Decompression Read Online Free

walks—but we knew that already .
    Then I stood in the garden for a long time and watched the sea playing with itself. All at once the old man was behind me with a glass of red wine in his hand. He put an arm around my shoulders, pulled me to him, and kissed the crown of my head. “Little Jola,” he said, nothing more .
    My eyes got damp. I held him tight. When he’s in the mood, it can be a great thing to touch him. It’s always this way: you travel thousands of miles to sleep less comfortably and understand yourself better .

2
    A typical evening. All the windows were open. Warm air flowed through the house and eliminated the difference between inside and outside. Antje was banging around in the kitchen. A sound as pleasant as rain on a tent roof. I was glad to sit at the computer in our tiny office while she busied herself around the stove.
    Three hundred and eighty-four thousand hits on Google. That was a shock. Even though I didn’t know exactly why it frightened me. In the background, a software program was uploading data from my dive computer. If Antje appeared in the doorway, I could click onto the other screen in a flash. I didn’t feel like explaining what I was doing and why. Googling clients wasn’t really my style.
    It looked like half the Internet consisted of Jola. Wikipedia entry, fan pages, Facebook profile, Twitter, press reports, YouTube. Hundreds of photographs. How many faces could one personhave? The longer I looked, the faster they seemed to multiply. From page to page, from link to link. It was fascinating. And somehow offensive.
Jolante Augusta Sophie von der Pahlen (stage name: Jola Pahlen), born 5 October 1981 in Hanover, is a German actress. Von der Pahlen comes from a Baltic German noble family. At the age of eleven, she recorded a CD of children’s songs and performed a singing role in a production of Woyzeck at the Staatstheater in Hanover. She gained her first television experience (1995–1997) in the children’s program Toggo , which was broadcast on the Super RTL network. Since December 4, 2003, von der Pahlen has played the role of Bella Schweig in SAT.1’s daytime drama Up and Down . Jolante von der Pahlen lives with the writer Theodor Hast.
• See “Jola Pahlen” in the Internet Movie Database (German and English versions)
    A chirping sound came from the ceiling. The gecko had left his sleeping quarters behind the curtain rod and was preparing himself for his nightly insect hunt. Years ago, when I saw him for the first time, he was approximately three centimeters long, practically transparent, and clueless about life. Now he was longer than my index finger, and he knew he had nothing to fear from me. I’d baptized him Emile, even though Antje declared he was a female. She claimed that this particular gecko species includes no males whatsoever; the females reproduce by self-cloning, she said. Then she grinned at me, as though she was talking about some masterstroke on Nature’s part. None of that bothered me. I liked Emile.He had the most beautiful feet, and he used nanotechnology to run upside down across the ceiling.
“Frau Pahlen, you come from a noble family. In what ways has your family background shaped your character?”
“Everybody’s shaped by their origins. I’ve learned from my family to protect and preserve beautiful things. It causes me physical pain to see someone put a water glass without a coaster on the bare wood of a Biedermeier table. Carelessness is beauty’s worst enemy.”
“Your father is a successful film producer. Your family is rich. Do you sometimes feel a desire to do something independently?”
“Everything I do I do independently. My father doesn’t stand in front of the Up and Down cameras, and neither does anyone else in my family. That’s me.”
“But people say, don’t they, that your father got you the part in Up and Down ?”
“Success always requires a combination of luck, hard work, and talent.”
“Frau Pahlen, you turned