Kaiserreich - Prelude to the Second Weltkrieg - Part 1: Germany

2

His suitcase left by the stairs, Karl felt naked and untethered as he sat in his usual spot in the family room – the left half of the sofa – his hands in his lap and his eyes darting nervously. This, too, felt both familiar and somehow alien. A year and a half, he realized, had been far too long to be away from home.

"Are you drinking coffee now?" His mother asked him before adding, "I can't really wake up in the morning without at least a cup now."

"Yes, mama, coffee would be very nice."

His mother walked off into the kitchen, leaving Karl in his discomfort. He looked around at the slightly smaller living room and saw that relative size was not all that had changed. The chairs weren't polished, the rug looked a little dirty and beleaguered, the hutch filled with fine plates looked as grey as the sky outside. His mother was making her own coffee.

What happened to Olga? He had the sense to ask the question internally and make peace with not getting an answer before his mother returned. She wobbled in awkwardly with a tray burdened with two coffees and accoutrements.

"I'm so glad you're home. I'm worried about Julia," Mrs. Schreiber wasted no time. This efficiency was not an oddity, but a critical part of her character. Knowing this did little to help Karl's struggling attempts to orient himself back inside this unsettlingly familiar home. He braced himself by placing sugar in the coffee and awaited the inevitable second blow.

"She's threatened to not attend the year end gala," the follow up came quick, loaded with Catholic guilt and motherly disapproval. A simple sentence broke the haze around Karl – his mother fretting over the social status of her children was recognizable, familiar, even if everything around that worry had shifted in the year and a half since he'd left home.

"She'll come around," Karl fell into a familiar role, one that his father had usually played – reassuring his mother that the children were not about to find eternal damnation.

"Don't be so sure," Julia's voice emerged from the stairway. Karl turned to see his sister's grinning face. She'd visited him in Munich the previous summer, so he'd seen her more recently than either of his parents, but even she looked different. Her hair had gone greasy and her eyes looked as tired as everyone else he'd seen so far in Weimar. She was wearing a long sweater on top of her nightwear too, but her bare ankles and feet poked out angrily. At least their mother found the bare skin angry.

"Julia!" She reprimanded her daughter. "Put on some stockings, for heaven's sake."

"I can't," Julia replied, her grin turning sour. "I'm in mourning."

"Your grandfather died."

His father's words hadn't struck Karl quite as hard as hearing the sense of defeat in the voice that spoke them. For a split second Karl's greater fear was that whatever had killed his Opa had infected his father too. Like part of him was already dying alongside the older, long-sick man.

"Oh Julia," their mother seemed to almost choke back tears. Before any emotion could overwhelm her though, she refocused on the practical – another of her unfailing traits. "We should have breakfast!" She announced, clapping her hands together. "Our oldest is home, I will make bacon!" And just like that she wiped out any sadness with the promise of fried pork. Karl had associated the smell of bacon with his mother's sadness for so long it was merely another reminder that this was home.

The older woman slipped out of the living room, coffee untouched, and the younger one slinked onto the couch in her customary position beside Karl. He watched her collapse back onto the cushions, then tilt her head onto the back of the couch, her closed eyes staring up at the ceiling.

"So... you're not going to the year end?" Karl probed.

"I'll go," Julia sighed. "I don't want to, but I'll go."

"But you can't tell mother that?"

"Of course not. If she didn't have that to worry about, she might start to worry about something important."

Karl hadn't realized when his little sister had become so perceptive. Even the past summer she had only been sixteen, but in those six months she'd grown up past his expectations.

"Are you ok?" He asked.

"I am great," she replied sarcastically.

"Opa..." he let the word hang into a question.

"Opa," she nodded imperceptibly, finally opening her eyes but keeping them trained on the ceiling. "Father. You."

"I'm perfectly fine!" He reassured her despite all the signals his brain was sending him that he was not, at that very moment, perfectly fine. To cover his fear that she was perceptive enough to see through his lie, he cracked a joke. "Mother is making bacon, so everything has to be fine, right?"

Julia smiled, began to laugh, then crumpled into tears. She rolled off her side and collapsed against his shoulder, squeezing his jacket and sobbing quietly.