15.6.2014
My husband suggested that I stay home today, as today is Sunday, and take a day off to care for Retia. He would handle matters in my stead while I stayed home. At first I opposed - there had not been anything wrong with bringing our baby daughter with us to work. I kept out of the way for the most part, unless I had to attend an important meeting, staying in my office with Retia, working on reports or answering calls while playing with my daughter. No, he said, today I ought to simply stay home for today. He himself would not be away for long, so he told me not to worry.
So, being the good wife that I aspire to be, I relented. However, I did make him stay an extra half an hour while I made some lunch for him to take with him to work - some grilled cheese and ham sandwiches - and made him promised that he would return home no later than 16:00 in the afternoon. He tried to claim that I was making unreasonable demands, but he dropped his act when it was clear I was not trying to joke around.
As I watched him drive out, I did think about my husband's thoughts about me bringing Retia with us to work. At first Gernot had opposed the whole matter, but he could not otherwise sway a mother's wish. He has not explicitly stated his reasons for his opposition, but I do believe that they stem from basic adult fears, that something may happen to our baby girl. We may get into a car crash while going to work (car crashes are very rare, though), and my husband and I may become injured, even killed, and leave Retia with no parents, either temporarily or permanently. Or, even worse, Retia herself might become injured or even killed. The Reichstag itself might get attacked in a terrorist strike, like the one at Hanover, and something may happen to Retia. Assassins might make an attempt on Retia's life or our lives if we bring her to work with us on the wrong day at the wrong time. Anything out of a whole infinitesimal plethora of causes may hurt my beloved Retia, our beloved Retia. It is our duty, both Gernot's and mine, to protect our daughter. That is what parents do. It is what any parent who cares about his or her child at all would do.
Thankfully, we have yet to encounter such a situation or an event, and I would very much so prefer to keep it so.
So today being Sunday, I spent the day relaxing with Retia, playing with her and reading some of the books that I have in the library that I still need to finish from my weekend nighttime readings while she napped. I called Heidi and invited her over for some afternoon tea and some bratwurst I was cooking for an evening snack for the family. The weather was very nice, and the sunshine poured into the house very well. There is something so...calming and majestic about reading a book on a nice, sunny day, so I opened up the windows and let the summer breeze flow in as I read Doctor Faustus.
After finishing the book, I decided to watch some TV. Normally I never have much time to watch television, as my work consumes most of my time, and given my role in the Bundestag, I usually receive information before most of the rest of the populace does, anyway, so watching the news is rather pointless for me. Usually, whenever we do use the television for anything, it is for movie nights with the girls. But today was different. I was flipping through the channels for something interesting to watch, perhaps a documentary or something of the like, when I passed over the news presenting a feature story that caught my eye. It was about a relative of one of the perpetrators of the Hanover Massacre, and she talked about how nobody knew that he even was part of the NDP. He was, in almost every conceivable way, non-NDP - his beliefs and actions all throughout his life always suggested that he was a good person and did not condone anything that constituted the NDP's own beliefs and actions, yet suddenly he now lies dead in his grave near his home, his name tarnished as an evil terrorist who had done terrible things against his own countrymen for seemingly arbitrarily extremist values. He never seemed like one to join a party like the NDP, so why so suddenly? It was only up until very recently, just before the massacre, that the said terrorist was, well, not a terrorist, and then all of a sudden, the massacre happens, and the GSG-9 shoots him dead.
This rang alarm bells in my head, and I immediately phoned Jollenbeck. I told him about the news report I saw on television just then, and I asked him if the interrogations he conducted showed signs of possible mind-control, as far-fetched as that may sound. Jollenbeck did mention that indeed, the man they captured from the Hanover Massacre did appear to behave and speak fanatically at first before they broke him in for information, and he and his fellow interrogators did take possible brainwashing and other such manipulative methods into account. Certainly their man did not seem like the normal, average, healthy German citizen. It had been clear that something had been done to him, but the effects of such treatment were not profound enough to the point where it was an obvious threat or enough to impair his cognitive thinking and logical reasoning.
I then phoned Heidi one more time while keeping Jollenbeck still on the line. I ordered her to head down to the BfV department and request that they map out the areas of residence of the terrorists involved in the Hanover Massacre. After that, they would have the authority to order several units of the local police forces in the area to interview the neighbors and the relatives of the terrorists, just like yesterday. I want to know if the man that Jollenbeck's men interrogated is but one of many like him who may have become brainwashed by the NDP to carry out their plans. Because if such is the case, then we have yet another problem on our hands.
I relayed to Jollenbeck the orders I had given to Heidi. I ordered Jollenbeck to monitor all kidnapping reports throughout the country within the past month and see if any of them matched up with our terrorists. Maybe the man that was interrogated may not have been kidnapped, but perhaps there are others who were. Is the reason why the NDP had been growing in strength and numbers until this time because of brainwashing or mind control? It sounds ridiculous, and normally I would not believe this to be true. But after living with humanoid robots called "ship girls" for a month, there may be truths to this world that are yet beyond the grasp of the public world sense of reality. If there exists technology to revive old warships and place their souls in the bodies of young teenage girls who are much stronger than the average human being, then surely it is not out of the realm of possibility that there exists technology to do other wondrous things as well.
Perhaps I did end up working just as much as I would have in my office. A good politician's work never ends...is what I'd like to tell myself. God only knows if I have yet to reach that threshold.
At 14:00, Heidi arrived with her own baby daughter, who is incidentally the same age as Retia at one year old. We enjoyed some simple Teekanne green tea, as I had no time to actually prepare proper tea because I had just gotten off the phone with my husband, informing him of my actions at home. Heidi reported that the BfV was hard at work trying to discover the reasons behind the NDP personnel's disappearances, and that they would tackle this case as well. I asked her about the plausibility and the feasibility of perhaps raising the salaries of the men and women of the BfV department, and Heidi replied that such raises should depend on the outcome of their research. And she also mentioned that on the topic of raising salaries, I ought to raise hers so that she could afford that new Bentayaga SUV she and her husband have been setting their eyes on perhaps purchasing or at least leasing. Needless to say, we both laughed.
Since this is the first time our daughters have met, we paid lots of attention to them as we introduced them to one another. Retia seemed to be intrigued by the sight of someone just like herself and toddled over to her, and Ermi seemed surprised to see that someone like herself was already able to walk. So Retia plopped down beside her and started poking Ermi on her arm, as though trying to elicit a reaction of some sort. Ermi did not know how to react to this, so she simply began to cry, not knowing what else to do. Heidi and I both giggled.
Heidi and Ermi returned home just as Gernot returned home - in fact, Gernot arrived just in time to bid Heidi and her baby girl goodbye. Gernot asked me how Retia received baby Ermi, and I told him of their interactions, which made my husband laugh too. He said that our baby girls would grow up to be good friends. I do not know whether he was being sarcastic or not, but here is to hoping that they do in fact grow up to become best friends.
This time tonight, I received a call on my laptop from Bismarck. Her voice was quite strained and showed signs of hard labor, and Bismarck reported that this training program was extremely tough. Had she not been built a battleship, she, too, would have ended up dead exhausted just like the others. Lebe, Max, Prinz Eugen, U, and Libeccio were all already dead asleep by this time, and Bismarck herself professed that she herself was quite close to passing out on her own bed after her nightly report. The training regimen had demonstrated all too painfully clearly that their lack of consistent training had made them all grow quite soft, and compared to the Royal Girls, they looked pathetic, and Bismarck even mentioned that her pride was bruised today. But she was determined to train to become just as good as the rest of the English ship girls.
Not wanting to keep Bismarck in the dark, I informed her of the recent developments in the country, about how NDP personnel were disappearing without a trace, and about the possibility that NDP personnel may have been brainwashed into committing evil deeds such as the terrorist attack in Hanover. I asked Bismarck to relay this information to the others so that they, too, would know what was going on in Germany by the time they returned in two weeks' time. Bismarck agreed and asked me to stay safe, especially Retia. This was a new an uncertain time, she said, and unlike ship girls like herself, if something happened to us, we could not expect to be so resilient.
Before ending the call, Bismarck did pine about how she already missed the comforts of our home. She mourned that she had allowed herself to grow so accustomed to the comforts of our lovely home that it was hard for her to truly let go of all the habits and tendencies and expectations she held while living here with us. This drew some chuckles out of us, but I ensured Bismarck that everything would be just the same as she'd left it when she and the rest come back home. And of course, Retia would be there to greet them when they do.
Speaking of my daughter, I can hear Retia rolling around on the covers of our bed. She has been doing this quite often recently - I think it is because she saw Prinz Eugen and Lebe do so one of the nights before they departed for England and wants to mimic them. Or she actually derives some kind of small joy out of rolling around on soft bedsheets.