Arnost Lustig - Lovely Green Eyes

Her legs turned numb like blocks of wood. The Obersturmführer forced himself, now flaccid, between them, colliding with her protruding pelvic bones. She changed into clay kneaded by strange hands. She tried to receive the Obersturmführer, but he was incapable of achieving what he wanted. The world shrank for her to a pain in her belly, to smells and sounds, to the impacts of abdomen against abdomen. He was holding down both her shoulders with his left arm; in his right hand he still held his pistol. He had more strength in one arm than she had in her whole body. He must surely feel, if he was capable of feeling anything, that giving him what he wanted was not a matter of good will. She was gasping for air. In her mind she was withdrawing from him.

“I’m doing what you want,” she said.

“That’s what you think. To you it’s all scheissegal . Are you or are you not a whore? You’re useless.”

She no longer wanted to consider whether wanting to live was wrong. Nor why she was born. If somebody had asked her, she could now say what a human being was, and what one was not. What it meant to have been born a girl. A spiritual poverty seemed to envelop her like a foul smell. Within her she heard an echo that she could not silence. She did not want to make the excuse, not even in her mind, that her father’s God had sent her here when she had been due to die in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She knew she had volunteered.

The Obersturmführer would not let her move so she might lie more comfortably.

“Stomach ache?” he asked.

“No,” she lied.

“Why are you gripping your belly then?”

“I only put my hand there. I’ve nowhere else to put it.”

“Do I have to tell you where you should put your hand?”

The question remained hanging in the air. She did not say no, but her lips formed the word. “Lie closer to me.”

“How close?”

“Do I have to tell you?”

She felt as if she was on fire. She thought of Dr Krueger’s human guinea pigs, of his daughter Hannelore who had been serving in Alsace. The day the doctor got his promotion he received two telegrams. The first informed him that Hannelore’s legs had been torn off by a mine. The second was a congratulatory telegram from the head of the Kraft durch Freude organization.

Oil brought her some relief from his desperate efforts. Above her was the breathless depraved 26-year-old face scarred by sleepless nights, punitive actions, a hundred terrors associated with his massacres. And by the injuries he had sustained, wounds like the one to his head.

He wanted to know how she had come by the frostbite marks on her face.

She had to whisper. Her mouth was close to his.

“On the way from the train, when I was under escort.”

“Have you got good boots?”

“I have boots.”

“You should have taken better ones from somebody.”

“I didn’t take mine from anybody.”

“I doubt that you’re in the right place here.”

“This is my place.”

“Aren’t you a whore?”

“I am a whore,” she said.

“No-one goes to bed in the evening as a virgin and wakes up as a whore. Better not ask why I slapped Ginger’s face to make her remember me.”

He put the pistol down and lit a cigarette, then told her what he wanted her to do next.

She pressed her lips together tightly.

“Why don’t you take that plaster on your bottom off?”

“It wouldn’t look nice.”

“I’ve seen worse things.”

Then he became insistent.

“Don’t you think you should do it for me?”

“What you want is forbidden. It’s on the notice on the door.”

“You expect me to stick to notices?” In his squeaky voice she could hear the knowledge that he could get whatever he wanted.

He ran his fingertip down her nose.

A huge raven was sitting on the window ledge.

“Are you trembling?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No.”

The bird flew off.

Was it possible that he could tell by her nose that she was Jewish?

“Do you think you have an Aryan nose?”

“I hope so.”

“Almost,” he said.

His forefinger moved down her nose and stopped at the tip.

“We all have our secrets,” he said.

He had told her some of his secrets. He acknowledged his Aryan god and those who were next to him — Reich Marshals, Sturmmänner, Scharführers and Oberführers. He acknowledged brutality as the supreme virtue, as the call and command of nature. He had no consideration for anybody; he asked no-one for permission, he needed no witnesses. He lied, stole and cheated just as others breathed. He was not constrained by rules and broke them whenever it suited him. He did not allow himself a moment’s respite, not an hour, not a minute. He did not burden himself by respect for family, parents or children. He considered it his duty to denounce — just as throughout the Reich children denounced their teachers and teachers their students, parents denounced their children and children their parents. His honour and pride were of a special mould. Ahead of him he saw a victory such as had never been won before, and no price was too high for him to achieve it, even if it cost his life. He believed in his race which would prove its worth to the extent that he prevented its dilution by other races. He made darkness and shadows subject to himself. He saw himself as the light. To him the key to the secret of life was obedience.

“They won’t forget us,” he said.

“No,” she agreed.

Behind them they left a desert, a depopulated scorched earth. And indelible milestones of history. From the Kristallnacht , when throughout Germany synagogues and Jewish shops were going up in flames, Jewish business people disappeared in the darkness from the southern border of Bavaria to the North Sea, and the Germans exacted a fine of a billion marks for the damage — the burnt or destroyed property and the danger to human lives — though they themselves had caused it; all the way to their Blitzkrieg , their lightning war, which had already gone on for six years.

They appropriated a Czech town, Terezin, and turned it into a transit station. They established camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and their crematoria. Skinny did not have time to reflect on this at length. It came to her with him, as it did with every soldier before and after him. She saw the Obersturmführer’s world and she felt his finger on the base of her nose for what seemed like an eternity. She wished he would take it away.

“Würden sind Bürden,” he said softly. Honours are burdens. When he whispered his voice wasn’t so squeaky. “Die Sonne bringt es an den Tag” The sun reveals all. He would test her, in a while she would see how. They would discover who each other was.

“Don’t you confide in one another who each of you is?”

“No.”

“Can I believe you?”

“Yes.”

“No-one told you, before I got here, what I would want?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“No, I’m not. We are forbidden to lie.”

“Do you remind all your visitors of what’s forbidden?”

She remained silent. She knew from Long-Legs what to do to prevent herself throwing up. She thought of her taste buds, which were at the tip of her tongue and not at the back of her throat. She had been feeling sick for a while.

He touched his scalp.

“I got this from an ambush, on the far side of the quarry, where you’ve probably never been.”

“No.”

“I’ll find a doctor in Germany who’ll glue me together again,” he said. He ran his finger along his scar.

He struggled free from the blankets, pulling them off her too. She had a little lipstick on, her arms and legs were weak, and in her face the kind of fear children have when they have done something wrong and are waiting for punishment. A whore’s failure was not exactly high treason, but it was close to it. To stand up, to overcome, were Aryan virtues. She had to meet three fundamental conditions — obedience, devotion and willingness to co-operate.