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= Woman in the Moon =

Mona Lisa Novel, or: Nocturne in Paris

by John Argo

Page 24.

“Your Dad was devoted,” Frau Jones said. “He was young, and immature, and he had a strong sense of duty. In his journal, he writes about how he felt the obligation to stay with Stana because he made her pregnant. They were married very quickly after they met. It’s a difficult story, too. Apparently, Dan had another woman in Paris. I know nothing about that. There is one reference in Journal II, but it’s as if he tore some pages out to hide all that. Who knows why. Oh.” She snapped her fingers. “It was a French woman named Claudette. She was his age, and Stana’s age, though Stana and this French girl never met as far as I know.

“The French girl was studying here in Heidelberg at the university. Very brilliant young woman, like your Dad, far too intelligent for the likes of Stana and her parents. Karin, the sister who escaped, was smarter, but your Dad never met Karin, and nobody here ever saw her again. I heard Karin died in South America a few years ago, so Karin is out of the picture. Dan Wilson was in love with both Stana and Claudette. He was torn between the two. The French girl returned to Paris and continued her studies at the Louvre or someplace. That is all I know.

“Your father married Stana, who was pregnant by him, and Danny wanted to stay, take responsibility, and do the right thing no matter what. Stana’s parents hated Americans, the way real village idiots and bullies hate anyone who is different, especially if they think the person is somehow smarter or better because they themselves are cow shit, which they only admit to themselves deep down. Chetko could not stop saying horrible things about Americans, including a lot of lies about the Jews and all the usual Nazi hallucinations that village idiots love to hear.

“Always with that tone, mocking, cutting, chin up in the air as if challenging you, cutting you, bullying you, goading—and those icy cold pig eyes. I shudder to think what atrocities that snake joined in Croatia before he slithered away to our poor village. Anna Maria, the cow, went along with anything Chetko said, so she and Chetko worked on Stana not to stay with Danny. Even though Danny was the only good guy who ever came along for the poor girl, though she was usually too drunk and hurting to know that.

“Poor Stana didn’t want the baby and tried to abort it herself. Abortion was illegal in West Germany, and she couldn’t afford to travel to Poland, which is Catholic but was run by Communists. In the end, who knows if her drinking did it, or if she got hold of some drugs, or what, but the baby was born with a heart defect.

“Suddenly they all became saints. Anna Maria became a dedicated grandmother, poor delusional drunken Stana became a model mother. Every day they went to the medical center, where Klara lived half her short life in a infant intensive care unit. Drunken Stana blamed Danny, and yet Danny stayed devoted to his wife and daughter. Danny could not simply pick up and leave. He was stuck here in the Army, and they treated him very badly also. He was working for some snake of a lieutenant who was an insecure, malignant sociopath—“

“Chetko’s evil U.S. twin,” Rob guessed, as he remembered reading bitter hints in the Journal.

“Something like that; and a senior sergeant from the South who hated northerners and spoke under his breath of the South seceding again. So he also hated Danny for those reasons, and spoke gloatingly to Danny’s face about how he would be bankrupt for the rest of his life because of his sick baby.”

Rob said: “How could he get away with that?”

Frau Jones said: “You know they talk in code, from both sides of their heads, your Southerners, and False Jesus is on their side no matter how many Negroes they drag to death behind their trucks, castrate, burn alive, or torture for hours while their wives and children watch proudly and take photographs and recite Bible verses. You have many Chetkos among you, some in the top levels of government these days. You see why my husband and I had no regrets moving back to Heidelberg.”

“You don’t like the South,” Rob said with equanimity.

“Does it show? Detroit was bad enough. Your South is one big Croatia, and their Ustasha simply wear white sheets. All so pious and full of hate and ignorance. Mir gruselts. I get gruesome shivers just thinking about it all. This is still my home, what I am used to.”

Hannah sighed. “I saw those ruins in Heidelberg and couldn’t imagine why people would stoop to so much death and destruction.”

Rob said: “Snapshot—the whole history of the human race, and even here in this village. I think the majority of people would live in peace and prosperity, but the Hitlers and the Stupid People always destroy the world around them; while the money people behind the scenes build weapons, loan money, and march around in field marshal uniforms.”

“If only people would learn from our mistakes,” Frau Jones said. “You Americans wrote our Constitution for us, and it is more democratic than what you have. We are smarter than we were a century ago. But look, about your Dad.

“After little baby Klara died, Danny wouldn’t let anyone from his office attend his daughter’s funeral. He said it would kill him to have that filthy lieutenant and that dirty sergeant show up at his child’s funeral in all of their hypocrisy and snake-like falseness. Probably to stand among mourners and gloat over their victim’s further misfortune.

“He told me all this, at a table in this restaurant, in tears half the time. He would have gladly left, but he would have been arrested as a deserter. His life would have been ruined with a dishonorable discharge.

“And he was so far from home, so lonely, he had nobody to talk to. He would go for long walks by himself in the forests around here, on Sundays when he was free, just to get away from everything and run away from his own thoughts.

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