Blue Glass

Ilse

"Why??" My mother isn't at home; all the servants are downstairs in their quarters; I can raise my voice to my heart's content. "Why would you say that to him??"
Lothar's dark eyes widen. "Ilse, I—"
"No, tell me, why did you say that to him?" I resist the urge to yank the cigarette that he's so cavalierly smoking out of his mouth and slap him across the face. "What makes you think that he has to prove to you of all people that he's a man?"
"You know Manfred." Lothar's mouth curls in a razor sharp sneer. "He couldn't fuck a girl to save his life. He can't continue to live like a monk on my watch—and an airborne monk no less."
"So you indoctrinate him into things like that...by blackmailing him?!"
"You know Manfred," Lothar says again, taking a languid puff off his cigar, the glowing end of it dancing in the twilight. "He never took any of us seriously. At the end of the day, no matter what either of us say to him, it's always his own opinion that matters, and that of Mama and Papa. It's only gotten worse since he's become famous." He spits the last word like a piece of gristle into a napkin.
"That doesn't mean you blackmail him!" I wrung my hands. "You couldn't take a casual approach to the matter...?"
Lothar vehemently shook his head. "If I approached the subject casually he would have given me a lecture about having dignity and shame and accused me of all sorts of things. It was the only way to do it, Ilse. Say what you want to my face but deep down you know I'm right."
"He's your brother, Lothar." I can't believe him. "I know you've always been jealous of him, but that doesn't give you the right to—"
Lothar sneers contemptuously. "Me, jealous? Of him?" He shakes his head. "Maybe for his military accomplishments, yes, I am, but anything else? We all know that I surpass him in everything else a man should know how to do. Tell me—when has he ever won a hand of bridge against me?"
"He has a lot on his plate," I tell him. "Despite that, he loves you very much. He's always asking Mother about you in his letters."
"You're going to make me cry." Lothar pretended to wipe away a tear. "My dear older brother will love me even more after he's gone through with my dare." He smirked. "Believe me, he won't know what hit him."
"You don't know what that must have done to him." I set my jaw. "Tell me, Lothar—do you get happy hitting Manfred's nerves like that?"
"It's good to see him squirm sometimes, I'll say that." Lothar reached under the table next to him, pulled out two glasses and a bottle of red wine, and set them on the mahogany surface.
I blinked at him in confusion. "Where did you get that...?"
"A friend gave it to me. It was an underhand purchase off the black market." He effortlessly popped the cork and filled the two glasses with garnet liquid. "Would you like some?"
I nodded and took the tiniest of tiny sips out of the glass he handed me. "What do you think Manfred will do now?"
Lothar tipped his head back and laughed uproariously. "He'll go find a girl to fuck and bring me proof of his...excursion. I'll be honest—I look forward to seeing it."
He sighed when I shot him a reproaching look.
"Manfred owes me for this," he continued. "He may not know it now, but I've done him a favor. When he's living on his own in a chateau of sorts with that baroness—what's her name? Amalie? Anna?—that Mama and Papa are planning on marrying him off to, surrounded by plenty of sons and daughters, he'll thank me I indoctrinated him to the pleasures of fucking."
"Language." I had never heard that word uttered so many times in one sitting in my whole life. "If you must know, her name is Adele. And how do you know he hasn't done anything with a woman before?"
Lothar cackled again. "Ilse, we're talking about Manfred. Our brother, as I said before, couldn't fuck a girl to save his life." He threw the contents of his glass down his throat in a single pass, slamming it down with a note of finality. "Haven't you noticed how irritated he becomes whenever Mama talks to him about marriage or getting married? Have you ever seen him with a girl or talking about one? He's a celibate monk by all standards." Then he smiled. "You know how they say priests and monks are crazy about sex on the inside because they abstain from it? It's probably the same with Manfred."
I balked. "That's a blatant lie."
Lothar shook his head. "It's true; I know it. Just put a monk in a brothel and he would sire a thousand bastards enough to fill one city. Not so religious anymore, eh?" He laughed at his own joke. "Our brother is no different from a monk—the only thing that sets him apart from the pastor at the Friedenskirche is his uniform."
"What are you trying to say?" I asked, taking another sip of wine. The decadent flavor bloomed on my tongue; I was secretly glad I had a brother who knew people who were able to procure such luxuries for him.
"I'm trying to say that I've unlocked the monster's cage." Lothar lights yet another cigarette, placing it between his lips and taking a long drag off of it. "And very soon it's going to come out."
I glared at him. "Manfred is good enough without being a womanizer like you are."
"Manfred won't be able to carry on the Richthofen line if he doesn't learn what he needs to do on his wedding night." Lothar countered evenly. "If I recall correctly, I told him that if things didn't change, he'd return to the family home the day after his wedding and say that he didn't know what to do the night before."
"How could you forget such a conversation?" I finished my wine and set the glass down on the table next to its companion. "I'm sure you enjoyed yourself."
"That's an understatement. And I'm just getting started. What's going to be even more enjoyable is when he brings me that garter."
I rounded on him, my eyes wide. "Garter...?!"
The look my younger brother gave me was one of pure innocence. "What else would you have him bring me as proof that he's done as I asked?"
"You...isn't the form from the brothel that he'll have to fill out before he...isn't that enough?"
Lothar brindles. "Brothel? Who said he was going to a brothel?"
"Isn't that where all men go to do things of that nature?" I asked.
"Oh, no. He's not going to a brothel." There was a glint of perverse delight in Lothar's eyes now, like he had waited all his life for his older brother, of whom he had always been inherently jealous, to be beneath his thumb and now that wait was paying off. "I told him whores don't count."
Horror courses through me. Does he know about...the Austrian girl?
"Wh-what do you mean?" I struggled to keep my voice even. "If he's not doing it with a whore, then who—"
"He's going to do it the way I do it. The way a real man does it, not the way some skittish, inexperienced officer who's just looking for fifteen minutes with a good-looking woman does it."
He doesn't know. He doesn't know...!
"And that way is...?" I gradually let my breath out; let my shoulders relax.
"He'll go out of his way to get to know some girl and...well, things will go from there." He gives me a satisfied smirk. "When Manfred wants to do something, he'll do it, and he'll do it well. He's gone to take care of some official business in Berlin. And what better place than Berlin to look for pretty girls? There's no shortage of them over there. I've given him until he comes back to prove his...virility, or lack of it thereof."
The question tumbled out before I could stop it. "And if he doesn't?"
Lothar sighed. "I don't normally talk to women like this, but since you're my sister I suppose I can make an exception." He looked up at me triumphantly. "If he doesn't, we can safely assume one of three things—or two, or maybe all three if need be: that he's homosexual, that he has a disease, or that he's not very well endowed and subsequently ashamed of it."
I didn't know what to say to that. Color rose to my cheeks as I stared at the toes of my house shoes, stunned into silence. If there was a silver lining to be found in this whole situation, it was that Lothar clearly didn't know a thing about the Austrian girl. I wondered how different things would be if he had been the one to find out about her instead of me.
"You shouldn't worry too much about him, though." Lothar leaned forward, his brown eyes alight with joy. "Our dear Manne-Manning would never put himself in a position where he's in danger of gaining a reputation as a homosexual. Nor would he ever allow the men in the Staffel to get information hinting that their Staffelfuhrer has syphilis or is deformed. He'll see the dare through"
I coughed. "I'm sure he will. Good evening, Lothar."
I turned tail and hurried out of the room. I heard the legs of the chair he was sitting in creak as he turned to resume staring out the window and reading today's paper by the natural light filtering in through the windowpanes.
On my way down the hallway, I paused at Manfred's door. He had left yesterday for Berlin, saying it was because of administrative chores he had to do. I thought about his overall demeanor over the past few days. No, he hadn't been excessively melancholy or quiet, or shown any signs of the harrowing conversation he had had with his younger brother. But then again, he would never let his feelings show. It just wasn't his way.
My thoughts went to the Austrian girl. I felt so sorry for her, despite her low station. My brother was painfully shy around women; for him to go out and get to know one and goad her into sleeping with him would be impossible. He already knew this girl; he wrote letters to her; he wrote her name on papers; he snuck around to see her. If Manfred was going to use her as a means to fulfilling Lothar's dare, she would end up getting caught in the crossfire between him and his brother, and come out of it with nothing but her lost honor—and, when the time came for Manfred to get married, a broken heart.