Arnost Lustig - Lovely Green Eyes

“It’s not healing too well in this cold. How long have you had it?”

“A few days.”

“A couple of weeks?”

“About that.”

“Do they beat you?”

“Only as a punishment.”

“Punishment for what?”

“For a complaint.”

The matron squeezed the pus out of the wound. With skilled movements she covered it with a piece of sterile gauze. She said something about how helpful the prostitutes had been during the night. For a while she looked into the girl’s eyes. This young army whore had the same green eyes that she herself had had in her youth.

Twelve: Kurt Vischel, Norbert Peltz, Helmuth Brünnich, Kax Joachim Klein, Bruno Bartels, Ottofeld Bader, Pritz Urban, Hans Markvart, Hans Feldmann, Sutr Johannes Schulhof, Anton Kahler, Alex Roubal.

The girls got up at 4.30 a.m. They shared their reveille with the guards, and then the cook struck his iron bar. The guards had their roll-call, morning exercises and breakfast, and then began their duty. The first shift ran until 8 p.m., the second from 8 p.m. until 8.00 a.m. the next morning. In the evening they had Party lectures on racial hygiene. Every day they had an air-raid practice, in which The Frog included the girls, though not all at once. For the slightest infringement of discipline the guards got three days of severe-regime imprisonment. The essence of the Waffen-S S was discipline. It was sufficient for a guard to be caught wearing a scarf in the blizzard for him to end up in the “glasshouse”. They learned to patrol around the estate with their chins pressed against their throats so that the wind did not blow down their collar. In a blizzard they wore motoring goggles with green-tinted glass. Any infringement was a disgrace for the whole of the Waffen-SS. For a second disciplinary punishment an S S man was sent to the front. But some of the guards had had their application for transfer to the front rejected.

At breakfast, Ginger told them that, if it came to it, she could look after the entire backlog of soldiers. There was no upper limit where she was concerned. Fasting did not do her any good. Her body was like a fish, it needed water, or better still a river, even a lake. She felt like a sponge, if they knew what she meant. The choice was theirs. With a full stomach she could do wonders. Long-Legs ate the sugar she had received for giving blood all in one go. They had been given sausage, which smelled, and potato salad made from frozen potatoes.

Twelve: Fritz Knoll, Raymond Stoll, Gerd Hartmann, Adalbert Neustadt, Hugo Brill, Karl Rek Neumann-Zaneski, Igor Vogel, Paul Scheer, Wolf Neugebauer, Siegfried Sessendheim, Marcel Seebauer, Jens Lindauer.

The girls’ latrines were surrounded by a partition made of rough planks covered with tarred paper. The paper was held only by a few nails and was regularly torn off by the wind. From outside it was possible to see the figures moving about inside. Occasionally a guard would peep in. The girls sat next to one another, wrapped in their coats and with kerchiefs round their heads, leaving only a gap for the eyes, each holding a stick for driving away the rats. At 25 degrees below it was difficult to maintain personal hygiene. The soldiers had inflamed backsides, brownish emissions, rashes, eczema and blisters, but from the girls they expected total cleanliness.

“I had a bellyache with all of them today,” Long-Legs announced. She kicked some rats away from her. What were they trying to do? Bite off her nose? How could such disgusting creatures be considered sacred in India? She had an aristocratic nose — experts on Aryan features had drawn her attention to it. Her legs and her high, foal-like ankles were as slim as her nose. When there was nothing she could steal from a soldier she would make do with twisting off his buttons.

“I’m passing blood,” Skinny said.

“Maybe it’s only diarrhoea.”

“Perhaps it’s from drinking melted snow.”

“You’ve got to drink something. I can’t get that general in the train off my mind. He was crushed by the walls of the carriage. The compartment was lined with purple plush, with windows that had little dark red curtains with gold braid bands. Those bandits must have had God on their side. Maybe the Jewish God. Before they made me a whore I had a Jewish boyfriend. My family weren’t exactly ecstatic about it, but I would have run away from home rather than give him up. The Jews have hard heads. They’d sooner have their heads cracked like a walnut than give in.”

She remembered how her lover had prayed, also for her: Baruch ata, Adonai: Praised be our God, king of the universe. She’d liked the fact that he never hurried to climax before she got there. He waited for her. She didn’t want to know where he was. Or was not.

Beautiful was pouring water into the tub.

“I’m not ashamed of anything I do. I haven’t done anything so far that I couldn’t admit to my mother, although she’s no longer alive. The nuns told me that a good girl waits. You can wait as long as you like, but you don’t escape that face above you.”

Beautiful had a voice that enchanted everyone, not just the soldiers. Her words floated liltingly, as if she didn’t want to wake from a dream. With the sleeves of her sweater pushed up, she poured in more water. There was passiveness in her eyes. Helplessness, perhaps, or a kind of chastity. Madam Kulikowa had given her perfume and glass earrings.

“Your voice is like a balm,” Skinny said to her.

Beautiful spoke as though she were interpreting. She immersed herself in her own resurrection, somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, an errant soul, almost languid, in contact with her mother. She was wearing a trace of lipstick.

“Can’t appear on roll-call all pale. Maybe I’ll tell him I menstruate 31 days a month.”

“You’re stooping today,” Skinny said.

Beautiful hunched, making her shoulder blades stick out from her back so that her breasts would not be too prominent. One soldier had told her that she had a bosom like the waves of the sea.

The tub was now three-quarters full.

“Ever thought that you might die by the side of a soldier?” she asked.

“Perhaps.”

“Or he at your side?”

Twelve: Fritz Rattenhuber, Rudolph Mansfeld, Karl Kersten, Hans Lammers, Heinrich Zeitler, Kurt Wunderbar, Julius Scheller, Karl-Ludwig Woos, Dietrich Stahl, Arthur Kengerhausen, Erich Kruger, Hermann Junge.

Twelve: Markus Frotzinger, Joseph Gruss, Bertram Hahn, Franz Prochaska, Roloff Frankenberger, Kurt Boskowski, Willi Titzelm, Juppe Schwartz, Nicolaus Ebner, Jürgen Pazzeller, Bruno Rahm, Ferai Kranz.

Twelve: Peter Drier, Dutrow Tello, Franz Hase, Egon Stolzfuss, Benedikt Bergmeier, Bartolomeo Stein, Martin Luther, Edmund Bernard, Franz Dietel, Dietrich Blumenbauer, Siegfried Ripke, Sepp Springer.

“I can’t rinse that soap off,” Estelle said. “Rub yourself with your towel,” Skinny said. “My skin gets all dried out in the cold.”

The noises of the night were carried away by the wind. Now and again a searchlight cut through the darkness. Another train clanged over the bridge.

“What astonishes me is that I hate myself almost as much as they hate me,” Estelle said. “They want a world without you or me. So that only they are left. The noble race. This morning a lance-corporal told me how two Judenweiber had been hiding out in a coal shed by the depot. He caught them as they were trying to get rid of the tattooed numbers on their forearms. One of them was cutting her skin off with a knife; the other was trying to burn the numbers off with a candle. War to the Germans is a vendetta. The honour of the knights must not be diluted by Slavs, Jews or Gypsies.”