“What do you mean?”
Annette sighed, and it sounded like ancient tissue paper being crumpled. Her head tilted forward and Lance feared that she would succumb once again to the silence, but soon words began to float out from beneath the veil of translucent hair enclosing her face.
“There was something wrong inside him. I knew it from the beginning. Maybe it was what drew me to him. I thought I could change it. But it was too deep, like a splinter that only slips farther in when you dig at it. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what he was.”
She paused, and Lance noticed that she had begun to rock in the chair. She reminded him of a child relating a particularly bad dream to a parent.
“He joined the army young. He told his family and friends that it was idealism. That he wanted to serve the Führer.” Annette raised her head so Lance could see her eyes through the curtain of hair. “He wanted to kill.”
Lance shifted in his chair. The pressure in the room felt nearly unbearable. He opened his jaw and tried to alleviate the discomfort in his ears, but to no avail. He was about to ask Annette if she felt it too when she continued.
“A blood lust. That’s what it was. He needed to see it. He loved to watch it drain from someone. He’d cut himself sometimes too, just to mingle his own with someone else’s. He never told me what he did at the camp he watched over. I can’t imagine. He had unlimited numbers to work on, to carve up, without anyone to answer to.”
Lance sat back in disbelief. “He was a war criminal? My grandfather? He presided over a concentration camp? Fuck me,” he said, putting his face in his hand and relishing in the darkness it brought, the oblivion. He wished that he could sink into it and out of the world without a trace. He wished none of it had ever happened. He wished his existence had been an idea never fully realized.
“The call came one day after I’d gotten home from the market,” Annette said. “It was snowing. I remember the flakes falling outside, and I wondered how something so beautiful could be, while something else so terrible happened around it. The phone rang, it was Heinrich. He told me it was time. We’d gone over it many times before he’d left for his post. We had our story and Heinrich had documents forged before he left. Our pictures with different names he’d picked out. My name is Gisela. I never liked Annette.” She stopped again, her gaze clouding over and her brow pulling down into a grimace.
Lance watched her—an enigma of a woman from a time he knew next to nothing about, her words spilling out from deep within where they’d been held for years. She struggled with whatever memory plagued her, and at last she won out as she swallowed and spoke again.