The German Girl

IN THE AIR OVER IRAN
January 2003

On the plane from Dubai to Frankfurt, I was seated next to a man from Argentina. “My family is from Italy,” he told me, and I could see this in the quick light bones of his face, in the tailored clothes on his elegant body, in the white hair, a little too fine, a little too wavy, a little too long to belong to a man. He wanted to chat; his voice had a graceful accent, and his eyes looked eager, and I was delighted he thought to talk to me. I asked him questions: where he was headed, where he was coming from, what was he doing in the Middle East, and he answered with a concentrated interest in my reaction, his words low and musical, delighted himself to address my next question.

“Where are we now?” I asked, meaning, what country is speeding below us. Iran, he thought, based on how long we’d been flying. Unsatisfied though with his own answer, he took long minutes intently flipping the airline magazine pages searching for a map, checking the real-time flight monitor on the pop-up video screen for comparison. I watched in silent fascination, enchanted by his hands. Yes Iran, he decided. I wondered out loud if he’d been there and yes he had, but did not enjoy it. Too much oppression, he said. He smiled briefly to himself, a shadow that sped across his face, then frowned and smiled again, deeply. He had a story he wished to tell me.

“We are flying to Germany,” he said. “The women in Germany are so free, not like the women in Iran.” He had seen a German girl once, in the hotel sauna. She was naked, they all were, men and women both, naked and unashamed in the sauna together. But she was different; she was free. She sat with her legs apart so he could see everything, and what he saw was that she had shaved, and so was smooth and lovely. And she knew this and didn’t mind if he knew it too, wanted him to know, which made her free. And there was more: a small gold ring. “Piercing both lips down there. Imagine. Beautiful. Amazing.” A beautiful decoration in addition to her own beauty. “Amazing, amazing. She was so free.”

He was aroused by the German girl in the sauna, and was aroused now by describing her to me. Of course he was. His face was luminous, remembering. And I was aroused too, listening, of course I was; I could feel a warmth, a swelling, a dampness. It was unexpected, it was meltingly sweet.

“Imagine the pain,” he whispered, his eyes half closed. “Oh, the pain.” I could imagine the pain, I could feel the pain. The muscles of my inner thighs clenched, my insides lurched, my eyelids fluttered. We all know this pain: every woman, old and young, girl and child and infant. It runs through all of us, the ones who have felt it in their own lives, and those who are blessed never to feel it themselves, we are aware, and we know. Break a woman’s heart and it will heal slowly, imperceptively but surely, like a scalded tongue. But to break a woman there is to amputate the hand of God, to forever maim and cripple the creation of life itself. We all know this, men and women both, and look upon that place with awe and fear. Painters sculptors photographers attempt to catch that fragile sorrowful beauty, to preserve it undestroyed.

This man himself was an artist; he drew her sacred splendor in reverent tones, amazing amazing amazing, and shook his head uncomprehending, his eyes gathering in light, pulling me into him. “How does she relieve herself? How does it not become infected? How does she keep it so hair-free? Like a baby, like a baby, soft, like a baby?” I wanted to weep at his compassion, at the purity of his concern, at his wonder and gratitude in witnessing this mystery. Amazing, amazing, amazing. He spoke with the voice and posture of prayer, bowed in respect, offering his unworthy self before what he had seen. I shook my own head, uncomprehending, at what was now being offered to me, a passage into the secret tender part of his soul. Involuntarily, I felt the swelling of own prayers, my own desire to kneel, my own self undeserving of this miracle.

They were dimming the cabin lights. In a few moments, he said, the veteran of too many flights, they would turn them off altogether. He needed to sleep, he told me. He stretched out his legs; just tap them like this if you need to get out, and now he grinned at me, touching his legs lightly. I believe he knew I had no intention of leaving his side, not now; I could not imagine tapping on his legs. If I touched him at all, it would be to remove the sleeping mask from his face and to kiss his eyelids gently, while he slept. I wished I dared to grasp his hand. I slept for a while too, in the strangeness of strangers, flown away from their consciousness like patients in dentists’ chairs, side by side in the dark cemetery in the point of the plane, held up in the sky by rushing air. And yet I was drowsily comforted knowing this man was near, adorning me in the intimate sharing of himself, that piercing glimpse of naked holiness: that which was given free from the German girl to this Argentinean man, given to me from him, and now from me to you who read this, all of us held in the streaming beauty of the Divine.