Summer Lies (13 page)

My neighbor laughed softly. “People keep recognizing me and I keep denying it. And now I wanted to take the bull by the horns, but there’s no bull.” He laughed again and introduced himself. “Werner Menzel. I hope we have a good flight!”

Over drinks we exchanged empty pleasantries, over dinner we watched different movies. Nothing prepared me for him to turn to me as the cabin lights were dimmed: “Are you very tired? I know I have no right to burden you, but if I may tell you my story—it won’t take long.” He stopped, laughed again softly. “No, it will actually take long, but I’d really appreciate it. You know, up to now it’s been the media telling my story. But that wasn’t my story, it was theirs. My story doesn’t exist yet. I have to learn how to tell it. What better way could there be than to tell it to someone who hasn’t heard any part of it, a stranger in the night.”

I’m not one of those people who find it impossible to sleep in planes. But I didn’t want to be unfriendly. Besides which there was something in the way he said “stranger in the night,” some ironic tenderness, that moved and seduced me.

“The story starts back before the Iraq War. I had a job in the Ministry of Trade and was invited to join a circle of young colleagues from the Ministry of the Interior, the Foreign Ministry, and the university. A reading and discussion group—the salon was back in fashion in Berlin at the time. We met every four weeks at eight in the evening, had discussions, emptied several bottles of wine, and at eleven we were often joined by our girlfriends on their way back from work, a concert, or the theater, to make fun of our bookishness and enjoy the last moments of our conversations. It was often the most lively right at the end.

“Sometimes our diplomats invited us to their receptions, not the important ones, but the one with foreign poets or artists. To begin with my girlfriend and I stuck with the people we already knew. Then we realized that other people were glad if we started talking to them. Naturally there were some who were too important for us to be interesting to them, and others who just behaved that way. But they were exceptions. I would never have thought it—you can really have fun at a reception.

“I should have noticed—I noticed that the attaché from the Kuwaiti Embassy was flirting with my girlfriend. Should I have taken that as a reason to avoid contact? He was a playful flirt, he was more admiring of her beauty than seriously courting her. That’s the way I flirt too if a woman attracts me—letting her know she’s attractive rather than trying to get her. My girlfriend flirted back; she was not really encouraging him, just showing that she enjoyed his compliments.”

While he was talking he had propped his elbow on the armrest, but now he leaned back.

“She was incredibly beautiful. I was in love with her blond hair! Its pale and dark streaks, the way it fell onto her shoulders in waves, the way it lit her face with its own glow. ‘My angel,’ I kept wanting to say, ‘my angel.’ And her figure!” I heard him laugh again softly. “You know how self-hating women can be about their own bodies. Perhaps her calves were a little plump, but I liked them. They anchored her blond beauty. They went with the fact that her grandfather was a farmer and her father was a railroad guy and she was a very hands-on doctor. I also liked it that by a quirk of nature the space between her nose and her upper lip was a little short, which often made her mouth open just a fraction. It gave her this bewitchingly charming expression, like a child dazzled by the world. But when she was concentrating and her lips were closed, her face showed the
strength of her determination. Oh, and the way she walked—do you know the song ‘Elle ne marche pas, elle danse’?” He hummed the melody quietly.

“We shouldn’t have accepted the attaché’s invitation. But my girlfriend loved foreign travel, and I, who don’t like traveling … Crazy, isn’t it? I don’t like to travel, would have preferred not to travel back then, and because I did travel, now I have to travel to save my life. So I thought I owed it to her to make the trip, and was pleased that at least we weren’t going to be stupid tourists, but would have a local partner and a place to stay. No one had given us any warnings, and why should they? We accepted the invitation and flew at Easter.

“We stayed in a hotel, not in the grounds where the attaché and his clan had their houses and courtyards and gardens. I thought it was already enough that he was looking after us. We were always going somewhere with him, and often his brothers and his friends. We drove into the desert, to the oil fields, and went out to sea with fishermen, we visited the university and the parliament and gambled and won at the camel races. It wasn’t an adventure, it was a rich people’s holiday; the infrastructure is like Florida’s, the restaurants have French cooks, picnics are served at picnic tables with tablecloths, porcelain, and silver, and we were driven around in large chauffeured cars. It was impressive. But I was glad when we were back in the evenings in our suite. Or when we sat out on the balcony in the mornings and watched the sunrise. Whether on the Mediterranean or the North Sea, we had often watched the sun sink into the water, but we had never seen it come rising out of it.”

He put his hand on my arm. “You’re very patient. Shall we have a glass of red wine? You had the Bordeaux, but the Russian River Valley Pinot Noir is better.” He didn’t wait for my answer but pressed the call button and persuaded the stewardess to leave us with the whole bottle. He sounded cheerful, as if the memories and the story had animated him.

“One morning they couldn’t collect us, and we wanted to take a taxi. At the entrance to the driveway we were hailed by two men who had been having breakfast at the next table and with whom we had exchanged newspapers. Could they give us a lift into the city? We got in, my girlfriend in front, me behind, and set off; at a red light the driver asked me please to jump out and drop a letter in the mailbox. Why me, you will ask, why didn’t he ask the other man or get out himself? The other man limped, as I’d immediately noticed, and the driver was on the left and the mailbox on the right; I could almost have reached out the window and dropped the letter in. So I got out, and the light turned green, and the car drove off. There was a lot of traffic; I thought, the driver doesn’t want to hold things up, he’ll drive around the block and come right back.”

He stopped, and switched off the little lights in the ceiling that shone down on his seat and mine. Did he want me not to see his pain? I said nothing, gripped his hand, and squeezed it briefly.

“Yes, he didn’t come back. I stood there and after half an hour I called the attaché. He phoned the minister and the minister immediately called out the police and blocked off the
roads and increased security at the airport and alerted the coast guard. I was taken to police headquarters and shown hundreds of photographs. I didn’t recognize either of the men. The German ambassador and his wife picked me up and took me to their official residence; they didn’t want me to be alone in the circumstances. Everyone was alert and friendly and protective.

“The first night I didn’t sleep. But a new day brings new courage, and I was full of hope as I got out of bed. I got out of bed full of hope on the next days, too. Until I had to admit to myself how bad things looked. The ambassador told me what he knew about the white slave trade in the Near East. When I was back in Germany I read everything on it I could find. In earlier times there were trading centers or markets, if you will, where the abducted women were sold and where you could try to buy yours back at auction. Today the women are secretly videoed, interested parties look at these on the Internet and make offers and order the women online, and only then are the women abducted. If her husband or boyfriend or the police notice, all traces are erased.

“What happens to the women, you’ll ask. We’re talking about top-grade women and top prices. If the women go along, they’re treated well. If they don’t go along, they change hands several times and end up in a whorehouse in Mombasa.”

I tried to put myself in his place. How does one mourn a beloved woman for whom one can only hope that she feels fine in someone else’s arms? Whom one can get back only when even a drunken sailor in Mombasa no longer wants her? How long does one mourn? How long does one wait?

“A year later the Iraq War started. I didn’t think it had anything to do with me or vice versa. But in Kuwait the rich families panicked and moved out, to Los Angeles or Cannes or Geneva or wherever they had houses.

“She got away from him in Geneva. She climbed out a window, clambered over a fence, stopped a car on the street, and called me immediately, using the driver’s phone. I caught the next plane. Because she was afraid they could search for her and find her, she didn’t want to be alone, and the driver, a student, took her to the reading room at the university library. She sat there till I came.

“Do you know the University Library in Geneva? A magnificent building with a reading room that looks like something out of a turn-of-the-century picture book. She was sitting in the middle of the first row, conspicuously dressed, made up, perfumed. As I arrived at her table, she held her head down. I touched her arm and she looked up and screamed. Then she recognized me.”

The pilot announced from the cockpit that there was turbulence ahead and told us to fasten our seat belts and pull them tight. The stewardesses went down the rows, checking to see that the pilot’s instructions were being followed, waking sleeping passengers whose blankets were covering their seat belts and collecting glasses.

My seatmate stopped talking and watched what was going on. “They’re serious. I’ve never seen the stewardesses wake passengers in first class.” He looked at me. “Do you feel afraid when things get dangerous on a flight? Or do you believe in
God? Who will not let you fall without catching you? I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in God and I don’t know if I still believe in justice and truth. I used to think that people who don’t have long to live tell the truth. But perhaps people who don’t have long to live are the worst liars. If they don’t play to the gallery now, then when? Truth … what is truth without a judge to sign and seal it? And what is a lie when he does? What is truth if it’s just wandering through people’s heads and authoritative corroboration?” Again he laughed his quick, soft laugh. “Forgive me, I’m a bit addled. I get afraid when flying turns dangerous, and what’s happening right now spells danger. But I must stop talking like Pontius Pilate or Raskolnikov, otherwise you’ll be asking yourself why you have to listen to me.”

Then it was as if a large hand seized the plane to play with it. It shook it, dropped it, caught it again, then dropped it again. The seat belt held my body but my insides felt as if they’d lost their place; I put my hands on my stomach to hold them tight. On the other side of the aisle a woman vomited, in front of me a man called for help, and behind me pieces of luggage came crashing down. Only when the plane resumed its peaceful flight did fear strike, not just fear of what had happened but fear of what might still be to come. It wasn’t over yet. The plane dropped again and gravity exerted its pull again on the body and its organs.

“That’s just how it was when we were together again. We were shaken and torn. It was like a poison. Sometimes everything went along calmly, but we didn’t trust each other. We eyed
each other suspiciously till one of us couldn’t take it anymore, then things would get cold and cutting and loud and rough.”

He was talking again? What was he talking about?

“You were shaken and torn. By what?”

“That’s how it felt. Like the storm that’s shaking our plane. A force that’s more powerful than we are. We fell into each other’s arms in the reading room and I held her in my arms all night that first night and the nights that followed, and we moved in together, which we hadn’t trusted ourselves sufficiently to do before, and we thought everything would be fine. But she didn’t want to make love with me, and at first I thought, she’s traumatized, like after a rape, and needs time and tenderness and being cared for, but then I asked myself, does she still love me? Had a piece of her heart stayed with the attaché? Had things finally been not so bad with him?”

“With the attaché?”

“Yes, he was the one who had her abducted.”

“The attaché? Has he been sentenced?”

“She needed a temporary identity card to be able to fly from Geneva to Berlin, and we drove to the German ambassador in Bern and told him the whole thing. He spoke to the Swiss police, who said we should talk to the German police in Germany. The German police said they could only turn to the Swiss police. Nobody wanted political trouble with Kuwait. We could have gone to the media; after an article in
Bild
and an interview in
Stern
maybe the police and the Foreign Office would have done something. But we didn’t want to hand ourselves over to the media.”

“You suspected your girlfriend although she …”

“Although she ran away?” He nodded several times. “I understand your question. I’ve kept asking myself the same thing. But being overpowered and abducted and used can have
its own sexual attraction, for women as for men. She had flirted with him and he with her. She didn’t want to spend her life in his harem so she had to escape. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t have the sexual experience of her life with him. And her refusing to sleep with me and my suspecting her wasn’t the whole thing, either. She suspected me too. I had put her in danger by going to Kuwait, and I hadn’t done all I could have done after she was abducted.”

The cabin lights came on, and the stewardesses took care of the vomit on the other side of the aisle, the whimpering passenger in front of me, and the fallen luggage behind. My seatmate kept talking, but I was concentrating on the rumble of the engines, which didn’t sound right, and was no longer listening to him. Till I heard him say:

“But she was dead.”

“Dead?”

“It was only two floors up, and I thought she’d broken something, her legs or an arm. But she was dead. She landed on her head.”