Pea soup, Wiener Schnitzel (escalope de veau a la viennoise) and that famous Rhine wine, hoc, par excellence (Liebfraumilch or Liebfrauenmilch), Strange! how she remembered my favorite dishes & wines which I love & could hardly afford in my student days. After dinner she told me important and occasionally very unimportant events of the past forty years of her life. Marianas parents were Antinazis and her husband was dragged to the denazification court which caused his untimely death.
I wish I could write in greater detail of my stay at the huge zamindari home where Mariana lived lonely and all by herself; the sons came only during the holidays but I presume, here, the Moderns expect hot stuff from me and I shall have a disappoint them. Our days flowed smoothly like oil from a bottle without any tempestuous entracts. Of course we were inseparable. Even while she cooked one by one all my favourite dishes I gave her company in the kitchen. During those days Herr Brandt and his Foreign Minister Herr Scheel were stoutly defending their Ostpolitik in the Parliament and although the whole of Germany was watching it on the television screen, we, having given only one chance to the two Herren, went back to our reminiscences.
But I left Mariana with a deep wound in my heart which will never heal. Amongst other things she said, as if it were of little consequence You know, when it can be really very, very cold here and the whole locality is snowbound it is really cheerless and I feel extremely lonely. Well, I think it cant be helped.She changed the topic.
And this winter was particularly cruel in Europe just to spite me. Sitting in a warm temperature of seventy degrees I read that it had snowed even in the south of Italy after many years. Mariana must have been buried in at least Six feet of snow. She does need a friend.
.
Friendship
Nonetheless some great thinkers have maintained that true friendship can exist only between a man and a man and there is no doubt that there are classical examples which have been sung by great poets. The friendship between Achilles and Patrocles, Krisna (Parthasarathi) and Arjuna, the Prophet Mohammed and Abu Bakr, and in recent times German literature has been considerably enriched by the friendship between Gothe and Schiller, as English by Hallam and Tennyson.
Perhaps there is a lurking suspicion in the minds of those thinkers that the friendship between a youngman and a maiden must ultimetaly turn into love.
Bana, in his famous novel Kadanıbari, has introduced the motif of friendship between a young prince Chandrapida and the daughter of a king, taken captive by Chandrapidas father called Patralekha and brought up by the queen as her own daughter but much to our disappointment, does not elaborate the theme. Tagore has discussed it in extenso in his article The Neglected in Poesy (Kavye Upekshita) where he counts her Along with Lakshmans wife Urmila, the two companions of Shakuntala- Priyambada & Anasuya.
According to Bana, when Chandrapida was sixteen, her mother sent through a chamberlain (kanchuki) a charming young girl, who had not reached her full youth (anatiyauvana), with the message that the prince should accept her as the bearer of pan-supari (tambulakarankavahini) that she should not be treated as a servant, but as disciple, a Friend (suhrid) so that the might become his permanent companion.
Tagore comments Patralekha in not a wife, not a beloved, not a ser vant; she is the companion (sahachari) of a male. This curious friendship is like a sand beach between tow seas. Haw can it excape destruction? That puissant and perrennial attraction which exists between young folk in their early youth– why does it not attack the narrow dam and destroy it?
But alas! the poet has made the poor orphan princess sit for all times on that narrow strip; what could be a grosser negligence of the poet towards this ill-fated war prisoner? Living as she did behind a thin curtain she never attained her normal status. She kept awake near the heart of a man but could never step into it.
