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Remembrance – 03

We all have parents.

That includes me. You. Everyone else.

You probably get asked this a lot. Who do you take after?

Your strict father? Gentle mother?

An idealistic father? Or a pragmatic mother?

Depending on what kind of parents they have, children may have different feelings about which one they want to be like. This is that kind of story. It’s about my adopted daughter, Beatrice Baran, and which of her parents she took after.

Beatrice was born to parents of extremely different personalities, but she inherited the qualities of one of them so strongly that she made a fortune and lived a happy life in the New World.

First of all, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Rene. I lived in a rural town in Germany until 1627. I never married, and instead took care of my parents, who passed away from illness when I was thirty years old. In the same year, my sister, who had been away from home for a long time, returned with a filthy fourteen-year-old daughter, and after leaving her in my care, she disappeared again.

That’s the kind of person my sister was. Impulsive and unable to settle down in one place. When she was still in her teens, she fell in love with an older man and left home, but the man’s family disapproved of her, and she disappeared. Unbeknownst to me, she had given birth to the man’s child, and had struggled to raise it. I reluctantly decided to adopt and raise the filthy girl my sister left behind. Deep inside, I was very worried. The man my sister fell in love with was a young, but skilled merchant. I wonder which of her parents she resembled more. Her impulsive and foolish mother, or her skilled father?

This was how I met my adopted daughter, Beatrice Baran, who later became a well-known businesswoman. In the end, my fears were unfounded, but it took me a long time to realize that.

There’s a reason for it.

Which I’m going to write about in a bit.

Now that I’m old, it takes time to remember the past. My handwriting is shaky, not because I am not used to writing. It’s because of my old age. My hand holding the pen cannot muster much strength. It is now the year 1698. I am over a hundred years old. How in the world did I live so long?

No. Never mind that.

Old people tend to go on a tangent when telling stories.

What you want to read is the secret behind Beatrice’s success. Everyone wants to follow in her footsteps. Nowadays, every young person in the New World wants to be successful. They carry not some hidden pride in their hearts, nor a lofty spirit, but a dream of success in the business world of this new world, America. That’s probably why the young publisher came to me, an old lady, and asked me to write a book about the secret to Beatrice’s success story.

But if it will help the younger generation, then I will gladly share it.

Ah, I got sidetracked again. This is why people don’t like the elderly.

I have to start from when I met my adopted daughter Beatrice. The secret to her success lay in one thing: which of her parents she took after.

My sister was beautiful in her younger days. The fourteen-year-old girl she had left behind was dirty and smelled funny when I met her, but when I bathed her thoroughly in some warm water, she turned out to be a surprisingly pretty girl, more mature than her age, with long curly blonde hair falling down her back, and big gray eyes. Not good, I had thought. She looked just like my sister. No, worse. She was the spitting image of her. I assumed she was impulsive and a slob, just like her mother.

I tried to raise her strictly, but immediately I suffered a setback.

Beatrice could not speak. At first I thought her silence was her way of rebelling against my strict upbringing, but when I saw her bright, gray eyes moist with sadness as she shook her head repeatedly, I knew something was wrong. So I took her to the doctor. When they told me that the child was mute, I fell into despair. How could I raise a child who was mute? It was unfamiliar territory, and I was at a loss. First of all, communication was difficult. I didn’t even know if she understood what I taught her.

Beatrice spent her days like her mind was somewhere else. I couldn’t even tell how much she understood. But her beauty, which she inherited from her mother, soon became the talk of the town. When she walked through town with her long, curly blond hair, boys followed her like butterflies to a flower. As a devout Puritan, I despised the persistence of these insincere heathens. One boy in particular, a little older than Beatrice, worked in a flower shop. His unappealing, freckled face grew darker by the day as he pursued Beatrice.

Soon…

---

“Huh? Victorique?”

A bird twittered.

Kazuya, leaning against the window, looked inside the house. Victorique was lying on the emerald couch, her eyes closed. The squirrel, half-buried in her silky golden hair, looked sleepy too.

Victorique’s long eyelashes quivered, and she slowly opened her eyes.

“Are you sleepy?” Kazuya asked.

“Hmm.”

“I get it. Your stomach’s full from the lemon cake.”

“The old lady keeps going on a tangent.”

“You can hardly blame her. She’s over a hundred years old.”

“…I suppose. When is the flower shop opening?”

“In a bit. Soon after this, Beatrice will board a ship to the New World.”

“I see. Go on, continue.”

“Okay. Here I go. Beatrice is about to board a ship. ‘Six months passed…’”

Fixing his posture, Kazuya resumed reading.

The squirrel crawled inside Victorique’s long and wavy golden hair and vanished.

A cool autumn breeze blew outside the dollhouse, stirring the flowers in the beds.

Birds chirped in the distance.

---

Six months passed, and I decided to emigrate to the New World. I was fascinated by the idea of crossing the sea, developing new land and building a village, but above all, I was concerned about Beatrice’s future. If we stayed in Hamburg, people would eventually find out that she was a child born out of wedlock. I feared that when she reached adulthood, she would have difficulty finding a partner. I would probably die of old age first, and the thought of my mute daughter’s future made me anxious.

The migration of the Puritans to the New World was just beginning during this time. It was a huge undertaking: boarding a ship and sailing across the vast sea to establish a new nation. I decided to go with my daughter. Reclamation would require labor, and we might be able to hide Beatrice’s past. When I told her this, she looked worried and shook her head, but I couldn’t tell from studying her face what she thought about it or whether she even understood what I meant.

When it became known that we were emigrating, the adults said nothing, while the boys came to see Beatrice to say goodbye. She just sat there with a puzzled look, not saying a word. In the evening, the florist’s boy came to visit her, pounding on the door.

I opened the door a little. “What is it? It’s already late.”

“Please leave Beatrice behind,” the boy replied curtly.

“I can’t do that. It’s the dead of night. Go home.”

“Please. We promised to get married,” he insisted.

As an adult, I knew immediately that he was lying. He made a promise to a mute? I gave him a piece of my mind and slammed the door shut.

The night before our departure, I cut Beatrice’s long, curly blonde hair. I told her that it would be a nuisance during the voyage, but there was more to it. I believed that her hair was the one attracting men, the glistening curls that looked so much like my sister’s. Beatrice quietly obeyed. When her curls fell to the floor, she shed a few tears, but that was it. With her hair shortened, Beatrice’s alluring charm vanished, leaving only a pale, skinny figure that looked like a boy’s. Relieved that traces of my sister were finally gone, I slept well that night.

The next morning, Beatrice and I left the town I grew up in, carrying one small luggage each. After a long ride to the port town, we finally arrived at the ship. Before we set sail, a large number of boys gathered on the wharf. They had come to say goodbye to Beatrice. But none of them could find her. Her signature golden curls were gone.

When the ship was about to depart, a boy came running along the jetty. Dirty, with freckles. It was the boy from the flower shop. He found Beatrice, even with her hair short, and went straight to her.

The whistle blew.

The ship slowly left the harbor.

“Beatrice, over here!” The boy threw a small burlap sack. “They’re edelweiss seeds. It’s your favorite flower. You used to look at them all the time when you passed by our shop. I even wished I would turn into an edelweiss. I wanted to be by your side all the time.”

His voice was drowned out by the steam whistle.

“This serves as a promise, that we’ll never forget each other.”

Soon I couldn’t hear his voice anymore. Beatrice took the burlap sack and studied it.

The wind blew, and Beatrice staggered a bit.

This is the end of me and my adopted daughter’s story in Hamburg. And this is how, mostly by chance, she acquired edelweiss seeds, the source of her wealth.