Verena 3
By Gersheimer gersheimer77@seznam.cz
A war-time romance; an improbable, but true story. Part 3

1943: Escaped French pilot rescued by a huge German woman - his future wife. 

'I must kill the fat pig at any cost!' was the first that came to Raynal's mind. 
'This is my duty as a soldier of France, to hit the enemy at the highest whenever an 
opportunity appears,' he reasoned. However, he recalled his other oath given to 
Verena that he would follow her rules, and his resolution not to endanger her. The 
conflicting oaths ringed in his mind for hours and he couldn't fall asleep that night 
at all. His lovemaking abilities also suffered, but Verena was tolerant, attributing 
this obviously to his previous exhaustion and starvation.

Early next morning, Verena woke up, kissed Raynal good morning and went to an 
old armoire, from which she took out two rifles. "How good a marksman you are, 
Jean?" she asked and continued: 
"We will have to prepare supplies for the dinner for the hunters. There will be 
around forty-five of them, so I estimate that one wild boar and one adult deer 
plus six to eight pheasants will be enough." 

"They won't eat what they themselves shoot?" asked Raynal, unfamiliar with the 
hunting practice.

"Of course not, you silly; there wouldn't be enough time for preparation of the 
meals then. Moreover, any wild game needs a time to ripen for consumption -- two 
weeks are optimum. What the hunters shoot they take with them to their families 
for later use. And in the present wartime with strict food rationing, even some 
of the prominent people would enjoy such a supplement to the rations. The 
Reichsmarschall, of course, not," explained Verena.

They put on their clothes and went to a quiet, frosty morning. It was still dark 
as Verena wanted to be back home before the babies woke up. The snow was softly 
cracking under their boots. "I know how to shoot a hunting rifle, but I am no 
sharpshooter," said Verena. "I just hope you can shoot better than I, my little 
soldier." 

Raynal wasn't quite convinced about it. As an airman, he didn't undergo much 
shooting practice even before the war. However, he was amazed at this turn of 
events. To be walking freely in an enemy country, under the loving personal 
protection of its biggest woman, and now even with a gun in his hands. Did 
something like this happen to anyone in the whole history? he mused.

In a short time they came to the favourite place of an adult wild hog. Its tracks 
in the snow were visible everywhere around. Both of them listened carefully, guns 
ready to shoot. Minutes passed and first glow of day began to appear when 
suddenly the biggest hog Raynal had ever seen jumped without warning from a 
bush and ran straight at him.

Verena shot first but missed and Raynal had very little time to aim his own rifle. 
His own bullet hit the hog in one of the front legs crippling the creature, but 
still its momentum was enough to steamroll over Jean's still weak body. He finished 
on his back, the maybe 150-kg animal not only lying on top of him but also writhing 
wildly. Raynal was totally unable to breathe and he felt some bones in his body 
cracking. Only a short time before his brain would go black from lack of air, he was 
suddenly relieved and watched Verena lifting the hog in one fluid motion by its two 
left legs in the air over her head and tossing it against an oak tree. Bones cracked 
and the animal stopped writhing in few moments, while Raynal tried to catch his 
breath again. It was a painful process.

Verena was at his side in a second: "I am so sorry, Jean! How are you?" She 
expertly ran her fingers around his body and considering all Jean's painful reactions 
she finally resumed: "It seems like one or two ribs on either side is broken, but 
nothing else. At home I will make you a bandage and try to keep you as calm as 
possible. Can you walk?" 

Raynal stood up and took a few steps. The pains from his ribcage when breathing 
were strong but tolerable, and leaning on the rifle he was able to walk slowly. To 
his shock Verena wordlessly took the now dead oversized hog by its two front legs 
and put it effortlessly over her right shoulder, as if it was a just small bag of 
potatoes, and again walked as fast as before, only a bit slouched to the right side, 
back to the lodge. After a while she noticed that the pace was too fast for her 
injured companion, so she waited for him and, extending her left arm, she said 
merrily: "Hop on!"

Jean just stood there not believing what he had just seen, so Verena squatted down a 
bit, embraced his mid-section with her left arm and stood up again. "Would you 
hold both rifles, please? It's good anyway to have the weight I am carrying at least 
a bit balanced. When I was working for the circus..." and Verena merrily talked all 
the way back home, walking as fast as usual without any sign of strain.

The next two days -- and especially nights -- Raynal kept thinking about what he 
was going to do regarding his conflicting oaths. He still felt himself to be bound 
to harm the enemy by killing the Supreme Commander of its Air Force, but was sure 
that such an act would again mean the end not only for him, but also to Verena and 
her daughters.

Late on the second night, he had a strange dream: David, his old-time British friend 
from the POW camp, came to his bed and started to explain to him something 
obviously very important. He spoke vigorously and gesticulated wildly, repeating 
full sentences again and again, only in an unintelligible language -- probably his 
native Welsh -- so Raynal didn't understand a single word of it!

Before Raynal woke up, he managed to recognize only two words, repeated again 
and again: "Dunkirk" and "Luftwaffe." 

'So, what David might have wanted to tell me?' reasoned Raynal, sitting in bed. 
'Why he didn't speak English or French? And what might be the meaning of it?' he 
thought. 'Dunkirk is obvious,' David was one of a very few British soldiers taken 
captive when the German Blitzkrieg offensive in May 1940 pushed the Allies to the 
banks of the La Manche near the port of Dunkirk. He was injured and left in a 
Belgian military hospital, thus falling captive when Belgian King Leopold 
capitulated at the end of May. Almost all of the remaining British and French 
soldiers however managed to evacuate from Dunkirk by June 4th. But what was 
that about Luftwaffe, the German Air Force?

And then Raynal suddenly remembered: It was David's earliest narration about how 
the beginning of the war went around him. "On May 25th, 1940, we were defeated, 
almost surrounded and moving in total disorder on a single road to Dunkirk, the 
only usable port for eventual evacuation. The German tanks were everywhere 
around us, including at the sea, and all the enemy had to do was to move with its 
tanks five more miles and cut the road to Dunkirk. Then, 350,000 British and 
French soldiers would have fallen captive, instead of just us few dozens wounded. 
And what was the reason that it didn't happen?

"Rumors have it that the German tank unit commanders wanted to cross our path 
and finish us quickly, but then it was Goering, the commander of the German Air 
Force, who persuaded the Fuhrer to stop them on the pretext that his bombing 
squadrons alone would make short work with us. He didn't fulfill that promise 
though, as the British Isles were close and RAF fighters were ready to defend us 
from their home bases. Plus, the weather wasn't friendly to air operations as well.

That's how it happened that the then-entire British army wasn't put out of the war 
as early as in the spring of '40."

"That's what David wanted to tell me!" exclaimed Raynal involuntarily. 'Killing the 
Reichsmarschall would make no actual harm to the enemy! He is a vain idiot who 
has actually helped us Allies through his stupid decisions! If he was ever 
eliminated, someone smarter might come to assume his place and could make more 
harm, perhaps even prolong the war,' he finished mentally. However, his earlier cry 
of relief woke up Verena, who asked him what was on. 

"Just thinking, ma belle; have you ever tried morning sex?" And they started 
another lovemaking session, all previous inhibitions on his side having been 
instantly removed.

The next day Verena went to the nearest post office with a public telephone and 
upon return she explained how the things will go: "The hunt will be eleven days 
from now, on Sunday. As it is common to start before sunrise, some of the guests 
will come on Saturday evening. The Reichsmarschall and the high-ranking guests 
will sleep in a luxury chateau nearby, but the drivers, bodyguards, manservants, etc. 
will sleep those two nights here; I will make them places in the hayloft above us.

"You, Jean, speak German quite well but you wouldn't pass for a native speaker. 
You will thus have to pass for my deaf-mute cousin who came to help me with 
cooking and so on. I actually have such a cousin back there in Larrach -- my parents 
will keep him inside their house during those days. He is only eighteen, so you will 
have to shave your beard clean to appear younger. Still, you must not raise any 
suspicion. I, and all the others, will communicate with you by notes on slips of 
paper. You must not utter a word and, more importantly, you must not react to any 
sound, however strong, through the entire time!"

Raynal considered this extremely difficult, but agreed. Her next question, however, 
startled him a bit more: "By the way, Jean, how good are you when it comes to 
cooking?" 

"Well, a few years ago, when I was in that flight school in Colmar, the food in the 
cadet's mess was so terrible that we made a brotherhood and every day one of us 
always cooked dinner for the rest from the supplies we had bought. No one 
complained too much against my creations. But really, you don't want me to cook 
for the Reichsmarschall, Verena?" asked Raynal suspiciously. 

Her widely grinning face however told him that she had thought precisely about 
this. "Just let the Reichsmarschall and the others enjoy the French art of cooking 
once," she said. "We will have enough time to try, you will make something and I 
the rest.

"However," she continued, "there will come an advance party this weekend, two 
days from now. Two men from Reichsmarschall's entourage plus two men from 
Gestapo will come to check the venue thoroughly and we will have to tend to them. 
So the 'deaf-mute regime' between us must, unfortunately, start just now, so that we 
get used to it in time," said Verena and kissed him deeply.

Communicating through notes written on paper seemed strange, but Verena's loving 
attitude to him removed all restraint. The less talking, the more touching was there 
between them and Jean enjoyed every bit of her enormous yet beautiful body.

On Saturday morning the bell rang, and two men in typical Gestapo overcoats, plus 
two in Luftwaffe uniforms, appeared at the forestry house. Verena greeted them and 
started showing them the surroundings. The first conflict came soon. When she 
presented Raynal as Hugo, her deaf-mute 18 year-old cousin, he tried not to raise 
any suspicion. But, one of the Gestapo men took his still starved-looking face by its 
chin and spoke haughtily: "So that's the deaf-mute guy from Baden. He looks to me 
dumb rather than deaf, though. Anyway, I heard once that a few sound slaps at one's 
face can often return both senses to the respective head, and then the guy in 
question can even join the Wehrmacht like his peers did!" said the brute laughing 
loudly and raising his hand for a blow at Jean's face. Raynal blinked at Verena at 
the right time when she made her move. In fact, only her left hand did move.

It was just a simple short backhand slap at the Gestapo man's face, fast as a blur, 
but still the blow was strong enough to push the over-100 kilo man three meters back, 
knocking a heavy seat on the way as well as some of his teeth out of his mouth. The 
second Gestapo man went for his gun and pointed it at Verena, crying: "You are 
arrested, you hag!" 

She didn't seem concerned, looked around and, with a similar lightning-fast sweep 
of her right hand, slapped the gun out of his hand to the corner of the room. Then 
she took both men by the collars of their overcoats, one in each hand, and slammed 
them to the wall simultaneously before speaking slowly and carefully:

"Be careful what you say in a Black Forest household. I mean that about joining the 
Wehrmacht. Let me remind you that the Reichsmarschall's family has its roots in 
the Black Forest as well, and that the Reichsmarschall might be very interested in 
why two such strong, courageous men are not protecting the Reich at its eastern 
borders, where the threat for the Vaterland is the highest."

Whether they both went pale by the force of her slam or by her threat, Raynal didn't 
know. She then bodily threw them out of the door and told them to return only the 
next day to retrieve their pistols -- or else! And they did precisely that.

The remaining two men obviously didn't express sympathy for the Gestapo men 
either, and the consultations went on smoothly. On Sunday evening, after making a 
deal with Verena about how the hunt and the dinner would go, and what would 
have to be brought to the lodge from outside before it starts, the advance party left.

After that, Verena and Jean afforded themselves to talk to each other again. He was 
interested in what she was threatening the Gestapo men with, and Verena explained: 
"There is a clandestine, centuries old brotherhood of people living directly in the 
Black Forest, aimed at helping each other at any cost. Especially foresters and 
gamekeepers always made its backbone. I became a member through marriage with 
Hubert. From time to time someone asks me to keep somebody endangered here for 
a while, or to help a starving family with a poached piece of wild game. I always 
do. The Goerings are, of course, not members, but the Gestapo men couldn't have 
been sure about it as the Reichsmarschall often boasts about being rooted in the 
Black Forest, and he is known to be very vengeful. He has actually sent a lot of men 
to the eastern front after being -- in whatever way -- unpleasant to him. So the threat 
was very believable to them."

Jean was amazed at his lover's intelligence, on top of her strength, tenderness and 
other amazing features, and awaited the future happenings with much less fear than 
before.

(to be continued soon)