Arnost Lustig - Lovely Green Eyes

He laughed. He pushed the blanket off, feeling warm, and fell silent.

She listened to the wolves on the plain, to the footsteps in the corridor, to the bell of Big Leopolda Kulikowa.

“You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to. I don’t wish to interrogate you, that’s not my business. I’m only asking out of curiosity. Have you got any brothers or sisters?”

“I had a brother. They separated us when we got to the camp. I never saw him again.”

“What age? You’ve no idea where he is?”

“No. He was 13.”

“Perhaps they put him with a family that had lost a child.”

“It’s possible,” she said.

“Would you like that?”

“I’d like to believe he was alive.”

“They could have put you with a family too.” He wondered how she would get on in a German family. Would his family accept someone whose parents had been killed for the assassination of the Reich Protector? Was she really as old as she said?

“Did they teach you anything after school?”

“Hairdressing,” she said quickly.

She had a sudden vision of Slavomîr Slâma from their block of flats in Prague, and just as quickly it vanished. In 1941 Mr Slâma had begun to learn German so that he could cut the hair of Wehrmacht soldiers. He ordered German colour magazines for his salon, including an issue of Der Adler with pictures of airmen, planes, balloons and Zeppelins. The airmen on the cover were laughing. Her brother Ramon had stood outside the window, looking at the pictures. They were all still alive. Lying here naked in bed with a German captain, she could not reproach Mr Slâma. For the past eight days she had concealed her Jewishness. A few clever questions would be enough to make her give herself away.

The captain began to speak again.

“Funny, at the beginning of the campaign the enemy hardly interested me. I was only interested in how much Germany was growing. I experienced the friendships that war offered, it stripped me of all worldly ties and money questions. How willing women were in wartime. How everything tested you: were you up to it or not, what effort could you make? What you would eventually return to. And what would never be the same again.”

“On my last home leave in Berchtesgaden I went to the home of a fellow officer. I couldn’t find his father or mother, his brothers or sisters, to tell them that their boy, recently awarded the Iron Cross, was well, in good shape and happy. I couldn’t even find the house. There was only a big bomb crater there and they were still clearing up. There are more of those craters in Germany than mouse holes.”

It occurred to her that this was where they were now retreating to and where they would end up one day — a day she would like to live to see.

*

“Would you mind if I had a short sleep?” the captain asked.

He was full of that tranquillity which comes only after sex. That was how sleep, death’s sweeter sister, came to a man when he had tired himself with what he’d wanted to do. Perhaps one day the captain would wish to die the way he now wished to sleep. He thought of the dignity and indignity of death, of not having to ask when his hour would come. It was with him all the time.

“You look after the stove meanwhile, or else have a nap yourself. Or if you don’t want to, wake me after an hour or so. You can look at my watch. Just shake me by the shoulder.”

The captain was dozing already, only vaguely aware of her unease. She had been uneasy ever since he had arrived and he had attributed it to her inexperience and her youth, and to his rank. He noticed her relief when he told her he would sleep. It neither irritated him nor gave him particular pleasure.

The fire in the stove and in the flue lit up her face and shoulders, her breasts and hands. He liked her. Captain Hentschel thought sleepily that she was young and that he would be able to train her given the chance.

He fell asleep thinking of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she had been sterilized. He had spent the night there out of necessity. It was not a place he was curious about. He accepted that it was one of those historical inevitabilities, the primeval face of war — of this war, which was a total war. For a moment he wondered how his wife was managing without him, and what his children were doing. Thanks to the family’s considerable assets he did not have to worry too much.

The captain’s face brought back a memory. A woman, the mother of four Wehrmacht soldiers, had been brought to Terezin from the Reich the previous year. Her four sons, one after the other, had been killed in battle. When the last one fell she had lost the protection of the law. The young men had mixed blood on their mother’s side. They had all worn the same uniform as Captain Hentschel. They also wore the same uniform as the two Wehrmacht officers who were brought to Terezin when it was discovered that they had Jewish grandmothers, and who were sent east inside a week. Like the mother of the dead soldiers, they had dissolved in the Jewish ocean, in the ocean of ashes from which Skinny had escaped to No. 232 Ost, so she could gaze on the purplish, sleeping features of Captain Daniel August Hentschel. She looked at his huge hands, his neck, his greatcoat on the door, at the flashes of his rank.

She waited fully an hour, and then he began to cough a little. Her father had coughed just like that when he woke from his afternoon siesta. She could see him in her mind’s eye, returning from the Aschermann café on Dlouhâ Street with the news that the Germans were beginning to transport Jews to Terezin.

At that time mobile x-ray units were making the rounds of the schools. On the pretext of the fight against tuberculosis, the Germans were collecting data on the racial composition of the population of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia — on the percentage of the population suitable for Germanization and subsequent assimilation. The family had been almost glad to escape by being sent to Terezin. S S and SA men were photographing girls aged from thirteen upwards in the nude. Later the photographs were sold in nightclubs.

“Dropped off for a while. What’s the time? How long did I sleep? Come to me. Why are you so far away?”

The captain was wide awake. It was after midday. She returned to the bed. His body and the bedclothes smelled of sleep. He sweated a little. If she understood his expression, she knew what it meant.

“Are you here?” he asked after a while.

“Yes,” she answered.

“I wouldn’t swear to it.”

She lay down by his side, closing her eyes. He could do with her whatever he wanted to. She didn’t want to have a part of it other than with her body. She heard him say that she was looking at him as if she were looking into water. But she was anxious not to make him angry.

“Do you always keep your legs together so tightly? Do you never relax? Or have you got cramp?”

He didn’t like the way she pressed her lips together either. Her youth he accepted; but stubbornness, or what he thought might be stubbornness, he would not. He couldn’t and didn’t want to admit that she might feel an aversion to him and he could see no reason why she should be afraid of him.

He wanted her to sit on him. It was pleasant to look into her face.

A few cinders dropped, spitting, through the grate.

“It’s warm here,” he said.

They heard the door of the next cubicle open and close. The captain got up as he was and walked over to the window. The blizzard had moved off beyond the river. She looked at his huge body.

“Soon we shall be defending ourselves on the Oder,” he said. “An hour or two from Berlin. Many hounds — death of the hare. We’re a tough nut; they haven’t got an easy run with us. But we don’t have an easy run with ourselves. We’re a big country, even if we’re small. A mere ninety million Germans. But we’re our own worst enemies. I could explain to you why we’re withdrawing, if you’re interested. As Frederick the Great said: He who would defend everything will defend nothing.”