Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

“But what prompted you?” Caroline asked.

  “Frieda Koehler was my mother,” she said. “She passed away in 2008. She was eighty-one years old. She became a professor of mathematics at the University of California. I followed her into academia.”

  Caroline considered it. “And your grandfather? If I may ask? Heinrich Koehler?”

  “It didn’t work out so well for him,” she said. “He was captured by the Soviet Navy in the final days of the war. He surrendered his ship rather than have his men be killed. He was taken prisoner by the Soviets and taken back to the Soviet Union. He died in a Soviet labor camp in 1952.”

  “Oh,” Caroline said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you? At one time, Heinrich was an ardent Nazi.”

  “I won’t make judgements,” Caroline said. “Not after hearing your story.”

  There was an awkward pause. Then Ellen was suddenly aware of the time.

  “Oh,” she said, “I’ve talked a blue streak. It’s after five. I need to go meet my family. They’re all lucky enough to be American, by the way,” she said. “Thanks to Frieda, thanks to your father, and thanks, strangely, to Heinrich.” A beat, then, “We wanted to give you something.”

  Ellen reached to the shopping bag by her side an withdrew a small package. It was gift wrapped. Caroline guessed what was coming.

  “For me?” Caroline said.

  “Absolutely. May it bring you the same good fortune that brought Frieda and our family for the last seventy-six years.”

  “I can’t say ‘no,’” Caroline said. “Not after listening to you today.

  “Then don’t.”

  Caroline removed the gift paper and slid the aging box of dominos from its wrapping. She gazed upon it almost as if it were magical, and in a way it was, to have travelled so far and survived so long. She touched the wood which still bore the markings in English and Arabic that had once attracted the attention of her father in wartime Lisbon.

  She slid the top open and reached for a tile. Before she could turn it over however, a waited accidentally nudged her arm in passing. The tile slipped from her hand and came to rest face up on the table.

  It was a double six.

  Bill Cochrane’s return from Berlin and Frieda Kohler’s journey to America was thus complete.

  THE END