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.