Episode 4- Demosthenes and the unbearable truth
Some years after, something quite unexpected and sad happened. Claus' family split.
Olga left them without saying goodbye when she fell in love with the master horseman of a Russian circus that got stuck for the winter in their village. As soon as the next -early-spring came, when the snow melted, all they found remaining as they woke up one morning (the first morning of an early spring, patati patata…) was her dirty laundry and in it a handwritten note saying "I love you baby". Both Demosthenes and Claus took it it was meant for them, although Demosthenes was a geriatric 103 years old by that time and Claus almost a man. Out of sheer stupidity, it occurred to none of them that this was not her hand writing and that her lover, one particularly hot evening, had slipped it in Olga’s minimalist underwear which she forgot to take as she hurriedly prepared her suitcase.
Soon after, Demosthenes became sick. They never found what he really had, but he suddenly quit smoking and started macrobiotic eating. He lost 65 kilos and his nails turned to a normal colour again, but one could see this was not a life for him. He missed his Olgaya… In the winter he sat for hours gazing outside their frozen window, waiting with a fixed, melancholic look for her to return while listening to suicidal balalaika music, eating muesli and sipping broccoli soup. “Olgushka, Olgashka, where are you?” he’d howl like a wolf in the deep Tzatziki winter.
Then, one night, as he was waiting for Her to open their frozen garden gate and come back to Him with tears in her eyes and -ideally- a pack of sausages as well, he saw a strange shadow spinning around on their frozen pond. He looked at his watch. It was exactly midnight.
At first he thought it was the crazy woman of the village that had gone berserk. She always did strange things after a vodka or ten. He put on his thick glasses to see better and this is when finally reality caught up with him…
It was Claus. His son, his only son, night skating in Olga's afternoon-tea robe!
Now, I realise that when you see Claus in his night skating dress suspended in front of the Lex building –because it’s him, as you may have guessed by now- you don't get this kind of life threatening emotions, or blood pressure for that matter, but for our half-Greek Demosthenes, the bearer of such a meaningful name, the überstud and the sworn macho, this was definitely too much to bear. And, talking about bears…
Without giving it a second thought, Demosthenes rushed, despite his 129 remaining kilos, in the basement and went directly to the cupboard where he was keeping his gun, the one he used when he went to kill baby bears for fun, before Brigitte Bardot punched the village mayor in the face during a short visit at their village and the EU banished one of the major pastimes of the local men.
"Forgive me, Olgaya", he said, looking up above, as if she was listening, "for I am going to kill Claus!". Then he spat twice on the ground, twirled his moustache and rushed out to the garden, towards the pond.
In the meantime, Claus was perfecting one of his latest skating pirouettes while at the same singing "Madonna" with a castrato voice, without having the faintest idea that his life, their lives as they knew them were about to change for ever…
But he soon had to wake up to reality as well when he heard ice cracking behind him... At first he thought it was his own weight cracking thin ice. "Oh, Madonna!", he cried in a particularly high octave, "I put on weight! I am dying!"
"You are dead right!, shouted Demosthenes behind him. “You ARE going to die! You bastard!”
Bringing his pirouette to a sudden stop, Claus turned around to see his father approaching with a creaking sound and a thing that he could not decide if it was a hockey bat or a bazooka .