A small life documentary as if
told by Werner Herzog
In a small Bavarian field
approximately one hundred kilometres south of Munich airport, Hans Utrich, a
retired sheet metal welder from Nassau, was taking a break from a long drive.
He was on his way to visit his woman friend, Ute Braun, who he had met through
a lonely-hearts advertisement two years before. Hans was deep in thought for he
was considering how he might ask Ute to be his wife. In the event that she accepted
his proposal, she would become Mrs Utrich the second, his first wife having mysteriously
died under the wheels of a Lufthansa jet at Munich airport only three years
before. Perhaps the aeroplane flying overhead stirred a memory of his deceased
wife; but whatever the reason, Hans happened to look up as a giant iced manure ball,
mistakenly ejected from the passing plane, speeded towards its fateful landing.
The atmospheric
ice that held the toilet material together had melted by the time a farmer found
Hans. The farmer first presumed that he’d been fatally shat on by a herd of his
prizewinning Bavarian cows. It was only when he found in Hans’s hand, and later
gave to the authorities, a stub of a three year old aeroplane ticket made out
in the name of Mrs Eva Utrich, that a coherent and interrelated theory was put
forward to explain the deaths of both Hans Utrich, and his wife. It appears
there had been a recurrent problem on this same Lufthansa jet, with a critical
gap resulting along its undercarriage between the timing of the landing wheels
descending and the flushing of the toilet as it reached its full capacity. The
problem had occurred fatally and spectacularly for poor Mrs Utrich. She had
lost her footing at an inopportune moment and had been sucked through the
trapdoor of the toilet and onto the wheel arch of the plane. When the plane
landed she slipped under the wheels and was squashed. No record of her having
been on the plane was found as there had been a national computer crash that
day and all data had been irretrievably lost. Her ticket had most likely been
lodged inside the toilet in the intervening period and was not dislodged until
the moment before her husband held it at his death three years later.
Hans had never
understood how she had died on the landing runway of Munich airport. He would
not have been pleased to realise that she had been en route to a secret assignation
with her lover, a certain Ute Braun. As for Ute Braun, never to be Ute Utrich, and
all those involved with her in this sorry tale, it is surely a universal truth
that ‘shit happens and sometimes it happens twice’.
