Beauty and the Beast

Chainless Links

Silke,
This is my last letter to you. Tomorrow I am due to fly to Berlin, where I will be given instructions for my new role as Reichsprotektor of France. I have already been to France and seen for myself what I will be working with. There is an abundance of Jews there; I myself have told my aides to consider the death sentence pronounced on them. After I declare France Judenrein, I will then fashion it into an ideal occupied territory for the Reich, just like I did with the Czech Republic. The French are fickle, weak people, more so than the Czechs and Slavs. Conquering them should be an easy task; ruling over them even easier.
Lina and the children will be moving with me from Jungfern Brenschan. I have already made plans for a lavish chateau to be cleared out for us upon our arrival. As for the Czech girl, I have her fate already drawn up. I will give her as a gift to my security detail who have so graciously protected me throughout my stay in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After they have had their fill of her, they will do with her as they see fit. All I have asked of them is that she doesn't live through whatever they do to her. They could burn her alive, dismember her, flay her, hang her, or shoot her—I don't care. I'll be leaving her behind and moving on to the next chapter of my life.
Or maybe I won't have them kill her. In fact, I won't even give her to my soldiers. I'll give her as a gift to my successor—who will either be Karl Hermann Frank or that idiot Kurt Daluege. A one-eyed man old enough to be her grandfather or a fat idiot will surely prove to be worse than me.
Or maybe I'll just kill her myself. She's mine; she will always be mine. I can't have lowly SS soldiers or bastards like Daluege and Frank fucking the girl I used to fuck, even if she is a Czech. She looks too much like you for me to let her go. I let you slip through my fingers once; I won't let it happen again.
I miss us a lot, Silke. A lot. I was so good back then when it was just the two of us in our little world of secret meetings and underhand rendezvouses. I was such a good person, and that was mostly thanks to you. You brought out the good in me more than anyone else I had ever known could. Every day, when I sit across from Lina at the table, or when she attends functions with me, I wonder how different things would be if i hadn't jilted you for her. I like to imagine for a moment that it's you by my side, shaking the hands of dignitaries and socializing with the wives of my subordinates and superiors. Lina will often ask me what put me in such a good mood at a certain party. I don't have the heart to tell her that it certainly wasn't her presence that brought it on.
I wonder if I would have ever taken the Czech girl if I had been married to you instead. Probably not. On the contrary, I would probably have hired her to be my secretary or my housekeeper, or to clean my office—tasks that will keep her close to me because she looks so much like you. That way I would never have to go a second without seeing your face. But I would never have raped her; I would never have abused her; and no, I definitely wouldn't have fathered two children by her.
I should have known Lina would never let me keep the second child. The sad truth is that I thought she would. I couldn't have made a worse mistake—and I paid for it. It was she who had devised the plan from A to Z, you see. Every last detail was Lina's brainchild. She was the one who had given the order to inject the Czech girl with curare, a muscle relaxant that has been used for thousands of years as a means of killing people by relaxing all the muscles of their bodies including their lungs and diaphragm, leading to suffocation. She had instructed the nurse who would be presiding over the birth of my illegitimate son to inject her with a minimal dosage of the poison, so that she would be paralyzed but not in any danger of dying. Her child, on the other  hand, was another story. Lina had been adamant that the "little Czech son of a bitch" needed to die. And die he did, and in one of the worst ways imaginable.
I should never have told her. I should have just killed the child myself. Perhaps if I had just told her the truth, her reaction would have been a lot less devastating. I told her the girl seduced me; I got her pregnant and she told me she dreamed of one day becoming the First Lady of the Protectorate.
I'm disgusting, aren't I? I should have been a man and told her that I kidnapped her off the streets of Panenské Brezany and held her captive in a room in our chateau.
I can't go to sleep at night anymore. I lie awake in bed and stare at the canopy while Lina snores peacefully next to me. All I can think of is the horrified expression plastered on Sophie's face as she watched my wife extinguish the life of her son. If I close my eyes, I can see him again, his blue eyes flying open as the paralysis reached his little lungs and he was no longer able to breathe. Was that a silent plea to his mother now that he couldn't cry out, "Make it stop, make it stop!"
Or was he trying to pinpoint the cause of his suffering and in the last few seconds he had left, opened his eyes to look for the first and last time on the only person on this earth who showed him love during his first and last moments in life?
I'm a terrible father. I'm a terrible person. I know it. I shouldn't be allowed to have children. I'm just as responsible for that child's death as Lina is.
No. I have the perfect idea. I'll kill her myself. I'll kill her and make a death mask for her and put it up on my wall. That way I can gaze upon your visage every day, no matter where I am. And I know I will never tire of looking at your face.
If you think that murdering a child is bad enough, wait until I tell you of the aftermath of that murder. I ordered my security detail to have all the nurses and doctors present at the birth taken outside and shot after I left. As I exited the building, I thought I could faintly hear the staccato of the machine gun and the screams of the wounded and dying medical personnel.
I can't have anyone knowing about the Czech. No one can know that I ever fell for an Untermensch girl. No one but you.
Once I seal this letter, I won't write to you anymore. The memory of you ought to stay here, with your doppelgänger, in a country that I soon will no longer inhabit. Perhaps you can even find it in your heart to forget about me also.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'll slip and write a letter to you once I'm in France. Who knows? You've never left my heart no matter what I've tried to do to expel you. It's only fair that your memory follows me across Europe to the City of Light.
You shouldn't love me, Silke. I'm selfish, I'm greedy, I'm avaricious. You are the complete antithesis of all that. Between you and me, I don't even know how I'm ever going to look my child in the eye once he or she is born. The pain of knowing what I did to another child—and my child no less—not too long ago will be too great for me to bear.
You surely must have heard of my exploits in the homeland; why haven't you written to me? Why haven't you come to see me? Can't you tell how much I need you?
Then again, if you came, the knowledge of what I've been doing all these years will shock you. I would much rather you stay happy without me than be with me and be sad. I always did tell you I liked you better when you smiled. That hasn't changed. Neither has anything else I thought about you.
Live your life, Silke. Make friends, take care of your family. Listen to your father and honor the memory of your mother. Eat well, sleep well, and study hard in school if you still go to school. I would give you political advice also but I'm sure you would tell me to shut up.
Please don't forget me. Try to remember me if you already banished me from your mind.
I love you. If anything, never forget that.
Yours eternally, with everlasting love,
Reini

Quick notice—sorry I didn't say this before but to everyone who didn't notice I left an instrumental for y'all to listen to...just swipe to one side of the image above. ;)