Watching her children greet their beloved “Auntie” Claudia, forty-two-year-old Petra Schulze looked on with bemused skepticism. While there were no two people on Earth that she loved and trusted more than her son and daughter, the same could not be said regarding her sister. Though she loved her sister dearly; trusting her was an entirely different matter.
Something was awry.
Why is she here? What does she want?
For her part, forty-year-old Claudia Albrecht tenderly embraced her niece, eighteen-year-old Mia Schulze; pelting the girl with kisses all about her adorable face and lips. This made Petra cringe. That last kiss, in her opinion, lingered far too long for two women; particularly an aunt and her niece, to share. Claudia then spun around and leapt into the powerful arms of her toweringly tall nephew; Mia’s twin brother, Kurt Schulze. Their embrace, likewise, made Petra quite uncomfortable as Kurt lifted his aunt completely off the ground in his arms. Claudia then planted a kiss on Kurt’s lips that Petra once more perceived to be hardly appropriate for an aunt and nephew to share.
Entirely unaware of their mother’s misgivings, Kurt and Mia were thrilled beyond compare to be seeing their favorite aunt in person for the first time in almost four years. They noticed nothing out of the ordinary and certainly found nothing about her affectionate greeting inappropriate. But then, how could they?
Despite their age and by no fault of their own, Kurt and Mia Schulze were very naïve; having been hidden away and sheltered most of their lives in this, the small German village of Lebus on the Polish border. Though they were both fully and properly educated, academically bright and intelligent, their common-sense level and overall mental acuity was that of much younger teens. They knew little to nothing of the outside and modern 21st century world. They didn’t even have mobile phones or internet access at home.
Also, Kurt and Mia knew very little of their mother’s familial relationships with her parents and her sister. Hence, they would’ve had no way of even defining what was out of the ordinary or inappropriate where Claudia’s affections or behavior was concerned.
Lebus is a very rural and historic community in the Markisch-Oderland District of Brandenburg in far eastern Germany with a population of less than 3,000. It’s about 90 kilometers east of Berlin on the banks of the Oder River, which serves as the natural border between Germany and Poland. It is literally a town that time has forgotten. While it has most of the conveniences of 2019 Europe, it is a place which has chosen; by either necessity or nostalgia, to cling to the ways of the older and simpler world. A much safer world, Petra believed wholeheartedly. Perhaps that is why she loved it so much! That, and the fact that the modest two-story domicile she now shared with Kurt and Mia was also where she and Claudia had been bred from a very early age.
It was home. It always had been; and it always would be. To Petra anyway.
But to Claudia?
Petra and Claudia Albrecht were both born in Berlin when the city and the nation were still divided east and west by the wall. After the sudden death of their mother when they were just toddlers, their father; a soldier in the East German army, sent them to live with his parents in Lebus. Though he wrote to them often, the girls rarely saw him as they grew up.
After the fall of communism and the reunification of Germany in the early 1990s, the girls were sent to Boarding School in Munich. They were also reunited with their father, who moved to Munich after reunification. Having always been close; sometimes inseparable, Petra and Claudia became even closer in Munich. They also bonded deeply with their estranged father. But as time went on, things began to change, and the sisters began to grow apart.
Though she completed her studies and graduated with honors from the University of Munich at the age of twenty-two, Petra simply could not assimilate to the modern western world and clung firmly to her eastern roots and culture. She took work as a barmaid in Munich where she soon met Ernst Schulze. They married a year later, and Petra quickly became pregnant. After the twins were born, the family moved to Kiel, where Ernst worked on the docks. By the time the twins were old enough to walk, Ernst Schulze deserted his family; running off with another woman to Sweden. Nobody has seen or heard from him since. Then just days after, Petra and Claudia’s father died suddenly of a massive heart attack.
Heartbroken, penniless and on the verge of homelessness, Petra took her children back to Lebus where she found work as a seamstress and dressmaker in a local shop owned by a family friend. A few years later, Petra purchased the shop from the aging owners and her grandparents left her their house in Lebus and moved to Leipzig. Petra never remarried nor did she wish to. She created a very quiet, stable and secure life for herself and her children and was very content.
Claudia on the other hand; who dynamically embraced western culture, left Germany just after graduating from the University of Munich and enrolled at Oxford University in England where she ultimately earned a master’s degree in Business Administration. She then made her way to the United States, where she studied at Harvard University and earned a second master’s degree in Industrial Psychology.
Along with her native German, Claudia fluently speaks English, French, Italian, Polish, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and even Latin. An international businesswoman in the beauty and fashion industry; the C.E.O of her own company, as well as the editor-in-chief of a world renown fashion magazine, Claudia Albrecht has traveled the globe in her company’s Gulf Stream and netted millions of dollars in salary over the course of her illustrious career. With her main offices and primary home in Paris, Claudia also has offices and leased penthouse apartments in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Sydney, Rome and Stockholm with a chateau in the Swiss Alps. She also owns a virtual fleet of luxury automobiles and a Yacht on the Mediterranean.
And she has NEVER returned to Lebus after leaving it when she and Petra were sent to boarding school as young girls.
Until today! Why?
***
“It’s their birthday Petra,” Claudia said to her sister; speaking their native German.
“I know that,” Petra replied in German, then suddenly switched to French. “But then, they’ve had many birthday’s, haven’t they Claudia? Where were you for them?”
Momentarily puzzled by the sudden switch of language, Claudia replied in French:
“But this is not just any birthday! It’s their eighteenth birthday.”
“What’s so special about it?” Petra asked in French.
“Why are we speaking French?” Claudia asked in French.
“Because they don’t! And I don’t want them to know what we’re talking about,” Petra replied in French.
“They don’t speak French?” Claudia asked, taken slightly aback.
Petra merely shook her head.
“How many languages do they speak?” Claudia asked in French.
“Only German,” Petra replied in French.
“Two eighteen-year-old kids living in Europe and they only speak one language?” Claudia said in French, practically aghast.
“They’re learning Polish,” Petra replied in Polish.
“Why? To shout insults across the fucking river from the backyard?” Claudia snapped in Polish.
“Will you please watch your language,” Petra rebuked in French.
“Which one?” Claudia fired back in French.
“Your pig Latin,” Petra replied in French.
“I thought I was speaking French,” Claudia whipped in French.
“Cute,” Petra replied in French.
“So, just what exactly are we talking about?” Claudia blurted, suddenly switching to English.
“I want to know why you’re here,” Petra demanded in English. “You haven’t been to this house or this town in nearly thirty years!”
“I told you,” Claudia fired back in English. “It’s their birthday. I wanted to surprise them. After all, I haven’t seen them in person in over four years. Not since grandmother’s eightieth birthday in Leipzig.”
“Where you kidnapped them and took them to Rome,” Petra snapped; now speaking Italian.
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