Arnost Lustig - Lovely Green Eyes

“If someone accused me of stealing your nose and we both knew that it wasn’t true because you have a nose on your face, I’d still feel guilty.”

Estelle had never said anything like this to her before. She felt again that an inexplicable closeness to her, which she felt even when her friend was withdrawn. Skinny knew what it meant to feel guilty for what she had not done but would perhaps be capable of doing, though — fortunately or unfortunately — the opportunity would not arise. The idea seemed to bind them together, quite apart from what they had in common. They were also bound by what Estelle had said about her family, who were missing somewhere.

“It’s what the cold and the snow are doing to us,” said Skinny.

“I don’t know what the snow is doing to you. I heard they’re going to send us Italians. Men from Sicily have never seen snow. They’ve already had Slovaks, Estonians and Hungarians here. The girls before us had Frenchmen and Flemish.” Estelle paused.

“Right to the last moment I didn’t know they were sending me here. There was talk of the ‘Hotel for Foreigners’, of some knocking shop for workers on ‘total employment’. Sometimes they have Waffen-SS brothels directly in the camps. I’m almost glad I don’t have to make my own decisions about myself. They told me I’d be an entertainer. I didn’t know what that meant. I thought it wiser not to ask. It was enough to be alive, the Oberführer said. His assistant was a whore they’d discharged from Spandau prison. How are you feeling?”

“How do you think?” Skinny asked. “Fine.”

“Like me,” said Estelle. “Before or after?”

“I close my eyes,” said Skinny.

“That helps?”

“I don’t want to see anyone.”

“Is that possible?”

“Perhaps.”

“I didn’t know what eyes the devil had. Or his brothers. It never occurred to me that the devil had a military rank, from Obersoldat to Oberführer. Or that he wore a smelly uniform and didn’t wash his feet. Perhaps I should learn to shut my eyes like you.”

It was said of Estelle that she was waiting for two gunners who shared her. The fact that the story came from Maria-from-Poznan was enough to make people doubt its truth. Maria was known as “The Toad” because she had cold lips and, as one soldier put it, everything that should be the very opposite was as cold as a dog’s snout. As for passion, she could at best talk about it. She was both cunning and stupid, as Long-Legs described her. She made up for her lack of beauty with perfidy. Beware of ugly people, Long-Legs insisted.

The worst thing, though, was to fall for one of the soldiers. Those who drafted the regulations knew very well why an enduring relationship, for the same reasons as kissing or other amorous engagement, was forbidden. Only intercourse was permitted.

Was it not dangerous enough for Estelle to have such raven hair and even the hint of a moustache under the nose? Were her father and mother ravens? Who knows who her father and mother are, Maria-from-Poznan said to Ginger in the latrine. They were with Smartie and Long-Legs, so she quickly shut up. It could get to the Oberführer’s ears.

Estelle interrupted Skinny’s thoughts.

“That Obersoldat who told me I had eyes like black coffee has had his number come up.”

She didn’t say “And a good thing, too,” but her voice implied it. There was something in Estelle that Skinny couldn’t understand. Everything was boiling down to a struggle with time.

The water in the tub was dirty now. Blobs of Vaseline were floating on its surface. Uncleanness washed off from their skin, out of their pores, from under their nails. Anything that did not readily dissolve needed vigorous scrubbing.

“I feel swollen,” Estelle said.

“I don’t see why.”

“As though I was made of water instead of flesh and blood.”

“You’re made of flesh and blood, all right.”

“Mucous membranes and glands,” Estelle corrected her.

“You seem normal to me.”

“Like a lake when it overflows. Maybe they are normal discharges.”

She told Skinny that for three nights running she had dreamt that they’d cut her in two with an axe, from her skull through her body to her crotch, and that both parts were alive and in the course of the night came together again and that she returned to her cubicle.

“I can pretend anything now.”

“I can’t manage that,” said Skinny.

“I’m swollen like water,” Estelle repeated.

They both climbed out. They dried themselves vigorously, to set the blood flowing through their veins and to get warm again. They dressed in haste.

“Do you ever feel as if your blood is freezing inside you?” Estelle asked.

On Sunday orders came for them to dig a well. Water from the cistern would be for the guards only. They could melt some snow in jugs.

Skinny dreamt about rats. They were scurrying over the snow, down the stone floor of the corridor, between the water tubs. They talked to each other. An old rat said to its young: “What you can’t avoid you must endure.”

They appeared in her dreams with the bodies of other animals, dogs, foxes, wolves or fish, but always with rat’s heads. When she opened her eyes they were gone. When she closed them, there they were again, running in front of her. They were shouting words of advice to her, but she could not remember a single one.

“It’s best when you don’t even know who you’re with,” Long-Legs had said. Had she told her this during the night, or was it a dream?

Twelve: Günther Eich, Brentano Wolfenstein, Bern Reding, Viktor Holz, Bertrand Heim, Fritz Barthelms, Gottfried Weinheim, Erhard W ie s e ntier — Kä hr in g, Erik Unruh, Kanfred Reinisch, William Pohl, Suardon Kann.

The Oberführer — so he claimed — had given Tight-Lips her discharge papers in a sealed envelope. She was waiting for her escort to the “Hotel for Foreigners”. The Oberführer had been suspiciously silent. He hadn’t accused Tight-Lips of anything, nor had he ordered her to be put up against the wall. He’d merely forbidden her to talk to Madam Kulikowa. She thought it a little odd that she hadn’t even received a whipping.

The following morning, instead of getting an escort, she went to the wall. They could hear three salvoes, and no vehicle arriving or leaving.

By now they knew what had happened. A corporal in the sappers had been in the cubicle with Tight-Lips rather longer than he was entitled to be. The Madam had been about to ask the Oberführer whether she should point out to the corporal that his time was up, when Tight-Lips emerged, as white as a sheet. She had heard the Madam’s bell outside her cubicle. The corporal had had his fun with Tight-Lips — he had shaved her crotch with a razor. Then he had laughed, saying that she looked like a plucked goose. Now and again he had played with the razor, dangerously close to her abdomen. Because she said nothing, he also tried to communicate with her with his eyes and with gestures. Eventually he had stripped naked. His gaze had been wild; he had been like a man on fire. He had pulled out his pistol, slipped back the safety catch and in front of her shot himself through his left eye.

Oberführer Schimmelpfennig established from the Gestapo that suicide ran in the corporal’s family. His father, a captain in an infantry regiment, had shot himself through the heart in front of his wife, the corporal’s mother.

The Oberführer informed the Madam curtly that neither he nor the Gestapo intended to explore why such elements killed themselves. He considered the chapter closed.

For a few hours the temperature rose. The sun came out and gilded the snow.

“Some places you can swim to, others you can’t,” Long-Legs said.