Chapter Two Thousand Five Hundred Eighty-Two
16th September 1976
Richthofen Estate, Rural Silesia
The seasons were rolling around again with autumn having arrived. For Manfred the Elder, it was comforting to know that the patterns of the forest he had worked his whole life to preserve would continue on regardless of whatever else happened in the world. Unfortunately, he was rather limited these days as his age had caught up with him, as much as he hated to admit it. Short jaunts into the forest in good weather were the best that he could manage and even then Ilse made sure that he was never alone even for a second. Manfred found that he missed the solitude.
To Manfred’s surprise, his latest book had become a bestseller, the best since The Red Fighter Pilot in 1917. He had grown uncomfortable with that first book soon after it had been published, realizing that he was no longer the brash figure that he had depicted himself as in his own autobiography. There had been a number of other books about subjects like land conservation, military strategy, and hunting, but those had never garnered much interest with the wider public. This latest book was about a far more universal subject, stories about the various animals that had been a part of his life over the years. Mostly dogs and horses, but there had been a few cats and even a monkey at one point. The stories had inadvertently touched upon the lives of his children and grandchildren, so Manfred had already listened to Helene and Albrecht’s opinions about how he had depicted them. Helene didn’t think she had been nearly as willful and stubborn as depicted. Albrecht had been amused by Manfred’s depiction of his experiments which had frequently gone awry. Sonje and Caecilia had mostly complained about how they had not been mentioned enough. Most of all, Manfred had tried to tell the truth about his son Lothar, which was one of Manfred’s greatest regrets. Lothar had tried to measure up to Manfred’s standards and had always come up short and Manfred had been far less than understanding at the time. That had eventually ended in Lothar’s untimely death.
There were his own grandchildren as well as those he had accepted along with them. Manfred the Younger, Nikolaus, Sabastian, Ina, Katherine’s twins Tatiana & Malcolm, Marie Alexandra, Ingrid. Finally Mathilda, who had caused Manfred to question a lot of things with the beliefs that she had maintained despite how that occasionally put her at odds with the world.
Many people might have found the manner in which Mathilda was concerned for Manfred disturbing. She wanted him to receive his due when he reached the Feast Hall of the Gods and to do that one needed to die with a weapon in their hand. It made perfect sense from the standpoint of someone with Mathilda’s beliefs. Over the last few years, Mathilda had learned a great deal; concepts like context, symbolism, and allegory had entered her thinking. While she still enjoyed singing to the forest, Manfred couldn’t help but feel that Mathilda had lost a bit of her wild innocence. What hadn’t changed was her belief in endless tides of creation and destruction, birth, and rebirth. The idea of dying with a weapon in your hand wasn’t because the people with those beliefs were warlike, it was symbolic of their actual role within their society. You went to the Gods proving that you had served your community until your dying breath and should be honored for it.
The other concern that Manfred had was something that he had not realized until after the book had been published. He had depicted Ingrid’s life as being idyllic when the truth was far different and much more complicated. How would Ingrid react when she learned the truth about where she came from? That the two much younger children she played with as a favor for one of the Maids were actually her half-brother and sister? That the Maid in question, Izabella Lis, was her actual birth mother? Or if she never did. When Manfred had first learned about the situation he had wanted to fire Izabella to protect Ingrid but had been overruled by Ilse. Ilse had argued that it would make Izabella completely devoted to her and in the years since, she had proven Ilse correct on many occasions.
At last there was the news that in a few months there would be a great grandchild coming. There was a bit of annoyance that Manfred the Younger had married Suse Rosa von Knispel, the granddaughter of Generalfeldmarschall von Wolvogle, certifiable madman, and the father of the Panzer Corps. Manfred had always felt that von Wolvogle’s ego to be one of the most monumental in all of history. He had believed in the great man theory, but only so long as that great man had been von Wolvogle himself. Probably more than anyone else, he had done what was necessary to rid the world of the Soviet Union, but in the fullness of time Manfred was starting to question if von Wolvogle had gone far enough. Russia had reemerged as a world power, and they were neck deep in the latest round of the Greco-Turkish mess. It left Manfred feeling old and tired. He had been around long enough to watch how history was repeating itself and despite a lifetime of advancing his family’s social standing and his own person, he was powerless to stop the world from plunging into madness every few generations as it tended to do.
