‘You'll have to look out for yourself. There are greedy envious people who'll just want to get money out of you and they won't give up easily. Be careful, be especially careful about your daughter.’
I feel quite ill at the thought of Napirai being drawn into anything.
‘It's not critical, but you'll have to be careful. Many people are envious of you and their number will grow.’
Her parting assurance that I shall soon get to know a wonderful man does nothing whatsoever to reassure me. I'm not interested in a man and I tell her brusquely:
‘Oh, drop it! I've no time for a relationship, least of all now when I'm traveling all the time and going on endlessly about my “old” love. A new love would hardly fit in very well. And when I get home I've got my daughter waiting for me.’
‘No, no, that's where you're wrong,’ she says excitedly.
‘My cards never lie. And anyway I don't mean “get to know”. You've known this man for ages. You could almost say he's standing outside your front door.’
That makes me laugh: ‘What? I don't know any man I could suddenly fall in love with.’
It's not a subject I'm interested in. I'd far rather hear more about the demonstrators. But she waves the topic away and says:
‘Just watch out, that's all, and it'll all be fine. You're doing the right thing.’
My time is up so I go home and talk it over with my mother, telling her to keep a close eye on Napirai.
Two days later I go off to Bern to do my second reading there. The bookshop is crowded out, and outside the door there are the same demonstrators. This time however, I decide not to get involved in some pointless conversation because I'd rather keep my strength for those people I want to give a little pleasure to. Despite everything it's a really enjoyable evening that goes on and on because lots of the listeners have questions and also want to discuss the demonstrators with me. It's late when I get back to the hotel and I'm looking forward to going home.
New Love
Napirai is with her grandmother the next night, as I've been invited out. My friend Hanni is cooking a Thai meal and has invited various people round. I'm back from Bern around midday and it seems ages until the evening. My child is out, I didn't sleep well and my thoughts keep coming back to the African women, irritated by not knowing what it is they really want. By three p.m. I can't stand sitting around the house any more and get into the car without knowing where I'm intending to go. I just have to get out of the house.
I'm beginning to realise I can't even go round to Hanni's today. Just thinking of sitting in a room again almost makes me claustrophobic. I ring her up and rather than going on about all sorts of things as I usually do, I tell her nothing more than the fact that I can't come. She's disappointed and asks why, but ridiculous as it sounds, I simply haven't got a reason for her. I hang up and drive aimlessly around. There are fat snowflakes falling, even though it's the beginning of March. I head for Rapperswil, more on autopilot than anything else, and then I remember Irene, the blond, lively woman I met at the reading. She and her husband and three children must live somewhere around here. She came to another reading and we swapped cards.
I pull in to the side of the road and have a look for her card. I don't know why exactly but I find it and ring her up. She's thrilled to hear from me and tells me how to get to her place. It's snowing really heavily when I arrive and instead of going inside for a cup of coffee I suggest we take a walk together. She's surprised but agrees. When she notices how wound up I am, she asks me what the matter is and I tell her about the African women. She thinks it's completely crazy too and says:
‘What? You? Insult the Masai! They can't have read your book or certainly not understood it! I know it almost off by heart and there's not the slightest trace of an insult. It's impossible. You're only describing the things that happened to you.’ She comes back to the topic angrily several times on our walk.
By now, however, it's got cold and the snow is blowing into our faces. We go back to her house and make a hot cup of tea. Then she invites me to stay for a raclette supper. But I'm not hungry and have to tell her with a laugh that that's the second invitation I've turned down in one day.
‘No, no, I'll go and have a glass of wine somewhere and then take myself off home. I'm just not myself today.’
Irene says in a friendly way that she'll come with me, and given that I don't know the area well, I ask her where she suggests we go. We set off in both cars. It's only seven p.m. but it's dark already and I can hardly make out the streets in the snowstorm. She leads me along a wiggly road through the forest and I begin doubting that I'm going to find anything out here to take my mind off things. Then suddenly we come upon an old farmhouse with a restaurant and bar. It's incredible. I'd never have found it on my own. We park outside and go in. At this time of night the bar is still empty but we sit down at one of the little tables and order drinks.
Irene is just telling me about something that happened recently when the door opens and a good-looking man walks in. In the low light all I notice at first are his shining eyes staring straight at me. I turn back to Irene to resume our conversation but a voice from behind me says:
‘I don't believe it! The famous Corinne! What on earth are you doing in this little backwater?’
Before I can even turn round I recognize the voice: Markus, my former school chum. I look him in the eyes and notice that although his hair has a few touches of gray he's lost none of his radiant charm or good looks.
I start to introduce him to Irene but they've met lots of times before in this bar. We peck each other on both cheeks and he congratulates me on the success of the book. I tell him I'm surprised to find him in an out of the way bar like this, so early in the evening. He explains he's been ill in bed for the last three days but because it was really getting on top of him being stuck inside, he took it into his head to come out for a drink. I ask him why he was so confrontational when he called in to speak to me on the TV phone-in six months ago.
‘Oh, forget it,’ he says. ‘It was more to do with me than you. And it's a long and not a pretty story, not one I want to get into tonight, now that I've bumped into you two.’
We chat about this and that and gradually the bar fills up until it gets so noisy we can hardly hear one another talk without putting our heads together. Listening to his good-natured, spontaneous conversation I feel strangely attracted to him. All of a sudden I'm glad I didn't go to Hanni's after all. Eventually I ask him what a married man is doing out on his own in a bar on a Saturday night. He looks serious for a few seconds and then lets his eyes fall to his glass of wine with a look of embarrassment:
‘I'm not actually married any more. That's just the way things go.’
Then he asks me if we want another drink. Irene says no, she'd better get back to her family. On the other hand I'm enjoying his company and have no intention of going home just yet. On the contrary I'm dying to know why this ‘Mr Perfect’ is no longer married. We decide to go somewhere not so noisy so we can talk more easily. I have to laugh when we stop and park outside another bar:
‘It looks like you know all the boozers around here.’
‘Well, that's just how it is when you're single. Although to be honest, I don't really go out all that much.’
We find stools at the bar and gradually start spilling out details of our life stories to one another. I listen carefully to him, interested to find that behind the happy-go-lucky sunny outer appearance there's another man, shy and sensitive. His story is incredibly sad, almost the exact opposite of what the other women told me when we met up at the school reunion. He tells it to me the way it was, without throwing any allegations about: how his life's ambitions at first gradually began to disintegrate, and then suddenly fell apart. He had a nervous breakdown in the end. The first indications had already been there at the school reunion four years ago but nobody noticed, we were all so in awe of him.