Beauty and the Beast

Dynamics

All human beings have some good in them.
All but you.
Or maybe you do have some good in you, but you never bothered to show it. Maybe you never lived long enough to show it. Either way, it never got a chance to manifest itself. Or maybe it already had, in the form of your rocky marriage to Lina and your role of a loving father to your three children—Klaus, Heider, and Silke.
Your daughter's name was a point of interest for me, just so you know. I wondered who she was named for. For all I knew the Silke you spoke to me of back then could have been one of your mistresses, even though you had none, or at least, none that anyone knew of. Still, the way you had spoken so candidly and sentimentally about her puzzled me. You had never before spoken so highly of Lina in front of me.

After I had returned from my mother's house, you immediately sent me to continue my job as your puppet "assistant secretary". Come to think of it, I had missed the distraction of a job in my daily life. The secretary, who I remembered as the one who had nearly crushed my skull with a paperweight, treated me a bit more nicely than he had before, probably on your orders. The monotonic tasks of sealing envelopes, organizing file cabinets, and watching the printer gave me something to do, and helped me take my mind off of you, and my child.
I liked to imagine that it was a girl. I had always wanted my first child to be a girl.

We returned to our usual nightly dynamic after two weeks. The first week I couldn't talk to you, although I had told myself I would coerce personal information out of you. I just couldn't do it. Every time I looked at you I would see you holding that metal weight, slamming it into my stomach over and over and over again.
Your sadism carried itself to the bedroom, also. Although my mind hated you and the things you did to me, my body was another story. You seemed to take cruel delight making me enjoy what you were doing, and taunting me about it after.

"What would your mother think?"you said to me as you straightened the lapels of your jacket in the full-length mirror next to the door. "What will she think when she finds out that her daughter lusts after the 'Butcher of Prague'?"
I tried not to say anything. I knew that if I did, it would most likely be something inflammatory that would earn me nothing but a few bruises. Still, I couldn't help myself—you could talk about anything you wanted to me, but my mother was strictly off limits.
"You're a motherfucker," I said. "You're a sick, twisted son of a bitch."
You looked at me in the mirror, your back facing me. I vaulted off the bed and stomped over to you, glaring at your reflection in the glass.
"You're not used to a Czech talking to you like that, are you?" I was beyond infuriated now. The last thing on my mother's mind would how I involuntarily reacted to the feel of his hands on me. He had no right to talk about her; he had no right to do any of this to me.
Your right hand was twitching slightly, like you were trying to rein it in and keep it from shooting out in a perfect backhand, straight into my face. I moved closer to you, so close I could faintly smell the cologne you were wearing.
"Go on, hit me," I taunted you, all rationality swept aside by mounting rage. "You asshole—"
In a fluid motion, you reached over your shoulder and grabbed a huge hunk of my hair, savagely pulling me in front of you. I staggered backward slightly as you let go, your blue eyes alight with rage. You followed as I backed up, drew your arm back, cocked your fist and threw a punch that hit me square in the face.
There was a dull snap and a wet pop. Agony exploded throughout my face, radiating from my nose as I hit the ground. Blood poured down my chin, into my hands, onto my lap—almost like a tiered, macabre fountain. I couldn't feel my nose, and each inhale was agony to the point where I had to breathe through my mouth.
He broke my nose, I thought. He broke my nose.
Swaying like a drunken monkey, I clambered to my feet. You came towards me again and kicked me so hard in the stomach I promptly dropped to all fours and vomited all over the carpet. You instinctively jumped back and made a low sound of disgust.
"Never, ever take that tone with me again," you said. "I will talk to you however I like. And you'll take it, do you understand me?"
You cut a wide berth around me when I didn't respond and stood behind me, dropping to your knees and grabbing my hair. Pain lanced through my face at the sudden movement as you yanked my head back, forcing me to look at you.
"Do you understand me?"
I nodded again, my subdued "Ja" muffled and barely discernible.
"Now clean up this shit." You spat square in my face before slamming the back of my head into the floor as you rose to your feet. "I want to see it gone when I come back tomorrow. And have someone patch up your face for you. You look like shit."
The door slammed and I was alone. I laboriously pushed myself to my feet and staggered over to the mirror to see the extent of the damage you had wrought.
The middle of my face was a coagulated, sticky mess of blood. From what I could see, my nose was caved in on one side, listing more to the left. My lip had split open in at least two places,  a thin trickle of blood making its way down my chin from the greater of the two splits. My eyes were red, and the middle of my face was already starting to swell.
Anna came running in with a huge tray of ice cubes. She began to pile them haphazardly on my face, the cold slowly numbing the pain the longer they stayed there.
We didn't speak to each other. She didn't ask questions. She didn't have to. It was obvious that I wasn't okay.

You came by that night, after I had been taken to the nearby SS-run hospital to get my nose patched up. First I had to sit there and listen as you hurled insult after insult at me, calling me an ugly bitch, a dirty whore—just about every name in the book. Then you made me listen to the latest speech you were going to give to the Southeastern European Society, an organization devoted to the integration of Southeastern Europe into the German Reich. I struggled to suppress the urge to yawn the whole time. Finally, you produced a bottle of Czech spirits and made me drain it to the last drop, and then you made me smoke half a box of cigarettes. Only after that did you sit on the edge of the bed and lazily beckon me to you.
The alcohol numbed my senses so much that I was able to remain in a half awake, half asleep state the whole time you...I don't know what to call it anymore. The word "Fucking" gives it a semblance of dignity. I never felt so low in my life before you, Reinhard.
You satisfied yourself and stood up to put your clothes on. It was all I could do to pull the sheets around my naked, sore body and curl into fetal position. You strode to the door and left, slamming it so hard it rattled.

I cried myself to sleep that night. Why is that detail so important? There wasn't a night I didn't.