Blue Glass

Svetlana

I find it laughable how it could ever cross Lea's mind that I could turn against her.
I understand her actions perfectly. I should have known she would snap under her mother's tyranny sooner or later. I suppose that it just never crossed my mind that she would exact her revenge in such a bloody way.
Anyone is capable of murder. Even a seventeen year old girl who by all accounts is always on the good side of the law.
I think part of why I decided to make it look like I sided with Heinrich and his father stemmed from my frustration that she hadn't told me.
I expected her to at least tip me off that she was going to do something explosive. Then again, it was a silly expectation—who in their right mind would walk up to anyone, even someone they've known for years, and calmly inform them that they're going to kill their mother?
Maybe she had been afraid that I would hold her back and stop her.
That was a plausible explanation, I thought as I examined my face in the mirror. My normally flawless, lily white skin was dotted with a myriad of angry red blemishes, most likely a side effect of the many pots of facial powder and cosmetic products I had used to create the illusion of wrinkles and jowls on my face—an essential part of my "Marie von Wedel" disguise.
If she had told me and, say, I reacted badly, she would have had no choice but to eliminate me, too. And while I knew everyone was born with the instinct to raise a hand against their fellow human beings, doing it twice to two people who had been in your life for years was no easy feat, even if it was part of a sacrifice to save your lover's honor.
How would she have done it, I wondered. Would she have punctured my lung and allowed me to suffocate, and doused the room in kerosene as a backup measure, the way she killed her mother? Or would it have been more...violent?
If there was one thing I had to give her credit for, it was the mercy with which she had disposed of Klothilde. I had half expected her to knock her to the floor and vent years and years of pain and denial on her body, stabbing her beyond recognition and carving her up into a bloody pulp. It was the swift death she gave her mother that convinced me that what she had done was purely a move to ensure Manfred von Richthofen's honor wasn't besmirched because of her.
I hadn't even known she was going to Germany until I chanced upon her packed suitcase in her room the night she was leaving, atop which sat a one way first class train ticket to Berlin. It hadn't surprised me. It would be only natural that she would choose to flee the country altogether and be with the man she had killed for.
My initial plan hadn't been to dress up as an old noblewoman having fallen from grace, and follow her into a dilapidated shantytown. I had only wanted to wait for her emotional wounds to heal before extending an olive branch to her and asking her to come back to Vienna.
I was also extremely wary of Richthofen. I felt that it was my duty as her best friend to do my best to protect her from him. And while I didn't have any experience with men save Ilya, i knew that all men were wired the same: they only ever wanted one thing from a girl. Richthofen, with his gallantry and flawless manners, all his fancy titles and medals and social standing...he couldn't possibly be any different, could he? Besides, if he was a national hero, why was he cavorting with a girl who made her living as a wine seller and was nine years younger than he was, instead of courting a respectable countess or baroness like him?
It was only when I realized she wasn't heading for a chintzy hotel room in the heart of Berlin but rather a nasty apartment in an equally flea ridden pocket of the city called Wedding that I decided to resort to a bit of an extreme measure.
The disguise was easy. I had purchased a wig from a costume shop that had long gone out of business and was trying to get rid of its wares on the black market, as well as numerous heavy powders and creams to "age" my face and neck. As for my hands, I could only hope the years of dishwashing and ironing and doing housework would do the trick.
That was how, ticketless and sans baggage save for a bag with a few dresses and such stashed inside, I jumped the third class compartment of the train Lea had caught to Berlin.
It was a miracle I wasn't caught and thrown off at the next stop. The first thing I had done when the train rolled into the bahnhof in Berlin was locate her in the heaving crowds of people that flooded off the train and into the station. Next, I had had to literally stick to her heels as discreetly as I could in order to follow her to her destination—a rickety apartment building in the heart of this shithole they called Wedding.
If there was one thing I discovered about her when I spoke to her for the first time under the veneer of my disguise, for better or for worse, it was that Lea was a good liar. Introducing herself as "Helena Pottgen" to me, she adeptly spun a tale that rivaled mine in sorrow—and falsehood. It had proved extremely difficult to keep a straight face throughout our entire conversation, and if it weren't for the fact that one spontaneous move of my facial muscles could crack the mix of powders and creams I had methodically daubed on my face before leaving Vienna, I would have burst out laughing.
It was indeed a funny situation to be in. Here we were, two friends who had known each other for about five years now, sitting across from each other and lying to each other, introducing themselves once again under equally preposterous nom de guerres.
The only other thing I noticed that was wrong with her was the panicked, strained, on edge look about her. Her normally cool dark eyes had this wild, almost feral look to them, and her normally relaxed posture was tense and stiff. She looked like a caged animal about to be shot. I noticed that throughout our conversation she didn't remove her hand from her right pocket where I knew she kept her razor.
I had wanted to shake her when she came back early in the morning the next day, clearly having been somewhere else all night.
It didn't take a detective to deduce that she had spent the night with Richthofen—or maybe it was just my intuition. What was stopping her, anyway? Why wouldn't she? Her mother, the only real deterrent to their relationship as far as I was privy to, was dead.
Why? I wanted to shout at her. Why did you sleep with him?!
Lea's virtue was the only thing that would give her any sort of worth among men. Without it, Manfred von Richthofen now held all the cards—and only marrying him would save her reputation. Which deep down I knew would never happen. Richthofen was a nobleman, and a national hero at that, and his entire private life was more or less subject to intense scrutiny by the general public whether he liked it or not. For him to break free of all social constraints and marry a common wine seller would immediately lower his status in the eyes of the public. He would be expected to marry someone of his own status, and someone who was accepted in the eyes of his family and relatives. I didn't know much about the customs of German royalty, but that much must be true.
The whole absinthe thing had completely blown my cover. After I had rushed out of her apartment, I had hastily packed and set out for Vienna once again, not to the empty brown house but to Reinhard Schwarz's villa in the suburbs, where Heinrich had insisted I stay. Reinhard, unlike Lea's father, had adeptly harnessed the advantages that came with being born into minor Austrian nobility, and managed to secure a position for himself as a commissioned officer in the Austrian army during peacetime. His salary, combined with the great riches his wife had brought into their marriage, ensured a comfortable lifestyle for both of them and a lavish upbringing for their only child, Heinrich.
I hadn't been the only one affected by Klothilde's murder. If there was anyone who was more broken up about it, it was Heinrich. Him and Lea had been playmates ever since they were born, and as Siegfried Schwarz drifted farther and farther away from his family, it was his brother who magnanimously stepped up to fill the hole his absence left behind. He was the one who paid the bills, bought Lea and her mother lavish gifts, and did just about everything else that her father would have done—or should have done.
It had been harder to get Heinrich to put himself in his cousin's shoes because I couldn't exactly tell him the real reason why she had murdered his aunt. From what Lea had told me, Heinrich was part of the famed Richthofen Geschwader, and if he found out his cousin and his Kommandeur were having an affair...
His father, on the other hand, was absolutely livid. If it weren't for the fact that he had given both Lea and her mother his word as an officer that as long as he was alive they would lack for nothing, I was pretty sure he would have cut her off and disowned her by now.
"That was good money that little urchin stole from me," he had raged one evening. "She's just as slippery and conniving as her father. Why couldn't I see from the beginning that she would turn out like him?"
Because in the beginning, "Manfred von Richthofen" was nothing more to her than another name in a newspaper and another face on a Sanke card, I wanted to say.
Now, sitting at the window of my small room at the topmost floor of Reinhard Schwarz's large house, I couldn't help but wonder whether Lea had come home yet or not. Then again, what would possibly compel her to return? In his rage, Heinrich had made it very clear to her that if he or his father ever got his hands on her she would be headed straight to a mental facility.
I wondered why I hadn't come clean to her the day after I had given myself away. Ty che, blyad indeed, I thought ruefully. Then again, would she even have let me talk to her? I hadn't spoken to her since her discharge from the hospital, and I could tell by the plain mistrust that underscored her gaze whenever she looked at me that she thought I was also trying to get her locked up.
I wondered what I would say to her if I ever saw her again. Would I ever see her again? And if I did, would things between us ever be the same?
No, I thought, they wouldn't. Because she changed because of this. She's changed irrevocably, and for the worse.