~ More Than Angry Parting ~
I stared at him. “If you plan to murder Hitler, why are you right here? Can’t you get to Kassel more easily by train?” I stood up, brushing off my traveling pants before starting off toward the road.
“Um, aren’t you going to wait for my answer?” He sounded dubious of my attention and his decision to tell me all about his life story only to have me walk away moments later.
“I’m going to Berlin, of course. Oh that’s right, you didn’t know,” I added, when I noticed his raised eyebrows. Of course, I probably shouldn’t have told him, but he seemed pretty eager for me to learn of his life story; whether that had to do with earning trust or just plain interest, I didn’t know.
“Well, it was nice meeting you, um, Gunter Hoffmann.” I made sure to infuse as much dismissal and sourness into my voice as possible. He hurried after me, but I held up a hand to stop him. “Nope, you’re going to stay away from me and go to Kassel, and pretend you never saw me. Agreed?”
“Um, no, I don’t agree. You could be stopped by Germans and sent to prison!”
I whipped around to face him. “You don’t even know what I’m doing out here. And yet, you shout for the whole world to hear that I might just happen to have something the Germans would be interested in enough that they would send me to prison for it. Do you have any idea how much danger you just put me in? And just so you could have an audience for your depressing life narrative.”
“No! I simply thought–”
“If you had any brain at all, you would know that shouting about me and my business in Germany would – and will, might I add – amount to high stakes and consequences. So I highly suggest that you walk the other direction and learn how to behave like a real resistance member.”
“I am a real resistance–”
So he had chosen the defensive side. Often known as the I-Am-Very-Suspicious side. “No, you’re not,” I crossed my arms. “Tell me, Gunter, what else in your Tale-Of-My-Life was a lie? What about the part about you being ‘one of their best agents’? Were you truly? Because I find that fairly hard to believe.” I walked up close to him, looking him up and down, before grabbing a bunch of cloth right at the hem of his jacket. Feeling the sting of metal in my fingers, I pulled out the object and opened my palm, face up, just out of his reach. “And why would a resistance member have a grenade in their pocket with a swastika on it? Hm… I wonder why.”
“Because we ran out of weapons in our hideout and gathered some from the Nazi warehouses,”
“No, that’s another lie. The resistance I know would never leave a swastika laying across their explosives. They would coat their weapons with paint to cover it up, or they would print a different symbol onto it. They would never leave it on their weapons. And if you were a true Brother in Christ, you wouldn’t lie about this kind of stuff. You would avoid answering or hurry away, but you would never lie straight to my face.”
“B-but–”
“I don’t want to hear it. Go somewhere else, Nazi, and don’t come near me again.” I tucked the grenade into my pack, reassured that I had some sort of weapon against the Germans. Gunter looked offended by my title for him. He straightened, looking a bit pink, saying, “I am no Nazi, you should know, and—” I sighed loudly, interrupting, “Can you please just shut up? I don’t want to hear your lame excuses and your ‘I’m not this’ and ‘I’m not that’.”
“Emi, if you would just listen to reason–”
“Don’t you dare call me that.” I snapped, slapping him hard on the cheek. He winced, his hand flying up to his face as I got even closer to him. “Don’t you dare act like I’m your sweetheart. I would never choose someone as wimpy as you.”
“I wasn’t–”
“I’m sick of your excuses and your lies. Good. Bye.”
And on that happy note, I turned on my heel and bolted into the trees, keeping far away from Mr. I’m-Not-A-Nazi.
Who did he think he was, insisting that he was a Brother and then lying about his life story, carrying a grenade in his pocket so he could blow me up, calling me a nickname, and then claiming not to be a Nazi? He acted as though I was his best friend, or girlfriend, or whatever you want to call it. He wasn’t the respectable man he should have been, but then again, neither was anyone these days. You couldn’t trust the government, let alone your neighbors, friends, even family.
It was one of those things that only war could give. And only war could take away.