mother and Solange’s tutor: it chases some old demon away from him. Solange’s understands that Paul came close to slide into something close to incest in several occasions before she met him, and perhaps even more recently. So she too can only rejoice at the evolving relationship between Sarah and Phillip, away from Paul.
Often they talk about Julian’s work, as Solange quotes abstracts from Julian’s blog and journal, such as this:
Fallen leaves
“Fallen leaves: This year it may have arrived late, but now, it is here. The time of the year when shadows play tricks, shallow shapes appear, as if conjured up by a malicious genie, and then disappear, erased. This lovely vision may not be real, those blond hair, flying in the light wind, are not what they seem: as I got nearer, anxious to see the face, it’s nowhere, it’s just me, and some hidden gnome, invisible, yet present, and I think, laughing silently. The light is low, diffused, under the trees one does not recognise anything, cannot see through the light mist: I see you, but is it you? Or an ancient witch pretending to be you?
The waters of the canal reflect a deep green that doesn’t not come from the sky, but from an elsewhere, a deep, unfathomable to us, humans. We lost the skill to see this light, but was it ever a skill, or rather, a right? Gold and brown, grey and a colour which is undefined, a wavelength our eyes don’t capture. Dark knights ride in the clouds, bearing runes that may signal our end, our dismissal from what is, still, paradise. I feel small, in a world that, for now, and the next few months, no longer smiles at me. Those ghosts are not my friends, they merely remind me that life is short.
And Winter is coming.”
October 2019
“Isn’t this beautiful?” asks Solange, who often comes close to tears reading these short posts. “This was written in early October 2019, about one year before they left the city, and at about the time we think now was the first sign of serious trouble in Wuhan…”
“Julian was very talented,” replies Paul, “but his long hand work is, as you know, often confusing. The question is, was this deliberate, or a sign of delusion?”
Solange smiles, and invites Paul for a walk on the banks of the Fließ. “OK, but then you buy the beer!” jokes Paul back. Outside the afternoon sunshine lights the path, the thick bushes, the ancient willows. Later they see a couple of buffaloes enjoying the water and the shade.
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