Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred Forty-Eight
7th August 1964
Near Bad Reichenhall
This was not how someone like her was supposed to react to any situation. Kiki was supposed to be able to keep her head in a crisis because that was what she had been trained to do. Instead, when Ben had left to return to Berlin, Kiki had fallen apart. Once again, she had only managed to make it out of bed to care for Rauchbier. The difference was that this time she was crying the entire time she wasn’t asleep. She thought it was pathetic, her mooning after a boy like this just because he had gone home as they had planned weeks earlier.
This wasn’t like her at all.
There was also the issue that had arisen because she had not washed her clothes or bedding while the weather was good. Now she was out of clean clothes and it was raining again. Knowing that someone would check up on her, Kiki realized that she could kill two birds with one stone if she took her laundry down to the main house. Gertrud had said that she could use the modern amenities that they had. Hopefully that would include the washer and drier that Lucy said that she had gotten recently. Rauchbier was sleeping in the warmth of the stove that had the coals banked inside it hardly waking as she gathered her laundry, so Kiki figured that he would be fine for a few hours.
Negotiating the trail down to the house proved to be a challenge with a duffle bag over her back as well as the pillowcase with the sheets stuffed into it in her arms. What would have been a pleasant walk in good weather became surprisingly difficult in pouring rain.
Knocking on the door, Kiki watched as Lucy opened it and she pulled her into the house. “My goodness Kristina” She said, “You’ll catch your death out there in this weather. Don’t you remember the entire reason you are here in the first place?”
It was then that Kiki realized that she must be quite a sight. Old Hertha jersey, track pants, all dripping wet and her shoes covered in mud. The shoes were left on the porch and Lucy didn’t seem too pleased with the rest of it in her house.
“It’s just for my head” Kiki replied, “The rest of me is fine.”
The look on Lucy’s face softened, “It was worse than the official announcement, wasn’t it?” She asked.
“It is what is called a closed linear skull fracture” Kiki replied, “And the contents inside got a bit scrambled as well, so I was encouraged to take a long holiday somewhere quiet to recover. If I could use your washing machine?”
“No” Lucy said clearly taken aback when the word fracture had been used, Kiki doubted that she would understand that it had been her brain bouncing off the other side of her skull that had probably done more damage “You’ve taken care of yourself for the last week and the guest house being what it is, I’ll get Marika to take care of your clothes. You can get cleaned up in the meantime, some of Lea’s old clothes would fit you…”
With that Kiki was shoved into a bathroom and made to change out of her clothes into a bathrobe. This was before she could even tell Lucy that she was more than capable of handling it herself and that her housekeeper probably had better things to be doing. A few minutes later, a set of clothes that looked like school clothes that must have belonged to Lea Bäcker when she was much younger were handed through the door. Oddly, they were a rather substantial step up from what Kiki had been wearing. The shower was heavenly, something that she hadn’t realized she missed. That was until she ran her fingers through her hair and felt the still healing scar above her ear and a vivid memory of how that happened came back to her. Kiki yelling for Marie Alexandra to run before… followed by her being dragged to her feet dazed and bleeding and roughly forced back into the Kombi…
She swiftly turned off the water, stepped out and got dressed. One more bad memory to add to the list of those that she already needed to deal with.
Later, sitting in the parlor waiting for her clothes to finish drying, Kiki had nothing better to do but listen to the ticking of the clock over the mantlepiece. She must have fallen asleep because when she woke up, it was nearly dark outside, and Erwin was trying to quietly remove a book from the shelves that took up an entire wall of the parlor.
“Lucia said to just let you sleep” Erwin said, “She said that you told her what really happened to you and that it sounded serious. She also thinks that you are missing your boyfriend.”
“About me and Benjamin, our relationship is…” Kiki started to say and as always struggled to explain matters.
“Wholly inappropriate” Erwin said mildly, “Is that what you were going to say?”
Actually, Kiki was going to say “impossible” like she had so many times in the past. But what Erwin said worked just as well.
“I word of advice from me, Kristina” Erwin said, “Though things have worked out well over the course of my life with the decisions I’ve made, one of the few things that I occasionally regret was how I listened to what others had to say about a relationship they deemed inappropriate. Just something for you to think about.”
“Thank you” Kiki replied, though she wasn’t quite sure what he was referring to.
“There is food in the kitchen if you are interested” Erwin said before he went back to what he was doing before.