Broken Wings of Icarus

"That is hybris", his father had claimed in his vain attempt to convince her. "Don't fly. Hybris means to defy your destiny, and all people who did that were punished by the gods." What do you understand about hybris, she thought. Hybris was to know one's destiny and yet not to act accordingly. It would be hybris not to do it. She simply had to fly there; the Eagle's call had been echoing in her guts for years, deafening her during the last months, tearing her heart into pieces with its longing scream. However, her father had surprised her with unexpected insight when he compared her to Icarus. Indeed, how well did she understand his impulsive elevation towards the most irresistible and most shining – and nevertheless the most treacherous and deadly.

Now here she was, on the deserted beach behind cliffs and pine trees, her belly full of wine and little fish like in former times which had been crushed under the hot iron of oblivion.

"You have forgotten", noticed the man with the birdy name beside her, whose face at the airport had been radiant with joy as she had never seen nor expected in him before. "You have forgotten everything."

"My memories are in my body", she said. "But I don't want to remember!" She was not to remember what might have linked them in such an intimate way. She had her comparatively stable life in what one week ago she still would have called her country.

At least she had found now a convincing explanation for the feeling of being home, which had overwhelmed her since her landing or even in the air, when she saw the mountains for the first time and loved them immediately. Back home. Home again after such an unimaginably long time. Oh, finally being back in her motherland, among her people, under the sign of the Eagle. Now the lifelong search for her belonging, her roots, herself had come to an end.

If the country calmed down even more after the riots, maybe she would go even further south on her next, her second visit to the land of her soul. She was determined to look for that sunken place where the sun rose from the sea and fell into the sea again after having drawn a large bow over the water – the floods the fishers sailed away with every morning and returned on in the evening, bringing nets loaded with fish and hands full of warmth to share for the night. Now she remembered the curse-blessing she had howled at the sea out of her anxious longing. "Damned be the sea which took you away, blessed be the sea which brought you again!" It was not easy for a shepherd girl to be a fisherman's wife.

"Tell me more!" she insisted. They had lived a simple life, too simple a life perhaps. She had been the first girl to choose a man out of love, and this love made her suffer as she feared for his life among the waves, and this suffering linked her even more closely to the land under her feet, the sea in her eyes, the sun in her heart.

While listening to him, she could not stop tears running down her cheeks. This was an inner revolution or rather a revelation. The revelation of her true, lost identity, a loss that had been pricking her like red-hot needles for a lifetime. Finally she had come home to herself. Yet conditions had changed. Her former brother was her boyfriend now, whereas her former husband from the white cabin near the sea, the man with the birdy name, could not be but a brother.

"When I came first to the place I was only six or seven years old", the man with the birdy name told her through the salty wind. "Even though I'd never been there before, I knew the place. I remembered it from another life, and I knew, too, that somewhere in this world you would exist. So I began my search for you, first in my country, than after the fall of the dictatorship and the opening of the borders, all over the world. That's what I used my profession for. And now I have found you! I have found you!"

When they had left the decaying capital in the morning, she had foreseen that this day would be decisive. She had cancelled all her appointments without letting anybody know. He had kidnapped her with her consent, like a bride whose parents oppose the marriage. As they were driving across the large, sunny square, passing the museum, the riding iron hero and the street where only two days ago she had observed a policeman up to the hips in the floods of the heavy rainfalls, she pronounced solemnly the name of the day. Aware of its vital decisiveness, she erected the day an invisible monument out of sounds. It was the beginning of the so-called Second Autumn, a warm day between the times and therefore prone to revelations and revolutions. Indeed he had revealed her why she was here, why she had to come, who she really was. He had spent a third of a century looking for her. So she had to bow to the evidence of destiny. She was ready now.

When they kissed, she burned all the bridges behind her.

A few days later: flying back. The brutal cultural shock. An icy flat stinking of new paint, making her head ache. And her fax did not move, and her phone bell remained silent. When she called his number, his colleague told her: "He's not in." – "He's not in", the second day. The third day the employee told her that the man with the birdy name had gone to the mines in the north of the country.

She understood that he did not love her, that he had never loved her. But she was profoundly bewildered with all the rest. Who was she? What was real?

At that time a carcinoma began to develop in her breast.