Chapter 5

We drove for about an hour outside of the town of Coburg, and were deep in the countryside when he announced we had arrived at his castle. We went down a long tree-lined drive, and wound around until it appeared into view. It was smaller than I had thought it would be, and even in the dark, I could tell it was painted the same lemon yellow as most of the buildings I had seen on the way there. There was a gravel parking lot in what looked like a courtyard in the middle, the structure making a U shape around it, prettily framed by a high lemon yellow archway atop thick square columns. It looked rather new, not the crumbling grey ivy covered stone I had expected.

"Do you have company?" I asked.

He looked momentarily confused. I motioned to the other cars parked in the courtyard.

"No, they live here. They are my neighbors."

I looked around. There were three rows of big windows running along the building, so I surmised there were three floors, and as I looked closer, I understood the castle had been divided up into apartments. There looked to be ten in all. I smiled to myself. Munich is not Munich, Coburg is not Coburg and a castle is an apartment in the country.

He grabbed our bags out of the car and proceeded down some steps to one of the two side entrances. Inside, it was badly lit and smelled very strongly of wet dog. There was a ground floor apartment door to the left, but he bounded up the unstained rudimentary wooden stairs to the second floor. A lone light bulb hung from a wire, casting down a sickly yellow light. I looked down, and in the dimness, realized I was standing on a patch of astroturf. Astroturf in the entrance to a castle, I thought.

I followed behind him, and he opened the door. Immediately to the right was the bathroom, a big bulky square tub taking up most of the space, and the sound of dripping water eerily echoing from inside, as if someone had just taken a bath and forgotten to completely close the tap. Straight ahead was a closed bedroom door. There was no entry hall to speak of, but a small foyer off of which branched two more rooms and the kitchen. The ceilings were high, the floor parquet, and the windows reached from mid-wall to the ceiling. I put down my bag, not sure if I should go ahead without him. There was a distinct feeling of emptiness, of loneliness and isolation, and it made me suddenly cold.

"Let me show you the place," he said with obvious pride and fondness. He led me through the kitchen, furnished with a cheap looking table and three metal and plastic chairs. He pulled me by the hand to what had obviously been the living room. Stripped of most of the furniture, it seemed small and sad, a long-dead plant in the corner by the large curtainless windows. I tried to fill it with furniture in my head, imagine it as it must have been with Regina and her daughter to give it life. A newspaper rustled across the floor in the air we had suddenly disturbed, and startled me. There were a few pictures still left on the wall, one of which looked like a strange type of photograph of him.

"This is my hologram," he said, stopping in front of it and straightening himself up, "I spent a lot of money on it. They are very rare."

He stood there smiling, his hands on his hips. I looked at it, remembering a hologram of a human skull on the front of a National Geographic that, as a child, I had spent hours turning this way and that, the rainbow colors at odds with the solemnity of the skull's frozen grin. He was much younger in the picture, his eyes open alertly, his frozen smile one of fascination and novelty, as if congratulating himself for having had the idea and the money to have it done. Why would someone want such a thing? I wondered. I slowly walked around it, watching his preserved youthful face come out of the frame and into the room. I looked at it hard, knowing it would be the last time, knowing that the next time I passed it, I would avoid its slightly manic gaze.

He showed me the rest of the apartment, the two now empty bedrooms, and talked of how happy he had been here with his wife and her daughter. I wondered where the daughter was now, and why she was not with him. Perhaps she was with his wife's family - if they were in court over a red dress, they surely had gone to court for custody of their daughter's girl.

I went to take a bath, and soaking in the tub, I thought of Regina and what her life must have been like, living in this sad little apartment carved from a castle, hidden away in the countryside, waiting for him to come home on the weekends. I pictured her in the red dress, looking sadly out the window, watching and listening for the yellow jalopy to come up the drive.

She had been a teacher in a local school. Did the children miss her, think of her, or even know that she had died? Did shopkeepers in town, forgetting she was gone, still ask after her, and wince at their gaffe while holding the box of pastries or wrapped meat over the counter to him, the package hanging in the air like the question, until one of them looked away?

When I emerged from the bathroom, I found him standing in the hallway, a painting of a woman in yellows, reds and greens in his hands, holding it up for me to see.

“This is my wife,” he said, holding it up.

“Oh, she was a painter?" I asked, toweling my hair dry and tilting my head to get a better look, "Or did someone paint that of her?”

“No,” he said, “this is her.”

And then I saw it - the impression of her body, like a technicolor shroud. She had smeared her hips and thighs and legs with yellow, accenting her nipples in red and her pubis in green, and pressed the canvas up against her dripping form. Her body was slim and quite beautiful. I felt the sheer force of her will, the desperate defiance of death by leaving a physical trace of her very self, a map of the body she knew she would one day abandon. She would live again for a brief moment each time he looked at it and remembered the feel of his hand on her hips or the taste of her nipples in his mouth. I imagined a desperate sob escaping her, wracking her glistening rainbowed body as she clasped the canvas to her, knowing it would one day be forever captured behind a glass and frame. It sent a shiver down my back.


He had made a makeshift bed on the floor of the living room, and as we lay there together, he settled into sleep, cradling me in his arms from behind. He murmured into the back of my neck, asking me what I thought of the apartment. I didn't know what to say. I could hear the water dripping in the bathroom, puncturing my silence as I struggled for words. I didn't like anything about the place except the windows, precisely because they led away from this empty, isolated and unremarkable apartment he had called his castle in the country. I had visions of standing endlessly at them, tugging at the ill-fitting red dress, waiting for the chance to slip away. I imagined myself trapped there, isolated in the country, more than an hour by car away from the small town of Coburg, not speaking the language. Alone with the imprint of a woman I had never known. I couldn't wait to get out of there.

"I could never live here," I said, sensing he meant for me to. Feeling bold, I moved my head away from his.

"I'm a city girl," I said.