#GenghizInLove: Episode 33

Anastasia and I strolled leisurely towards the nearest taxi rank. "All in all, an entertaining evening," she pronounced. "What now?"

"Find somewhere to hide. Berlin isn't safe anymore."

"Himmelsberg," she said sadly. "Nobody would dream of finding us there. I haven't been home since my father forced me into marriage. But first we go to Der Mauer. We need the Ferrari. We were doing this new lingerie shoot there when those thugs kidnapped me. Pulled me right off the wall."

"How did you get out of their clutches?"

Anastasia arched her slender back. The points of her breasts punched provocatively through the bloodstained fabric of the trench coat. "They made me sit in the back seat between two of them. I let them rip off my bra and drool over me. Then I knocked their heads together and took their guns away. Sex and violence," she explained. "It works every time."

"Have you had much practice?"

Anastasia grinned at me. "Jealous, little one?" She ran her sharp nails lightly over my neck. I shivered.

The taxi pulled up at the warehouse. Anastasia's Ferrari gleamed darkly in the empty parking lot. An unusual silence filled the vast nightclub. We stepped cautiously between the corpses and shattered glass. Saure was in the underground bunker, tied up and gagged. He rolled his eyes in anguished welcome. "Why did they tie me up so tight?" Saure groaned as the blood came back to his swollen wrists and ankles. "They didn't know anything about sadomasochism! They could have at least tickled me with feathers. But they just tied me up and left."

"Was there much shooting?"

"The guards were easy targets," Saure said sadly. "Where am I to get new ones? All the remaining East German border guards are in jail now. I'm ruined!"

"There's still hairdressing," Anastasia said consolingly.

Saure shook his balding head disconsolately. "I can't live on tips at my age. I'll have to go back to being a mortician."

"Exactly what we need!" Anastasia gripped Saure's arm affectionately. "My father will die soon. Come to Himmelsberg with us."

And so Saure's snoring filled the Ferrari, in wavering counterpoint to the steady rumble of the engine, as we drove headlong through the night, at first on the cracked tar of a motorway built for Hitler and badly maintained by the Communists, but as the inky night diluted, we sped along on a sleek autobahn, hurtling past an endless procession of gigantic trucks carrying produce and industrial goods to the prosperous cities of the West, and then we left the big roads altogether and we were darting along the bends of a country road winding up through a gloomy forest. The bends grew ever steeper, and the forest thinned, revealing awful abysses on either side. I closed my eyes in terror and tried not to notice my heaving stomach. I sighed in relief when at last we stopped in a crunch of gravel.

"Are we there yet?"

"Not quite." Anastasia's voice was a low monotone.

"What's the matter, darling?"

"I'm scared." Her knuckles were white as she clenched the steering wheel.

I gently prised her hands away and held them in mine. I could feel them tremble. For a long moment we sat quietly in the darkness. Then she looked up and our eyes locked. I let myself fall into the unearthly green fire of her emerald eyes, seared for an instant in love's harsh flames. Then I was back again, breathing deeply.

Just then Saure snored loudly, an off-key trumpet blast ripping through the silence. Anastasia and I grinned gleefully. We got out of the car and crossed a ditch into the forest. She moved deftly through the trees, rapidly, unafraid, like a local wood nymph. She stopped in a hollow of the woods and leaned against a tree, her legs apart. "Now," she said urgently, pulling me to her. We made love vehemently right there, lusty nymph and horned satyr, unrestricted, unbridled, startling the birds into angered awakeness. Their precipitate song chimed with ours.

We walked back, holding hands, breathing in the cold clean pine-scented air. The snow shimmered like frozen light. Saure was stirring in the back of the car. Anastasia gunned the engine and drove up the road, a short perilous stretch up the precipice. I rubbed my weary eyes and stared in disbelief at the castle looming above us. "You grew up here?"

Anastasia nodded. "Home."

I thought of my mother and grimaced. "Home is where your parents live."

"And where you run away from." Anastasia smiled grimly at me. "But there's no escape."

"Don't be silly. Of course there is." And I leaned over and kissed my fierce sad love, tenderly, in that blue dawn.