THE BIRTH OF THE FIRE BIRD

Dear Nicole,

You will remember. It all began for me when Karl Berger organized that “Summer Studio for Musical Improvisation” in Heidelberg. I made a film about it and went to Munich to edit it. One day Karl stood behind me with some top-class jazz musicians, and they all looked at what I had achieved so far. They were on their way to Elba, to spend their holidays with you and give a concert in Portoferraio. They commented approvingly on my work and travelled on south. Up to that point everything was still in order. I worked on for another two weeks, and then magic intervened. Part of the job of film editing is keeping an edit list. I did this with the help of a little notebook. On 25 August I opened a new page and found a note from Karl: 27 August at eight p.m., concert in Portoferraio – come on down!

It was the time of psychedelic drugs, and “wondering” had long since been abandoned. The Beatles sang “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, Pink Floyd set out to win the war against Descartes. The question of how Karl Berger had managed to make his call sound on exactly the right page, philistines would have dismissed as “coincidence”. For me there was no doubt: it was not Karl who had called me, but the invisible powers that weave the fates. Karl was nothing more than their henchman, which however proved that he was in contact with them. The next day I locked up the editing room and we set off – Axel Jamm, who assisted me, his clapped-out 2CV and I. The ferry docked in Portoferraio right on time for the concert.

As it turned out later, this journey steered my life onto other tracks. The days I spent with you back then taught me to deal with time differently. I felt completely new energies in myself. I learned to see beauty. I learned that one can, like Fritz, make a work of art out of a life. I learned so much…

There was the sea, the scent of the eucalyptus trees, the architecture with which Fritz reconciled people with nature, the music that held everything and everyone together as if with a fine thread, the light and the shadows, the pictures in the studio, the muse among the muses, the fried fish that swam right into your mouth, the wine of Galletti.

I drove back, finished the film, sold it and felt like new. And yet I did not have the faintest inkling that this island would hold me fast for fourteen years of my life – the island, and you, your family.

In Germany the Baader-Meinhof group and “revolutionary” psycho-clubs like the Hydra were trying to instigate an impossible revolution. Cylla was up to her ears in the Hydra, and we lived in its large commune. Cylla at least agreed to open a leather workshop. The others lived off the money of the state they wanted to smash. We learned to make bags and trousers and jackets. In February we sold goods worth 20 marks. In October the turnover was 8,000 marks. There were two possible solutions: one could register the business and look for an employee, or one could close it down. We decided to close and travel via Africa and South America to Canada. We packed our leather and tools into a box and set off. The first stop was to be Elba. Fritz gave us one of the two little houses for free, as if we had been friends for years. We moved in and began to sew, this time by hand. In the evenings we sat together with you. In the evenings we played canasta. In the evenings we watched the news on television.

There was a crisis in the Middle East. The newsreader announced that nuclear weapons might be used. Fritz suggested switching off the television. No one objected. We had brought our positions and viewpoints so close together that we quite naturally and jointly assumed that the problems of the Middle East were not ours. Fritz had to paint; Cylla and I had to sew. The atomic bombs in the Middle East would get no chance to keep us from our respective work.

Then you, Nicole, showed us the little house, the Concia. We rented it. The owner was a butcher in the village. A freak from Turin was the previous tenant. He had disappeared for a while but had promised to move out on 1 March – at the latest. When he did not come, I broke open the door and got all the Turin man’s stuff out of the house. Fritz was outraged; his love for people did not allow such steps. I carried half the junk back into the house.

Below the little house there was an orange garden. The trees had disappeared under brambles. We cut back the brambles and laid out a compost heap. There was not much to do with the compost, for we had no manure. Fritz gave us a bantam hen that could brood, and we bought a big cockerel. The cockerel saw to the bantam daily. We built a coop, and the little hen hatched her eggs. The generation of hens thus produced was twice as big as the mother and half as big as the father, but it brooded. A foundation stone had been laid.

We spoke with Fritz about the lack of manure. He understood, as always. For my birthday he led a goat up to the Concia. Now we had manure, but we had to build a stable. When the stable was finished, it became clear to me that my chance of getting to Toronto had by now become a dream. I had put down too many roots on Elba. In fact, fourteen years were to pass before I decided to leave the Concia and go to the Caribbean – because of the women.

Even today, at 62, my body is strong and hardly ever ill. For this I have you, Nicole, and Fritz to thank. With the gift of the goat you saw to it that I actually spent many hours of hard work making something of the Concia.

These fourteen years of work have made me invulnerable to illness today. My body still draws on that stage of my life.

I turned the Concia into the first organic farm on the island, perhaps even in Italy. The people from the village laughed at me. At first my tomatoes were not even half as big as theirs.

But the eggs my hens laid not only tasted better than those from battery farms, they also made a contribution to the development of the fine arts on Elba: Fritz was my only customer who did not buy them to eat them, but to use them in making his tempera. With the eggs of the others it was apparently harder to mix a colour. Sometimes we sat in the studio, listened to jazz, and I tried to give titles to those indescribable pictures. One afternoon I crouched for two hours in front of a golden-red painting, and then it came to me: “The Birth of the Fire Bird” was the picture’s name from that hour on.

Someone came from America to visit you. He was an astrologer and had made it to a castle over there, for in this way he fulfilled the prediction of his own horoscope. You asked and urged him to cast my horoscope. It turned out that I was by no means a farmer, but a person who must write, publish and teach. I declared the man incompetent and astrology a superstition. Today I know that the man was right, even though I still grow tomatoes on my balcony here in Havana.

We saw each other for the last time when I came from Guatemala to write the final version of “Jaja’s Klau”. In Dominique’s room I had ideal conditions, and the book turned out like the place where I finished it. And Fritz was still the man against whom I measured myself, and once again realized that I was still rather small.

Havana, January 2003