Arnost Lustig - Lovely Green Eyes

She would never know whether she would have shot him through the heart if she had pulled the trigger. He didn’t bother to take out the magazine.

“Maybe you’d make a Brown Nurse,” he said. “You’d have to volunteer for the support units. You’re a different clay from us.”

He spoke with contempt. He caressed his gun. If he had a bullet in the magazine he might still shoot her. Her fear had not left her, but shame had joined it, not only because she was naked.

“I must see to the fire or it’ll go out.”

“If you’ve got some more fuel, why not?”

She got up. Relief had made the blood course through her veins again. She crammed what was left of the firewood and coal into the stove and raked the grate. The gale howled in the flue. She did not look at the Obersturmführer. She was aware of how close he was without seeing him. She wondered how much longer he would stay.

“No-one reproves a victor. I’ll bring you some soap next time. Come over here. Sit by me.”

As she sat next to him she involuntarily touched his sweaty hand but she did not want to move away. She sat motionless, her legs crossed, her arms crossed over her breast.

“I am by no means the worst,” he said. And then seeing her drawn face, “I don’t want to hurt you. You’re still a lamb. You need time to grow into a sheep.”

She mistrusted his friendliness.

“You’re trembling, or am I imagining it?”

She remained silent.

“Am I imagining that you’re trembling?”

“I’m cold,” she said.

“Perhaps you should dress now?”

“Perhaps.”

“Die Sonne bringt es an den Tag”

She kept her knees together as if she were sitting on a bench at school, her hands were still folded over her chest, and she was red with fear and shame.

“Maybe you want to tell me something you haven’t told me yet?”

“There’s nothing.”

Evidently he had not yet finished with her. Would he let her dress now?

“You keep surprising me with one thing after another,” the Obersturmführer said.

She did not understand. She was afraid of diarrhoea. She realized that this did not depend on the degree of danger. Fear was corroding her inhibitions, her judgement. It probably was not just cowardice. She felt sick again, but did not want to throw up.

“You are neither rose nor thorn,” he said.

A pity no-one saw him here, he thought. He was Knight’s Cross material; indeed the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. He would bet his right arm on it.

He got up. She had to move to make room for him. He began to put his clothes back on. He complained, just to keep the conversation going, about a commission that was due to arrive. They didn’t like the killing of the circumcised. Damned snoopers, sticking their noses in where they had no business. He pulled on his tight, wool-lined gloves. On his hands they looked like artificial limbs.

Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin strode out in his hobnailed boots. He slammed the cubicle door behind him.

Seconds later, still in her black underwear, Skinny stepped into the icy water of the tub, with the suds and the dirt of the officer, goose-flesh all over her, and a heavy weight in her stomach and guts.

Her talks with Rabbi Gideon Schapiro in Pecs were mostly one-sided. The rabbi would ask questions and Skinny would answer them; often more openly than she might have otherwise out of respect for the rabbi’s authority. Sometimes she remained silent and the rabbi went on asking questions, until he fell silent. Ten days and ten nights. She wondered whether rabbinical authority had undergone a change — she had seen rabbis at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they had been no different from the other inmates. Rabbi Schapiro did not know Czech, and Skinny did not know Hungarian. They talked in German. She felt no surprise at the sequence of events that had brought her to him in Hungary, by a roundabout route, after the war. The war had stirred Europe like a huge spoon stirring a cauldron of soup for 250 million people.

She sensed in him a degree of consideration that she was not accustomed to. He was trying to accept something that went beyond his comprehension, but he was careful that she did not take it personally. He was the only person to whom — for some reason or other, perhaps to get it off her chest — she told everything. She stripped herself bare. She felt relief that it was behind her. Did that mean it was no longer present? It turned out that even what had happened at No. 232 Ost was not irreversible. Nothing was irreversible. She was too tired or too unsure of herself to declare an all-out war on those 21 days. The rabbi was aware of dissonance in her story, but he felt her to be a kindred soul, and they ended up closer than Skinny had originally intended. Rabbi Schapiro had a gentle voice, a little hoarse as if he had a cold, and he felt inside him a second voice prompting him. She noticed that he looked at her as if he were seeing himself. He never raised his voice, but she could hear in it an anger that was not directed at her, an anger that was new to her. It made her believe that he was growing with it. In reality, the rabbi was ducking for cover. He had deep brown eyes which at times seemed wild to her. They had trusted one another from the moment they had met, when she’d been taken to him by two railwaymen whose addresses she had been given in Katowice.

“Child,” he had said. This was his first word to her when the men had gone. He didn’t have to ask her age, he could tell that himself. And he didn’t have to ask how she felt: he only had to look into her face with his brown eyes in which, on several occasions later, she would see tears.

“What are we?” he asked, more into the void than to her, like a rhetorical question. “A lump of flesh and a broken soul.”

From her reaction he realized at once that he had made a mistake. And he made many mistakes — but he did not repeat this one.

“You were in a house that God had abandoned,” the rabbi said.

That determined their relationship. At times she did not know how the rabbi viewed her; she found no answer in his eyes. He was feeling as helpless as the inmates of the concentration camps; assailed by questions to which there was no answer. One question that the rabbi asked again and again was: where was God? He glanced at the bookcase that contained his sacred books. They seemed to him to be running away as though they were made of water, trickling down the shining glass across from the window with its heavy red curtains.

At times she felt that he was expecting her to answer this question, which God did not answer.

“Each one who has survived is a messenger,” he sighed.

“I don’t know,” she said.

She realized that conditions in Hungary had been different from those in Bohemia or Poland. There, the anti-Jewish laws came into force only at the beginning of 1944. Unlike to the Terezin ghetto, Eichmann came to Hungary late, managing to kill only half the Hungarian Jews, some 400,000.

The rabbi had before him a child who spoke of a brothel in the way that a miller might speak of the flour he had milled, filled into sacks and weighed, or a bricklayer of a wall he had built from stones and bricks. Or else she was silent like an animal. He had not seen Skinny on that first Friday in December, when, after her first shift, she had washed off the dried blood from the inside of her thighs. She had been afraid to look at her crotch, which resembled a raw, bleeding gum.

It was all new to him, just as it had been new to her, different then and now. Her erstwhile now refused to transform into a present-day then. She did not know that every one of her words dealt a fatal blow to the rabbi. He thought of concepts like honour, humiliation, violation. He had a vision of scales on which he was trying to weigh that which cannot be weighed or measured. He thought of the right of the stronger and the form into which it had developed before the middle of the 20th century, 40 centuries after his own ancestors had decided to outlaw killing; to outlaw human sacrifice. What had happened to justice, which must be for everyone or else evaporate altogether like the steam from a saucepan? He bore each word she uttered as a reproach, a reproach he accepted for himself. Her experience conflicted with all the sacred and civil codes that he was acquainted with. He searched his mind: what had become of morality? Where did the idea of the worthlessness of human life come from? How did the difference between giving and taking life disappear? How was injustice measured? Fortunately Skinny knew nothing of his thoughts.