Friday, February 12, 2010

One More Story (Inge & John)

‘One more story!’ said the little girl to her father. ‘No no, you’ve allready had 5, you should go asleep now’, he answered. ‘Yes, but they were all moralistic stories. I want one that is just amusing, fun and hopeful.’ ‘No’, the father said and switched off the light. ‘How does she know that word?’ ¶ he asked himself. ‘It’s not a childrens’ word...’ Anne’s father had said the word several times in his hearing and each time he had felt the force of its maturity. ‘Yes, yes,’¶ he thought nodding his head, ‘a very grownup word. Definitely not for children. How come these children to be so mature for their age these days? Is it an improvement or a regression, or a degeneration?’ he wondered. ‘The three of them.’ answered a voice. ‘Who are you? Where are you?’
‘That’s not at all important.’ ‘You are patronising me too much’, said Anne to her father, ‘I can not devellop a true autonomy that way daddy.’ With some difficulty she extricated herself from the suffocating hugh he was giving her and went to the window where a strange light was now visible. She thought it ¶ might be the ghost of her great-grandfather, a famous homosexual who had been rumoured to have been born on the moon. ‘Get out of the house of your father’, he repeatedly said. And finaly she did. She left her fathers’ house at the age of 13 to study art-history in Helsinki. Of course ¶ she was the youngest of all students, but she managed to pass all het exams and even got a distinction on het macro-economic theory paper. Having achieved this, she spent the following week getting extremely ¶ drunk and was lucky not to die of alcohol poisoning, only avoiding this fate thanks to a regime of vitamin pills her mother had started her on when she was six. But did she learn from that experience?
No. Of course not. She visited party after party and drunk all the booze she got offered.