David und Dorothee

by Ingeborg Bayer, Hans-Georg Noack

Eine Nacht auf dem Frankfurter Flughafen: ein Junge und ein Mädchen begegnen sich zufällig, und für kurze Zeit sich sie sich sehr nah ...

Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

Reviews

[oliviasbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

The slim volume, which is narrated in switching first person points of view, shows two lonely teenagers on the verge of leaving their old lives behind stranded for a long night at Frankfurt Airport in the 70s. The seventeen-years old girl has just missed her flight to Vancouver, where she will spend an exchange year. Her taxi has splashed a young guy whose mournful eyes remind her of the David in the illustrated Bible at home. After silently passing him a few times on the escalators, she donates a pair of knitted socks to him. He is fifteen and is still deciding if his plan to hike North and hire as a helper at a cargo ship will really solve his problems. After some futile attempts to impress the older girl he relaxes into being just himself and into opening up to this complete stranger. We never learn his true name. But we learn his and Dorothee's deepest secrets, we observe them playing running games, arcade games, inventing stories, singing, playing the guitar, dancing the Sirtaki with an old, Greek cleaner, eating nostalgic food, getting a little tender and silently counting the hours. When she boards the plane taking only the blue, floating ball from the arcade hall with her, which he spontaneously told her to keep as a reminder of the night, your heart aches. You so wish until the last minute for one of them handing over an address slip or a promise. Both of them hesitate, but decide for themselves it would destroy the perfect night's magic. So you feverishly calculate how probable it is for them to maybe find each other again a year later.