Beauty and the Beast

TLC

I will admit something to you here, Reinhard. When you decided to "educate me" on the "finer points" of life, you did just that. To this day, I cannot live without my daily pack of cigars, nor my daily bottle of alcohol. Not a day goes by when I don't honor your memory through my ingestion of these two things: I can see your face in the wisps of smoke that curl up before me every evening. I can see your reflection in the garnet liquid in my glass whenever I look into it.
Whenever we...I don't even know what to call it. Fucked? Screwed? There are so many words for it these days, but I could never call it "making love." That euphemism was strictly off limits and didn't apply to our dynamic whatsoever. Whenever we had sex, I was the gullet, and you were the snake. You were the taker, I was the giver. In the end, the goal was that you were satisfied; that you had fulfilled your desires. Whether I enjoyed it or not made no difference to you, and I'd be damned if I enjoyed it.
My body still ached from the time you had unintentionally hospitalized me. To this day I don't know what made you turn so violent that night. I certainly hadn't done anything wrong.
But what shocked me the most was that nowadays, you made it more and more clear that I was nothing but a substitute for your wife, on whom pregnancy after pregnancy had taken their toll on her figure, which I assumed used to be amazing.
It was always "Lina" that fell from your lips when you forced yourself on me. And the day I started to get upset over that was the day i knew I needed to get away from you, before I began to let that tiny seed of jealousy blossom and sprout into something more...something unimaginable, something unthinkable.
You, however, had other plans for me. When you weren't in the mood for sex—which was rare—you would make me listen to you practice your speeches, and then you would make me smoke a few cigars and drain a whole bottle of Czech spirits. Then you would throw me out of your room.
You never bothered with contraceptives with me. Why would you? If I ever had a child by you, you could always kill it—or you could kill me.
I told Anna one day about that, and she was beside herself with rage.
"Are you really going to reconcile yourself to bearing that monster's child?"she said.
"I would rather die," was the answer I gave her—the correct answer, the only answer.
I lost weight rapidly from not having enough to eat. Anna and Axelina did all they could to smuggle me food from whatever their families brought them, but it was barely enough to compensate for all the malnourishment I was struggling with.
You didn't like that. You were so out of touch with what I was going through that you actually had the gall to complain. You didn't seem to like that you had to lie with a "bundle of sticks" each night, as you called it.
"Are you not eating the food I'm giving you?" You asked me one day as you dropped by your secretary's office.
I had been on my knees next to the desk, hastily scratching the addresses onto envelopes, so I hadn't heard you.
The secretary spat a curse, leaned over, and clubbed me on the head with a paperweight so hard I felt like my head was going to split open. I bit my lips so hard to muffle the gasp of agony that threatened to burst from my lungs. Stars danced before my eyes; I felt faint. The agony was slowly beginning to subside into a blissful weightlessness, into merciful oblivion. I was falling, I knew it, but I didn't care.
The next thing I knew you on your knees next to me. You were hauling me out of the stack of envelopes into which I had face planted, harshly rebuking the secretary, who hastily scampered out the door, slamming it shut behind him.
"Sophie." Your voice was low. "Can you hear me?"
Yes, I can. No, I can't. I don't want to hear you. I want to go far, far away...
You slapped me hard across the face, tearing me out of the void between consciousness and unconsciousness into bitter, hateful coherence.
"You see, this is what happens when you don't do as your told and eat the swill that's placed before you. Are you alright?"
I blinked up at you. Your impassive face blurred to the point that it was no longer distinguishable. You had already broken my soul once, the first night you forced yourself on me, and now the pieces of it that were still available for me to pick up were all I had left of it. But at that moment it completely shattered, as I lay sprawled on the floor amid envelopes and ink pens with you cradling my upper body.
Reinhard Heydrich was my present. Reinhard Heydrich was my future. My past was officially nonexistent.
I could feel the silent ribbons of tears coursing down my cheeks like streams of liquid fire. You remained horrifyingly impassive, staring down at me with a blank expression.
"You shouldn't be wasting your tears," you said. "I've given you no reason to cry."
You were wrong, Reinhard. You were wrong on so many levels. You didn't need to give me a reason to cry:you were the reason I was crying.
Then you did something that inwardly shocked me. You stood up and effortlessly swooped me off the floor, carrying me bridal style out the door. You breezed down the hallway and up the stairs, carrying me like I weighed barely anything. I heard a doorknob rattle open, and the next thing I knew I was lying on a downy mattress, on exotic sheets, sheets I knew the feel of far too well.
You pulled the comforter up to my chin and turned the light off. I wanted to call after you, to ask you why you were doing this. But I didn't.
The door slammed and I was alone, with only the darkness as my companion.