"This is nothing less than 'Zeno's paradox.'" "You are Achilles and the tortoise is the orgasm." "Oh, come on." " No, no, no." "Listen." "Achilles and the tortoise are going to race, and Achilles is confident, so he gives the tortoise a hundred meters head start." "Now the mathematical problem is that before Achilles can pass the tortoise, he has to reach the point where the tortoise started after a hundred meters." "But when Achilles gets there, the tortoise has already moved on, and then he has to reach the next point, and the tortoise has moved on again and so on and so on and so on." "So Achilles can never reach the tortoise and never pass him." "And in the same way, because you were giving chase, you couldn't reach satisfaction." "That's the paradox." "I'm sorry, but it seems as if you're not taking this very seriously." "I'm telling you about the worst thing that's happened to me, that I at that point, within seconds, lost all sexual sensation." "My cunt simply went numb." "And immediately we have to hear about this ridiculous mathematical problem." "In fact, I'm in doubt whether you're even listening." "Why do you doubt that?" "This is not a story I've told in its entirety before, but whenever I've told other men about experiences, episodes in my sex life, it was easy to see that they became quite excited." "I got excited." "Yes, about the mathematical crap, not about the story." "What kind of a person are you, actually?" "You wouldn't know." "No, but I can guess." "Why didn't I get that earlier?" "The fact you don't get excited over my dirty stories is because you can't relate to them." "You've never been with a woman." "That's quite accurate." "Not with a man, either." "Are you sorry about that?" "Well, yeah, out of curiosity... not out of lust, as you would think." "I consider myself asexual." "Of course, I experimented with masturbation when I was a teenager, but it didn't do much for me." "So, there's nothing sexual about me." "It's not as uncommon as you would think." "And of course, I've read a lot about sexual subjects..." "'Canterbury Tales',' Decameron', 'Thousand and One Nights'." "You name it and I've read it with great interest and enjoyment, but only literary enjoyment." "But... but I think maybe it makes me a better listener to your story, and..." "I have no preconceived notions or preferences." "I'm actually the best judge you could give your story to." "And when it comes to deciding whether you're a bad human being or not," "I'm..." "I've no problems with that." "Because I don't look at you through the glasses colored by sexuality or sexual experience." "I'm a virgin." "I'm innocent." "She's looking at me." "Yes." "It's an icon." "ls it Russian?" "Yes, it's, uh..." "It's a skilled copy, maybe in the manner of Rublev." "Icons are usually connected to the Eastern Church." "The Eastern Church?" "I might become a bit theoretical." "You may." "I'd like you to tell me about your picture." "Although the Christian church was split up in 1054 because of differences in opinion between the Eastern Church and the Western Church, what we today call the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, this is a typical Eastern Church icon." "It usually depicts the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus and more rarely, for instance, the crucifixion, which in the Western Church was much more prevalent." "If you generalize, you could say that the Western Church is the church of suffering, and the Eastern Church is the church of happiness." "Why is she looking right at me?" "Well, she's telling a story." "Icons were originally a kind of pictorial Bibles for the illiterate." "There are some who say you... you read an icon, even write it." "There are different types of icons." "This is a Hodegetria." "The directions are very important." "She's looking at you, but she's pointing at the baby Jesus." "And he's looking at you and pointing at her." "Do you see how flat it is?" "There's no... no perspective." "It's because it's an image of eternity." "And eternity isn't in 3-D." "But you said the Eastern Church was the church of joy?" "Yeah, the sanctities of the Eastern Church were all about the joy of faith while the Western Church wallowed in... in suffering and death." "If you imagine a... a mental journey from Rome eastward, you feel how you move away from guilt and pain towards joy and light." "But you say you didn't believe in God." "No, but the concept of religion is interesting." "Like the concept of sex." "But you won't find me on my knees with regards to either." "Let's call this chapter," "'The Eastern Church and the Western Church.'" "But it won't be... it won't be a story about traveling east from Rome towards the light, but rather the opposite." "So, in order not to make it too sad," "I've pepped up the name of the chapter with an extra title." "I have to go back a bit." "I was 12 years old and on a school trip in the hills." "Are you making fun of me?" " What do you mean?" "You have this orgasm, not only an orgasm but a spontaneous orgasm." " Yes, it was an orgasm, though the doctor described it as an epileptic seizure." "And during that orgasm, you had this vision?" "Of these two women on each side of you." "The woman on my right side seemed to be dressed in purple and scarlet with a lot of gold and pearls." "She was carrying a golden goblet in her hand." "She was sitting on some strange animal." "And then the other woman was dressed in Roman clothes, a baby on her arm and her hair lay in tight waves beneath a veil." "Was she holding the veil with two fingers like this?" "And the other woman, was she sitting on an animal with seven heads and ten horns?" "The animal only had one head." "It was kind of a bull." "What's the matter?" "You're making this up." "No, I'm not." "I'm telling you about my first orgasm, which came upon me without the slightest touch in some strange ways up in the mountains." "I never had achieved an orgasm before, even though I masturbated as if my life depended on it during that time." "Your story is like a..." "blasphemous retelling of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the Mount, which is one of the Eastern Church's holiest passages." "It's when the humanity of Christ is illuminated by the divine light of eternity." "Jesus, Peter and two disciples had climbed a mountain." "And suddenly, the disciples see this light emanating from Jesus' head." "And Moses and Elijah appear by his side." "And they hear the voice of God, calling him his son." "The relationship between..." "between the two women and you would be the same as the relation between Moses and Elijah and Jesus." "And that's where it becomes blasphemous." "I see." "You don't even... you don't even know who these women were, do you?" "No, but one of them did look like the Virgin Mary, now that you mention it." "Well, it wasn't the Virgin Mary, I can tell you that." "From your description, it must've been Valeria Messalina, the wife of Emperor Claudius, the most notorious nymphomaniac in history." "I thought she looked like your icon." "We have that image from a statue in the Louvre." "It's made like a Hodegetria, but it's not a religious person, far from it." "And the other woman, the one astride the creature, that was no one else but the great Whore of Babylon, riding on Nimrod in the form of a bull." "If anyone else would've told me that story," "I would've seen it as a blasphemous joke, spiced up with a Biblical light emanating from nothing less than a spontaneous orgasm." "Goodness gracious." "You demand a lot of your listener." "I promise you I'm as innocent in regards to the religious as you are when it comes to sex." "The Transfiguration on the Venus Mount." "And then later, you lost your orgasm altogether." "Wagner.'Das Rheingold'." "The descent into Nibelheim." "Was it that bad?" "Try to imagine that in one fell swoop, you lost all desire to read and all your love and passion for books and letters." "I don't even know if I can imagine that." "Can I help you?" "But as so often before in my life, a bit of hope sprang from a mystical event." "Which was?" "Three dead leaves performing a strange ballet." "That gave you hope?" "For what?" "For regaining my sexuality." " How?" "To claim it by force." "In spite of my tireless efforts, my cunt totally failed to respond." "But the fact that the initiative had shifted seemed to encourage Jerome greatly." "And I have to admit there came a time when we had fun together." "I'll give you a fiver." "Uh-huh." "If you can put this... up inside your cunt." "A fiver?" " Right." "Shit." "Thank you." " You're welcome." "Didn't you get any spoons?" " No, we didn't." "So what does this tell us?" "That love and sex have nothing to do with each other, or... or that they decidedly work against one another?" "The most grotesque thing was that it was during that period, where every sexual sensation was denied me, a period," "I must admit, of secure and restful domestic comfort." "We had moved in together and so on, that I became pregnant, because I was careless about my birth control pills." "Consciously or unconsciously, it was important for me to have a Caesarean." "I mean, I was hoping that my cunt was going to fucking work again, and I had a feeling that a haphazard birth wouldn't make things better." "I may have been imagining things, but as I lay there, the noise from the instruments rang out in a chord like the one from the Little Flock." "Yes." "And it wasn't fear." "More like a kind of disgust." "I could've sworn I saw him laughing." "A laughing son." "In 'Doctor Faustus', Thomas Mann describes the birth of Noah's son Ham, who was laughing when he was born." "Another satanic omen." "Incidentally, the innocent child was named Marcel after Mars, the Roman God of War." "And motherhood?" "I assume maternal love didn't quite live up to its expectations." "No, I didn't have any expectations." "And maternal love wasn't a problem." "It was just that each time I looked into the child's eyes," "I had this unsettling feeling of having been found out." "It's probably a strange thing to say about a child... that my love wasn't being returned." "But it was my perception." "If Jerome had hoped for a break from what was for him now mostly strenuous work, he could forget about it." "Achilles was again chasing the tortoise." "Fill all my holes." " I can't, Joe." "I'm sorry." "I'm trying." "Can we talk a bit?" " Of course." "I love you." "I love your wildness and your desire." "I love you, Joe." "At the moment, I don't seem to satisfy you in the way that I'd like to." "Don't get upset, Joe." "It doesn't mean we won't continue with our sex life, which is very important to me." "Very important to me." "When you buy a tiger, right, you also have to feed it." "Um, satisfy it, right?" "Long story short." "I have a tiger on my hands." "You mean I'm too much for you." " No." "You're just the way you should be." "I was just thinking if you would consider that I get a little help with the feeding, that's all." "You're saying I should have sex with others as well." "That's a rather cruel way of putting it, Joe, but..." "But exact." " Exact." "For a long time I'd been playing around with the idea that the concept of the fuck-me-now clothes could be improved." "You look nice." "And became the piano teacher." "You okay?" " No." "What's the matter?" " Well, I'm such an idiot with cars." "I don't really know what to do." "Do you mind helping me?" "Of course it won't work." "The spark plug caps have been removed." "Yes, I did that." "Was that wrong?" "For the first time I had the pleasure of having an eight-cylinder car." "The possible combinations of eight spark plug caps on eight spark plugs are 40,320, if I remember my math correctly." "And only one of these will make the car run, which gave me all the time I needed." "Beethoven, huh?" "He was certainly very good, but, you know, he couldn't write a fugue." "You think so?" " Well, yeah, I think so." "It would be more precise to say that Beethoven renewed the fugue." "That he was such a visionary that the old Bach purists, they accused him of not mastering it." "Good day?" "Not one word was ever spoken between me and Jerome about my piano lessons." "The first time the mysterious letters addressed to me arrived," "I, of course, feared that they were love letters from someone I'd completely forgotten about and hid them, so as not to hurt Jerome if he should see them." "But as Jerome was always somehow present when I would get the mail, and as the envelopes were always empty," "I understood that the letters, in fact, were sent by Jerome himself as a way of testing me." "My decision not to show them to him was exactly the reaction he had feared, and it reaffirmed his insane jealousy and his fantasies of the countless times" "I would fall in love for real while being the piano teacher." "And now to reach the heart of your suffering Western Church," "I have to jump ahead three years in the story and talk about my meeting with what I would call" "'The Dangerous Men.'" "I was alone with Marcel a lot during this period, as Jerome was traveling most of the time, and when he was finally home, he spent most of the time accusing me of neglecting Marcel, which, in my opinion," "was just a cover for his anger over my lovers." "Despite my, to put it mildly, promiscuous initiatives, any sexual satisfaction, let alone orgasm, was further away than ever before." "I had to make a change." "And somehow, the inspiration had been right there beneath my window the whole time." "I'd planned to go where I would never before had dreamt of going." "For instance, to be with a man with whom I shared no spoken language." "I could feel that it turned me on enormously to imagine a sexual situation in which verbal communication was impossible." "Hello." " Hello." "I'm Tobias, the interpreter." "Hello, I'm Joe." "Come in." "I understand that you mastered the African languages." "I do have a basis." "Who and what needs interpretation?" "Um, that man." "The one with the green jacket." "What language is being spoken?" "Well, God knows." "I..." "All I know is that he doesn't speak English." "It's quite difficult." "But, uh, we did manage to find a dialect, of which we both had some knowledge." "Mm-hm." "You coming?" "No, I'll stay here, and the two of you communicate." "You are to ask him if he wants to have sex with me." "Sex?" " Mm-hmm." "Yeah, um... ls it a go?" " It's hard to say." "I've written down the time and place, but, um..." "Honestly, I wouldn't like to take responsibility for the precise wording in this case, which I think, uh, accidentally may belong to a Grey zone in my profession." "It was the address of a cheap hotel." "Why were there two?" "My words exactly." "Apparently, N had brought his brother along." "Why was he so angry?" "Clearly, it was something personal between them, but later I heard that performing a sandwich requires great sensitivity, since the men apparently can feel each other through the tissue." "I imagine the quarrel had already started on the stairs and that one or the other party had laid claim to one or the other of my holes in conflict with his Negro brother's interests." "You shouldn't use that word." "It's not what you call politically correct." "Negro." "Well, excuse me, but in my circles, it's always been a mark of honor to call a spade a spade." "Each time a word becomes prohibited, you remove a stone from the democratic foundation." "Society demonstrates its impotence in the face of a concrete problem by removing words from the language." "The book burners have nothing on modern society." "I think society would claim that politically correctness is a very precise expression of democratic concern for minorities." "And I say that society is as cowardly as the people in it who, in my opinion, are also too stupid for democracy." "I understand your point, but I totally disagree." "I have no doubt in the human qualities." "The human qualities can be expressed in one word:" "hypocrisy." "We elevate those who say right but mean wrong, and mock those who say wrong but mean right." "Society is based on hate." "It should be based on forgiveness." "Hatred is rudimentary." "One should be able to forgive one's executioner." "By the way, I can assure you that women who claim that Negros don't turn them on are lying." "So, did they satisfy you?" "Those Ne..." "Negros." "No, but they showed me that there was a world far from mine" "I had to explore." "And there, or perhaps on the other side get my life back." "Who are you?" "I know what you do." "I'd like to be one of the women you see." "That's of no interest." "Madame." "Princess, I specifically said five days, and five days haven't gone yet." "So, you'll have to leave." "Sorry." "You still here?" "I, uh..." "I don't think this is for you." "Shall we conduct a small test?" "Stand up." "Sit down, please." "I just want you to sit completely relaxed while I hit you in the face." "Nothing special." "It's just a..." "it's just a slap." "You ready?" "I'm ready." "No!" "See?" "How mysterious." "Will you give me a reasonable explanation now, or shall we wait?" "I can't give you an explanation and certainly not a reasonable one." "What exactly were the rumors about him?" "That he was violent." " How can that be exciting?" "I think the easiest way to understand it is to refer to my rebellious nature." "This business of K's was something I was completely against." "So, the fact that I was now contacting him was a last, desperate attempt to rehabilitate my sexuality." "The system was the overriding factor with K." "A system of violence?" "Well, you were the one who insisted on the Western Church, right?" "And I..." "I seem to remember that the systematic approach to the crucifixion is of a violent and not to say sadistic nature." "Oh yes, the Passion of Christ is full of systematic violence." "The Via Dolorosa, the Nine Stations of the Cross, and the 39 lashes." "You are beginning to irritate me." "Let me tell you the rules, then." "The first rule is that I don't fuck you, and there isn't any discussions about that." "Then, what do you get out of it?" "That's my business, and I don't mean to mention it again." "The second rule is that we have no safe word, meaning that if you, uh, go inside with me, there is nothing that you can say that will make me stop any plan or procedure." "You must bring a brown, used leather riding crop." "And not one from a shop selling sex toys." "It's not a masquerade." "Third rule..." "If I choose to let you in, you have to be sitting out here." "In other words, you..." "you won't know when." "Only that it would be some time between 2:00 and 6:00 at night." "I can't stay here that late." "My babysitter's not reliable, and I can't leave my child." "You don't even know my name!" "I'm not interested in your name." "Here, your name is..." "Fido." "Can I help you?" "I'd like to buy a riding crop." "For what?" " For my horse." "Yes, I understand that part." "What kind of horse?" "Well, it's not very big." "No, I just meant is the whip for dressage or for jumping?" "Um..." "I don't know." "This is a dressage whip." "Well, it's probably for jumping, then." "Okay." "Like this?" "Is it used?" " No." "We do have used whips, but these are not that expensive." "I prefer a used one." "Okay." "Marcel's awake." "Do you want to say goodbye to your mom?" "Goodbye." "Fido..." "I'll take your coat." "I'd like you to have your hair up." "You can use this." "Just in case it becomes necessary for me to hit you in the face." "Should I take my clothes off?" "I'll tell you what to do and when." "You may sit down." "Give me your hand." "I wanna see what this knot looks like on your wrist." "Okay." "You may get UP" "Now you may bend down." " How?" "Approach the chair." "Now bend from the hips." "Look forward." "Look forward." "With your head up." "Head up." "Keep looking forward." "Keep looking forward." "You may stand up." "We have to use the couch." "Come and sit." "Take it easy." "Take it easy." "Bend over." "Lay your arms out straight." "Take it easy." "Take it easy." "Bring your hands out straight." "Palms facing each other." "Take it easy." "Next time, don't wear knickers." "Your ass is not high enough." "I don't think we can do this today." "What?" "I'd like to see you again on Thursday." "What's wrong?" "I think we should see how it goes on Thursday." "Hi, I can't come to the phone right now." "Please, leave a message." "Yes, this is Marcel's mother again." "It's now 1:30." "We had an agreement." "I hope you get this message and come as quickly as you can." "Ah, Marcel is sleeping." "Uh..." "I have to go now." "Raise yourself up." "Even further." "Better." "Also so much better." "So much better." "I am now going to hit you 12 times, no matter how much you scream 'cause no one can hear you down here." "That's, uh, that's not how it goes." "Most people don't scream until I hit them." "That's it." "Thank you." " You're very welcome." "Hello?" "Are you there?" "It's just all so very strange." "Yes." "Very, very strange." "Because I was wetter the second time." "There's no doubt about it." "I don't know where we get our sexuality from or where tendencies of this kind come from." "Probably a perversion created in our childhood that never manifested itself before." "Well, oddly enough, Freud says the opposite." "He talks about the polymorphic perversion of a child, meaning that in a child, all kinds of perversions exist." "And then we use the childhood to diminish or remove some Of them." "Basically, a child is sexually polymorphic, and everything is sexuality in an infant." "And yet it was deeply bizarre to lie there and especially to want to lie there." "I felt invincible." "But mostly, I felt like a potted plant." "Potted plant?" "Yes, because he was constantly checking my cunt juice." "The way old ladies check their potted plant to see if they need watering." "It is an interesting point that you actually lubricated in expectation for a pain that you hadn't experienced." "Your body prepared itself for an intercourse that you knew wouldn't happen." "I can only describe the mood as sexual." "Despite K's immature appearance, his methods were surprisingly refined." "As I twisted and turned while he was whipping me," "I could feel how clever his knots were." "If I fought them, they would get tighter, and as I relaxed, it seemed they did, too." "Hmm." "Like a cat playing with a mouse." "Fooling it to believe it has a chance of escape and then attacking it again." "I don't know what kind of knot K used, but I know of a knot that tightens when force is exerted and vice versa." "It's called a Prusik knot." "It's after a man called Prusik." "He was a mountain climber, and he and a friend were out climbing and they had an accident, and his friend died." "And he ended up hanging at the end of a rope with no possibility of getting up." "You know, you can't climb up a mountain climber rope." "It's too thin." "But he was an intelligent man, and with his back to the wall, he was a genius." "And he took the shoelaces out of his boots and made two loops and affixed them to the rope." "And he could move these up when they weren't under tension." "And then he could step into them and climb the rope and save himself." "Prusik." "I think this was one of your weakest digressions." "May I continue?" " Be my guest." "Tomorrow bring 15 small coins, all the same." "No more, no less." "I sometimes give a Christmas present." "But uh, you have to do the work yourself." "I'm going to show you how to do it." "This is called a blood knot." "You have to make nine ropes with three blood knots on each." "Let me see you do it." "You decide whether to make four, five, or six turns on the various knots." "Let me see." "That's fine." "If you... if you start with one knot at the top of the rope, and then you have to put two more knots at a distance of..." "Well, between 10 and 20 centimeters to be exact, but the most important thing with blood knots on the nine ropes is that they are placed differently and that they are staggered." "The cat-o-nine-tails is often called the 'Captain's Daughter' aboard ships." "The blood knot is important because those are the ones that break the skin and not, as erroneously thought, the end of the rope." "A gallows knot is also a kind of a blood knot with many turns." "The American military standard demanded five to 15 turns, as it was the turns placed behind the left ear of the delinquent that would break the neck of the condemned as he fell." "I'll take it from here." "Joe?" "Love?" "Marcel?" "Marcel." "Are you fond of me still?" " Yes." "More fond of me than the others?" "Yes'?" " Yes." "You're not thinking of leaving again tonight, are you?" "No." " No?" "No, no." "Not at all." " You sure?" "Yeah." "Are you lying to me, Joe?" "No." " Be honest." "It's all right." "Just fucking say it." "No, I..." "I just want to be here." "Why?" "I don't know." "If you leave tonight, you'll never see me or Marcel ever again in your life." "You understand?" "ls this goodbye?" "ls that what you're saying?" "Marcel, get up." "Stop it." " ls that what you want?" "Yeah, so you could see him." "Look at him, Joe." "Let's face it, Joe, you're not a mother." "Let's wake him up." "Marcel, baby boy." "Say bye, Mom." "Please, put him..." " ls this what you want?" "You see?" "You see, he wants you." "Come." "It's Christmas." "It's fucking Christmas." "What is this?" "Today it's Madame who must wait." "Madame, I'm very sorry, but I have to have a few words with Fido first." "Your behavior is really upsetting me today." "I really ought to send you home." "Happy Christmas, Fido." "I want your cock." " What did you say?" "I want your cock." "No, you don't." "No, you don't." "What's the matter with you today?" "On account of the holidays and your behavior today," "I'm going to give you the original Roman maximum of 40 lashes." "Are you ready, Fido?" "I'm ready." "One." "Two." "Three." "Four." "Five." "Six." "I'd seen through K's knot technique, so I was able to loosen my position a bit to move my pelvis and thereby stimulate my clitoris against the cover of the book." "Forty." "And when you came home, Jerome and the child were gone?" "I haven't seen Marcel since." "This sentimentality..." "I hate it." "Why?" " Because it's a lie." "Are you sure?" "Jerome understood that he couldn't prioritize his life according to a child either, so he put him in a foster home." "My only contact to the boy is the thousand pounds" "I put in his account every month." "Anonymously." "As a penance." "Every time I leave," "I have this feeling that when I return, you'll be gone." "And all I can hear is the cat flap, swinging back and forth." "Thank you." "I didn't know you had a cat flap." "I used to have a cat, so I have a cat flap in the door to the stairwell." "But how did it get outside?" "I never thought of that." "I suppose through the basement." "The thing is..." "Every time someone opens the door to the street, the cat flap squeaks." "There's a lot of drafts in the house." "It hasn't squeaked yet." "No, there's not many people coming and going." "That's a bit creepy." "No, I like it." "It's... it's peaceful." "After all this sadness, may I ask what happened to the silent duck?" "Oh, shit." "The silent duck." "I'd forgotten all about it." "One night K had been in what was for him an unusually good mood." "I don't know what caused it, but he didn't hit hard, and he joked that he would introduce me to the concept of the silent duck." "One hardly dare imagine the quacking duck." "Well, deep down, little K seems to have been a jolly man with versatile talents." "But he got that bit about Roman punishment and the 40 lashes wrong." "Because it's true that the highest punishment was 40 lashes, but it had to be delivered in series of three." "That's why Jesus only got 39 lashes because three goes into 39 but not into 40." "Well, I don't know about K being jolly." "His position as a sadist wasn't perhaps as enviable as it might first appear." "Superficially, the sadist acts as the decider." "But I once had a conversation with a prostitute, who had tried all the variations in her field." "She wasn't surprised by anything." "And she admitted to have only masochists." "Masochists, for her, were the most demanding and the most ungrateful." "First, she were to deduce their desire by reading their thoughts, then perform without any alteration from the norm, and after which, unlike other clients and the most honorable sadists, for example, you never received any thanks," "let alone gifts or flowers." "I never went in that direction again, neither back to K or masochism." "But I took the orgasm with me." "You yet have to show me one single example of maliciousness." "But that's all I'm doing!" "It's as if you want to misunderstand me." "You keep inventing complicated and false excuses for my despicable and selfish actions." "During the time when our relationship was going downhill, Jerome really tried his best." "I bought you something." "You bought me something?" " I'm sure you'll love it." "Wow, it's a ring." " Yeah." "It's beautiful." "It was impossible for me to work out Jerome's income." "Sometimes he had lots of money and other times none, which I later thought perhaps meant that his work was not entirely above board." "But this time he'd really gone all out." "That must've been so expensive." " Well, it wasn't cheap." "Best craftsmanship." " Hmm." "I'll guarantee you that." "Let's play a game, then." "A game?" " Mm-hmm." "Get up." "Okay." "It's called 'Cinderella'." " I don't know it." "You will." " Okay." "Right." " No, you don't touch it." "Okay." " You just look at it." "Okay?" "Are you ready?" "Yes." " Steady." "Steady." "Go." " Fuck!" "Joe!" "Come on, Cinderella." "Oh, fuck." " Come on, come on." "Joe!" "For fuck's sake." "Move!" " Cinderella, Cinderella!" "Fuck!" "Are you mad, Joe?" "Are you fucking mad?" "Fuck!" "Fuck." "£7,000, Joe!" "Did he find it?" "Oh yes, and returned it and got all his money back." "So can you call this game anything other than malicious?" "Let me chew on that for a while." "So it wasn't the diamond that you're wearing around your neck?" "No." "But that was a gift, too." "But I have to be honest and say" "I can't remember the person who gave it to me." "I've always been in..." "in the theoretical way, of course, interested in diamonds and their cuts." "The word 'brilliant' refers to the cut." "Diamond is the stone." "If we use the word 'divine' in connection with the Golden Section and Fibonacci, the brilliant cut is nothing less." "It's a frighteningly refined cut." "Fifty-seven facets." "The theory is that the light enters through the top plane, which is called the table or in some languages the mirror, and then inside the diamond is refracted in all the facets and thrown out the same way," "creating a absolutely unique light effect." "So, it's called a mirror." "I didn't know that." "You have a mirror, too." "Yeah." "It's like a thought, isn't it?" "Some years later, the bodily abuse began to have an effect." "First, rare bleedings from my clitoris, but then they became more and more frequent." "Come in." "But I really need my salary." "I know." "And I'd like to help you." "Have you heard any of the rumors about yourself?" "They say you see men every evening" "and spend all night with them." "They say you can't be trusted, all of them." "Why do they say that?" "I suppose they're afraid that I..." "I can't keep away from their men." "Right." "And can you?" "No." "I've spoken with a psychologist." "He says you're addicted, but that it's not the kind of addiction that can't be treated." "They have some groups." "I know about these kinds of groups." "I don't have anything to say to a psychologist." "I'm not suggesting therapy." "I'm demanding it." "Even if you leave us, it'll be the same at your next job and the one after that." "Why didn't you want to speak with a psychologist?" "It's an old story." "I just don't like them." "Well, if you insist that I try to understand, then you have to tell me that story as well." "The old story." "Okay." "Okay." "It's not that old after all." "It was about a year after I'd lost Marcel and Jerome." "Okay." "I'd been careless with my birth control pills before, and now I just didn't use them." "Didn't the whole experience with Marcel convince you that there was no room for children in your life?" "That's right." "I know it sounds incomprehensible, but actually, it was because of my crippling fear of becoming pregnant that I didn't take the pills." "It's probably impossible to understand." "No, it makes sense to me." "You were so afraid of getting pregnant that you repressed the possibility of it." "You couldn't even handle seeing the box of pills." "Okay." "Would you turn it down?" "If you look at the screen you can see your child, but I can't tell you the gender yet." "I don't give a shit about the gender." "I want it removed." "Okay." "Uh, you're in week eleven." "So legally, there are no barriers for an abortion." "Yes, I know that." "Just remove it." "Well, we have some procedures to follow." "There's nothing more to talk about." "I can have it removed." "I want it removed." "It is a very big decision, best not made in haste." "Didn't you understand what I just said?" "Okay, there's an informative consultation with our psychologist before you can have the procedure." "You didn't really fill out the form." "Maybe you didn't have time, uh, so I will need to ask a few more questions." "What's the most important thing in your life right now?" "It could be many things, your family, your friends, your..." "The most important thing for me right now is to get an abortion." "Yes." "Well, that's what we're going to resolve together." "I need some information." "Do you love the father?" "That's none of your business." "Well, it is my business because I'm here to form an impression of your circumstances." "That's my job." "Okay, so what would you most like me to answer about the father in order to get the fucking abortion?" "That I love him, or that I don't love him?" "Or that I..." "I don't know him because I fuck tons of men?" "I, uh, see that you were emotional during the doctor's examination." "I think you're emotional." "Please, listen." "This is what we call an informative consultation." "What is it I need to be informed of?" "That you can't stuff the kid back inside?" "I already know that." "I just need to be certain that you're completely sure about your choice, and my professional opinion based on your behavior is that clearly you're not." "I've never been more sure in my life." "I want that fetus out right now." "And as a professional, I cannot defend recommending an abortion based on this conversation." "I've already had a kid!" "I know what I want!" "Fuck you." "There were, of course, many ways to do it." "But I had chosen to follow the common medical procedure" "I had learnt while studying medicine, as it was of great importance for me to get the fetus out straight away rather than wait for it to be expelled a couple of days later." "Clearly, the most painful part would be the gradual opening of the cervix, which otherwise was always done under anesthesia." "wasps, sobs)" "Say something, Pierrot." "What do you mean?" "Well, you always have so many clever things to say." "Well, I..." "I feel bad for you that you had to cause yourself so much pain." "But the... the abortion is completely understandable." "You simply thought the child wouldn't have a life worth living, so..." "Yeah, but the abortion in itself." "Abortion is not murder." " Oh, come on." "Don't fall back on false clichés just for my sake." "I ask again, what about the abortion?" "I have no comment." "I'm a big proponent for abortion rights, but this is 100% female territory." "I don't believe a man can ever comprehend the situation or the pain." "And when it comes to the method, I think the less said, the better." "Those are two very interesting points of view." "First, you say that as a man, you can't understand a woman's feelings with regard to abortion." "Well, that's a bit like saying that I couldn't understand the victims of earthquakes because they were Chinese." "I thought we agreed that empathy was the foundation of all humanism." "But I can see that it's very convenient for men to leave all that abortion stuff to women." "That way they don't have to deal with the guilt and all of the small stuff." "But your other remark provokes me even more." "You think my method is not worth discussing?" "What enjoyment would I, or let alone a young pregnant girl, have from hearing all the lurid details about how a fetus is removed in a clinic or any other way?" "Well, then, we're back at the discussion about eating something that was once alive." "Do you really think abortion is so repugnant if you believe that we should know how animals are slaughtered in order to eat them?" "Well, that's a fact we have to live with, even if we try to repress it." "Just as we do with abortion." "Well, you sound like a pro-lifer from Texas." "I don't think so." "First of all, I'm just as much a pro-choice as you are." "But on principle," "I believe that taboos are damaging for human beings." "That's a relatively easy stance for you to take." "One that can be misconstrued as a... as an argument against pregnancy termination." "I don't want to belittle anything, but I can't see your abortion as anything but a... luxury problem." "A luxury problem?" "The really serious, serious abortions, the ones that save lives, far from our social spheres, you can't endanger them just because you provocatively insist on showing the gory details." "Consider all the millions of repressed women, the victims of rape and incest, hunger." "All those who, maybe thanks to an abortion, have regained a new life, maybe saved a child from starving to death." "You can't harm them just because of some principle of openness." "Luckily, I was able to get the head of the fetus out on the first try, but it rarely goes like that." "In the 12th week, the diameter of the head is a little more than 1.2 centimeters." "Therefore, a very impressive instrument has been developed by the medical community." "The nutcracker is an instrument that we use to get the fetus out of the uterus completely." "We enter it into and through the dilated cervical channel and position it around the head of the fetus, and you crack it like a nut, and then you pull out the fetus, and there you have it." "That is the so-called nutcracker." "This is not something I need to know." "Oh, I hope you're not going to be an opponent of abortion based on that." "No, but you have to think of the outrage this knowledge would create in society." "So, you're saying that people in general are too stupid to make decisions on an informed basis." "And that coming from a man who only an hour ago sermonized about his belief in human qualities." "No, you... you're simplifying things." "You can't look at it like that." "It's funny to see you so emotional suddenly." "Looking back, it rankles me a bit that I didn't just show up all calm and collected at the appointment with the psychologist and have my abortion under full anesthesia." "The fact is that when you're completely under, the fetus doesn't feel anything either, whereas my action, of course, caused pain, depending on how much consciousness you want to ascribe to a fetus about 12 weeks old." "I'm a bit nervous about bringing that subject up, as most of the abortions in the world, due to lack of resources, occur just under local anesthesia or none." "Well, you're a careful man." "Whether we talk about abortion or not, you can't escape death, and my fetus could have turned out to be a fine human being, but one that would also eventually die." "What haunts me is the ironic detail that my father and I were snail-gatherers." "We had the deepest compassion, not to say sentimentality, about the smallest living things on the planet which we demonstrated by saving snails, often, by the way, the same size as my fetus, from certain death on the path." "We did that only when the other one wasn't watching, as it was a bit embarrassing." "Are you picking up snails?" "No." "Are you sure you weren't picking up snails?" "Yeah." " You're sure?" "Yeah." "Shall we drop the subject?" " Yes, please." "Are you sure you don't want a little tour of the technical details of removal of organs for organ donations?" "No, thank you." "I'm fine." "Where were we?" "I think something about your boss sending you to see a psychologist." "Yes, that's right." "My name is Joe." " Hi, Joe." "And I'm a nymphomaniac." " Sex addict." "My name is Joe, and I'm a nymphomaniac." "We say sex addict." "Here, everyone's the same." "Renée, last time you told us you had a plan." "How did it go?" "I thought of trying something new, as nothing had helped." "I thought if I overdosed... in other words, if I did the exact opposite of what we are trying to do here, then I could get well." "You mean function normally." "I had prepared the whole thing very carefully." "Sent my husband away for the weekend and had the children taken care of." "It was to happen on the Saturday." "I had..." "I had collected phone numbers for a whole month, and then back in the coal." "They fucked me for three hours." "And how did you feel about that?" "Well, I never feel good afterwards." "I feel ashamed." "But in relation to..." "to your addiction, do you feel relieved like you thought you would?" "No." "What should I do?" "I'm ready to do what's necessary." "Sex addiction is very different from, say, abuse of drugs or alcohol because you don't actually need either of those things." "These addictions can be completely removed by removing the drug or the alcohol, not that that's easy." "But the difference with sex addiction is that everyone has a sexuality that's an integral part of their personality." "If one could imagine exterminating sexuality, then you'd be left with a severely reduced person because... because sexuality also includes tenderness, contact, solidarity with others, which would be hard to imagine anyone living without on some level." "What you're saying is that no one can remove their sexuality, even though it's destroying everything for them." "I wouldn't say no one, but let's say, at most, one in a million manage to live a life without sexuality." "But you can't be basing your therapy on that one in a million." "No." "The first and most important step is to remove incentive and to reduce exposure." "You have to ask yourself what kind of incentives you have and then make it difficult for yourself to come into contact with them." "Basically, anything that makes you think about sex." "Stop it." "Joe has something she'd like to share." "My name is Joe." " Hi, Joe." "And I'm a sex addict, but I haven't had sex for three weeks and five days." "Tell us how you did it, Joe." "You brought notes?" " Yes." "Dear everyone, don't think it's been easy, but I understand now that we are all alike." "Are you okay, Joe?" " Yes, yes." "Would you like a glass of water?" "Thank you." "Would you rather share another time?" "No, I'd like to speak." "Dear everyone, don't think it's been easy, but I understand now that we're not and never will be alike." "I'm not like you, who fucks to be validated and might just as well give up putting cocks inside you." "You already got your bloody kick a long time ago when it turned out that someone was even bothered to fuck you." "And I'm not like you." "Eat yourself to death if you want." "I have no pity for you." "All you want is to be filled up, and whether it's by a man or by tons of disgusting slop makes no difference, because it's all just a pathetic attempt at filling out your own resounding emptiness" "and hiding your ridiculous egocentric self-loathing." "And I'm definitely not like you." "That empathy you claim is a lie because all you are is society's morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the Earth, so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick." "I'm not like you." "I am a nymphomaniac, and I love myself for being one, but above all, I love my cunt and my filthy, dirty lust." "What just happened?" "I didn't get that, with the car that burned." "No, I'm sorry." "I was just in too much of a hurry to get to the last chapter." "It's dawning." "How can you tell?" "Oh, it's..." "it's just a slight coloring." "I know because I've stood here so often at this time." "You could say I've developed an ability to see dawn before everyone else." "Then you understand what I mean when I say that twilight suddenly appeared at this point in my story." "I understood that society had no room for me, and I had no room for society and never had." "It would've been much, much easier to have realized that earlier on, but suddenly, my senses unfolded dramatically." "To go from the respectable daylight side of society to the shady, nocturnal side was like changing sides in a war." "You put your old army behind you, and suddenly, the next second, you're swallowed by the new one." "There's no in between." "I'm sure it was quite natural for you to furnish your room as a monk's cell, but as an inspiration for this story, chapter headings hasn't been easy." "There's simply nothing left for me to use." "Well, I'm sorry about that." "But if I may, I can give you a tip." "Yes, please." "You know, I occupy myself mostly with texts, but sometimes the text can seem so... so empty, so unfathomably empty." "It could be the best text by the most famous author." "The solution might be to change your point of view." "I don't get that." "Things hide when they become familiar." "But if you look at them from another angle, they might take on a new meaning." "You're right." "Before this was just the stain from the tea I threw." "Can you see what it could be?" "A revolver!" "No, a revolver has a drum that revolves." "It's a pistol." "Can you see what kind it could be?" "No, I don't remember anything like that from my literature." "Oh, but it's something I can remember from mine." "Ian Fleming." " Not familiar." "If you haven't read that, you haven't read anything at all." "This could be, with a little imagination, a Walther PPK automatic, the same gun that was issued to Bond, after his preferred pistol, the Beretta, had jammed." "Is that something you can use?" "Oh, yes, it is." "Whether I left society or it left me, I cannot say." "I suppose you could make an argument for both sides." "I was on my way to the shady side of the debt collecting business, which, among other things, involves stuff like burning people's cars." "I had for a long time known about this man, L." "Hi, my name is Joe." "I know that." "Come in." "I'm looking for a job." "I've been working in an office, and I was never really good at it." "I can understand that." "I mean, what's the point?" "I've thought of you now and then and wondered when you'd show up." "My lifestyle is relatively expensive, and I need a fair amount of free time for a sideline." "Of course." "I already know that." "I believe I possess some qualifications and that I'm rather unscrupulous." "I know all about your qualifications and they're excellent." "And you have already proven you are unscrupulous by coming here." "I would suggest that you start your own little business with my help." "I understand you possess a great deal of insight about a rather broad spectrum of men." "This could be, or should be, capitalized on." "What should I do?" "I facilitate certain assignments for my humble firm as part of a debt collection business." "In other words, I need subcontractors who can put moderate pressure on individuals, with whom my clients rightly or wrongly have a bone to pick." "Understand?" " Extortion." "No." "No, no, no, no." "I always prefer the term 'debt collection.'" "Yeah." " I refrain from judging whether my clients' wishes are legitimate or otherwise, a point of view I strongly recommend you follow." "I'm still unsure of what it is I should do." "Well, you'll need two thugs, and I can think of two good ones." "They both have a lot of experience and can show you the ropes." "That's interesting." "It's not at all interesting." "Most interesting thing about it was how easily I dedicated myself to crime." "My main qualification, of course, was my considerable experience with men and sex." "But even my more specialized skills came in handy." "No, now this is not how it goes." "You have to wait until you're hit." "The two helpers that L had recommended were okay, but they were predisposed to a rather repetitive technique, which consisted of creating as much havoc as possible with a pair of iron bars." "Destroying your things doesn't seem to have much effect on you." "The only thing worth mentioning from my first years as a collector was the story of an unusually sober-minded, and for that reason vulnerable, man." "The dirt I threatened to go public with was normally within my core competence: sex." "But for once, here was a man I was unable to read sexually, so I became persistent." "Tie him to the chair." "Don't hurt him." "I can't find a stain on you, but my experience tells me that no man is spotless." "Luckily, you're equipped with a very reliable truth detector." "I'm going to tell you a few stories." "All you have to do is listen." "You're in a bar watching a couple..." "I now meticulously went through the catalogue of sexual deviations in fictional form." "Stories about sado-masochism, fetishism, homosexuality, you name it." "But he didn't react." "And I'd almost given up when I said..." "On your way home, you walk through the park." "And something makes you stop." "You hear something." "Yes, that's it." "You can hear the children in the playground." "You sit on a bench nearby and watch them play." "There's a little boy in shorts." "He's playing in the sandpit." "He looks at you with his blue eyes." "He smiles at you." "I think he comes to you." "He sits on your lap and looks up at your face." "He says he'd like to come home with you." "At home, you can't fight the idea of being naked together." "He crawls all over you." "You get an erection." "Won't you please stop?" "He lies on his stomach." "You pull down his pants." "I'll pay!" "You did what?" "I gave him a blowjob." "Why?" "That pig!" " I took pity on him." "Pity?" "Yes." "I had just destroyed his life." "Nobody knew his secret, most probably not even himself." "He sat there with the shame." "I suppose I sucked him off as a kind of apology." "That's unbelievable." "No, listen to me." "This is a man who'd succeeded in repressing his own desire, who had never before given into it, right up until I forced it out." "He had lived a life full of denial and had never hurt a soul." "I think that's laudable." "No matter how much I try," "I can't find anything laudable in pedophilia." "That's because you think about the perhaps five percent who actually hurt children." "The remaining 95 percent never live out their fantasies." "Think about their suffering." "Sexuality is the strongest force in human beings." "To be born with a forbidden sexuality must be agonizing." "The pedophile who manages to get through life with the shame of his desire while never acting on it, deserves a bloody medal." "The writer Thomas Mann said somewhere that a temptation resisted is not a sin but a test of virtue." "Wasn't there something about that writer and boys?" "Yeah, so they say." "I suppose he dealt with it by writing them out." "And he got a medal, a Nobel Prize." "But there was another reason for my sympathy, which you find so mysterious." "I saw a man who was carrying the same cross as myself." "Loneliness." "We were both sexual outcasts." "In any case, some years passed, during which my business grew, enabling me to step up my anonymous deposits to Marcel." "Your business is doing great." "You complete all the jobs I give you to perfection." "And I hear only words of praise from your other clients, but..." "But what?" " We aren't getting any younger." "No, that's for sure." "I think you're getting to that age where you have to start thinking about a successor." "Oh, I don't need a fucking successor." "Listen." "A person should take their crime seriously." "You need someone to be your right hand, someone to help you." "A crown princess." "The normal process is to find out what colleagues are in prison, or are drug addicts, and thereby unable to fulfill their roles as parents." "Then, you find out where their kids play football, and you get involved." "You cheer them on for a couple of years, no matter how bad they are." "Actually, the worse, the better." "That way, gradually, you take on the role of the parent until, in the end, you have a loyal helper that will walk through fire for you." "Even do time for you." "It sounds like a kind of an entrapment you're suggesting." "An unsavory entrapment." " Call it what you want, but if you believe at all in the effects of good parenting, that kid will have much greater opportunities with you as a mentor than without." "And since I like you," "I've been looking around for a suitable subject." "She's 15 years old from a family of hardened criminals, and she's been through a lot." "Last couple of years she's been institutionalized." "Her father's in prison and her mother died of an overdose." "She's a smart girl." "And although she doesn't play football, she does play basketball very badly." "She's chosen a team sport because she's lonely." "I saved the best part for last." "Her right ear is slightly deformed, which she is very ashamed of, and of course, this serves to isolate her even more." "It makes her an easy target for even the slightest bit of attention or sign of empathy from you." "Despite my protests, the clever L somehow talked me into actually having a look at P." "The longer I watched the poor girl with the deformed ear, the more repulsive I found the whole plan." "But as if L had foreseen this, the meeting with P filled me with pity and emotion." "And without wanting to," "I found myself, weekend after weekend, at her games supporting the poor player." "Thanks for cheering me on." " You're welcome." "You played really well today." "No, I didn't." " You did." "You really improved yourself lately." "Sixteen years." "Congratulations." "Thank you." " You're welcome." "I was proud to introduce P to my father's passion and his world." "It's actually... the souls of the trees that we see in the winter." "I think they look like human souls." "Yeah, you're right." "They do look like human souls." "Twisted souls, regular souls, crazy souls, all depending on the kind of lives human beings lead." "Then that must be Miss Williamson from number 21." "That's not a very nice thing to say about Miss Williamson." "But she's always angry." "She has a monster in her belly." "Well, she does have an ulcer in her belly that I've been treating for the last 15 years." "And sure enough, one of the following days my dad dragged me into the woods again." "I found my tree." "My soul tree." "And no, it's not that one, okay, 'cause then I would be dead." "This is my tree." "It's not an ash tree." " No, it's an oak tree." "It has two trunks." "Yeah, isn't it great?" "It shows itself to both sides, the lake and the forest." "But, Dad, how does a tree get two trunks?" "The most common reason is that the top broke when it was very young." "That means that you've been broken once." "Have you, Dad?" "It seems that it can be rather revealing... to find your soul tree." "My father found his soul tree, but I've never found mine." "'You will know it when you see it,' is what he said." "Kitchen and dining room." "And in here..." "When P reached the age of maturity and I became her personal adviser," "I asked her to move in with me." "Let me see you with your hair up." "You're so pretty." "All this time all my sexual activity had stopped." "My groin was one big sore from my abuse that wouldn't heal, and made even masturbation impossible." "I experienced definite abstinence symptoms... fever and cramps." "Joe, what's going on?" "Careful." " We need to clear this up." "I just get this sometimes." "It's okay." "It's okay." "Do you want to go back to bed?" "Yeah." "Yeah, yeah." "I love you, Joe." "I love you, too." "I don't mean it in that way." "Come on, it's late." "You should go back to bed." "Good night." "Perhaps she really loved you." "She was so very young." "Maybe she, too, discovered her cunt at the age of two." "Maybe earlier." "I couldn't accept it." "Perhaps because you really wanted it to be true." "Perhaps I hoped it." "It's very touching, all this about P." "Then you've probably misunderstood the whole thing." "Shall we get the story over and done with?" "Don't." "I wanna see you." "Don't." " Why?" "Please, don't." " Why not?" "No." "No, I have a wound." "I have a wound." " It doesn't matter." "No, you don't understand." " I have that thing with my ear." "I'm so ashamed." "Do you like me?" "You're so beautiful." "There's one thing I don't understand." "Did she know what you did for a living?" "P was very discreet and a girl of few words." "Oddly, although I worked strange hours, she never asked about my work." "But one day she had a question." "Joe." "Why did you start coming to my basketball matches?" "It wasn't a coincidence, was it?" "No, it wasn't a coincidence." "I didn't tell you because I..." "I thought you'd be upset... and that you'd get angry at me." "I won't get angry" "What I do..." "My job isn't a normal job." "It's not legal." "No one in my family does anything legal." "A man that's helped me in my business suggested that I watched you." "The plan was that I..." "I should look at you to see whether one day I could use you in my work." "I should make friends with you because I knew you didn't have a mother or a father." "What's wrong with that?" "Don't you see how evil that plan was?" "I felt terrible." " You shouldn't have." "Why not?" "Because if you hadn't... we'd never have met." "I'd like to go with you to work next time." "No." "Will you think about it?" "No." " Yes." "No." " Yes." "She didn't take no for an answer." "No, of course not." "How do you keep a wave upon the sand?" "And in the throes of love, I was weak and no match for her." "With the risk of being too clever for myself, social inheritance is an irrefutable fact." "If anyone knew about the laws of the street, it must've been P." "You're more right than you know." "Let's shoot the fucker." " No, no!" "Stop!" "Stop!" "We don't use firearms." "I'd like to have the gun." " The others have weapons, too." "Well, I didn't know that, but in any case, you're not to have one." "But guns aren't dangerous." "It depends on how you use them." "Yes, exactly." "I wasn't going to shoot him." "We wouldn't have gotten any money out of him that way." "Can I have the gun?" "Thank you." "You're evil." "And now I'm afraid one of those coincidences you have such a hard time with occurred with a very special person." "It was P's job to take us to the debtors, so until I saw the name on the door," "I had no idea whose house we were at." "This is Acer siccharium." "Saccharinum." " Saccharinum, yeah, that." "I said that." "Are you sure this is the right place?" "Yeah." "I was thinking maybe it's time for you to do this one on your own." "Yeah?" "Thank you, Joe." " I don't want anything destroyed, and I don't want anybody hurt." "Okay?" "You just show yourself and offer him a reasonable payment plan." "If you say so, of course that's how I'll do it." "Whether the feeling when I saw Jerome again was love," "I couldn't say." "But it was a feeling... and far stronger than I liked." "I was actually walking home through the alley here." "Your two neighborhoods are totally different, but still so close together that the shortest route from Jerome's house towards the center was through the alley." "Hello!" "How did it go?" " Brilliant." "Yeah, really well." "I made a reasonable payment plan like you told me to." "How did he look?" " Scared." "How old did he look?" "I don't know." "Ancient?" "Jerome was to pay off his debt in six payments." "Every time P went to Jerome to collect," "I'd pace around restlessly until she was back home again." "I even had to find my mother's sad old solitaire cards in order to make the hours pass." "Each night I was less reassured by her coming home than the night before." "The question of whether jealousy is the fear of sharing or the fear of losing was of little interest to me." "But yes, it was a fact that this unworthy feeling" "I had managed to suppress for so long was creeping up on me." "The evening she was to collect the final payment, she didn't kiss me." "I took it to be forgetfulness, but the hours passed, and she didn't return." "Every time I saw car lights, I thought it was P being driven home." "So the next morning I took a trip to the round hills just outside of town that I visited with my school class when I was 12, to say a symbolic goodbye." "I had decided to flee." "I couldn't stay in this town with her and him." "I had cowardly made a plan to escape and head south." "Like from some ice age" "I didn't have the guts to turn around and face." "But the goodbye was sad and strangely unfulfilling." "And something called me on to seek further up the mountain." "I understand dictators who commit murder." "What was Hitler, when it all boils down, other than a man to whom society gave free reins?" "Well, that was just what we were missing." "You understand racists, you have a soft spot for pedophiles, and, of course, now at the finishing line, you have to sympathize with the greatest mass murderers of history." "What I mean is..." "It's said to be difficult to take someone's life." "I would've said that it's more difficult not to when, as a dictator or as me, you've nothing to lose." "For a human being, killing is the most natural thing in the world." "We're created for it." "Wonderful." "No, get off!" "Fireman's grip." "Fill all my holes, please." "I still don't know why the gun didn't work." "I did check to make sure that there were bullets in the magazine." "It simply malfunctioned." "Just like Bond's Beretta." "I think I know enough to say that even if you had rounds in the magazine of the Walther PPK, if you'd taken off the safety, you cannot shoot until you've racked the gun." "You pull and release the sliding mechanism." "And P hadn't done it because as she said, she had no intention of shooting the man." "I don't know about Bond, but I assume it has to be apparent from his books and his films that you have to rack an automatic pistol." "Of course, you're right." "I've seen it in films a thousand times." "It's morning." "The snow is gone." " So the sun must be up?" "Yes, there is sun." "How can you see it?" "This alley's located so that you never get direct sunlight here, but I can see a small reflection on the building on the other side." "I've never managed to figure out where it comes from." "It must be some interplay between windows and towers and high buildings." "It's not much, but it's the sun you get here at my place." "It's beautiful." "In the beginning, you said that your only sin was that you asked more of the sunset." "Meaning, I suppose, that you wanted more from life than was good for you." "You were a human being demanding your right, and more than that, you were a woman demanding her right." "Does that pardon everything?" "Do you think if two men were to walk down a train looking for women, do you think anybody would have raised an eyebrow, or if a man had led the life you had?" "And the story about Mrs. H. would've been extremely banal if you'd been a man." "And your conquest would have been a woman." "When a man leaves his children because of desire, we accept it with a shrug, but you as a woman, you had to take on a guilt, a burden of guilt that could never be alleviated." "Your abortion was legal, but more than anything else, it was a punishment you inflicted upon yourself." "And all in all, all the blame and guilt that piled up over the years became too much for you, and you reacted aggressively, almost like a man, I have to say, and you fought back." "You fought back against the gender that had been oppressing and mutilating and killing you and billions of women in the name of religion or ethics, or God knows what." "But I wanted to kill a human being." "But you didn't." "Because of a chance event." "You call it a chance event," "I call it subconscious resistance." "On the surface you wanted to kill, but deep down, you celebrated human worth" "in a veil of forgetfulness draped itself over your knowledge of how to rack a gun." "Although all this sounds frighteningly close to the clichés of our times... and I'm predisposed to knock holes in your arguments..." "I'm too tired." "Well, that's good." "Why don't you lay down?" "Yes." "Let me just say that telling my story as you insisted, or permitted," "has put me at ease." "At this moment, my addiction is very clear to me." "And I've come to a decision." "Even though only one in a million, as my dubious therapist said, succeed in mentally, bodily, and in her heart ridding herself of her sexuality... this is now my goal." "But is that a life worth living?" "It's the only way I can live it." "I will stand up against all odds... just like a deformed tree on a hill." "I will muster all of my stubbornness... my strength... my masculine aggression." "But most of all I want to say thanks to my new and maybe first friend." "Thank you, Seligman... who perhaps is happy when all is said and done." "I'm happy at any rate that the shot didn't go off and made me a murderer." "If I may, I'd like to sleep now." "I'll make sure you won't be disturbed." "And when you wake up, maybe we could discuss your future if you'd like." "In your new life, would you consider seeking out your son?" "It's possible." "Good night, Joe." "Good night, Seligman." "No!" "But you, you fucked thousands of men."