Chapter 16: Emergency road trip

Mark

Alas, fate does like a good cynical laugh and trouble is never far from the Karass household. It was Friday, fifteenth of January 1993 and I was looking forward to seeing Jonjo again. He was slated to be back at his old stomping grounds for a week.

Of course I also looked forward to my daily telephone talks with mom and to Meri’s visit on Saturday night. As I had told mom, I wouldn’t jump her bones every other day, but we had decided that for the three weekends my better half was going to be in South Africa for altitude training, Meri would spend the night from Saturday to Sunday in hour home and my bed, which was enough opportunity for some canoodling to prevent either of us from building up a hormone overload.

As always I had the news running in the background while having breakfast. They had reported that a Polish ferry named Jan Heweliusz had capsized and sunk just off the East German Baltic coast on its way to Sweden, taking twenty crewmen and over thirty passengers down with her. The only reason it had peaked my interest was because it was not far from the piece of Baltic coast where my life had started and where I had started to look for my father just under a year ago.

I did become the focus of my thoughts though when a call came in from Germany, from a hospital in the town of Stralsund. I was asked if I was a relative of one Beatrice Karass. They had found mom’s number and address in her wallet. I told them who we were, and since there had been no name attached to the number they only now realized whose sister their patient was.

I told them the name and address of great grandpa Ernst’s retirement home, but urged them only to call it and not tell him everything before they knew if she would live or die. I promised them to take it from there. I would inform all pertinent parties and would be on my way to Germany as soon as possible.

My first call went to John. I didn’t like calling in a favor again, but I knew that asking him for a ride in his Citation was the only way to get to Germany in less than two days. He didn’t even let me apologize for the inconvenience and told me Rhonda and he would be coming over right away and help me get prepared before giving me a ride to the airport.

The next call was the hard one. It was still morning, but that meant it was already past lunch time in South Africa. Mom was predictably completely beside herself and it took me a while to calm her down to a mild panic. Of course she insisted of going to Germany but I put my foot down, insisting that at nearly nineteen I was old enough to go there myself and that the last thing Bea would need was living with the guilt of having wrecked mom’s entire season. It was a bit of anvil-in-a-velvet-glove diplomacy, but it got through to mom.

That doping was rife in all long distance disciplines was the world’s worst kept secret. Especially EPO was the juice du jour, a drug that increased the production of red blood cells and thus the amount of oxygen the blood could supply to the muscles. The only way a clean athlete like mom could achieve the same effect was training at altitude several times a year.

If she were to break off her pre-season training, the most important of the entire year, she would start out with a disadvantage that she would not make up for all year. At nearly thirty-three she could not afford to lose yet another season. I had been perhaps less than diplomatic in my delivery of that fact, but it was a logic she could hardly refute. Issuing me strict order to call her as soon as I knew anything, mom finally relented.

John and Rhonda had meanwhile arrived, and while I finished the call to mom, John’s wife had already started to pack my bag. She had been at our place often enough to know where everything was.

“Got any accommodation in Germany already?” John asked me, his chunky mobile phone already in his hand?

“I was just about to organize that,” I said and scribbled a city name on a piece of paper. “Can you ask your pilots if they can land in Magdeburg? It’s only a small City airport, but the Citation isn’t exactly a jumbo jet.”

John just nodded and walked out on the terrace to call his pilot.

My next call was to Frank. He gasped at the news and I remembered that he must have known Bea, at least as a five or six year old girl back from their vacation in 1973. It didn’t need much to convince him to help me. He promised to collect me in Magdeburg or Berlin, depending on where we could land and take me to Stralsund. He would also book a hotel room for me.

“Frank, that needs to be a room with two beds. I’m also taking grandpa Ernst with me. If you don’t want to, we can take a taxi.”

I heard a sigh from the other end of the line.

“It’s okay, Mark. I can’t run forever and hope the consequences never catch up to me. You’ve made it easier for me than I ever deserved, but I think I’m old enough now to face the music.”

“It won’t be so bad,” I promised him. “If nothing else, he’ll say the same as mom. At least the two of you managed to make me.”

I heard a chuckle, but I could also hear it was one of nervousness. I ended the call.

“Fred says we should be able to land there,” John said. “We’ll be light on fuel by that time anyway and with just you on board the plane won’t be anywhere near maximum load.”

“New pilot?” I asked. I had flown several times with John’s plane, but his usual pilots were called Jack and Barry.

“He’s Jack’s older brother. He normally flies for Bering Air up in Alaska, but the two of them want to start their own charter business in a year or two. He tries to get more flying hours on business jets. He only flies bird-whackers up there.”

“Well, he’ll surely collect some hours on this trip,” I said.

John

Not for the first time I found myself surprised just how mature Mark could react when the pressure was on. He certainly had his priorities right. We were already on the way to the airport when he finally called Meri to call off their weekend shenanigans. Any other eighteen year old with a more than willing friend with benefits at hand would probably have called her for one final quick boink or even taken her with him.

It sure was a stark difference from the turbulence caused by their ill-fated attempt at a ménage à trois the year before.

By now he had called everyone short of the pope. He had informed the Pasadena Mariner that he could probably not deliver any material this week and by the sound of it, they had been quite understanding once he had told them the reason.

I had been tempted for a moment to launch a story to the Mariner in an attempt to ‘write Mark out of America’ and reintroduce him under a new identity, but a look from Rhonda told me she had had the same idea. Seeing her nigh-on imperceptible head-shake made me think again and I realized that it was not beneath the yellow-press rags to sniff him out in Germany and put his aunt in a spotlight she didn’t deserve.

Fred and Jack met us at the general aviation gate of the airport and Rhonda gave Mark a long hug and some encouraging words before he left for Germany.

Frank

Twenty years after the biggest folly in my life, I was in a real bind. My wife Jana had been really understanding after my first meeting with Mark, but she also insisted that our girls would one day learn that they had a gold medal winning auntie and a half-brother who was a really brilliant artist. Of course Kirsten at three was way too young to be told of my messed up history, so was Doreen at five, but our five year old daughter had picked up on the fact that her daddy had cheered an American runner instead of the German one in the Olympics. I would soon have to explain that to her.

Right now, however, I was just a pile of nervousness. It was not so much about seeing Mark again, we had after all stayed in contact after our first meeting in Berlin. My main worry was that our first trip would go to a village called Reesdorf to collect Lydia’s grandfather from a retirement home. Mark had told me that he and his wife had effectively raised both him and Lydia, so I had an idea how he would react to meeting the idiot who was responsible for Lydia being disowned by her own parents.

The plane sailed in at shortly after seven in the morning, using all of the short runway. Magdeburg airport was a small city airport and normally only saw two or three flights a day. The ‘terminal building’ was little more than an oversize bus stop and it didn’t take long for Mark to walk out. I could see that the twenty-or-so hours of flight with a fuel stop at the Canadian east coast had messed up his internal clock.

“Do you want to check into a hotel?” I asked him after we’ve greeted each other. “I could visit an old friend at the university while you get a few hours sleep.”

He shook his head.

“I can take a nap in the car. I want to get to Stralsund as quick as possible.”

I nodded and took his bag off him as we walked to the car.

Mark

The good thing about Frank being a university professor was that the job was obviously well paid. His rather new large Mercedes and the fact that pretty much all roads in East Germany had had to be renewed after the reunification made for a smooth ride, a ride that I had completely slept through.

When Frank shook me awake, we were already at the retirement home in Reesdorf. It took me a while to get my bearing before I walked into the building. I asked Frank to stay behind as I wasn’t keen to start a riot in there should gramps not quite react the way I hoped.

He was understandably a bit confused about why the nurses had packed his bag, but he was all the more happy to see me, and so was I. After the sad stories I had heard from aunt Bea about his decline after granny Aurelia’s death, I couldn’t believe how well and lucid he was after the time in this place. Except for that short moment on TV during mom’s home town run last year I hadn’t seen him for nearly three years.

Of course I felt bad for unloading the bad news about auntie Bea on him, especially with the added twist that Frank was waiting outside, but I had seriously underestimated a man who might have become frail at the age of nearly eighty-seven, but also had lived through two world wars and forty years of communist dictatorship.

Not wanting to waste any time, he told me we should get going. When we arrived at the car he gave a visibly hyper-nervous Frank the once-over and raised his cane, but not to beat him. He just pointed at him, the way he had done with mom’s father after the funeral.

“So you’re the piglet who knocked up my granddaughter,” he asked him sternly.

All Frank could do was muttering a clumsy apology, but gramps waved it off.

“It’s ancient history,” he said. “And without you the boy wouldn’t be around now. At least you’re taking responsibility now. Help me get into this thing and let’s get going. We don’t have any time to waste.”

Frank

I could probably never thank Mark enough for making sure the start of the journey wouldn’t be dominated by awkward silence. He had joined his great grandfather on the backseat and they were swapping stories about the last three years. After an hour there was a lull in their talk and I could see in the rear view mirror that the old man would make me a topic next.

“So boy, why did you and your folks run off back then?” he asked me pointedly.

I gulped before answering. “We didn’t run off, we were banned from the camping site.”

“I bet Gerd had something to do with it?” he replied dryly. I just nodded, remembering that this was the name of Lydia’s father. I continued my explanation.

“There is one part of the story I haven’t told Mark yet. Our clumsy attempts at kissing each other might have tipped her parents off. They quickly realized that we were not mere playground friends. So they started to send Beatrice along whenever we went somewhere on our own.”

“That sounds just like that idiot,” the senior in the backseat said with a snort. “Let me guess, you somehow got rid of Bea and knowing that you wouldn’t get much more chances, things got out of hand.”