So here, on the cold stairs, a former foreign correspondence clerk and business translator and part-time pianist from the formerly big bad wild city, holds her head in her hands and blubbers. She knows, in how many languages one can plead and in what tones, she knows many of them, but she should also know that tones are no use if there's someone who doesn't want to hear and feel or has no receiver for them, not even in a dental filling with detector capabilities. This woman simply cannot be understood. That's the way it is. It's all no use. The question, which we have meanwhile almost forgotten, although it's often been asked, goes: Why is the door to the apartment suddenly shut, locked from inside, just where the key is in the lock? And why doesn't the spare key open it up? Because you can't get it in? No. Because it's outside the house under the door mat, where we can't get at it. Anyway, it wouldn't open up at all if a colleague is sticking in the lock on the other side. Can't it be put more simply? Well, I can't do it. And why is the woman still waiting and has now forced her body to wait with her? For whom is she doing it? Let us free the body from its constraints and let us be quite frank ourselves: Of course I understand, that the beloved man can't go home to where his wife is with the girl, after all I've read enough novels about that and similar unpleasant matters. Please, come and visit me and bring me something nice, that's what I said to him, almost cheeky, wasn't I?, after he had examined my documents on the country road, as if he had personally picked up copies of the laws and brought them with him, in order to throw the book at people. It was all as if carved in stone. He had thought for a long time beneath his crash helmet. As far as I was concerned he could right away have taken a cane in one hand and my ass in the other, because I really had behaved very badly on the road, it's true (disregarded right of way of the country road, but really nothing came along, from any direction, and the one who did come I didn't even glance at). The country policeman hesitated, stared at me as if his eyes were halters, oh yes, that's how a relationship begins, even if only to one's own body, but which one didn't have beforehand either. And then he gripped my arm, he gripped me by the arm. In an intense conversation with me he absent-mindedly held my upper arm with one hand. But then I was already waiting for the other hand, so please, when is it finally going to come? So I said, what can you bring me, when you come to visit me, that is above all, you! Yes, always remain yourself. I think you're good the way you are. You are the man of my dreams. Tall, strong, blond, blue-eyed and you look like a Viking, only a little smaller. You have a powerful erotic effect on me. In addition you are the tower of strength I have always longed for, exactly, that's what it says here and as far as I'm concerned it can stay. How lucky that I picked you up on the road first of all, then accepted my punishment, and, already with a firm date with you, on the spot, where I stood with lowered eyes, which were right below my modern short haircut in Caucasian blonde, so already with a date arranged, met you again in an outdoor restaurant in the county town, quite by chance as far as the other customers were concerned and so also found you at last, for my part forever. So, I catch my breath a little, now I want to decide my price per cubic meter. It's to be expected that I set the tone, after all I've seen almost the whole world and understood most of it, too. But I didn't expect that you would pay no attention at all to my tones. You brought a measuring tape with you, what's that for? It's high time to mark out the remaining space, it's the space that I need before your ass can touch my oak trunk (the bed is made of that precisely without any use of iron the healthiest thing possible and brand new and no nails!) for the first time. Why don't you follow me? Further occasions are to follow, until I start feeling better. One last spark of reason has stayed with me, now it arouses my anger, a smoldering fire develops, which eats away my views and opinions at breakneck speed. I know, I know, I should keep up with all the fresh cut flower girls, this year's harvest, hardly out of their leading strings, but I can't do it. You're already a grandfather. Valentine's Day is already definitely past for this year, on which you didn't bring me any flowers. Perhaps there's nothing like experience? Well, perhaps like mine. When it comes to women any amount of experience can in five minutes effortlessly be canceled out by youth. Yet you're not so young yourself anymore. On the other hand: If I want something, a whole peace studies research institute could not get me out of a war with myself, which I would start immediately. I can fight, bloody hell, are you talking to me, then you'll soon see. I shouldn't love him, this man, but I do. So time passes. It's the bloody truth. No letter, no postcard, no phone call, no divorce, no decision at all, no engagement, there's nothing without him, only the naked, grinning nothingness of death, and that comes ever closer instead of keeping its distance. But I still have a lot of time, perhaps the best of times. Statistically speaking at my age the safe distance from death is 38 years or perhaps a little less. I beg to be allowed to write to him, but his wife has never seen a letter which someone might have written to him except the bank. His wife, suspicious that some repayment date had been missed again, would immediately tear open the letter and disembowel it. And if I press him, then he just goes, he really did go once before, that is, he knows how to play the game. Disillusionment will come to me and stay. I want to come myself a few times before that and go again, in order to make things cozy once again where I am. Now more than ever. So who am I?