Printed in the United States of America
iUniverse rev. date: 11/18/2011
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
A bright-eyed seven-year-old walked alongside his mother as they strolled the aisles of the crowded, outdoor market. He maintained a mischievous, snaggletooth grin as a stick of blue raspberry flavored rock candy hung from his mouth. He zigzagged between shoppers, dribbling his basketball with the precision of a future point guard.
It was a Saturday afternoon; the summertime weather was refreshingly cool, and a slight breeze, filled with the pleasant aroma of freshly cut flowers and various fresh fruits, blew through the busy streets. The market was bustling with people carrying baskets filled with colorful fruits and vegetables. A man strumming a guitar sat in front of the corner fruit stand; children passed by in the street kicking a soccer ball back and forth, laughing as they darted effortlessly through the crowd. Two elderly men, both distinguished, sharply dressed, retired, college professors, sat outside a nearby café playing chess and laughing heartily over coffee and conversation.
The moment the little boy spotted the two gentlemen, he turned to his mother and asked permission to cross the street. With only a slant of her eyes, his mother reminded him that when he addressed her, he was to do so in English. He smiled, realizing his error, and his mother smiled back at him with an amused nod. Again, he asked permission to cross the street to go to the café, and his mother sent him on his way. The little boy dribbled his basketball across the street as he bounded toward his two companions, eager to hear what new stories they had for him.
“Hurry back, Grant!” his mother called after him. “We have a lot of packing to do this afternoon!” She breathed in her own words as she practically danced down the row of fruit with a spring that had been absent from her steps for months if not years.
Grant Cohen was a quiet little boy, much more comfortable in the presence of adults than with children his own age. He had spent the past two years being home schooled by two German professors who found his inquisitive nature most remarkable. They taught him the language, culture and history of their country while taking him through daily lessons on arithmetic, philosophy and literature. Otto and Ludwig didn’t believe in classrooms or textbooks, so, instead of boring their young student with lectures, they took him on frequent fieldtrips and allowed him to experience Europe firsthand. At seven years of age, Grant had an incredible command of the German language and a vast understanding of things beyond his years. He was an incredibly gifted child who genuinely enjoyed learning; he was a teacher’s dream…attentive, yet not without his own views, opinions and surprisingly well-thought-out theories. Otto and Ludwig’s teaching methods were unconventional, but Grant thrived under their care, and they grew to love him. The inevitable news that Grant’s father was taking him back home to the United States had hit them much harder than they had expected. In a matter of days, their young protégé would go back home to America and integrate into a classroom where Dresden is a dot on a map and studying its tragic history means looking at a picture in a history book, not going on an educational walking tour through the site of World War II’s most controversial bombings. Otto and Ludwig worried that, while they had educated Grant in the most stimulating manner they knew how, they had done very little to prepare him for the classroom he would enter back home in North Carolina.
It was not at all uncommon to find Grant, after his lessons were done for the day, sitting in the vast library in Ludwig’s office, mesmerized by the shelves of books that stretched from floor to ceiling. Grant loved literature, particularly, at that point in his life, the work of Ernest Hemingway. He was fascinated by stories of bull fights, boxing matches, fishing expeditions and warfare. One day, while on a train to Hannover, Grant found himself transported into the world of an American ambulance driver serving in the Italian Army during World War I. Ludwig was a tremendously talented storyteller, and he pulled no punches while discussing the fictional tales that Grant loved. While A Farewell to Arms was not necessarily intended for a seven-year-old boy, it was always Ludwig’s belief that if Grant possessed enough discernment to ask certain questions about a books’ content, it was his responsibility as an educator to answer them honestly. Grant was always full of questions; he wanted words defined, scenarios explained and themes analyzed. He sat on his knees there in his seat on the train listening carefully to every word that Ludwig said. Their conversation moved with ease from German back to English and back to German again. Fellow passengers found themselves intrigued by the astuteness demonstrated by the young, unassuming, fair-haired, little boy whose English was accented by a subtle, yet distinctive, German accent.
At night, Grant often sat outside at his father’s feet, dribbling his basketball and listening to his father and his father’s foul-mouthed comrades telling stories, which often included language that made his mother, who listened inconspicuously from the kitchen window, shudder angrily.
Nora Miller Cohen was a southern belle from a tiny Tennessee farm town, and, though she had traveled with her husband for the entirety of their twenty-six year marriage, she was unashamedly partial to the American Southland. When her husband’s job had landed the newlywed couple at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, she had fallen in love with the state, and, for the simple reason that none of her five children had ever lived in her home state of Tennessee, she now proudly called North Carolina her home.
As Nora walked through the market on that Saturday afternoon that summer, she did so with a pep in her step because in less than twenty-four hours she was going to board a plane that would take her and her family back home to the Tar Heel State.
“All by yourself today, are you?” General Cohen chuckled as he snuck up behind his wife.
Nora turned quickly, smiling at the sight of her husband, now a much older, but equally intense, version of the West Point cadet she had fallen in love with so many years earlier. “Oh, Randy, you scared me,” she scolded. “You know I hate it when you sneak up on me.”
“Where’s the knucklehead?” Randy asked as he draped his arm around his wife’s shoulders.
“He’s doing his morning rounds,” Nora mused. She pointed. “He spotted Otto and Ludwig sitting outside the café.”
From across the street, Randy watched his youngest son conversing with the two gentlemen. Grant sat on Otto’s knee, and they seemed to be discussing their Chess game with passionate intensity. Randy had never particularly cared for Chess, but his son’s introduction to the game had turned him into somewhat of a master strategist, and Randy reveled in thoughts of the possibilities that lie ahead of his brilliant mini-me.
“Grant really will miss this place, Randy,” Nora sighed. “I’m afraid that his teachers back home might find that he speaks better German than English.”
“Well, we both know that he speaks perfect English and has a rather exhaustive vocabulary to boot, but perhaps Grant would prefer to spend another year here with his tutors,” Randy suggested.
“You let him speak German to you…that’s the problem, you know?” Nora said, intentionally ignoring Randy’s announcement. “Do you have any idea how it makes me feel that my seven-year-old can carry on entire conversations during which I have no cotton-pickin’ idea what he said? Sometimes I think you forget you were born in Massachusetts and not somewhere on this side of the world, Randy.”
“But thanks to a twang like yours, we won’t ever forget that you’re a farm girl from Tennessee, will we little lady?” Randy replied with a roll of his eyes. During his days as a cadet, Randy had taken painstaking measures to eliminate what had once been a very thick Boston accent. For the sake of his job, in order to be taken seriously, he had acquired a sort of accent free, middle American dialect, but his wife was one hundred percent southern and proud as she could be about it.
