Chapter 18: Tante Hilde

William O’Connor (Bill)

Helping John out was a no-brainer. We had had plans to expand into the Benelux states for years now, but the planning and preparations had always become mired and buried in red tape and people advising too much caution. The European Union, as the EEC would become known as after the Maastricht treaty, was moving towards closer integration and a unified internal market, so we had to get a move on anyway, lest we missed the opportunity to stake our claim. I knew for a fact that our fellow Californian rivals, Bond Technology Consulting, who also had a German subsidiary, were having the same idea.

My son Ian, even though he was only twelve, had actually provided the key to getting this project off the ground. When my old friend John had asked to help with sponsorship for a certain Meredith Daxter, I was sure she was one of his numerous athlete clients, but not really in the loop about who she actually was. That was until our son explained that she was the ‘cute blonde with the huge titties, what won the gold in Barcelona’. It had been one of the few moments when even my carefully cultivated British facade couldn’t hold it in and I guffawed.

My dear wife, a beautiful lady of a sadly somewhat prudish disposition, had of course been properly scandalized at the thought that our twelve year old son had developed a bit of a fascination with breasts. It took me the best part of the evening to calm her down again.

But knowing that we had the chance to sponsor not one, but actually two, American Olympic champions had set the cat among the pigeons, and even middle management types, that the people in our German branch disparagingly called Reichsbedenkenträger (imperial announcers of doubt), suddenly skipped their usual amount of risk assessments, impact assessments and what-not, and actually worked to make it happen, pronto.

The whole affair did lead to a bit of a domestic crisis though, when my wife found out why our son did know who the two ladies were, who we were about to sponsor. It turned out that both of the athletes had had appearances in a well known gentlemen’s magazine, wearing less clothing than was common workplace practice. Already on the prudish side, my wife went completely bonkers at the thought that our prepubescent son had gotten his hands on such material.

In that regard my wife and I are probably the most unlikely people you would expect to find being bound by marriage. Unlike my better half, I’m more on the relaxed side when it comes to matters of physical intimacy and erotica in General. We were both born in the 1950s, when people were still scandalized by seeing a naked wall. But this was the nineties. By age twelve kids had learned about the birds and the bees already. Knowing that my young son knew what an unclothed female body looked like was hardly a scandal. In fact, I would have been more worried if he didn’t. I did not want him to grow up as repressed and stuck-up as my wife.

Of course, even my progressive nature has it’s limits. Had we found anything more than actually quite tastefully made nude and semi-nude photographs, I would have been alarmed, but there had been no hidden items of literature in his room that one would normally only find on the top shelf of a roadside truck stop.

Thankfully, she who is my lovely wife, doesn’t know that I’m the man who helped John and Rhonda sort out their messed up love-life years ago. She would probably implode.

Mark

Well, it was either taking a taxi from the city of Stralsund to the airfield in a town called Barth, or asking Regina to help me pick up mom, who had broken off her altitude training and was on the way to Germany on John’s plane. In the end I asked Regina if she could drive us there. She didn’t have a car, but she had a license, and I had the means to hire a rental car – a nice Mercedes.

Thus I found myself riding shotgun with her the next morning, leaving Bea and Regina’s daughter Jenny in the capable hands of grandpa Ernst, who had recovered enough to make the short walk to the hospital.

“You’re even quieter than usual,” Regina noted as she drove along the country road.

I sighed heavily. The topic of mom and I was bound to come up. By the time I had tried to call her, she had already left towards the airport, and not knowing that Regina would come along, she would most likely kiss my lights out, blowing up any illusion that we were your garden-variety mother-son pair.

“Regina, when we come to the next village, can you find us a place to park safely? There is something we need to talk about, and I don’t want you to wrap us around a tree or drive off the road.”

She raised an eyebrow, but then just nodded and directed her concentration back to the road. Come the next village she spotted a {i]Landgasthof, a typical village pub that served breakfast. We had already eaten at the hotel, but she insisted that whatever I had to say seemed important enough that it should be discussed over a cup of coffee.

“Look, my mom and I went through a number of rough years,” I said when the waiter had delivered the drinks. We were alone in the room, but I still kept my voice down as staff kept walking in and out of the kitchen.

Regina just nodded.

“When she fled to West Germany, she had to leave me behind,” I explained. “Aunt Bea became my ersatz-mom for nearly 3 months, including my eleventh birthday, until I was released to the West too.”

“My god,” Regina whispered and put her hand on mine.

“In West Germany we simply didn’t fit in, and in 1987 the Stasi tried to abduct mom back to East Germany to punish her for fleeing. That’s when the Americans stepped in and we emigrated to California in 1988.”

“In the space of four years you had to start completely from scratch twice,” Regina realized. “And I thought I had a rough ride.”

“We had more support than you though,” I argued. “However, we had always been close and due to the constantly being on the move we grew even closer over the years.”

“I’m going to see some heavyweight kissing when she gets off the plane, aren’t I?” Regina said and smiled at me, the sort of smile that say’s ‘Do not worry, it’s okay’.

I just stared at her.

“The moment I found out who you are, and finally recognized your face again, I realized that you and your mother are probably a lot closer than is usually the case.”

“You recognized my face, again?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“You were the boy she ran the last kilometer with in Vienna two years ago,” Regina said, still smiling warmly at me. “I told you I’ve been a fan of hers for years.”

“You’re the first who remembers that race.”

“I want to become a teacher, Mark. The two things you need for that are a good memory and being able to observe people and their body language. What I saw that day was a nearly grown up man looking at his mother much more lovingly than is normal. Of course it didn’t really make sense until I saw your phone call yesterday, when you nearly trampled the hotel’s lawn to bits.”

“How so?”

“I assumed you called your mother, because we had spoken about her the day before. You became very angry, twice. Yours was the face and the look of someone being unjustly accused of something. That was probably the moment you told her that we had met the evening before. Now why would a mother react badly to her son meeting a girl?”

“And you worked all that out, just by observing me?”

“You are an open book, Mark. Why do you think I approached you two days ago? You could just as well have worn a sign saying ‘I’m miserable and conflicted’.”

“Are you sure you’re supposed to be at that level of Sigmund Freud already, Ms. Marx? You’re what, nineteen?”

Regina nodded.

“I’ve been an outcast since I had Jenny at fourteen. When the others went to garden parties or terrorized the city streets with their mopeds, I was walking the streets with a pram and later a stroller. I had no friends and all I had for entertainment was reading books, lots of books. You become a very good observer when you’re basically invisible to the rest of your peers.”

“It sort of scares me that people can read me this easily,” I admitted and finished my coffee.

“There’s a simple solution, Mark. Get yourself some dark shades. Just from the way you look at people, you give a lot of your inner thoughts away.”

We stood up, paid, and finished our journey. Now I had one thing less weighing down on my shoulders, but a new, much more inconvenient one. While I was willing to believe that Regina’s talents of observation were somewhat extraordinary, she was certainly not the only person with such a gift.

Lydia

As an international athlete I was used to flying a lot, but this particular flight seemed to be endless. Not even my tried and tested method of just sleeping through it had worked, simply because I had so much on my mind.

There was the obvious worry about my sister of course, and the fact that I didn’t know where we would be staying or how we would get to Stralsund. Rationally, I could be sure that my manager John and Mark hat organized all of it, but I didn’t feel very rational at that point, and I hated it when I didn’t know all the details. Whenever I went to a competition, I needed to know the exact schedule, where we were staying, how we got to and from the venues. This structured approach allowed me to concentrate on what I was there for, running fast.

Jonjo meanwhile had brought enough of his study material to keep himself occupied. Deep into his junior year in Berkeley he had a lot of studying to do and spent most of the time with his nose in a book, scribbling and sketching away into a notebook.

At long last we approached the small airport of Barth, a town that was the gateway to the Darß peninsula, home to the nudist resort where I, and apparently Mark’s new friend, had gotten ourselves knocked up at a way too young age, about fifteen years apart.

Mark

According to the helpful people in the arrival area, the airport had not seen any commercial traffic in four years, so the odd private plane coming in was the only traffic they had. That was why the arrival area consisted of a rusty gate that could be opened on the rare occasion that any passengers came in.

When John’s plane finally landed, I had to wait until the engines had been stopped, but then they opened the gate and I could walk up right to the plane. Two policemen, the entire security detachment of the whole airport, were watching the scene from a respectful distance.

As soon as the door was opened, I was assaulted by a slender, brunette missile of the type ‘Mom, well tanned’. She planted a searing kiss on me, and babbled away, peppering me with questions. I couldn’t even start to answer before a second passenger disembarked, Jonjo.

“Dayumn, that’s properly cold here, man!”

Both mom and I laughed and I took off my jacket, handing it to Jonjo, who put down the baggage he was wearing.

“You not gonna freeze yourself, man?” Jonjo asked and fist-bumped me, flashing me a large grin full of teeth.

“I grew up in these lands, ninny,” I needled him and took mom’s duffel from where Jonjo had put it down.

“How did you get here?” mom asked in German, as we started walking towards the parking lot.

“I rented a Merc and Regina has a license,” I said, which got me an undecipherable sideways glance from mom.

“You’ll get along,” I added quickly. “She knows about us, by the way. Worked it out all by herself and said I better get myself some dark glasses because my eyes are giving away what I’m thinking or something like that.”