Portugal is the setting of Emmi Rothner’s two-week beach holiday with her children, but it also becomes a test of whether Leo Leike will remain present in her life while she is away. The trip is reported in emails rather than narrated as a continuous vacation: family mishaps arrive as concise updates, while Emmi’s urgent need for Leo’s response gives the journey its emotional weight.

The holiday and its interruptions

Emmi announces that she is leaving for Portugal for two weeks with the children and asks Leo whether he will still be there when she returns. Her question is deliberately uncertain: she cannot quite define what being “there” means, but says that she is afraid of losing him. She would accept even empty words, provided they were still exchanged with him. The holiday thus begins not as a break from their correspondence but as a test of its continuity.

From an Internet café in Porto, Emmi sends a quick reassurance that the family is fine, while giving an unvarnished account of its troubles. The younger child has had diarrhea since their arrival; the older child has fallen in love with a Portuguese surfing instructor. With six days of the trip remaining, Emmi closes on an eager note about returning. The message places ordinary family discomfort and romantic comedy beside her more serious anxiety about Leo’s continued attention.

A family story inside the emails

The surfing instructor’s role grows in Emmi’s later account: Fiona is supposedly going to emigrate to Portugal and marry him, and has returned only to pack her belongings—“Or so she thinks.” The exaggerated certainty and qualification make the episode a playful family anecdote rather than a confirmed outcome. Portugal is consequently evoked through the children’s holiday romances as well as through the illness and travel updates.

Emmi also adds a pointed postscript to her Porto message: Leo should not start anything with Marlene. The warning brings the absent third party into the holiday correspondence and shows that, even at a distance, Emmi is attentive to Leo’s possible romantic life. Her account of Portugal is therefore not merely logistical; it provides a setting in which family news, teasing jealousy, and the wish to keep the email exchange alive coexist.

The trip’s later significance

After the holiday, Bernhard Rothner recalls that he and Emmi spent two weeks in Portugal without speaking to each other, each trying to act as though everything was fine. He connects that silence to the crisis he later describes: Emmi was absorbed in what he calls her other world, and the family trip did not restore their ordinary closeness. His account adds a retrospective domestic consequence to the emails’ breezy reports, making the holiday appear outwardly manageable but emotionally strained.

Portugal therefore has two registers in the correspondence. In Emmi’s messages it is a beach vacation, an Internet café in Porto, a sick child, and a daughter’s infatuation with a surfing instructor; in Bernhard’s later recollection it is the setting for two weeks of marital silence. The contrast makes the holiday a compact example of the gap between the family’s performed normality and the tensions concealed beneath it.