Arnost Lustig - Lovely Green Eyes

His remark caught the Madam by surprise.

“We were close to victory, and that made us giddy. It made our heads spin. The worst people are those who think themselves invincible to the very end.”

Twelve: Hjalmar Steinbruch, Hubert Donnerstag, Haraki Trinkiewitz, Jürgen Heck, Horst Geuss, Dieter Fritzen, Ulrich Kohl, Manfred Kollmann, Hannes Lurke, Bragi Kleist, Otto Fest, Adolf Eiermann

In the afternoon the weather cleared. Later, there was a blood-red sunset before the sun disappeared in the patchy clouds. Dark mountains seemed to tower on the horizon, with a fire burning on top of them and spreading towards both sides. Skinny had not seen a sunset like this before. The wind was howling outside the window. She listened to forces she did not comprehend. The sky had dropped lower. Darkness fell on the plain and in the cubicle. Ice was forming on the window and on the grille, white at first and almost transparent, but slowly darkening. She felt a fear that she couldn’t name. At the moment when her twelfth soldier, Adolf Eiermann, pointed to the bed, the wind suddenly dropped. She closed her eyes, sensing that there was something in the air, new and unknown, something imminent.

After they’d had sex, the soldier dressed. The slightest sound could be heard — the rustle of the cloth, the scrape of his puttees, his bootlaces being tied. Snowflakes began to fall into the silence, a heavy snowfall.

The Madam called them out into the corridor and announced that there would be no more men. None had arrived.

The Oberführer did not bother to tell them the next day why their rations were being reduced. There was no need to speak of blocked roads, bombed-out supply depots, ambushed military convoys. The Third Reich was on its knees. If they had practically nothing to eat in the fatherland, why should they feed parasites such as the army prostitutes? He’d regarded them as vermin from the moment he stepped over the threshold of the brothel.

“It’s only a matter of days before the fortunes of war do an about-turn again,” he said at roll-call. “Hitler has a miracle weapon.”

On the twenty-first day of Skinny’s service, before the sappers blew up the two bridges, The Frog, the commandant of Feldbordell No. 232 Ost, Oberführer Dr Helmuth Gustav S chimmelpfennig, put Big Leopolda Kulikowa up against the wall.

He ordered her to undress because frozen stiff she would not resist. He knew what the frost did to a naked body. The condemned woman would prefer to get it over with. He had worked in the camps and knew why inmates so rarely rebelled; starved, frozen and helpless people did not revolt. All that was required was to starve them for a few weeks, not allow them to sleep, make them do heavy labour on not more than 242 calories a day, as at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“Keep your boots on!”

He approached her with his Luger drawn. If she flung herself at him he would finish her off. He recited to her in a businesslike manner what she was being sentenced for. A hostile attitude to the Reich, proven by a series of acts of sabotage. She had bitten Corporal Mussel’s hand when he thought she was going to kiss it. She had cut a fistful of Corporal Broder’s hair off when he asked her to shave the fine hairs on the back of his neck. At that moment Madam Kulikowa realized that she was feeling as so many before had in this situation — like a Jew. That was how the Jews must feel, she thought. The last people on earth.

The morning was exceptionally clear, with only a faint haze. At daybreak the best marksman among the guards, Horst Witzleben, had succeeded in killing the silver wolf. There were no shadows yet. The Oberführer glanced at his watch.

On her way to the wall Madam Kulikowa remembered a fortuneteller who had told her that anything that was important in her life would happen in daylight. She had assured her that she would not drown or be burnt to death.

Madam Kulikowa no longer saw the sun. She looked wearier than weary. What she had lost was not just a struggle against fading or ageing. She had long suspected that she would not leave the estate alive. Her knees had given way during air-raid practice and she had twisted her neck as if rocks had been piled on her. It occurred to her again that she should have had a child. When she was 14 she had dreamed of a white wedding and a grand feast. Now she was to be punished, but not for infertility. Perhaps for having stolen the bread, salami and margarine intended for the girls. There was a taste of salt in her mouth. The Oberführer avoided her eyes. They were smoky grey and had bewitched many men. In them was a gleam of feminine longing. She had as much strength in them as she had between her thighs. During the night she had shared out sugar, margarine and bread among the girls. She made them tie all the brooms together. She was not permitted to tell them anything, but this spoke for itself.

Rigid with cold, she gazed through the open gate towards the white plain. She had heard the shots that killed the silver wolf. In the distance the overcast sky met the wasteland and the frozen river melted into infinity. The guards were getting ready to depart. Three of them still had their firing squad duties to perform, and then they would join the rest of the evacuating personnel, except for the prostitutes who would walk in the direction of Festung Breslau. The men were singing the Horst Wessel song, “Die Fahne hoch,” as they fell in below the inscription proclaiming We were horn to perish . No. 232 Ost and its guard towers would be blown up.

Skinny was the last person to speak to Big Leopolda Kulikowa before she was collected by Schimmelpfennig. The older woman’s voice was gravelly.

“I’ve known from the start what you were. I kept my fingers crossed for you. In the beginning we try to survive with dignity. Later, we just try to survive. Someone must describe what happened. Hardly anyone will believe you. Look after Estelle. I rearranged her name — she’s really Esther.”

Her suitcase was packed, with a leather strap around it and with a label: “Kopernik Street 19, Cracow”.

“At the end there’s nothing,” she said. “To everybody comes his day. I will always have Cracow.” As her grandmother used to say, when you are old and sick there’s only one thing left for you. To die in your own way. She had been a woman at twelve, a bride at 22, and at 32 she certainly had no need for a gravedigger.

The painter who had kept Leopolda when she was 17 had shown her the Pole Star, around which the other stars turned. She had been fascinated by the dawn when it came. She saw the vastness, the transience of everything. The eternity of transience. Now she thought of that Pole Star. Of the wild geese it guided to safety.

Through her mind flashed a memory. As a young girl she was standing at 19 Kopernik Street, in the former convent. It had a staircase with a handrail of polished oak. The interplay oflight and shadows provided the décor: twilight, dawn and nightfall, the bright sun, the moon and the stars. She was waiting for her 60-year-old lover. She would have married him at 14, regardless of the years between them. When she was 15 he told her that between her legs she was like a valley where it was always evening. In her mind she heard his declarations of love. Love of my body, love of my soul.

“It’s annoying that I should die without ever having learnt the names of flowers, or of more trees.” She stroked Skinny’s gingery hair. It had grown a little during those 21 days.

Madam Kulikowa had long resolved that when her time came she would accept it with dignity, elegantly, like those women they’d sung of in Cracow. She doubted that anyone would sing about her, but once she had dreamed of it. It seemed to her that the wall against which they were going to stand her up was nothing out of the ordinary. Nor was what would happen next. The knowledge that she was ready filled her with a great calm. Her eyes softened. She was looking at Skinny, but she saw something else as well, or somebody else.