The Fragile Claim of Being Unique

Not a single word has been added to the table conversation for a spacious five minutes. An expectation fades on the palate. Alisa swallows her disappointment. The careless treatment of food reminds her of Peter, whom she assisted in a hotel kitchen on Usedom two summers ago.

Peter had seemed like a traveler to her. His spiritual superiority gave him the right, in his own mind, to despise the heavily overweight guests in the dining hall. Only old people came there; the hotel advertised barrier-free accommodations. Often they could no longer even make it to the beach. They were not much older than Alisa’s parents and yet already as good as dead.

Peter could cook, but preferred losing himself in volcanology and complicated astrological speculations that he approached mathematically. If a meal was sent back, he would “improve” it with magical curses and send it right back to the table. It worked almost every time.

Alisa and Peter were drawn into a current that led them to take ever greater risks. Turning worms into mush and serving mice (taken from traps in the storeroom) was not yet crossing the line. Peter spat into salad. Supposedly it was voodoo. Many empty plates reached the deep sink—the pre-rinse station—accompanied by warm expressions of gratitude.

“That old asshole couldn’t stop raving about it,” said Akim, flexibly and theatrically imitating a waiter.

He was a console-game addict from Braunschweig, attached to his hometown to the point of sentimentality—unless he felt insulted by Germans. Then he switched roles and spoke as a strategist of jihad.

“The split goes right through him,” Peter diagnosed.

Peter sought extremes—fire and snow. He called volcanoes nature’s blast furnaces. His photographs of erupting and raining slag were good. He posted them on Facebook.

Too late, Alisa realized that he could hold on to nothing. That everything slipped away from him. By then she had already become involved with him. Everyone brought their own stunt. Everyone had a trick and a mechanism of love. Alisa associated island flings and summer romances with a particular tone. A shift in perception was the first sign of falling in love. She declared a song to be their favorite song and felt a small misfortune when Peter still did not know her favorite flavor of ice cream.

There had to be a place on the beach that both of them could agree was especially beautiful.

Alisa tolerated neither distortions of her name nor cutesy diminutives. She demanded respect. She had mastered the repertoire of kitchen assistants and chambermaids. She knew the servant quarters intended for the far-sighted employers.

Peter knew these little pearl chambers as well, where Eastern European women without residence permits existed in near concealment. He circumvented Alisa’s defenses. He patrolled her borders.

Alisa danced to the summons of a drum on the beach of Usedom. People moved with increasing expressiveness. They looked like the last hippies and lived that way too. But their commune was a right-wing project for which one had to apply in writing and bring along a useful profession.

Alisa tells this to Virgil (English pronunciation) during the germination period of their love. Although under the compulsion of attraction, the undeclared couple cannot yet, after two days, claim a shared night together.

Alisa’s charm explodes like the Serengeti in spring. Virgil’s hand on her knee is enough to bring sensations bordering on fainting. He pronounces her name more beautifully than any man before him. When he addresses her directly, she gets goosebumps from that alone. No doubt remains: he is the one God created for her.

For that reason alone, measured behavior is no longer appropriate. Alisa wonders how long the tension can be sustained before the last string of propriety snaps and they must, one way or another, ignore the rules of the game.

An hour later she relaxes for the first time in Virgil’s arms. He has tasted the dew of her desire, caressed her buds, and transformed her from head to toe into a single erogenous zone.

Virgil had been enchanted in the Laotian jungle by the dagger-dance séances of Hmong warriors. The Hmong, an ethnic minority with a strong desire for independence, fought in the Vietnam War under the direction of U.S. advisers and with the support of pilots who officially held no military rank in regular armed forces. The advisers and pilots operated like freebooters and lived in a jungle city that appeared on no civilian map. They lived beyond the moon and did whatever they pleased there. They attacked the North Vietnamese supply route that passed through Laos—the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The Hmong fight ritually with two long daggers. In their exercises they achieve ecstatic states. The techniques appear brilliant while being nothing other than dangerous. Virgil teaches Alisa the basics. She resisted learning such things for a long time. Her energetic nature is governed by a pacifist reluctance toward violence. Virgil sees it differently.

“Human beings were not created to be workers. There were no masters and no money in the gallery forests and savannas that we find pleasant. Take a child into nature and you will recognize how fulfilled it is by the manifestations of the primordial. We are hunters, and what we most enjoy is hunting with endurance and intelligence.”

Alisa and Virgil train on a geological belch—a basalt scree slope. For years the area has been left to itself as part of a renaturalization project. Storm damage defines its appearance. Fallen and uprooted trunks form tangles in which fox and hare bid each other goodnight.

After training, Alisa leads her beloved through a labyrinth of fir trees to the ruins above the Ax Gorge. Two castles once stood on the heights of a mountain. Three families sharing a common origin—two of which we still know, the Wolfens and the Groppes—represented the interests of Mainz until Henry I of Hesse disarmed them and razed their residences in the thirteenth century.

This was done with such force that a legend spread of a titanic deed. Once again a Hessian giant was said to have been seen accomplishing something marvelously great. Yet the chroniclers considered the matter itself rather banal. Else von Groppe, née von Salzmannshausen, had an affair with the lord of the castle opposite. This enraged her husband so much that he brought about his own ruin. Secretly, the follower of Mainz opened a breach in his own castle and invited the Hessian to devastate it.

Alisa stops.

“Here,” she says softly.

She slips off her shirt and steps out of her shorts. Virgil embraces Alisa, opens her bra, and turns his attention to her breasts. He kisses her nipples and stimulates them with his tongue. The tongue wanders farther, past her navel to the center of her being.

Alisa’s tireless affection gives Virgil a new home in the world. Have I already mentioned that he is an heir of the House of Omri?

The House of Omri was the Kingdom of Israel in the north. After its destruction, youthful free spirits—today counted among the Lost Tribes—migrated to Opis because of its unrestrained nightlife. People took drugs openly in the streets, fired guns in saloons, covered themselves in tattoos, and indulged in an oriental variety of proto-communism.

Opis lay on the Tigris near present-day Baghdad. From there the activists moved on to Babylon. After the first Babylonian conquest of Judah (587 years before the events in a stable at Bethlehem), Nebuchadnezzar II deported the elite of Jerusalem to his capital on the Euphrates. Thus began the Jewish diaspora.

For a thousand years it fertilized Mesopotamia before Islam had even begun. Until a mass emigration around the time of the founding of the State of Israel, Jews in Iraq preserved the memory of a Golden Age. Eight hundred years after the most famous decree of Emperor Augustus, Baghdad was founded as the capital of the Caliphate.

The Iraqi Jews who settled in Shanghai after 1842 were called Baghdad Jews.

To be continued.