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.Someone suggested we sing.Again I had the experience of seeing that Americans don’t know any songs.Finally we decided on “We Shall Overcome.” They had sung it with enthusiasm back in the day.They wanted to hear “Am Brunnen vor dem Tore” from us two Germans.Suddenly the stars leapt out after all and we blew out our candles so that we could see them clearly.There was silence.Greg shouted down a nighttime greeting from a window on one of the upper floors.It was late when we picked up all the trash, put it in bags, and parted.Angelina too had vanished.John and Judy had gone to Berlin, to meet John’s new East Berlin relatives in person.The time that had seemed so endless grew short.I saw Bob Rice one more time.Hey, he said, when we were saying goodbye.What about my overcoat?Oh, Bob, I said.That overcoat is indestructible.It has served me well.I believe I’ve given it back to you already.Bob said he had figured as much.* * *The goodbye parties came closer and faster.One time, I drove my Geo without air-conditioning all the way down Olympic Boulevard, in melting heat, to Doheny Drive to buy sixty veal sausages from the famous German butcher shop there and then spent a whole morning making an enormous bowl of potato salad.We all brought a dish from our homeland along with all the bottles we had with any alcohol left in them.That was an especially nice party.Francesco, still with his thick accent, gave a warm speech of thanks and farewell, and the director of the staff told us how happy he was that we seemed to have enjoyed our time here after all, that we had not only viewed them and the whole institution with skepticism—he could say without hesitation that we seemed like the most skeptical group that they, the staff, had ever had, but also the most capable and independent.Mrs.Ascott was wearing one of her big flowy dresses with a floral print, and still barely knew who any of us were, but started, under the influence of the strong drinks she seemed to prefer, to talk to various residents who crossed her path and trap them in long, meandering conversations, during which she never looked at the person she was talking to but fixed her gaze on a point behind their left shoulders.Francesco said: You know what’s wrong with her? She has a complex.Mr.Enrico, meanwhile, threw caution to the winds and revealed himself to be a dashing Mexican, by no means disinclined to dance with preferred members of the female sex.Ria and Ines took turns—he’s wearing us out, Ria said.The director sat down next to me.He wanted to know what I had planned now.I’m taking a trip through the Southwest, I said.To see the Hopi Indians, among other things.Ah, the director said.You’re looking for the soul of America.Good luck.Angelina stood on the stairs, watching the party.She smiled when I walked past her.I did not say goodbye to her.See you later, I said.She did not seem surprised.I remember I vacillated about whether I should really take that trip to the American Southwest with Lowis and Sanna.I finally agreed, mostly because of the friends who said I couldn’t pass up a chance like that, and then I was surprised to find myself actually sitting in the plane to Albuquerque, a city I had hardly ever heard of and knew nothing about.I noticed that I entered an atmosphere of clarity, somewhere over Arizona, and that this clarity remained with me for my entire trip (which lasted not even ten days), and that the seat next to me in the plane was empty but I knew who was sitting there—Angelina had come with me, we had wordlessly agreed on that.I had understood that she would always be there when I needed her.The confusion of the period I had just been through fell away.Was I only now, finally, arriving in this country? It was a country built on myths and it was as if the previous months, lived in the thick of reality, were melting away; as if this dusty place with the desert winds blowing in were the first American city I saw, the Indian women sitting in their taciturn row under the arcades on the main square and offering ceramics with Indian patterns for sale were the first American women I saw, and the round, beehive-shaped pueblos we visited on the road to Santa Fe were the way dwellings here should be.Lui, a friend of Sanna’s, was a psychoanalyst who had been given her name by the Indian healer who had saved her from a serious childhood illness when the other doctors had given her up for lost.She lived with her dogs in the northern part of the city, on the edge of the desert, and she let us spend the night in her bungalow filled with Indian art: colored pottery and masks, carvings, woven rugs and fabrics that Lui herself wore.She had no intention, she said, of worming her way into another culture and claiming to belong to something she didn’t belong to, but it also would have felt wrong to her to live here surrounded by the insignificant everyday objects that the average American is so unable to do without.Her bungalow cast a spell that we could not escape and didn’t want to escape.We could easily imagine that patients would want to come see her here
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