secrets

I showed a couple around the home a little while ago. An elderly man with a strong German accent and his nervous daughter. Along with all the usual questions about cost, etc., he kept asking me how much forgiveness there might be. I told him that as we all needed it I hoped there would be a lot. And would we need a lot of background information? Enough to make sense of the present situation, I said, but that of course we couldn't make anyone tell us what they didn't want us to know. That seemed to be a relief and he alternated between English and German, translating my answers to himself and their implications. The daughter seemed weighed down, trying hard to keep some sort of calm yet feeling his emotion was running away from her control.
She constantly tried to bring the conversation back to the prosaic in order to enforce some sort of normality but the whirl wind of his anxiety over took her and she gave up.
The tour was proscribed - no going into the lounges where other people were - "Show only to me the room". "Would it be necessary to eat with people?".
"Dad likes to keep to himself, very much." She explained with a nervous laugh.
Suddenly, I wanted to ask him to roll up his sleeves and let me see his arms. Of course I didn't but my mind replayed grainy black and white archive footage of striped clad bodies staring out with dark, hollow, eyes.
I returned to the present. I must have gone to auto-pilot because I seemed to have made the right responses. He was already out of the door, still muttering bi-lingually. The daughter tried to redeem some shreds of social grace and say "Goodbye" as casually as a bag of nerves can.