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Page 25.
“The baby, named Klara, or Claire, did not live a full year. She died in the medical center here in Heidelberg. You have no real health care in your country. A crime against logic and humanity—incomprehensible that you put up with it. The Army would not provide for her in their hospitals after Danny’s return to civilian life. Danny’s own Army doctor, very sympathetic, told him that the Army would ship her back to the United States and ultimately put her in some civilian place that would charge a fortune. That snake from the South knew this, and gloated; told Danny he would be bankrupt for life back in the USA. Danny made a tough decision to let her stay in the German system, which made his hateful in-laws happy. The German medical system did everything humanly possible, including flying in the country’s top surgeon from Berlin to operate. Danny told me they implanted a heart valve from somewhere in the United States. Some child in that same city in California could not receive that heart valve because her family could not afford it in your barbaric system. After the operation here in Heidelberg, Klara lived a few more days but slipped away during the night. Her tiny body could not handle the stress.”
“Her grave is gone,” Rob said.
The old woman nodded. “After your father left, it was Chetko’s last revenge. At twenty-eight years, if you don’t renew the payment, they throw away the gravestones. They let the grave go to seed, and eventually bury someone else in it. Anna Maria might have wanted to pay to keep her granddaughter’s pretty marble stone with Klara’s name on it in brushed steel letters, but Chetko would hold forth with his chin in the air, pushing and goading, stabbing with that knife of a thick yellow finger, saying it was best to kill of the last memories of the American who had invaded their home, or words like that. I don’t know if Danny ever came back here, but after twenty-eight years he would be shocked to find they had thrown Klara’s gravestone away as if she never really mattered.”
“What happened to the stone?” Rob asked.
“It went to the stone breaker down by the river, who crushed it into rubble to cover driveways or build taverns. Nobody knows or cares.”
Hannah sat mutely, horrified.
Frau Jones added: “Chetko gave your father’s memory, and his granddaughter’s, one more kick in the ribs.”
They all sat silently contemplating these gloomy details.
“There is one more thing.”
After a minute’s silence, Frau Jones continued: “Danny told me that as the baby died, about one in the morning, he was here in the village in his and Stana’s little Stube, staying up late by the wood stove, and writing in his journal. He and Stana had an apartment near Chetko and Anna Maria, because by then, Stana had already given up on her marriage and simply wanted to be drunk and stay near her parents. It wasn’t that she hated Danny so much, as she hated herself. And that was done to her by Chetko, the monster and war criminal, who died here a few years ago never having a shred of repentance. Absolutely no remorse, no connection to other human beings. Brain wired differently. Defective, like a robot, but evil and conniving amid all his bluster and shallowness.” She paused a moment. “Many of us may live in villages, but we do have the Internet and news services. We listen well, those of us who do listen.
“So back to that evening. Danny had been drinking. Stana was passed out in the bedroom of the apartment, drunk. At about one a.m., Danny felt a terrible urgency and rose. He felt it was time to get down to Heidelberg to the medical center. He knew that Klara, the little infant, was dying at that moment. You have to understand. I talked with both Danny and with Stana at various times. Klara would have been a beautiful, brilliant woman. Already as a baby she could look you in the eyes and laugh if you laughed, or look at you seriously if you were telling her something important. She had charisma.”
Frau Jones’ eyes were rimmed, red, with sadness and joy as she told this story.
“I know there was one happy moment in all that sadness, when Stana and Danny sat with Klara on Stana’s lap at the hospital. The baby spent half her brief life in the hospital. Klara was having such a wonderful little day. She kept laughing gurgling as Stana bounced her gently on her lap, and the three of them laughed, and laughed, and laughed together as one joyous soul. As they three laughed, the two young parents were simultaneously bathed in tears of tragedy because they knew in their souls that this was the only such moment their little baby would ever have.
“It lasted ten minutes, from what both Stana and Danny told me, but it was the happiest moment in Klara’s short life, and maybe the only happy moment in that sad marriage. And thank God for the wonderful young German nurses who took care of all those infants. Some of them were orphans, abandoned, most of them born with conditions they were dying from. Same old story—parents lost souls as well—alcoholics, on drugs, or dead. Those nurses gave these little babies the only love they ever knew in their short lives…
“So after the baby died, Stana turned completely away from Danny. He was stuck in the army, working for some miserable people who had no shred of sympathy or understanding. The saying was: if the army wanted you to have a baby, they would have issued you one. Same thing about marriage. Danny buried himself in work until he could reach his departure…”
“His ETS,” Rob said in a flash of understanding.
“His Estimated Time of Separation,” Hannah said. Aha!
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