The man did not answer, Lina understood that her words seemed nonsense to him, since Marcus did everything possible so that his brother would perceive the situation in the most negative way.
This man quickly learned to manipulate the emotions of others, and since he knew Armand even better than Armand knew himself, it was not difficult for Marcus to cause his brother to hate him. This was his goal, and he managed to achieve this goal successfully.
"When I was three years old, my mother had a terrible dream," Polina began her story, "In this dream, I was standing at the foot of a mountain of dead bodies, and there was a man on top of this mountain. He was standing right on the corpses and smiling. He thanked me for the good work, and when I looked around, I found that there was nothing alive around. No trees, no animals, no houses, no people. It"s like the whole world became extinct, and I somehow was the reason for this."
Armand heard this story for the first time, even as a child, Polina did not tell anything about her life before she came to their house. He and Marcus sometimes asked her about this, but the girl only shrugged and replied that she did not remember her early childhood well.
"At the end of our street was a large house in which one family lived. The neighbors said that the mistress of the house was a witch, but she rarely showed up outside, as she was in a poor health condition. Mom was very scared of this dream and thought it was a bad omen, so she decided to turn to that woman for help. That woman"s name was Clara Teser."
"Clara Teser?! Wait, Teser... You mean she was just like Ameli"
"Yes, it was Amelia"s grandmother," Lina confirmed. According to the girl, the day when her mother came to the Teser family home was exactly the day when it all started. If not for that case, perhaps none of this would have happened at all.
"Clara turned out to be a very kind woman, but when she took my hand, her face turned pale. She asked me to go out and play in their garden while she was talking with my mother, at that moment I still did not know the content of their conversation, but after this visit, we began to live in the Teser house and help their family with the housework."
"Then why did your mother go to work in the Taubert"s house? Did something happen? After mom"s death, father changed all the servants in our house, but he was a very demanding person and never took anyone without a direct recommendation from people he knew," Armand understood that by this logic, the connection of their family with Amelia"s family could begin much earlier than he expected.
"The matter is that it was not my mother who brought me to the Tauberts" house, but the woman who was in no way related to me."
Arman looked at the girl in surprise, "What do you mean, in no way related to you? You used to call her mom."
Lina smiled sadly, she herself for many years considered that woman to be her mother and experienced great offense when she did not show a single amount of care about the girl, and then completely abandoned her and gave her to the possession of the twins" father as some kind of a thing.
"Clara Teser was a kind woman, selflessly loving her husband. She trusted him so blindly that she didn"t even understand what kind of monster that man really was. In public, he always behaved himself with gallantry, but away from prying eyes, this man was full of greed, cruelty and thirst for power," the girl turned her head towards Armand and asked,
"Did you know that your father was one of the founders of the Ahnenerbe?"
The man frowned, even now the mention of this organization caused him a wild disgust, "I did not know, but I had a feeling he had something to do with it."
"Your father was one of those who created this organization, but the one who gave him this idea was none other than Mark Teser, Amelia"s grandfather."
"Wh-what?"
The Teser family, in the understanding of Armand, was certainly very influential, but he did not a.s.sume that its members could stand behind such dirty affairs, Amelia never mentioned anything like that.
"The purpose of Ahnenerbe was to study the ancient secrets and abilities of the human body, the organization had more than a dozen spheres it was involved in. Officially, their task was to find evidence of the superiority of the Aryan race and bring the Third Reich to world domination, but this was official. In fact, your father and Mark Teser used the resources of the Reich to pave the way for the future ruler, who should have outmatched the Führer in everything. And that person was supposed to be you."
"Me?!" Armand noticed from childhood, with how unhealthy stubbornness his father raised the leadership qualities of the exemplary Taubert in the boy. Even the cruel experiment that he conducted on his sons was in order to create a new person who would be unrivaled by anyone, which, in the end, had happened.
All who survived those experiments were far from being the "ordinary people".
"But why did he get the idea that I should be this person? Why not someone else?"
If not for their father"s obsession, Marcus would not have experienced so much cruelty on himself because of the ways that Sigmund Taubert used to bring them up, and, perhaps, would have become a different person, not what he was now.
Lina lowered her eyes, it was true, which she herself learned only after that fateful experiment, when she woke up on a cold table and saw Marcus"s empty eyes, full of resentment and pain.
"Because I said so."