Lineage(116)

“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.

“He came home in a rush that night. He said the allies were advancing and that we had to leave. The war was lost. I went to get my mother’s silverware from under the stairs, but he said there wasn’t time. A car that would take us to the coast was leaving in an hour for France, but I had to do something first. He took me into the bathroom and had me stand by the sink with my mirror. He told me to hold it steady and to not let it drop, no matter what. He had his knives.” Her voice fell to a whisper and Lance saw that her eyes no longer registered him, or even the walls surrounding her. She was back in that bathroom, her hands, white-knuckled, gripping a mirror while her husband drew a blade out and lifted it toward his face.

“He made me watch as he sawed through his nose. He cut it right off. I can still hear it hitting the floor like a dead mouse. And he took his lip too. He cut it from his gum, and he told me he would always smile this way.” A tear so delicate and fine that Lance thought it would shatter rolled out of one eye and into the lines of skin on her face. “They took one look at his face before we got on the boat and let us pass. He couldn’t be recognized. Besides, who would turn a man away with the proper documents and missing his nose? We came here and had just enough money to build our house and start a business.”

Annette fell silent and closed her eyes. Lance didn’t know what to say. His mind attempted to grasp everything she’d said, but it felt huge and he was unable to organize it into anything that neared cohesion.

“Why the shipping company? Was he trying to start a new life?” Lance shrugged his shoulders with the question, and Annette responded by shaking her head again.

“That company was nothing but a cattle farm. He knew all along what he wanted to do. He wrote the applications himself. He put questions on them that meant something to him.”

“Questions? Like what?” Lance asked.

“Questions about their family and next of kin. He was looking for something in each of the men he hired. He was looking for isolation. Someone who had no family or that had moved far away from anyone of relation.” Annette stared at Lance again, an intensity in the look that told Lance she needed him to understand. That something was coming, like a tsunami he couldn’t see in the darkness. “He was singling them out, one by one. Selecting the ones who were alone.”

“So he could kill them,” Lance finished. He watched his grandmother nod, her guilt so palpable he could almost see the word etched across her face. “And you helped him, didn’t you?” Again the nod. “Tell me.”

Annette sighed the crinkling of dry paper again. “I would approach them after their shift and invite them to dinner at the house. Tell them there was a promotion of sorts that Heinrich had picked them for, and that they must not say a word to their fellow workers about. ‘Tell no one,’ I’d say, and they would answer, ‘Yes, of course,’ thrilled that they were moving up in the company. Only I knew the truth—they were condemned.”