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= Woman in the Moon =

Mona Lisa Novel, or: Nocturne in Paris

by John Argo

Page 22.

“Terrible things happened in that family,” Frau Jones said. “You must prepare yourselves when I tell you, because you will see what they all suffered when that monster came here. Driven by Chetko who was relentless—a drunkard, a loudmouth, a boisterous and boastful dirty man, and an extremely sly, intelligent or cunning one—they never totally confronted their tragedy.” She paused, as if not sure she wanted to continue. Her lower lip trembled at the verge of again crying.

“Chetko was a bully and a braggard, always with his chin up and his mouth open, challenging anyone into his arguments, and those dirty little pig eyes of his cold as ice while he made grandiose declarations, gesturing a brutal finger in knife stabs. He was born a bully, was a fascist all his life, and died a bully without ever experiencing a moment of regret.”

Hannah shook her head. “Sounds like a sociopath. Please, start at the beginning. How did our Dad ever get involved with this outfit?”

“Well,” Frau Jones said, “love is blind. Look at me. I am almost blind, but this is not love. It is old age. I have tried reading your father’s journal, which he forgot here one day. He was writing in it, and was drinking a bit too much beer—so sad, the poor boy—and he forgot his journal when he walked out that door for the last time. That would have been, what, forty years ago now. I was in my forties then, a young woman like Irma here.”

Irma beamed, and called for two young waiters—her sons Hannah guessed—to bring more coffee and sweets. The lunch crowd was thinning out as men and women returned to their houses or farms or drove back down the hill to the office buildings in the valley around Ziegelhausen.

“The Bautz family lost a son in the war, as many of us did. They had two daughters and a surviving son, all of whom lived until the 2000s. One of the daughters was Anna Maria, the only one who stayed with her parents here in the village. The others moved to Heidelberg, married, and lived their lives out in the modern world. Anna Maria was a simple, quiet girl—a cow, I tell you—who stayed at home. And then this treacherous, boastful animal came here as a war refugee. What nobody realized was that he was a war criminal in hiding. One of the village girls, Fräulein Matthias, now also dead, told me long ago that she was doing some house cleaning for Anna Maria, when she saw a photo album on the coffee table in their livingroom. That is, the living room of Mischa Chetko and Stana, where Anna Maria lived when she got older. She peeked into the photo album out of curiosity, and there was Chetko decked out in some sort of dark uniform with medals and death’s heads like the SS. He was a member of the Ustashe, the Croatian fascist terror regime that was worse than the Nazis. If you remember the horrible things the Serbians did in the 1990s under Milosevic, some of that was revenge against the Croatians for the horrors of World War Two. And of course, as always, religion played a hand in the dirty dealing, as it always does when stupid people go to war, believing that Jesus speaks through Hitler or Milosevic or Stalin or name a hundred other demagogues, empty worthless windbags who leave only death and destruction.” She stopped to catch her breath. “They are all gone now—Anna Maria, Chetko, Stana, even your little tiny sister—so I can speak freely because this village is cleaner without him. They’re all gone.”

“So what was so terrible about that family?” Hannah asked, holding her father’s journal under her palms.

“It wasn’t the family. They were no better or worse than any of us. It was Chetko who brought evil with him.” Frau Jones leaned close to continue her story in a low voice; even in a small village there were secrets. “We were all in bad shape after the war. Those were desperate times. Then along came this foreigner, this Croatian, Chetko, who was on the run from police in several countries. He always reeked of beer and had his chin and nose in the air, a real bully, poking at you, while he pronounced stupid things—a demagogue with power only over his wife and children—but he was fiendishly clever. He told a lot of lies about himself, and managed to go to work for the Americans. A lot of people here worked for the U.S. as Local National civilians. Many of them stole tools, furniture, anything they could from the Americans. Like a cargo cult; they felt it was owed to them, without any reason. Chetko and some of his cronies had a red-hot black market bazaar going in the area.”

“Always a criminal,” Rob said.

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