59. Anna Karenina
Pearl called her friend. They agreed on an ad in The Scotsman that would inform Pearl whether she had been accepted into the remote landscaping course. We decided to take the train back to London and fly from there to Zagreb in Croatia. I booked tickets under the identities of Kevin Sanders and Stephen Grant. To be on the side of caution, I booked Pearl on a different flight via Frankfurt in Germany. If Butler was waiting for us at the airport, he could only catch us, and Pearl had a fair chance of getting away.
“How did you get Pearl to drop everything and come with you?” Martin asked me when we were over the Alps.
“Dunno. It just happened.”
“I think she loves your devotion,” Martin said.
“Rachel would drop everything if you asked her to live with you on the North Pole.”
“I won’t, I mean, I’m not going to ask Rachel to join us.”
“Feel free to do it if that is in your heart.”
“I think I have put us all at enough risk for the time being.”
“Are you not pining after her?”
“You know me. Always in love with love, always uncertain about the object of my love.”
“You’ve got enough time to figure it out before we go to Vienna.”
Three days later, Martin and I picked up Pearl from the airport in Zagreb. We allowed ourselves a week of exploring the city before settling down. We enjoyed the warm spring weather in the parks and cafés of the bustling old town. Pearl bought The Scotsman at a newsstand in the main station and learned she had been accepted. Her course was about to begin a few days later.
It was time to nest. Pearl needed a place to study, I needed a place to figure out the proof and Martin was itching to start working on the unpublished novella about Sophie and her unlucky lover.
We decided to rent an apartment in the new town. Through a real-estate agent who spoke German, we found a three-bedroom apartment south of the Sava on the top floor in a shapeless socialist building block. The apartment itself was pleasant with good furniture and appliances and full sunlight in the morning.
Within a few days, we had found a routine that suited us all. Martin and Pearl got along well. The three of us lived together in harmony. I usually got up first and went out to buy fresh milk and pastries. I made coffee for Martin and me and tea for Pearl.
After breakfast we all studied until lunch, or I went out to use an internet café. We were concerned with us all using the internet from the same location and so we decided that only Pearl should use the excellent broadband that came with the apartment. She needed to use her real name and ID to take part in her courses. She also needed peace and quiet for the frequent video calls. I feared that Butler had put trackers out on the net for keywords I might be researching. Using different internet access points seemed an appropriate measure of caution as well as a proper courtesy to my girlfriend.
I could bundle the things I needed to research on the internet and do it in one go from an internet café in the old town. Every other day, I took the tram to the old town and used a different internet café. For the first time in my life, I enjoyed using public transport. The trams were half empty at the time of day when we used them. I liked the old cars the Zagreb tram company had bought from Mannheim in Germany. An odd sense of familiarity filled me when I rode in the cars and read the German symbols and labels.
I usually returned to the apartment around lunchtime. Martin and Pearl prepared lunch while I was working on my proof. In the late afternoon, we gathered for a stroll in the old town, where we usually had dinner in one of the many restaurants before we went back to our temporary home. The pizza was excellent in most places, and we discovered fried calamari with French fries as our favorite dish.
For a few weeks, we lived like millions of other students around the globe – only we never fought about cleaning the dishes or taking out the trash. Someone always volunteered in time.
Martin hardly ever talked about Rachel, and I didn’t ask. I wondered if he wasn’t yearning for a bit of romantic drama. I had a hunch that he found our happiness boring and was curious if he was going to have a similarly boring relationship with Rachel once they were finally an item. A devotee to romances with long courtships and intricate plots, Martin couldn’t stop quoting Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina saying: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
My family had been a model for the latter and Martin’s for the first. In these few peaceful weeks in post-communist Zagreb, our roles were reversed. Where I bathed in blissful harmony with Pearl, Martin was struggling to come to terms with the secret clause that had driven him to come with me to Europe. It was the first significant disturbance in his family life, and he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to trust his father again. I, on the other hand, couldn’t believe how smoothly Pearl and I slipped into an everyday life together. We were two peas in a pod and more so with every day. Martin didn’t grow tired of reminding me that we were only the first few weeks into our relationship and that I shouldn’t count my chickens before they were hatched. He was right, of course, but then I knew how I felt, how I had felt from the moment I had met her. It was the same with Pearl as it had been with Martin himself: We were friends from the moment we met and nothing had changed that.
Copyright by Ines Strohschein, Berlin 2022