Chapter Two Thousand Two Hundred Two
2nd February 1973
Tempelhof
Like always, Kat withdrew from the world on this date. Sophie knew the basic story. Kat had a building blow up in her face when she had been just a few years older that Sophie was presently. It was a major part of how Kat had become who she was today, however it was noticeable that she obviously saw things differently. Doug said that Kat had never considered herself to be the heroine that people thought that she was. All of that had happened long before Sophie had been born and for a long time all she had known was her maternal grandfather’s comments about how César Sauvageot had clearly not gone far enough because he had missed a few. Sophie had not understood what that had meant at the time beyond it being like many of the other things that her grandfather had said that seemed geared mostly to anger other people. Later, she learned that it had been because of Kat that many people had made it out of the building who wouldn’t have otherwise.
Still, life went on even if Kat was mostly absent today.
Like every other morning for the last couple weeks, Sophie had been made to read aloud the weather report from the newspaper to either Kat, Petia, or Doug. They thought that if she acknowledged that the weather would be bad that day, then she would think twice before she did something else stupid. The other thing that Kat had insisted on was that perhaps Sophie needed things to keep her occupied closer to home. That included minding Heinrich, or Henri as he preferred to be called, Asia’s nine-year-old son.
Presently, Henri was spinning around on his feet in the library until he grew too dizzy and lost his balance. He fell onto the carpet and was laying on his back laughing as Sprocket who had been circling him as he had spun licked his face. The pup just loved it when Henri was around to play with him. The treasonous little shit, Sophie thought to herself but did nothing to stop them from playing with each other. Sophie knew that if Sprocket wasn’t playing with Henri, then he would be begging her for attention.
“You are going to make yourself sick or get hurt doing that” Sophie said, Henri had done this a few times now and he seemed to have no regard to what might happen if his head hit something solid when he fell.
“So” Henri said. He really was being a pill today. His mother had dropped him off here this afternoon after Kat and Doug had told Asia that they could take him for the weekend. Apparently, Asia and Kris were throwing a party and they didn’t want a child underfoot. All Henri knew was that the grownups were doing something fun, he was being excluded and didn’t like it. He began running around the room with Sprocket. Considering the amount of noise that he was making, Asia had probably been at her wits end after having him cooped up inside all winter. Henri being away for a couple of days was likely preventing a homicide. Sophie went back to her studies, English this time. It was a particularly vexing class for her, and she was finding that she envied how easily Marie Alexandra picked up languages. Last year, French had been difficult, this year English was proving impossible.
“What are you doing?” Henri asked, pausing from his mayhem to take an interest in what Sophie was doing.
“Studying” Sophie replied, “It is important that I get a passing grade in this class, or else they will make me retake it next year.”
There was a good chance that Sophie would get to retake English anyway. It seemed like her school had a perverse sense of humor at times.
Henri looked at the textbook in Sophie’s hands and saw what purported to be a street scene in an English city with many common items labeled in German and English. There were also tape cassettes that were supposed to help Sophie with the pronunciation. With Henri in the room that was absolutely impossible.
“Which class?” Henri asked.
“English” Sophie replied.
Henri found that funny. “Howdy, howdy, I’m a Cowboy” He said in English with an attempt at an American Texas accent that simply didn’t work. Of course, most of the English he had been exposed to would be in the form of Cowboy movies and television shows that were American exports. Sophie had been told that they depicted an idealized, whitewashed version of the American Western Frontier from the prior century. So much so that recently Mel Brooks had done a movie starring Richard Pryor along with a cast of thousands that parodied the entire Western Genre. Sophie had wanted to see it, but the theater had refused to sell her a ticket. Apparently, the theater owners felt that a movie depicting the towns of the American Old West as backwards and racist with the people as boorish idiots was more than she could handle. As if she hadn’t seen a great deal of that exact same sort of behavior before she had been removed from her mother’s household.
“My English Teacher said that American movies are the worst way to learn language” Sophie said, “Cowboys and Gangsters seldom speak proper English.”
“Oh” Henri replied, sounding a bit disappointed.
“That doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be nice to be able to watch those films without subtitles” Sophie said.
Henri just shrugged. Then he stood up and resumed spinning himself around.
