Still, I didn’t become despondent until I learned about his new, Norwegian wife, and the child she was carrying. Andreas had never even spoken of marriage. I had always taken it for granted that we would be together wholly of our own choosing. Marriage seemed unnecessary, really.
And now he was beginning a brave new life. And I was alone. I felt so old.
My family was not very much help in all of this. My mother shrugged, tossed her long gray hair and tried to look sympathetic. She does not hold men to very high standards. She has had too much experience. My father was one of her serial relationships; growing up, I saw him twice a year when her current lover would drive me and my sister Sabine to Munich for a brief visit.
Though a brilliant mathematician, he was a pot-head, pure and simple -- and as soon as he could he buggered off for a decrepit farmhouse in Portugal, where he lives now, painting abstracts and smoking weed.
Our half-brother is ten years younger than me, an East German truck driver, like his father before him. And like his dad, he is blunt-spoken and hard-working. My mother is still living with his dad, though I know it’s just because she dreads being alone. He is not at all what she, a retired teacher, would have expected for herself. As for me, I respect both my step-father and my half-brother, but we do not agree on many things.
“You’re like all the other German women,” Stefan said, quaffing his Bitburger beer. It was Christmas Eve, at our parents’ apartment. “You think you’re too good for German men. That’s why German men are marrying foreigners. All of you women have no real interest in having a family. Feminism has ruined you.”
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