“There’s something up there,” he told the party. “Did you hear the rumor about those wild little girls they found the other night?”
The guests began to drift off in pairs and start new conversations. Since his rescue of young Oscar Love, Jimmy had acquired a reputation for tiresome repetitions of the story, exaggerating details until it became a tall tale. When he launched into another yarn, he was bound to be dismissed as merely another storyteller, desperate for attention. “No really,” he said to the few of us remaining. “I heard the local fuzz found these two girls, ’bout six or seven, I hear, who had broken into the drugstore in the dead of night and smashed everything in sight. The cops were scared of those girls, said they were spooky as a pair of cats. Man, they could barely speak a word of English or any language known to man. Put two and two together. They were living up in the woods—remember that place I found Oscar? Maybe there are others up there. Put your mind around that. Like a whole lost tribe of wild children. It’s a trip, man.”
Elizabeth was staring at me when she asked him, “What happened to them? Where are those two girls?”
“Can’t confirm or deny a rumor,” he said, “and I didn’t actually see them with my own two eyes, but I don’t have to. Did you know the FBI came and took ’em away? To Washington, D.C., and their secret labs, so they could study them.”
I turned to Oscar, who stood slack-jawed, listening to Jimmy. “Are you sure you want this boy tending bar for you, Oscar? Seems like he’s been hitting the bottle a bit too much.”
Jimmy came right up to my face and said sotto voce, “Know the trouble with you, Henry? You lack imagination. But they’re up there, man. You better freakin’ believe it.”
During the flight to Germany, dreams of changelings interrupted what sleep I could manage on the airplane. When Tess and I landed in damp and overcast Frankfurt, we had two different expectations for our honeymoon. Poor thing, she wanted adventure, excitement, and romance. Two young lovers traveling through Europe. Bistros, wine and cheese, jaunts on motorbikes. I was looking for a ghost and evidence of my past, but all I knew could be written on a cocktail napkin: Gustav Ungerland, 1859, Eger.
Immediately bewildered by the city, we found a small room in a pension on Mendelssohnstrasse. We were dazed by the sooty black elephant of the Hauptbahnhof, disgorging trains by the hour, and behind it the resurrected city, new steel and concrete skyscrapers rising from the ashes of the ruins. Americans were everywhere. Soldiers fortunate enough to have drawn duty guarding against Eastern Europe rather than fighting in Vietnam. Strung-out runaways in the Konstablerwache shooting up in broad daylight or begging for our spare change. Our first week together, we felt out of place between the soldiers and the junkies.
On Sunday we strolled over to the R?merberg, a papier-maché version of the medieval Alstadt that had been mostly bombed out by the Allies in the final months of the war. For the first time on our trip, the weather was bright and sunny, and we enjoyed a springtime street fair. On the carousel in the middle of the festival, Tess rode a zebra and I a griffin; then we held hands after lunch in the café as a strolling quartet played a song for us. As if the honeymoon had finally commenced, when we made love that night, our tiny room became a cozy paradise.
“This is more like it,” she whispered in the dark. “How I imagined we would be together. I wish every day could be like today.”
I sat up and lit a Camel. “I was wondering if maybe tomorrow we could go our own ways for a while. You know, have time to ourselves. Just think how much more we’ll have to talk about when we’re back together. There’s stuff I’d like to do that might not be interesting to you, so I was thinking maybe I could get up a bit earlier and go out, and I’d be back, probably, by the time you woke up. See the National Library. You would be bored to tears.”
“Cool out, Henry.” She rolled over and faced the wall. “That sounds perfect. I’m getting a little tired of spending every minute together.”
It took all morning to find the right train, then the right streets, and the address to the Deutsche Bibliothek, and another hour or so to find the map room. A charming young librarian with workable English helped me with the historical atlas and the seemingly thousands of alterations and border changes brought about by hundreds of years of war and peace, from the final days of the Holy Roman Empire through the Hessian principalities’ Reichstag to the divisions at the end of both world wars. She did not know Eger, could not find anyone in Reference that had heard of the town.
“Do you know,” she finally asked, “if it is East Germany?”