-The Beginning-
Gilbert
Infernally Haunting Reality
1920s
Note: Chapter title was pulled from this really interesting article I read while researching Weimar-era Berlin. You can read it here: .
If Gilbert closes his eyes and lets himself fall down, down, down into the past, he can arrive at a time before all this- a time when he was a person and not a monster. Gilbert's earliest memories are a wound healed wrong. Hazy in the way that early childhood memories generally are, they hurt him in a place he can't seem to locate, in ways he doesn't fully understand and can't quite articulate. The happy ones hurt as much as the sad ones, maybe more; the brief, golden moments serving merely to highlight the darkness. It's this, the happiness just slightly out of reach that will crush his tiny child heart into powder; the one word playing on repeat in his mind- the saddest question of them all…
Why?
To tell a story right, you have to go all the way back to the beginning, once upon a time. It's too easy to think that bad things happen because the people who do them are evil, that they enjoy pain and destruction- get some sick pleasure from it that the rest of us don't. It's easy to think this; it's easy and it feels good to cast atrocities as anomalies and those who commit them as monsters, because if you believe that, you can believe that they're not like you. That in the same situation, you wouldn't make the same awful choices- and maybe you're right. Maybe you wouldn't, but the truth is, you never really know. It's this nagging uncertainty that tugs at your precious fucking heart and threatens to rip it into a thousand bloody pieces. So you whisper to yourself, "I'd never do that," the lie you tell yourself so you can sleep at night. The truth is, all monsters are human, like you are; like I am.
And monsters aren't born, lovely. They're made.
Berlin in 1923 is a filthy sort of lovely; a lush, noirish fairieland that exists in the liminal zone between prosperity and destitution, the sulking girl at the edge of the party that is postwar Europe. In the daytime, the rich take to the newly-built autobahn in long, shiny cars built to go fast, fast, fast- fast enough that they can pretend not to see the weary, coal-covered workers, the harried mothers flinging handfuls of nearly worthless deutschemarks onto the counters of shopkeepers, "Is this enough for you, saukerl?". When night falls, velvety, expansive, darker than black, hungry-eyed shopgirls spill from run-down apartments in beaded dresses and fake gems- all bought on credit- to dance the night away in smoky, sparkling clubs. Maybe they'll meet their nouveau-riche prince charming there; maybe, but probably not. It doesn't matter. Tomorrow they'll rise to do it all again. So Berlin in 1923 isn't one city, it's two, superimposed upon each other- shiny and shadowy, the glitz ever-tainted by coal-dust, the glass of gin that's guaranteed to precede a hangover, and at the edges of this glittering metropolis- away from the decadence and the modern art and the intellectualism, there are whispers of discontent, the proverbial witch at the heart of the forest.
When she offers you an apple, don't bite.
(This time the witch is a man)
Johanna Beilschmidt is a wild, beautiful, rageful creature- the kind of woman men write songs and poetry about; the kind smart men don't marry. Gilbert's memories of his mother are mostly of her on her way out the door. Even in his childhood memories, Gilbert's hands are red, red from trying to hang on, from being slammed in the door when he's fast, but not fast enough- left behind again.
It's not blood, but the sight still horrifies him.
(Gilbert hates the color red)
Johanna is a shooting star, bright, brilliant, gone in an instant.
"Are you coming back, Mutti?"
"Of course, liebling. Mutti always comes back."
She always comes back until she doesn't. She's like a shooting star; beautiful, cold, speeding through space, perpetually out of reach. When Gilbert is in first grade, his teacher tells him that shooting stars aren't stars at all. They're rocks that look like stars. It's so fitting that he starts to cry; right there in the middle of class. And when he gets pulled into the corridor, because he punched Freddie Schmieder, because Freddie called him crybaby, and the teacher asks what's wrong, he says "Nothing." Because my Mutti is a dead, cold rock sounds crazy; because my Mutti is a lying, selfish whore and she isn't coming back hurts too much and he doesn't have the vocabulary to say it anyway. He says "Nothing" and the teacher sighs, shakes her head and slaps his knuckles with her ruler. Gilbert grits his teeth and watches in miserable resignation as his hands go from white to pink to red.
He hangs his head as he slinks back into the classroom, trying to swallow down the miserable tears that he doesn't want and can't yet control.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing." (everything.)
When Gilbert gets home, he hides in the broom closet and screams until his esophagus is raw.