fic: intermission (inglourious basterds)
intermission
inglourious basterds. no language has the words they could ever use; they get three days. shosanna, shosanna/hellstrom. AU. rated r. 5104 words.
notes: oh god. this is like the fic equivalent of a cry for help, haha. i clearly cannot get these two out of my head, ergo, more fic? endearlings, zauberer_sirin and boones: i am looking at you guys, haha. but, um, this was fun? i imagine some liberties have been taken in this (ie. time frames), it's not all that AU-ish, but i felt the need to warn? also, this is a lot more...strange (for lack of a better word) and abstract than i intended it to be. also, i feel like a lot of the thematic elements (LOL that sounds grand, right?) were influenced by Zau's awesome hummingbirds gone to hell. okay. i am going to go get some sleep now, heh.
- and you realize the one person in the world who loves you
isn’t the one you thought it would be,
and you don’t trust him to love you in a way
you would enjoy.
And the boy who loves you the wrong way is filthy.
And the boy who loves you the wrong way keeps weakening.
You thought if you handed over your body
he’d do something interesting.
(A Primer for the Small Weird Loves, Richard Siken)
They get three days.
Here, that is the equivalent of a lifetime.
-
Here is the place of nightmares. Here is the place where a man is always pulling a gun and a woman is always crying no! in vain (but she will cry it anyway, and the man with the gun will still shoot, for this is what it means to cry in vain). Here is where your name yesterday is not your name today, where every inch of your body will be read, every facial tic, every word that goes unuttered.
Here is the stage no one has the legs to stand on.
(Three days: day one they meet and he devours her, day two she fights back but she can’t get him out of her mouth. Day three they are in love, or they would be if they used that word, but we can use that word and we can say they are in love.
They are in love.
Day three he dies. Day four she follows).
-
DAY ONE
In the restaurant, Colonel Landa leaves her and she cannot breathe. As the last gasping, dry sob leaves her, a man clears his throat behind her.
“I’m to deliver you home,” Hellstrom tells her, in German. She stares blankly at first, and he repeats himself. Her throat aches.
“That won’t be necessary,” she says in her own cobbled together, rudimentary German.
“I insist.”
Of this, she is sure he says.
-
He surprises her on the ride back by speaking in French.
“Young Zoller seems more excited about the prospect of the premiere at your theater than you do,” he says. Shosanna blanches.
“I did not think you spoke French,” she finally says.
Hellstrom smiles, all cat who ate the canary, and Shosanna is already pressed against the window, as far from him as she could hope in such a confined space. He leans back a little, relaxes against the seat.
“That’s the problem with the majority of you French. You don’t think,” he says. He carefully takes out a cigarette, but he does not light it. He holds it in his fingers and stares at it. He slips it in his mouth.
“As I was saying,” he continues, then pauses, a lighter in hand. “You don’t share our young hero’s enthusiasm. Why is that?”
Shosanna’s eyes are hard, almost narrowed, and Hellstorm likes that. She does not know it, but Hellstrom likes that.
“I hold my emotions well,” she says. Hellstrom takes a long drag on his cigarette and as he exhales he is close enough that Shosanna can taste the harsh sting of the nicotine. She swallows.
“I’ll say,” he drawls.
There is the sharp crack of metal on metal as his fingers toy with the lighter still in his hand. He pockets it. He eyes her, scans her up and down, or as best a man can seek at a woman’s form in a seated position.
“Don’t much know what Private Zoller sees in you,” he finally says.
Shosanna catches herself, finds herself something close to amused. She does not smile. She hums her assent.
“You don’t either, I take it?” Hellstrom slips the cigarette between his lips. “Such lack of confidence in a woman.” He withdraws the cigarette. He clucks his tongue and catches the look on her face.
They are silent the rest of the ride.
-
“Mademoiselle,” he calls out from behind her as her feet hit the pavement. She is still seated on the back seat and her body twists as she turns to look at him.
Hellstrom grabs her hand.
He presses his lips lightly, almost chaste, to the back of her hand, much as Colonel Landa had done earlier. The similarity ends there as Hellstrom opens his mouth against her skin. His tongue is hot as he licks over the raised ridge of her knuckles and his eyes never leave hers. Shosanna sucks in a harsh breath as she feels the edge of teeth, but she does not pull her hand away. His eyes are dark, frightening, and beyond that, amused as he presses a loud open-mouthed kiss to her hand.
“Till tonight,” he says with a smirk.
Shosanna’s hand is wet as she pulls it away and she does not look over her shoulder as she walks.
-
That night the Nazis arrive.
She ushers them into the theater.
She plots murder with Marcel.
And then, nothing. There is a disquiet to the building, and Marcel slips away, unable to enter this part of her, uncomfortable with their guests (a word he employs with great disdain).
Shosanna retreats to her office.
-
First there is a knock against the door. And then, the door opens.
“Can I help you?”
“I don’t care for the film,” Hellstrom tells her in French.
“I didn’t choose it,” she says evenly, and when he smiles the bottom of his face curves upward but he does not show teeth. Her fingers flex at her side; his smile makes her nervous.
Hellstrom shuts the door behind him.
“Again,” she says, then pauses, tries for tact, “can I help you?”
He leans a hip against the edge of her desk and the leather of his coat creaks against the wood. “Unless you have a cure for insufferable boredom, I imagine not.”
Shosanna shrugs. “Out of luck, I’m afraid,” she says, and she imagines this must be what it is like, those men that tame lions, that toy with wild animals: careful, so utterly and precisely careful. She takes a deep breath and that feeling that surfaced earlier that morning, high up on the ladder, has risen again. She is on the edge of something awful.
Her posture relaxes slightly as she sits and he stands over her.
“You got anything to drink in this place?” he asks, and the way he asks it is teasing and conspiratorial and from what she knows, entirely out of character. Shosanna tries not to let her surprise register, so she nods. So she reaches into the bottom drawer and pulls out a bottle of red wine and reaches behind her for a glass. When she sets only one down, Hellstrom stares at first the glass and then her face, and Shosanna makes a decision: if he wants her to join him, if he wants her to drink too, he will have to ask her.
He does not ask her.
He pours his own wine. He pours it, and then he stands there, takes a sip of it. There is one other chair in the small office but he does not take it. He stands over her with his glass of wine.
Shosanna watches him carefully. He does the same in kind.
She wonders how much he would hurt her if he knew the truth. Maybe this is what intrigues her about him. Whereas Fredrick openly adores everything about her while knowing nothing, Hellstrom looks at her as though he has doubted her from the start.
He smiles at her like he’s seen inside her and knows there’s nothing good in there. He smiles like he knows, like he knows Emmanuelle Mimieux is as real and tangible as any character on the screen Fredrick and Landa and Goebbels watch, and maybe that thought alone is enough to make him lick his lips. Maybe he isn’t sure. She considers this. He’s bluffing. He knows she isn’t the real deal, but he has no idea just how dangerous a catch he’s managed to wrestle into his net.
That’s a lie.
There is no net, she’s not in a net, he has not cast one out and he has not caught her. Not in the slightest. She sits across from him and almost wishes for a glass of wine, if only for a distraction, if only to take a stoic sip from the glass of wine in front of her. His eyes settle on her mouth, maybe this will be the moment she spills, he might think, it’s what Shosanna thinks he is thinking, and there’s another problem: you can’t anticipate the thoughts, you can’t predict the actions, of men whose brains, whose souls and hearts are impregnable.
He downs half his glass of wine in one gulp, and when he smiles after his teeth are already stained.
-
This is the part of the story where they both take that one step forward that is enough to void any opportunity to turn back.
They do not know this.
The benefit of hindsight does not kick in until after the fact, after the door has already been shut.
-
“Stand up,” he tells her. There is authority in his voice, but the tone is quiet, gentle, she would almost call it. Almost.
Shosanna stands.
He puts down his empty glass and takes a step forward. He does not say anything and Shosanna does not breathe. He raises her chin to him with the pad of his thumb; she imagines her eyes defiant - his are unreadable.
His other hands rests on the waistband of her trousers. His fingers are quick.
He undoes the button; Shosanna does not breathe.
-
Shosanna does not run.
-
His hand is warm against her thigh, too warm. She fights hard against the instinct to shrink away from him and the muscles in her leg twitch. He must feel it. He has to feel it. Instead of the tips of his fingers just grazing her skin he presses a firm hand high up her leg, her inner thigh; Shosanna can feel the sharp whoosh of breath that escapes her teeth.
He steers her body back and her ass hits the end of the desk. Her teeth click together, her trousers caught around one ankle but she does not stumble.
He breathes heavily as he watches her, hooded eyes, and she stands there in her loose blouse and underwear (she feels naked, she already feels naked, and at no point does she stop, at no point does Shosanna ask the obvious question of why - instead she lets the old wood of the desk bite into the back of her thighs and she lets him reach a searching hand out to her, lets him feel what her breast feels like in his hand, because the thing is, the thing she is trying so, so, so hard to ignore is that she feels it too, he moves his fingers, her nipple caught beneath the cloth between them, she feels it too).
-
His hand is hot and insistent against her.
His two fingers are brutal and long inside of her, but it’s still not enough.
-
She can’t bring herself to say the word - more more more more more - but her hips do buck up, inviting his two fingers deeper. Hellstrom does not oblige. He maintains the same shallow, slow rhythm he has already set and Shosanna bites her bottom lip hard against the word (more). Her mouth tastes metallic and eager and Hellstrom breaks his gaze from her eyes to her lips. He makes a small sound. It almost sounds like a moan. It almost sounds desperate.
His fingers dig in a little deeper on her hip, and the fingers inside her slip, push with more force, and the knuckle of his thumb grazes her clit; his finger slips, he slips, there is blood in her mouth, she wipes at her mouth, there is blood on her hand (he does not slip again, not yet, and this time Shosanna slips, grabs hold of his wrist, grabs hold of the wrist of the hand of the fingers inside her, and there is blood on his hand now, blood on her chin; he moaned, she needs more) and the sound she makes at the contact is quiet and broken.
(He will slide a third finger into her, his arm bent at an awkward angle between her legs, between him and her and her hand will still cling tight to his wrist. His teeth will scrape her cheekbone as he leans in, down, and this is when it will happen, this is when Shosanna will cry more and this is when Hellstrom will oblige her).
(He makes her come and she wants to cry).
He licks his fingers before he leaves.
But first:
Shosanna cannot catch her breath, she sits on the edge of the desk, her legs still spread. She aches through the center. He steps in between her legs and grabs her hard by the back of her head and kisses her.
She is a fool because she kisses back. She was stupid enough to leave this door unlocked and she was stupid enough to permit him entrance, but it would have been dumb, dumber still, to have said no and she knows this. He knows this. His mouth is just as hot and slick as it had been earlier in the car against her hand.
She can feel him, hard against her bare thigh, and it is entirely too natural the way he moves his hips against her.
A part of her wants to stop, push him away and yell at him. Push him and tell him, we don’t live here, we don’t do these things together.
Hellstrom takes a step back and this is when he licks his fingers, this is when he smirks. He lights a cigarette.
“Far more entertaining,” he muses after the first inhale. “A pleasure, Mademoiselle Mimieux.”
Shosanna cannot bring herself to look at him.
“Always a pleasure,” Hellstrom repeats. And then he says: “Emmanuelle,” like some sort of poisoned afterthought.
“That’s not my name,” she bites off, stupidly, defiance still too fresh and alive in her and she knows, she knows, he already knows. Her shoulders are still set and she fights against the shiver trying to race through her. He never took her panties off, but they are twisted, her cunt bare, and Hellstrom smirks again. He flicks the butt of his cigarette onto the desk and her eyes flicker over to it. It smolders there, leaves a small scorch mark, and Shosanna turns her gaze back to him.
“I know,” he says.
Shoshanna does not shiver.
-
Back in the theater Hellstrom slips quietly back into his seat.
Fredrick quirks an eyebrow. Hellstrom leers.
“Needed some air,” he says, a stage whisper.
He leans back, his profile caught in the flicker of the screen. The inside of his mouth still tastes like her.
Shosanna will never know of this.
-
DAY TWO
He is smoking a cigarette on the corner the next time she sees him. He has one foot against the wall at his back, knee bent, and his hat sits at a crooked angle on his head. When he spots her, Hellstrom does not exactly smile but instead appraises her.
Shosanna bites the inside of her cheek, and if she stands a little straighter, then she stands a little straighter. Her fingers fumble over each other buried deep in the pockets of her trousers, and if she is fighting against the temptation to ball them into fists, then she is fighting that temptation, too.
“Afternoon,” he offers as a greeting, the cigarette caught between his teeth, raining ash. He brushes the front of his uniform, red band around his arm.
Something pathetic and biting is at the forefront of her teeth - something like, “good until now,” something lame, something not really inspired, but he raises something in her, not quite bile and more along the lines of a toxic antagonism that up until now had been foreign to her, hate always spilling in the abstract, the vengeful, the beat of run Shosanna run au revoir Shosanna au revoir, never like this, never this personal, his teeth scratch the bones of her hands -
Instead she offers him a small smile she does not mean, and Hellstrom seems to know this because his own smile has slipped into the rueful, the teasing, the knowing. Holding the cigarette between his thumb and index finger he takes one last drag before grounding it out with the heel of his boot.
“I’m buying a dress,” she says. The words sound too precise, like lines a better actress than her would utter on the screen. Actually, the better actress would say: I am buying the dress. The better actress would enunciate.
Shosanna sometimes forgets. Actress is not synonymous with liar. Just because you pretend, you invent a new name and a new life, a new history, you are not an actress. If anything, you are a storyteller.
“I need a dress,” she says after that.
Hellstrom’s grin is the closest thing she has seen to genuine as it cuts his face in half.
“I imagine so,” he says, and then he makes a vague gesture toward her frame. “Hardly appropriate premiere wear, I’m sure.” Despite the scrutiny, his narrowed eyes and the mocking grin, her jaw remains firm and she remains silent. She does not pull at her blouse or look down at her trousers. She just stands there.
“I need a dress,” she repeats.
He smirks this time.
“Let’s get you a dress then. Mademoiselle Mimieux.”
-
Hellstrom does not ask the questions Fredrick or even Colonel Landa ask of her. He does not say much. Instead he looks at her, he looks at her like he is attempting to find the one place where she has not fit it together just right. He is looking for the part of her that lies, the part where the truth escapes, the ripped seam, the crack in the lining.
If he has found it, he does not let her know.
-
Once again, he escorts her.
Like before, he is silent, almost glowering, and she does not understand why he is here.
In a boutique he pushes the curtain behind and she stands there, back bare, unable to reach the buttons. His fingers are sure; he runs his knuckles over her spine before he begins.
“You should buy the red,” he finally says.
-
That evening, he comes back. This time there is no Fredrick, no Colonel Landa, no Goebbels in tow.
“What do you want?” she asks.
There are love stories out there. Of this, Shosanna is sure.
This is not one of them.
“What do you want from me?” she asks.
Of course this is when he kisses her.
-
They bite into each other, bite into mouths, teeth and lip and tongue and blood and she scratches the side of his neck, her waist shrinks into his grip.
There are swastikas hanging in the hall. This place, this refuge, is no longer hers.
She sinks to her knees and grabs for his belt; Hellstrom sags against the wall and she does not try to read his face.
(When he leaves, the swastikas will still hang and this place will still not be her home. Her mouth will taste and stretch of him and she will be liquid between her legs).
-
“Harder,” she tells Marcel. “More,” she all but begs.
Marcel will cup her face and call her beautiful, and maybe to him she is. But she is not beautiful. She does not feel beautiful. She is deadly, she is dangerous, and soon she will be nothing. He will be nothing.
She signed his death warrant for him, with her own blood.
The guilt is heady and while he sleeps next to her, Shosanna stares up at the ceiling, eyes bright.
-
Hellstrom gripped her hair and pulled.
“I know your name,” he had ground out between clenched teeth. The head of his cock hit the back of her throat and her throat convulsed involuntarily around him. Her fingernails dug into the pale skin at the top of his thighs.
“Shosanna,” he said as he came, and she swallowed him whole.
-
DAY THREE
It is morning of their last day.
They do not know this.
They do not know they are together.
There are men moving statues into the foyer. Hellstrom stands as though he is in charge, a surveyor, but his eyes give him away, a glazed look of boredom.
He nods his head in her direction when he spots her.
“Emmanuelle,” he says, and something inside her clenches, animal instinct threatens.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asks quietly.
To anyone else in the room, they are too people having a quiet morning chat. She is an attractive young woman and he is a strapping officer. “Are you going to kill me?” she asks, and Hellstrom laughs.
“Those are not my orders,” he tells her. “Yet.”
Shosanna raises her chin and fights against his gaze. She can remember what his hands felt like around her neck.
-
Hellstrom knows her name; he still searches for the chink in her armor.
(His fingers will trace her sides, start at her ribcage and work their way down, but they don’t stop at her hipbone, no, they continue down, around, he grabs her ass and pulls her closer and by then, by then of course, they both will be breathing hard and her body will ache, the endurance of fighting two opposing, crushing forces -
right and wrong and want and need and good and bad and life and death and here and gone, today and tomorrow and man and woman and bone and flesh, the killed and the killers, him her, him and her -
and she will never ask him to kiss her, but she will never want his mouth more than in this one moment).
(Remember: want is not the same as need. Remember: this is not a cautionary tale. Not every story has to have a moral, sometimes it is nothing more than a string of events related as they occurred. If this story had a moral it could be:
Not everyone here is going to get what they thought they had wanted.
It could be: in the end, everyone dies.
It could be exactly what Joy Division would come to sing decades later: love will tear us apart).
(Love, love will tear us apart. Again).
-
They are not in love.
-
They, they are liars. Again.
(It might be less than lying, it might just be as simple as an inability to understand. For Shosanna, love is something light, love is something that carries you, not something you are forced to carry, forced to endure. Love is the light at the end of the dark tunnel this world lost itself in, when the world lost Poland, lost Czechoslovakia, lost so many of its people. This can’t be love, is what she tells herself. She does not use words like love for him).
(Hellstrom does not use words like love either, though for him, he has his own reasons. Quite simply, love is an impossibility. Love is allowing pardons. It is a weakness. He has no room for weakness. He has no room for her).
-
Tomorrow night there will be a premiere. Tomorrow night her film will be shown and Marcel will start a fire. That will be tomorrow.
This is tonight.
First there is a knock at the door.
Shosanna makes a decision. Shosanna is going to hold her ground this time. This time, she is going to be brave. But, no, this is not about courage and this is not about bravery. She has been brave and she has been anything but a coward the last four years running. The floorboards were shredded with bullets and her own blood, her own family, their flesh, their blood, ran together, ran with the mud, and she ran, she ran and she ran and she ran, she’s still running now, and maybe that makes her less than brave: she hasn’t stopped running. She is Emmanuelle Mimieux and she runs, she doesn’t stop, she won’t stop until the flames lick the walls and the roof caves in.
It is very tiring to be this brave. It is exhausting to run and not know when the end will come. It would not be brave for her to say no to Dieter Hellstrom. It would be another stretch and shade of the same prudent self-protection she has engaged in for the majority of her adult life.
But here is another thing: she says no, and it means nothing. She says no, and it’s unlikely he’ll walk back out the door. It is unlikely he will forget her.
“No honor among thieves, eh,” she said once, the day with the red dress, and it was the closest she will ever engage in teasing with him. Hellstrom had frowned, the joke clearly misunderstood by him.
“I don’t follow,” he told her.
“Fredrick,” and it was all she said at first. “You told me. That first day. You told me Fredrick was… besotted with me. And here you are.”
“I used no such language,” was Hellstorm’s answer, and the conversation stalled.
(“Don’t much know what Private Zoller sees in you,” he had said).
Hellstrom walks in through the door; he shuts it behind him.
-
Shosanna does not run.
-
Her office is no longer hers anymore, it is Landa’s. The room feels foreign to her, less so with Hellstrom in the room with her, and she does not know, she does not want to know, what that means.
They collide. Everyone makes the jokes about the men in uniform and everyone knows by now that she could have had a genuine war hero. She could have had one of the good men, she already has one of the good men. But here she is. Here she is again, and one time can be excused as a mistake, a grievous lapse in judgment, and twice can be ruled as a relapse, as your own fault, a lesson learned.
Three times equates a habit.
There is not much room on the floor, but they fall to it. There are old film posters, old newspapers, and they grab for each other, trousers and hips, spare parts attempting to create a whole. He kisses her and she tips her head back, bares her throat. His cock is thick and painful inside her, the rhythm his hips push forward cruel and unrelenting. His eyes flicker open to shut and open to shut, or maybe it’s her own, his face is terrifying, as open as she has ever (will ever) see it, and something catches in her throat, he catches inside her, he pushes and he pushes, and she is giving it all back.
(She still thinks he is trying to get under her skin, and maybe he has, maybe he has achieved that, but if he has, if he has, then he is in there with her.
We are all trapped. We are all caged, even if only in the physical sense. Reams of skin that keep everything under cover, structured bone guarding pockets of tissue and soft organs that pump and beat. Maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it is less. Just a word. Maybe it’s a first name, a last name, a middle name - titles, Mr., Ms., Miss. Emmanuelle Mimieux. Major Dieter Hellstrom.
Shosanna Dreyfus).
His frame overwhelms hers, and she presses her open mouth to his throat.
-
(In another life, one where the world is singular and whole, a world where they are the same but different, new - we can’t change that much, we can’t change them, if we remove the parts, we lose the whole, we lose the story, the point is lost - the following could occur:
Hellstrom (and here, in this brave new world, Shosanna would call him Dieter) would say with his same smirk:
There are other words than love.
Shosanna would be brave (Shosanna will always be brave, even in death) and say:
There are no other words than love).
-
There will be no grand deathbed scene here.
Major Dieter Hellstrom is shot in the balls and then stabbed in the back of the head.
There are no pretty ways to put this. There is no poetry for the damage a bullet does when it meets its intended target.
(The next night, Shosanna’s body will be hollowed out as well. Her body will catch on fire.
She will burn).
-
DAY FOUR
The day of the premiere the sun rises bloody.
There is no other way.
-
“Where is your friend?” Shosanna asks Fredrick.
Fredrick frowns. “My friend? I have plenty of friends, Mademoiselle. I believe I need you to clarify.”
Shosanna all but blushes. She does not blush. She clears her throat. “The Major. By my impression, he seems to follow you wherever you go. Not for this though?”
Fredrick rests a hand on her forearm and Shoshanna worries the inside of her cheek but does not pull away. The veil does not hide her face well enough.
“I regret to inform you, but the good Major was killed last night. Terrible shame. Awful loss.”
Shosanna stares blankly ahead. There is a pile of film waiting to burn.
“Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
-
Hellstrom asked: Why were you crying? Before, in the restaurant. Why were you crying?
She took a step back.
I don’t remember, she said.
He did not call her a liar. But he did not believe her.
She did not answer, and he did not ask again. He fucked her, she fucked him.
And then they killed him -
and then they killed her.
-
The thing to remember is this, (and remember this was all just once a rhyme):
Jack and Jill went up a hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.
(She came, Jill came, tumbling after, she bumped his shoulder with her heel and then her arms found his arms and they tangled, tangled in that way only two people can tangle and can never break free. He fell, he broke his crown, and she flipped over after.
Jill landed next to him, their fingers twisted together to make one fist. She pressed her lips to his bloody temple and sighed.
They left the pail of water).
-
A book tucked under his arm, Major Dieter Hellstrom entered La Louisiane.
He took a seat and licked his lips.
-
Shosanna will wear the red dress.
-
fin.
inglourious basterds. no language has the words they could ever use; they get three days. shosanna, shosanna/hellstrom. AU. rated r. 5104 words.
notes: oh god. this is like the fic equivalent of a cry for help, haha. i clearly cannot get these two out of my head, ergo, more fic? endearlings, zauberer_sirin and boones: i am looking at you guys, haha. but, um, this was fun? i imagine some liberties have been taken in this (ie. time frames), it's not all that AU-ish, but i felt the need to warn? also, this is a lot more...strange (for lack of a better word) and abstract than i intended it to be. also, i feel like a lot of the thematic elements (LOL that sounds grand, right?) were influenced by Zau's awesome hummingbirds gone to hell. okay. i am going to go get some sleep now, heh.
- and you realize the one person in the world who loves you
isn’t the one you thought it would be,
and you don’t trust him to love you in a way
you would enjoy.
And the boy who loves you the wrong way is filthy.
And the boy who loves you the wrong way keeps weakening.
You thought if you handed over your body
he’d do something interesting.
(A Primer for the Small Weird Loves, Richard Siken)
They get three days.
Here, that is the equivalent of a lifetime.
-
Here is the place of nightmares. Here is the place where a man is always pulling a gun and a woman is always crying no! in vain (but she will cry it anyway, and the man with the gun will still shoot, for this is what it means to cry in vain). Here is where your name yesterday is not your name today, where every inch of your body will be read, every facial tic, every word that goes unuttered.
Here is the stage no one has the legs to stand on.
(Three days: day one they meet and he devours her, day two she fights back but she can’t get him out of her mouth. Day three they are in love, or they would be if they used that word, but we can use that word and we can say they are in love.
They are in love.
Day three he dies. Day four she follows).
-
DAY ONE
In the restaurant, Colonel Landa leaves her and she cannot breathe. As the last gasping, dry sob leaves her, a man clears his throat behind her.
“I’m to deliver you home,” Hellstrom tells her, in German. She stares blankly at first, and he repeats himself. Her throat aches.
“That won’t be necessary,” she says in her own cobbled together, rudimentary German.
“I insist.”
Of this, she is sure he says.
-
He surprises her on the ride back by speaking in French.
“Young Zoller seems more excited about the prospect of the premiere at your theater than you do,” he says. Shosanna blanches.
“I did not think you spoke French,” she finally says.
Hellstrom smiles, all cat who ate the canary, and Shosanna is already pressed against the window, as far from him as she could hope in such a confined space. He leans back a little, relaxes against the seat.
“That’s the problem with the majority of you French. You don’t think,” he says. He carefully takes out a cigarette, but he does not light it. He holds it in his fingers and stares at it. He slips it in his mouth.
“As I was saying,” he continues, then pauses, a lighter in hand. “You don’t share our young hero’s enthusiasm. Why is that?”
Shosanna’s eyes are hard, almost narrowed, and Hellstorm likes that. She does not know it, but Hellstrom likes that.
“I hold my emotions well,” she says. Hellstrom takes a long drag on his cigarette and as he exhales he is close enough that Shosanna can taste the harsh sting of the nicotine. She swallows.
“I’ll say,” he drawls.
There is the sharp crack of metal on metal as his fingers toy with the lighter still in his hand. He pockets it. He eyes her, scans her up and down, or as best a man can seek at a woman’s form in a seated position.
“Don’t much know what Private Zoller sees in you,” he finally says.
Shosanna catches herself, finds herself something close to amused. She does not smile. She hums her assent.
“You don’t either, I take it?” Hellstrom slips the cigarette between his lips. “Such lack of confidence in a woman.” He withdraws the cigarette. He clucks his tongue and catches the look on her face.
They are silent the rest of the ride.
-
“Mademoiselle,” he calls out from behind her as her feet hit the pavement. She is still seated on the back seat and her body twists as she turns to look at him.
Hellstrom grabs her hand.
He presses his lips lightly, almost chaste, to the back of her hand, much as Colonel Landa had done earlier. The similarity ends there as Hellstrom opens his mouth against her skin. His tongue is hot as he licks over the raised ridge of her knuckles and his eyes never leave hers. Shosanna sucks in a harsh breath as she feels the edge of teeth, but she does not pull her hand away. His eyes are dark, frightening, and beyond that, amused as he presses a loud open-mouthed kiss to her hand.
“Till tonight,” he says with a smirk.
Shosanna’s hand is wet as she pulls it away and she does not look over her shoulder as she walks.
-
That night the Nazis arrive.
She ushers them into the theater.
She plots murder with Marcel.
And then, nothing. There is a disquiet to the building, and Marcel slips away, unable to enter this part of her, uncomfortable with their guests (a word he employs with great disdain).
Shosanna retreats to her office.
-
First there is a knock against the door. And then, the door opens.
“Can I help you?”
“I don’t care for the film,” Hellstrom tells her in French.
“I didn’t choose it,” she says evenly, and when he smiles the bottom of his face curves upward but he does not show teeth. Her fingers flex at her side; his smile makes her nervous.
Hellstrom shuts the door behind him.
“Again,” she says, then pauses, tries for tact, “can I help you?”
He leans a hip against the edge of her desk and the leather of his coat creaks against the wood. “Unless you have a cure for insufferable boredom, I imagine not.”
Shosanna shrugs. “Out of luck, I’m afraid,” she says, and she imagines this must be what it is like, those men that tame lions, that toy with wild animals: careful, so utterly and precisely careful. She takes a deep breath and that feeling that surfaced earlier that morning, high up on the ladder, has risen again. She is on the edge of something awful.
Her posture relaxes slightly as she sits and he stands over her.
“You got anything to drink in this place?” he asks, and the way he asks it is teasing and conspiratorial and from what she knows, entirely out of character. Shosanna tries not to let her surprise register, so she nods. So she reaches into the bottom drawer and pulls out a bottle of red wine and reaches behind her for a glass. When she sets only one down, Hellstrom stares at first the glass and then her face, and Shosanna makes a decision: if he wants her to join him, if he wants her to drink too, he will have to ask her.
He does not ask her.
He pours his own wine. He pours it, and then he stands there, takes a sip of it. There is one other chair in the small office but he does not take it. He stands over her with his glass of wine.
Shosanna watches him carefully. He does the same in kind.
She wonders how much he would hurt her if he knew the truth. Maybe this is what intrigues her about him. Whereas Fredrick openly adores everything about her while knowing nothing, Hellstrom looks at her as though he has doubted her from the start.
He smiles at her like he’s seen inside her and knows there’s nothing good in there. He smiles like he knows, like he knows Emmanuelle Mimieux is as real and tangible as any character on the screen Fredrick and Landa and Goebbels watch, and maybe that thought alone is enough to make him lick his lips. Maybe he isn’t sure. She considers this. He’s bluffing. He knows she isn’t the real deal, but he has no idea just how dangerous a catch he’s managed to wrestle into his net.
That’s a lie.
There is no net, she’s not in a net, he has not cast one out and he has not caught her. Not in the slightest. She sits across from him and almost wishes for a glass of wine, if only for a distraction, if only to take a stoic sip from the glass of wine in front of her. His eyes settle on her mouth, maybe this will be the moment she spills, he might think, it’s what Shosanna thinks he is thinking, and there’s another problem: you can’t anticipate the thoughts, you can’t predict the actions, of men whose brains, whose souls and hearts are impregnable.
He downs half his glass of wine in one gulp, and when he smiles after his teeth are already stained.
-
This is the part of the story where they both take that one step forward that is enough to void any opportunity to turn back.
They do not know this.
The benefit of hindsight does not kick in until after the fact, after the door has already been shut.
-
“Stand up,” he tells her. There is authority in his voice, but the tone is quiet, gentle, she would almost call it. Almost.
Shosanna stands.
He puts down his empty glass and takes a step forward. He does not say anything and Shosanna does not breathe. He raises her chin to him with the pad of his thumb; she imagines her eyes defiant - his are unreadable.
His other hands rests on the waistband of her trousers. His fingers are quick.
He undoes the button; Shosanna does not breathe.
-
Shosanna does not run.
-
His hand is warm against her thigh, too warm. She fights hard against the instinct to shrink away from him and the muscles in her leg twitch. He must feel it. He has to feel it. Instead of the tips of his fingers just grazing her skin he presses a firm hand high up her leg, her inner thigh; Shosanna can feel the sharp whoosh of breath that escapes her teeth.
He steers her body back and her ass hits the end of the desk. Her teeth click together, her trousers caught around one ankle but she does not stumble.
He breathes heavily as he watches her, hooded eyes, and she stands there in her loose blouse and underwear (she feels naked, she already feels naked, and at no point does she stop, at no point does Shosanna ask the obvious question of why - instead she lets the old wood of the desk bite into the back of her thighs and she lets him reach a searching hand out to her, lets him feel what her breast feels like in his hand, because the thing is, the thing she is trying so, so, so hard to ignore is that she feels it too, he moves his fingers, her nipple caught beneath the cloth between them, she feels it too).
-
His hand is hot and insistent against her.
His two fingers are brutal and long inside of her, but it’s still not enough.
-
She can’t bring herself to say the word - more more more more more - but her hips do buck up, inviting his two fingers deeper. Hellstrom does not oblige. He maintains the same shallow, slow rhythm he has already set and Shosanna bites her bottom lip hard against the word (more). Her mouth tastes metallic and eager and Hellstrom breaks his gaze from her eyes to her lips. He makes a small sound. It almost sounds like a moan. It almost sounds desperate.
His fingers dig in a little deeper on her hip, and the fingers inside her slip, push with more force, and the knuckle of his thumb grazes her clit; his finger slips, he slips, there is blood in her mouth, she wipes at her mouth, there is blood on her hand (he does not slip again, not yet, and this time Shosanna slips, grabs hold of his wrist, grabs hold of the wrist of the hand of the fingers inside her, and there is blood on his hand now, blood on her chin; he moaned, she needs more) and the sound she makes at the contact is quiet and broken.
(He will slide a third finger into her, his arm bent at an awkward angle between her legs, between him and her and her hand will still cling tight to his wrist. His teeth will scrape her cheekbone as he leans in, down, and this is when it will happen, this is when Shosanna will cry more and this is when Hellstrom will oblige her).
(He makes her come and she wants to cry).
He licks his fingers before he leaves.
But first:
Shosanna cannot catch her breath, she sits on the edge of the desk, her legs still spread. She aches through the center. He steps in between her legs and grabs her hard by the back of her head and kisses her.
She is a fool because she kisses back. She was stupid enough to leave this door unlocked and she was stupid enough to permit him entrance, but it would have been dumb, dumber still, to have said no and she knows this. He knows this. His mouth is just as hot and slick as it had been earlier in the car against her hand.
She can feel him, hard against her bare thigh, and it is entirely too natural the way he moves his hips against her.
A part of her wants to stop, push him away and yell at him. Push him and tell him, we don’t live here, we don’t do these things together.
Hellstrom takes a step back and this is when he licks his fingers, this is when he smirks. He lights a cigarette.
“Far more entertaining,” he muses after the first inhale. “A pleasure, Mademoiselle Mimieux.”
Shosanna cannot bring herself to look at him.
“Always a pleasure,” Hellstrom repeats. And then he says: “Emmanuelle,” like some sort of poisoned afterthought.
“That’s not my name,” she bites off, stupidly, defiance still too fresh and alive in her and she knows, she knows, he already knows. Her shoulders are still set and she fights against the shiver trying to race through her. He never took her panties off, but they are twisted, her cunt bare, and Hellstrom smirks again. He flicks the butt of his cigarette onto the desk and her eyes flicker over to it. It smolders there, leaves a small scorch mark, and Shosanna turns her gaze back to him.
“I know,” he says.
Shoshanna does not shiver.
-
Back in the theater Hellstrom slips quietly back into his seat.
Fredrick quirks an eyebrow. Hellstrom leers.
“Needed some air,” he says, a stage whisper.
He leans back, his profile caught in the flicker of the screen. The inside of his mouth still tastes like her.
Shosanna will never know of this.
-
DAY TWO
He is smoking a cigarette on the corner the next time she sees him. He has one foot against the wall at his back, knee bent, and his hat sits at a crooked angle on his head. When he spots her, Hellstrom does not exactly smile but instead appraises her.
Shosanna bites the inside of her cheek, and if she stands a little straighter, then she stands a little straighter. Her fingers fumble over each other buried deep in the pockets of her trousers, and if she is fighting against the temptation to ball them into fists, then she is fighting that temptation, too.
“Afternoon,” he offers as a greeting, the cigarette caught between his teeth, raining ash. He brushes the front of his uniform, red band around his arm.
Something pathetic and biting is at the forefront of her teeth - something like, “good until now,” something lame, something not really inspired, but he raises something in her, not quite bile and more along the lines of a toxic antagonism that up until now had been foreign to her, hate always spilling in the abstract, the vengeful, the beat of run Shosanna run au revoir Shosanna au revoir, never like this, never this personal, his teeth scratch the bones of her hands -
Instead she offers him a small smile she does not mean, and Hellstrom seems to know this because his own smile has slipped into the rueful, the teasing, the knowing. Holding the cigarette between his thumb and index finger he takes one last drag before grounding it out with the heel of his boot.
“I’m buying a dress,” she says. The words sound too precise, like lines a better actress than her would utter on the screen. Actually, the better actress would say: I am buying the dress. The better actress would enunciate.
Shosanna sometimes forgets. Actress is not synonymous with liar. Just because you pretend, you invent a new name and a new life, a new history, you are not an actress. If anything, you are a storyteller.
“I need a dress,” she says after that.
Hellstrom’s grin is the closest thing she has seen to genuine as it cuts his face in half.
“I imagine so,” he says, and then he makes a vague gesture toward her frame. “Hardly appropriate premiere wear, I’m sure.” Despite the scrutiny, his narrowed eyes and the mocking grin, her jaw remains firm and she remains silent. She does not pull at her blouse or look down at her trousers. She just stands there.
“I need a dress,” she repeats.
He smirks this time.
“Let’s get you a dress then. Mademoiselle Mimieux.”
-
Hellstrom does not ask the questions Fredrick or even Colonel Landa ask of her. He does not say much. Instead he looks at her, he looks at her like he is attempting to find the one place where she has not fit it together just right. He is looking for the part of her that lies, the part where the truth escapes, the ripped seam, the crack in the lining.
If he has found it, he does not let her know.
-
Once again, he escorts her.
Like before, he is silent, almost glowering, and she does not understand why he is here.
In a boutique he pushes the curtain behind and she stands there, back bare, unable to reach the buttons. His fingers are sure; he runs his knuckles over her spine before he begins.
“You should buy the red,” he finally says.
-
That evening, he comes back. This time there is no Fredrick, no Colonel Landa, no Goebbels in tow.
“What do you want?” she asks.
There are love stories out there. Of this, Shosanna is sure.
This is not one of them.
“What do you want from me?” she asks.
Of course this is when he kisses her.
-
They bite into each other, bite into mouths, teeth and lip and tongue and blood and she scratches the side of his neck, her waist shrinks into his grip.
There are swastikas hanging in the hall. This place, this refuge, is no longer hers.
She sinks to her knees and grabs for his belt; Hellstrom sags against the wall and she does not try to read his face.
(When he leaves, the swastikas will still hang and this place will still not be her home. Her mouth will taste and stretch of him and she will be liquid between her legs).
-
“Harder,” she tells Marcel. “More,” she all but begs.
Marcel will cup her face and call her beautiful, and maybe to him she is. But she is not beautiful. She does not feel beautiful. She is deadly, she is dangerous, and soon she will be nothing. He will be nothing.
She signed his death warrant for him, with her own blood.
The guilt is heady and while he sleeps next to her, Shosanna stares up at the ceiling, eyes bright.
-
Hellstrom gripped her hair and pulled.
“I know your name,” he had ground out between clenched teeth. The head of his cock hit the back of her throat and her throat convulsed involuntarily around him. Her fingernails dug into the pale skin at the top of his thighs.
“Shosanna,” he said as he came, and she swallowed him whole.
-
DAY THREE
It is morning of their last day.
They do not know this.
They do not know they are together.
There are men moving statues into the foyer. Hellstrom stands as though he is in charge, a surveyor, but his eyes give him away, a glazed look of boredom.
He nods his head in her direction when he spots her.
“Emmanuelle,” he says, and something inside her clenches, animal instinct threatens.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asks quietly.
To anyone else in the room, they are too people having a quiet morning chat. She is an attractive young woman and he is a strapping officer. “Are you going to kill me?” she asks, and Hellstrom laughs.
“Those are not my orders,” he tells her. “Yet.”
Shosanna raises her chin and fights against his gaze. She can remember what his hands felt like around her neck.
-
Hellstrom knows her name; he still searches for the chink in her armor.
(His fingers will trace her sides, start at her ribcage and work their way down, but they don’t stop at her hipbone, no, they continue down, around, he grabs her ass and pulls her closer and by then, by then of course, they both will be breathing hard and her body will ache, the endurance of fighting two opposing, crushing forces -
right and wrong and want and need and good and bad and life and death and here and gone, today and tomorrow and man and woman and bone and flesh, the killed and the killers, him her, him and her -
and she will never ask him to kiss her, but she will never want his mouth more than in this one moment).
(Remember: want is not the same as need. Remember: this is not a cautionary tale. Not every story has to have a moral, sometimes it is nothing more than a string of events related as they occurred. If this story had a moral it could be:
Not everyone here is going to get what they thought they had wanted.
It could be: in the end, everyone dies.
It could be exactly what Joy Division would come to sing decades later: love will tear us apart).
(Love, love will tear us apart. Again).
-
They are not in love.
-
They, they are liars. Again.
(It might be less than lying, it might just be as simple as an inability to understand. For Shosanna, love is something light, love is something that carries you, not something you are forced to carry, forced to endure. Love is the light at the end of the dark tunnel this world lost itself in, when the world lost Poland, lost Czechoslovakia, lost so many of its people. This can’t be love, is what she tells herself. She does not use words like love for him).
(Hellstrom does not use words like love either, though for him, he has his own reasons. Quite simply, love is an impossibility. Love is allowing pardons. It is a weakness. He has no room for weakness. He has no room for her).
-
Tomorrow night there will be a premiere. Tomorrow night her film will be shown and Marcel will start a fire. That will be tomorrow.
This is tonight.
First there is a knock at the door.
Shosanna makes a decision. Shosanna is going to hold her ground this time. This time, she is going to be brave. But, no, this is not about courage and this is not about bravery. She has been brave and she has been anything but a coward the last four years running. The floorboards were shredded with bullets and her own blood, her own family, their flesh, their blood, ran together, ran with the mud, and she ran, she ran and she ran and she ran, she’s still running now, and maybe that makes her less than brave: she hasn’t stopped running. She is Emmanuelle Mimieux and she runs, she doesn’t stop, she won’t stop until the flames lick the walls and the roof caves in.
It is very tiring to be this brave. It is exhausting to run and not know when the end will come. It would not be brave for her to say no to Dieter Hellstrom. It would be another stretch and shade of the same prudent self-protection she has engaged in for the majority of her adult life.
But here is another thing: she says no, and it means nothing. She says no, and it’s unlikely he’ll walk back out the door. It is unlikely he will forget her.
“No honor among thieves, eh,” she said once, the day with the red dress, and it was the closest she will ever engage in teasing with him. Hellstrom had frowned, the joke clearly misunderstood by him.
“I don’t follow,” he told her.
“Fredrick,” and it was all she said at first. “You told me. That first day. You told me Fredrick was… besotted with me. And here you are.”
“I used no such language,” was Hellstorm’s answer, and the conversation stalled.
(“Don’t much know what Private Zoller sees in you,” he had said).
Hellstrom walks in through the door; he shuts it behind him.
-
Shosanna does not run.
-
Her office is no longer hers anymore, it is Landa’s. The room feels foreign to her, less so with Hellstrom in the room with her, and she does not know, she does not want to know, what that means.
They collide. Everyone makes the jokes about the men in uniform and everyone knows by now that she could have had a genuine war hero. She could have had one of the good men, she already has one of the good men. But here she is. Here she is again, and one time can be excused as a mistake, a grievous lapse in judgment, and twice can be ruled as a relapse, as your own fault, a lesson learned.
Three times equates a habit.
There is not much room on the floor, but they fall to it. There are old film posters, old newspapers, and they grab for each other, trousers and hips, spare parts attempting to create a whole. He kisses her and she tips her head back, bares her throat. His cock is thick and painful inside her, the rhythm his hips push forward cruel and unrelenting. His eyes flicker open to shut and open to shut, or maybe it’s her own, his face is terrifying, as open as she has ever (will ever) see it, and something catches in her throat, he catches inside her, he pushes and he pushes, and she is giving it all back.
(She still thinks he is trying to get under her skin, and maybe he has, maybe he has achieved that, but if he has, if he has, then he is in there with her.
We are all trapped. We are all caged, even if only in the physical sense. Reams of skin that keep everything under cover, structured bone guarding pockets of tissue and soft organs that pump and beat. Maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it is less. Just a word. Maybe it’s a first name, a last name, a middle name - titles, Mr., Ms., Miss. Emmanuelle Mimieux. Major Dieter Hellstrom.
Shosanna Dreyfus).
His frame overwhelms hers, and she presses her open mouth to his throat.
-
(In another life, one where the world is singular and whole, a world where they are the same but different, new - we can’t change that much, we can’t change them, if we remove the parts, we lose the whole, we lose the story, the point is lost - the following could occur:
Hellstrom (and here, in this brave new world, Shosanna would call him Dieter) would say with his same smirk:
There are other words than love.
Shosanna would be brave (Shosanna will always be brave, even in death) and say:
There are no other words than love).
-
There will be no grand deathbed scene here.
Major Dieter Hellstrom is shot in the balls and then stabbed in the back of the head.
There are no pretty ways to put this. There is no poetry for the damage a bullet does when it meets its intended target.
(The next night, Shosanna’s body will be hollowed out as well. Her body will catch on fire.
She will burn).
-
DAY FOUR
The day of the premiere the sun rises bloody.
There is no other way.
-
“Where is your friend?” Shosanna asks Fredrick.
Fredrick frowns. “My friend? I have plenty of friends, Mademoiselle. I believe I need you to clarify.”
Shosanna all but blushes. She does not blush. She clears her throat. “The Major. By my impression, he seems to follow you wherever you go. Not for this though?”
Fredrick rests a hand on her forearm and Shoshanna worries the inside of her cheek but does not pull away. The veil does not hide her face well enough.
“I regret to inform you, but the good Major was killed last night. Terrible shame. Awful loss.”
Shosanna stares blankly ahead. There is a pile of film waiting to burn.
“Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
-
Hellstrom asked: Why were you crying? Before, in the restaurant. Why were you crying?
She took a step back.
I don’t remember, she said.
He did not call her a liar. But he did not believe her.
She did not answer, and he did not ask again. He fucked her, she fucked him.
And then they killed him -
and then they killed her.
-
The thing to remember is this, (and remember this was all just once a rhyme):
Jack and Jill went up a hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.
(She came, Jill came, tumbling after, she bumped his shoulder with her heel and then her arms found his arms and they tangled, tangled in that way only two people can tangle and can never break free. He fell, he broke his crown, and she flipped over after.
Jill landed next to him, their fingers twisted together to make one fist. She pressed her lips to his bloody temple and sighed.
They left the pail of water).
-
A book tucked under his arm, Major Dieter Hellstrom entered La Louisiane.
He took a seat and licked his lips.
-
Shosanna will wear the red dress.
-
fin.