Famepunk: Part 3: The Lutheran

By Liz Mackie

Almost 1992. The Soviet Union is about to crumble. And reigning Wimbledon champion Emma Jasohn is confined to her home on the Long Island Sound. Pregnant, single, broken-hearted, stripped of privacy, she’s plotting revenge. She needs help.

Enter...THE LUTHERAN.

Part 3 of FAMEPUNK, the groundbreaking historical fantasy novel, is a nativity story with several twists and a fallen star. A generous short read that can double as an introduction to the story, THE LUTHERAN is a fast-paced, self-contained, often uproarious comedy of manners, dreamers, sinners, students, actors, renegades, gangsters, magic-workers and (of course) babies. This season, before you take in another work of American fiction, pause here and treat yourself to an original taste of sweet, subversive pleasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liz Mackie
• Release date: Dec 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310286391

Liz Mackie

With LAMENT: A SOVIET WOMAN AND HER TRUE STORY, author Liz Mackie launched Nostalgistudio, an independent publishing company for high-quality American writing. Three volumes deep into FAMEPUNK, her picaresque historical-fantasy novel set in the world of women’s tennis, she's also published a poetry collection (DUG FOR VICTORY: POEMS FROM RIP-TV), a travel novella called THE HAPPY VALLEY, and the on-line writings collected at www.liz-mackie.com. A long-ago graduate of Swarthmore College, she lives and works in New York City, and has climbed Breakneck Ridge with the kind help of friends.

Book preview

FAMEPUNK

PART 3: The Lutheran

A Short Novel By

Liz Mackie

Published by Nostalgistudio at Smashwords

Copyrighted Material by Elizabeth Mackie

Author’s Note:

FAMEPUNK is an historical novel that tracks, among other things, the effects of the Cold War and aftermath on the lives of fictional tennis players. Part 1: 1987 US Open begins and ends with a young heroine becoming America’s newest champion. Part 2: Middlemarch follows her career and her love life through an eventful 1988. The following book, Part 3: The Lutheran, takes place during the fall of the Soviet Union, three years later.

To find out what happened before and after, look for excerpts to proceed the release of Part 4: Against Theodosia; forthcoming from Nostalgistudio.

2nd Nostalgistudio Edition, Advent 2020.

Previous Smashwords Editions published in 2013, 2019.

© Copyright 2013, 2019, 2020 by Elizabeth Mackie.

Cover adapted from public domain work via Wikipedia

Posthumous Portrait of Martin Luther as an Augustine Monk, Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder, Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

This book is a work of fiction filled with fictional coincidence.

Smashwords Edition | License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

FAMEPUNK

Selected Cast of Characters

Emma Jasohn, tennis player

Vivienne Helm, tennis player

Erich Helm, her brother

Freya (The Great), tennis player

Theodosia Z, tennis player

Shanaya Greene, pre-medical student

Eugene Till Greene, adolescent

Brava, founder & head, Moscow Talent School

Lidia, her niece

Ilya Kasimov, security specialist & restaurateur

Gretchèn Kasimov, his wife

Nelya, lower housekeep, Moscow Talent School

Semyon, driver, Moscow Talent School

Boris, tennis player

Henry Kissinger, celebrity diplomat

Glossary of German Words & Terms

Bäeurin farmer

Ficken! Fuck!

Frottee terrycloth

Haarzunge Warzen hairy tongue warts

Jäger-Kohl Hunter’s Cabbage

Kipferl Crescent Cookies

Kommen come here

Könige ‘Gesänge Kings’ Song

Marienkäfer ladybug

Mumpitz nonsense

Pichelsteiner Bavarian Meat & Vegetable Stew

Silvester German New Year’s Eve holiday

Zweiter Weihnachtsfeiertag Boxing Day (December 26th)

Ulmer Münster Lutheran church in Ulm, Germany

Unglücklich unlucky

Ziege Fotze! goat cunt

We followed him down a steep path through an orchard, and met three Moslem women, coming up, leading a pack-horse. They asked breathlessly, their black veils shaking and twitching with their agitation, May we go into the church? and the monk answered, Yes, but you must leave the horse outside.

Rebecca West,

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

December 1991

Klaus-Rainart looked down at the classified page of the Union Theological Seminary student newspaper as directed. One edge of the boxed advertisement in question lay obscured by his wife Clara’s right index fingernail—clean, rosy, unpolished. They had been married five months. He loved her fingernails.

YOUNG WOMAN CONFINED TO HOME SEEKS LUTHERAN FROM GERMANY FOR EXACT TRANSLATIONS. Long Island. Strong faith required; divinity student or clergy preferred. Will pay cash $$ plus some travel. Job runs December-January. Call for CONFIDENTIAL interview 516-4

While urging him to apply for this position his delightful young wife made the most of her excellent points. Because she would be in the sixth month of pregnancy they’d decided—a first for them—to forgo travel to their family homes in Germany for Christmas and the Silvester festivities that would mark the arrival of 1992. Instead, ensconced at her desk in their small Upper West Side student apartment, Clara would spend the mid-year break reading and making notes towards her doctoral thesis; while Klaus-Rainart who was simply between classes had talked about getting a bookstore job for the holidays. Maybe this would pay better. They were trying to save for when the baby came.

All this he knew.

Unsure that she understood enough about the reasonable nature of his hesitation to oblige her, his wife, in this matter, Klaus-Rainart reminded Clara that she was well aware what was being rumored in Lutheran circles, she knew how well-founded. The advertisement had been running all over town for two weeks, many people had answered and some having talked, the riddle was solved. Housebound in a condition of advanced and wholly out of wedlock pregnancy, the young Long Islander with the paying job to bestow would prove to be Emma Jasohn, the notorious tennis player. Who, even though he possessed a noble character and was the father of her unborn child, had cast aside the greatest German athlete of his day, she’d refused to marry Boris, refused to be with him; and she had long rejected any family she could call her own. Her morals were trash. Now for some unknowable cause she wanted to meet and possibly corrupt a devout Lutheran. This was not for him, Klaus-Rainart told his wife.

Clara played her trump card then. What if, she suggested, moving forward at the kitchen table to let her knees knock playfully at his, what if the story had taken a turn? Maybe Boris stood a chance still. Scoffing as he recalled the preference for other women as sexual partners so recently expressed in terms strong enough to be upsetting, Klaus-Rainart said no: the girl was a Gay. But Clara said no: other women didn’t think so. They doubted. In their opinion (and hers, Clara said) Emma Jasohn had finally learned to use her thinking powers. About men, about life and about Boris, she’d woken up wiser at last. Naturally she was in need of translations from a sanctioned source because what could be clearer than the reason why?

She planned to speak her wedding vows in German.

Klaus-Rainart’s disbelief—massive, skyscraper-sized—started shrinking immediately. Granted there was cause for skepticism, after all, what wasn’t to believe? If the girl hadn’t felt some attraction to the natural order she wouldn’t have wound up with child. What was so unlikely in his wife’s word-picture of delinquency reformed, the deviant corrected? Of course it wasn’t impossible. For God, nothing was.

He agreed to call the number to apply and Clara kissed him.

Then she brought him the telephone. Halfway through the fourth ring came a bang, a clatter, a high pitched rush of water into a sink full of dishes, a roar of background voices and a virile female shout: Pushkin Heeksville! Ahloeh—Pushkin!

Yes, I have this number to telephone for responding to—

You from Luther?

Ja, yes, I—

Minute. The mouthpiece cracked against some surface. Now amid the ambient din he caught a crooning baritone in maudlin spate above synthesized orchestral strings and Klaus-Rainart sighed. He really disliked Russians, he thought they all suffered from various forms of hysteria.

Speak, the next one on the line commanded. A man who sounded enormous. Please. Apply. Tell who you are. Sitting close, Clara could hear through the earpiece easily and nudged him to begin.

So he did: explaining that he was an ordained Lutheran originally from the former West German Republic, now at seminary in New York after a year in Geneva which had followed his studies in Bonn—no, he hadn’t been required to leave, he said of course not. It was an intellectual choice and not any legal decision to come to New York; in truth he was academically inclined, study drew him—for his career, yes, an American degree might be helpful. No, he did not personally feel called to become a jungle missionary but nor did he believe those had been were dangerous idiots, he felt they were doing important work, really vital, he said. He thought after seminary he might go on to teach in university and possibly share duties at an urban parish church, he thought back in Germany—yes, he was married—yes, one, on the way. A little girl.

Ah, said the big Russian. Girls are best.

I think so, Klaus-Rainart agreed.

So. Last question. Top percent importance. Okay. This Luther, yours, Lutherans—the guy who starts you. In moral nature this Luther was pig or no pig? Answer carefully.

Twitching in shock, he held the receiver away from his cheekbone. His eyes met his wife’s and widened even further until they were as wide as hers. Wide, wide, her blue eyes wavered in a most minute seizure of surmise. Then she looked right at him and said, Pig.

A puff of breath below a whisper’s volume: Klaus-Rainart thought he might have misunderstood. When she started nodding and said it again with her eyebrows raised for emphasis (PIG) he knew that he hadn’t. She’d said it quite audibly that time. And yet everyone at Union Theological Seminary considered Clara the more complete and exemplary Lutheran! He didn’t know what these people thought they were talking about at this moment. With a reproachful look at the flesh of his flesh he started temporizing:

Of course, Martin Luther in the history of world religion is a most central and complex character and we Lutherans appreciate his great gifts and contributions always without denying his great appetites and flaws—he was a human being, not some myth—that is to say. He was being distracted: Clara was through tossing her head and rolling her eyes at him and now her fingernail-fatale was back on the classified box that she raised to his view, at one spot she was tapping: the dollar signs. Happy to oblige her this time Klaus-Rainart paused to phrase carefully. Can you, sir, tell me what is the starting salary for this position please?

He heard a deep grunt that might have indicated amusement. Wives, too, are best. In my humble view.

Ah, yes. They are, naturally, yes.

Don’t worry. About Martin Luther. It’s trick question.

I see.

Okay. You pass interview. Now say your information. So Klaus-Rainart recited digits and spellings and agreed to wait five minutes for his telephone to ring; the next step. And my friend, personally, I tell you—please inform wife this is good money.

How good? Clara’s smiling mouth advanced to share the mouthpiece, her laughter swept across her husband’s lips. How much?

They heard the Pushkin Hicksville do brisk business for a moment before the voice returned. Think top American college fund for little daughter—all cash.

Ah! the happy couple exclaimed as one.

The call was finished and they kissed. Then they almost forgot about the next step; for sure they forgot to wait for the telephone to ring. When it did, Klaus-Rainart answered a bit incoherently, his breath short and his manner abrupt.

There was a pause and then a pleasant voice, low, female, said, Um, are you the Lutheran?

I—yes, I am the Lutheran. The hairs had risen on his arms, his system had snapped to attention. It was the voice, world-famous. You have reached me. He nodded quickly at Clara who wasn’t sure why. She began refastening her nightgown. Klaus-Rainart breathed deeply through his nose.

Am I—are you busy? he heard.

He denied it. "Only