Part 132, Chapter 2252
Chapter Two Thousand Two Hundred Fifty-Two
21st September 1973
Tempelhof, Berlin
“It will help keep the lights on Josef” Sepp’s mother said, “So thank you, I guess.”
Was that all? Sepp thought to himself as he walked from the kitchen into the parlor.
He had gotten the afterschool job at Benno’s Burgers with the understanding that his marks wouldn’t slip at the Realschule he attended. The intention from the start was to help out his family, but it all seemed very anticlimactic when he gave his mother the money. What exactly had he expected to happen? His mother had taken the money in the weary manner in which she had gone about doing everything for the last several years. The only thing that had animated her was when she had told him that regardless of what he did, he was to stay in school. Unless he wanted to live in this neighborhood his whole life, he had to get into the next level of education, the one that was preparatory for getting into University. She had warned him that a job and girls could derail that entire thing, he only needed to look at his father to see where that could land him. There was also the example he was setting for his youngest brother Dieter to consider.
His mother had not mentioned Hagen. It was a shocking omission for her to have made, but even though he was eleven Sepp assumed that it was inevitable that Hagen would be lost to the streets. He was extremely surprised that his mother apparently thought along the same lines. Never once had Sepp had the impression that his father cared one way or another about him going to school.
Into this, Sophie and her friend Franziska had shown up at Benno’s for lunch that week. The two of them had eaten and then started working on their studies, that had included topics that Sepp couldn’t have imagined being taught at their level. That was something that Sepp himself already knew on some level, so he didn’t make a big deal of it. It was the presence of Sophie herself that caused the most trouble. After he screwed up enough courage to talk to her, he had stood there, tongue tied, unable to ask more than “How are you doing?” with a sheepish grin. Then Sophie had answered by talking about all sorts of things. Her dog, the bicycle club she had joined so that she could race competitively, her school and that she was struggling in English and that she found it harder than Latin, how Doug, whoever that was, had decided that she was a bit too young to take an adult course of bicycle repair…
Then Sepp’s boss had told him that he needed to stop flirting with the girls and get back to work or else he would be wearing the Benno the Bear costume out front for the rest of his shift. Considering how hot it was in that thing, no one who worked at Benno’s wanted to wear it, but the owner thought that it helped promote the business. When Sophie and Franziska heard Sepp’s boss say that; they had asked about the mascot costume and like everyone else who didn’t have to wear it, they thought it was funny.
“Is anything on?” Sepp asked Hagen who was watching television on the couch while their father was snoring in his chair.
“Still reruns” Didi said, “We’re watching Berlin Emergency though.”
Sepp looked just as the face of Doctor Noah Bauer appeared on the television. He remembered watching reruns of the long running medical drama with Hagen and Didi over the summer a couple years earlier because the hospital it was supposedly set in was just a few kilometers away. The earliest episodes had Bauer as a Doctor crusading against the hidebound Hospital Administration. These days he was the Director of the Emergency Department, one of the hidebound Administrators and that was a source of a lot of angst. Too bad they were not doing reruns of the story arc that had supposedly been set in Argentina but had been filmed in Lower Saxony and later in Bavaria. Today, the story of the week revolved around a man who had been brought into the Emergency Department who was symptomatic for smallpox and the Hospital’s response was swift and massive.
“Do you think that the hospital would really react that way?” Hagen asked.
“I think that it is understated” Sepp replied. He remembered how his grandmother had told him about how when she was a Nurse during the Soviet War, she had seen extreme measures that had been taken to contain certain diseases and smallpox had been one of them. Entire towns and villages burnt to the ground and the inhabitants forcibly quarantined.
“Oh” Hagen said before sitting quietly.
That was typical of Hagen. For as long as Sepp could remember, everything was a battle with him. Didi was the opposite though, the hopeless optimist of the sort who risked burning down the house because something should have worked though it hadn’t the prior times he had tried.
“The Doctors will save the day though” Didi said cheerfully, “They always do.”
Sepp wished that real life worked the way it was depicted on television. With every problem wrapped up neatly by the end of the hour. The truth was that real life was far messier. Where simple things like talking to a girl he liked proved very difficult.
21st September 1973
Tempelhof, Berlin
“It will help keep the lights on Josef” Sepp’s mother said, “So thank you, I guess.”
Was that all? Sepp thought to himself as he walked from the kitchen into the parlor.
He had gotten the afterschool job at Benno’s Burgers with the understanding that his marks wouldn’t slip at the Realschule he attended. The intention from the start was to help out his family, but it all seemed very anticlimactic when he gave his mother the money. What exactly had he expected to happen? His mother had taken the money in the weary manner in which she had gone about doing everything for the last several years. The only thing that had animated her was when she had told him that regardless of what he did, he was to stay in school. Unless he wanted to live in this neighborhood his whole life, he had to get into the next level of education, the one that was preparatory for getting into University. She had warned him that a job and girls could derail that entire thing, he only needed to look at his father to see where that could land him. There was also the example he was setting for his youngest brother Dieter to consider.
His mother had not mentioned Hagen. It was a shocking omission for her to have made, but even though he was eleven Sepp assumed that it was inevitable that Hagen would be lost to the streets. He was extremely surprised that his mother apparently thought along the same lines. Never once had Sepp had the impression that his father cared one way or another about him going to school.
Into this, Sophie and her friend Franziska had shown up at Benno’s for lunch that week. The two of them had eaten and then started working on their studies, that had included topics that Sepp couldn’t have imagined being taught at their level. That was something that Sepp himself already knew on some level, so he didn’t make a big deal of it. It was the presence of Sophie herself that caused the most trouble. After he screwed up enough courage to talk to her, he had stood there, tongue tied, unable to ask more than “How are you doing?” with a sheepish grin. Then Sophie had answered by talking about all sorts of things. Her dog, the bicycle club she had joined so that she could race competitively, her school and that she was struggling in English and that she found it harder than Latin, how Doug, whoever that was, had decided that she was a bit too young to take an adult course of bicycle repair…
Then Sepp’s boss had told him that he needed to stop flirting with the girls and get back to work or else he would be wearing the Benno the Bear costume out front for the rest of his shift. Considering how hot it was in that thing, no one who worked at Benno’s wanted to wear it, but the owner thought that it helped promote the business. When Sophie and Franziska heard Sepp’s boss say that; they had asked about the mascot costume and like everyone else who didn’t have to wear it, they thought it was funny.
“Is anything on?” Sepp asked Hagen who was watching television on the couch while their father was snoring in his chair.
“Still reruns” Didi said, “We’re watching Berlin Emergency though.”
Sepp looked just as the face of Doctor Noah Bauer appeared on the television. He remembered watching reruns of the long running medical drama with Hagen and Didi over the summer a couple years earlier because the hospital it was supposedly set in was just a few kilometers away. The earliest episodes had Bauer as a Doctor crusading against the hidebound Hospital Administration. These days he was the Director of the Emergency Department, one of the hidebound Administrators and that was a source of a lot of angst. Too bad they were not doing reruns of the story arc that had supposedly been set in Argentina but had been filmed in Lower Saxony and later in Bavaria. Today, the story of the week revolved around a man who had been brought into the Emergency Department who was symptomatic for smallpox and the Hospital’s response was swift and massive.
“Do you think that the hospital would really react that way?” Hagen asked.
“I think that it is understated” Sepp replied. He remembered how his grandmother had told him about how when she was a Nurse during the Soviet War, she had seen extreme measures that had been taken to contain certain diseases and smallpox had been one of them. Entire towns and villages burnt to the ground and the inhabitants forcibly quarantined.
“Oh” Hagen said before sitting quietly.
That was typical of Hagen. For as long as Sepp could remember, everything was a battle with him. Didi was the opposite though, the hopeless optimist of the sort who risked burning down the house because something should have worked though it hadn’t the prior times he had tried.
“The Doctors will save the day though” Didi said cheerfully, “They always do.”
Sepp wished that real life worked the way it was depicted on television. With every problem wrapped up neatly by the end of the hour. The truth was that real life was far messier. Where simple things like talking to a girl he liked proved very difficult.
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