Would I lie to you?

Oh, yeah

When I was married, to a German, we would spend a fair amount of time zipping up and down the A1 autobahn to Oldenburg and environs, to Sven’s Zuhause.

His parents had divorced when he was a nipper and both of them had remarried soon thereafter—in at least one case, it was the potential remarriage that had led to the divorce in the first place.

The two parents lived with their respective spouses about 13 or so kilometres apart and, although we normally stayed with mama, we always did an excursion out to papa. One Christmas Day we did the usual at papa’s, when grandma would treat us all to a spiffing buffet lunch at a restaurant on the River Weser: crisp and cold outside, warm and friendly inside. We’d later have supper round the dinner table with all sorts of good things, including Waltraut’s famed Donauwelle cake, which is best described as Black Forest gâteau plus. I enjoyed it, liked Holger’s company, Waltraut was always jolly and a good hostess. Great day.

Towards midnight, we’d bid our farewells and hop into the car for the short drive back to where we were staying, where mama would usually still be up watching a late movie on RTL+.

“Und, wie war’s?”—how was it?

“Ach, du kennst papa,”—you know dad, followed by an evaluation of some remark or another that he’d had from his father in the course of the day. Sven bitched about his father to his mother, and I spoke to him later about it, since I was surprised at it.

“You do know, when you come in and talk to your mother about your father like that, she will wonder what you tell him about her, when you’re over there?”

Sven dismissed the observation: his mother knew his father and there was no question of any kind of dishonesty, not in his mind. No, I thought to myself, not between them, perhaps, but it makes me wonder between us.

Several years later, we were divorced, and I shan’t delve into the nature of the dishonesty that was practised upon me.

Check this out, especially at time mark 1:27.35: