In the Land of Armadillos

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  * * *

  The next time he saw the red-haired workman, Reinhart was standing in his shop.

  Reinhart was in love. He had just purchased, for a song, the girl of his dreams, a Polish Arabian mare by the name of Fallada. A feminine, sweetly arched neck, a tapering, dish-shaped face with a muzzle no bigger than a teacup, eyes that were the icy blue of a skating pond, and a luxuriant coat the color of bittersweet chocolate. But it was her mane and tail that made people stop and stare: long and wavy, with strokes of mahogany, ochre, copper, and caramel, like a painting by a Renaissance master. She had a pedigree as long as his arm, the horse trader assured him; her parentage could be documented as far back as 1813, to the great stallion Bairactar.

  He would need a new saddle, of course. An exquisite beauty like Fallada deserved it, the way a bride deserves a white dress. He was directed to a man named Soroka, the best leather artisan in the region, according to Drogalski, with a shop on the market square across from the grand old synagogue, which had been refurbished by the current administration into a stable.

  A bell tinkled when he opened the door. “One moment, please,” a voice called from the back room.

  The room smelled like leather and neat’s-foot oil. Reinhart inhaled happily. His father was a farmer, and his grandfather before him. Not a peasant attached to some nobleman’s turnip field, but a real Landwirt, a man with his own farm. Millions of cabbages had paid with their heads for little Willy’s university education, where he was supposed to study hard and make something better of himself. He’d wanted to pursue architecture; his father had wanted him to become a judge. He became a lawyer, arbitrating settlements between warring heirs, petty criminals and the state, men and their wives. The money was good, it had won him a pretty bourgeois wife with a small inheritance, but he was bored beyond belief. He’d never really purged the land from his soul. When war came, and with it, the offer of a Party job arbitrating between farmers and the Reich, he jumped at it.

  A man came to the counter, wiping his hands on a rag. With a shock of recognition, Reinhart realized that he knew him. “Remember me?” he said with a smile. “Last week I nearly fell into your lap. I should have bought you dinner first.”

  Soroka froze. Reinhart could practically hear the questions rocketing through his brain. What does he mean by that? Should I run? Should I lie? Will he turn me in? What should I do? A stack of hides lay on the table. Reinhart ran his fingers appreciatively over the smooth leather. “What did they want you for, anyway?”

  The saddlemaker lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Who knows. My name was on a list.”

  “I’m Willy Reinhart,” he said. “Regional Commissioner for Agricultural Products and Services. My manager tells me you’re the best saddlemaker in all of Poland.”

  “Thank you, Herr Kommandant, he’s too generous.” He hesitated. “Hahnemeier told you that?”

  “No, my manager is Jozef Drogalski. Who’s Hahnemeier?”

  “He was the manager under the earl.”

  “Oh, him. Volkdeutscher. Used to be a beet farmer. Fired for stealing, I heard.”

  Soroka pursed his lips and nodded. Reinhart had the sense that he was being appraised, evaluated.

  “Let’s have a look at your horse.”

  He walked Fallada into the yard behind the house. Soroka unbuckled the saddle, turned it over to inspect the padding, then placed it carefully on the table. Next he ran his fingers expertly over the dip in her back. The horse flinched. A whinny of pain escaped her. Angered, Reinhart felt his fists clench.

  But Soroka was grimly shaking his head. “That’s what I thought. Feel here.” He directed the commandant’s hand to a place on the horse’s back. “And here.”

  The horse trembled at his touch, flicked her gorgeous tail. Under his fingertips, he could feel scabs, welts, raw skin. Bearing his weight must have been torturous, but she never showed it. He felt ashamed. “Poor girl. I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you didn’t know.” The saddlemaker’s lips were pressed together in a thin line. He rummaged in his pocket, found a sugar cube. Fallada nosed daintily into the palm of his hand like the fine, highborn lady that she was. While Soroka stroked her neck, he murmured to her in Polish, and she dipped her pretty head against his chest. “Before you, she belonged to Forster.” He muttered in an undertone, “He always knows better than everyone else.”

  A shockingly incautious statement. A Jew could be shot for this, the crime of being critical of a German. He looked curiously at the saddlemaker. Was it deliberate? Was it a trick, a trap?

  No, he decided. The man was just being honest. Reinhart understood that he had found something of value, something that was in short supply here, a man who would say what he really thought.

  “Anshel!” called the saddlemaker.

  A boy bounced through the door. Resting his chin on the counter, he gazed with wonder at the stranger in his father’s shop, at his clean-shaven handsome face, his unimaginably fine coat, his hat with the feather in it.

  Soroka leaned over, spoke in Jewish. The boy nodded and skipped back into the other room. Moments later, he returned with a glass jar.

  “Go on,” his father persisted, nudging him forward. Hesitantly, the boy put the jar into Reinhart’s hands.

  “Let her rest for a few weeks, no riding, nothing on her back. Rub this into her sores every day.” Curious, Reinhart unscrewed the top, grimacing when the smell hit his nostrils. The saddlemaker chuckled. “I know. Es shtinkt! But it works. Don’t worry, Herr Kommandant, she’ll be fine.”

  The German officer reached down, clapped the boy’s thin shoulder. “Call me Reinhart,” he said.

  * * *

  “No!” she gasped. “Not yet!”

  With her long thighs wrapped around his hips, Petra was rocking fervently up and down, her eyes closed, like she was having a religious experience. Only when she had squealed to a finish, collapsed on top of him did he take his turn.

  Afterward, they shared a cigarette. With one finger, she made slow circles in the scruffy hair on his chest. He crinkled a smile, slapped her curvy bottom. “How about getting us a drink?”

  She threw aside the covers. He admired her creamy skin, the mole on her right shoulder, as she walked naked to the dresser. Pretty Petra, his marvelous chef’s marvelous daughter. Just nineteen years old, she was the village beauty, an angel in the kitchen, and a fury in the bed. With little formal education, she knew three languages and was delightful in each one.

  He linked his hands behind his head and watched smoke rise in lazy rings over his head. Women always did as he asked, he was thinking. Men, too, though what he asked from them was more complicated and infinitely more risky than climbing into his bed.

  Except for a certain knack with the ladies, he’d led a fairly ordinary life: a good student but not spectacular, decent enough on the playing fields but not a standout. After Germany and Russia blew through Poland, borders shifted, farmers on all sides had to leave their ancestral homes, and this was where he really shone. The transition went smoothly. The farmers thought he was fair. Men in power said nice things about him.

  Publicly, he protested that he was just doing his job. Privately, he was immensely proud of his efforts on behalf of his country. He saw himself as a kind of ambassador; in his own small way, he was bringing the German sense of justice and fair play to a dangerously uncivilized part of the world.

  In November he witnessed his first massacre.

  It was almost incidental. A meeting with a local SS honcho, like a hundred other meetings. Only this one was scheduled in the woods outside of town. A routine matter; could Reinhart fix it so that Farmer X, a cousin to the SS man, received the land of Farmer Y, who had, shall we say, moved elsewhere. Also, could he join the major and his wife for a dinner party at their villa.

  Reinhart tried to focus on the officer’s moving lips. In the near distance, among the slim white trunks of birch trees, wave after wave of naked human beings filed into a pit, knel
t on the bodies of their neighbors, and were shot in the back of the neck. Bearded old sages passed him, young girls trying to hide their breasts, mothers gripping toddlers by the hand. The shooters were German soldiers.

  Later that night, Reinhart had sat with the windows open, smoking cigarette after cigarette, trying to vanquish the smell of death that filled his nostrils. Was it in his hair? His clothes? It wouldn’t go away even after he’d bathed.

  Reinhart had no stomach for the Party’s racial rants. He’d fought as an infantryman in the last war, where he’d seen enough bodies, blown up, bayoneted, or riddled with bullets, to know for certain that in Death’s opinion, all men were created equal. He’d always known Jews, and as far as he could see, they were no different from anybody else. Back home, there had been Jakobowitz the livestock trader, whom his father treated like a brother. At school, there’d been Lemberg, who let him copy his notes, Perlmutter, who listened to his girl troubles and made him laugh.

  There were places, secret places, where people who found fault with National Socialist policies were taken. Willy Reinhart was the son of a farmer and the grandson of a farmer. He knew the value of keeping his mouth shut and fixing his gaze on the horizon. Still, the next day he asked his secretary for a map. In the privacy of his own bedroom, he drew a tiny red X over the Bydgoszcz woods.

  After that, his rise was of the sort commonly described as meteoric. As crosses metastasized over the face of his map, colonels and generals sought out his company, laughed at his jokes, competed furiously to fulfill his requests. It didn’t matter what he wanted—more workers, more wagons, an airy apartment in the best neighborhood, a vacation villa on a lake, placement in elite schools for the boys—he was never refused. It was like he had some kind of power over them.

  Within months, he was the lord of Adampol Palace. Ruler over a Polish fiefdom, he had a thousand laborers at his command, and his word was law. Behind his back, people whispered that he was a sorcerer, or perhaps Hans Frank’s brother-in-law. As if being related to the German governor of Poland could be the only explanation for his dazzling good fortune.

  He rolled onto his side, stubbed out the cigarette. The truth was too mundane for them, he thought, that he was just good at his job. Or was it a gift from the angels?

  Petra returned from her quest. As she put his glass down on the bedside table, her shirt gapped open, revealing one perfect pear-shaped breast. Though it was so soon after the last time, he felt the stirrings of desire. He slipped his hand inside her shirt, rubbed his thumb over her nipple. She closed her eyes and caught her lower lip in her teeth.

  When he reached up to turn off the lamp, she stopped him. “No,” she breathed. “Leave it on. I want to see everything.”

  * * *

  “Excuse me, sir,” said a mournful voice from the doorway.

  He blinked, rubbed his eyes. He’d nodded off over the ledger that tracked each farmer’s assets, from how many chickens they kept down to the last milk cow. He put his finger on a column of numbers so that he wouldn’t lose his place. “What is it, Jozef?”

  “The tailor, Hammer. He finished repairing the uniforms.”

  “How do they look?”

  “Perfect. Like new.”

  “Wonderful. Was his wife there? How did she look today?”

  “She was wearing the green dress. The one with polka dots.”

  “Ah, Dora. You’re killing me. Anything else?”

  “Yes. We need more workers to bring in the wheat harvest. An experienced crew, please.”

  “I’ll tell Haas. He’s the new Chief of Employment.”

  “One more thing. Mirsky delivered the flour earlier than expected.”

  “Good. Excellent. What else?”

  “Jasinski. He says his cow died.”

  “Hm. Too bad. Tell him he has to bring it here before we can mark it off.”

  The pallid face registered horror. “You want him to bring his dead cow? Here?”

  “Tell him to leave it around the back. Near the stable or the rabbit hutches. It stinks so much already, a dead cow can only be an improvement.”

  “Excuse me, Reinhart. But what do we want with Jasinski’s dead cow?”

  “How can I be sure it’s really dead? For all I know, he sold it on the black market.” He went back to the books. “By the way, you’re doing a spectacular job with these ledgers. I could never be this organized. Take an extra bag of sugar. Go on, you’ve earned it. Tell Manya it’s from me.”

  “Speaking of Manya, she sent you something special.”

  Reinhart liked Drogalski’s wife, a pale, freckled farm girl with apple cheeks and straight, sandy hair. She came now and then to bring the manager his lunch, accompanied by a cherubic flaxen-haired daughter. “What is it?”

  “Topielec. Poppy-seed cake. Old family recipe.”

  “How did she know? My grandmother used to make poppy-seed cake. Thank her for me, will you? And stop looking so anxious. You’re making me worry.” This was a running joke between them, but today the manager wasn’t smiling. “Come on, what is it? Money trouble? Girl trouble? Your secret’s safe with me.”

  The manager’s prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He chose his words with care. “You remember Hahnemeier?”

  “Sure. Volkdeutscher. Used to be the manager. Fired for stealing.”

  Drogalski shifted from one muddy boot to the other. “Well, since I started here, he’s been talking to people. To our farmers. When I see him, I tell him to leave. He says he’s just visiting friends. But what I’m hearing, it’s worrying me.”

  Reinhart massaged his forehead. After spending a whole day in the manager’s close office, reviewing ledger entries scrawled in a neat, upright hand, he had a piercing headache. Also, there’d been the letter from his wife today; she wanted him to come back to Breslau for summer vacation, the boys hadn’t seen him in months, they needed to spend time together as a family, etc. etc. “What are you hearing?”

  “Well . . .” He looked uneasy. “For years, Hahnemeier lied to the earl about how much the estate was bringing in. He would say this farmer had a bad year or that one came up short. Then he would sell the difference and pocket the profits. When I started here, that was the end of his business.”

  “What does that have to do with you? He was a bad thief, he got caught. He should have been more careful.”

  The Adam’s apple bobbed up and down a couple of times before he spoke. “He says I’m taking food out of his children’s mouths. He says something might happen to make me sorry I ever met him.”

  Reinhart burst out laughing. Drogalski looked startled. Affectionately, he squeezed the younger man’s shoulder. “Do you really think he would dare to hurt a hair on your head, you, Jozef Drogalski, manager of Adampol Palace, assistant to the Reich Regional Commissioner for Agricultural Products and Services? Come on. He’d spend the rest of his life in jail, if he wasn’t shot! Sounds like tavern talk to me. He’s just blowing off steam, trying to make himself look important. Now, cheer up. Have some of your wife’s poppy-seed cake. And explain to me what happened to the rest of Walczak’s potatoes.”

  * * *

  His vacation was planned for July, it couldn’t be helped. He left Adampol with a heavy heart, turning around in the backseat of the Mercedes for a last glimpse of his glorious castle before it disappeared behind the curtain of trees, just in time to see Petra wave goodbye to him, heartbreakingly beautiful in the yellow square of light that was their bedroom window.

  At the lake, he parceled out gifts, swam with the boys, lay in the sun, made dutiful, docile missionary love to his wife. While the boys quarreled, his wife bombarded him with mind-bendingly dull trivia; the neighbors were impossible boors, the cook had purchased the wrong roast, they were invited to Judge Koenigwasser’s for a luncheon, she volunteers with Winter Help, he’s a big shot in the local civil administration. In his heart, he was riding through his forest on the back of his beautiful Polish Arabian mare, Fallada.

  O
n the fifth day, he received an official-looking telegram. Lotte, watching him read it, saw him pale and lean against a wall for support. Then he summoned the car, bid his family a hasty farewell, and sped back to Włodawa.

  * * *

  “How did he die?”

  The doctor bent over the body. “Clearly, he was badly beaten. You can see for yourself, there’s massive bruising on the chest and stomach.” He pointed to the blackened marks mottling the thin, sunken chest. “And, of course, there’s the large wound here, on the side of the head. It looks to me like he was hit with a shovel.”

  For a moment the only sound in the room was the accusatory buzz of busy flies. Someone thought to bring in an electric fan; the reek of decomposition in the small hot room was almost overwhelming. By the time Reinhart had the body exhumed, it had been in the earth for a week.

  With shaking hands, he took out his handkerchief, held it over his nose and mouth. He’d been wrong about Hahnemeier, terribly, irredeemably wrong. The Volkdeutscher had confronted Drogalski on Sunday, right after church. In front of his wife and daughter and a whole host of farmers, he’d promised to kill him in such a way that no one would ever know, and no one would ever find the body.

  The doctor was examining the wound, black with earth and clotted blood. “The trauma to the head is bad, but it wasn’t enough to kill him. See his hands, the way he’s holding them over his chest?” He sighed, stroked his little pointed beard. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Kommandant. These men, whoever they were . . . in my opinion, when they buried him, your friend was still alive.”

  * * *

  It was late in the afternoon when Reinhart’s Mercedes pulled up in front of Soroka’s shop. The worst heat of the day was over, the sunset was painting the gables of the Great Synagogue across the street in shades of jade and tangerine. Emerging from the back of his car into Włodawa’s market square, Reinhart felt like he was swimming through swamp water.