Stupid Luck and Happenstance, Thread II

Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred Seventy-Eight



3rd March 1965

Essen

Her parents had been completely surprised when they learned where she would be going this week. Out of all the things that Aurora could have as a career option, they had never considered industry, especially with her having gone to University. It seemed that Krupp was offering other possibilities even if Aurora hadn’t made her mind up just yet.

Aurora’s mother had said that she hoped that all of this wasn’t some sort of odd reaction to her perceived appearance or her lack of success in dating. In recent years Aurora had finally managed to lose the pudginess that was such a curse when she had been a teenager and yes, she’d had a string of rotten boyfriends. Still, she was interested in this because Krupp sold their products all over the world and she could be there representing them.

As Aurora followed Heinrich Vogt down the elevated steel walkway. Below them was a hive of activity as the foundry’s operations were continuous and the workers were preparing for the next round of operations. As she grew closer to getting her Diplom in International Relations, Aurora had found herself heavily recruited by both Government Ministries and Industrial interests. Krupp Steel had invited her to Essen for a three-day tour of their manufacturing and fabricating centers to entice her to come work for their public relations department.

It had been a lot to take in.

Divisions of Krupp made everything from precision instruments and cutlery all the way up to artillery pieces, the plates that would make up the hulls of ships and the thousands of kilometers of rail that linked the nations of the world. When she had walked into the hall of the Corporate Headquarters where the company’s varied products were displayed, the first thing she had seen was a StuG VIII Assault Gun that was waiting to be shipped to a unit in the Heer. Heinrich, her tour guide, said that if anything was made of a steel alloy then Krupp made it.

Heinrich Vogt was a bit of a surprise as well. He was a bit rough around the edges having started on the foundry floor and working his way up to his present position, Senior Operations Officer of Krupp’s heavy industry here in Essen. The first two days had been spent touring the tool & die works, one of the fabrication plants and a factory where they assembled marine diesel engines. The whole time Heinrich had been explaining to Aurora exactly what was going on. The entire time she had felt a nagging sense of familiarity towards him. Then it hit her, he reminded her of Fürstin Katherine somehow which was extremely strange.

When Aurora brought it up with him, Heinrich had just laughed. “Usually it’s people saying I remind them of Hans Mischner” He said, “Katy is my half-sister and I would prefer you didn’t spread that around.”

That was not what she had expected to hear. Sure, there were rumors that Katherine’s father had been some sort of mafioso and a complete rake, but to speak to someone who was that completely frank about it was different.

Now, hours later, Aurora followed Heinrich onto the observation platform. She was wearing heat reflecting coveralls and a steel hardhat, because plastic ones tended to melt according to Heinrich. They were going to see the foundry operation and one of the rolling mills today. This was the first part of that.

“That’s where the magic happens” Heinrich said as he pointed to the furnace. “The charging buckets are loading scrap steel into the crucible now. Before they turn on the juice, you’ll want to put on the earmuffs that I lent you.”

The earmuffs were different from what Aurora had seen before. They went around the back of the head and rested on the collar of the person wearing them. It wasn’t until she watched Heinrich putting them on that she realized that they were made to be worn with the hard hats. No sooner had she got them on than a klaxon sounded, and a large electrode descended into the crucible. The angle was wrong to see what was going on in the crucible itself beyond the flashes of blue-white light reflected off the corrugated steel roof of the foundry high above, but the sound was deafening. After a few minutes the crucible itself started to glow white hot and Aurora felt a wave of heat hit her though the furnace was at least hundred meters away.

Despite herself, Aurora was amazed as steel poured like a liquid through a ceramic pipe into water-cooled molds that were waiting below. The scale of this was larger than anything she had ever seen before.



Jena

The article had been submitted to English edition of the Mirror for local publication in Germany and supposedly it was to run in Time Magazine in the United States. Hunter had agreed that he wouldn’t embellish anything and would instead present Kiki as he saw her, warts and all.

Still, Kiki had gotten a call from Zella’s mother telling her that they wanted updated photographs of her for the story. Mercifully, Hunter had gone back to Paris and they were sending out Doug Blackwood because he had worked with her in the past. Even so, Kiki was wearing her least attractive clothes, an oversized brown sweater and a pair of baggy grey trousers.

Doug had not seemed to mind her look at all. He took several photographs of her in the back garden of the house she shared with Vicky, even a few with Rauchbier.
Given the level of sender and receiver this is not just a normal orderly or mailroom clerk. This is, more than likely, the personal assistant to the chief of staff for the hospital or the pa’s assistant that delivered it. These are generally ones who think they are so important until someone points out they are just an assistant not the actual person in charge.
 
I have always liked Dr. Berg since we first saw her take charge of Kat when she was expecting the first time.
One of the best things about her is how she deals with her patients who in her mind have more ego then sense.
The evolution of her relationship with Kiki has been realistic and actually heartwarming in parts as Kiki has become a surrogate daughter to her.
We must remember that Dr. Berg has not gotten were she is now by being a shrinking violet and by being "nice".
 
While most of those who staff hospitals are wonderful, the attitudes of some of the medical staff AND admin staff towards the cleaning staff can be even worse. Cleaners, especially hospital cleaners, are NOT mere "custodial" staff; they are the first, best & last line of defence against diseases. In a hospital environment, cleaners are the ones responsible for keeping the death toll as low as it is, not the doctors, and they are the lowest paid, over worked & under appreciated people in the whole damn building. Hygiene is their specialty and hospitals are packed full of both infectious diseases and people with compromised immune systems. Care to guess what happens when there are few or no cleaners?

Sorry for the mini rant; flashbacks to a 6 month hospitalisation & seeing an arsehole junior doctor snarling at a cleaner for reminding him to sanitise his hands before entering the oncology/haematology ward. Chemo really fucks over your immune system & some of my fellow patients were seriously ill.
 
Part 104, Chapter 1680
Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred Eighty



1st April 1965

Jena

There was no escaping today’s date. Kiki knew full well that the joke was on her and it wasn’t in the least bit funny.

“I can assume that all of you read that stupid article by now?” Kiki asked to the others nodding and affirming what she already knew. This group along with everyone else she knew it seemed. It was not as if she could have pretended to be anonymous for long but to have things blow up the way they had it was impossible to hide.

The problem was that she had either told Hunter more than she had been intended or he had found out by other means certain things that she hadn’t intended the public at large to know about her and the events of the last few years. There were several things that had gotten mention in the article that Kiki was certain old friends would probably be sore about even getting mentioned.

“I don’t think that what you did was stupid at all” Doctor Holz said, “We are trying to remove the stigma that surrounds those issues.”

“My experience is never going to be what others face” Kiki said, “Anyone else would have wrecked their life and completely destroyed their career by doing what I did. That might still happen anyway.”

Because Kiki was the Princess Royal, she couldn’t be thrown out of the FSR or the Medical Service. That didn’t mean that she didn’t understand that there would be serious consequences of her actions. Kiki would likely never get another promotion and in due time she would get shown the door with her very lack of advancement providing the excuse to shove her through it.

“That is why it was so important” Doctor Holz said. That was incredibly easy for him to say. He wasn’t going to spend the next several decades paying the price for a few moments of candor.

“Important?” Kiki asked, “Do you read the medical journals in your own office? There are Surgeons keeping people alive in ways that would have been considered impossible just a generation ago and you think that what I did was important.”

“It’s all about courage Kristina” Doctor Holz answered, “And an expert in their field isn’t taking as much of a risk as I know that even a woman in your position took by giving a frank interview. Your actions reflect your character.”

It was obvious that they were on completely different pages here, so Kiki sat in sullen silence waiting for someone to change the subject. It didn’t happen, all anyone wanted to talk about was her and it made her want to scream.



Munich

Picking Maria up at the train station because of the situation that Emil had found himself in wasn’t how he was expecting to end this business trip. She was certainly amused by it as she looked at the car that he had found himself with. It had been given to him as a bonus when he would have preferred for BMW to have just given him cash instead.

Emil had come to Munich in order to meet with the executives of BMW for him to discuss his strategy for the upcoming racing season, it basically amounted to him having to explain what the technicians on his team had told him dumbed down to the point that people who knew little about the subject might sort of understand. The executives had been completely surprised when he had arrived on his old R68. He had turned it into a joke by saying that you cannot improve upon perfection and they had laughed. It was the same motorcycle that he had been around the world on though, so it wasn’t entirely a joke. He had gone on to brief them about what his team had been up to over the winter such as improvements on the supercharged 500 cubic centimeter opposed four-cylinder engine, the efforts to further lighten the alloy frame and the improved disk brakes he watched their eyes glaze over. That was until he mentioned that his team was reaching speeds well over three hundred kilometers per hour on the test track. That was met with a bit of disbelief.

While they didn’t pretend to understand the entirety of what Emil was doing, they saw that his team had been winning races as was as their rivalry with Honda’s Racing Division drawing a lot of attention and that was translating into sales. It was that final aspect that they understood perfectly.

Then the subject of compensation came up.

Emil was treated like any other Department Head by BMW and that was reflected in his paycheck. It wasn’t as if he needed the money, he drew a comfortable pension as a retired Generalfeldmarschall and former Commander in Chief of the Military High Command. He had gone to work for BMW Motorrad because it was something that he might have done without corporate backing regardless. While they mentioned that he probably deserved a raise, they gave him a car instead.

It was the latest version of the 700 Coupe Sport that was BMW’s answer to the Volkswagen Föhn series. Emil couldn’t help but noticing that it was filled with technology that his team had developed, not the least of which was the engine that happened to be an enlarged version of the same one that had gone into the racing motorcycles over the previous year. The problem it presented Emil was how did he get two vehicles back to Berlin?

“Why didn’t you ask to have it delivered to our house?” Maria asked as they drove back to the hotel where Emil stayed when he was in Munich.

“That didn’t occur to me” Emil admitted.

“Not that it matters now” Maria replied, “I needed the escape anyway, the offices of the paper have been a zoo since that story in the Mirror, the weekly magazine that operated in conjunction with the BT, ran a feature story featuring Princess Kristina.” The normally press adverse Princess had spoken openly about a subject that Emil knew was a prickly problem for the military, something that most didn’t have the guts to even mention.

“This car will be perfect for Zella” Maria said.

“Excuse me?” Emil asked. That wasn’t what he had been thinking they might use the car for.

“She will need a way to get around if she wants to look presentable” Maria replied, “As much as the two of you love those motorcycles there are times when they are simply not practical.”

Emil didn’t entirely agree with that, but Maria did have a point.
 
Last edited:
Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred Eighty



1st April 1965

Jena

There was no escaping today’s date. Kiki knew full well that the joke was on her and it wasn’t in the least bit funny.

“I can assume that all of you read that stupid article by now?” Kiki asked to the others nodding and affirming what she already knew. This group along with everyone else she knew it seemed. It was not as if she could have pretended to be anonymous for long but to have things blow up the way they had it was impossible to hide.

The problem was that she had either told Hunter more than she had been intended or he had found out by other means certain things that she hadn’t intended the public at large to know about her and the events of the last few years. There were several things that had gotten mention in the article that Kiki was certain old friends would probably be sore about even getting mentioned.

“I don’t think that what you did was stupid at all” Doctor Holz said, “We are trying to remove the stigma that surrounds those issues.”

“My experience is never going to be what others face” Kiki said, “Anyone else would have wrecked their life and completely destroyed their career by doing what I did. That might still happen anyway.”

Because Kiki was the Princess Royal, she couldn’t be thrown out of the FSR or the Medical Service. That didn’t mean that she didn’t understand that there would be serious consequences of her actions. Kiki would likely never get another promotion and in due time she would get shown the door with her very lack of advancement providing the excuse to shove her through it.

“That is why it was so important” Doctor Holz said. That was incredibly easy for him to say. He wasn’t going to spend the next several decades paying the price for a few moments of candor.

“Important?” Kiki asked, “Do you read the medical journals in your own office? There are Surgeons keeping people alive in ways that would have been considered impossible just a generation ago and you think that what I did was important.”

“It’s all about courage Kristina” Doctor Holz answered, “And an expert in their field isn’t taking as much of a risk as I know that even a woman in your position took by giving a frank interview. Your actions reflect your character.”

It was obvious that they were on completely different pages here, so Kiki sat in sullen silence waiting for someone to change the subject. It didn’t happen, all anyone wanted to talk about was her and it made her want to scream.



Munich

Picking Maria up at the train station because of the situation that Emil had found himself in wasn’t how he was expecting to end this business trip. She was certainly amused by it as she looked at the car that he had found himself with. It had been given to him as a bonus when he would have preferred for BMW to have just given him cash instead.

Emil had come to Munich in order to meet with the executives of BMW for him to discuss his strategy for the upcoming racing season, it basically amounted to him having to explain what the technicians on his team had told him dumbed down to the point that people who knew little about the subject might sort of understand. The executives had been completely surprised when he had arrived on his old R68. He had turned it into a joke by saying that you cannot improve upon perfection and they had laughed. It was the same motorcycle that he had been around the world on though, so it wasn’t entirely a joke. He had gone on to brief them about what his team had been up to over the winter such as improvements on the supercharged 500 cubic centimeter opposed four-cylinder engine, the efforts to further lighten the alloy frame and the improved disk brakes he watched their eyes glaze over. That was until he mentioned that his team was reaching speeds well over three hundred kilometers per hour on the test track. That was met with a bit of disbelief.

While they didn’t pretend to understand the entirety of what Emil was doing, they saw that his team had been winning races as was as their rivalry with Honda’s Racing Division drawing a lot of attention and that was translating into sales. It was that final aspect that they understood perfectly.

Then the subject of compensation came up.

Emil was treated like any other Department Head by BMW and that was reflected in his paycheck. It wasn’t as if he needed the money, he drew a comfortable pension as a retired Generalfeldmarschall and former Commander in Chief of the Military High Command. He had gone to work for BMW Motorrad because it was something that he might have done without corporate backing regardless. While they mentioned that he probably deserved a raise, they gave him a car instead.

It was the latest version of the 700 Coupe Sport that was BMW’s answer to the Volkswagen Föhn series. Emil couldn’t help but noticing that it was filled with technology that his team had developed, not the least of which was the engine that happened to be an enlarged version of the same one that had gone into the racing motorcycles over the previous year. The problem it presented Emil was how did he get two vehicles back to Berlin?

“Why didn’t you ask to have it delivered to our house?” Maria asked as they drove back to the hotel where Emil stayed when he was in Munich.

“That didn’t occur to me” Emil admitted.

“Not that it matters now” Maria replied, “I needed the escape anyway, the offices of the paper have been a zoo since that story in the Mirror, the weekly magazine that operated in conjunction with the BT, ran a feature story featuring Princess Kristina. The normally press adverse Princess had spoken openly about a subject that Emil knew was a prickly problem for the military, something that most didn’t have the guts to even mention.

“This car will be perfect for Zella” Maria said.

“Excuse me?” Emil asked. That wasn’t what he had been thinking they might use the car for.

“She will need a way to get around if she wants to look presentable” Maria replied, “As much as the two of you love those motorcycles there are times when they are simply not practical.”

Emil didn’t entirely agree with that, but Maria did have a point.
Insert picture of Zella showing up at the palace for a formal event on a big beemer touring bike.
 
BMW 700, just seeing someone seated in it shows the size of this car.
f25172bacf3c503854a397a8751f9b92.jpg
 
Part 104, Chapter 1681
Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred Eighty-One



11th April 1965

Mitte, Berlin

Even on a Sunday evening parking in Mitte was atrocious. At least the car had good mileage while they searched for a parking spot.

For the umpteenth time Zella cursed her rotten luck as she drove around the block again looking for a place to park. If she had her motorcycle, she could have just parked it on the sidewalk in front of the club with the other bikes and called it good. Walter, her little brother, thought that it was all so funny. She had this car she hadn’t asked for, that she didn’t dare complain about and her mother had made one of the conditions of her having the car being available if her brother who didn’t have a driver’s license, needed to get someplace. Zella suspected that Walter that had wanted to come along tonight for the express purpose of putting her in this situation. If he said anything to confirm those suspicions, then he was going to find himself walking home.

After the third trip around the block, they finally found an empty parking spot. As Zella locked up the car, she had to remind herself the entire reason why she had wanted to come in the first place. It was because she had been so buried in her coursework that she simply hadn’t had the time for the last few months to make it into the V8 Club between being near to completing University and being Bart’s assistant. Tonight, it would hopefully be the house pickup band composed of whoever happened along. It was probably the best showcase of Berliner Jazz or Gutter Blues on a good night.

Zella had been offered a job over the summer at ARD entirely on the strength of the documentaries that she had been making. Someone over there was intrigued by her ability to put them together on the cheap. Apparently, it represented a great opportunity if she made the most of it. So, she had no idea when she would get a chance to come back around. Zella couldn’t help but feel a bit of guilt regarding Kiki. Her and Aurora were getting on with their lives and starting careers while she still had a year to go. It was odd because Kiki had started a year before them. All the time that Kiki had sacrificed to join the Medical Service and go to Korea had made a profound difference in her life. Zella was still trying to figure out if that had been worth it.

Entering the club, Zella saw that some rangy looking teenagers were packing their gear up. The fact that the club was extremely empty wasn’t a good sign as their abilities. The noticeable absence of John Elis was hardly a surprise. Whenever a new band played in the club, he found an excuse to be elsewhere.

“Who are they?” Zella asked Sarah, who was behind the bar tonight. The members of the band were hanging around at the other end of the bar drinking beer and trying to act grown up. They were failing at it.

“Forgettable for the most part, mistaking volume for skill” Sarah said.

As Zella ordered a drink and waited to see how things would pan out for the night, it didn’t look like anything was going to happen. Walter was starting to fidget, and she figured that it was probably not going to be a good night around the V8 Club. Which meant that she would probably be home and asleep by midnight. How very disappointing.

“Do you come here all the time?” One of the boys from the band asked as he walked up to her. The others had obviously egged him into talking to her.

“Not as much as I would like” Zella replied pensively, she wasn’t interested in being anyone’s entertainment. “And you are playing way over your division.”

Sarah looked like she was trying not to laugh. “I warned you about this sort of thing Rudolf, the local wildlife doesn’t like being bothered.”

With that Rudolf retreated to be among his friends. Him screwing up enough courage to speak with a woman so obviously out of his league would probably be one of the high points of the night. Walter was older than them, it was absurd that one of them even approached her.

“They are harmless” Sarah told Zella, “Visiting the big city and learning that being a big deal in their own minds somewhere out west doesn’t mean a damned thing here.”

“That would be like me hitting on Sarah” Walter said, he had observed quietly. By now he understood that Zella could take care of herself. It was obvious that there were still a few things that he had yet to learn. Both Zella and Sarah got a laugh over the comment he had just made.

“It is a bit less extreme than that” Zella said.

“Because she is older?” Walter asked, a bit confused.

“No” Sarah replied, “You are not in the right scene.”

Walter looked even more bewildered by that.

“It’s because you have a penis” Zella said, and she watched her little brother’s face turn a deep crimson. As much as he aspired to be a sophisticated urbanite there were still a few buttons that Zella knew she could press that would reveal his lack of worldliness.

“That reminds me” Sarah said, “Have you solved the little problem that you discovered in Jena.”

It was Zella’s turn to be perturbed. She had asked Sarah for advice the last time she had been in here. About Kiki telling her that Vicky had a thing for bad girls, and she had a crush on Zella. Even if Zella swung that way, getting involved with her best friend’s little sister was something that she would never do. Sarah had advised her to let Vicky down gently if it ever came up.
 
Last edited:
So the Zella & Vicky situation has potential to go down at least 4 different paths.
1) Vicky never acts on her crush.
2) Vicky does act on her crush, Zella lets her down and, but for some embarrassment, they stay friends.
3) As number 2, but it ends badly.
4) As number 2, but Zella finds out that she DOES swing that way, or at least she does for Vicky.
If number 4, she may need to ask Ben for advice on how to handle a potentially over-protective father who just happens to be the Kaiser; i.e. how do you survive the change in status and/or goon squad? Considering their background, that would be a fun conversation to listen in on.
Numbers 3 & 4 may strain her relationship with Kiki.
 
Numbers 3 & 4 may strain her relationship with Kiki.

3 yes, but 4...unless she treats Vicky badly, why?

TBH, I've always thought this 'Don't date your friend's sibling' thing is silly... OK, there's a couple of my friends who I'd be nervous about dating my sister, but for the most part? I'd be like 'Yeah, they're decent folks and my sister's a grown woman, it's her decision'. I mean, if they then broke her heart or treated her badly I'd give 'em what for, but I wouldn't get all stroppy about it when that hadn't happened. Again, once your sibling - or indeed your kid, let's be honest - is an adult, your input into their romantic life should be confined to shoulders to cry on if necessary, or warning off ex-partners who turn out to be bastards.
 
Last edited:
Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred Eighty-Two



17th April 1965

Rural Silesia

It was a nice spring afternoon with a shocking amount of green suddenly visible after the long winter. The sun was warm, though there were still patches of snow in shady spots from the last snowstorm that had blown through just a week earlier.

For the last few days Manfred had nine-year-old Marie Alexandra along as he conducted the annual census of game animals on his lands. This was in addition to Manfred the Younger, Marie’s older brother Malcolm, Nikolaus and Sabastian Schultz. Rust was in his accustomed place by Manfred’s feet. With that many of them it was wonder that they were even able to get close enough to see the animals in order to count them. It had also come as a bit of a surprise that the girl had shown interest in coming along with the them. Normally, when the entire family gathered here for a holiday like they were this week the girls stayed in the house with the women listening to gossip and indulging in whatever entertainment Käte had arranged. Having everyone here for Easter tomorrow was something that Käte wanted this year because from her perspective it didn’t happen often enough.

Marie had come with them into the forest because she wanted to see what roebucks really looked like. Manfred had told her that the among the diminutive roe deer, the males could be extremely elusive. That didn’t dampen her enthusiasm though. A couple days earlier, she had asked if roebucks were really called the princes of the forest and Manfred had been a bit amused by the question. She had obviously been reading the work of Felix Salten and wanted to see for herself what had been depicted in those books. Manfred had met the Austrian author a few times before the Second World War, he had been an avid outdoorsman and hunter himself, it was reflected in those stories. If that was enough to get Marie out of the city and into the forest with her cousins, then it was something that Manfred approved of, her choice of clothes not so much. Marie was wearing a green wool coat and a heavily embroidered dress that made her look like she come directly out of one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The old-fashioned brass spyglass that she had sticking out of the pocket of her coat completed the picture. The woolen stockings and practical shoes did prove that she wasn’t entirely frivolous.

Presently, they were sitting in a blind at the edge of a meadow that Ilse said she used for her observations. Manfred suspected that it was where she came when she grew tired of other people. There were several other blinds that Ilse used within a few kilometers of the house, so when she wanted to be alone finding her could be a bother. Manfred was watching through his binoculars as a handful of red deer hinds browsed along the far tree line. He had been debating whether a cull hunt would be needed early this summer. If he continued to see more of the hinds then it might prove necessary, it would depend on the final tally. He wouldn’t discuss that in front of the grandchildren. Only Manfred the younger was old enough to understand some of the, harsh at times, decisions that needed to be made. Of course, Manfred wasn’t certain how interested Manny would be. He had seemed distracted of late. Helene had said that it was because there was a girl who he was seeing socially, and she was proving particularly challenging for him. He had originally asked her for help with academic tutoring and no one was quite certain how, or even if, things going to progress. From the sounds of it, the girl was probably smarter than he was and therein lay the real challenge. Manfred hoped that his grandson would rise to the occasion.

A familiar shape emerged from the woods. A red deer stag with still growing antlers in velvet but well on their way to becoming the magnificent spread that they would become in the autumn. He had a distinctive set of markings on his chest that lent him the name that those who had spotted him in past called him by.

“Will you look at that” Manny said, “Old Bullseye survived another winter.”

The younger boys stopped fidgeting and looked for themselves. Marie pulled out her spyglass and was looking through it. Manfred watched as Bullseye joined the hinds. He had been watching the old stag for years and while he had asked the other hunters in the area to avoid shooting him, Manfred was surprised that it hadn’t happened.

That was when Nikolaus and Sabastian started arguing over which of them got to look through the old pair of binoculars that Manfred had given them. The deer heard the sound and headed for cover. Not that it mattered, he had already written on his notepad when and where Bullseye and the four hinds had been spotted. Seeing the withering look that Manny and Malcolm were giving their cousins after breaking noise discipline, Manfred knew that he wouldn’t need to take corrective action because it would already be taken care of. He also watched as Marie collapsed the spyglass and put it back into her coat pocket.

“They were much bigger than the roe deer” Marie said, “Beautiful too.”

She had watched and hadn’t made a peep. Perhaps Katherine’s youngest child would be worth keeping an eye on.
 
Last edited:
Love the way that the Graf has become the de facto Grandfather for this generation, I would bet anything that twenty, thirty years ago he could not imagine himself being in that position.
What is even more amazing to me is how sensitive he is to the he feelings of the younger children including Marie about the necessity of culling the deer herd.
Instilling a love for nature to this group of children may have given him the greatest sense of joy for these past few years and made him want to be more active.
 
Part 104, Chapter 1683
Chapter One Thousand Six Hundred Eighty-Three



20th April 1965

Silesia

With Easter past everyone was just enjoying a few quiet days in the countryside before returning to their lives. The big family meals in the Richthofen house had grown into raucous affairs. Helene’s mother said that it was good to have them from time to time because the house tended to get extremely quiet if Ilse and Albrecht were back in the city. After nearly fifty years of marriage, Manfred and Käte understood where their interests lay and how they overlapped. There simply wasn’t a whole lot to talk about that they hadn’t discussed countless times before.

As Helene watched Marie and Tatiana playing a board game with Ina, it occurred to her that every time she saw Kat’s daughters, they reminded her of Kat herself when she had stepped off that railcar at the vegetable market in Berlin almost thirty years earlier.

There was also the reminder that her father was very different when he played the role of Opa to the various children who came to the estate. He had taken an interest in Marie this time, helping with her curiosity regarding the animals that she had only read about in books, seeing them for real. There was a rather large contrast between that and how Helene remembered her own childhood. She recalled that he had always been somewhat remote and a rather hard disciplinarian.

“How can he be so different?” Helene asked as she explained it to her mother.

“Because indulging grandchildren is the domain of a grandfather” Käte replied, “And as much as he is loath to admit it, I believe that he has learned from his mistakes.”

Of course, that was exactly what Helene would expect her mother to say. She had seen the great Manfred von Richthofen when he had been at the height of his personal power and commanded the attention of the entire world. His career had continued for decades afterwards, but he had never quite matched the achievements of those early days. Helene knew that saying that her father had made mistakes was about as far as her mother would be willing to go, with her anyway.

“What’s this girl Suse who I’ve been hearing about like?” Käte asked, changing the subject.

“She is Gerta’s little girl” Helene replied, “And I don’t think that her and Manny are an item. Not yet, anyway, if ever.”

“Gerta?” Käte asked, “As in Gerta von Wolvogle?”

“Yes” Helene replied, seeing the expression on her mother’s face change.

“It is just speculation, but many researchers think that some forms of insanity might have a genetic component” Käte said, “Just something to consider if the girl is Ritter von Wolvogle’s granddaughter.”

“You knew the Old Wolf didn’t you” Helene replied.

“All too well” Käte said, “Do you have any idea how destructive that man was when he got drunk?”

“Ask the Russians” Helene said darkly.

Käte nodded, “He broke the picture window on the landing between the first and second floor of…” She trailed off as she remembered that this house wasn’t the same one that she had lived in decades earlier even if it had been built on the same spot. For Käte, damaging her house in a drunken stupor was unforgivable. Even after more than two decades, she still hadn’t been able to square that with how her husband had torched the old house rather than have it become a trophy for the Soviets.



Wilhelm Station

When the end came, it was an anticlimax.

The SMS Sirius had arrived a few days earlier and it was to open a passage for the Albatros back into open water. Louis’ mail had arrived, and it had included a stack of magazines about various topics and dozens of letters. There was an article about Kiki in there and they seemed to have caught her when she was in one of her melancholy moods. Still, seeing her sitting there in a garden somewhere was a reminder of just how long he had been away from home. There were also plants growing there, even in wintertime. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen an actual plant growing in the ground.

Louis had not had time to think about how much time was left in Antarctica, or much else, because he had been babysitting a group of Geologists as they had worked their way down a mountain range that was poking out of glaciers in the interior. It had been a boring task, keeping Geologists from coming to grief in the cold and weather had proven to be a fulltime job. Then they had returned to Wilhelm Station and it had been mentioned that he was on the next ship back to the world. Unless he wanted to spend another winter at Wilhelm Station that is, they always needed volunteers…

Now as he got out of the Iltis with Hugo carrying his sea bag across the ice dock to the gangplank, Louis realized that he was not going to this place at all. His time in Antarctica had not been an epic tale of survival or exploration. He had come here to do a job. He had done it to the best of his abilities and now it was over. Was most adventure just boredom masked by nostalgia? Louis didn’t know.

The Obermaat in charge of the security detail gave them the evil eye as their papers were checked and approved. Minutes later, they were shown to their quarters aboard the Albatros.
 
Last edited:
Top