What We Will Do On Our Sommerferien
OMG, so like Genevieve, right? Like TMI, I know but OMFG—this is how she speaks, Johnny. This is how everyone in America speaks, it’s so peculiar. Even Orlando—tell me you know Orlando, Johnny. The American Hollywood heartthrob and former Mouse-kateer? The boy in the alien-invasion movie featuring Tom Cruise? We saw it last Sommerferien with Rheinhold, but any case, this American Valley Girl Genevieve—we are on Orlando’s yacht, in the bedroom. With Orlando and it’s true, his supermodel girlfriend—are you listening, Johnny? This is uncanny to me but guess from where she hails? The supermodel girlfriend, not the American Valley Girl Genevieve—guess, Johnny. No? All right, then I will tell you—St. Mortiz, where Grandpapa skied, and this is what we are speaking of when guess what the American Valley Girl Genevieve does? She removes a miniature handgun from her purse—and pop! it discharges. But don’t worry, I was only grazed on the neck—look, Johnny, here is my blister…
This is my elder sister Gertrudis speaking, and I am Johan and we are the von Schmidts of Zurich, Switzerland. In fact, I am an American dual national, born in the locale of a Super 8 Motel flanking the Turnpike outside the hamlet of Hackensack, New Jersey. But our father Gerhardt is a Swiss-Austrian nurtured in St. Moritz and he and Mother, who is an American-Luxembourgian, met and resided in Berlin. As both Gertrudis and I spent ample hours with Grandpapa, we are athletic like him and enjoy to ski and toboggan and snowboard and paraglide and bungee jump and hot-air balloon and skeet-shoot and bobsled and of course we are expert in ski flying. Whereas I was maimed in a training run prior to this last winter’s Games, Gertrudis competed in freestyle skiing and garnered two silver medallions and one gold. It was an unforeseen triumph for our homeland and our family especially, since our withering grandpapa Horst, who prevailed in St. Moritz 1948 and Oslo 1952, endured long enough to experience our Opening Ceremony. His death the next morning, hours before the ladies’ moguls competition, should have stymied my sister but she endured and dominated, that day and later during aerials and ski cross. In the face of the world, she was a sympathetic champion and as she is attractive and humorous she was invited to appear on talk shows in Europe and America, where she was fêted aboard the yacht of the Mousekateer Orlando when the American Valley Girl gunned down a former acquaintance and two bystanders in cold blood.
Five months are elapsed since then and still all Gertrudis speaks of is the shooting. Whatever she says is Orlando this, Orlando that—if it wasn’t for Orlando diving upon me and shielding me, I also would have been hit, Johnny. I would have died, Johnny, she says, and I am wearisome of her introspective banter. What happened to the humble and happy Gertrudis I knew skiing with Grandpapa in the Alpen? Will her triumph at the Games change her into a vapid and preening person? Will she move to Hollywood and star in a reality show about Olympians who reside together in a bungalow atop the unimpressive hills overlooking the geometry of the city? Will the trivial role in the Mousetakeer’s next movie which Gertrudis was offered and accepted aboard the yacht alter her? No, I am sure not, for at heart she is earnest and while she is two years my senior I think we are more friends than siblings and I love her and long to spend the summer months with her in our adopted hometown, Berlin. Here is where we are to rendezvous with Mother and her new Freund, Markus Vebbling of the insignificant rock-and-roll band Ulrike. I have yet to greet him, as the coupling is adolescent and Mother failed to invite him to visit her during the Games, but Gertrudis encountered him one weekend when she returned to Berlin while I was recovering in a chalet in the Alpen. Despite her own questionable romantic experiences, I believe her when she reports the new Freund was friendly and restrained, even if, she says, he is so very much more diminutive than I expected. Have you seen his Musikvideos? I have not seen his Musikvideos but know a bit about the band Ulrike, and this is what I am telling Gertrudis when she interrupts me to say, I am glad we are towering, Johnny—which is something you should know about me. While I am termed Johan Wolfgang, after Grandpapa, and while Father insists on calling me this in honor of his father, I prefer the Americanized Johnny as it is easy-going and colloquial, as I aspire to be.