Sylvia had a new idea and followed suit. She wanted to rent out.
Smart as she was, she had soon found an institution that regularly sent her guests. Consequently, I had to get windows and insulating material and glaze the balcony. From then on, we slept on the balcony, and Jacky slept in the living room.
Bedroom and children’s room were rented. At some point my wife asked me for a ride to a strange village somewhere in the heath. She did not tell me what she wanted there. Eventually we ended up with a family that bred Pekinese.
Trusting in my love of animals, we drove home with an expensively paid Pekinese puppy. In the end, I was also stuck with the dog, which had to be cared for, trained, and walked from the 6th floor. My dear wife had neither patience nor desire to do this.
She wanted to take the doggie on a leash in nice weather and go for a stroll with him. To make matters worse, the Pekinese was not a purebred, grew larger than a Spitz and died, probably unvaccinated, a good year later of distemper.
The constant unpleasant surprises that my wife gave me tore at my nerves, and I felt that I would not be able to endure this life much longer. But there were also pleasant surprises. One day something happened that I had been waiting for for years.
Suddenly my oldest was standing at the door. I had not seen Andreas since he was a child. Only through third parties had I learned that he was being trained as an agricultural technician somewhere on a people’s estate.
At present he had to do his military service, and chance, which he immediately used to visit his father, brought him near me. Finally one of my hopes was fulfilled, I had one of my sons back.
The strangeness between father and son after all these years was quickly overcome, and we never broke off contact again. I learned from Andreas that Thomas had also been trained as an agricultural technician somewhere in Mecklenburg on an LPG.
Both brothers had virtually no contact with their mother. The conclusion was obvious that they were quite indifferent to their parental home. But we didn’t talk about that; we were interested in the future. Sylvia treated my son like a guest, cool and correct. One could not expect much more from her.
Our marriage degenerated more and more into a marriage of convenience, and I was not entirely blameless in this. After the physical confrontation over the curtains, I no longer tried to change that.
My ambition was to avoid quarrels and to get by like a battered boxer until my daughter would understand why I was still married to her mother. Sylvie didn’t live on bread alone either, I had known that for a long time. I was little at home, nor did I care.
But the following embarrassing incident broke the camel’s back: One of their guests, a good-looking man in his forties, was the manager of a radio and television store somewhere in a small town in Mecklenburg, and of course he had color TV sets.
Such sets were in absolute short supply and, despite their outrageously high price, impossible to acquire without connections. After Sylvie’s guest had said goodbye, a few days later a Wartburg station wagon with Mecklenburg license plates was parked in front of our house. I came from a business trip and knew immediately what had happened. 𝓣𝓸 𝓑𝓮 𝓒𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓾𝓮𝓭…
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