School Days and Finding a Profession

After her family immigrated, Greta was enrolled in a special school for police and bureaucrats’ children where her mother had joined the staff.  At the school it was discovered that Greta had a special gift for languages.  She already spoke and read German and Russian.  Her family had spoken Russian at home in Germany to stay in practice for when they were recalled to Moscow and her mother taught her to read and write Russian so she could immediately enter school.  Greta had learned to read and write German on the playground and in her kindergarten.  At the Russian school in Saint Petersburg she had learned to speak, read, and write English and French.  She had gone through school in an accelerated liberal arts course and when she was sixteen she had graduated and then started attending the polytechnic school.  Greta had discovered her great passion there.  She had learned to fly both fixed wing planes and helicopters in less than a year and started working at the flight center in exchange for advanced commercial flying lessons.  When she wasn’t eating, sleeping, or studying she was flying.

One day she left for work early to finish a complicated navigation assignment that needed to be completed that day.  She had been reviewing some of her papers on fuel calculations after breakfast and when she sat down on the trolley she discovered that she had the papers but had been so preoccupied that she forgot her lunch and brief case with the rest of her assignment. At the next stop, she jumped off the trolley and ran back toward her parents’ apartment that was six or seven blocks back up the street. When she got a block away from her parent’s apartment, she saw cars with red lights blocking the street and an ambulance. She stopped and asked one of the people standing on the sidewalk what had happened.

“I don’t know. Suddenly, all these cars showed up and the police ran in,” said the man. “I heard that one of the neighbors said someone was shooting.”

Greta started to move toward the police line when she saw her father’s cousin walking toward her. He made push back motions at the crowd with his hands and then ducked under the police tape and took her arm and kept walking.  When they were a block away he pulled her to a transit station bench and sat down.

“What’s going on, Uncle Rolf? Where are Momma and Daddy?” asked Greta.

“There is no easy way to say this, Greta. They are dead.  Your father started shooting and they killed them. Thank God I saw you. They probably have people waiting at your work. Your father and I both worked for both sides long ago and the wrong people finally found out about him. I am going to give you some money. Take a taxi to the airport. Do you have your papers?” 

Greta nodded and he handed her an envelope.

“Give me your papers and I will try to confuse things.  Here, take this. It is all the cash I have and there are some new identity papers in there too. I’ll call and there will be a ticket to Berlin at the Aeroflot counter under a name that matches the papers. You are Greta Steiner now, a German student.  Speak only German until you get to Berlin. A blond-haired woman with a red carnation in her hands will meet you in Berlin. She will rush up and call you Nina and give you a hug and the flower. Go with her, they will keep you safe.”

She had boarded the plane in a state of shock and the woman had met her when they landed. Greta went with the woman and they trained her in what they did, and she had spied and betrayed and murdered and fornicated and lied for them. And they had been her family and they had kept her safe.