Beauty and the Beast

His First Love

I don't want you to think that I liked talking to you, Reinhard, or that I liked hearing you talk to me. It made me humanize you, made me look upon you with sympathy. That was and still is disgusting to me. You hit me, you raped me, you took me away from my family—only for me to begin to sympathize with your past misfortunes on some level, however small it was.
Talking to me didn't mean you eased up on forcing yourself on me nightly. As if you wanted to make up for all the times we hadn't had sex in the past month, you never failed to show up at my door at exactly a quarter past midnight.
What was worse was that instead of numbing my thoughts, memories of my family and of my friends only made me cry. You seemed to take sadistic pride in that, apparently assuming that I was crying because of you. What you failed to realize, Reinhard, was that my tears for you had dried up a long time ago. Sometime during the previous month I had realized with horrifying clarity that I no longer cared what you did to me, as long as I never had to go through a repeat of that night in the woods. If it meant letting you have your way with me every night, so be it. If it meant having to wear your wife's unwanted dresses, I was fine with it.

"Does your wife know you're doing this?" I asked you one night, as we lay amid the rumpled bedcovers, my back against your chest. "Does she know about us?"
"Intuitive question, Sophie Gabcik." You said it with a hint of mild amusement in your voice. "Between you and I, she doesn't need to know."
"You should tell her." The words tumbled out before I could stop them.
You laughed uproariously and roughly turned me to face you.
"Now, why would I do that? Lina and I have an amicable marriage, and I have every intention of keeping it that way."
I had no reason to doubt you, but I would later learn that your marriage to Lina von Osten had deteriorated into anything but amicable. Before the war, you were the "Nightclub King of Prewar Berlin", a fact your wife made no attempt to deny later on in life. You were a womanizer in every sense of the word—the infamous Salon Kitty, a brothel you used to inadvertently spy on top ranking Nazi officials, had been your brainchild more than anyone else's.
"I find it hard to believe you could ever love someone." I bit my tongue so hard I drew blood. I was thankful we couldn't see each other in the dark.
"You're not the only one to think that, believe me." You sat up. In the faint moonlight I could just make out the outline of your naked body, your knees drawn to your chest, your arms locked around your legs.
"I was in love—truly in love—only once," you said. "I knew the girl in question long before Lina was ever anything to me. We met in an alley behind a bar. She was the daughter of a successful industrialist, who ran his household with an iron fist, more so after his wife died."
I remained lying on my side, averting my gaze to the wall of darkness before me. If anything, this talk was going to be the one that turned you from a heartless monster in my eyes to a man disappointed in love. That wasn't supposed to happen. That couldn't happen. But then I thought of my village, my brother working for the resistance, our government in exile, and I forced myself to listen to what you had to say.
"She hated living like a nun," you said. "She saw how other girls her age were living and envied their freedom and their ability to choose their own path. So I did my best to give her that freedom."
I wanted to laugh. You, doing such a magnanimous deed to anyone? It was almost impossible to imagine.
"At first, she saw me as the older brother she never had. I remember how she used to call me every day, without fail, when I would be at the naval cadets' barracks in Kiel just to talk to me. But gradually, we fell into a physical relationship that I today consider the best time period of my life."
"She must have made you very happy." My tone was drier than sandpaper.
"Indeed she did." If you noticed the sarcasm in my voice, you didn't say anything. "That was, until I met Lina. Lina was all I could think of after that. I broke things off with Sil—her shortly afterwards."
You didn't just "break things off with her", Reinhard. You sent her a copy of your engagement notice. Gag me with a spoon if that's the new way to break up with someone.
"She told her father immediately, and I was promptly sacked from my position in the navy as Oberleutnant zur See. That may not sound like a big deal, but in those days where employment was scarce, it was."
I would have dismissed that as yet another detail in your overall unimportant story if it weren't for the words that followed.
"Lina eventually set me up to meet the Reichsfuhrer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler." You said the name with a significant amount of scorn, as if from your seat of power you felt comfortable enough disdaining the man who had once been your savior and benefactor.
You turned to me in the dark. "And now here I am. Small wonder I married Lina, don't you think? I would probably be a boot licking civil servant today if it weren't for her ingenuity."
And at that moment—one of the worst moments of my life—I gave in to the thought that everything you had done up till now had been out of your desperation to keep your job, and to continue rising through the ranks of the Nazi party. I told myself that you did it out of necessity and not because you knew you could do anything and get away with it.
"So what use could you possibly have for me, then?" I asked, my voice rising and falling as you climbed on top of me once more. My skin crawled as it made contact with yours. "If you owe Lina so much—"
"Don't speak her name with your filthy Untermensch tongue, Czech," you spat, backhanding me so hard across the face I saw stars. "And don't patronize me, either. I will do as I like."
I would learn so much about you later on, Reinhard. How wrong I had been about your motive for having done what you did out of necessity. You had not only the blood of more than a million Jews on your hands, but also that of your fellow Nazis, those whom you had ordered executed from the comfort of your office simply because they stood in your way as you walked the path to power.
But that was much later on in life, long after you had departed this Earth. For now, I lay beneath you in the oily darkness and willed myself not to show signs I was crying.
"May I ask you something...?" I eked out as you rolled off of me and began to put your clothes on in the dark.
You didn't say anything, so I continued: "This girl that you loved...what was her name?"
"It shouldn't matter to you," you said harshly. Then, as you made your way to the door: "I don't mention her name to anyone. Not anymore."

Oberleutant zur See: Naval Lieutenant