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= Woman in the Moon =

Mona Lisa Novel, or: Nocturne in Paris

by John Argo

Page 19.

Jack drove slowly, with the sureness of someone who had been here many times. The narrow little village road took them around the central monument again, and out along a street labeled Eichengasse, or Oaktree Alley. “Each of the main alleys has a tree name,” Jack explained.

They pulled up in a miniature parking lot suitable for a dozen cars at most. Beyond it, snug in the forest, was Zum Forst. It was as picturesque a building as Hannah could imagine.

“Built around 1870,” Jack said as he pulled the brake tight and opened his door. “I know because the owner told me. I used to come here to drink beer and play cards before that whole generation died out, or most of them did. There is one old-timer left, and I hope we can talk with him.”

They trooped into the small restaurant, where it seemed the whole village was assembled for the noon meal. The air smelled richly of meat, gravy, potatoes, and pickled cabbage.

“You guys hungry?” Jack asked.

“Now that you mention it,” Rob said.

“Starving,” Hannah said.

An attractive middle-aged woman with slightly lined features brought them leather-bound menus. Guten Tag, meine Freunde. “Good day, my friends.”

Danke; Gleichfalls, Jack said. “Thanks, same to you.”

The woman wore tasteful, modern clothing as if she lived in the big city. Only a few men at adjoining tables wore corduroy or leather knee-breeches or culottes common in the region, along with high woollen stockings; some wore suspenders. Other than that, no yodeling or tourist scams, although Lederhosen shorts could still be a stock men’s clothing item in Bavaria, way over near Austria and Switzerland. It seemed however that every German man around here was born wearing a dark green felt hat with a small feather in the band, a tribute to the respect with which the Forstmeister were held. It was, Rob said to Hannah at some point, the cowboy hat of Germans.

In another sign of modernity, there was a prominent sign: Rauchen Verboten. Smoking Prohibited.

“In my day, this place used to be thick with cigarette smoke,” Jack said as he studied the menu. At his recommendation, they tried a hot, steaming dish of crispy potato pancakes with salt and sour cream, along with piquant Bratwurst in sharp mustard. To stay sharp, they decided instead of beer to order black coffee.

As they finished lunch, and waited for dessert in the form of small fruit tortes soaked in whipped cream and raspberry sauce, the proprietress, a Frau Hagel, returned from a brief trip down the road. With her came an elderly woman in a sweater and rumpled grayish house dress along with shoes that looked more like dark-green corduroy slippers. She was introduced as Frau Jones, and needed help climbing into a bench at the table. She was about 85, and partially blind, as her upturned filmy gray-blue eye in a pasty yellowish face attested. Her other eye was sharp as binoculars and looked straight into a person. She wore a plain dark blue scarf, loosely knotted under the chin, and wrapped around her gray-haired head. Not surprisingly, given her name that said much, she spoke excellent English with a mild German accent. “Welcome to our metropolis here in the mountains.”

They all laughed and shook hands. She might not have both eyes, but her insight was clear. “I was married to a U.S. Army sergeant for over thirty years. His name was Tommy Johnson, and he was from Michigan. I was born in 1935, and I was just eighteen in 1953 when Tommy swept me off my feet. My parents didn’t care for Americans that much, but they felt there was no future with our own Germans at that time. I had a brother killed in Russia, you see, only eighteen in 1944 when he disappeared near Stalingrad, so my parents had much grief, but so did all the German people. That defined our world, you see. What a lot of fools to listen to that insane barking dog from Austria.” She shook her head, changing to a gentler mode. “Life with Tommy was good. We lived near Detroit for a time, but he reenlisted and we came back here to Germany, where he retired. He passed away in 1998. He was 69 and could have lived longer, but he smoked too much, and died of lung cancer.” She was chatty, the old woman, which Hannah found helpful and informative.

Rob asked: “What do you know of a woman named Bautz? Anna Maria Bautz?”

“A cow,” Mrs. Jones said sharply. “Bautz is a word for a cow. She was a cow, although a pretty one in her younger years. She just passed away not long ago.”

“And a man named Chetko?”

“Oh that swine,” she said darkly. She looked around, as if afraid to be overheard. “He is dead also, and the village refused to bury him here. So he was cremated and his ashes were eventually dumped in the river. Should have been the toilet.” She whispered: “We found out he was a war criminal. He wanted to emigrate to the United States to continue his dirty work, I suppose, but the Americans were clever enough to spot a former Ustashe. So he was stuck here, and managed to grab Anna Maria Moo-Cow for a wife. And what a fiasco that was.”

“What’s an Ustashe?” Rob asked.

“Those were the worst of the worst, the Croatian fascists who made our German Nazis look mild.”

“And Chetko was one of them?”

“Oh, of course.” She nodded, making what Hannah called the European poof-poof, an exaggerated expression involving the entire upper body, from shaking the head ‘no’ while poofing the lips, to a sort of rolling shoulder shrug, which described something too absurd for words. “It all came out in the end. He pretended to be a refugee, when in fact he was implicated in mass murders. The European Court could never quite pin anything down, but people here put two and two together. He and his fellow terrorists in Belgrade would get drunk and go out looking for Jews or Gypsies or anyone else they hated. Then they would hold them down and saw their heads off with a hand-saw while the victims were screaming. Even the SS would turn pale when they saw that sorts of things that Chetko and his type did.” She added: “What human beings aren’t capable of.” She changed the subject: “So who are you two fine young people?”

Hannah explained the nature of their mission, and their relationship with their guide, Jack. “Our father was Dan Wilson, who apparently married a Stana Chetko.”

At this, the woman turned even paler, and her one good eye radiated horror. “Not Stanislava.”

“Yes,” Jack said. “Stana. Her name is on the wall in the mortuary.”

Frau Jones nodded. “What a tragic family. And your poor father, to stumble into such a nest of vipers.”

“What do you mean?”

Frau Jones appeared unable to speak, but just shook her head. “Such things. The war was awful enough, but such things.”

Rob prodded: “Frau Jones, we came a long way. We hope you can be so kind and help us find answers. We want to know what happened to our father while he was stationed here.”

The proprietress, Frau Hagel, came and sat beside her elderly friend. Apparently, Hagel’s mother, now deceased, and Frau Jones had been best of friends in school, both in the Kindergarten and lower schools in Verlorenau and Ödendorf, as well as high school further down the valley near Heidelberg. That would have been during the Hitler years—long long ago.

Comforted by the closeness of her friend’s daughter, Frau Jones continued, reluctantly, and in horrified whispers. “What I know, I learned from sources in the U.S. Army headquarters. They knew everything about the local Nazis and other war criminals. You couldn’t jail or execute a quarter or more of the German population who ran behind Hitler and his henchmen. Most were stupid followers, as these people always are, just like today—so they lost interest and became almost normal people again after the little clown from Austria killed himself. Our entire world here was in ruins back in 1945. Just soldiers alone, Germany lost millions of young men for nothing, plus countless innocents everywhere who died. It can happen anywhere.” She gave them a hard look (Amerika heute…).

Rob said: “Modern craziness aside, we had a civil war that cost nearly a million lives, for all the wrong reasons.”

“You see,” Frau Jones said. “Humans still live in trees.”

Hannah nodded: “I live in Paris. There is enough evidence from French history to support what you’re saying.”

“Human history everywhere,” Rob said, “including ours in the USA.”

“And of course nobody wants to hear it about themselves, just about others.” Frau Jones leaned close and whispered, so nobody else would hear. “Mischa Chetko was a monster. An alcoholic with delusions of grandeur, and a huge mean streak. He was a fanatic when he joined Ustasha, as Hitler invaded Croatia. I knew your father Danny, children.”

“No,” Rob and Hannah said in one breath.

“Pay dirt,” Jack said happily, though with a reserve owing to the dark subjects under discussion.

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