Kaiserreich - Prelude to the Second Weltkrieg - Part 1: Germany

3

His childhood room was the most disorienting place so far. Everything there seemed to have shrunk to half the size its size compared to a year and a half earlier. He sat on his bed and couldn't remember how he managed to get by on a simple single mattress – his room in Munich was the same size but he'd immediately spent some of his extra cash to upgrade the bed to a double. His childhood toys and baubles that had seemed so precious amongst the nostalgia of his move away from home now almost felt like they belonged to someone else, and he was intruding on this stranger's childhood room.

Those two weeks when he'd been preparing for the move were loaded with not just nostalgia – in particular the sense he'd be missing out on the future of Weimar when he moved away – but also excitement at the future in Munich. It was a future that seemed boundless, with as many possibilities as there were young men to imagine them, and Karl had quickly been surrounded by these young men and their vivid imaginations.

In Munich he lived just a few blocks from campus, in a home full of other students, and lived almost exclusively in the tiny academic world that ran parallel to the rest of the city. He ate in his home, studied in the library, and only ever visited the cafes and beer halls frequented by students. It was every bit the campus lifestyle he'd heard about and lusted after as a younger boy in that childhood room, and it was only upon the return to that room that he realized what a bubble he'd lived in these past eighteen months.

There had been the odd student who'd disappeared from campus, a few whose clothes weren't as nice as when they'd started school, a few others whose trips to the beer halls were not as frequent as earlier. But for the most part the young men at his university were just like him: wealthy young men from families rich enough to be separated from the real world, with all its depression and unsettling contradictions between memory and expectation. That real world had fallen apart and Karl had somehow not noticed until his return home.

He'd unpacked his clothes onto the bed beside him, then become overwhelmed by the strangeness of his presence in the room as part of that shattered world. He was glad when his mother knocked and walked in. She stood beside him and began refolding the clothes he'd just folded. "I'm really glad you're home," she said again.

"You mentioned that," Karl reminded her.

"Well I did miss you this last year, we all did."

"Mother," he took a stab at guessing what was bothering her. "A year and a half was too long."

"Oh no," she dissuaded him, sounding genuine. "You were new at school, you had that summer job in the library, you needed to stay in Munich. We all know that..."

"I could have come for Christmas at least..." he offered, testing her second layer of pleasantries.

"I suppose," she admitted, patting the same shirt onto the bed over and over again. "But no one could have seen this coming so soon."

"It was cancer. That was why he was sick."

As soon as Karl's father had said it, he'd remembered their last conversation, over a month earlier, when his father had first told Karl that his grandfather was sick. Two sources of guilt had dovetailed at once in his chest: that it had been over a month since he'd last spoke to his father, and that he'd forgotten that his grandfather was ill at all.

"The funeral will be tomorrow?" Karl asked.

"No," she corrected him, "the day after. Your father arranged it with the pastor last night, over the phone."

Still no telltale sign of why she was now unbuttoning and rebuttoning the same button over and over again. He tried a new approach.

"When will father be home?"

A slight pause, and Karl knew he'd identified it. "This evening," her voice was tight. "Right before dinner. He'll probably be on the train right now."

"How is he handling it?"

"Oh, as well as you can hope for. He and your grandfather were quite close, as you know. When we had to choose between Olga and Helen, there was no hesitation in your father's mind – he wanted Opa to die in his own house, not some hospital."

The answer of where Olga, their longtime Polish housekeeper, had gone answered, all Karl had to suss out next was why they'd been forced to choose between her and his grandfather's caretaker at all.

"It tore him up that he had to stay away while Opa grew sick. But that's the job, he said. The job is in Berlin."

She'd become fixated on a pair of underwear, nervously pulling at the elastic over and over again.

Karl reached out and took hold of her hands. She fidgeted within his grasp for a few seconds, then exhaled a pained sigh.

"Is father ok?" Karl asked.

The second Schreiber woman that day turned her face into sobs and she shook her head. "No," she admitted. "I'm afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"The job. It's going to kill him."

Karl's mother had a tendency to overstate things, to worry needlessly, and to inflate the suffering of those she cared for. But Karl guessed that in this case, none of those were the real issue. It was very possible she was right.

"Is it that bad?"

"You talked to him," she looked Karl in the eye, tears welling in the corners of hers. "You heard him."

Karl stood and hugged his mother and stained the other shoulder of his jacket.

"I can't lose him too," she pleaded. And finally Karl saw that his own disappearance was only the smallest of ones that had injured his mother. Well, maybe second smallest. Olga, after all, had never quite got the ironing quite right to his mother's satisfaction.