Eva Braun's Last Tragic Abortion by Lynda Schor

Eva lies in the mother-of-pearl tub staring at the green tarnish bleeding from the fourteen- carat-gold carved faucets into the bathwater. She raises the hand mirror she'd brought with her into the bath, which, like the faucets, is carved with Aries rams just at the point of being transformed into Taurean bulls—Adolph's sun signs. Used to picturing herself as Adolph sees her, she peers at her face as if to recall herself, whatever that is. Or perhaps to catch a glimpse of a new possibility. She feels (perhaps it's the water, the sensation of floating) unmoored, as if she could, like a turn of a faucet, find herself beautiful one moment, ugly the next. She moves the small mirror from her face, flushed, surrounded by an aureole of fine curls, downward toward one breast, which, as she's just six weeks pregnant, is tender, swollen, nipple rounder than usual, areola rosy. She enjoys the sensation of prickly cool on her face and shoulders, the rest of her submerged in water almost unbearably hot. She moves the mirror along to her belly, just slightly more rounded than usual, an almost undetectable convexity between diminutive pelvic bones which stand out of the murky bathwater like small sails softened by mist. It's exciting to see each small portion of her body at one time, magnified, as if it's foreign terrain. Raising her hips she feels the slight tickle of the water's edge, above which she's flushed pink. The portions of her still in the water appear dead white, buttery and unarticulated. Sexual arousal was the only time Eva could stand feeling the least bit vague, her boundaries undefined. The image in the mirror of her stomach, then her pubis, excites her, then the pictures in her mind superimposed, then the warm excitement she feels, then those sensations in her mind, then the image in the mirror–she's tempted to carefully deconstruct passion, but finds she no longer wishes to think. She lays the mirror across the marble ledge and closes her eyes and listens to her breathing.

Eva imagines she can hear similar breathing from Adolph's room on the other side of the bath. She likes to think they are doing the same thing, separately, and toys with the idea of climbing out and trying his door. She jumps when Adolph, in his brown, beige and gold flannel robe, barges in without knocking. Timid about his aging body, he pulls on an already tight belt. Eva looks into his eyes and in the lust reflected there sees herself anew.

He stands looking at her for a moment, glassy-eyed and peaked, and Eva senses his whirling galvanism, his inability to remain immobile, or placid. She watches him and imagines how he sees her lovely hair, pulled up in back except for the long, damp tendrils which hang down around the sides of her narrow face and delineate her small moist ears, rounded cheekbones, and, under a wide chin, her surprisingly slender neck.

"Your wide, smooth forehead reminds me of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the greatest war criminal of all time," he says in a tired voice, while laying his chenille robe over the gilt stool. He sits on the edge of the tub, one patent leather scuff hanging precariously from the toes of the foot he is resting on his other knee.

Eva stares at the pale flesh of his abdomen. He's not at all fat, but there's a looseness to his flesh nowadays. His white calf, crossed over his thigh is slightly freckled, like freshly poured pancake batter with raisins. How ugly he is, she thinks.

"What are you thinking?" he asks.

Slightly flustered, she says, "Nothing."

"That you find me repulsive and ugly because I'm so much older than you?"

"I don't find you ugly," says Eva, upset to be caught at a rare moment when she saw him clearly as one would see a stranger, or an object. "I feel our spirits meeting," she says, observing how his eyeball apertures resemble miniature anuses.

Adolph leans over the edge of the tub and dips his hand into the water. He fondles Eva's ass slowly, feeling, and picturing, her lovely curves; then, reaching under her, he inserts his finger with the square nail into her anus. As he pushes he describes the smoothness he feels as "a road, fish entrails, a muddy trench, a shiny train track, the inside of a cheek." Eva responds to his descriptions. She's always turned on by him. She listens to his monologues for hours. She's especially moved by Adolph in his uniforms. He has charisma.

"I believe," says Adolph, "in ending life in a clear-cut manner. No use being so in love with it, so dependent upon it, wishing to prolong the pain of it. It can be so neat if our relationship with life is broken cleanly, when we make the decision to end it. I can't stomach passivity. I'm in love with free choice."

"Why are you thinking about ending your life?" Eva asks. "Do you think it's fair of you to end a life that expends so much in the service of others?" She studies his buttocks hanging further over the water. His passion for order and cleanliness seems to be growing daily. She wonders about "free choice."

Adolph abstractedly rubs the moist bar of soap near his thigh with his forefinger, and then, for a moment, rubs the foam into it. He slips his feet out of his patent leather scuffs, the only shoes he wears now in the bunker, even when dressed in suits and uniforms, and gingerly enters the tub, facing Eva, careful not to scrape his back on the gold fixtures. He peers over his knees, folded nearly to his chin. Eva's legs wrap around him, her calves circling his buttocks underwater.

Eva feels uneasy, but says nothing. She can't help recalling her pain when Adolph continued his relationship with both herself and the beautiful, buxom Geli Raubal, lying to both, unable to break off with either one until Geli made the choice by killing herself. "What about Geli? Were you so strong then?"

"I didn't miss her," says Adolph, misunderstanding. "I was enraged that she found a way to counteract my will."

"Geli lives with us always," cried Eva. "She still lives in us both." Perspiration drips down her face and neck, reddened even more now by suppressed anger. The heat of the room, the water, is suddenly unbearable. She focuses on the spot where her calf touches Adolph's thigh until she loses any sensation of the contact.

Eva recalls the funeral, Geli perfectly beautiful, perfectly frozen, embalmed in the best Egyptian technique, worthy receptacle of the costly scientific studies of the third Reich. Even then Eva envied Geli as she lay there, peaceful, her white hands across her breasts, clutching dried baby's breath. Her dark hair is pulled back around her heart-shaped forehead, so different from Eva's. The deep blue color of the clingy jersey dress chosen by Eva accentuates the clarity of her eyes, a shade of blue quite different from Eva's and Adolph's light ones, her skin pure white, cheeks rosy with rouge. Eva recalls seeing Adolph lift Geli's dress. Her thighs, close, make a heart shape, outlined by the top edge of her black underpants. He gazes into her eyes, which stare dumbly, willfully into space.

Adolph suddenly looks meek. He lowers his eyes, seeming to watch the smoggy water.

"She still is the master of your moods," Eva continues. "That's why you're always so sad. And I think about her all the time too."

"You're lying on your bed, arms out, naked. ‘Eat me,' you order. ‘I'm not in the mood,' I say. ‘Then Geli will do it,' you say. ‘You turn your head. Geli is kneeling, hair shiny and disordered, light trapped in the tangles like fireflies, straight-cut bob just brushing the silk sheet. Her large, firm breasts rest arrogantly over her wide rib cage, the small, dark birthmark between her heavy mounds disturbs me. She bends over you lingeringly, letting you feel her hot breath on your groin. I lean tensely against the chill wall and watch, pulling the peach silk cover sheet over my small breasts. After a moment you lift her hair in your hand exposing a portion of the back of her neck, which is thin and childlike in contrast with her voluptuousness, and which, though resembling my own, is somehow hateful to me. I restrain an urge to smack her, which hopefully might cause her to bite down hard on your prick. Geli looks at me, her eyes pulled Asian by your clutching of her hair. Within my jealous hatred, a bubble of compassion grows. Only then can I gently kiss the soft hairs at the nape of her neck also, while I whisper with love and envy, ‘How can you be such a masochist?'"

"Don't talk to me like that," says Adolph, but meekly. He was forgetting all he'd meant to tell her about his depression, caused by events currently occurring in the German Nation, and everyone either against him, or after his ass.

"You can't make a commitment to me," says Eva, watching his soft penis move in the water like a slug.

"Can't you get over it?" asks Adolph. "I needed emotional security from both of you."

"Don't you think I need emotional security?" Eva screams.

Adolph covers his ears with his hands. "Don't scream like that. It reminds me of my mother."

Eva feels her the wrenching of tears in the back of her throat. Adolph places his fingers on her breast, but she only cries harder.

"It's strange about the mind and the body," says Adolph. "Without the mind, the body is an animal. The mind is God and religion. The body of Eva won't respond when her mind is upset and angry. This is Eva's integrity." He pauses. "My own body, on the other hand, tends to respond to the physical under any mental conditions. It therefore follows that my mind has more integrity than my body."

"If your body has no integrity, neither does your mind," says Eva. "Mind and Body are one."

Adolph is aware that he's sweating. Eva has never spoken to him like this. It reminds him that there's no time.

"Listen," says Adolph, "I don't bother about your past, why harp on mine?" He recalls that they are practically buried alive beneath the rubble of the destroyed city.

"It's our past. Our past was connected. Should have been connected. Except all the parts you didn't share," says Eva. I've lived with you so long, she thinks, and have been so alone.

"Nothing like that matters any more. Today's the day I make a clear commitment to you. We're getting married," says Adolph.

"Only because today's the day you're making a clear severance with your relationship with life," pouts Eva.

"Sarcasm is unbecoming in women," says Adolph, rubbing his chest against Eva's. His excitement has the quality of desperation. "Do you hate me?" he asks, holding his penis as if it's something to grasp for security.

"No, no," says Eva nearly inaudibly. She feels triumphant, yet sorry for him.

He stares at her in a supplicating way, as if she can give him self-esteem, as a gift. "Hit me, oh, hit me, Eva," he sputters, churning in the water in what seem like attempts to become smaller, something lower on the evolutionary scale. "I feel I'm nothing. A piece of slime. I can't bear it. Hit me hard. Put your finger in me," he begs, on his knees in the water. Then, sinking down, surrendering to his feeling of being slime he almost looks it—white, flabby, shrinking, he becomes another creature, a pulsing sea anemone, a mudpuppy, so light that he moves with the oscillating water.

Feeling powerful, Eva raises herself to gain leverage, and smacks Adolph really hard. He glances at her with a mixture of love, gratitude and supplication. Placing his hands above his own head as if they're tied there, he writhes, whispering unintelligibly.

Eva doesn't know what fantasies he disappears into. Yet she adores his strength. She loves it that he allows her to hate him, while not feeling threatened that she can't love him at the same time. She would have gladly pretended to untie his wrists and feet if only he'd tell her about their being tied. Squatting with her back toward him, she moves over him, lowering herself on him and watching his feet turn in and caress each other, toes curling under, then out.

Adolph moans, "Now, baby, now."

Eva knows what he wants. Relaxing her muscles, she urinates on and around his penis, seeing her urine as a mountain stream. The warm liquid and her sense of abandon excite her too.

"Let's pretend," says Adolph breathlessly, "that you're a massacred Ogellala Indian, beautiful, and oh so wounded."

Eva nearly loses her balance as she feels her hair being pulled back by Adolph. She can almost sense the location of each hair on her head. Her mouth is long, her eyes pulled into slanty Indian eyes.

"Boy of the Loups," Adolph says, "the scalp of a mighty Dakota shall never dry in Pawnee smoke."

"What?" asks Eva.

"It's from THE PRAIRIE, by James Fenimore Cooper, who copied it from our Karl May." Adoph stares at Eva's throat, trying to imagine blood there. He keeps his hold on her hair. "The fickle Indian gives up his wife for a white woman. But shaking off the grateful sentiment like one who would gladly be rid of any painful, because reproachful, emotion he laid his hand calmly on the arm of his wife and led her directly in front of Inez."

Adolph presses his penis back and forth along his own thigh, eyes closed, concentrating. Eva is surprised by his erudition.

"You be the discarded Indian wife," Adolph suggests feverishly, "and after my battle scene I ravish you."

"‘Fool, die with empty hands, Mahtoree exclaimed, setting an arrow to his bow and sending it, with a sudden and deadly aim, full at the naked bosom of his generous and confiding woman . . .'"

Eva no longer hears his words. He is sweating. Ripples generated by his drilling hand on his own penis seem like volcanic waves. She feels like she's drowning. She can feel each minute body hair as live coral or seaweed pushed back and forth by the stormy waves.

"I admire your control," whispers Eva.

"Shh," says Adolph, one hand on his lips, the other still holding himself, but absolutely still now. "You're lying on the bloody sand. Both of us are wounded." He breathes in and begins moving his hand up and down along himself again.

"This is wonderful. You're letting me share your fantasies," cries Eva.

Adolph moves his hand faster, then stops, and holds his breath. Eva watches the three creamy spurts as they lie on his stomach, then slowly dissipate like smoke in the water.

Adolph lies there exhausted, crumpled and infant-like, hand curled next to Eva's breast. He rubs her nipple halfheartedly, as if he wants to try to satisfy her.

"I feel good," he says, tracing a finger lightly over her round breast. "I'd love for you to have my baby."

Eva knows he only says that because it's probably their last night alive. She hates him for this deception, yet looks hopefully into his eyes wondering whether to reveal that she's pregnant.

"Imagine a baby of the Führer. It would be such a great baby. With such beautiful blue eyes." Tears moisten his own pale eyes, now framed in pink.

Eva recalls all the abortions he'd insisted upon, and her unsuccessful attempts at suicide, which she knows full well were desperate demands for attention and fulfillment of needs he was simple incapable of fulfilling. Staring at Adolph, she sees him as an infant. His cheeks are fat and rosy, squeezing his small lips into a rosette, the bluish vein on his white forehead even more apparent. His curls are soft and blonde.

Water drips, echoing in the silence as in a tunnel. Blue-green stains run down like blood on the tiles where the faucet drips. For the moment Adolph is still. They face each other in the tub. Eva sees herself as she looks at Adolph. Both are now wet-haired, draggled creatures, pale and limp. She feels a rush of hatred, yet her belly and thighs feel heavy with desire.

Adolph gazes innocently into her pale blue eyes. "I really want to be your only baby," he says.