What can I say about this girl...?

         What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died? Everything in a breathless sigh. Nothing in a drowning silence. She was love and hate, passion and clarity. She was the object of my devotion, my obsession.

         I had lived for many years, ages passing without a second thought, and never had I felt so bound. Trapped by her presence, I was outraged. How dare she be more than simple, more than I was capable of ignoring. I stole her, to keep the world from discovering the breathing enigma.
         
         So what can I say about this girl?

         She is mine.

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         After years of self-loathing, locked in a repentant personal hell, it was as though I were breathing again. Each moment I saw her, the physical embodiment of grace, it was as if I were a drowning man drawing in the crisp, sweet, life-saving air. She would come, dressed in scandal, and hide herself away in the furthest corner of my record shop, listening to whatever jazz record would get her into the most trouble.


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         It was a time of repression; the Nazis would round up anyone caught being subversive, different, to the status quo. It was a time of urgency; young and old, equal for once despite the layers of mistrust and stereotyping, understood the shaky ground that their freedom was positioned on.

         To have a record store was one thing, a possible danger but nothing over the top if you were found to have the right lineage, the right virtues, the right color, and the right religion. It was something else to have a record store that acted as a front to a dance club, where swing music and jazz echoed off of the roughed walls and bounced into the souls of brave, foolish revolutionaries who gathered there. Having my gypsy ancestry long buried in a series of ramshackle paper trails, I owned just such a subversive record shop. Though I was different, my lean features and lithe gait deviating from the everyday, left-footed Nazi stomp, without any incriminating papers the Third Reich couldn’t touch me. According to my papers, which were crisp and officially sealed, I was German born for centuries back, my family always marrying good, strong, industrious German citizens that would, in turn, produce even more good, strong, industrious German citizens. The Third Reich was all for that, the procreation of the master race.

         What did I care for the world of men, of daytime roll-call and daytime raids? Those running the grand show, power-hungry men with a lust for death and dismemberment, were not concerned with a beautiful man who allowed teenagers to listen to good, pure, classical German music. That is, after all, all I was offering to the youth that would flock into my shop. Or, at the very least, that was all any German official would see if a raid were to be ordered--rows upon rows of strong, prideful German oom-pah records.

         Such tricks of the eyes kept my patrons safe; in the moments they took haven in my shop, with boarded-up windows and black-draped furniture, the Nazi war did not exist.