Arnost Lustig - Lovely Green Eyes

“You don’t get out of anything on your own — only exceptionally. It’s better with some help. You don’t have to love them,” she said to Skinny, almost apologetically.

Long-Legs called them to the window. For about five minutes a wolf had been dancing, twisting about its own axis as if trying to catch its tail. Abruptly it ran off.

“You can want, but you don’t necessarily get,” Skinny heard the Madam say to Fatty.

Twelve: Reiner Dressier, Rafael Habe, Paul Hoffmann, Klaus Rune, Christian Schulte, Fritz Adler, Seigfried Knappe, Uwe Welt, Demian Schuhmacher, Volker Werner Blind, Willi Lump, Heinrich Burke.

Before lights-out the rats gathered between the latrines. Motionless, they resembled piles of wolf’s hair. Suddenly they would scatter, leaving raven’s feathers behind on the snow.

During the evening a truck from the Wehrkreis delivered three barrels of salted beef.

Over the radio came the voices of three German singers, one of them Lile Anderson. In a direct relay from Paris, Maurice Chevalier was appearing for the benefit of frontline soldiers, war widows and the victims of the air raids on Germany. He sang “Give me Your Hand, Mam’zelle”. The commentator mentioned the soul of Europe and its full stomach. The audience applauded. One mother, he said, gave birth to her baby during an air raid. Her husband, a doctor, had handed the child out through the window to some air defence personnel, so they could take it to a shelter. The child was named Adolf. In honour of the child, Monsieur Chevalier would sing …

The station’s signal faded.

They were all examined during the week by an army psychologist, Oberführer Michael Blatter-Spirit. His dissertation had been about Oswald Spengler; on the extinction of life, on the duty to die. The Frog had his own opinion of Blatter-Spirit. The body knew four million kinds of pain? Could one agree with Arthur Schopenhauer that man’s most essential longing was to be free from pain? Blatter-Spirit could look back on his respectable series of researches. He had studied the psychological features of blond and blue-eyed people over five and a half feet tall. He’d probed into the Viking and Nordland Divisions of the S S that had levelled the miners’ village of Lidice in Bohemia and razed Oradour near Limoges in France. He had examined those who participated in the massacre of Malmédy. One S S man had recalled the end of Oradour. This man had described how it had occurred on a sunny Saturday in the peaceful quiet of a German village. He had exhibited all the qualities of Waffen-S S members — the sons of middle and upper class parents. In Oradour he had killed more women and children than men: 190 men, 207 children, 245 women. Blatter-Spirit had also studied the Germanization of foreigners, that which made the Waffen-S S so attractive to them, a magnet for Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Romanian and French SS. The psychologist wore small round spectacles, his eyes behind them shone like opal glass. His face was pockmarked with childhood acne and duelling scars from his days at the German University in Prague.

He took his subject seriously. The army prostitutes must be made to smile.

“Smile at me,” he ordered Skinny.

She smiled at him.

“That’s lifeless,” he said. “Again.”

She had to grin at him 20 times. He promised her chocolate, two hard-boiled eggs and bread with ham.

From smiling lips, he explained, signals went to the brain and triggered energy which — even if the smile wasn’t spontaneous — produced positive effects. He based this on discoveries of the French neurologist Duchenne de Bologne, according to whom a hearty smile (not just a half smile) gave rise to a “play of sweet feelings in the soul”. He was trying to get results that could lead to a general instruction. He glanced at her file, at the questionnaire she had answered.

“What do you know? Rat — rabbit? Ox — cockerel?”

Oberführer S chimmelpfennig remained doubtful about these theories. Either Dr Blatter-Spirit was right, or he was an idiot — and he’d decided which. The Oberführer himself recognized health only, and the opposite of health. Nothing in between.

Over tea Blatter-Spirit expressed the view that Columbus was a Jew. He had brought syphilis back to Europe. And weren’t the Jews everywhere? The two men talked about experiments carried out by Japanese doctors using horse blood for human transfusions. Then they discussed pressure chambers and the point at which a person’s eyeballs popped out.

At daybreak on Sunday repair gangs and teams of camp inmates from Auschwitz-Birkenau and Blechhammer, Monowitz and Gleiwitz, where the rolling stock repair shops were located, arrived at the steel bridge. Under the guidance of railway engineers they reinforced the piers and replaced the rails. In the fierce wind they broke the ice on the river with hand grenades. They encased the piers in heavy timber. There was a sound of gunfire, shouting and the clash of metal against metal. The guards were warming themselves at iron braziers with red-hot coke. A few camp inmates drowned in the ice-cold water.

Throughout the night, troop trains and trains carrying war material roared east. And in the opposite direction came long trains carrying wounded men, bits of booty and damaged heavy weapons. They fought their way through snow, blizzards and artillery fire. The rails were bending. Ruby sparks swished through the darkness and the snow.

On Tuesday a Mercedes with its escort arrived with a new girl from Festung Breslau.

The girl addressed the guard at the gate in passable German.

“My name is Debilia. I fuck like a tigress.”

The guard liked her guttural “r”. She had been in an institution from the age of eleven to fourteen and believed herself to be a cat. After her discharge, no school or training college would accept her. When the first soldier entered the cubicle she had inherited from Tight-Lips, she sat on his lap, spat, miaowed and purred, and then licked his nose. At dinner she said that she liked everything and then proceeded loudly to list all the things she didn’t eat. At roll-call she got her first three strokes with a cane.

“In China,” the Oberführer said, “the mandarins used to dish out 30 strokes and nobody thought it out of place.”

Debilia squealed, so he ordered more strokes. After five he ordered that she be given 25. At the eighth fall of the cane she stopped yelling. After the twenty-first they carried her away. The Oberführer ordered the other prostitutes to sing. He was going to demand a replacement for her from the Wehrkreis, he said. It would be no bad thing if they started to send German girls.

“It’s up to you to make sure the word ‘woman’ has no bad flavour. Remember, there are two kinds of girl. The first kind were born into the right bed, the second climbed into it. Don’t think that what’s bad for the Germans is good for you,” Madam Kulikowa told them later.

They should not behave like a bad innkeeper who drove her guests away instead of welcoming them. Or who simply waited for a guest to put his money on the table and leave. They had something to display — youth, hair, breasts, a feast for the troops. They saw the men at their most vulnerable moment. A girl was like a doctor in some respects. She had to discover the best in everyone.

Was Skinny Jewish? Or Estelle? The Madam sometimes wondered. If the cards had been dealt the other way round, would the Jews behave like the Germans and the Germans like the Jews? You couldn’t tell anything from a girl’s crotch. What could she have in common with the troops who came here for an advance on their home life? The cemetery was nearer for her.

After supper a messenger on a motorbike with a sidecar brought a parcel for Skinny. A couple of pounds each of sugar and lentils, a chunk of salted beef and some pork crackling in a jam jar. A twopound bag of millet. And a visiting card from Captain Daniel August Hentschel.