Reny's mother died shortly thereafter, after Reny's brother survived leukemia at the age of about fourteen.
Maybe Reny's father could, silver-grey all his life, the village doctor, do not be friendly to anyone after this event. Not even to us children, who received the vaccinations in his practice. Not even to his only daughter Reny.
When Reny's father remarried, hardly for love, Reny was going through a difficult phase, and an agreement was reached between my mother and the new mother Renys, that I should meet up with Reny from time to time.
When I was repeating fifth year in secondary school a year later, I was seated next to Reny and we became something like best friends.
Reny wanted to be a boy. Her face looked like that of a duckling that had hatched, the minutes were all the more tragic, that Reny spent in front of the mirror after gym class, to accentuate her thin blonde hair with L'oreal Studio Line hairspray along the top of her head.
Everyone had L'Oreal Studio Line in their pocket back then, and when I visualize the scent, then I feel an inarticulate mental pain.
So Reny was a bit ugly, behaved roughly, up like a boy, but she was a brilliant student.
When she realized that, she started to strut, whispered to the teacher and wanted, if possible, not for joint schoolwork
with me, but to be with the clever ones.
What Reny needed me for, these were her doubts about her appearance, her secret sexual desires (she was in love with the music teacher), short: for everything forbidden and delicate.
We often took the lift through the glass interior of the doctor's villa down to the basement, where a heated swimming pool lolled. We climbed into our ribbed, high-waisted swimwear, stood at the edge of the pool and chatted.
Suddenly Reny became more and more beautiful and self-confident. Under her little, Her tomboy face, her body took on the silhouette of a leggy Pamela Anderson, a gazelle with slender pasterns, wide pelvis and lush breasts on slender arms. All that Reny hid behind loose T-shirts with cute writing: CALIFORNIA.
Reny was now striving for high school and hardly bothered with me anymore.
At the graduation theater she performed a fabulous moonwalker in the garb of Michael Jackson, and received a round of applause for it.
She later made her dream come true and became a geologist in San Francisco.
The early death of her brother plunged Reny into a deep depression, she came back to Switzerland for him for a few weeks
and contacted me. In addition to her uncanny ambition, she still had this cruel and direct manner, for which I had liked her. I offered her my condolences, I could only half imagine, what she was going through, she, the ones with ten
heard the screams of her dying mother in the bedroom.
Nevertheless, I didn't want to receive Reny at my place and tried to avoid seeing them again.