Sample Pages: The Cavern (page 4 of 12)
physical health. In other words, it was hygienic. The bohemian lifestyle appealed to Heike and she discovered she enjoyed the freedom that living alone gave her. But she also appreciated the financial stability that being married to Karl provided.
Heike had, in fact, grown to appreciate the various benefits of their separation. She hesitated, delayed, and ultimately made no attempt to join Wisent in Paris, although she gave it lip service on their sporadic telephone calls and pretended to her friends that everything was as it should be. Karl, unaware of her feelings and her flirtations, accepted her excuses for not joining him. Nevertheless, after time, almost unconsciously, he constructed a life in Paris alone.
Sometimes, late at night, he would admit his marriage was over. Then, throwing his book across the floor, railing out at her in his Berlinisch dialect in the solitude of his apartment, he would vehemently express the anger he felt toward Heike. He would accuse her of exiling him into a provisional life, a life where he was neither married nor single, a life that he found sterile and painful. For him, this provisional existence was the worst of all possibilities. Yet, he made no attempt to change his situation or to confront Heike with an ultimatum to move to Paris. Instead, he searched for strategies to deal with his exile from his country, his wife, and his language, just as he had done when he was a child confronted with the separation of his parents.
When Wisent’s thoughts reached this point, usually late on a Saturday evening, the loneliest time of the week for him, he felt his problems were insolvable. He could not make the decision to return to Heike in Berlin, to divorce her or even confront her. Further, he had not yet faced the fact that leaving her in Berlin as he did with her full acquiescence emphasized a situation that was evident to all of their friends but not to him.