Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(90)

“So you said you knew something about Die Eichel?”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t a resistance group. It was a place. A therapy center in Berlin.”

Miles remembers running across a mention of that in his initial research. He’d dismissed it as irrelevant.

“What made you ask about Die Eichel?” Mama D asks.

“Just this podcast mystery thing Chloe and I are doing.”

“Oh! So you and Chloe made up? That’s wonderful! What’s the podcast about?”

“Just a thing. Something from her Mormor,” he says. He doesn’t feel like getting into it.

“Funny. I hadn’t thought about Die Eichel in decades. It got me thinking about the woman who ran the center. She was our neighbor that summer. Frau Hermann.” Mama D laughs. “This girl in our building told me that Frau Hermann was a witch. Martina. God. I gave her my Hardy Boobs.”

“Hardy Boobs?”

“Long story.”

“Was Frau Hermann a witch? Because that would’ve been awesome.”

Miles has never heard this story before. Probably because he never asked. “Tell me more about her.”

Mama D lights up at his interest. “Oh, um. Well. She always had pastry, thank God!” she says, laughing. “And she was a bit of a slob—papers strewn everywhere. It was both un-German and so the opposite of my mother that it made me like her all the more for it.”

“So can I claim the Frau Hermann defense about my room?” Miles jokes.

“Not a chance.”

“Why did Martina think Frau Hermann was a witch?”

“Because Martina was sixteen and bored,” Mama D says with a knowing glance. “Frau Hermann was pretty secretive, though. She was definitely haunted by something from her past, some trauma she wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about. At least, not directly. I assumed that’s why she became a therapist. She was a widow. And lonely. And a little sad. God. I should’ve been nicer to her.” Mama D shakes her head as if the movement would remove her guilt. “She had a lot of books. Psychology. Mythology. And fairy tales! She was big on those—had a whole shelf of ’em.”

Miles sits up straighter. “Fairy tales?”

“She said she used them in her work as a therapist—Die Eichel helped people experiencing PTSD from the war. She said fairy tales were a way of talking about things that were too hard to talk about directly. Anyway. I had the idea that she might’ve constructed her own fantasy life to block out her real life.” Mama D winces. “She was a bit of an unreliable narrator.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She used to tell me this story when I’d visit. She would dole it out a little each time, like breadcrumbs. Honestly, I never knew how much of it was true and how much of it was designed to keep me coming to visit. It felt like a fairy tale, too.”

Miles takes this in. “Are you still in touch with her?”

Mama D shakes her head and sighs. “The last time I saw her, we fought.”

This surprises Miles. Mama D isn’t one to pick fights.

“What happened?” Miles asks, unsettled.

“I brought Lena to tea at her apartment and—surprise, surprise!—it did not go well.”

“Ha!” Anke supplies from the other room.

“Frau Hermann told her the story she’d told me and it really upset Lena. She stormed out. She was sure Frau Hermann had been a Nazi.”

“Was she a Nazi?”

“No! I don’t think so.” Mama D looks troubled. “I guess I didn’t want to know at the time because she was so nice to me. All I know for sure is that Frau Hermann spent literally the rest of her life trying to make up for whatever happened during the war. Die Eichel was born from her need to make things right. And Die Eichel helped many, many people.”

“So, what, you can be a Nazi collaborator and all is forgiven?”

“First of all, we don’t know for a fact that she was a collaborator, and facts do actually matter. No matter what the internet says. And second, I think it’s much more complicated than that. The truth—the full truth—usually is. If we don’t believe that people can change and make reparations, that good can still rise from pain, well, then we’d have to erase the word hope from the dictionary.”

“Sometimes I think we should erase the word hope. Feels like some hippie bullshit excuse not to actually do anything.”

Anke shouts, “Genau!”

“Guess it depends on how you define hope. Active or passive. I mean…” Mama D gestures to the wall of photos behind her. “Those all started with hope. Righteous, furious hope. It sure wasn’t cynicism.”

The air has gone out of Miles’s sleuthing. He’d thought he was onto something but now it feels like one more dead end. And he’s not in the mood for a lecture. “Anything else?”

Mama D laughs. “Oh God. Honey, it was a long time ago.”

“You’re right. You’re really old. How many fingers am I holding up? Can you still see them?”

“Which finger am I holding up?”

Miles snorts. “You still got some punk in you.”

“Darn right I do,” Mama D says with a grin.

He tries to imagine his mom and her punk girlfriend and this older German woman drinking tea but can’t. “What was the story she told you? Do you remember any of it?”