Blue Glass

Lovers Quarrel

I didn't see "Marie" again after that. It seemed that somehow after her visit the day before she had vanished into thin air. Perhaps she also knew her cover had been blown.
It seemed a part of me had always known she reminded me of someone else. The accent she had spoken German with that I had had such a hard time placing I now knew was distinctively Russian. Her voice also hadn't been creaky or raspy or the kind of voice you would expect an old woman to have—although that hadn't bothered me too much because it was normal for old people to retain their youthful voices to some extent. As for the disguise...
That was the only part I truly didn't understand. How she had managed to make herself look older, not to mention the wrinkles, was beyond me. Then again, she had probably taken a page or two out of the books of the many successful con artists that had risen to infamy over the centuries.
The thing was, Svetlana was nowhere near becoming a con artist herself, so any ordinary person ought to have seen right through her disguise. Anyone but me, because what reason did I have to believe Svetlana would have given two whoops in Hades what I did? In my mind, she hated me for using her to steal money from my cousin.
What exactly had made her come all the way from Vienna to a a country in which she knew no one and had no one, just to follow me around? Was she trying to keep tabs on me so Heinrich would know where I was and have a ball tracking me down? Or was she genuinely trying to watch out for me? I could only hope it was the latter, otherwise I would have to...

The resounding slap I bestowed upon myself echoed on the stairwell as I slumped down on the nearest step and drew my knees to my chest. It seemed that my mind immediately jumped to murder as a solution to whatever problem came in my way like it was nothing. The fact that I had already done it before made it even less abhorrent in my eyes.
It wasn't murder...! I did it for him...
I waited for the overwhelming urge to throw up all over the stairs to slowly dissipate before getting to my feet and adjusting my hat. Under normal peacetime circumstances, I would be holed up in a dank cell in a women's prison by now, sitting on a barrel in a grimy dress watching the occasional rat or cockroach skitter around my feet. I supposed the authorities hadn't paid much attention to the case because of how tattered the political and government system of the country already was. Also knowing Heinrich and Onkel Reinhard, they weren't the type to sully our family name further by making it known that a murder had occurred in their midst. I was sure that they had convinced whatever jury they had come up against to rule it out as an accident with the appropriate evidence, and had my mother quietly buried in some graveyard.
A wave of renewed nausea swept over me as I realized I could suddenly sympathize with all those serial killers who had been put to the chair or hanged for their crimes. To kill was indeed an intoxicating feeling, one that made a person itch to do it again for the emotional burden that lifted from their shoulder with the death of the person in question. Everyone grew up knowing that to take the life of someone else was a grave sin, but I was beginning to see it as nothing but a means to the end.
And that terrified me.

I hadn't expected to want to kill again after my mother. What I had done to her was a cruel necessity, one that I never intended to repeat for as long as I lived. And now here I was, contemplating in the back of my head how things would play out if push came to shove and I decided to surprise Marie—Svetlana—one night and slash her throat open.
My feet shook terribly as I made my way down the stairs and into the dank alleyways leading away from the dilapidated apartment buildings toward the clean, roomy streets and tall buildings of Berlin. I couldn't believe what a monster I had turned into. I didn't know what I was at this point.
I wondered what Manfred would say. Then again, he wasn't even around to see anything I would do. And even if he was, he wouldn't care. I was, after all, nothing more than another one of his many one night stands.

Forgetting about an ordinary man is easy. Forgetting a man who is a national hero is anything but.
That fact soon manifested itself as I tripped lightly through the heart of Berlin and saw nothing but Manfred, Manfred everywhere. It seemed that his face had become as ubiquitous as that of famous German higher ups such as von Mackensen, von Hoeppner, and the Kaiser himself, all of whose likenesses were printed onto glossy paper and displayed on the shop windows. Another thing that became all too clear was the absence of the strain of wartime costs on the city that the rest of the country wore like a badge of honor. It was clear by the amazing functionality of all the art galleries, museums, and theaters that that Berlin could still afford a lot of luxuries suburban towns could only dream of.
A notice on the front door of one of the many art galleries I passed caught my eye. Apparently a painter named Reusing had done some portraits of Manfred and they were now on display for the public to appreciate.
It's just his face, I thought. His face shouldn't be that hard to look at. Especially since I'll never see him again...
That last rationalization was supposed to bring me peace of mind, but it had done the complete opposite. It felt like someone had placed a bag of stones in my chest as I made my way slowly up the stairs, one step at a time. Above me, the sun was slowly being blotted out by angry dark clouds—an apt reflection of my innermost feelings.