1634: The Baltic War: Chapter Nine

Magdeburg

    Thorsten found the office easily enough. After he entered Government House, for the first time since he’d settled in Magdeburg, he discovered a big plaque posted right next to the entrance that listed every office in the building and specified which floor they were on and even gave the room they were using a number. Then, once he reached the third floor, there was another plaque facing the stairwell that listed the offices on that floor—with arrows pointing either to the left or right, along with the name and number of the office. Only a village idiot could not have managed to find their way.

    He found it all somewhat amusing. The term Amerikanische had many connotations in Amdeutsch, to be sure, most of them very positive. But one of the prominent connotations was “fussy, obsessed with detail, precise to the point of absurdity.” Those neat plaques and arrows were a perfect illustration of the trait. Everything must be in order!

    What was amusing about it was that Gunther Achterhof had told Engler that in the universe the Americans came from, they perceived themselves as “rugged individualists”—whatever that might mean, exactly—and it was their accepted mythology that Germans were the world’s natural bureaucrats.

    Germans! Who squabbled about everything, including even the language they spoke, and were notorious throughout Europe for the production of religious sects, mass rebellions, mercenary soldiers—everything except “order.”

    So, getting to the right office was easy. And, sure enough, there was another precise plaque on the door:

    Room 322
    United States of Europe
    Department of Social Services

    When it came time to enter, though, he found himself hesitating. Unlike Gunther, he’d had very little contact with up-timers—and that, only with male Americans. But this office was reputedly run by Americanesses, and the stories about them were enough to make any sane man pause.

    Incredible women, by all accounts—although the stories Thorsten had heard rarely agreed with each other from that point forward. Some legends claimed they were the most lascivious creatures in the world, short of outright succubi. Others claimed they could find an issue concerning sex over which to take offense that no one else could possibly discern. The deadliest females in the world, and the most fragile females in the world. Sorceresses and fools at the same time, who could undertake chemic wonders but had no more sense than a chicken when it came to a multitude of practical matters.

    Thorsten didn’t know what to think—and was not at all sure he wanted to find out.

    He paused with his hand on the door handle for a while. Finally, he decided to open it. They couldn’t possibly be any more peculiar than his great-aunt Mathilde, after all. So, fortifying himself with the image of Mathilde’s fierce eyes—badly crossed and near-sighted, but always fierce—and her constantly disheveled hair and the bizarre utterances that issued from a mouth whose teeth were about the worst anyone had ever seen, he entered the office.

    And found himself staring at a young woman seated behind a desk, looking up at him with a smile.

    About his age, he thought, somewhere in her mid-twenties. Hard to be sure, though. One of the things Americanesses had a reputation for—most accounts agreed on this—was that they seemed to have a peculiar resistance to aging. Some pointed to that as a sign of witchcraft, but most people ascribed it to their well-known chemic skills.

    It was certainly impossible to imagine this woman as a witch, whatever her age. If someone had set Thorsten to the task of picturing a woman who was the exact opposite of his great-aunt Mathilde, he didn’t think he could have come up with anything better.

    To begin with, where Mathilde had been always been very short and became shorter as she grew old—shorter and hunched—this woman was tall. That much was obvious, even seated as she was. Secondly, every hair was in place. True, the style of the hair was perhaps a bit strange, cut short the way it was, but not really all that much. More important, the hair was colored a rich brown, almost chestnut, and very healthy looking, where his great-aunt’s hair had gone from an ugly black to a still uglier gray without ever once losing its most distinguishing characteristic, which was looking like a sheep that had gone unshorn since it was a lamb—but had had many an encounter with briars and thorns. Family legend had it that small animals and birds were occasionally spotted nesting in Great-Aunt Mathilde’s hair. Even as boy, Thorsten had had his doubts, but… you never knew.

    The eyes were completely different, too. Straight, not crossed; a bright and clear greenish color that went superbly with the hair, where Mathilde’s eyes had wavered from a sort of muddy blue to a still muddier gray, depending on her mood of the moment. More striking still was that the green eyes studying him seemed friendly. Mathilde’s mood of the moment had either been frenzied or angry or simply crotchety—but never friendly.

    But all of that Thorsten noticed almost as an aside. From the moment he set eyes on the woman, his gaze was riveted on one feature alone.

    So. At least one legend proved to be true, in every particular. The woman’s teeth were perfect.

    Perfect, and…

    Also stunning. Because the teeth came as part of a wide mouth that had a smile on it that was the most beautiful smile Thorsten had ever seen. It would have been a little scary, if it hadn’t been for the friendly green eyes floating somewhere above.

    “Well, you sure took your time about it,” the woman said, somehow managing to smile more widely still. “I was starting to wonder if I’d need to get help, come nightfall, prying your hand off the handle so we could leave for the day. Or if I could do it myself, with a crowbar.”

    Startled, Thorsten glanced behind him. Only then realizing that he’d turned down the handle before he’d paused for a while.

    “Ah,” was all he could think of to say.

    The smile stayed on her face, but at least the mouth closed. Thorsten thought if a man stared at those teeth for too long, it might turn him to stone. Or something.

    “Never mind,” she said cheerily. “You managed to get in. I’m Caroline Platzer, by the way. I’m the receptionist here, three mornings a week. What’s your name, and what can I do for you?”

    Thorsten cleared his throat. “My name is Thorsten Engler. A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Fraulein.”

    He thought he was safe enough, using that last appellation. So far as he could see, the Platzer woman wasn’t wearing one of those gold rings that Americanesses used—so legend had it, at least—to signal their status as married women. He couldn’t be positive, though, because even while speaking to him her hands continued to fly about the desk, doing… whatever it was a “receptionist” did. He might have missed one of the fingers.

    She startled him with a soft laugh. “Oh, relax, will you? Herr Engler, I promise you I won’t bite. Even if you do use one of the—how many are there supposed to be, by now?—eighty-three thousand, six hundred and forty-two Absolutely Forbidden Words in my presence. That includes any one of the five hundred and six Absolutely Prohibited Forms of Address, except three.”

    Warily, Thorsten eyed her. “And those three… are which?”

    “If you call me a bitch or a cunt or a twat, I’ll knock your head off.” Her right hand came up, waggling a little. “A broad or a dame… depends.”

    He stared at her. He was familiar with the terms “bitch” and “cunt,” since the words had been absorbed into Amdeutsch. He had no idea what “twat” meant, but in context, he could guess. “Dame” was obvious, although he suspected he’d encountered a different connotation than the usual one.

    “I would never do such a thing anyway,” he said. The words came out automatically, not even a protest so much as a simple statement of fact. Most of his mind was still trying to make sense of “broad.” He understood the approximate meaning of the term, but could see no connection to women.

    Her eyes crinkled. “Y’know, I believe you. Would you like some tea?”

    Without waiting for the answer, she rose from her seat and went over to a counter where a pot waited, simmering on a peculiar little mechanical candle of some sort. On her way, Thorsten saw one guess confirmed. She was indeed tall. Slightly taller that he was, he thought, though not by much. Less than an inch.

    Then she bent over to reach the jar of tea nestled on a shelf below, and the sense of the term “broad” became instantly clear to Thorsten. Just as instantly as the stirrings of an erection.

    Dear God in Heaven. None of the legends had prepared him for this.

    Yes, certainly, she was a bit exotic and a bit startling with that direct manner she had, and she was a bit of this and a bit of that and it was all silly nonsense. She wasn’t even beautiful, although she came awfully close. What she was, was something Thorsten had felt and understood since he was fourteen years old and had first laid eyes on one of his second cousins.

    Desirable. Sheer and unalloyed, it was as simple as that.

    Poor Brigida, that had been, who had died in the first epidemic that swept the village. She’d only been sixteen years old, a little older than Thorsten at the time. But for every day that had passed in the two years since the glorious moment he first met her and the horrid time they took her body away to be burned, he had desired her. He’d been completely smitten, in the way boys often were and young men were never supposed to be, once they entered adulthood and had to be practical about such things.

    Thorsten had never expected to encounter that sensation again. Certainly not under these circumstances.

    Fortunately, while those thoughts and emotions roiled through him, the Platzer woman was looking elsewhere as she went about the business of preparing the tea. By the time she turned around to face him and, still smiling, handed him a mug of tea, he was reasonably composed again.

    “Reasonably composed,” that is to say, in the way that a twenty-six year old man will be when raw desire is sweeping through him, back and forth, like great waves washing over a ship’s deck in a storm. Not more than one-fourth of his brain was able to concentrate on anything besides the woman herself. Fortunately again, the heavy workman’s clothing he was wearing to fend off the December cold kept the half-erection from showing. He did manage, as casually as he could, to wipe his mouth with his hand. He was afraid there might be drool showing. He had no idea at all how a man went about courting an Americaness, but he was quite sure that starting off by acting the uncouth boor would not be helpful at all.

    “You still haven’t answered my question, Herr Engler,” she said, resuming her seat behind the desk. “What can we do for you? And would you please sit down?” She pointed at a chair behind him and a little to his left.

    A bit clumsily, Thorsten sat down. Clumsy, because three-quarters of his attention was elsewhere. Her fingers were gorgeous. He could imagine them—

    That way lay disaster. Hastily, he broke off the surging reverie and wracked his brain to think of something appropriate and intelligent to say.

    Informality. That little piece of the many legends got jostled loose and rose to the surface. Almost all of them agreed on that, too, so it was probably true.

    “Please, call me Thorsten.” That came out much more stiffly than he’d intended. But he was afraid to smile. His mouth open that far, drool was sure to come.

    “Thorsten it is, then. And please call me Caroline.” She leaned forward a bit and waved a finger at him, playing the scold. “But I warn you, sir! It’s ‘Caroline,’ not ‘Carol.’ Cross that line at your peril.”

    The same finger, alas. Was there any part of the woman that was plain, at least, since he couldn’t imagine anything actually ugly. Something he could focus on to keep from sliding into the behavior of a village idiot or—worse yet—a schoolboy.

    The best he could come up with was: “I would not dream of it. Caroline it shall always be.”

    He said it too intently. Too… roughly, almost. She would think he was coarse.

    And, indeed, the smile that seemed permanently fixed now faded some. And, suddenly, she had a different look in her eyes. But it didn’t seem to be one of irritation or revulsion. Simply…

    Startled, perhaps?

    Who could say, with an Americaness?

    Luckily, he still had enough of his wits to remember that she’d now asked him the same question twice. Or maybe it was even three times.

    “Friends recommended I come here. Today, because I just enlisted in the army and I will soon be leaving for the training camp. I was involved in the accident at the coal gas plant. Very closely involved. And… well, I am having nightmares. And I keep seeing images of what happened. Very vivid images. They told me I might be suffering from some sort of—of—what is it called?”

    Caroline was not smiling at all, now. “Post-traumatic stress disorder. We heard about the accident, of course. That must have been horrible.”

    He took a breath. “Yes. It was. Does this mean I might be… ah, going insane?”

    She shook her head, very forcefully. “Oh, no, nothing like that. In fact, you may not have PTSD at all. Thorsten, all the reactions you’re having are perfectly normal, after people go through an experience like that. We don’t define it as PTSD until quite a bit of time has passed. It’s only if the symptoms such as nightmares, flashbacks, hypervigilance—there a lot of them and they vary from one person to another, but those are the most common—don’t fade that we conclude something abnormal is happening. But ‘abnormal’ does not mean insane. There’s nothing at all wrong with your mind.”

    She leaned forward still further, lowering her head and pointing to the back of her skull. Which, of course, was also shapely. Thorsten was racked by a sort of thrilled despair.

    “Back here is what we call the limbic part of the brain. To simplify some, you can think of it as the most primitive—and most basic—part of the brain. It’s where automatic responses and our animal instincts are centered. But it’s not where thoughts are formed and emerge. That happens here”—she raised her head and pointed to her forehead, using both forefingers this time—“in what’s called the cortex.”

    She paused briefly, gathering her own thoughts. “What seems to happen with PTSD is that the traumatic memories get stored in the limbic part of the brain, instead of the parts where they would normally get stored. We don’t know why it happens, really. Or rather, why it happens to some people and not to others. But once it does happen, the problem is that the memories are now locked into a part of the brain that doesn’t think rationally and doesn’t respond to reason. That’s why traditional talk therapy doesn’t usually work all that well, with PTSD. In fact, a lot of specialists—Maureen Grady, who set up and runs this department, being one of them—think talk therapy by itself is more likely to be harmful than helpful. They think all it does is keeping stirring up the traumatic memories without doing anything to alleviate them.”

    Thorsten tried to sort through what she was telling him. Relieved, finally, to have something interesting to think about other than Caroline Platzer herself. That would help him… he though the American expression was “keep his cool.”

    It was interesting, too, even fascinating. It had never occurred to him to think of the brain as something with different parts that did different things.

    “So—perhaps I do not understand something—what you are saying is that there is not much that can be done for me. Yes?”

    “No, not exactly. There are some techniques for dealing with PTSD that seem to be successful much of the time, or at least helpful. Using mental imagery as a way of soothing your limbic system before you engage in talk therapy often helps. There’s even”—here she chuckled softly, and shook her head a little—“don’t ask me how it works, because it’s always seem like magic to me. Maureen could explain it to you. It’s a peculiar form of getting a person’s eyes to move rapidly back and forth while they’re undergoing therapy—a lot of times the therapist just has them follow their finger—which seems to decouple the limbic responses. Like I said, it seems like magic. But, however it works, it does seem to work a lot of the time.”

    She leaned back in her seat and half-turned, glancing first at a clock on the back wall and then at one of the doors behind her. “Maureen’s seeing a client right now, but she should be free, in a moment. I’ll talk to her about giving you the finger therapy. It’s also useful even for people just suffering from temporary symptoms.”

    She turned back to face him, lacing her fingers together. Caroline was the sort of person who gestured a lot when speaking, so her fingers had been fluttering about. Now, for the first time, all of them were still and visible. He’d been almost certain already but now he could definitely see that while she was wearing three rings, not one of them fit the description of a… what did they call it? “Wedding band,” he thought. And none of the three rings was on the finger that, if he remembered correctly, was supposed to hold the wedding band.

    He could only hope that that legend was true, at least. Any number of the others had already fallen like pigs at slaughtering time.

    “But the main thing,” she continued, “is simply that it’s much too soon to determine if you have PTSD in the first place. You may very well not be suffering from it at all, Thorsten.”

    The door behind her opened, and a middle-aged woman emerged, followed by another. From various subtleties of dress and manner—mostly the latter—Thorsten knew that the second woman was the up-timer.

    His assessment was confirmed an instant later.

    “Thank you, Maureen,” said the first women. “I shall see you next week, then.”

    “Yes—but at noon, not the usual time, Cleopha.”

    While the German woman passed through the outer room, nodding in a friendly way to Caroline and a polite way to Thorsten, Maureen held her door open. Once Cleopha had left, she glanced at Thorsten and then looked at Caroline.

    “Can I speak to you for a moment, Maureen?”

    “Of course, Caroline. Come in.”

    Once Thorsten was alone in the room, he was finally able to relax a bit. “Relax,” at least, in the way that a twenty-six year old man will relax while his mind seems to have dozens of ideas ricocheting about at random—all of them involving a plot or scheme or ploy or maneuver to figure out how he could possibly manage to see this woman again, each and every one of which he is almost certain is completely hare-brained.

    After Caroline finished her quick summary of the Engler case, Maureen Grady shook her head. “God, that accident was horrible. Dennis got there toward the end, you know. There were still pieces of people lying all over. One corpse he saw hadn’t even been decapitated. The head was simply disintegrated. Dennis almost vomited.”

    Caroline grimaced. Maureen’s husband Dennis was a cop, and as hard-boiled as most cops are. It took a lot to penetrate his hide.

    Maureen was now consulting her calendar. “Did he tell you when he’d be leaving for boot camp?”

    “No. I don’t think he knows himself.”

    “Damn army!” Maureen said, half-chuckling. “Whatever else is different between this universe and the one we left behind, one thing for sure and certain stayed the same. The army’s motto is still ‘hurry up and wait.’”

    She pushed the calendar aside. “I can see him tomorrow, at two o’clock. After that…”

    She shrugged slightly. “We’d have to wait anyway, even if he weren’t going into the service. But it might still be helpful for him to have a counselor to talk to. Do you want to handle it yourself? It doesn’t need to be here, since you’re mostly at the settlement house. You could set it up to see him over there, in one of the spare rooms.”

    Caroline issued the same sort of half-chuckle. “’Spare rooms’! A broom closet, maybe.”

    She hesitated, then looked at the door beyond which an unseen Thorsten Engler was waiting. Then, still hesitating, looked out of Maureen’s window.

    “Oh, don’t tell me,” Maureen said. The chuckle that came out this time was a full one.

    Caroline made a face. “For Pete’s sake, Maureen, I just met the man. Still…”

    She gave Maureen a look that tried and failed to be aloof. “Seeing as how you insist on maintaining the social workers’ professional ethics code, in every jot and tittle…”

    “You’re damn right I do, young lady. I don’t care if we’d been planted back in the Stone Age. If you take someone on as a client, that will be your one and only relationship with that person. Ever. I don’t care if its twenty years later.”

    Caroline nodded, and looked back out the window. She hadn’t expected a different response—and, for that matter, didn’t disagree with Maureen anyway. There was a very good reason for that tight-laced code of ethics.

    Mostly, she realized, she was just startled. Twice, today, and by the same man. That… certain sort of startlement. The one that suddenly, unexpectedly, makes you focus on a person. She hadn’t felt that since the Ring of Fire. Hadn’t really expected she ever would again.

    “In that case, no,” she said. “I think it might be better if someone else took him on as a client.”

    “Fine.” Maureen was all business, now, back to checking her calendar. “If he wants to see someone before he leaves, tell him I can set something up. Lutgardis would do fine. So would Maria Magdalena or Rosina. Maybe Gertrud, too, although I’d be happier if she had a little more experience. We’ll manage, one way or another.”

    Maureen made sure to get a good look at the Engler fellow, as she ushered Caroline out the door. Nothing too long or rude, of course. Just enough to get a sense of things.

    She was quite satisfied by the brief study. Engler had that certain unmistakable look about him. Caroline wouldn’t really grasp it, of course, since she was too close to the matter. But to Maureen it was obvious.

    Rather a good-looking man, too, even if you couldn’t really call him handsome. Dark-haired, blue-eyed, quite a nice mouth and a perfectly acceptable nose. A bit on the stocky side, maybe—but to make up for it he seemed to have better teeth than usual.

    But all that was trivial. What mattered was the look on his face, that Maureen had seen but Caroline hadn’t, because she’d been too busy looking somewhere else while Engler tried and failed miserably to keep from ogling her.

    Okay, “ogling” wasn’t really fair. He seemed a perfectly polite man. But it was still The Look. The one—perhaps the only one—that made men really, really cute. She could remember the same look on her husband’s face, years back, when he’d spent two hours skittering all over before he finally asked her out on a date. By the end, she’d thought he might have a complete meltdown before he managed to get the words out.

    It was the look on an ox’s face, she imagined, when the hammer comes down. She’d never worked in a slaughterhouse, so she wasn’t positive. But if it wasn’t, it ought to be.

    She checked to make sure the door was closed. It was a nice thick heavy seventeenth century door, too. Not quite soundproof, but close enough. Then, started hopping up and down and pumping her fist in a cheerleader’s gesture of victory.

    “Yes! Yes! Yes! About fucking time!”

    “No, you wouldn’t be seeing me, Thorsten. I only work here part of the time, anyway. Just in the mornings on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Most of the time I work at the settlement house. Are you familiar with it? It’s almost on the river, not far south of the Navy Yard.”

    “Oh. Yes, I’ve seen it. Never went in, though.”

    She gave him her best smile. “You should drop by some time, then.”

    “I would not wish to intrude.”

    “Oh, don’t be silly. It’d be nice to see you again. Really, it would.”