Beauty and the Beast

The One That Got Away

I don't know what's worse: having your life resting in the hands of a sick, twisted rapist or witnessing that same rapist try to be nice to you for a change. I tried to figure it out then; I have agonized over it to this day, and I have come to the conclusion that I would prefer having to contend with this rapists's blind cruelty rather than having to suffer watching him blur the lines between cruelty and kindness.
But you clearly didn't care about my preferences, did you?
I was sitting in my room on New Year's Eve, watching the village's annual fireworks display from the window. They seemed to me to be a lot more pitiful and suppressed this year, probably because this year, there was no actual joy in the onset of 1942. It was to be another year spent under the cloak of tyranny, another year under the iron rule of Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague. Nevertheless, the pretty colors exploding against the night sky and lighting up my otherwise dark room provided a welcome diversion amid all the ennui I had been feeling prior.
I was so caught up in watching the grand finale of multicolored explosions that I didn't hear the doorknob clicking as you twisted it on the other end. I didn't hear you let yourself in, didn't hear you shut the door behind you. I didn't hear your footsteps, muted by the carpet, as you crossed the room to stand behind me. For a moment, you were silent, peering over my shoulder out the window.
"They're so beautiful...aren't they?"
I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle a scream at that voice, your voice, so close to my ear. My heart hammering in my chest, I slowly turned around to face you, a tall, dark shadow in your black SS uniform, your face vampire pale in the moonlight.
Your lips curled in a tiny smirk at my otherwise dismayed countenance, and yet you chose to ignore it.
"Happy New Year, Sophie," you said, your voice strangely placid and subdued.
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. The blood was beginning to roar in my ears. I could feel myself beginning to break out in a cold sweat. All I could think about was what you had done to me in the woods: the darkness, the the cold ground, your weight like a boulder on my back, the tearing, the blood, the excruciating agony.
It was all I could do to nod to you.
"You know, New Year's Eve used to be my favorite holiday when I was a boy," you said. Your face faded away into the darkness; I could tell you had moved away from the window, where the faint moonlight offered minimal light.
"We would sit on the roof of my house and watch the fireworks from there, me, my brother, and my sister. We always said that everything was nicer on that night—the stars seemed to shine more brightly, the moon, too."
"You have siblings?" The words tumbled out of my mouth faster than I could register that they were leaving the recesses of my throat, and even faster than I could stop them.
Even from where you were standing, I could hear the sound of surprise you made low in your throat as clear as day, as if to say, Ah, she speaks.
"I do. I have an elder sister and a younger brother, Maria and Heinz respectively. Heinz is the editor of a German magazine, Die Panzerfaust. As for my sister..." You paused, more out of disgust than anything else. "...she's married to a penniless alcoholic."
I don't know what's worse, I thought to myself, being married to an alcoholic or unknowingly having a brother who rapes teenage girls?
"What's worse is that I have had to shoulder plenty of embarrassment from having such an unstable brother in law." You sounded like you were talking to yourself more than me. "I've had to take money out of my own pocket to pay for their extravagant expenses, and I've had to deal with that sorry excuse of a German man using his status as my brother in law for his own benefit. Do you have any idea how degrading that is?"
You were silent; I was silent. I wanted to tell you that you deserved it; I wanted to shout that I didn't give two whoops in Hades what your personal hardships were. I wanted to shout, You sorry bastard! and slam the door behind me.
"No, you don't." If your tone had been conversational before, now it was cold as ice. "You never will. You're a filthy Czech piece of shit that's good for nothing more than pleasing your betters." I heard the bedsprings groan as you sat yourself down on the edge of the bed. "Come here," you said.
I had to force my feet to move, to carry me out of the frying pan and into the fire. It had been a month or so since you had put your hands on me, and neither my mind nor my body were jumping at the prospect of going back to that horrible dynamic.
Anfangen ist leicht, Beharren eine Kunst.
'Starting is easy, persisting is an art.' Out of all the German phrases circulating in the village since the occupation of Czechoslovakia, that was the only one that had stayed in my mind out of them all. I was glad that it had, for all the encouragement, if minuscule, it gave me.
But now, lying here beneath you, my body against yours, listening to you gasp and moan in blind pleasure above me, that proverb could never have been more wrong and right at the same time. While time had turned me into something of a Picasso in the supposed art of persistence, starting was by no means easy. No, starting wasn't easy, I thought, as wounds that had slowly started to heal over the course of this month were split open once again, as whatever pride and semblance of dignity I had regained were tossed away almost as quickly as the clothes had fallen away from my body.
You shuddered over me and then collapsed, your jaw slack, your inhales and exhales sporadic and ragged. I felt dirty; I felt disgusting; I wanted to douse myself in bleach and scrub myself off with boiling water until I bled from every pore. I thought of Ata, sitting all alone in the living room where we once played chess and checkers together, and bit the inside of my cheek so hard  my eyes welled up.
"I'm sorry," I whispered to the darkness.
"What are you sorry for?" Your lips moved like two flesh-eating worms against the shell of my ear, your breath as hot as the blast of a furnace.
I didn't answer. I couldn't. I was too busy focusing on hiding the fact that I was crying. Yes, I was crying, for the first time in a long time. All because of you.
I've asked you enough times why you did what you did. You never gave me a reason; you certainly won't now. But I'll ask you regardless, just to give you something to think about down there, beneath the dirt and the grass.
So why, then, Reinhard? Why did you do that to me?