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Page 17.
 Verlorenau was a settlement of neat, sturdy looking stone houses that had to withstand extra winds and cold up here in the snowy winters, even though the Heidelberg climate itself was among the mildest in Germany.
The uphill road led into a little village square, actually a circle, with a statue in the center. The statue, which serviced a fountain as did the Keltic cross in Jack’s village further down the winding mountain lane, was of a man in a military coat, looking heroic as all such statues must. Whoever he was, he was a man of the 1800s, with a full beard and long hair hanging over a wide collar, or so he had been hewn from granite. Another sign read Bevölkerung (Population): 350 anno 2000 N.C. (nach Christus, after Christ, like A.D.). So in 2000, about 350 persons had been permanent residents. Probably had not changed significantly in the past twenty years. Looking at the sign, Jack said philosophically: “In a few years, that will be a quarter century ago. That’s how time flies. As an old retired Army NCO, with my wife terminally ill with cancer, I’m acutely conscious of such things.” He added: “Mortality. We’ve already made arrangements to be buried in Ödendorf. My wife is German. She was born there, and we met in Heidelberg where she worked as a secretary for our general staff.” He sighed. “It’s been a good life. I have nothing to complain about.”
The lane made a circle around the fountain and statue. At the edges were several small buildings. These included a squat stone church (Evangelical, meaning Lutheran), Kindergarten (literally a children’s garden), a little -grammar school, a tiny one-room library, and a modern, glassy one-story Rathaus or town hall. As Jack explained, der Rat meant council, not rodent, which would be die Ratte and pronounced differently. “I have to explain this stuff endlessly to Amis,” he said, meaning Americans. “This little village square branches out in five different directions, like a star. Each direction has a little road leading out to a settlement of farms. At the end of the main one is the old Forsthaus, the lodge of the forest master or Waldmeister. That’s the most prestigious local office here. The Germans still worship trees, although they’ve destroyed most of them through acid rain, and Hitler used them for the war industry. Harming a tree will get you a severe penalty under German law.”
“We love trees,” Rob said.
“We hug them all the time.”
“You have a lot of them up there in Oregon, huh? We do too, in upstate New York.”
“You’re going to make me homesick all of a sudden,” Hannah said. A tear formed in one eye as she thought of her parents and the recent funeral, which was still fresh in her dreams and memories.
Jack had no idea, and carried on happily. “I used to come up here twice a week evenings for beer and cards with a bunch of Germans. They have a really nice Gaststatte up here called Zum Forst, which means something like At the Forest. But let’s check out the cemetery first.” He pulled around under a weeping willow by a clean new stone wall and they got out.
The parking area was graveled and well-tended, strewn with willow debris. “One piece of bad news,” Jack said, as he stretched his rangy frame. “They clean out the cemeteries every twenty-eight years. People either pay to renew for another twenty-eight years, or their gravestone is handed to a stonebreaker to be made in to gravel.”
“Ouch,” Rob said. “Sounds kind of cold-blooded, eh? Dad left here in 1980, which is now forty years ago.”
“Well,” Jack said sadly, “if nobody renewed the mortgage, so to speak, there will be no stone. They don’t dig up the dead but usually leave them in place. In fifty or a hundred years when a new burial takes place at that spot, about all you’ll find is a skull at best.”
“How cheerful,” Hannah said drily.
They walked through a wooden gate of two swinging halves, and entered what looked like a small garden of high hedges, wild blue amarys and other flowering plants, and tilted, broken, mossy stones. “The real old ones are left in place,” Jack explained. “They refer to everywhere long ago, meaning before Nazi times, as the Old People. That includes everyone from the Old Stone Age forward.” He enumerated: “Indigenous, Keltic or Gaulish, Germanic which means mostly Frankish, Romans who had a huge presence all over Europe, then the Goths and Franks and other invaders, and finally the Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern people. And, as you have probably noticed, Europe is covered with ruins from so many wars between Protestant and Catholic warlords after 1500. Tyrants, all the same. Our magic is better than your magic, so we have to kill you all.”
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