Page 158 - harryDEC12_clean.iba

"Well, imagine I’d help you with the finance - generously, I mean. With your income you’d certainly have to get 50% of the money from our company account - the rest I’d give you as a loan from the firm, interest free. To say it openly, I’d do that in the hope that our dear Martha would remove herself from Hamburg in the long term. There she can insult anyone she wants and would not stand in your road or mine. You’d have a marriage at long range. Others do that too. In any case, Martha h a s to disappear from Hamburg, and soon.”
For a moment I am as though I have been hit on the head, then my face lightens up. My marriage has already become a great burden for me, that is clear and any solution freeing me from the stranglehold is a welcomed one. Such a step would be indeed very liberating. I could throw off the manacles of eternal domination; become myself again, and save face before the world. So I say that this is an outstanding idea, without giving more details about the situation of my marriage or asking for the reason for this sudden urgency.
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oOo
Martha received the idea with her own reasoning, with unbounded enthusiasm, started immediately to leaf through property offers, contacts local real estate agents, and two weeks later we landed in Nice and had two different real estate agents show us various plots - in Saint Paul de Vence, the artists’ colony in the gentle hills behind Nice. At last Martha found what suited her. A very beautiful house in old Provencal style on a plot of 2,400 square metres, set out in terrace shape, where exotic African plants are growing because the owner a certain Monsieur Lepez, an extravagant colonial businessman, had spent most of his life traveling the Congo and the Ivory Coast. The walls were covered in abundant bougainvillea - a wonderful picture in violet. Next to them Phoenix palms twenty metres high, of incalculable value, a natural spring, and a pool inhabited by frogs. Of course there was also a 50 square metre swimming pool with a pool house. On clear days one could see from the upper terrace over the Mediterranean, reflecting the glistening sun, as far as Corsica, but perhaps it was only a mirroring, an illusion - like most things in life.
The price far exceeded our budget, but to my surprise I succeeded in getting the finance from the bank with Klaus Friedrich's help. My friend Alex, with whom I had had only telephone contact in recent years, was lending the rest to me.
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