Chapter 30 - Pop Songs

My marriage with Sophie was in decline.  We ended it on good terms and remained steadfast friends.  I had always felt like a guest in the Gustafson estate.  Our children were supportive of the separation and in time we adjusted to the new normal.

I resumed living on my own in an apartment in town.  It was near my old apartment building that was destroyed during the war.  The new tenements were markedly improved and I had a view of the sweeping vistas abutting the city perimeter.  My neighbors were working class folk, some with new families and few old retirees like myself.

Anna offered to move in with me, but we both know or I hoped it was mostly in jest.  We had more time to spend together and she often traveled to the city to pay a visit among her numerous sisters and their growing broods.  They had formed their own enclave within the city, fully functioning with monthly club dues and a set of official bylaws and schedules.  If one only realized who they once were, it would be quiet a terrifying experience.

Whenever she did visit, she insisted on staying with me, obligating that I furnish an apartment larger than I needed as a bachelor.  Sophie often paid a call and we agreed to meet once a week like we once did in the garden and felt a certain ease by reducing, but maintaining our social visits this way.

The two women finally became acquainted and I surprised myself that neither Anna nor Sophie had ever met until that day.  They only knew of each other in passing and from my interactions between them.  It was quite an experience for all of us to finally share a table and simply chat.

The new regime remained and was growing old, but everything seemed to work as intended.  People blissfully complacent as how the Artesians had hoped and no longer a need to be treated like a trendy new fad and now the stodgy old tradition.

There were fewer and fewer guards in the central hall and in time none were needed.  Knut's pen lost significance as did all his physical possessions.  His messages and his teachings remaining as powerful as ever, even if they remain gibberish to me.  A new dawn for mankind and Knut lives on in pop songs sung by ever younger and young generations who have less and less a reason to know who he was.