CHAPTER 1
I was driving home to the villa in Blankenese, Hamburg. My husband, Richard, had suddenly been summoned to join some of his manager colleagues for a series of meetings in the US. So we had to interrupt our vacancy in Croatia. And he would be away for a couple of weeks.
Richard was a member of the executive board of a big company in Germany. It happened from time to time that he was summoned to meetings on short notice. Your private life has a pretty low priority when you are a high-ranking manager at a big company.
I had dropped Richard off at the Zagreb airport and was driving our big Mercedes towards Hamburg. I felt low and angry. And I wondered how I should manage the last week of my vacancy all alone. Maybe I should visit my mom in Sweden?
The first time Richard and I met, it was at an international conference in Frankfurt. I was 22 and worked as an interpreter; it was one of my first assignments. Richard was 27, a civil engineer, and participated in the conference for his company, one of the bigger ones of its kind. And we fell in love instantly. He invited me to his hotel the third night. And we made love most of the night. And it was so wonderful! We were pretty tired the following day.
We had a fine sex life at the beginning of our marriage. But the sex declined as he climbed in the management hierarchy. Often, he complained of being tired and having a headache when I wanted sex. And our sex life had ceased entirely since a few years.
I had hoped for some sort of reawakening in the hotel in Croatia. And we did have sex the next to last evening. But he didn't show any real affection, and he came pretty quickly in me. Then he withdrew, turned away from me, and fell asleep. And there I was, unsatisfied, frustrated, and abandoned. It would have been much better not to have had sex at all that evening.
I had a strong feeling that he had been seeing somebody else for several years. He smelled faintly of perfume sometimes, and it wasn't my sort. And some of his business trips seemed made up. So somehow, I sensed that our marriage was about to crash.
I left the A7 freeway at Memmingen in Bavaria to have a light dinner. When I drew back towards the A7 I recognized a hitchhiker in a parking space just at the entrance to the freeway. He wore a big backpack, a pair of well-worn jeans, and a T-shirt, and he was showing a Swedish streamer. I slowed down. It would be nice to have some company on the long way home, I thought.
The guy looked nice, so I stopped and lowered the side window, but to be cautious, just a little.
The guy bent forward and asked in perfect German, "Guten Tag, wohin fahren Sie? (Hello, where are you going?)"
I answered in Swedish, "But you are Swedish, aren't you? I'm on my way to Hamburg."
"How nice! I haven't spoken a single word of Swedish in nearly three weeks," the guy said.
So I stepped out of the car to put his backpack in the trunk. It was heavy; I could hardly lift it. But he handled it like it weighed nothing. He was much stronger than he seemed.
He presented himself as Mikael, although people mostly called him Micke. And I told him that my name was Ingrid. And then he started talking. He lived in a small apartment in Västerås, Sweden, together with his parents. His father was a foreman in an assembly factory for small electrical motors, and his mother was a housewife. He had celebrated his eighteenth birthday recently, and he was going back now to finish his last year at high school. After that, he intended to study to be a civil engineer.
Then he told me about his journey. He had hitch-hiked a lot, both in Germany, Austria, and Italy. And now he was on his way home from Venice. He talked a lot about all the funny people who had picked him up. One elderly lady in Austria told him that she always picked up young hitchhikers because, otherwise, she would not go to heaven.
It was still a long way to drive to Hamburg, so I had planned to stay in a hotel. I asked him where he was going to sleep. He told me that he had slept in a nice youth hostel in Fulda when he was heading south. It was close to the A7, so he wondered if I could drop him there. I asked him to pick up my Guide Michelin from the glovebox, and then he listed a number of Fulda hotels with quality stars and everything. So Fulda would suit me too.
I dropped him at the hostel, and we agreed that I should pick him up at nine the following morning. Then he walked in with his backpack, and I found my hotel.
It was difficult to fall asleep that night. The timid teenager had stirred something in me that I didn't quite understand. And he got me aroused.
When I arrived at the youth hostel the next morning, I found Micke waiting outside the building with his backpack. Now he wore a pair of fine, sleek trousers and a fine shirt. I asked him how he had managed to keep his trousers and shirt so wrinkle-free in his backpack. He answered that he had rolled the trousers with the shirt, which used to work well. That was when I decided to invite him to stay with me in Hamburg.
At first, he was hesitant; we didn't know each other. But finally, he accepted. He would sleep in one of the guest rooms. And he could stay a week if he wanted to, since that was what remained of my vacation. And I could suggest what to do in the city.
We kept on talking, and I got increasingly fond of Micke. When we drove past Hannover, it felt as though we had known each other for a long time.
It was dark when we arrived in Hamburg. We drove the last stretch to Blankenese on the narrow Strandweg along the northern shore of the Elbe. Our villa was situated in a row of old luxury villas on the street. I parked the Mercedes on the gravel court. The garage was occupied by Richards Porsche.
I remember that evening clearly. Cargo ships chugged along on Elbe with shining navigation lights and deck lighting. And the small lighthouse Unterfeuer stood blinking on its small islet at the northern shore.
The evening was warm. The smell from Elbe blended with the sweetish fragrance from the blooming gardens nearby and the odor from a hamburger restaurant further down the street. And there was a scent of cigar smoke in the air. And crying gulls circled over the dark water.
Micke was silent at first. He looked at the river and then at the villa. Clearly, he was moved by the sight. Then he said, "What a place! And what a villa! You have quite a lot of money, haven't you, living in that house?"
"Yes, " I answered, "we have quite a lot of money."
"Well, we haven't," Micke said.
Micke dropped his backpack in the guest room. Then we had a late dinner. He was quiet. He looked a bit lost in the new environment and a little tired.
This evening, it was also difficult for me to fall asleep. Something in Micke moved me profoundly. I didn't quite understand what it was. But sexual fantasies haunted me about him and myself. That was probably the reason why I chose one of my semitransparent nightgowns that evening.
I went up in the morning and made breakfast. I waited for Micke to turn up, but no Micke appeared. I nocked at his door, but he didn't answer, so I went in. He slept in his underpants, and I was still wearing my semitransparent nightgown. A profound boner bulged in his underpants.
I shook him softly and said, "Micke, it's breakfast time." He woke up slowly, blinked, and stared at my body under the nightgown. "Come along, Micke," I said. "You can put on your clothes later. It's getting late, so let's have breakfast first."
