POSTSCRIPT

The anguish for days and weeks before I told Reinhard makes it all the harder to keep my promise to him that I would never communicate with Martin again. He usually sends me his latest painting, or rather my parents. He did once send one to our house - I don't know how he got the address but it was probably through another German girl who rang my mother asking for my address, saying she knew me from Munster. Reinhard replied saying he was stuck on a ring road on the outskirts of a city. It's true. We are like two planetary bodies circling one another, never meeting but impelling each other all the same, driving ourselves along a path. I always knew it would be like that with Martin. A permanent if remote link. There was the feeling - the overwhelming feeling - of deja vu with that first long kiss, I looked at his face against a backdrop of stars and he was already another planet or star and there was the deep shock of knowing him. Perhaps we have helped each other many times before, but I did know when my teacher had come.

It is the last day of the year today, I always think about that first unrequited love of mine, the gypsy. I don't know why it is that the traveller has such a fascination for woman, perhaps it is his experience we are seeking, or simply a reminder that he is for her largely unknown, and the unknown is the fatal attraction.

With Reinhard it is the predictability and dependability that I have settled for. In Germany we have had too much change, we all crave stability and would sacrifice almost everything for it. We have had enough for now of high-flying idealism, the ideals always seem to crash to earth and I wonder if we can ever soar again with the weight of all those crimes weighing down on us. We have tried to bury them out of sight and mind but they won't go away, perhaps there will be another war quite soon. That would leave the whole of Europe a smoking contaminated ruin, not just Germany. There is something in us that looks forward to this frozen, snow-covered landscape. Our beloved woods in winter perhaps, offering a fastness against the invader, the Romans, the Huns, the Mongols, even the Russians. They have never fully penetrated the Teutonic woods where those fairy tales promise we will discover our souls.

I was telling you about the gypsy. Today I made a pilgrimage back to that spot I last saw when I was 17, when he had persuaded me to leave the warm house and go out in wind and rain to make love. We walked, I remember, past a paper mill and a farm. Across a field, over a stream twice, there was a pig in the field with some piglets crowded underneath her nuzzling at her teats. The gypsy threw his oilskin on the ground, in a small fold between two trees, there were early daffodils already about to bloom. It was very cold, your breath raised a cloud of condensation, but I let him tug at my tights to lower them down below my knees and he raised my jersey to kiss my breasts. It was hot and cold. I was threshing about on the ground while he tried to get into me but he could not, partly because I could not open my legs wide enough with the tights still around my legs. Yet just to feel him at the entrance to me was delicious. I was astonished someone could want me that much. We moved together till he came, we walked back up the lane past the church which had seemed to impart its blessing. It was an easy laughing walk back up the hill, the two opposites had been reconciled, we were ready for the new year and knew that freedom is what we really seek, freedom from stricture, the lure of the open country and yet everywhere the country is divided and curtained off. If a person becomes free he or she is liable to excite extreme envy.

And I am searching for this spot as the new year comes again. It is twlight and the green of the wet grass, the purple blue of the darkening sky, are so rich and intense it is like being in an enchanted world. As indeed it is. But the magic, the promise from then that the earth can be a Garden of Eden, has faded into the flow of the past. New events are surging up, just as illuminating but differing in the side of reality they highlight. In fact, as I searched in the winter fields for that fold in the ground where we had lain I could not be sure where it was. Perhaps the stream had been diverted through the fold I thought, or is that fold further up the hill where two tree stumps only are left? I could hear our sighing in the leaves but as for a mark upon the belly of the earth, there was none. All had flowed on, as it must. That is the law.