Jacqueline. As a teenager, I went across the Iron Curtain every year to spend the summer in pioneer camps for boys and girls. I had a diary, a thin book wrapped in red cloth, which I loved. I painted the first letter on every new page rather than write it. My life seemed boring to me: this book was going to be about calligraphy. It wasn’t even a book, it was a sign in itself, a sign of my flight to the stars. The camp management had always lots of activities planned for us. Gladly, they involved males and females. They observed us doing our exercises, playing ping-pong, walking about the grounds as young people do, and eating together. We slept in separate quarters, of course. Everything that we did was recorded, which somehow did take the spontaneity away. We were never told what to do or not to do though it was clear, kind of, that we were not supposed to fall in love or respond to our crushes. I fell in love each summer. Once, I was crazy about the camp nurse: she was fat and friendly and she smelled exquisite, not like a nurse at all. Best of all: she’d read everything that I was reading and we could actually talk about things using the books between us as bridges. My happiness was complete when an older boy broke my nose – he was a lot more brutal than I thought possible – and I had to go to the infirmary which was run by the nurse. I’ve forgotten her name so I’m just going to make one up: Jacqueline. Whenever I fell in love, I got my heart broken. Every summer.
#19. Photo: Michael J. Solender. (German version.) Text published in Wilderness House Literary Review 6.2.
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