I hardly remember those four years that I spent with eight other boys and several girls in a musty classroom in the village school under the supervision of an elderly teacher who taught us our letters and numbers and dragged us across the tributaries of the Danube and educated the victims of the First World War. Oddly enough, in those four years, I rarely had arguments with my classmates, even though I was still an underdog. I think today that it was because I accepted my role as a loner and then acted. I didn't care about my classmates and so it was the other way around. In the beginning a boy tried to make friends with me, but he quickly gave up his attempts and told me without further ado that I was much too "in thought".This remark may indeed be true because I remember that although I began to give up familiar children's games at that time, I mostly lived in some kind of magical fantasy world in which I created my own adventures. I don't mean to boast that I was a great beauty, especially at the tender age of six. My dreams were just the result of my past, shaped by my mother.
Now when I think about it, I was probably the only kid in my class who had a past. That sounds a little strange, but I'll try to explain it.
Most children of my age had lived their lives so far in the hustle and bustle and if you had asked them what they had done in the last year, the answer would undoubtedly have been either very short or extremely awkward and unclear. This kind of "living in the day" is of course for a small child, but although I had played as much, if not more, as my classmates, thanks to my mother I had a kind of fixed order in my games.She was the letting spirit who helped plan my games and made sure I had fun. She set up a kind of fixed ritual circle around me, which I only notice now - well in retrospect.
For certain times of the day, week, year, certain games, songs or stories were common. Big events were planned in advance and organized together, something that may normally seem very strange to a little boy. My mother also wrote a diary with me. These were small, about 20 x 25 cm large books, in gray, with light gray wave patterns painted in different shades of paper. Day after day, my mother wrote down everything we did in her small, rounded handwriting, from walks, found snail shells and flowers to new songs or books. Since I could not read at that time, of course, she decorated each page with small drawings that clarified what had happened.So I was able to "read" the events of the last few years even in preschool age (although I never went to any preschool or kindergarten) without even being able to spell my own name.
Somehow my mother always managed to fill these books in one year, from January 1st to December 31st, from the first to the last page, no less, no more, so that at home, at the bottom right of the bookshelf, there is a small pile from six graying little books, which I sometimes took out and "read". The last entry in the top book is dated April 13th. and the text goes halfway up the page. Then he breaks off. My mother has not written a diary since my father's death. That custom died with him.
As mentioned, the elementary school did not give me any reason for bigger experiences. Even the fourth year school trip wasn't special for the simple reason that I didn't go.I couldn't imagine leaving my mother alone with her grief for an entire week. Not that I was so social, no, that wasn't, but I couldn't - and that's probably the more honest version - imagine being without her for a week, because although she was only a shadow of herself, we were inside her still memories of happier times.
The holidays, which were between elementary school and high school, were a new change. The previous vacation had passed in a kind of twilight with long hours at the window and thoughts that were too melancholy for a child's head. I don't know what I was doing then, somehow I will have played or listened to the radio. But something new happened during that vacation. And for me it was like a small ray of light through a blind window pane. Because in the second week of the summer vacation a library opened in a wing of the old town hall.
Actually, I had never read that much.What stories I knew I got from my mother. We didn't have that many books in the house either, and what we had didn't interest me, because most of them were very serious, factual books that had belonged to my father. Even at school we hadn't done a lot of work on our literary skills. The only thing we dutifully rolled through was an English-language crime thriller in primitive language as preparation for school work.
It is therefore not really surprising that I only noticed the library in the fourth week of the vacation, i.e. 14 days late, although otherwise every hatched egg was discussed in the whole place within a few hours. Not until I was on the way from the supermarket, where I had been shopping for the weekend (I have to note that I had now given up all domestic tasks with the exception of shopping. My mother now did them just as indifferently as she everything else without Emotion did) home, passed a large poster that was posted next to the entrance to the library.Actually, it was not so much the poster that caught my attention than the girl who was sitting in a folding chair next to it, reading a book.
It is now essential to describe my attitudes towards girls and my experiences with the opposite sex. Since I had little contact with other children, of course I also had little contact with girls. And since I missed the conversations that ten-year-old boys generally had among themselves about these exotic creatures with skirts and lace on their sleeves, I was actually without prejudice. I knew the difference between males and females without it disgusting me or bothering me significantly, and otherwise I had barely noticed the girls in the village - something that was probably mutual.
But now this particular girl, who sat there with crossed legs in her folding chair and read eagerly, was so striking that even I, as an outsider and dreamer, looked at her.The average girl in our village wore a long or knee-length skirt (depending on the season), a white blouse and, depending on the mood, a simple scarf, a jersey made of fabric or a small wool jacket. The hair was usually tied back in a long braid or wound on the back of the head in a snail hairstyle. These young women used to sit in small groups on benches or kneel on blankets under trees. Sometimes you saw a couple of them walking together, either gesturing quickly or giggling cautiously.
The picture that I am drawing here seems to be fifty years old, from the pre-war period, but you have to bear in mind that in some areas of Franconia, especially in such small villages, there is a kind of time vortex where the old-fashioned mixes with the modern. In order not to leave any confusion, the moment I stood in front of this poster with my two (modern) plastic shopping bags (the color was something yellow, what was depicted on it, I don't even remember) and this peculiar girl (the reason for her I will explain the peculiarities in a moment) looked at them, almost stared at them, it was the twenty-ninth of July 1996 and about three in the afternoon.And now that the question of time has been answered, I will begin to describe what I saw when I first met Rita.

I have described how the girls in our village were dressed. Now imagine what it must be like for a boy who has had this image of a girl for ten years when he faces a girl like Rita. It is like when someone who grew up among sheep suddenly encounters a fox.
And actually the fox is not such a bad comparison, because the hair of this girl (because of course I didn't know her name at the time) was the same color as the fur of a fox. And I don't mean the red-brown fur of the real fox, as you can admire it in the zoo (because you hardly ever come across it in the wild), but of the fiery red fur that the foxes have in picture books. This hair, which blazed around the head in thick, thick curls like a (picture book) lion, was red.And to this day I can't find a better comparison than the one with the picture book fox. Cherry red, crimson red, magenta red, brick red ... all words that call up a certain color for me, but none of these colors fit my memory of Rita, although on closer inspection they were all there. But at that moment, that is, on the twenty-ninth of July 1996 at around 3:00 p.m., I did not get a closer look. Because underneath that hair there was a lot more to see, which amazed me. Her skin was light, light and evenly tanned like a piece of very light caramel and just as smooth. I couldn't examine my eyes because they were knocked down to read the book on their knees. What I noticed was that she had very narrow cheekbones and a delicate, short snub nose. Under this nose came a small mouth, or at least half of it, because the girl had pushed her upper lip over the lower lip and put the latter gently between her teeth, an expression I would often notice in her.The mouth, which was arched a little forwards, as if to be an implied kiss, turned into a round chin with a small dimple in the middle that stood out clearly while she had her lower lip between her teeth. That head, which was already conspicuous in itself - my goodness, the hair alone was conspicuous! - sat on a slender neck, which grew out of two narrow shoulders. The collarbones were only vaguely visible under the (still caramel-colored) skin.
Her clothes were the most striking thing about her (to my eyes). She wore a white T-shirt, the sleeves of which reached up to half of her (caramel brown, of course) upper arms and over it a pair of dungarees made of light blue, faded denim. The two straps, one of which had slipped off her shoulder, ended in bronze-colored buckles attached to the bib. On the same bib, however, proudly emblazoned the image of a bright