Chapter 40

While in the hospital, she turned for the worse, was calling me daily, berating me for putting her there. Saying the worst possible things she could say. Hurtful, personal things. Things I never thought her capable of uttering. She blamed me for ruining her life. That everything was my fault.

In a way, seeing her disintegrate the way she did, it was similar to watching my father die. She’d become emaciated like him. She’d been overtaken by this terrible disease. And like him, she was in denial about it.

I’d done what I could to help her but was exasperated. I’d talked to her parents, neighbors, and a couple schoolmates of hers. All told me really awful things, stories of her temper, her lashing out at people, her conflicts. She’d driven away most everyone and didn’t have any friends. It turns out that was part of why she went to South Beach, to start anew.

It was like the person I’d met and fallen in love was dead. I blamed myself. I figured that we should have stayed in South Beach. Then none of this would have happened. I started blaming myself for Gertrud’s death too. Like I should have done more to help her, taken her away from this crazy village, and maybe she’d still be alive, have had my baby.

The nightmares were continuing too. Every night seeing death, tormented by my sleep, and every day felt like 100 years...

I was starting to think that not only was my wife not right for me, maybe Austria, too, wasn’t for me. At first the history had disturbed me, the nightmares, but it was becoming more about teleology, with all these crazy people and death. I came to believe in a negative mist, an energy, a form, a heart of darkness there.

Insane cases in the media came out too, like Josef Fritzl, the arrant psychopath, who’d kept his daughter as a captive sex slave for years, in a locked basement of their house, and had kids with her, the kids also forced to live as prisoners in the basement.

There were a couple other similar cases too of girls being kidnapped, forced to live as slaves, prisoners in some freak’s house.

I was feeling like a prisoner too. This wasn’t the life I wanted. This wasn’t the person I wanted to marry. I missed America, too, my old friends there, the culture.

I’d reached a denouement.

I decided it was best to separate from my wife. Take a few months apart, let her have her treatment, hopefully get better. I needed a break. And I wanted to travel around Europe a little, see Rome, Scotland, and Paris, while I could. I was so close to so much.

And so I left. I left Austria. Left that crazy village, with all its memories. And my first night away from there, the nightmares stopped. Completely.

By myself, I did some backpacking, traveling around the continent and saw incredible, once in a lifetime sights. The Eiffel Tower, the Roman Coliseum, The Highlands of Scotland.

I visited England, saw my long-lost aunt, met extended family out there and had a blast. The English countryside being one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been. The rolling green hills’ beauty defying mere words to describe it.

I’d been looking at jobs in America and had found an opportunity in Sarasota, at a legitimate finance company, seeking loan officers, especially those with international experience, language skills, and although I spoke an accented, stilted, and grammatically poor German, I’d become quite fluently conversant, and had aced the phone interview, part of which was done in German.

Back to America I went. To start my new life. A life that was surprisingly boring. Reverse culture shock hitting me like a sledgehammer, in ways I didn’t think possible. Everything seeming otiose.