Beauty and the Beast

Smoke and Wine

"Ich will Ihren Korper heute abend nicht." That ought to have been my first warning sign the moment I walked into your room on my first night back at Panenske Brezany--or Jungfern-Brenschan, as you called it.

If you don't want my body tonight, then what is it you want?

I was terrified, but sought not to show that I was, instead putting up an indifferent front.

"Come here." You were dressed not in your black SS uniform, but in a white terry cloth bathrobe and slippers.

I stood before you and was half expecting you to demand that I take my clothes off but instead you roughly pulled me into your lap, at the same time extricating from the pocket of your robe a box of cigars and a matchbox.

"Today I will educate you on some of the finer points of life," you said grandly, like you were the owner of a museum displaying a new exhibit to the public. "How old are you exactly, my dear girl?"

"Nineteen." It suddenly sounded so preposterous--a thirty-eight year old man satisfying himself every night with a girl about two times his junior, if not slightly more.

"Very nice." You smoothed my hair back with a gentle hand. "Rauchen Sie?"

Do you smoke. I didn't know what surprised me--that you used "sie" in contrast with the casual "du" you usually addressed me with, or that you would even ask a question like that. I wasn't stupid, Reinhard. I knew that under the rule of your Fuhrer, women were forbidden to drink or smoke. I'm sure that that only applied to cultured German women, though, not Czech girls held captive by top-ranking Nazi party members.

"Nein...Reinhard." Bile rose in my throat as your name fell from my lips, and I had to swallow a few times to suppress the biting acidity that followed.

"Good. Today you will start."

You struck a match and held it teasingly in my face for a good three seconds before you lit the cigar you had between the index and middle finger of your free hand.

"For you," you said gallantly.

I recoiled like it was a ticking time bomb. "I don't want to smoke. I'm not allowed to, nor do I have any intentions to start. It's uncouth and unhealthy besides." I didn't have any hope that you would back off and just do what you kidnapped me for and call it a night, and I was right not to have had any. You shook your head and pressed the cigarette to my lips.

"Open your mouth."

I was too terrified to disobey. The end of the cigarette felt alien between my teeth.

"Inhale." You were so close to me I could feel your lips move against my ear.

I took a deep breath, and with it came an onslaught of smoke, acrid, bitter, and dry. It swirled down my throat, and into my lungs, eliciting a deep cough from me. I bent into two in your lap, coughing wildly, my eyes streaming.

You were laughing when I righted myself. "It will take a while to get used to it, I'll say that. Go on. Have another go at it."

You made me finish the entire cigar off. My mouth was as dry as a bone when I finished it; my throat stung and itched uncontrollably.

"How do you feel?" you asked callously.

"Water...please..."

"Ah! You reminded me!"

You reached beneath the upholstered loveseat we were sitting on and produced a bottle of red table wine and a glass. The bottle hissed and popped when you cracked the seal and proceeded to pour some of the red, now bubbling liquid in a glass.

"This is your last lesson for the night," you said. "Learn it well."

I balked. None of my family members drank alcohol, not even my father or brother. My mother was a staunch believer that alcohol destroyed more than it benefited, and raised all her children with that principle in mind, and that alcohol should be avoided at all costs.

"Don't make me angry with you," you hissed after what seemed like centuries of me staring at the liquid in the glass. "I'm starting to lose my patience."

I hesitantly accepted the glass from you and took the tiniest of tiny sips. It burned even more than the cigarette smoke; I despised the taste immediately.

"Go on, drink the whole glass. Treat it like medicine."

You kissed me when I had drained the last drop, your tongue disappearing down my throat like a surgical probe. You stood up and walked me backwards to your lavish four-poster bed. You tore my clothes off and let your robe slide from your body with a lazy roll of your shoulders. Your hands roamed my body like starving wolves roaming the prairie, worrying about no one but themselves; their benefit; their well being.

Did you think I enjoyed it? I'll tell you flat out, in case you didn't figure that out at the beginning of the story--no, I did not. My time in your room, on your bed, atop you or underneath you depending on which way you wanted it at a specific time, was spent staring to one side, begging my soul to leave my body and go up to the heavens, where it would be safe from all this torture. But you and I both know that souls don't just leave, and so I was forced to remain on Earth, staring blankly at the walls, thinking of what I had had and what I had lost as you corrupted me with your fingers, your tongue.

You handled me surprisingly gingerly when you finally decided to sprawl all over me. Not that I cared, anyway. I was actually disappointed you hadn't taken me brutally, the way you had before my hospitalization.

The bed creaked and squeaked, the background music for your gasps and moans of pleasure as you had your way with me. Your eyes were always shut, your hands always on either side of my head. I looked past your forearm and at the wall to my left, to the picture of you, your wife, your sons, your daughter. Reinhard, Lina, Klaus, Heider, Silke. What a perfect family.

For the first time, you let out a shaking groan that was the closest thing to a sob I would ever hear you emit. And then, as you collapsed atop me, clutching my body to yours in a show of exhaustion yet satisfaction, you murmured a name.

Lina.