Beauty and the Beast

Suffering

If I had ever had a prayer of going home, I ought to have forgotten about it the moment you threw me out of your room.
The SS escorts that had brought me to the castle were waiting for me outside. They immediately blindfolded me and dragged me down what seemed like a maze of stairs and hallways. They only pulled the blindfold off when we got to a thick metal door.
One of the soldiers sniggered as he shoved me inside.
"Your abode."
The room was so hot I could barely breathe. All that was in it was a moldy mattress and a few bottles of mineral water. I would later learn that you were planning to board up this room before I came because of how useless it was and because of its tendency to heat up unnecessarily.
I felt faint. My whole body ached, and I had no more aptitude to withstand any more pain. I threw myself down on the mattress and gave myself to the blackness of unconsciousness.

You came down there the next day with a bowl of such thin soup it looked like water from where I sat huddled in a corner, pressing my fists to my lower stomach to try to alleviate the pain.
"Here you are, Mein Liebe," you said callously. "Enjoy. My wife made it."
I wanted to tell you I was going to die. I wanted to beg you to let me go home.
"Do you need anything?" You asked.
"I want my mother," I croaked.
"You're going to make me cry," you said, pausing in the doorway. "All this talk about your mother."
I didn't bother to say anything to you. If you didn't want to give me what I was asking, I didn't need to say anything more.
"You must be terribly bored down here," you said after a pregnant pause. "Here."
The slap of something hitting the ground inches from my feet made me jump. It took me a while for me to process that it was a book. It was bound in black leather and its title was stamped into the material in gold embossed lettering.
Mein Kampf.
I recoiled, staring at the book in horror. You didn't look pleased at my reaction.
"Kiss it. It fell on the floor."
I looked up at you, silently pleading with you not to make me do it, not to make me touch the abhorrent pile of bound papers before me.
Your face twisted with rage. "How dare you disrespect the Fuhrer, you piece of Czech vermin. Pick it up and kiss it. Now!"
I saw your hand going to where your Parabellum was and realized that you wouldn't hesitate to shoot me over a fallen book.
Slowly, very slowly, I stretched out a hand and curled my fingers around the spine of the book, dragging it across the floor to me. You looked on as I brought the book to my face and pressed my lips flush against the front cover.
"Good girl." You set the bowl of soup down and closed the door behind you.
No sooner had you done so did I hurl the book at the opposite wall, the resounding slap of the paper hitting the concrete music to my ears.
I ought to have thrown the bowl of soup at your face the moment you came in. But that would only serve as a more enticing incentive to shoot me dead.
I crawled over to the bowl and stared disgustedly at the contents, a thin, almost colorless liquid with cut up vegetables floating in it. The sight of it made me hungry, despite the growing suspicion that you might have slipped something into it, like poison or even drugs. Still...
I put the bowl to my lips and drained it in a few large gulps. It was literally tasteless.
The bowl slipped from my fingers and fell to the floor with a loud clatter. The sound jolted me from my depressed mindlessness—there would certainly be severe repercussions if it had broken.
I set the intact bowl down and crawled back to my corner. I hadn't had a chance to take a bath after what you did to me last night. The apex of my thighs was sticky with dried blood, and I literally reeked of you, of your cologne, of your room.
And then there was the gnawing pain in my lower abdomen, eating away at my insides like a starved rat. Did I have a hernia from what you had done to me? I wouldn't be surprised if I did.
My friend Maria had told me once that it only hurt the first time, and that it hurt a little afterwards but then everything else was fine by the next day and everything else after that was amazing. What you did to me was anything but amazing, Reinhard. And physically, the pain would fade eventually, but the gnawing depression and heartbreak I felt—and continue to feel today—are never ending.

You summoned me to your room later on that night. I had finally fallen asleep after squeezing my legs together for hours trying to suppress the pain and trying to keep the soup down--if that's what one can call the literal water you gave me--as well as the flask of water an SS man had thrown into my virtual cell sometime around dinner. There was neither toilet nor sink in the room, so throwing up was out of the question. I literally had to pray my body would absorb everything and I wouldn't have to go to the bathroom. I wasn't ready to sacrifice whatever tattered shreds of my dignity I had left and piss on the floor.

In any event, one of your SS men came to wake me up when it was time for Anna and her counterpart to doll me up for you. This one was, I must say, a lot younger and a lot nicer than the first two escorts I had had. He was firm--he had to be--but I could feel the compassion in the way he asked me to get up, in the way he held the door for me on the way out of the room. To be able to look into a German face and see kindness in it was rare in Czechoslovakia, let alone in Panenske Brezany.

Anna was the first to react to what had happened to me as she and her counterpart eased me into the hot bath. She began to cry the moment she noticed the blood between my legs.

"How dare they do that to a little girl! How dare they!"she kept saying through her tears. Her counterpart, whom I later learned was a Slovak dissident named Axelina who had had her tongue cut out in the public square of her village for cursing the name of Adolf Hitler, looked on in stony silence.

The dress I got this time was velvet, just like the one Anna had peeled from my body, only this time it was more fitted instead of loose and flared. It was a sky blue color, and it came with a fake diamond choker and bracelet.

Axelina did my makeup in silence while Anna looked on, struggling to compose herself. As the two were preparing to leave, however, I grabbed Anna's arm and bent to whisper in her ear.

"Please don't tell my mother."

Her eyes immediately became wet with tears. "You poor dear. You've been through so much, and all you can think about is your mother?"

"Don't tell her what he's done to me," I said. "I can take it, but I won't be able to live with her depressed over me. Please, keep this to yourself."

"I will, child. I will." Anna's fingers dug half moons into the flesh of my forearm as she returned my grip. "And I swear to you: I will do all I can after these filthy vermin are expelled from Czechoslovakia to restore your honor. I swear it!"

I nodded. Somehow her comforting words gave me the courage to face you again that night.