TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Kathrin Schmidt

of the mirror, turning this way and that a few times, she would fling herself on Tadeus, kiss him exuberantly and set about unbuttoning his jacket, shirt and trousers. He loved that. Though a strict Catholic he’d been unable to control himself when she’d first made a move on him. She had travelled by bus from Gotha to Kielce with her women’s choir to sing at the Church of the Holy Trinity. After the morning concert he had been one of the men tasked with showing the women round the town, but only she had gone exploring with him, the rest preferring to celebrate their boss’s birthday in the hotel. He’d taken her to the Krakow bishops’ palace and the famous Paradise Cave before they came to a halt for a coffee-break on the historic Sienkiewicza Street, both of them trying to brush up their Russian to get a little more intimate. As she would later confide, the angular, sinewy shoulder of his left arm had somehow happened to brush her hand when he was bending down to pick up a dropped match. In that instant she was done for, and came up with a pretext for taking him to her hotel room where, without further ado and to her own astonishment, she’d fallen all over him. That was seven years ago and today they were both into their fifties. Pia Geissler continued to love her husband as much as when they’d first met. The fact that he hadn’t exactly been taken to heart by her family no longer concerned her. She was an independent woman, PA to the director of the former automobile manufacturing plant that had just about struggled on through the revolutionary years of Germany’s reunification, and she earned enough money to cover the small flat, her Polish husband and a regular bottoming with good old General Bergfrühling ‘alpine spring’ cleaning fluid. Since coming from Poland he had learned to speak good German. For his fiftieth she’d given him a course of driving lessons, and now they took turns at the wheel when they explored their local area 164