Konrad and Alexandra (PDF) - Rolf Gross

purpose, and Cyrene became so rich from its export that the Cyrenian coins carried an image of the plant. Attempts toplant the fennel in other places failed. By the first century AD the demand had risen so steeply that silphion, orlaserpicium to the Romans, was exported by the shipload. The plant was over-harvested and during one extended dryspell became extinct.He finished his tale with a dirty laugh. "A great tragedy for the expensive courtesans of Rome. Silphion had to bereplaced by the inferior ferula asafoetida in the brothels of Europe.""Alexandra, are you a typical Georgian woman?" asked Claudia out of the blue while copying some text. "What isGeorgia like?""Oh, my dear Claudia, both of these questions cannot be answered. I always thought that I am an atypical Georgianwoman. However, the longer I am living among non-Georgians the more I become aware of how Georgian I am. Next toKatharina I look very Georgian, my dark, depressive moods are very Georgian, as are my sudden outbursts of temper.Georgia is an old culture and its women are its oldest creatures. Niko and I have been brought up in a westernizedfamily, we speak four languages and feel more at home in Germany, Italy, or France than in Russia…superficially atleast. But now I know that we will always be homesick, for what, I still don’t really know. Your mother asked me thatquestion, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about it. Our men are terribly prone to that malaise—in case you want toknow—they pine for the Georgian woman, but what my homesickness is made of I cannot say.""You guessed right, I am thinking about Niko and myself."She carefully wrote a word in Greek, then started a new one. "Would you consider me capable of being a good wife forNiko, to be able to hold his ‘homesickness’ at bay? Could I be a Georgian wife to him?"She had finished her list of words. "Look, the Greeks have so many words and we have only one, if I could put them alltogether would that be enough for him?" She showed Alexandra her paper:agape + eros + gamos + latreia + kharis = LoveAlexandra was moved. "Dear, serious Claudia, for a while you will need large quantities of the last kind of love for him, hedoes not know what love is, you will have to teach him. He needs to understand himself first as I had to and still have to.But he has always looked for non-Georgian girls and maybe his attachment to our old, female ways is not as great asmine was, besides you have many things in common with Georgian women, much more so than, for example, Katharina.You know the age-old tragic side of life, how that is possible, I cannot say."Claudia suddenly very formal, straightened up. "Oh, because father comes from an old rabbinical family, I think that is thereason." She relaxed and looked at Alexandra. "Tell me, should I marry Niko?"Alexandra hugged her. "Yes," she said simply and kissed her friend.With Konrad’s help they wrote a paper comparing Soranus’ and Dioskorides’ lists of contraceptive plants with thoseAlexandra had collected in Georgia, showing that this knowledge had survived, having been handed down by women, fortwo thousand years. They ended their investigation with a plea for careful medical research to identify the activeingredients of these plants, test their effectiveness as well as their side effects, and make them available to the women ofthe twentieth century.As Konrad had predicted, the paper was rejected by three journals with the explanation that this work was violating theHippocratic Oath—and existing law.“A Comparison of Contraceptive Plants in Dioskorides and Soranus with Special Reference to Georgian Folk Medicine,“by C. Dahl-Dadiani, A. Dadiani-Rost, and K. Rost, appeared twenty years later, in the Annals of the Academy ofSciences of the Georgian SSR.26.Katharina's pilgrimage to Andechs1904The Föhn brushed over Munich, drawing lightning sparks from the charged bed covers and leaving behind frayed nervesand a few wispy clouds high in an electric-blue sky.After a restless night, Alexandra had woken Konrad at seven from a last drugged sleep with the cry, "Konrad, come here,I can see the Caucasus on the horizon!"Half-awake he had staggered onto the balcony and rubbed his disbelieving eyes. The entire chain of the Alps hovered,unreal, magnified by the crazy air, over the roofs and spires of the city."Look, Liebster, there is Kazbeg and here are Tebulos and Diklos Mta and the mountains of Tusheti. It is uncanny, so88