"Precisely the commonality of language creates the illusion that one's partner must naturally perceive reality as it is - that is, as I see it." Paul Watzlawick

Spur of Desire

Nora is a congress personality. She gives lectures that attract attention beyond her own discipline. She turns down offers. She wants to remain in Ederthal and lead her department. She would then be the first Mistress of Language, a historical title for the head of the German Studies faculty. Nora comes from a household of professors; for her, a university is a honeycomb-like structure in which she can be both bee and beekeeper at the same time.

Two conferences are scheduled so close together in time and space that Nora plans to commute between the venues. Sten accompanies her to the first stop. She reaches the second one alone, allegedly after a final argument. Albrecht has gone ahead and picks her up on the platform. They go straight to the hotel room. Champagne is chilling in an ice bath in the bathtub.

Nora likes to undress in hotel rooms. Even in this constellation she follows a well-worn route. Albrecht is two meters tall, a type reminiscent of Kretzsche Kretzschmar. He does not doubt the existence of aliens and reptiles. Only a few years ago in Vietnam, an underground jungle was discovered in a cave ten kilometers wide and forty stories high. The refuge contains a complete ecosystem with sandy riverbanks, its own clouds, semi-autonomous flora and fauna, and stalagmites up to eighty meters tall. Two karst craters provide sunlight. Fossilized bat guano serves as natural fertilizer. Researchers discovered amphibian species there as well as the Vu Quang antelope. The Sơn Đoòng cave lies in Phong Nha–Kẻ Bàng National Park near the border with Laos.

Albrecht has always drawn from abundance. His greatest coup was uncovering mafia structures in Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania. Colombian cartels had already used the GDR as a safe haven. Police seized tons of illegal goods, and Pablo Escobar's motto "plata o plomo" — silver or lead — made it into the top ten of the Ahrenshoop slogan competition. Respectable-looking drug dealers took up residence on the Baltic coast. Small, stout men appeared, waddling like penguins, displaying the mannerisms of sleepy mayors. They had themselves and their families guarded by British mercenaries. In a leisurely fashion they attempted to assassinate the Colombian justice minister Mónica de Greiff. A bounty of two million dollars had been placed on her head. Her life expectancy became the subject of a bet.

Nora should not believe that Albrecht holds anything against her. No one understands her better than Albrecht. They both come from Rostock. They grew up with stories about their parents' first trips to the West, still under the impression of not knowing "where Italy is." What shaped them was their parents' uprootedness and bitterness, and the feeling of having to uphold a banner of decency in opaque circumstances, based on an upbringing that emphasized collectivity. Added to this was an occasionally orgiastic eroticization of loss in tribalistic glorifications of a lost time.

Suddenly Nora feels a tremor. A disturbance in the elements strikes her as an urgent warning. Albrecht does not understand her agitation; he is completely certain of her love — just as she will be completely certain, barely two weeks later, that nothing between them can continue. Between the sentences "I'm following you, do you hear me?" and "We will not see each other again" there are, in the end, only ten days.

Nora suspects integrity only in the East. She considers the West a façade. She finds herself exceptionally honest; her being is pure, untouched innocence. At the same time, there exists the topos of betrayal of one's own origins.

From Nora's Notes

You saw it that way and allowed no other interpretation. You believed you had everything under control. I will tell you how you perceive yourself. I come from good stock, I have a good education, a good mind. I know everyone, and everyone knows me. I could have made more of myself as an athlete, but professionally I didn't give away a millimeter. All of that is true. But compared to superpower connections, it's no more than a smear on a windshield.

People like me lead two lives. On the one hand, we exist in society and present ourselves in such a way that some people think: why is she making herself so big? Most people miss this dimension entirely. They register the high status, the confident appearance, the good clothes. Either way, they are triggered by phonetic arrogance. They hear the appeals of standard language and unconsciously stand to attention. They are subordinates by birth. They never realize it. They die with a false sense of equality.

My other life takes place in a land of ghosts. A dream path — a songline — leads there, everything is prescribed to me. My freedom exhausts itself in an ecstatic joy of existence. I can reach a deep preliminary level of this plane at any time and experience myself in heightened form. That is a lot for a human being, but little compared to what is actually possible.

The ghosts, too, have a world. I say everything as simply as possible. I learned that from intermediaries: trainers, masseurs, physiotherapists, osteopaths, musicians, poets, lifeguards, gym supervisors, studio operators, and extreme athletes. They are media of power. From them, masters build batteries, the way computers are linked to collapse digital nerve centers. They generate a force they themselves never possess.

Some appear intellectually frail and spiritually threadbare. In some, a small light shines. One senses a happiness in a corner — something that has succeeded under bizarre circumstances. They do not understand their roles in the greater network. Every adept passes through a school whose teachers teach something they master very well, without knowing the larger discipline at all. They are blind, like oxen once chained to mill wheels. If you get too close, you perceive an unpleasant smell, as if one of their limbs had been constricted long ago and rotted in its bonds. It is possible that only I and other female servants of a master can perceive this stench. I am not sorry to say this.

You never had a chance. If Sten wants me to fall into the abyss of difference between your possibilities and his, he lets me experience bottomlessness. To you I appear insane, while in truth, switched to a level of lucidity incomprehensible to you, I am learning something new. Just as ants milk aphids in a defensive community for mutual benefit, so I am milked and protected by Sten. I live under an invisible covering. Men run against it as if against a transparent wall.

*

At the end, might she be more connected to Albrecht than to Sten? After all, Albrecht and she went through a Gothic-rave phase and a shared initiation by the sea. Albrecht was Nora's witness when she deviated from the main road onto mule tracks of secondary stimuli. In his presence, she built the first chambers for producing erotic echoes. He could ruin her at any time. His Nora archive is pure poison — and yet Nora is aroused by the thought that Albrecht guards compromising photos of her like the apple of his eye.

It is also a kind of addiction to keep bending down to Albrecht in thought and serving him with written provocations. After barely an hour away from her desk, Nora finds two dozen messages filled with bursting impatience.
(explicit message content omitted)

The Alphabet of Dominion

The Black Bar, the Gogol, the Dungeon. Nora wears a skirt and boots. A washed-up lover is about to lose his mind. Before the night is over, Sten will lift Nora's skirt. She likes it to happen already in the stairwell. Without a word, she presses a gun to the unfortunate man's chest: either you accept the situation, or I reduce its frame until there is no room for you in it.

Albrecht is blind with rage. Instead of asking Nora why she feels the need to appear with Sten at a site of their youthful love, he takes care of refreshments.

"What are you drinking?" he asks Sten. "I don't need to ask Nora."

Sten does not like the concern.
"It's okay," he says. "It's a shitty situation. Not just for you. But Nora really wanted it."

Eat bird or die.

Albrecht asks Nora for five minutes alone; she follows him. They stand facing each other at a safe distance.

"I will never give you up," Albrecht says.
"I know," she replies. In her black eyes glimmer hatred, mockery, and bottomless affection. "I know I have you around my neck."

Albrecht closes his eyes to let the pain arrive fully. He smokes a hole into his lung.

*

Nora appears like a fairy with an updo hairstyle.
She says in greeting: "If you want, I'll stay with you tonight."

Sherry in front of Kötter's kitchen tavern. Nora observes, "It's still very beautiful here."

On the way home she urinates in the courtyard of the Reifenberg company, to Albrecht's delight. In his apartment there are flowers in a borrowed wheat glass. A woman must have brought them. The thought gives Nora a stab. She resists the urge to interrogate Albrecht and count his ashtrays. She once pocketed one for him in a bar in Wismar. Sometimes they would simply drive off.

In a fruit bowl Nora gave him ten years ago, an avocado is rotting. Nora dislikes the stripes Albrecht theatrically painted across the walls. Albrecht puts a record on.

In the night her phone rings.

"You're not going to answer that now, are you?" Albrecht hopes, blinded.
"I have to," Nora says, bizarrely meek. She can cause such damage and yet feels so fragile.

In Sten's studio. His Finnish assistant is wearing a bolero-style outfit. Her handbag is printed with Japanese characters. Sten explains that she will one day be celebrated as a writing model. An admirer has founded a publishing house especially for her. He orders pizza. The delivery man calls him boss.
"Boss, where should I put it?"

Nora believes malicious gossip is trailing her. Sten withdraws into a quiet assembly hall and blows smoke rings on a lathe. After a pause dictated by propriety, Nora and Flora join him. Flora carries herself with the competent assurance of a dentist. Sten has the women's full attention, as if they were taking notes. Once, Nora raises an eyebrow suggestively.

Flora arranges Parmesan and olives and pours oil over the cheese. The small herd feeds according to the alphabet of dominion. Sten resides in Flora's bathrobe; Nora sits there, incredibly beautiful, in her slip. Flora fulfills her duties as hostess. Sten speaks.