The Pension
Chapter 1: The Letters

Copyright© 2017 by Fofo Xuxu

The letters stopped coming. Every week, Rebeca had sent a letter to Brazil to her mother, Mrs. Francisca, as soon as she got a room at a pension or boarding house as the Austrians prefer to call such places. The rooms were rented primarily to university students. Mrs. Francisca found it unsettling when into the eighth week and after eight letters no further news arrived. Family members tried to downplay her worries with possible and positive explanations on the whereabouts of the daughter. However, after four consecutive weeks without even receiving a postcard, they too became alarmed.

Rebeca had finished her third year of college and decided to go to Europe to pursue an independent course of study. She suspended her enrollment for one semester and departed soon after the family’s New Year’s party, planning on returning only after the June Festivals.

Her passion was literature and she wanted to become a journalist and eventually a writer. For her, writing came naturally like riding a bicycle and her letters were rich in details about the locations, the people and their daily lives in the small university city of Stadtberg, where she would immerse herself in the literary tendencies of that country. Her father had come from Austria, and she was the only one of three siblings who took interest in their cultural heritage. Everyone in the family, including Mrs. Francisca’s neighbors who read the letters imagined themselves being with Rebeca, visualizing the colors and objects, hearing the sounds of the city, and even savoring the delicacies of that region.

Mrs. Francisca wrote several letters to her daughter, asking if she was well and begging her to send news, so that she could stop worrying. However, after several weeks, when her second and third letters were returned from abroad, anguish hovered over the family like a dark and threatening cloud. Bruno, the older brother of Rebeca, suggested that they call the pension where she was staying. All they had to do was find someone who could speak German. However, they were disappointed when they discovered that none of Rebeca’s letters included a telephone number. The only thing she mentioned was that:

There is no telephone in my room. The only apparatus – in the style of the past century, black, resting on its hook like a lazy cat – is located in the reception lobby and can only be used for emergencies. I would love to hear its ring, a magical sound from the past, however until now the telephone has been silent like a mannequin in a store window. There is a post office near the university with several telephone booths both for domestic and international calls, and I promise to call at the end of the month.

Another member of the family suggested they contact the Brazilian Consulate to visit the pension and talk to Rebeca. That idea was soon swept under the rug, when they saw that none of her letters contained a return address that would allow someone to locate the pension. Everyone became more frustrated. Not even the name of the establishment was mentioned.

According to Rebeca, someone at the hotel where she stayed the first few days upon arrival to the city had indicated the pension to her. It was cheaper and quieter.

I was in awe as I rounded the corner and saw the pension with its stucco façade, painted in my favorite peach color. The windows, framed with salient stucco in white, are wide and tall to allow the maximum amount of light to penetrate the rooms, especially during this wintery time of the year with shorter days. The recessed doorway in the form of an archway is also framed with salient stucco like the windows, and has wooden doors carved with details of vines and grapes, characteristic of the vineyards in this region. Everything looks like something out of a fairy tale.

The only reference with regard to an address was Postfach 870, Zimmer 12. Several Internet searches showed that letters arrived at a post office box to be picked up and later presumably handed to Rebeca in her room by the person in charge.

The woman in charge, who speaks a broken form of English, yet better than I, explained that the post office does not deliver the mail in this old part of the city with streets configured like a maze or labyrinth, some of which don’t even have names, and that all the houses and establishments use post office boxes. It makes sense considering how these people of Germanic origin pride themselves on efficiency.

Without any news from Rebeca for several weeks, returned letters, and an address that lead to nowhere and without a name, the family asked Clara, the sister of Rebeca, to try to get at the bottom of the mystery.

Dark wavy hair, green eyes, and light skin, Clara was six years older, the same height as Rebeca, 1 meter 68 centimeters (5 feet 6 inches), weighed 60 kg (130 lbs.), however with the strength and ability of a karate fighter. She ran 10 km (6 miles) almost every day, did power exercises at a gym three times a week, and trained self-defense periodically to maintain her form. She not only enjoyed doing these activities, but it was necessary for her career as an agent of the Federal Police, where she was quickly promoted to the division of international drug trafficking.

Fluent in English, French, and Spanish, she had several foreign contacts, but not in Austria. She turned to her contacts at INTERPOL. They were momentarily occupied monitoring terrorists roaming around Europe and were unable to promise any immediate results.

The situation went from bad to worse. After an explosion among a multitude at Saint Peter’s Square in the Vatican by an Islamic fanatic, using a bomb vest which killed more than 150 people and injured another 450, INTERPOL reported that it had neither the time nor the personnel to continue the investigation. In reality, after sitting on the case for nearly three weeks, they hadn’t even started to pursue any of the leads. They apologized, saying that from now on they had priorities that were more urgent and probably more time consuming.

More than eight weeks had passed without a sign of life from Rebeca, and Clara too became increasingly desperate, realizing that her sister was all she had of a childhood with happy memories. The difference in their age never affected the special bond between them; distance and geography didn’t matter. Their father always told them that the relationship between brothers and sisters is one of the longest that they would experience and the most continuous. He repeated this lesson every year on the birthdate of his only sister who was killed in the war. He never overcame the loss.

Clara was the type of person to never give up easily, neither in her dedication to her the family, nor at work. It was through her dogged determination that she excelled in her career and she decided to use this trump card to request a leave of absence for family emergency reasons. Her request was approved, and, with the financial help from everyone in the family, Clara headed for Austria. She took with her photographs of Rebeca, all her letters, and notes from phone calls her mother and others had with Rebeca.

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