Alisa nestles against Virgil, who breathes in rhythm with her. The two merge in a wave of Qi. As this happens, Virgil stimulates Alisa’s peaks. Her buds rejoice in the fine dust of desire.

For centuries, the Klingenbach floodplain offered opportunities to spot wildcats. The rooted, eccentrically domed raised bog continues to grow. It has its own climate, known among the people of Ederthal as the “good bog air.” Its losses are the gains of the Klingenbach, which, after joining the Losse, drains into the Eder. There is hardly a word here that does not invoke at least a thousand years of history through a name. Loss and Klingen are landscape terms. Ravines, ruins, and people bear these names—among them descendants of the old Elmar von Loss and Bieber, even under variant spellings.

Emperor Barbarossa crossed the area near Ederthal with the intention of elevating the bishops of his favorite city, Würzburg, to Dukes of Franconia. Yet Würzburg’s first bishop had been the Irishman Kilian. During his pilgrimage for Christ, he and his companions reached the Eder near Ederthal and baptized countless devils in human form, along with earthbound souls clinging to their hosts.

For whom did they baptize? Germans of every conceivable tribe who had become Franks.

Alisa Narrates

Retro Chic in Ederthal — For the past few months, the conspirators have had a new hangout. At the Heaven & Hell Bar, people sit at kidney-shaped tables. The wallpaper displays South Sea motifs that somehow also conjure up Fiddler on the Roof. The decorative arts merge Gauguin with Chagall according to an extremely obsolete concept of décor.

The atmosphere stimulates the academic staff of Landgrave Philip University, who still form cliques in the taverns near campus as they always have. No one notices the transgenerational redundancy. At the bar stands a prominent representative of the clan that has supplied Ederthal’s mayor for decades—now, and already in the third generation, the mayoress. Ansgar Gerster is an uncle of the current mayor, Atlanta Gerster-Mansfeld.

Expert to his fingertips in every aspect of his trade, shrewd, jovial, energetic, the wholesale meat merchant is pursuing, of all people, an increased interest from me.

I am a child of this region, born and raised in Ederthal. My mother and Ansgar are the same age. At the moment he is telling me how, in the glorious days of the Cold War, he flew from Berlin-Schönefeld to Burgas in Bulgaria aboard an Ilyushin-18 to relax and conduct a little reconnaissance.

The Riviera of East German citizens lay on the Black Sea. Ansgar explored the Bulgarian-Greek border region. In the Turkish territories he surveyed the situation. They tortured him with slices of melon and rakı. Mixed with water, the anise-flavored spirit becomes aslan sütü—“lion’s milk”—floating across the palate. Ansgar drifted into a moon-struck state and forgot his mission entirely in a drunken haze beneath awnings.

His informant looked like a scarecrow. The old goblin invited Ansgar to the slaughter of a ram. The animal bled out on a Bulgarian mountain pasture.

Ansgar met a Dane named Lars, a magnificently battered figure who seemed to have stepped out of the days of the Danish West Indies. Lars played the role of a shipwrecked captain burdened with terrible cargo-hold secrets. To the tune of Bella Ciao he served kebapcheta and kyufteta. Kyufteta are meatballs—originally boulettes, as Berliners in Brandenburg call the French culinary import from military field kitchens.

To aid digestion, a pear brandy made from Pyrus communis appeared on the table. Suddenly three young women arrived. They wore headscarves and were married.

Hours later the group traveled in a Trabant through mud to the women’s village. Against the night sky, oil derricks stood like the skeletons of prehistoric reptiles. Before returning to the confines of domestic life, the women wanted a little more giggling and flirting. Lars failed to understand the subtleties of the game and became overly forward. Ansgar corrected him with a fist.

“The night ended at ten in the morning,” Ansgar says comfortably.

He mistakes my endurance. I am not standing here because of him and his stale stories. I am waiting for you.

And at last you arrive, scarcely late, although only yesterday, on another continent, you managed the feat of turning my sorrow over your absence into desire. The sky through which you soon flew toward me afterward seemed nothing more than a divine trifle.

I fly into your arms. You spin me around. I give you time to reach the goals of your longing in my eyes. In yours I see a fire that must be extinguished immediately.

“Do you still have something to do here?” you ask.

Even in this role you command an entire register of variations. You can conquer and adore at the same time. Oh, how I love these transitions between professional discussion, training, and erotic expansions of horizons—experiences I never have to forgo because you are so desperately attracted to me.

I was born in one of your dreams. I exceed your expectations and confound your sense of reality. I appear to you exactly as you recognize me. I allow you everything in exchange for the miracle that I may be for you. And naturally, you allow me everything in exchange for the miracle that you may be for me.

I could never do this with a man lacking a sense for the poetry of mutual devotion.

We cross the campus. The lights are just going out in the Forster Pavilion. The garden behind it is enchanted at this hour—a quiet refuge from the bustle in front of the university, founded in the Middle Ages as a fortified college for knights.

Why not there? I ask with a glance.

It is not merely desire, love, or sheer delight in the body. It is friendship, admiration, steadfast alliance, and the urgent need to be taken by you without preamble.

You are my fulfilled longing. In your eyes I meet you once again. You and I allow ourselves to be miracles for one another. We are devoted to one another. That is our poetry.

No, you do not say it when I have aroused you so intensely that you can barely endure it. But your body knows no restraint. I know your mechanics of movement almost as intimately as an MRI scan. I encounter you in your most original condition—a being genetically attuned to me, flank vibrating. The determination visible in your eyes will not resist for much longer. Then your gaze clouds over, and you begin to call for me with the voice of the autonomic self, not exactly silently.

I soften the climax and watch as a socially acceptable self once more takes command. We turn. You are above me now and take the initiative.

The Night of Yucatán — Virgil Narrates

Humanity survived the night of Yucatán as a mouse beneath the earth. It trembled in cave passages. It had come that far because, as prey, it appeared insignificant to the dinosaurs according to a simple calculation of cost and benefit.

As so often, evolution pressed the reset button after catastrophe, and a diminished variant prevailed. Thus came the triumph of the gram over the ton.

Sometimes Alisa and I drive to Frankfurt to contemplate a district with all the charm of a dented pizza box. We eat in a snack bar where the television is always on and bread is served unasked in astonishingly shabby plastic bowls. No matter what you order, tea comes with it.

I lived in the neighborhood for a while. Alisa and I love cuddling in a small theater in the Gutleut district and losing ourselves in the labyrinths of wildly eccentric productions. When it becomes too absurd, we retreat behind the curtain of our love.

I am happier than I have ever been. It is almost painful.

Today Alisa and I are eating at Tiago’s. Tiago runs a former Nature Friends lodge styled like a fisherman’s tavern. The maritime junk decorating the place is inherited clutter from a descendant of seafarers. Tiago attracts Portuguese people from between Kassel and Giessen.

Immigrants who were once clearly separated from the majority society have shed almost all markers of difference. They have dissolved into the broader public without becoming German. In Tiago’s restaurant everyone gnaws at the root, regardless of where they, their fathers, or grandfathers stood when the Carnation Revolution of 1974 strengthened left-wing hopes.

Alisa’s surname is Hagestolz. She does not know its meaning. An enclosure may also be called a Vride or a Hag. Through several turns of semantic change, one arrives at both the Burgfried (castle tower) and Hagestolz.

Within Hagestolz lies a designation for an heir who descended from an important man but inherited only his name. From this emerged the meaning of an aging, confirmed bachelor. Even if the bachelor pursued a respectable profession, his refusal to father children rendered him suspicious. He was described—and marked—as eccentric. The community overlooked such a figure.

This, too, fits the dimensions of the Hag. The word increasingly came to denote something small and remote. One still finds Hagbauer as a family name in the telephone directory. A Hagbauer was the smallholder among farmers. The rose hip, too, belongs to the Hag in its second sense: to prick and to thrust. Yet the first meaning also leads to to nurture and to tend. A contradiction unites pricking and nurturing within the hedge itself, which both excludes and protects, bringing the meanings together once more in an act of defense and preservation.