Fraulein Hildegard Anna Maria
Frau Hilde, or rather Hildegard Anna Maria as her full name was, had lived alone for many years in a small pre-war house located in the middle of a small forest, on the edge of the former East Prussian town of Allenstein (today Olsztyn in Poland). She looked at least 70 years old, but in fact no one quite knew her age, let alone her tumultuous life history.
For years she had led a rather solitary life, shying away from company, and after her retirement she retreated to her old house altogether, leaving it regularly only once a week to do the most necessary shopping at a not distant general store. Further afield she never left, only the forest around her cottage grew thicker and gloomier over the years.
Hildegard's youth reached far back into pre-war East Prussia, where she led a life full of pleasures and entertainments as the third daughter of an aristocrat belonging to one of the leading local Prussian noble houses. She very faintly remembered those carefree days of childhood bathed in the glow of the sun reflected in the sheets of the Masurian lakes and the fragrances of the surrounding forests. Together with her siblings and cousins, they went on hundreds of trips full of adventures and games filling the slow-flowing days in the countryside where her father's beautiful, opulent palace lay.
From the perspective of a well-born girl growing up in the countryside, nothing foreshadowed the upcoming harrowing events that were to leave nothing intact of the world as she knew it. Perhaps only her father's frequent trips to Berlin, as well as the increasingly gloomy news in the newspapers that for some were a reminiscence of the time just before the outbreak of the Great War.
For young Hilde, however, the first shock and symbolic collision with adulthood came earlier, when her seemingly innocent affair with a few years older maid came to light after they were caught in a passionate kiss. Despite the strenuous efforts of her father and mother to keep their daughter's sexual inclinations a well-hidden family secret, a local morality scandal erupted.
This was probably also one of the main reasons why, until the arrival of the front at the end of the war and her escape westward, first to Berlin and later to Bavaria, there were none, not even completely informal, inquiries about her potential marriage. Despite the fact that she was quite pretty and shapely, with beautiful blue eyes and long blond hair, none of the potential admirers from the respected families were liberal enough to accept bisexuality in their potential chosen one.
If she had at least been her father's only child, decked out with a rich dowry and a potentially even richer inheritance in the future, then no one would have minded if she had even been a publicly declared lesbian. Unfortunately, a daughter third-ranked to inherit could not enjoy such privileges in the conservative world of the Prussian aristocracy.
The nightmare of the war years distributed suffering equally, regardless of one's nationality and personal or collective guilt incurred, or lack thereof. Her family had to flee the advancing front, selling off property and trying to avoid the increasingly frequent bombings. Sadly her father was killed in one of them. She and her mother wandered around Europe for several years, unable to get a foothold anywhere, and when she was left alone after her mother's death, she decided to return to the place where it all began, near Allenstein, which became Olsztyn after the war ended. She settled in one of the abandoned houses that once housed some of the servants responsible for forests and ponds in her father's estate.
The post-war times rolled into one very long period of routine and repetitive daily routine that seemed to have filled her entire life. She worked in a tiny community library, and in her spare time grew flowers and vegetables in her home garden.
Old friendships were lost in the darkness of the past, new ones never had a chance to surpass the first stage of loose acquaintance. She was too secretive and mired in the lost past to even try to accept the present.
Dark stories
An old woman living alone in a remote old house surrounded by a forest, she very quickly became the object of legends repeated especially by younger generations, resembling stories of haunted houses. The fantasy of local residents, especially those who had no contact with her during her work in the library, had no bounds.
They spoke of her with unbelievable stories oscillating around her origins, starting with untold treasures secrets of which she guarded as the heiress of a powerful family, other times calling her a madwoman who, when the front passed, fell victim to endless rapes leading to helpless confusion of her senses. People tried to explain away her desolate lifestyle in various ways, and children from the local elementary school were too scared to even venture into the woods surrounding her home.
The house itself also had a strongly favorable effect on the atmosphere of horror surrounding the place. The tall, two-story wooden building in the characteristic pre-war style had lost its amiable colors over the years, darkened and decayed, becoming a gloomy caricature of the once beautiful building, then nicely blending in with the forest surroundings.
Perhaps that's why even the disappearance of a girl in the area years ago was quickly linked by creative minds looking for cheap sensationalism to the single woman who allegedly committed kidnapping and kept her as a personal slave for many years. There were even some who swore that at night they had supposedly heard distant screams and moans coming from inside her house.
In a way, the apogee of the place's bad reputation came with the growth of the nearby town and the establishment of a high school right next to the elementary school that had been in existence since the 1950s. The more adventurous young thrill-seekers loved nighttime excursions into the woods surrounding the deteriorating building. More than one boasted of spending the night in a tent right next to the crumbling fence, and there was one who reportedly even dared to cross the fence and enter the nowadays overgrown garden.
The majority, however, occasionally took the longer route home at most, to walk through the woods on a dirt road near the old house, accelerating hard when a curtain moved, or hastily turning back as soon as someone spotted a small, hunched, black-clad figure loitering in front of the house.
Ania
To the latter group belonged Ania, who, together with her best friend Basia and her boyfriend Mark, often decided to return home by the circuitous route, leading along an old, already well desolated road through the woods, which had not been driven by any car for many, many years.
Scaring each other and maintaining an atmosphere of horror was a very refreshing change from the seemingly endless boredom of one lesson following after another during the school day.
Ania was a blonde girl smiling from ear to ear, with slightly wavy long blond hair, blue eyes and nicely defined full red lips.
Like her friends in the yearbook, Ania had recently turned 18, which seemed reassuring and no longer allowed her to publicly admit any superstitious fears. One had to be grown up and fearless. Earlier, in elementary school, they would never have dared to take such big risks.
What mesmerized not only her classmates and older friends, but seemingly all men and more than a few women, were her firm, full, large breasts, miraculously rippling when she walked, always outlining themselves in an enticing shape under literally any kind of clothing.
They were like a magnet for eyes and hands, an object of unfulfilled dreams for her colleagues, who at times, as seemed to her, tried to outdo each other in finding ways to draw attention to her breasts, or even accidentally rub against those two gorgeous hemispheres and get even the briefest sense of their firm shape and perfect form.
Although she wasn't at all sure of it herself, all indications were that it was the incessant, constant and endlessly intrusive adoration of her breasts that had so far caused her to successfully reject the advances of younger and older admirers, whether classmates, older brothers of classmates, students, old bachelors, aging erotomaniacs or even bored couples looking for ways to liven up their dull erotic lives.
She was focused on studying, spending time with friends, discovering new passions and planning to go to college after the fast approaching graduation.
