Aunt Mika from Paris (France) with her jerky movements and her self-trimmed snow white hair, Aunt Walja from Bamberg (Germany), who could produce the most perfect pilmeni, meat pockets made with the thinnest dough imaginable ("Russian Ravioli", as we disrespectfully called them, eaten with melted butter and vinegar or with sour cream and ground pepper), the most brillantly intelligent and etherial granddaughter Alexandra from Bogota (Columbia), who was married there to Luis, a mega-macho-weapon-crazy landowner ... then there was the household help Friedel, schizophrenia paired with a violent temper, but submitting unconditionally to her mistress like a domesticated animal ...
All of a sudden it became too much for me and I felt entrapped in this disaster laden life spiral. In order to create my own space on a new level, I decided to write down Katia's life story, as far as I had been told about it. I was able to distance myself from her by writing an (unpublished) novel of 800 pages, entitled "Lydia Bucher". Psychoanalysis would have been more expensive and certainly not any more effective.
Katia seems to be asleep in this painting, laying on the fake baroque sofa, wearing her (originally) dark green high heels by Charles Jourdan. As a melancholic after-note, not very long ago at the age of 102, she – the notorious chain smoker and avid newspaper reader – had enough of all of this and just decided to fall asleep.
|