Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

She was whistling a German tune that the officer had put on the record player. She couldn’t help it. It bothered everyone that she whistled that song. But once she had been made love to while listening to that song, so how could it not be stuck in her head?

She said that he made her take off her shoe and sucked on her toe. She said he sat on a chair, pulled his pants down and started masturbating. She got embarrassed and turned to the wall. He begged her to turn around and just look at him once.

But afterwards, she sat happily watching Marie pull the gloves on and off. Marie threw her black hands around Grandmother’s neck in gratitude.

With most of the soldiers, it went pretty quickly because they didn’t speak any French. She was made love to by one soldier while standing on her head. She got down on her hands and knees and pretended to be a dog for another. One fair-haired and gentle-looking soldier tied her wrists to the bedpost. A fat soldier wanted her to give him a hickey on his neck while he banged his knee and laughed uproariously.

One, who was a teacher in Berlin, made her pretend that she was back in school, practising her handwriting. When she made a mistake, he bent her over his knee and gave her a spanking.

One wanted her to cry. He made her sit quietly naked on the side of the mattress. He had found that if you let a girl sit without any clothes on for long enough, then she would always start to feel melancholic and begin to weep. And then, when Grandmother did inevitably start to cry, he kissed her face madly. He said there was nothing that he loved more than kisses that tasted like salty tears. He had gotten a taste for it while he was on the Eastern Front.

Afterwards, she would always stuff a pastry into her mouth before heading home. She wasn’t letting herself be starved to death anymore. But she felt more guilty about eating those cakes all by herself than she possibly could about sleeping with the German soldiers. She didn’t feel anything about that at all. She knew that it wouldn’t matter when the war was over. The important thing was to survive. And then somehow — in a way that you couldn’t rationally grasp — all this would be gone. Like when you wake up from a nightmare and everything goes back to exactly the way that it was before.

When a soldier with black eyes picked her up and began fucking her against the wall, she tried to convince herself that it wasn’t actually happening. There was a yellow lampshade with little crystals hanging from it on the table next to them. The crystals were knocking against each other violently. And if this act didn’t really exist, then what was making the lampshade shake like that? It must be an army coming, or an earthquake. The act of the soldier making love to Grandmother was as violent as all the German tanks rolling into Paris.

She never went to dinner with the officers or hung around longer, because she wanted to get back to Marie. She would dress so quickly that she would get tangled up, trip on her stockings and bang her chin on the floor. Each time, she would get more and more desperate to get back to Marie.

It was Grandmother who started it. Everything that she had known before the war had been taken away from her. There was no way that she could deal with that. She couldn’t just sit there and be overcome with loss. She had to make Marie her whole world. She became fixated on Marie.

Sometimes the things that Marie did filled her with so much wonder that she would feel herself trembling. She watched Marie’s fingers lacing up her shoes and she thought it was so exquisite.

The way Marie would shake her curls out after pulling on a tight turtleneck was so wonderful too. She would try and do it herself in exactly the same way, so that she could feel what it was like to be Marie. She was the only person in the whole world that got to watch Marie sitting on the side of her bed in her underpants. And see Marie’s bare feet at the end of their bed.

She liked the way that there always seemed to be dirt under Marie’s fingernails. She liked the way that there were hairs around Marie’s nipples. She would lie closer and closer to Marie as they were sleeping. She marvelled over Marie the way that a mother marvels over a newborn baby.

When she was asleep, Marie would swat at Grandmother with her little hand in the air as if to wave off a fly. And she would murmur from somewhere deep in a dream for Grandmother to get the hell away from her.

Grandmother knew that she was getting on Marie’s nerves. She knew that she was so adoring of Marie that there was nothing that the girl could do but despise her. But the more Marie abhorred her, the more madly she tried to somehow possess her. Isn’t that the way that love works?

One night she put her hand on Marie’s belly. She knew that Marie was still awake. She knew that Marie wanted to push her hand off, but she also knew that for some reason, Marie could not. Her hand had put a magic spell on Marie.

She put her hand down Marie’s underwear. Marie was helpless. Marie was desperate for her to do what she was about to do. She put her finger on Marie’s sweet cunt and began to rub. When Marie moaned, everything in the world was filled with sweetness. When it was over, Marie rolled over, still pretending she was asleep.

The next night she kissed between Marie’s legs. One officer had given Grandmother a bottle of champagne. He had six cases of it. She and Marie burst it open in their room with the lights off. It was warm and the suds poured all over their knees.

There was a light layer of snow all over Paris, as though it had been dusted like a bundt cake. Grandmother’s coat left her chilly. It was threadbare and had gone to seed and the lining had long since been torn. She had always hated the cold so much. Her father would laugh and say that she needed more meat on her bones. She took the money that she had made and went to see a dressmaker that an officer had told her about. She wanted to get herself a coat that fit her and kept her warm and made her feel like a human being again.

She looked at the reflection of her body in the dressmaker’s full-length oval mirror that had the ghostly effect of making her look as though she were lying at the bottom of a tiny boat adrift on a river. She felt a little bit good about herself when she noticed how much she looked like an adult. She was able to buy herself a coat. She had a little bit of independence and power in the world now.

She knew that her foster mother wouldn’t say anything about her coat. She had started to give money that she made to Marie’s mother and nobody could say anything to her after that. They left Grandmother in peace. Actually, Marie’s mother wondered why she even wanted to stay in that crappy little apartment. After all, she could get her own little place with wallpaper with birds on the wall and a big brass bed by the window.

And Marie was not jealous, because Grandmother had bought an identical coat for her. Whatever she bought for herself, Grandmother also bought for Marie. They had matching black high heels with buckles across them. They had matching blue dresses with a circle of little white buttons shaped like roses around the neckline.

Marie’s feelings for Grandmother changed from moment to moment. She would feel so incredibly good about herself when Grandmother was around. She would feel like a million bucks. She knew that it was Grandmother who had made her feel so cocky and bold and full of herself. Her mother didn’t really care for her, her father knew nothing about her, and her brothers were little better than thugs. They would never be able to see the things in her that Grandmother saw.

She loved her new things. No one in her life had ever bought her anything special or given her any gifts. But as much as she loved these pretty things, she loved revenge more. What would make her feel the most good about herself would be to see Grandmother destroyed.