Pico flies to Mallorca

Pico was afraid of flying. His first flight, when old Mr. Cantor had taken him to Jerusalem, had impressed him very much. Later, when he was learning to sail, he sometimes flew on sailing trips, but he was was scared to death every time, even though he would never, ever have would have admitted it.

Now he was sitting in the waiting lounge of the airport, feeling a deep fatigue and only more subliminally his nervousness. The impatience, it may finally start or be already at the end, astonished him as much as his impatience after the death of Lila, who had been the companion of his quiet and simple life. Even then, when his mother was buried, he could not contain his impatience for it to be over soon, he could not and did not understand. He felt that his life would somehow change again abruptly, suddenly and fundamentally, but it made him very sad that the impatience affected him more than the grief itself. That the uncertainty at his age still made him as nervous as the then thirteen‐year‐old, filled him once again with deep insecurity.

Insecurity. That was probably it, what had accompanied him all his life. The death of Uncle Rodolfo, his last direct relative took place almost simultaneously with the Disaster that Peter had brought him.

He didn't want to think about it now. He was in his late 50s, was receiving a good pension from the bank which had sent him into pre‐retirement, and he had decided to take up his inheritance, his share of Uncle Rodolfo's estate in Mallorca. Nothing held him in Vienna anymore; the shy seclusion of the first decades and the rather clumsy attempts to find a connection thereafter, and the catastrophe with Peter encouraged him even more to leave Vienna. Perhaps he would have wanted to get out earlier. He had sent his luggage days ago, leaving only the large duffel bag made of stiff, dark‐blue plastic wax cloth with him on the flight.

The waiting hall of the airport Vienna‐Schwechat looked almost deserted, although some nightly Charter flights were being handled. Pico and a young, grumpy‐looking musician were the only guests who had Geneva as their flight destination. The young musician listened grimly to his own sometimes fumbling with one hand for his earphones or the knob of his Walkman. Pico glanced at his watch again, he still had at least two hours to wait. He looked around again, perhaps expecting someone from the court or a policeman to show up. But nothing such happened, everything remained quiet.

The waiting rooms were like large glass cubicles lined up, one after the other. The flight to Mallorca via Geneva was written on the board above the exit with 03:25, in addition, the clock displayed the current current time. Pico had to go to the bathroom, so he shouldered his blue duffel bag and scurried into the restroom. When he came back, a dozen or so sleepy‐looking people streamed past him, swaying impatiently. Staggered past him, pushing and shoving impatiently into the nearest waiting booth. Pico glanced briefly at the scoreboard. Chisinow 02:10 was there, arrived. He did not know at the moment where this Chisinow was.

A stewardess passed him and quickly followed the crowds. Already, while she approached him, he looked at her body sympathetically and thought, "a beautiful, naked Russian girl in a uniform", then he had to grin sourly, because this thought sounded very absurd when he whispered it to himself.

The stewardess had no expression because he was whispering to himself, but when he murmured "Kissinau" half aloud, she turned around and approached him with a questioning expression. Pico froze in his soliloquy. The stewardess looked at him questioningly, looked him up and down and raised her eyebrows in a friendly manner. "Kisino?" she asked.

Pico shook his head, then grinned and said, "Kissy now, or kissy later, as you like!" The stewardess only stared for a moment, then she had Pico's gaze, which scanned her curves with unabashed frankness. With a somewhat haughty gesture, she stroked her hips with the palm of her hand before turning away snappishly and continuing on her way.

Pico sat back down on his bench in the waiting room for the flight to Geneva, glancing sometimes unobtrusively over to her, but she did not dignify him with a single glance. Pico was inwardly turning more and more into the little boy he had once been and who was now ashamed because he had been a fool quite stupidly to a tall, beautiful and powerful woman. He hated this feeling, but it was a recurrent, almost compulsive experience that he had experience that happened to him when he approached a strong woman. He was painfully aware that he had developed a strange behavior in the past ten years since he had become a widower, quirky and idiosyncratic, and that his demeanor toward women had become even more shy and outlandish as a result of his seclusion. His inadequate attempts to contact women were often of an embarrassing penetrance and aloofness.

After a while, Pico rummaged in his duffel bag and pulled out the cardboard sleeve in which he kept some books; his mother's diaries and Lila's diaries had been with him for years. Lila's had been with him for years now. The bulk of them he had sent ahead, but as always he carried some notebooks with him and read them, rereading them over and over again. He had already read them all, but he read and read again in the yellowed pages, which remained his last and only reference to the past. It did him good to take himself back to the "old days" and to read again how everything had begun, how it had been, back then, back when he was still the little Pico.