Chapter 7: Family Research

Lydia

When I came back from Bogota, Mark dropped the bomb on me. While I would be in Barcelona, he wanted to go to Germany, stay with Bea and start looking for his father. With me hopefully being in the news and him not allowed to be seen with me due to the still fresh new identity issue, he wanted to use the time to find the guy called Frank who had put him into me nearly two decades earlier.

It had only been a year since Mark had even started forgiving his elusive father for what happened in the summer of ‘73, but I realized he would not find the necessary closure unless he knew who had donated the other half of his genetic make-up, seeing that he came so much after his father. I wasn’t really comfortable with bringing back a past that I thought I had made my peace with a long time ago, but Mark was insistent and of course my sister Bea sided with him, she always did.

I would have been angry with my younger sibling for always taking Mark’s side, but I knew very well that the two of them were very close, as Bea had been his Ersatz mom in those months between my flight from East Germany and his release to be reunited with me. If it wasn’t for her, Mark would never have made it through those months of separation. In the end I gave my blessing and Mark left a week before I was due to leave for Barcelona.

Mark

Coming back to Germany was weird. It had only been four years since we had departed for America, but with the monumental changes in our life, of course mainly concerning the unique relationship with mom, our time in the U.S. of A. had sort of estranged me from the country of my birth. Back in America I still lapped up everything German, especially the food, but coming back to the country sort of felt surreal. Auntie Bea and her girlfriend Rita met me at Fuhlsbüttel Airport in Hamburg, the place where I had reunited with my beloved mom seven years ago.

It was the first time for me back in Germany since we’d come for Granny Aurelia’s funeral in 1990 and like back then, Rita beat a discreet retreat, leaving Bea to spend some time with me. I understood that I hadn’t seen her for two years, but I sort of felt like driving Auntie Bea’s girlfriend away.

“Don’t worry, darling,” Bea said and gave me a peck on my cheek. “Rita and I spend every day with each other and she’s a little shy. She is actually quite happy to leave me with you for a few days, because she knows how much I missed you. It’s been two years since I saw you the last time.”

It eased my worries a bit, but I still felt a little uncomfortable.

We had spent the next two days re-enacting the old days, mainly cuddling on the couch like Bea and I had done in those months I had been separated from mom, but, unlike all those years ago, I wasn’t crying most of the time.

In a way Bea felt more like a mom to me than my actual mom, if you know what I mean. Mom felt more like a wife by now, while I had the loving relationship to auntie Bea that defined a ‘normal’ mother-son relationship, as defined by people, who thought a son falling in love with his mother was a deviant.

Once I had settled back into life in Germany, I packed my bag and took my leave from my aunt, catching a train towards the Baltic coast in East Germany. I arrived at Prerow on the Darß peninsula, where the camping site still existed - the site of my conception nineteen years ago.

Mom had never forgotten the day – fifteenth of June 1973, so hoping that the old registration data still existed, I had to search for a family with a son called Frank, who checked out on June 16th 1973 and after hours of searching, I found that my elusive father was named Frank Schmidt. And as lucky a find as that may sound, it was a huge let-down. Schmidt as a surname in Germany is pretty much a catch-all term. Every second guy is named Müller, Meier or Schmidt.

It was clear that I would not make it through that search on my own, so I went to the district capitol Rostock and walked into a private detective agency, where people were falling over themselves to accommodate me. Those poor guys wasted their days chasing piss-poor East Germans who couldn’t repay their meager loans. An American with a broad Berlin accent, walking into their office and asking for help to find his father was creating quite a buzz.

What we needed was to find a Frank Schmidt, born in East Germany around summer 1958 and most likely having a job that required a university degree. The latter was pure speculation though, because having the brains for it didn’t mean you were allowed to go to university in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin wall. All it took was being mildly opposed to the party-line and you would end up as a lowly factory worker, even if you had Einstein’s brains.

The only other thing we knew was that he was most likely born in southern Saxony, as mom always said he had spoken in a ridiculously thick Saxon accent, which meant he must have come from somewhere around Chemnitz, back then called Karl-Marx-Stadt where people were speaking with such an outlandish accent they could just as well be Mongolian.

And the most important bit was that according to mom, he would be looking like a 34 year old version of myself. Another reason why I dearly hoped that he was really a braniac and had studied, because a photo of some doctor or other was surely easier to be found than that of an anonymous factory worker. And being named Schmidt in Germany was as good as being anonymous.

In the end it all went pretty quickly.

I had barely re-acquainted myself with the concept of nude beaches for two days, when I was given a note upon returning to the hotel, asking me to visit the detective agency. With my heart beating so hard it must have shown as a pulsating blood vessel on my neck, I entered their offices the next morning and the chief detective wordlessly pushed a photograph across the table.

“Holy shit,” I exclaimed, before I remembered that I was supposed to speak German. “That guy looks like an older version of me, alright. That has got to be him! Who is he?”

“Professor Doctor Frank Schmidt,” the detective said. “I suppose your guess that he’s a brainiac wasn’t that far off. He lives in Berlin and works at the Humboldt University. We don’t know what field of research, but considering he’s a professor at thirty-three, he must be good at it. Are you sure he’s your father? You look at least twenty yourself.”

“I’m eighteen and a half, but yes, he was not only quick in making it to Professor,” I replied with a chuckle. “Do you have an address or number?”

He passed me an envelope with all the data they had collected and I wrote a generous check that was worth substantially more than what they had asked me for their services. Suffice to say I was given a very friendly farewell.

Back in my hotel I paced my room, trying to pick up the phone, but finding myself reluctant to. What do you tell a guy whom you never met, but who could be your father? In the end I formulated a plan and dialed the number, his work number in fact as at 3pm he should still be at the university.

I had barely time to compose myself when a male voice at the other end greeted me with a laconic ‘Schmidt’, reminding me that Germans habitually just state their name when being called. It was sort of ridiculous, considering that I was technically a German myself, but four years in America had changed me.

“My name is Mark McElway. Am I speaking to Professor Doctor Frank Schmidt?” I asked and I noticed the short pause at the other end. My new identity didn’t exactly sound German, yet I had posed the question with a pronounced Berlin accent that made me sound anything but Anglophone.

“I am Frank Schmidt,” he answered. He had still a distinctly Saxon twang, but it was not as exaggerated as I had expected.

“What I am going to ask you is going to sound outrageous,” I said. “But it is important to me. Did you, as a very young boy have sex with a very young girl named Lydia?”

There was a long pause at the other end and I could hear a deep breath before he replied with a distinct edge to his voice. “How much do you demand?”

I had to shake my senses back into order before I replied. “Father, I didn’t call you to blackmail you. I’m not even calling to extort alimony from you. You are a Professor, do the math, I’m over eighteen.”

There was a sort of whimper on the other end and I feared he would just slam the receiver down and run, but after a while I heard a distinctly emotional reply.

“We conceived a child?”

“Yes,” I confirmed. “Mom rarely spoke of you. Not that she knew much to tell me in the first place. I spent the last week trying to find you, which is not the easiest thing if you’re looking for someone, whose surname is Schmidt.”

“Mark, can we meet?” he asked, audibly emotional. “I can never make up for what I did to poor Lydia, but I would very much like to see if I really have a child.”

“That’s why I’m calling,” I answered. “Right now I am in Rostock, so I’ll need a day to come down to Berlin. Just tell me the name of a good eatery and we’ll meet over dinner tomorrow.”

He told me the name of a restaurant and its address and then he asked me how he would identify me. I chuckled.

“Frank, do you have any photos of yourself at age eighteen?”

“Yes,” he answered, confusion evident in his voice.

“Take a marker and paint a beard and round glasses on it. Then you’ll know what I look like.”

I could hear a chuckle mixed with tears on the other end of the line.

Lydia

God, his timing sucked. On the very last evening before I was to leave for Barcelona Mark called me and announced in an ‘oh by the way’ sort of tone that he had found his father, a certain Professor Doctor Frank Schmidt. Well, at least I knew now that my premonition where Mark’s brilliant brains came from had been spot on. But seriously, sending my thoughts into turmoil mere days before I was supposed to compete at my first Olympic Games was singularly unhelpful.

On one hand I was happy for my darling. I could hear it in his voice how happy he was to find the last missing piece in the puzzle of his ancestry, but what would be the result of this? Would Frank suddenly demand to be part of our lives? After all he had abandoned me twenty years ago.

Meri – bless her heart – sensed my turmoil and without asking questions just held me close throughout the flight, soothing away my worries.

Mark

I was sitting in a Berlin Restaurant, remembering just how much I had missed the robust cuisine of Prussia. The Bachlmayer’s back in Pasadena were Bavarians, so they did of course promote their flavor of cooking, but nothing came close to the distinctly robust cooking of our old home region. I could hardly wait to order a huge Eisbein with Sauerkraut, something that would make most Americans run for cover.

My thoughts were interrupted when I felt as if I was being watched, and indeed I was. There, in the entrance stood an older version of me, almost the same build and definitely the same face, but sans beard.

“I can’t believe it,” he said and with a perplexed smile he handed me a photo. He had really taken a picture of his younger self and scribbled a beard over it. It looked eerily similar to me.

“Well, believe it,” I said with a lopsided grin, standing up to greet him. “I’m Mark and I don’t think that sort of resemblance is coincidental.”

We shook hands and took our seats, both sizing each other up for a while.

“How have you found me?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to find Lydia a couple of years ago, but I never found as much as a good lead.”

I gave him a short summary of how I had found him, which made him remark in jest that I should perhaps look at a career as a detective, but after I had told him our story to make him understand why he most likely had been looking in the wrong country to begin with, he was close to tears, realizing that his roll in the hay back in ‘73 had had more consequences than just an unexpected teenage pregnancy. After all my birth was responsible for mom being disowned by her own parents.

“It’s ironic,” he said with a fair amount of self-depreciation. “I’m a professor. I teach my students about the do’s and don’ts of sexual relations every day, but I have almost destroyed a life because I couldn’t keep it in my pants as a fourteen-year-old.”

“I don’t think you were wearing any,” I quipped, which cheered him up a bit. “If I remember correctly, Prerow was a nudist resort back in the day.”

He nodded and chuckled despite himself. Meanwhile the waitress brought our food and we both dug into it. It had been almost a decade since I had had a proper Berlin Eisbein for the last time and I savored every bit of it.

“As far as mom and I am concerned, I can speak for both of us that we’ve forgiven you, although I must admit that it took me a lot longer, because I only learned the whole truth about a year ago. We both grew up to be decent people and we’re happy with our lives, so I don’t think you need to beat yourself up over it. I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of finding you, just so I could yell at you. That’s not my character. And as mom once said, no matter how clumsy you two kids had been, you actually managed to make me and you made a really good one.”

That broke him out of his self-reproach and he had to fight his laugh long enough to swallow the last bite. But then he properly guffawed until tears welled up in his eyes. A few people looked strangely at us, but we both didn’t mind and since we were in Germany, they soon minded their own business again.

“Well, she definitely hasn’t lost her sharp tongue,” he said, still chuckling. “Did Lydia ever marry?”

I shook my head, and I don’t know why, but I felt I could trust the man and that he deserved the whole truth, so I ended up telling him in a lowered voice about the true nature of my relationship with mom. He merely nodded as if it was the most normal thing in the world that his long-lost son would live in an incestuous relationship with his own mother. That startled me.