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Page 12.
 They called it a pilgrimage. Rob and Hannah agreed they would take a trip to Heidelberg, where their father had been stationed during the 1970s.
Elise and Yves were welcome to come, but each was busy. Elise had a big accounting project to finish in Frankfurt for EU auditors. Yves was helping a new pop music band (with lots of money backing them) get started in Paris, and so he begged off.
That left the twins on their own, and they agreed to meet in beautiful Heidelberg, a romantic university town on the Neckar River in Germany.
Hannah took a very fast train (TGV) across northern France from the Gare de l’Est or East Station in Paris. The route was circuitous, but the train was so fast that her trip ended up being a three hour journey by way of Strasbourg. From there she traveled to Karlsruhe, and then on a more local train arrived at the western Bahnhof in Heidelberg.
Rob had driven south from Frankfurt, and awaited her on the station platform. He embraced her, gave her a swing around, and then they scampered arm in arm through the big, oddly plain, glassy box of the station and out onto the spacious square in front.
“I booked us a pair of singles at a nice little hotel in the suburbs,” he told her. “Got a bargain deal.”
“Always glad to hear that.” She did her makeup, looking into the passenger side overhead mirror. “I could use a little lunch, a glass of wine, and a rest. It wasn’t a long trip, but it’s always so stressful.”
“Go go go,” he echoed. “We’ll fix you right up, sis.”
“It’s so beautiful here.” She sighed, looking around at the small town atmosphere, the surrounding green Hartz Mountains, and the peaceful olive-drab Neckar River as they crossed it on a roadway bridge.
“To think that Dad was stationed here for nearly six years. Two enlistments.”
“So long ago.”
“Yes,” he said, “and just about all that’s left of the U.S. military here today is museum stuff. We had hundreds of thousands of troops in West Germany for half a century. When the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Warsaw Pact with it, we pulled out and put people and hardware into the Middle East after those 2001 attacks in New York City and Washington.”
“East and West Germany became simply Germany after 1989.” She combed her fingers through her hair. “I am asking myself what made us come here. Was it to just have a weekend together in a fabulous touristy university city with so much to see? Or did you want to spend time digging up the past?”
He shrugged lightly. “Both?”
She laughed. “Have your cake and eat it, huh?”
“Without Dad here, we wouldn’t know where to start.”
“I’ll start with a hot bath.”
“Sounds good. I’ll have a beer in the dining room while you do that.”
They followed the S-Bahn tracks out of the city center and into a peaceful, clean suburb called Kirchheim—appropriately named Church Home, if one translated literally. It was the quintessential small town German environment.
The hotel room was quiet and clean, lit only by a faint glow from the street outside. That was the Heuauerweg, which literally meant sort of ‘hay swamp road.’ It was a very old street name, reflecting the fact that in previous centuries this had been farm country. Much of the land surrounding Heidelberg still today consisted of farmland divided into rectangular patches. Some of those acreages had been plowed and showed lines in the brown soil. Other acreages had been let go to seed, as farm acreage must to regenerate itself from exhaustion about one in five or seven years. All the signs of small town German and European life were here, from tram tracks on the street to nearby churches and a cemetery. Up the street were a modern supermarket, a tiny town hall, and a school.
As Hannah showered, enjoying a nice steamy relief after traveling, and as Rob sat over a cool, tangy Bitburg Pils at a heavy oak table in the Hotel Heidelberg’s cozy Stube (parlor), a shadow moved across Hannah’s empty little single room. It was a shadow resembling that of a woman—slender, moving in elegant and continuous motions almost as if to soft music like Claude Debussy’s Claire de Lune (Moonlight)—who swept through Rob’s room, passed through the wall like a ghost or a messenger or an angel and into Hannah’s room, where she pulled her delicate, long-fingered hand through the air after her, ballet-like, leaving a small object fluttering in the still air before she faded away through the opposite wall.
Hannah emerged from the steamy bathroom, toweling herself and humming brightly. It was dim in the room, and she flicked a wall switch. Something was different in the room, but she couldn’t immediately tell what it was. She toweled herself, sat and used the hairdryer that blew noisily in her ear, shut that off, and sorted through her fresh clothes. As she sat on the bed, slipping her briefs on, she noticed a white rectangle. Picking it up, she read: Peter Towns, U.S. Army (Ret.), Tour Guide (English and German spoken). Forty years in Heidelberg—I know my way around and want to make your stay complete with an expert guided tour.
She thought: Odd. How had this gotten here? It didn’t surprise her. Maybe the hotel got a kickback for promoting his tours. She’d lived in Europe long enough to have seen many such cooperative schemes to milk tourists; but often the tourists benefited from good services, as did those who brokered shops and services or provided them. She finished dressing, applied light makeup, brushed her hair, tucked the card in her pocket, picked up her purse, and headed out the door to find Rob.
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