Page 172 - harryDEC12_clean.iba

Thank you, I thought, no longer in the mood to defend her. I was puzzled, also because of that massive superstition which I attributed to a certain traditional naiveté of these country folk. At first I laughed, to the displeasure of the innkeeper. On the other hand there had been many witch burnings here in the Taunus in the Middle Ages. Perhaps there was something in it that was inaccessible to rational knowledge. Perhaps that was where Martha replenished her destructive energy. I decided to say nothing about this visit, and drove back to Hamburg, in a thoughtful mood.
On my next and last visit to Saint Paul de Vence - it was before Christmas – one evening guests came in the company of the Siemens agent, guests from Germany, from the Heidelberg area. They drove an old 250S Mercedes onto the courtyard and unloaded valuable carpets and handed over to Martha a jewel case for her to choose something for herself. I looked at them with apprehension: A short stocky man with thin straight black hair, that was damp with perspiration, a wide flat face and small eyes, accompanied by an exotic woman in an expensively embroidered caftan, and with large creole earrings. And than there was a young couple, the son of the man and his future bride who accompanied them. I looked at Martha in wonderment.
“They are friends of Simeon,”
She said.
“They sell us carpets and jewelry at a good prices.”
“Stolen ...”
I whispered to her.
“So what?
Answered Martha. How stupid of me to mention that. In fact I bought for a little money two silk carpets and a golden circlet similar to the one Martha had thrown away on Ibiza. Why I did that, I do not know, it was like I followed an inner compulsion, totally against my will - but my will was imprisoned. Then we sat down at the big stone table on the terrace, ate and drank red wine. Martha went with the woman she got along with very well straight away into the lounge and laid out tarot cards, or rather she had the woman teach her that skill. Not long after the stocky man, who was called Roman, urged his son to sing songs in their national language. The son obeyed his father and presented in a foreign language (a mix of Spanish and Rumanian) heartrending, sad songs, which were about love and poverty, as was explained to me. The situation was absurd. At the end of the evening Roman asked Martha which type of car she liked.
“Ferrari,”
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