that popular trucking route, for my car refused to go over fifty miles per hour. I stopped only once, at the first telegraph office I saw, and sent a wire to Caroline saying I was on my way.
Somewhere on the outskirts of Stocksee, I heard a terrific clank and turned to see my muffler fall on the asphalt and clatter to the side of the road. I backed up and retrieved the lanky hunk of metal and hurled it into my backseat. After that, my car sounded like the loudest motorbike when I pressed the gas pedal, but what choice did I have? I had to keep going.
I chugged into Stocksee in the early afternoon and shivered as I passed the flowered sign: WILLKOMMEN IN STOCKSEE! Herta’s home base? It was a rural town close to a lake with the same name, a big lake, tranquil and dark. She always did like lakes.
I drove past rolling farmland and into the heart of Stocksee, a tidy little place. If the dress of the inhabitants was any indication, Stocksee was a conservative place too, for most wore traditional Tracht, the men in lederhosen, Trachten coats, and alpine hats, the women in dirndl dresses. I slowed my car by a sidewalk and asked a man for help in my best rusty German.
“Excuse me, sir, could you tell me where Dorfstrasse can be found?” The man ignored me and kept walking. A stab of fear went through me when I saw a woman resembling Gerda Quernheim, Nurse Gerda from the camp, pass by on the sidewalk. Could it possibly be her? Out of prison already?
I found the doctor’s office, a single-story building of white-painted brick. I parked far down the street, relieved to turn my car off, and sat there attracting hostile looks from passersby. One peered into the backseat in a pointed way, looking at the muffler lying there. I tried to steady my breathing and gain courage. Should I just return home? Call the police and ask for help? That might not end well.
A silver Mercedes-Benz slid by me and docked at the curb in front of the doctor’s office. It was an older model but the kind of car Pietrik would have admired.
A woman got out of the car. Could that possibly be Herta driving such an expensive car? Why had I forgotten my glasses? My heart beat like a crazy, flip-flopping fish. The woman was too skinny to be her, wasn’t she? My hands were slippery on the steering wheel as I watched the woman walk into the doctor’s office.
I slid to the passenger door and exited, the hinges complaining, and shook my hands about like two wet mops, trying to calm myself. I entered the doctor’s office, and stopped to read the brass sign next to the door: FAMILY MEDICAL CLINIC. The words WE LOVE CHILDREN were painted below. Children? It couldn’t be Herta. Who would let someone like her touch their little ones?
It wasn’t a big waiting room, but it was unnervingly neat and tidy. The walls were painted with schools of manic fish and turtles, and an aquarium bubbled in the corner. I sat and thumbed through magazines, glancing now and then at the patients, waiting to see if she’d walk by. It was hard to look at those well-fed infants with their velvety skin and know Herta might be the one touching them. As their names were called, the mothers went in to see the doctor just as we once had. Did she give them their inoculations or leave that to a nurse?
I watched an angelfish in the tank suck in and spit rocks from the pink-gravel bottom. A German mother sat across the room, the picture of Aryan purity. The Nazis would have put her on the cover of every magazine during the war. I considered telling her how they killed babies at Ravensbrück, but then thought better of it. Never volunteer information. The Germans were always suspicious of that.
Though it was cool in the room, sweat ran down my back. To calm myself, I paged through German Mother magazine. The war was long since over, but the Hausfrauen had not come far. Still working hard, but no longer for their beloved Führer. If the magazine was any indication, the Germans worshipped a new idol—consumer goods. Volkswagens, hi-fis, dishwashers, and televisions. At least that was an improvement. The receptionist scraped her glass window open.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked, blue eye shadow on her