Poisoned. Everything around him, inside and out.
“Can you come up to my room?” Gerlinde’s eyelashes were wet with snow. The melted drops of it shone in her hair, on top of her coat, like dew. “I want to show you something.”
Against his will, a spark of hope singed his lungs, like a match with its hissing breath. He discovered that he hoped for the letter and tried to strangle that hope in himself at the same time. How pathetic it was that after all that had been done to him, he still wished to see the good in people.
His shoulders heavy as lead, he dragged himself upstairs after her, dreading the coolness of her bedroom, into the privacy of which she pulled him, an unwilling victim.
Once inside, she shrugged off her coat and folded it so that the wet camel wool wouldn’t touch the upholstery of the chair. Tadek kept his on. His hands were buried in his pockets. He observed her silently, still stuck on the threshold, in the shadows between her bedroom and the passageway.
Against the glass, wet snow was throwing itself with force and turning into narrow snaking streams as it melted. For some time, Gerlinde stood in front of the window with her back to Tadek and observed it silently.
“Do you think they’re trying him in absentia as well?” she asked, her voice strangely steady and hollow. “There, in Nuremberg?”
“I wouldn’t know. I followed you outside and didn’t catch the rest of the names.” With the best will in the world, he couldn’t keep accusation out of his voice. “Does it really matter though? He’s not there to stand trial, with the rest of them.”
She still wouldn’t turn to face him. “I didn’t expect to see them all there. To be truthful, I didn’t expect to see any of them alive at all.”
That was an odd thing to say. Tadek waited for the explanation.
“When the war was nearing the end, der Führer was explicit in his wishes. If the German people lost it to the Eastern ‘sub-humans,’ the German people had lost their very right to exist. They lost their right to be called a master race. From now on, their only fate was their entire obliteration.”
At last, she turned around. Her face was a mask of infinite disillusionment; her eyes – oddly extinguished.
“He issued that Nero decree for that very purpose – to destroy all infrastructure that the enemy could use and to hell with the civilians. The best thing they could do, in his eyes that is, was to throw themselves under the enemy tanks with the last hand grenade or to kill themselves otherwise, instead of falling into the arms of the ‘Asiatic hordes.’ On the evening of April 12, the Berlin Philharmonic gave its last performance, mostly for the Party members and the rest of the elite. Vati took me along.” Her mouth twisted into a smirk. “After listening to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Bruckner’s 8th Symphony, and some Wagner, we headed to the exit near which Hitlerjugend boys stood with baskets full of cyanide capsules for everyone to take along.”
Tadek found it amazing how calmly she talked about it all – that mass madness which made people follow one single raving lunatic straight to the abyss. As if reading his thoughts, Gerlinde snorted with unexpected disdain.
“He counted at least on the most loyal of his followers to follow his example and do away with themselves. However, as soon as he blew his own brains out, they suddenly realized that there was more to life than der Führer and that, perhaps, something could have been arranged with the Allies, if not with the Ivans. Look at them all, very much alive and well.”
She gestured vaguely toward the window, indicating Nuremberg no doubt. In her eyes, the light was aglow once again, wrathful this time, burning everything with its righteous condemnation.
“As I said, I didn’t expect to see them there. We were raised with this idea that our lives were not our own but Germany’s, the Führer’s. It was them, our leaders, who kept drumming it into our generation’s heads. Not even a year ago, it was them, who made all these heroic speeches before us, BDM and Hitlerjugend; Axmann himself inspired us to commit suicide, no less, by sacrificing our lives for some abstract idea but when the time came and it was their turn to choose a noble death in the name of National Socialism or life in a world without it, they all almost unanimously chose life. Margot was right all along. Betraying him, resisting the entire system was the right thing to do. She wasn’t a coward like my father. Now I understand why he was so fearful of her. It wasn’t because she knew of his past or anything of that sort… It was because he sensed that resentment in her, directed at everything Party-approved. Sensed something in her that he had lost a long time ago – the inner moral guide to what is right and wrong.”
“His past?” Tadek was suddenly interested.
Gerlinde only looked at him with a faint smile. Slowly, she turned around and went to her vanity table. From one of the drawers, she pulled what looked like a heavy, leather-bound album. She stood for some time, pensive and impossibly distant, caressing the leather with her pale fingers. At last, she sat on the bed and patted the spot next to her. “Yes. His past. This is what I wanted to show you.”
In spite of himself, Tadek lowered next to her. It wasn’t the letter but it was still something and besides, something had shifted in Gerlinde herself. She was talking like a different person altogether.
She carefully lowered the album onto her lap. When she turned the first page, its hard cover, with “Our Memories,” engraved in silver on it, landed on his knee. Tadek
