On the plane from Amsterdam to Zurich, a large, angry-looking man is already sitting in the row in front of us. First one, then the other of the seats in his row are filled by men who have suitcases. But he has put some flowers in the overhead bin... Twice he explodes with rage at these fools who have the temerity to put suitcases next to, in front of, his flowers; he gets up and throws their bags to the floor, pulls out his flowers, snarls in a mixture of English and Dutch how many years he has flown; finally the conciliatory stewardesses take the flowers to put them elsewhere.
Through all this, I and the delicately beautiful young woman in my row, in a stylish summer dress and dark red high heels – Spanish, Israeli? – something like that – glance at each other cautiously, eyebrows raised, startled, amused, wary of the explosion two feet away. She unwraps an expensive slim chocolate bar, and a small parchment card falls out; she reads it. The man subsides, and when all is quiet, she leans over and shows me the card: ‘Gracefully I embrace all lessons in my life’.
I can't help it – one bark of laughter. No one notices; she smiles with me, laughs quietly. And we relax as the plane rises...
•••
I show her this when it is written, and we talk; she is Turkish, but has grown up in the Netherlands. We talk about family, food, the places we’ve traveled, for two hours…
Oh, and her shoes. They are indeed very, very classy.
•••
The train from Zürich airport into the city has a number of people, no air conditioning – a generally fairly sweaty atmosphere. But there is a sense of, not misery or dirtiness, but just a certain intense and unproblematic physicality. The Swiss in summer; the young ones athletic or casual, the older often assertive walkers...
A change in the sense of what the body is, how it is supposed to be: especially given how difficult mine has been for the past week (hives at stress, peeling, embarrassment), I become oddly reassured: being pretty doesn't really matter. The body is physical, erotic, even when it is sweaty: my whole sense of bodies changes. It feels very central European – not the self-consciousness of Latin Europe, but the unquestioned animality of Germanic Europe, when the sun is high.
I think of Ralf König's quote of Westenhagen:
Tiere sind wir,
wir still'n uns're Gier,
süsser Gestank,
vor Geilheit ganz krank,
aber lieben werd'ich dich nie.
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