A Heartbeat
The Rise of Nazi Germany
1933
The double bass, woodwinds, and the trumpets all rise as the band finds a new rhythm. They all blare in her ears and she's listening to the crowd gathered around them roar with applause over the music. Gilbert smells like smoke and sweat and ink and she's breathing him in desperately as they the crowd splits into couples. The singer is untrained, she's almost broke out laughing several times, and Elizaveta can't tell if she's a soprano or Mezzo-soprano or Contralto like Elizaveta had been trained to listen for during her marriage. She's tipsy, perhaps on the beer, perhaps on the music, perhaps on the endorphins flowing through her.
The song has a Yiddish title, "Bei Mir Bist Du Shein" played much too fast, but Elizaveta is to feverish in delight and exertion to care that she's going against everything Ludwig's stood for lately. Gilbert is his brother, and he doesn't seem to care.
"I could say bella, bella, even say wunderbar, Each language only helps me tell you how grand you are." The singer rang into her ears and she was kissing him. She tasted schnapps and cigarette smoke and he lifted her as they kissed before crooning "Wunderbar, wunderbar!" into her neck. The "W"s are sharp "Vs" and German has never been beautiful, but its what she loves. She raises her voice in delight.
"Its in Yiddish!" She laughs, laughs harder than she has in forever. The heat growing in her cheeks can't be helped. She sways her hips, he pulls her up and she can feel him against her thighs when she tightens her leggy grip to keep herself on him.
"Nothing like a little madness, is there?" He breathes into her ear. She's stunned. All the film reels and posters and blame and he's alright with it? She lays there in his arms for a moment, barely swaying.
"Its not mine." He growls after a moment.
"What isn't?" She gazes back at him, curious.
"The hate." She can barely hear him over the music crescendoing as it accelerandos and she pulled herself up by his shoulders and he's throwing her over his head, letting go of her hands and letting her think, for one glorious, spectacular moment, that she would fall. But he caught her by her forearms and swung her back in front of him, spinning her into a tango-esque stoop.
"I know," She whispers as he holds her so close to his face that she can kiss him with almost no effort. She does, biting down on his lip to keep him there when he begins to pull away. The teenagers stare, but she slips her tongue into Gilbert's and he finally reciprocated, knocking her to the floor and wrestling with her, all the while never leaving her mouth. She found her legs and pushed them both up, grasping him by the suspenders to do so. She howls in laughter as he grasps her by the bodice and swings her away, only to have her return back to him.
The singer giggled, looking at them, but kept singing. "You're really swell, I have to admit, you deserve expressions that really fit you and so I've wracked my brain, hoping to explain all the things that you do to me!"
She let her body take over, let her mind escape to its own musing for a moment. If Gilbert was this new fangled jazz and swing, then Roderick was the old minuets, stiff and controlled, and at his height back when men and women were both perfectly powdered and constrained, like dolls. But flying over Gilbert's head, her legs open and his grin, sharp and cocky, burned behind her eyelids, she can't help but like who she is now, wild and violent and wonderful.