JEAN E. VERTHEIN - THE LODGING

Busing across Afghanistan and staying in Iran lead Jean E. Verthein to write poems and stories on the wonders of survival. Counseling students as an Adjunct Professor in Public and Social Work has been invaluable to her. Two Ragdale Foundation 
Grants and a Sarah Lawrence College MFA encouraged her publishing in St. Ann’s Review, Downtown Brooklyn, Gival Press, Green Mountains Review, Hypertext and River Press Review. In October, 2019, her literary historical novel Last Gentleman in the Middle Distance will be published by Adelaide Books, Lisbon and New York City. 

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THE LODGING
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​In the following months Georg’s visits to her in the Kaiser’s lodge enveloped her. Once departed from her niche there, she’d change. The big, dark, red-brick, neo-gothic house of her earlier life and its quatrefoils might overwhelm her again, though she there aimed.
Next, from the removed Kaiser’s hunting lodge, she lifted two other items: a Meissen soup tureen and silver ladle. She packed them. No one would notice.
Watchful of Todi’s loss of Harald, she took him to meetings in rural Lower Saxony. Small farmers were gathering against foreclosures of mortgaged properties. Each seemed fearful of losses of soul and soil.  
* * *
Angelica, with her grandmother, Frau Bauer, the dying woman, lived a few kilometers away and pressed her to visit them. Meta had not seen Angelica, Grete, Lili, or Katia for months. But she could hike or ride an old horse to see them or on a younger horse, if found.  
This black elder horse Todi called “Fritz II,” the German World War 1914-1918 survivor, accepted harnessing. Fritzi cantered along, jingling his bells.  
One Saturday a note inviting Todi to play with Harald’s cousin’s children his age excited him. Such family knots Meta likened to thistles on wool. But if Todi was left behind with them, would he be well cared for? She nagged herself over what she owed her son and Harald. Pity she struggled to thwart.
But Georg’s indifference affected her; he failed to respond to her passion for him. Her insecurity exaggerated other problems. Stretched to rid anxiety, she snapped into tension: was he seeing Mala still? The beauteous, dark-haired woman appeared to hibernate. 
Escaping from worry, in newish jodhpurs, Meta set out to deliver Todi to his cousins and visit Angelica and Frau Bauer. As Meta’s horse, Fritz II, jaunted along, the journey seemed to release her tight neck. The breezes and greenery and blooms comforted her.
After tapping Fritz II’s neck with the riding whip, they clipped along. In a glade hepatica grew beyond the field of violets with green heart leaves. After dropping Todi off, she rubbed her temples and looked around. On the roadside grew crocuses, blue and white cups sucking the wet ground. Red berry bushes flickered on a burnt-green hummock, and nature grew red-orange fire prick.
“Come back.” A husky voice yelling at a crying boy caused Meta to ask, “Who’s there?” Because of the screeching child and whinnying horse, a farm laborer rushed over and tch-tched at the young mother thought to be ignoring their children. Had Fritz II been a bronco, he might have reared in the racket. But age-sluggishness calmed the elder horse. The boy sniffled. Why should she comfort the boy, not her son?
Arms flailing, Lili said, “My boy’s hurt,” meaning her nephew. Lili’s, dark sleek hair tangled on one side with burrs. 
“With me, he’s got trouble.” Surprisingly in a non-German, Lili hugged Meta.
Meta asked, “You’re with your brothers and father?”
“We’re caring for our nephew and Landvolk. My Karl attends the meetings.” 
“I’ve never met your Karl.” His Ernest, boy-child-nephew, must be a ruffian.
“Oh, he came into my life.” Lili, hands in blue jumper pockets over maroon jersey, said, “He’s political.” Hands out, she gesticulated. “So am I. Karl took over his grandfather’s farm. I help out. We sow, reap, and speak for Landvolk. Everyone’s apt to lose small farms we’re trying to save from the banks’ repossessing for unpaid mortgages to prevent the authorities’ sell-offs. But Karl lost his horse, so we trek and hitch rides from others.
“To the Reichstag in Berlin we push for righteousness. None yet. Communists, Nazis are there and Social Democrats. All over North Germany. Know them?”
“I’ve bumbled into a local meeting with them,” Meta said, “to investigate what was happening.” 
“Meetings spread.” Lili’s hand waved northward. “Come, one’s minutes away. See hammers, sickles, a little like swastikas, the ancient sun symbols.” The mystical and bizarre carried her away and she attacked. “The Weimar Republic’s current president is the devil incarnate.”
Meta replied, “Now I’m going to see Angelica on the farm and I’ll return before dark.” She handed Lili her phone number, maybe non-working. “Tell me if there’s another meeting.”
“Your Georg’s at one nearby?”  
Unpersuaded, Meta said that Harald she’d married died. Like others, Lili made no response. So Meta said, “Giddy-up” to Fritz II.
Elated with her Georg, Angelica, Grete, and Lili friendships, freer than earlier and family, she and the horse clomped on. 
Meta brooded: loneliness was torn from the soul and assuaged by a social circle’s warmth. But not much came from a political men’s circle Lili drew her toward.  
Meta sensed angling toward others’ troubles.
Daylight sparked on the stream alongside the road and silvery birch leaves. Evergreens beyond furred against the sky. Birds—robins, blue jays, and phoebes—chuckled or sang. Spring’s warmth rose into summer’s heat. Meta inhaled the osmanthus, an evergreen.
In this countryside’s well-being, she felt watched.
“A charioteer sun goddess of the north,” Georg called her, with dark-red hair, too long for the popular Louise Brooks style. Meta laughed to herself. By surprise, Georg caught up with her. “See you later here.” Would this meeting be possible?
Meta floated under the clouds and over the countryside. She’d landed, when coerced, in her marriage, now nonexistent. Riding away, feeling watched, she could stable her horse and trek. For the future she was fearful Georg could abridge her life.
Near-swooning under the greenery, embracing him masked her feelings. She ruminated on her life.
To Berlin and back to the rural life, she, like a poor squire, honor lost, savored Bremen with its small-city artistic crafts and old Hanse international harbor. Less Berlin-like with centrifugal music and hell-raising government, the moor stayed in this era without king or queen. Some gentry downgraded it by thieving, Nanna said. Thumping hollow logs, often chopped down in the woods, they mostly survived.
With little money, how would she survive? If she moved back with her uncle-father, trouble would erupt. His land Todi might serve but without her modern ways. Spelling his name and searching for jazz or psychoanalysis would jar Heinrich. She’d swerve away from Heinrich. Yes, she would.
Better yet, Georg could involve her on his farm? His indifference, though, to farming led to listening to speeches and poking around political huddles, seeking his role, and let folkish types guide him. Less völkisch, folkish, than Heinrich, Georg could build his following and show off “my young beauty,” as he called her.
On a whim she turned the horse onto a hillock Todi and stood in the stirrups behind some bushes to overlook Georg through the leaves. He was smoking, throwing away butts and nodding at familiar faces. She’d beguile his guests at his farm.
In the crescent moon cusp, along with the sun, above a dilapidated ancient chapel-sized church, Georg picked up the pieces from the ground while seeking his old uncle’s marble gravestone, while searching for his exact forebears and claim their documents, like his uncle’s could settle Georg’s claim. 
The church sexton hobbled over, unsure whether to speak to a superior. Georg detested sniveling. The old countryman hesitated; his baggy work pants below his Sunday tweed jacket might say, “Sir, what’d you think about this meeting?”
Georg shrugged and shook hands, swept his hair back. She waved to him again without his seeing her, turned, and rode off to meet Grete.
* * *
Once Meta reached the pavilion grounds, a youngish woman hovered above the crowd on boxes or tabletops. Speech was inaudible while the klieg-like sun filtered through the high oak trees and spotlighted click-clacking women in red-glorious brown fox and mink fur stoles.
Styled for 1928, the women nearest the podium defined the combustible and glamorous group in knee-length hemlines below luminous hair and wraps.    
Someone resembling a Katia was hooting against the furred women. Why? This wayside inn, open on a mellow spring day, served at one end like a pub for ale or wine while, at the other, it offered tea or coffee frothy with cream along with berry tortes.
Meta had never stopped where jazz was played in the countryside.
Here women, mangy in dresses clustered in pale reds and greens, compared with the tall women in spectacular furs meters away. Maybe this event was meant to display their style differences. But why near Lüneberg, Bremen, and not Hamburg or Berlin, where more fashionable women lived? 
True, Tante Lore, her aunt, had complained no one dressed except in this 1928 prosperity style more than in the previous postwar ten years. A Berlin style show must be here.
Her skirt panels flaring, an ultra-lean woman bent toward the certain women cluster, evidently awaiting Trixi to photograph them? They little saw her arrival, so lithe was she. The woman photographer, snub-nosed, was camera-close for grab-shots. Anyway, the women in their self-sufficiency little minded.
Meta half-expected to find Grete’s mother-couturier behind the overall show or some furrier. Not so.
Yes, here were her friend Grete and her friend’s aunt! Grete and Meta squealed; her aunt shook hands with Meta.
Not yet hungry for noon dinner, they sat. They smelled the kitchen nearby: potatoes, fenichel, cauliflower, roots, and onions for beef stew.
Suddenly, above the trees, a tiny biplane soared. Fragile, constructed from two straight wings looking joined with toothpicks, as if glued like a toy the older Hansi had assisted the younger Todi to piece together, bigger metal airplane parts collected by Harald. Observers of the overhead plane jumped on one wooden bench to see the one-person cockpit double-winged. One might fall off.
The jaunty photographer girl was still here in her green cloche. Meta wished for binoculars for an overview and focus so Grete handed over hers. They both jumped up and down. She helped pull Grete, with shapely legs and sculpted heels, up onto the outdoor wooden table.
Aunt Ulrike, evidently Grete’s father’s sister, disapproved of the gathering. “Meta’s okay here as a wife and mother but not suitable for a single, available, marriageable girl like you.”
Whatever her meaning, Meta did not want to know. As it was, this gathering was dealing with no motherhood or marriage Meta knew of. When the excitement of Trixi’s landing died off momentarily, Meta whispered in Grete’s ear, “Harald’s gone and Todi found him dead.” She didn’t want the aunt to overhear and query for details.
“What happened?”
“He was cranky, overworking and getting sick. I didn’t know what to do.” Her eyes watered.
“Well, you didn’t want him to start with, remember?” Grete whispered out of her aunt’s hearing in the talkative crowd.
“What’d you say I said?” asked the Dutch aunt.
“Nothing,” Grete replied, “business between Meta and me.”
“Is that courtesy?” her aunt asked. A combo was tuning up and testing rhythms for the dance floor in later afternoon with romantic promises for girls tapping toes on the floor and fingers on the wooden tables scratched with illegible names or comments. 
Meta said, “Harald’s killing himself upset Todi.”
The combo drummer was rolling out beats, dah-dUH, dah-dUH.
“You must have died over him and your son’s upset.”
“What? Well, I died for instability.”
“Instability’s everywhere nowadays.”
“At least Georg drove us to a child therapy you and Katia recommended.”
“Oh, but you wanted to be with Georg anyway.” 
What could Meta say or write? Could words describe the warmth of fantasy and ecstasy?
“You like where you live, don’t you?” Grete asked, her floppy, twisted flower on her large hat bouncing to the combo’s rehearsing and to her words.
“The novelty’s gone.” The Kaiser’s hunting lodge had been one of many truths easing and complicating her life, now that she was being dislodged into the unknown world.
“I don’t know if I ever did. There’s more than one problem. Visit us.”
“This would be my only palace invitation ever. How could you not be there? Did Harald know about Georg?”
“Too many questions. How could he? There was nothing to know. Harald was never around. Nor Georg now.”
God, she was perceptive and provocative.
“I think Harald worried about our living quarters that we had to vacate. I’ve extended our stay but now the authorities are ousting us. Where to live is the problem. Should I go to Bremen or Berlin and live in poverty or back to Uncle’s farm or to America?”
“Take me; take me with you, please, please.” She grabbed Meta’s hand, squeezed it, and pulled it. 
“I don’t know how. Just apply.”
“Why beg?” Aunt Ulrike asked. “Come to Amsterdam.”
The musical combo was again tuning up.
“That city’s boring.
“We’ll dance here so we can talk,” said Grete to Meta. Grete’s silk-flowered shoes danced here and there in one place beneath her flaring, paneled skirt in her usual portrait of grace, unlike Meta within her pinafore-like dress and a little smile. “Spiff up your dress a bit, as you used to,” Grete told her.
Meta knew not what to say about her folkish outfit, preferred by Heinrich and Georg. Usually she ignored conventional clothes and styles that required funds.
“Now I’m free,” Grete said, changing the subject, “from my chaperone, set upon me by my father when he doesn’t know where else to put me. She’s Calvinist Dutch, a bit severe, you see, and her children are grown.”
The two friends, while dancing spotted, Aunt Ulrike, smiling and bouncing with a mustached gentleman.  
Surrounding the two young women, Meta and Grete conjectured, when settled away from the dance floor at round tables. “What’s this get-together for?” asked Meta.
“Mutter asked me to look in on the furs and Trixi for style-setting,” Grete replied.
“On the other end, maybe a Landvolk social fundraiser’s; at this end the women might be the future style-setters,” Meta speculated. “I should learn from them.” Grete shrugged. 
Nearby an unknown rural woman was irate: two speakers she’d insisted on were dismissed. Of the arrangement process she said, “No fair treatment here. The arrangers put them last on the list. Nobody will stay to hear them.” Of this nearby bickering group, one, who wrapped her warped neck like one of Lore’s friends when her coppery scarf was slipping, charged. “You didn’t back me when I tried to move them to the program top. Now I’m the fool for inviting two prominent women, and they’ll blame me for taking up their time.”
“They won’t mind,” another countrywoman reassured her against the stylish woman. The braid of the country wound in a honey-colored bun, homey, attractive, and not chic like the deep-waved, marceled hairstyle of in-the-know women of her kind.
Small-group members still bickered among themselves on both sides. In fact, one said, “Trixi’s the key speaker, not your two speakers. She’s still buzzing overhead in the sky.”
Trixi displayed her prowess as an aviatrix in this transatlantic age of universal sky riding. Circling round and round, she flew, swooped, and rose up.
“Just think, she’s joined the heavens, and she’s a friend of Hitler’s,” said to anyone who would listen. The elfin, very young photographer agreed and gripped her Leica and Graphix, small and large cameras.
Having run into her in Berlin and here, Meta nodded to her. Ada was her name. Was she accompanying a critical Ventriloquist group here, suspected to photograph its friends, or was she here on her own?
“No protesters here,” Meta commented to make talk. The photographer nodded back.
Meanwhile Lore’s friend, coppery-scarfed, disputed. “Read the newspapers? We’re struggling for the countryside. Bankers buy and big marketers do so, like your father,” the woman said to Grete. “Your type grabs everything.” Meta wondered if she meant Heinrich’s trying to buy all possible land. Or Grete’s cattle-broker type father was. The unknown woman added this: “Your type’s men serve the German landowners.”
“How does she know to say such stupidities?” Grete asked.
“What?” bewildered, Meta asked. How did anyone know where one was while in the experience? She was unsure. Which pavilion end did the perceived friend of Lore’s belong to? Yes, she was one of them, or was she? Where did she belong? Meta looked and almost spoke aloud: But her very own father-great uncle’s selling off his land to pay his taxes.
To intercede struck her—she herself must pay his taxes in Lüneberg for him.
No protesters here, though. Not yet.
Trixi, now landing to cheers, approached her knots of supporters. She stood at the podium like the lectern of a restaurant maître d’ without menus.
The crowd quieted. Most women stood or sat up. Some men stayed in the back—Meta looked for Georg—with his arms akimbo. More arriving women with some menfolk grouped in the back with arms crossed in front of their muscled chests.
Stillness allowed in the sound of the wind. Close by, the local brook’s piddling over rocks lulled Meta. The speaker could be Trixi or someone else for or with the Ventriloquist in the trench coat. Were the groups intermixed or mixed up about their locale?
The only thing for sure was Trixi had landed and arisen out of the cockpit, as if dismounting from her flying silvery horse. Gradually Trixi projected her voice.
Everyone applauded. Meta believed Trixi said, “We women support the country people and the right of its women to own property, if necessary. Or for some to combine to supply food for all.” Everyone crowded around the muffled words.
Trixi derided the women in reddish fur coats, mink, bear, or fox, as the animals should graze in peace here on the protected heath with its dazzling beauty. Her close-fitting leather cap hung by its strap around her neck above her snug body suit, fit for a firm torso. Her curled hair fell helter-skelter around her bare eyes, free of her goggles.
“Did you hear what she said about animals?” asked Grete. 
“Not quite. Let them pasture or stay in the woods, not lose their fur, unless sheep for wool.”
Meta was confused about what she was seeing.
“Certainly Trixi would favor animals.”
“Harald never did. He only wanted army metal.”
“Wasn’t he earning a living for you by reselling it?”
“You do what you have to do.” Grete didn’t understand that she, Meta, earned money too.
“What happened to you two?”
Meta tried to delve into her five-year marriage and its loneliness, except for Teodor, her beloved Todi, she must rush back to.
Ah, friendship was happiness, talking here to someone at least half-understanding her while they nibbled treats and sipped tea. “Harald never loved me; I never loved Harald. But we survived in leftover splendor and more or less got along. When Todi grew into a little boy—Harald claimed his duty was to direct Teodor’s development. 
“He took him to meetings about land use changes he could not control and refused to introduce me to his friends. Then he lost his way. He killed himself or got caught in his military equipment accident. He provided well for us in these dire times.
“My son blamed himself at times and me at other times for the death. We fought, child against mother. Surprisingly, Georg helped take him to Göttingen for child therapy.”
“I saw that fellow there.” Grete asked, “Is he your type?”
“You mean the one from my big church? Paul? He’s a city-type, not like one from my other small church where I was married, no.” Meta twisted her interests to confuse Grete. She agreed on one point.
“Paul’s agreeable and good-looking.”
Meta knew Grete disliked Meta’s father, known in her early childhood as her uncle. Her uncle-father Heinrich loathed young men like Paul. Heinrich favored only Harald, who was acceptable in this post-war period because of not demanding a dowry. My so-called father Heinrich dislikes Georg somehow for his politics. Heinrich prefers Völkisch nationalism folk-like, less elitist. I’m trying to figure all this out.”
“Paul’s a good man.” Grete was delicate and attuned to persons, for sure.
“Then you pursue him!” said Meta.
“But he’s with the Christian social democrats or social democratic non-believers. Father-uncle despises both, says they’re fewer in number every day, about to be overtaken by the NSDAP. Onkel-Vater wants it without right or conflict—in between ag-laborers and landowners. Georg, his opponent unknown, favors heritage, customs, Fachwerk with straw roofs and squashed roof points opposing Bauhaus starkness.”
Grete nodded. “But for your happiness, consider good-looking Paul.”
“Consider him yourself.”
Paul, Meta knew, belonged to the quasi-correct human way. She gleaned that Grete was becoming an outcast. How to know the truth? Meta tried ignoring her own anxiety as she sought to trek away from it, however much she now hated country viewpoints. After all, only Georg mattered, for he was drawing her toward him.
Meanwhile, in the pavilion, the models, wherever from, were forced to sit on the sidelines from some mix-up over space use. The audience consisted of style watchers and women’s groups for more land rights. Meta was puzzled. 
Next the woman, coppery silk-scarfed, groused, “The Ventriloquist, if here, would straighten our troubles out.” Women thought her style-oriented, not political, as she whispered his sacred name.
 
THE END