Beauty and the Beast

Where Are The Parachutists?

One would think that after surviving you, Reinhard, I would be incapable of ever having sexual relations with any other man ever again.
Wrong.
Well, not quite. I never looked at men the same way again after you. And the image of sex in my mind was forever ruined. After you, the word "sex" in my eyes was synonymous with "ignominy," "abasement," and "mortification."
There was one exception to my phobia of all things male, and that was--and had always been--Vlastimil Moravec—or more familiarly, Ata.

I probably would never have gone to see him again if it hadn't been out of necessity.

After Josef left, things only went from bad to worse. My mother made it very clear that I was no longer welcome in her house because of the threat I posed to her personal safety. I had been more than happy to get out of her hair. At first, I had gone to Maria's house, and when her father objected, I went to Libena's house. To my dismay, I realized that they had moved back to their apartment in Prague, most likely to aid my brother and his comrades in whatever else they needed to do in the capital. Her father was an important resistance fighter, and had only come to stay in Panenske Brezany for a while to soothe Libena's mother's nerves, which had begun to fray due to the precarious situation in Prague.

Libena's father had boarded up the house and chained the door shut from the inside. I spent days skulking around the backyard like a vagrant, living off of whatever vegetables were still good enough to eat in the Fafeks' small garden and sleeping on their back porch. But that only lasted a few days before I was left with nothing. In the end, I moved back into my mother's house and told her I would be staying until I found myself a place to stay.

While I was barely scraping by in Libena's backyard, I thought a lot about you.
A lot had happened since you passed, Reinhard. Everyone wished you had never died. They all felt that it would be much better with you around—at least you knew when to stop. At least you knew that cruelty had its limits. You were unspeakably cruel to us—I won't deny that—but you were certainly much nicer than Kurt Daluege or Karl Hermann Frank.

Have you seen Frank on the other side yet, Reinhard? For sure you have. He was hanged in front of roughly five hundred Czechs, including the few surviving mothers of those who died in the eradication of Lidice. Although I didn't witness the hanging, I saw it on newsreels. To see your high and mighty subordinate reduced to a frail old man that had to be helped up the gallows gave me a heady rush of savage relief second only to the immense joy I felt when the stool was kicked out from beneath his feet. They later said he died not of a cervical fracture—a broken neck—but of asphyxiation from the noose as it tightened around his neck. He died a slow death.

I couldn't help but feel saddened by the news of your demise when it was broadcast over national radio. I had grown so used to seeing your face, to listening to your high pitched voice as you showered me with verbal abuse, that it upset me that that piece of my life was gone. I found that thought so disgusting that I promptly keeled over and threw up.

It didn't make sense to me. You killed my children; you ruined my life in the worst ways imaginable—I wasn't safe even after your death. All that, and my first reaction to your obituary was to flop down on my bed and cry into my pillow.
I imagine you're probably sitting somewhere in Hell, or Heaven, or wherever the hell people go when they die. I was never really religious; I don't give things like that much thought. But I imagine you're looking down at me and laughing at how stupid I am. I'm supposed to hate you. Yet here I was, crying over  your death.

I think it's because you put me in a position where I had no choice but to rationalize that I was a worthless piece of shit, and then treated me like I was of value to you. Maybe that's what caused me to forge such a strong emotional attachment to you.