On the Writing Leash
It was Elena's third day in Ahrenshoop, and thus the third day of her intoxicating affair with bestselling novelist and creative writing guru Marek Lorenz. For Elena, a married homicide detective from the small North Hessian town of Ederthal, the writing workshop Marek conducted in the former fishing and artists' village was meant to become a creative retreat illuminated by erotic heat lightning. A passionate act of adultery—for which she had never intended to risk either her orderly life or her marriage to the construction contractor Jörg. Elena believed she was acting of her own free will and within clearly defined limits.
In reality, she had been running along Marek's writing leash toward the writing line for quite some time.
How had Marek baited her? In his latest novel, The Ice Princess, he had woven into the story the traumatic fate of Elena's twin sister Aline, who had vanished into Frankfurt's drug underworld. The parallels were so subtle that Elena mistook them for a bizarre coincidence—and, like an addict, found herself seeking the company of the man who seemed, unknowingly, to possess a key to her past.
Or so it seemed.
While Marek slept on the sofa in his Ahrenshoop cottage, the illusion almost shattered. Between the pages of a cheap railway paperback Elena discovered handwritten notes. They resembled the protocol of an act of psychological anthropophagy.
Marek had been dissecting her.
The most intimate confessions she had made over the previous three nights had already been catalogued. His annotations appeared to outline a fatal accident for her husband. Marek would console the widow consumed by guilt. The genetic duplicate of her ruined sister Aline was, to him, merely the second draft of an experiment.
No.
That would have been too simple.
Elena remained blissfully unaware while Marek snored on. The dreadful ordinariness of the scene—the thread of saliva hanging from her lover's chin—suddenly transformed the adultery into something monstrous. She shivered. She wanted to leave immediately.
Then Marek woke.
One glance was enough to grasp the situation—and to restore it to the margins of his design.
Elena would not escape him now.
There was none of the groggy inertia of awakening about Marek. He was instantly alert, like one of the American Revolution's Minutemen.
The Minutemen were colonial militiamen required to be ready for combat "within a minute's notice." They slept in their boots, Kentucky rifles within arm's reach. Marek sprang upright as though he had merely been lying in ambush; a soldier of the written word, permanently deployed in a state of paranoid readiness. His wolfish eyes locked onto Elena. With faint embarrassment he wiped the saliva from his chin. The emotional storm raging inside his captive almost amused him.
An ordinary lover would have reached for Elena now, exploiting her longing to remain enchanted. Marek, however, neither wooed nor coaxed. Without transition he slipped into the director's role, orchestrating a tactical offensive. In time they would learn to sleep beside one another without being shaken by each other's vulnerabilities. Rome had not been built in a day.
With calculated force he pulled Elena toward him, expecting her compliance.
She had already resolved to commit adultery. She had prepared herself for it. He merely helped her carry out what she herself had prescribed—quite literally, since she had already written about it. In one of her workshop exercises she had experienced an epiphany. Once again, shame had arrested her hand. She longed to become explicit, to include every word she would never dare utter aloud, though those forbidden words lived within her all the same.
Her ambition, her optimism, and the transgenerational certainty that success was simply what one achieved—all entered into communion with Marek's sinister programme.
Already he was staking his claim to ownership so tangibly that Elena almost awoke from her delirium of love.
Almost.
"Just now, you packed your suitcase in your head, didn't you?" he observed in the calm, professorial tone with which he captivated the women attending his workshops. "The third day, Elena. That's the classic turning point of any narrative arc. The heroine finally understands what she's done, and the moral hangover begins."
His voice was as compelling as the man himself.
Elena thought of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Of Kurtz, the ivory trader who loses every moral compass in the Congolese jungle. There was jungle here as well—the Darß Forest.
"Yes," she admitted. "I wanted to leave."
"No," Marek replied quietly. "You wanted me to stop you. That's something entirely different."
She did not contradict him at once.
The hesitation frightened her.
Once, she had been able to arrange her thoughts like police regulations: numbered, systematic, dependable. Since meeting Marek, cause and effect had begun exchanging places.
"You're dangerous," she said at last.
"Of course. And yet you're still here."
"Perhaps because of that."
He nodded with quiet approval.
That irritated her.
She had the unsettling feeling of speaking to an editor revising not merely her manuscript, but her very character.
Marek rose and walked toward the window. Outside, a dramatic storm was gathering. Along the Baltic coast such spectacles were a dime a dozen. As theatrical devices they had become clichés—discount-store poetry.
"You know," he said without turning around, "people believe they have secrets. In reality, they only have patterns. Secrets would be original. Patterns merely repeat themselves."
Elena felt resistance rising inside her.
"And what pattern am I?"
Marek shrugged.
"I don't want to offend you. Sooner or later everyone has to choose. Either they remain material... or they begin telling themselves."
"You speak as though life were literature."
For the briefest instant Elena thought she detected a crack in his certainty.
Not compassion.
Not doubt.
Weariness, perhaps.
As though maintaining the role of superiority demanded more strength than he cared to admit.
The impression dissolved immediately—a mirage born of wishful thinking.
"You think you're seeing me differently now," Marek said with quiet condescension. It was as though he wished to demonstrate that he had no need to pretend. He could humiliate her and reduce her to a supplicant.
She had to fight back.
"You snore like an old sea dog, Marek. It takes a bit of the shine off the whole performance."
He remained unfazed.
"Reality always breaks through, Elena. That's precisely what makes art come alive. If we leave out the dirt, we produce kitsch. And you didn't come here to improve your production of kitsch. You came here to learn how to wield the knife."
He closed the distance again, allowing her to feel his physical strength. There it was again—that gap, the lofty critics would call it a gap in reception. Marek possessed not only supreme confidence; the sculpted relief of his torso looked as though it had been carved from stone.
"Tell me about Jörg," he whispered. "How does your builder react when the foundation begins to crack?"
For the first time she sensed the leash attached to her.
For now, Elena still mistook the bond for one of the conditions of writing. Master Marek demanded material. He exacted tribute. Her shame was his raw resource. She was expected to surrender Jörg to him.
His desire flowed effortlessly into her own. His thumb brushed across her breasts. Elena's breathing quickened. Marek leaned forward, his lips touching the curve of her breast through the lace. A quiet sound—half sigh, half laugh—escaped her as his tongue tasted the warmth his desire unfailingly awakened within her. Elena writhed with anticipation, her heart racing, her skin burning.
For the fourth time that day Marek entered her.
She searched his eyes, wanting him to see how deeply she longed for him.
Filled with desire and gratitude, she whispered,
"I belong to you."
Marek brushed a loose strand of hair from her face.
"I am your student with every breath, every word, every touch. Your voice shapes me. Your gaze lifts me."
Teaching and passion...
Elena yearned for a sacred initiation. Even in surrender she was ambitious. Silently she prayed,
"You are my anchor in this world. You are my hearth."
The lesson consisted of discipline, breath, stretching, exertion—and finally, stillness.
After training, Malia said to Alisa,
"I tried to hate you. It was exhausting."
Alisa smiled.
"Hatred is a form of attachment too."
Master Agravain motioned for the students to remain.
Alisa would have liked to tell him about her dream—a dream that was steadily crossing over into daylight, one that had long since ceased to be mere fantasy.
It happened because she wanted it to happen.
Barefoot, Alisa stood on the dew-soaked training ground, still drowsy as she received the day's first lesson. She felt the strength of the earth. Her soles connected her to the ground, and through it to the essence of life.
The floor is the beginner's best friend.
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