Since they had started the search for a house in the country, Walter had kept a diary. Almost daily, he typed a few lines or sometimes a whole page on his Olympia typewriter, which he had bought with some of his confirmation money when he was fourteen years old. As autumn changed into early winter and suddenly he had a lot of time available, Walter decided to write a book. Literally, he determined to use the diary manuscript and transcribe it by hand onto white paper. As winter swung into full gear, Walter’s hair grew long and curly again. A modest beard appeared on his chin and cheeks. When the laundry was done and hung on the clothesline outside in the meadow between two poles, he retreated to his nicely heated room. With some black tea with cinnamon and milk, the pipe filled with hemp tobacco, he worked on the painstaking task. Using liquid ink pens and writing in block letters, Walter wrote slowly but continuously. As time went by, he added sketches, song texts, pictures, and submissions from other people.
He went for a visit to another group and specifically to one individual who had been in Hohenhausen during one of the parties. Volker had rented a big, old house with other people about thirty miles to the east. They sustained a vegetable garden; their alternative emphasis rested on a spiritual approach and nobody cultivated fields or kept animals. Some of the members had been in the East. Walter noticed Shiva posters on walls, incense burning, and tarot cards in the middle of a very large living room filled with mattresses and thick cushions. He liked the environment and peoples a lot and became an occasional visitor. He very much appreciated the fact that most of the times he visited, other guests and especially female visitors were present. Walter felt genuinely happy there. He began to believe he was somewhat exceptional, one of them—especially since he began writing and identified with it. The act of writing gave him a previously unknown satisfaction.
On a Friday night, he called Volker to ask whether it would be proper to show up. Volker said it would be perfect because a troupe of visitors from southern Germany had arrived, and he would fit right in. Walter made sure that everything in his house was secured and prepared because Hilde had left earlier to visit her parents with Magda. He took the Citroën 2CV and headed east again. At Volker’s house, an exclusive party had already begun. People sat or lay all over the large living-room floor; soft music sounded from the stereo. A small circle gathered around a copper tray in one part of the room drawing from the tarot deck. As soon as Walter entered the room, he noticed a young, short girl with long, wavy, brown hair and attractive features. Soon they were talking to each other. Christel had arrived with a group of five from the Bavarian countryside near Nuremberg who drove through the land to visit other people interested in a similar way of life. Soon Christel and Walter hugged each other and exchanged a first, delicate kiss. The host family prepared a delicious vegetarian meal, and their visitors added something to the dinner table on the living-room floor. Walter donated a bottle of wine, and everyone sat down to enjoy the food, drink, and company.
Hilde had revealed weeks earlier that Bert was her nightly visitor. Walter laughed about it secretly and joked around with Gerhard and Gaspar that Hilde had found a lover. Gratefully, Walter was able to accept the fact that another man slept with his partner without him feeling jealous. He perceived that the situation presented no danger to him in any way, that nothing had been taken away, and that it represented a step forward in his personal development. Hence, for him to indulge in the company of friendly, like-minded individuals with healthy food, good wine, and agreeable women did not cause any guilt feelings or remorse. During this period, he began to enjoy his role in the alternative society.
The feast ended slowly; all participants left for their homes or rooms within the building. Walter found himself the only one remaining, together with Christel, in the living room. After a few moments of total silence, when they could hear the sound of distant car tires on asphalt, they moved closer to each other on the carpet and looked into each other’s eyes for a while. Christel had light-brown eyes with some black spots in them and an enthusiastic smile that invited Walter. He caressed her cheek, and she bent her head sideward, pressing his hand between her cheek and shoulder. While he slowly got to his knees, with both hands he pulled her sweater and shirt over her head and then looked at her again. She got up on her knees and moved toward him. They touched with their bodies, from the top to the knees. Walter quickly removed his shirt so he could feel her soft breasts against his chest and hugged her gently, while she opened his belt, unbuttoned the front of his pants, and stripped it down to his knees. Walter dropped down on his back, removed the pants, and reached for her. Christel lay on top of him kissing, while he caressed her back.
Back at Hohenhausen, a knock on his door and Hilde’s voice asking, “Can I come in?” pulled Walter out of his concentration. He interrupted a pen stroke on the page he worked on and replied, “Of course.”
To a certain degree, it was odd that she would knock on his door, but considering their relationship at that point, not really. The two had not slept together for months.
Hesitantly, Hilde entered and said rather uneasily, moving from one foot to the other, “You know, I have wanted to ask you something for some time. It is about the kids. What I want to know is whether you will also take care of them, and how far are you willing to go?”
Walter was bewildered; he had just finished a loaded pipe of hemp tobacco, which was working in his head. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What do you mean?”
At this moment, he looked at her fully and noticed panic in her eyes that he had never seen before in all their time together.
“I just need to know how willing you are and how far your commitment goes,” she said while pointing at her swollen belly.
Walter did not say anything for a while. He tried to comprehend the circumstances, evaluate the reasons why Hilde would ask such questions, but he did not find an answer. All he knew was that he did the whole lot to the best of his abilities. Holding up his open hands, he replied, “Hilde, I don’t know what to tell you.”
Then Walter noticed a straightening of Hilde’s back and a tightening of her shoulders as she turned and left the room. He remained confounded in his chair for a long time, unable to move or to think clearly, until he felt coolness sinking into the room.
A few mornings later, he noticed that Hilde’s blue Citroën had not returned from a visit to the Neudorfer Hof and only Silke with Florian roamed around in the kitchen.
Walter asked her, “Do you know what happened to Hilde?”
She said, “Um, I do not know what happened. She went to visit Kurt last night and took Magda with her.”
Walter became aware of a constricting sensation inside his breast and adrenaline racing to his brain. No good indications, he knew instinctively; something had happened that would be discovered in the future. The news presented itself via Hilde when she returned around noon the next day. She immediately disappeared into her room and then took a shower in the bathroom next to the kitchen.
Walter had Magda on his lap on the big bench, feeling very nervous.
When Hilde finally entered the kitchen and took a seat with some tea in front of her, she said, “I stayed with Kurt for the last two days. It may be more serious. Bert was like a friend and son, but now I feel shaken inside.”
“OK, what can I do, or what shall we do?” Walter asked.
“I don’t know, nothing at this point,” she replied. “Nothing will change right now. I live here and Kurt down there at the Neudorfer. I also do not know how serious it is for him; he just separated from Ulrike.”
Hilde reached over the kitchen table and caressed his cheek, looking at him through her brown eyes with, he thought, compassion. This he had not anticipated when he encouraged her some weeks ago to have some fun. Silke must have seen or felt something, because when she came into the kitchen sometime later and looked into Walter’s eyes, she hugged him for a little while.
“I don’t understand it, but there is nothing you can do,” she said, her voice full of compassion.
Walter went up to his room and smoked a pipe. A few weeks passed. In reality, nothing changed except that some nights Hilde received a visit from Kurt, who left again before Walter got up. What hurt Walter was the noise from her room, where the new lovers made love and Hilde used her voice to let it all out. The screams and reverberations of passion made their way through two doors and up to the second floor, where Walter lay in his bed, his body stiffened and unable to sleep. During the days after those visits, his nerves relaxed, and later he could not tell anymore what felt better—when Hilde visited Kurt or when he visited her.
None of it had anything to do with enjoyment. He felt fortunate, however, to have friends not too far away at Volker’s place. There he met Gerlinde Kirsch, who instantly became a friend and confidant. Gerlinde had been one of Volker’s networks for some time. They went to the same university in Marburg, where she studied sociology. She had just delivered her degree dissertation, which included an essay about recent history, from the political left to the alternative movement, in Germany. Gerlinde traveled a great deal all over the country to meet with individuals and groups and find out how and why they decided to move together to distant locations in the countryside.
She visited Walter in Hohenhausen and stayed overnight sometimes; she even met with Hilde on occasion. Her relationship with Walter remained friendly but nonsexual. They slept together in his bed, and Walter tried every time, but she refused to have intercourse with him for reasons Walter could accept. Gerlinde’s abstinence turned their meetings into thought and experience exchanges that he never experienced before. It made him happy for a while not to be alone, to have someone with an interest in him, even if the interest had a strong non-personal aspect to it. Walter visited Gerlinde at her small apartment in a provincial town not far from Volker’s house. They had coffee and cake together in a coffee house. He spent time with a good-looking, intelligent woman in a café during daytime hours in obvious pain. Walter experienced a strong feeling of being a Bohemian, which neutralized his pain temporarily.
Gaspar, Percy, Hilde, and Egon had given Walter poems, letters, and sketches that he included in his handwritten manuscript. Gerlinde gave Walter permission to use her dissertation as a preface to his book.
He had been in contact with people from the Information Service in Frankfurt. They published a weekly political news and commentary collection from their offices in a converted factory complex near the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. The collective also owned and operated offset printing presses, which transferred an inked image from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface. The technique enabled the production of a book with the type of Walter’s material. He spent two weeks in Frankfurt, staying with Gaspar in the Westendstrasse, to help produce the rubber blankets in the print shop. To see his work come to life was an exciting period for him.
Gaspar had been involved with the Information Service for a long time. His new girlfriend, Klara, and he and Walter visited people and places in the city. They went to concerts and enjoyed each other’s company. Walter felt special in his role as author and book publisher. He appreciated the time away from country life and his issues with Hilde. After Walter’s part of the printing job ended, he drove back to Hohenhausen to wait for the book printing and binding process to be completed so he could pick up the finished product.
When he entered the house and walked into the kitchen, Silke, Hilde, Florian, and Kurt sat at the table having coffee. For an instant blood went to Walter’s head, and he felt his heart pumping, but he recovered as he unpacked a few groceries from his bag and put them on the shelves and in the refrigerator. There had been silence in the kitchen since he entered, even though everybody said hello to each other.
Hilde got up and announced, “I am going to clean some vegetables for dinner—any requests for tonight?”
Nobody said anything, and she muttered, “OK, then I’ll go ahead and do the ground meat.”
Walter went to the kitchen table and said, “Hello, Silke. Hi Kurt, how are you all doing?”
Silke replied with OK. Kurt appeared to be thinking for a while and then said, “I am good too. How are you?”
This quick exchange appeared to release pressure in the kitchen air because Walter suddenly heard church bells ringing that he had not heard before. Kurt began telling stories from life on the Neudorfer Hof and did not stop talking, drinking one glass of wine and then another. Walter excused himself and left the kitchen. He needed to light the stove in his room and could not endure these endless yarns. However, a major breakthrough had been accomplished by all present, bridging a very sensitive situation to which nobody had looked forward.
Life in the house continued as before. Walter had more time on his hands since the book writing was done, and he felt a little lost and bored. He played the guitars, sang, and recorded his songs onto cassettes again. He went with Fritzi for walks and shopping in Flederbach. One night, he heard knocking on his door, and Silke entered the room.
She said, “I think the time has come, the contractions started.”
Walter, Florian, and Silke were the only ones in the house. Hilde had left the afternoon before to see her boyfriend, Kurt. Therefore, Walter happened to become the assistant during Silke’s home birth. He called the midwife on the phone around 1:00 a.m., and she told him to measure the time between contractions. During the next two hours, the labor pains came in shorter intervals, and Walter called the midwife again. She told him she would be there in thirty minutes. When the midwife arrived, she had plenty of time to arrange necessary tools and aids for her work. Walter and she added a rubber sheet under the regular sheet on the bed, to protect the mattresses. Silke walked back and forth and up and down the stairs. Occasionally she breathed very deeply.
Little Florian scrambled up the stairs crying. He had been awakened by all the noise and looked for his mom. Silke carried him around a little bit and then Walter took him back to bed. The water broke an hour later, and then Walter witnessed for the first time the miracle of birth. Given that this was her second child and with firm assistance from the midwife, Silke delivered a girl quickly and without difficulty. When the baby lay in Silke’s arms, breathing on her own, the room in the old farmhouse filled with an air of massive clarity, a delicate atmosphere, which had not been present before.
Suddenly there were three kids in the house and another one almost there. With an emphasis on childcare, daily routines and adjustments settled in after the initial bliss and excitement triggered by the newborn. Load upon load of cotton diapers, first in the washing machine and afterward in freezing temperatures on the clothesline outside. A noticeable smell of baby powder, drying laundry, preparation of milk in bottles, and baby poop floated through the building. Walter felt as if he was at the wrong place at an improper time. He could not keep up in his mind with his better-equipped roommates. The situation between Hilde and him did not amend. She disappeared for a night or two, returned and looked very happy and very beautiful. When Walter asked, she had no answers. He visited Neudorfer Hof occasionally, but Kurt’s endless, oblivious storytelling became extremely boring and difficult to accept for Walter.
He appreciated an invitation from Gaspar and Karla to join them on a short car trip to Rome, Italy, where they wanted to visit friends. Walter packed his bag and the acoustic guitar, but before he left, Silke used her newly arrived hair-cutting kit to cut off his hair and shave his head bald. He had requested the dramatic exterior change because inside he felt he needed a metamorphosis. Leaving his car behind, he took a bus from Flederbach to Frankfurt and arrived in Westendstrasse, from where the trio left the next day. Walter had to wear a knit stocking cap because of his sensitivity to every air draft.
Back in Hohenhausen, just in time for the holidays, Walter saw the weekend issue of a major Frankfurt newspaper on the kitchen table. It featured a special one-page report on the alternative scene in the area. Kurt, Hilde, and he had been mentioned, and their story told by the reporter. It felt very strange to see his name in the press. He did not know what to make of it, but he could feel how it expanded his ego. The Christmas holidays that year in Hohenhausen passed with sober spirits, and for unknown reasons, nobody cared to decorate a tree.
After the holidays, Walter received a telephone call from the print shop that his book was ready for pick up. Very happy to hear this, he returned to the city. His car filled with cartons of packaged books, he immediately went through the list of bookstores that potentially could sell it for him. Politically left bookstores, health-food stores, and women’s bookstores accepted a number of copies and put them on the shelves. It felt very good to be out there; Walter had had no idea whether anybody would accept this type of self-published printed material.
He placed an ad in an alternative magazine to introduce his book and its availability by mail order. At the same time, he sent free copies to various important people on the scene and to certain friends he had not seen for a long time. Very curious about the overall response and potential sales of the book, he experienced pleasant surprises. Essentially, all the cash he had invested returned to level the balance; he did not lose money. The book did not become a bestseller; nevertheless, he felt an affinity with what he had done the past six months, and it continued to keep him busy. Almost every week Walter drove to Frankfurt to check the shelves in stores. He had never encountered this type of satisfaction before. Often ecstatic, he enjoyed every minute of it, made many new acquaintances mingling in and around the scene.
Whenever he left the house and knew where he would be, Walter left a number where he could be reached. The second home birth could happen at any time. One Tuesday he left and visited Manuela, the beautiful mother and ex-model who still warmed up for him. She was alone at home. As they lay naked on the sofa in the anteroom, Manuela told him that she had had surgery on her breasts, belly, and thighs. He could not see a single scar or evidence; to him, her body looked flawless.
She prepared a salad and appetizers and then proposed they go to Cooky’s club at the Hauptwache. Walter drove in his Citroën downtown and parked in a garage. The couple walked the few steps together to the club and down the steep flight of stairs into the basement below a cinema. A soon as they entered the disco, Manuela went straight to the bar and asked Walter what he would like to drink. He asked for a beer, and when the bartender handed it to him, Manuela told him that this was on Cooky, the owner and her friend. Then she said, “See you later,” and disappeared behind the bar.
Walter did not see her again that night. He also did not know where to spend the night, but that did not matter. Earlier that night he had taken one of Anthony’s little dried drops of lysergic acid diethylamide, and the world had become his miraculous friend. He put his beer bottle on a table and made his way onto the dance floor. The best popular dance music, delivered with the most sophisticated equipment available, made Walter dance in tune with the beats and sounds. For some hours, he simply moved; then he remembered the bottle of beer, but he could not find it anymore. Early morning had arrived. Walter picked up his car and drove to the university area, thinking he might be able to have a drink at the club he went to with Hilde on their first night. Luckily, he arrived just in time to get the last serving before closure and then had to vacate the club.
Many people stood in front of the entrance not knowing what to do, waiting for someone to suggest something. Walter listened to some folks talking about how to get home. He offered them a ride, and when they reached their destination in east Frankfurt, they invited him to join them for a final nightcap. The roommates also had some fine hash to smoke that extended Walter’s stay at their place into the late-morning hours.
Later that day, as he rested in the Westendstrasse apartment, the call came in that Hilde’s labor had started, and Hilde asked him to come back. He left Frankfurt during rush hour, and when he reached Hohenhausen, he saw an ambulance standing in front of the house and a group of people around the entrance door: Silke, Kurt, a woman he did not know, and 2 men in uniform.
As he approached the gate, Hilde exited the house, noticed him, and said, “There you are. Are you coming with me, or who is going?”
A very awkward moment occurred when Kurt and Walter looked at each other, started toward the ambulance, stopped and backed off again, and then did the same again, until Walter said, “You go.”
Kurt went with Hilde to the hospital. Silke explained to Walter that earlier the midwife had measured Hilde’s blood pressure and did not like what she saw. She became concerned enough to call the ambulance for childbirth under medical supervision.
Without further complications, Hilde delivered a healthy baby boy she named Johannes. Lots of excitement developed in the old framework house with new life and interesting arrangements. Where Kurt had been previously more discreet, he suddenly spent a lot of time with Hilde in Hohenhausen. Since consciousness and sensitivity had never been Kurt’s strength, Walter had to raise the issue, telling Kurt that he did not really own the house he was visiting. Kurt backed off and from then on visited only briefly and in the company of one of his subordinates from the Neudorfer Hof. Hilde spent most of the time in Hohenhausen, and now and then, it looked as if things had returned to a previous state. When the temperatures turned pleasant, the team planned a party to welcome their new housemate and the new season.