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✲꘏ ꘏ ꘏ ꘏✲
"How do you know all this?"
"I know everything. Now answer the question."
"I have no idea. Hitler said he had some unfinished business with my father. He wanted to tell me about it, but I didn't want to know. Still, he never got the chance, though I could tell he wouldn't have cared about my wishes. I suppose I angered him when I called him something rather unpleasant," I said with a deep sigh, rolling my eyes.
"With your father? And your father is..."
"Was," I snapped angrily. "He's been gone for a long time."
"What happened to him?"
"He died."
"Died? Or was he murdered?"
"I don't know. I was very little when I lost him."
"All right. Your father died when you were a child. But people don't simply die for no reason. And, as it happens, I managed to uncover something." After a long silence, Pijus spoke again. I didn't understand why he had begun by interrogating me, only to now claim he had already discovered everything. "Are you interested?"
"Interested in what?"
"In how your father died, of course."
"My mother told me he had gone climbing in the mountains, as he often liked to do, but one day he lost his footing and fell into a fast-flowing river. The current carried him toward the waterfall. He drowned in the fall, because, as fate would have it, he couldn't swim," I explained.
My voice was still angry, though it trembled with emotion.
"How strange that a high-ranking general didn't know how to swim," he said mockingly, a smile tugging at his lips.
"He wasn't a general. He was a doctor."
"Before becoming a doctor, he commanded an air force division," Pijus said calmly and quietly, ignoring my flashes of anger.
"That's nonsense. I would have known that about my own father," I muttered, my voice trembling even more now.
"Or perhaps you didn't know because your father never told you. Nor did your mother, for that matter." Pijus raised his eyebrows.
I said nothing.
I could no longer utter even half a word.
I wanted the earth to open beneath me and swallow me whole.
Why had this man decided to speak to me about my father?
No one knew the real truth about him except me. I was his only daughter. I knew everything about him.
Complete strangers couldn't possibly know the details of my father's private life.
