Milena

Milena was a Czech, she met Mr. B in the circus, where after the war they both worked. She was an acrobat and he did something there too. Later she had an accident on the trapeze in which her back had been banged up. 

She had to part ways forever with her career, but otherwise her back did not seem to bother her with anything; she walked, ran, jumped, skied, and danced normally. She had also apparently become unable to have children, and to that she could only have sex doggy style. 

Milena and her husband lived on the same street as me, two villas further. Mr. B was a rather inconspicuous fellow who one time impressed me greatly. I had by chance found myself by their house, doing something by some automobile, which I had been looking at buying and which in a test drive had just there decided to stop working. 

Mr. B was remounting the roof of his one-floor villa. There were three workers and it was lunch time. The workers had taken a break, laid out their magazines, they had bread, tomatoes, salceson, which they in jest called salcefix, and a half liter of vodka. Normal workers’ fare in this part of Europe. Mr. B hung around nearby. When they finished eating and were preparing to return to work, one of them admitted that he was afraid to get on the roof, because he felt drunk. 

Mr. B laughed, and took out from his back pants’ pocket money and told the apparent drunkard to go to the nearest store and buy a liter bottle of vodka. When the man returned, Mr. B handily uncorked the bottle and told each of them to take a swig from it, just not too much. He asked me to try as well. It was the most normal vodka. Each of the tasters, including me, could attest to this. 

“And now look, dickhead,” he turned to the apparent drunkard, expertly shaking the liter bottle, which during our tasting may have been emptied of no more than ten percent of its contents, and put it to his lips. 

The level lowered steadily, and Mr. B, only his Adam’s apple moved rhythmically. When there was nothing left in the bottle, Mr. B pointed yonder at the four-storied building with the red stone steeple roof, in a representative architectural style of the type Heimschtedt. 

“And now look, bitch, at this chimney,” he ran off quickly, and in a minute was waving at us from the red roof. 

He got up to the chimney, stood higher, and bent down to grasp it from above, slowly showing off a sturdy handstand. He stood there upside down for a minute, and then leaned over, placing his entire weight on one hand. 

Again he stood for a minute on this hand, with his free hand waving to us, he switched hands, waving at us with the other hand, and then standing again on two hands, he performed a back flip, landing delicately on his two feet on a thin plank placed near the entry to the roof. 

Of course, the four story Heimschtedt building was no Empire State Building... but the height was quite enough, still, to die. 

Milena, who for some reason did not lie with her husband, I got to know much earlier. Often when she had the occasion, she came discretely to see me two houses down. Mr. B was often away, to his priest brother, and sometimes he stayed there up to a week. Milena loved JAZZ, which without interruption played on the radio at my house, caught with the help of a special antenna, and originating from the American station in the American sector in Germany. 

As soon as she found herself at my place, with a typical Czech lack of prudishness, irrespective of the time of day or night, immediately, already in the doorway, she undressed herself and we went to bed. She was a few years older than me and very beautiful, the beauty of a ripened woman. 

Only disproportionate maybe were her slightly too large breasts, to which Milena had a certain way. Being not a stupid woman, even to say intelligent, her beautiful breasts, of which she was always wildly proud, she treated very seriously, like some expensive jewelry, or even like, say, some very, I mean very, high-end real estate. 

And when it came to me, I could play with them for hours. Milena enjoyed this very much, giving them to me at any opportune occasion. She said that when she had her accident, everyone said that probably by a complicated maneuver on the trapeze, certainly her breasts interrupted her and that was why she came falling down. She had a funny Czech accent, which for me was very arousing. Whenever the radio began some really good JAZZ, Milena almost always recounted a past romance in Prague, a jazz bassist named Ludek Hulan. 

She recounted it rather often enough that sometimes I was saddened that I didn’t play the bass or any other instrument. For Milena JAZZ, it was always Ludek Hulan, and Ludek Hulan, he was always JAZZ. Having been with me a long time, Milena, when she got to know me well, my integrity, honesty and discretion, shared with me in greatest confidence that supposedly her husband Mr. B, at the very end of the war, stole from some SS-men an impressive amount of gold acquired by them when they melted Jewish teeth. The gold he had apparently buried in some distant forest and once a year, always during the season of mushroom picking, in the garments of a mushroom picker, he made his way there to check it, dig it up and saw off what was required for the entire next year.