Chapter 12: Season 2 - Eyes Wide Opened

We left Perpignan on an evening flight to Paris-Orly for a connecting flight to Berlin early the following morning. I was excited, looking forward to my first flight, but the Chevalier seemed uneasy as we taxied out and prepared for take-off.

“After flying between here at Gibraltar several times, your trip to Paris last year, and serving in the Legion, I thought you would be used to flying, Chevalier,” I said.

“Only fools and birds fly, Rafael, and birds do not fly at night. And when flying in the Legion I had a parachute strapped to my back. All I have now is a brown paper bag!”

We were heading for what the Chevalier referred to as the ‘German Riviera’. I had never heard of the place but according to the Chevalier, who had visited the area five years previously, the Riviera is situated on the Baltic Sea coast of the German state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, an area of medieval towns, forests, and miles of pristine white sand beaches.

“It is the summer playground for North Germans and other Northern Europeans, but rather than the sun, sea, sex and Sangria of the Costa Blanca it is sun, sea, sailing, and strandkorbs,” he said with a smirk, leaving me dangling as to what a strandkorb could be.

We stayed overnight in a motel at Orly, caught the 7 am flight to Berlin and de-planed there two hours later. The last leg of our journey was to Stralsund, the town where the first pair of April-Decembers were to be escorted, and was taken by express train.

“Stralsund is a former Hanseatic port...” The Chevalier saw the word meant nothing to me and then spent the remainder of the rail journey explaining about, and educating me on, the Hanseatic League.

The Hanseatic League (also known as the Hansa) was an alliance of trading guilds that established and maintained a trade monopoly along the coast of Northern Europe, from the Baltic to the North Sea, during the thirteenth–seventeenth centuries. Rival cities cooperated within the League to defend themselves from pirates as well as to compete against larger economic powers. The League is widely regarded as a forerunner of the European Community both as a free trade zone and as an entity that had to balance the interests of the larger polity with the identities and interests of its members on the other. For almost four hundred years, the League maintained its own military, an exchange mechanism, and regulated tariffs. The League even had a Parliament, the Hansetage, although this met infrequently.

“I must have been away from school the day that subject was taught,” I said. “I’ve never heard of such an alliance.”

The Chevalier chuckled. “Unless you went to university and studied medieval European history I doubt you would have much knowledge of The League, or the part it played in European trade and commerce.”

“What happened to it?”

The Chevalier shrugged. “Things change. The Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese set up their own trading networks and competed with the League. The turmoil of dynastic families fighting to become the main power in Europe combined with the schism in the Church, fractured and rent the alliance. Nationalism, allied with religion, became more important than trade partnerships.”

From Stralsund we made our way westwards along the Baltic coast, stopping at Wismar, Lubeck, and Flensburg. In each town we met our ‘dates’ and spent three weeks ‘entertaining’ them before having a week of rest and recuperation, and then moving on to our next assignment. Each meeting followed a routine. The two pairs stayed at the same hotel, often in adjoining suites. Mornings were spent sightseeing; visiting places of interest such as museums, art galleries, and the like. After a light lunch at a side walk bistro the afternoons would see us on the beach. The young girl would venture into the waves, sometimes accompanied by the mature female. Neither I nor the Chevalier joined them. The Baltic Sea froze in winter and even in summer was not at a temperature that I was willing to immerse my body. Evenings were spent at a casino where the older couple played cards or sat at the roulette wheel and I and the young girl danced. Of course I also had to partner the mature female on the dance floor, which would segue into a night of horizontal dancing in her bed.

One of the mature ladies I ‘escorted’ was a professional artist, and I accompanied her as she sketched seascapes or townscapes. Watercolours were her forte, although she also expressed her artistic talent in oils, acrylic, and horizontal dancing. She said the Baltic coast ‘had a special clarity of air, and the light was divine’, which she strove to capture on canvas. ‘If Vincent van Gogh had discovered the Baltic coast he would have spent his time painting seascapes rather than those damned sunflowers,’ she said. ‘And might have retained both his ear and his sanity if he had!’ When our ‘date’ was over she gave me one of her paintings as a ‘thank you’. I think it was of Wismar, but as far as I’m concerned once you have seen one medieval Hanseatic town you have seen them all, so it might well have been Lubeck or Rostock. I sold her painting for 1000 euros so it must have been recognisable to the person who bought it.

Our last assignation of the season was at Flensburg on the Danish/German border. Flensburg sits at the head of an inlet, a fjord in fact, that debouches into the Baltic. However, the mature female I escorted wanted to travel to Sylt, an island just off the North Sea coast of Germany about 60 kms to the west of Flensburg. Sylt Island is connected to the mainland by the Hindenburgdam, a causeway carrying a single track railway line. All wheeled transport has to be loaded onto flat railcars on the mainland and then off loaded at Westerland, the main town of the island. Once at Westerland we put up at the Dorint Strandresort hotel and Freida, a jolly if somewhat chunky mature female from Düsseldorf who was my ‘date’ for three weeks, hurried me to Abyssinia nudist beach (aka Barearse Beach) which was her sole reason for wanting to visit the island. We stripped off before being allowed onto the pristine sand and the beach appeared to be deserted. However, there is always a keen breeze blowing from off the North Sea and aficionados of nude bathing get out of the wind but keep in the sun by constructing sand scrapes in the sand. Secreted away from the flaying wind and prying eyes Freida and I lustily fornicated, her nails digging into, and the sun burning, my buttocks. Freida did not get much of a tan during the three weeks we spent on the island as I was on top of her when sun-bathing on the beach, or more accurately in the beach, although she took pole position more often at night. As for the Chevalier and the young girl, Freida’s niece Lotte, I assume they also took advantage of the privacy at the bottom of a sand scrape. I noticed the Chevalier had acquired a healthy tan during our stay in Sylt, and there was always a residue of sand in the shower stall after he had showered when returned from the beach.

That was the one disadvantage of horizontal dancing on, or rather in, a beach. Sand clings everywhere on a sweaty nude body; in every nook and cranny, and it must be even worse for females as thy have more nooks and crannies then males. That being said I have to admit horizontal dancing was a sight more comfortable in a sand scrape than in a strandkorb, which is German for ‘beach basket’: A hooded windbreak seating furniture used at seaside resorts, constructed from wicker, wood panels and canvas, usually seating up to two people, with reclining backrests. Built for two sitters rather than for two fornicators I struggled to accommodate Freida without straining more muscles than needed to be strained. We usually managed with her astride me cowgirl, or in her case cow-mature female, although it was much easier to ride her at the bottom of a sand scrape however much sand was displaced. Incidentally, Lotte and I managed very well in a strandkorb, she being supple and agile, extremely inventive, and at least thirty five kilos lighter than Freida. I did not have the opportunity to try Lotte out on/in Barearse Beach but by the nail rakes on the Chevalier’s back she was equally enthusiastic and energetic in a sand scrape with an elderly man as with a young man in a strandkorb.

At the end of the three weeks we returned Freida and Lotte to Flensburg and I thought we would hand in the rented car and catch a train back to Perpignan, the season now being over. I was astonished when the Chevalier informed me we were going to Hamburg. “We will be visiting Grafin von Eylau’s establishment. I have a proposition, a business proposition, to put to her,” the Chevalier explained.

The brothel owned and managed by the Grafin was situated on the Reeperbahn. ‘The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions’ but the Reeperbahn, also a road that leads to hell, is flanked by the habitations of the most decadent and deviant purveyors of sex. Cinemas showing sex films 24/7, pole dancing bars (‘Real Poles’, one such bar advertised ), live sex shows – I wondered if there were dead sex shows –- probably, and every sexual fetish known to man humankind. Women with women, women with men, men with men, women with animals, men with animals, women and men with animals.

The Grafin’s brothel was built in mock Bauhaus style, or so the Chevalier informed me. It just looked like a square shaped, four storied, building to me. The name of the establishment was written in English – Peters’ Pleasure.

I think the sign writer made a positioning error with the apostrophe.

The Chevalier spent several hours in conversation with the Grafin while I was first given a guided tour of the brothel by a sweet young Polish girl named Magda before being given a guided tour of her. Before the second tour started I asked Magda how Maris Kotcheff was getting on in her career, to be told Maris had been rented out to an oil rich sheik for three months and was currently in the USA as the sheik was attending a meeting of the United Nations in New York City.

“What does he want with a young girl at the UN?” I asked.

Magda looked at me in surprise. “What else but to fornicate with,” she said, although she used a vulgar Polish word that meant fornicate.

I was aghast at her reply. “Surely not at the UN?”

“Why ever not? They’ve been doing it everywhere else. Maris sent a selfie of her and Omar doing it on the top of the Empire State building, and another of them at it inside the White House!”

Three hours later, when both I and the Chevalier had finished our business, we took a train from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof to Aachen, where we had an hour’s wait for a train to Paris.

We sat at a table of an enclosed pavement café near the station and had a coffee while watching the passing inhabitants of that ancient city. I was staring at a trio of extremely attractive girls, their short skirts showing well-tanned legs and flashes of thighs, when the Chevalier interrupted my lewd fantasy concerning the three and me.

“The Germans wanted the HQ of the European Economic Community to be sited here,” he said,

“I’m sorry, Chevalier, I’m not with you. What is the European community thing?”

“I could see you had that trio of young fräuleins on your mind, Rafael, and thought it best I bring you back to planet earth. The European Economic Community, the EEC, was the forerunner of what we now know as the European Union, the EU. The EEC had six members; France, West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries...”

“Benelux, where is that?”

The Chevalier burst out laughing, not something he often did. “I’m surprised at your ignorance, Rafael. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed a customs union between their countries not long after the war, the Second World War, Be – ne - lux, being the initial letters of each country. They later joined with the European Coal and Steel Community of France, West Germany and Italy to form the EEC, the forerunner of the EU.”