“How do you know this if she was…” I trail off. If she never told you she was Jewish and she was dead by the time you returned from the war.
“I tracked down Johanna’s mother after I’d been to Auschwitz. She was in a terrible way. She’d lost her husband in the bombing and her daughter in the camps. She spat at me, hit me. She blamed me for Johanna being killed.” His eyes are unfocused and fixed on a spot above my head. “When I think back I remember one of the last times Johanna and I were together, and I’m sure that she almost told me then but something stopped her. Maybe she was afraid for me. Or maybe it was my Nazi uniform. I don’t know. There was something worrying her but she said it was the war. The bombing. That I was fighting. The last time I saw her we were supposed to be married but she said she couldn’t find her birth certificate and there wasn’t time to request a copy. I was sent to North Africa to fight, and a few months later I got the letter saying that—” His lips press together. “Saying that she loved me and she couldn’t wait to be my wife. Then I was captured, and I never heard from her again.”
He’s silent a long time, and then he notices that his cigarette has burned down to his fingers and grinds it angrily into the ashtray. “Why do I tell you these things? I haven’t spoken this aloud in twenty years.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to say something wounding. She didn’t trust you, that’s why she didn’t tell you she was Jewish. She can’t have really loved you. But it’s rare to see him so raw and open and despite everything, I feel for him. Or, I feel for the man he once was, the focused but blinkered young man who wore the uniform of those who killed the woman he loved. I see the same hatred of the Nazis in his eyes that I saw in my father’s for the Russians, their hearts both hardened with hate because they lost the women they loved. How quickly the political becomes personal when those you love are taken from you.
Reinhardt reaches for his uniform jacket which is slung over the back of the sofa and digs in one of the pockets. “Here.” He tosses a small cardboard box over to me and I catch it.
“What’s this?”
“Birth control.”
I’m still lost in his past and it takes me a moment to switch back to my present. I stare down at the box, feeling like a chair has been pulled out from beneath me. “Did you have to do it like that? Make me feel sorry for the things that happened to you and then throw this in my face?”
“I thought you’d be pleased. There are women in countries all over the world who are denied access to these pills.”
“Oh, yes, the women of East Germany are so lucky,” I fume. When did he get them, today? Or did he acquire them during these last weeks and has been keeping them aside for the cruelest possible moment?
But he just reaches for his reports and begins packing them back into their files. “Don’t feel sorry for me, Liebling. I landed on my feet after the war. I always will.”
“Yes, I have no doubt you’ll be fine. You get to do whatever you want, take whatever you like. Everything will always work out for you, while I—”
Faster than I can follow he’s crossed the space between us and is leaning over me, hands braced on the sofa either side of my body and his face close to mine. Eyes blazing, he speaks in a low, threatening voice.
“You think I’ve had a say in all the things that have happened to me? You think I would choose them? Yes, I took you, but it was the Fates who put you in my path twice in the same week and I knew then it would be this way between us. I have been patient, waiting for you to feel it too. And you do. You may hit me, swear at me, declare ten times a day that you hate me, but all it takes is one look, one kiss, and you will give me everything.”
His words burn through me like fire. I remember what I thought the very morning after I encountered Reinhardt in the street. The man I’ll fall in love with will be unlike any of the men I’ve known in my life. He’ll be remarkable.
“You were meant to be mine. And I will have everything.”
I don’t believe in fate, but he’s right about one thing. I do feel it, and it’s not just his physicality, his intensity. Chemistry, the Western magazines call it, that indefinable connection that two people have to each other on a frequency only they can hear.
But it doesn’t matter what I call it. We want each other. And we are going to tear each other apart.
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He stays where he is a moment longer, just watching me, just breathing, content to wait. He’s thinks he’s got all the time in the world.
When he finally straightens I ease myself off the sofa, my face averted, letting him think that it’s shame or submission making me look at the ground, but really it’s because I don’t want him to see the anger burning in my eyes. I will bring this man down if it’s the last thing I do.
Later, as I’m hanging my skirt up in the closet something inside on the ceiling catches my eye. I’ve seen it dozens of times before without realizing what I’m looking at. I step inside to get a closer look, and reach my fingers up to touch it.
What a curious place to put such a thing, but I suppose it has to go somewhere. I stand in the semi-darkness of the little space for some time, just thinking, remembering something Frau Fischer told me.
Yes, it could work. It could work beautifully.
Brimming with excitement, I step back into my room and spy the box of birth control pills sitting on my dressing table. The smile is wiped from my face in an instant. My plan could work, but it will take time. Possibly weeks, and in the meantime I’ll be living under the same roof as Reinhardt.
My heart beating in my throat, I reach for the box and read the instructions. One every day at the same time… Inside the box the pills are arranged in a case that resembles a telephone dial and labelled one to twenty-four. Each one a tiny decision.
I can still feel his mouth whispering against mine. I remember how he looked in the semi-darkness, naked and implacable; the slide of his tongue against mine, against my sex. The memory makes me whimper because I’m no longer the indifferent, sexless creature I once was. He’s awoken a hunger in me that burns hotter than wildfire and I pray that it won’t consume me before I manage to get away from him.
I count back the days, reach for the eleventh pill and swallow it down with some water.
Chapter Seventeen
Evony