The Many Petals of a Rose

The Many

Petals

Of A Rose

Heidi Ebelt

AuthorHouse™

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© 2013 by Heidi Ebelt. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 06/03/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5451-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-5452-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909336

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Table of Contents

Planning the first time

The kiss

Leaving Berlin

England

The stranger

The touch

Unreciprocated love

Faire l’autostop

Paris

The boy from the Bordello

Fighting for her life

Home again

The boyfriend

Entering the lion’s den

Planning the

first time

Her parents named her Rose. If it was for her rosy cheeks or her rosy disposition, or the flower she never found out. When she was small, her mom loved to sing to them at bed time in her beautiful voice and many times she asked her for one song in particular, the rose in the heath. Her mom had told her that the famous poet and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had written Heidenroeslein and the rose stood for a former love while Franz Schubert had given the poem its melody.

The song begins when a young boy discovers a rose in the heath, looking young and beautiful like the dawn and he rushes to look at it and in his eyes it transforms into a beautiful young girl. He tells her of his intentions that he will take her but the rose warns him that she will prick him so that he will never forget her. The wild boy is not discouraged and even though the rose fights back, moans and groans in pain, he succeeds in plucking her.

She liked her name but when she was fifteen a huge scandal exploded in the German papers, when a young woman named Rosemarie was found strangled on the day of the dead, November 1st 1957, in her apartment in Frankfurt. Rosemarie was born in 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor and had grown up in foster homes, but in spite of her childhood she had become a wealthy prostitute being linked to high ranking personalities and a business man was a prime suspect. In school a substitute teacher talked about the murder of the prostitute, proclaiming that if her name were Rosemarie she would change it unaware that one of the students was called Rose.

Her best friend was Camilla and they liked the fact that they were both named after flowers. When they were teenagers they made a pact with each other, to share the first time with their still unknown boyfriends and possible husbands together. They had not thought of the how and where, only that it would be a day of utter happiness and the most important event of their young lives. She was nineteen then, her girlfriend eighteen and they already felt old. She had read Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire where Blanche Dubois was described as a twenty-nine year old spinster. Time was running out for them, they did not want to become virgin spinsters.

They had known each other since they were little kids, since her girlfriend had moved next door and they shared a common wall, dividing one long hallway from another. They lived in the Vorderhaus, the front house, on the third floor, and there were three apartments on each floor, two of them facing the front while Camilla’s apartment faced the back. Tenants reached the back house and courtyard with its sandbox through a door next to the super’s apartment. The left wing had regular apartments while the right wing had a spiral staircase leading to the former maid rooms which were now occupied by families since there was a great shortage of apartments.

Camilla’s family consisting of her mom, a twin brother, an older brother and sister had been expelled by force from Silesia and in 1946 had to leave everything behind. Most of Silesia was transferred to Poland not unlike Pomerania, her mom’s birthplace. The grandmother followed telling of tremendous hardships she had to endure and she was a frail tiny woman with long hair tied in a bun.

When the weather was not suitable for outdoor play, the thirty-one children who lived in the building, played indoor games. They jumped up the stairs to the huge attic and ran across it, then down the stairs in the back house or vice versa, but then they slid down the wide smooth cherry wood banister, always stopping at the end which had a large window to the courtyard, then mounting the next banister until they reached the bottom which had a tree chiseled into its reddish brown shiny surface, curved at the end, meeting with a tall wooden post its pointed top beautifully carved with sun flowers.

The attic was mysterious, a little dark, almost misty, with small windows, storing collections from the tenants and providing a great view on the street. Her father had stored newspapers there as paper had become valuable and they consequently disappeared. The basement on the other hand was scary, and they rarely ventured there ever since they found a dead rat.

Camilla’s father appeared suddenly, having survived a Russian prison, and the children who had just been running through the house, slid down the banisters and cheered the emaciated figure loudly. The super came out in a rage but calmed down when she learnt the reason. He was the second father who had come back from a Russian prison camp and had never met his daughter who was also surprised since her father had supposedly died in the war.

One day workers appeared and tore down the wall between their apartments, and they happily jumped over the dividing line spending time in each other’s apartment becoming as close as people could become short of being family members. The girls always brushed their grandma’s hair who was sitting on a spinning chair and one day she was gone. As the wall was being rebuilt and crept higher and higher, much to their disappointment, they had to use the door again to enter each other’s apartment.

She knew nothing about the opposite sex and when confronted for the first time with a man at the age of eight, she was utterly shocked. Her uncle visiting from East Berlin was sitting on the toilet and she had opened the door. What were these appendixes hanging from him, she wondered in disgust, did any of her friends knew about this? At first she was too ashamed to even ask and now boys appeared to her hideous since they had to carry these awful things between their legs.

She had never seen her parents undressed, they never kissed in front of her and they had told her never to kiss anyone on the mouth, not even her relatives of which she only knew her uncle, aunt and