Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  He wept almost all the time. He smelled of tears like a damp, musty gallery in a salt mine. The others despised him for it. The odor of tears is repulsive among men. Not much better than the smell of urine, something wet, a bodily secretion, something clinging to his clothes, his breath, from which they flinched away, revolted, as from something disgusting. They were used to a good deal, the men in those huts. They stank of sweat and urine and all other physical emanations. But they hated the smell of tears that clung to him.

  Don’t whimper, they told him. Be a man.

  He wanted to be a man. He knew it was about time for him to become a man. He was growing. He could tell from the clothes he wore, his trousers and his jacket. They were getting too short for him. He noticed his sexual organ changing, too, and saw it grow of its own accord. But the comfort that gave him never lasted long.

  There were no limits to his homesickness. It devoured every other feeling in him. Homesickness is an emotion that makes you soft and weak, not hard and strong. It was as if a spider were sitting in his heart, its venomous saliva slowly dissolving him from within, to absorb him into itself by sucking, sucking, sucking. There was nothing he could do about it. Be a man, the men said.

  Why don’t you go home, then, if you’re men, he thought. If I were a man I’d go home.

  And so, in countless nights of weeping, his hand on the large penis he had grown, he came to the reverse conclusion: He must go home because he was a man now.

  As soon as he had come to this decision his tears dried up. He saw it as confirmation that he was doing the right thing.

  He didn’t know where he was. He saw the same uniforms that he had seen in Korcziw. He heard the language that he knew was the language of the masters spoken around him, the language of orders that you had to obey, or threats in case you didn’t. The language in which the days someone spent in the arrest cell were counted. The language in which rations of food were handed out.

  Five o’clock in the morning: coffee, a piece of dry bread; ten o’clock: a piece of bread and jam; midday: soup, twenty to thirty grams of meat with potatoes; supper: warmed-up leftovers from the midday meal, if there were any.

  He understood everything. Like all the rest, he knew German much better than anyone suspected. They dissimulated. It is always better not to understand your masters’ language too well. Why make things too easy for them? But it wasn’t even mere deliberate dissimulation that prompted them not to say a word and look baffled when one of the Germans asked a question. It was also the genuine timidity that affects slaves before their masters. How could they use the language of the Germans? It wasn’t right and proper. They themselves felt it presumptuous to do so. And so they stuck to reacting idiotically with brief sentences such as “You the boss,” while the gulf between their spoken German and their knowledge of the language gaped wider and wider, and even years after the end of the war Mikhail would still speak his slave’s pidgin German, although by then he had long been able to read German newspapers and knew what kind of a country he was in.

  At the time, however, in the autumn of 1942, he thought he could be anywhere at all in Germany. The guardhouses along the roads, the high wire fences, the dense presence of SS men, the barracks, the shooting ranges where, he knew, they practiced for shooting people like him, the well-tended properties of the powerful, their wonderful houses somewhere in the neighborhood, at which he guessed rather than actually seeing them, the escorted limousines in which the masters of life and death arrived on the mountain—Mikhail had expected all this when he came to Germany. It did not occur to him that this was a special place. He had imagined Germany as a single Obersalzberg, a kind of guarded open-air Nazi preserve.

  The snow-covered mountains surrounding the place, as he saw it, were all part and parcel of the same thing. Their precipitous slopes, their great distance, their inaccessibility. People used to avoid the peaks in the Carpathians. To the Germans, no mountain was too high, no rock too steep for you to build a house there. He looked up with horror at the Kehlstein house. So that’s how they live, he thought.

  Initially they were put to work moving earth and doing construction work on a housing estate. There were a few of his own country-men in his troop, and they made sure that he was given the lighter tasks, digging trenches, clearing rubble, mixing mortar. Hey, little fellow, they said to him in Ukrainian, I’ll do that for you if you fancy a bit of a rest. And they showed him how you could disappear into a trench for a brief period, until the German overseers had finished their cigarettes and began to make their rounds checking up on the workers again. Then a swift kick from one of them woke him from the sleep into which he could always fall anywhere, he was so exhausted.

  When winter came they had to go on working in hard frost. They were given gloves, but the gloves disintegrated with the work they did, and when one of the older workers, hands in his pockets, came over, saying, Hey, little one, lend me your gloves a moment, will you? he knew he had no choice, handed them over and never got them back. So he kept trying to put his own hands in his pockets. This was not easy, for a slave with his hands in his pockets is living dangerously, and knows it. Even his protectors sometimes snapped at him, Don’t just stand around. If you don’t work you don’t get fed, right?

  And that was another request with which he was familiar, Hey, little one, lend me your bit of bread, will you?

  The same men helped him and despised him, depending on how they felt. That is the law of the stronger.

  Yes, right, he would say, handing it over.

  The most he would sometimes allow himself was to bite off a large chunk before he gave them his bread. Then they laughed.

  That’s okay, little one, they said. You need to get something inside you if you’re going to grow big and strong.

  Although winter in the German mountains was as hard as in his own country, you didn’t feel the peace here that winter had always brought to Korcziw. There could be no thought of knocking off work. The Germans were quick. They were restless. Whatever they wanted, they wanted it at once. No sooner had a beginning been made than they wanted the work to be done. It was as if they knew they wouldn’t have much more time to finish what they had begun. Mikhail could not understand their restlessness. If the world belonged to him, as it belonged to them, the first thing he would do would be to give himself time. But the more powerful the Germans he saw, the overseers of overseers and their own overseers, the more restlessly they went ahead with the work others were doing for them.

  So they erected huge tents over the building sites and put stoves under them. When it grew even colder, so that it was impossible to mix concrete, they kept the supplies of gravel and sand warm by inserting heating coils into them. They heated the water for mixing concrete in huge boilers, and erected large radiant heaters on the boarding. The heating had to be on day and night, to avoid damaging the fresh concrete, and the men in the huts suddenly began to regard work on the building sites as very desirable. They had feared winter more than anything else, and when the next autumn came they thought, with a sense of reassurance, of the radiant heaters for the concrete.

  But around this time they were suddenly called elsewhere. The Germans had begun hollowing out their mountain from the inside. It was as if they now wanted buildings to grow into the earth rather than on top of it. Mikhail could not understand what their idea was, which made it even stranger to him. They were setting up their empire even underground.

  They were in the air, too. He had ducked under the thunder of their aircraft often enough back in Korcziw.

  They were in the water. He had seen pictures of the U-boats with which they shot any ships that still dared put to sea out of the depths of the oceans.

  They were in the air, on water, on land, and now underground as well. They were everywhere.

  He saw the vast halls they had built below the mountain. Throne rooms of the underworld, linked by a labyrinth of underground passages. He realized that they were working to provide themselves
with everything you would need to live deep below the surface of the earth: fresh air, electricity, telephone lines, water, central heating. . . . Now he knew that nothing at all was impossible to them.

  He had always been afraid of suffocating. It was a completely uncontrollable fear. To him, the worst part of death was the idea of going down into the grave, and when they buried his father Mikhail felt sure that he was struggling to be free there in his hole in the ground, in the narrow coffin where they had nailed him up, he felt that his father was hoping to the end that he, Mikhail, would come to his aid. And when they handed him the spade and he did what was expected of him, it suddenly seemed as if all the people who had gathered for his father’s funeral were really there to prevent him from coming back to life, a sworn conspiracy of the unmerciful that, for some incomprehensible reason, included his mother, his brother, his father’s best friends . . . and Mikhail himself. He was one of them, too. They were all standing there cutting off the dead man’s way back to life.

  Mikhail’s fear of suffocating was the fear of being let down, betrayed, exposed, alone in the dark. Everything underground made him anxious. In Korcziw there were only graves underground. The wooden farmhouses had no cellars under them, and there were no underground structures in the country around except for foxes’ earths and badgers’ setts. Now, however, Mikhail had to work below the surface.

  Since he was the smallest of any of them, they made him crawl along the smaller service tunnels running parallel to the main galleries when there was rubble to be cleared away, or if someone had to find where a passage was blocked. It was often so narrow that he could not even support himself on his knees, but had to wriggle forward like a snake, lying flat on his stomach, arms stretched out ahead of him, face on the ground, his mouth full of dust and coughing breathlessly. There was a rope fastened to his ankle. Often he couldn’t feel it anymore and didn’t know if it was still there. From far away he heard them calling to him.

  Little fellow? Got it? Hurry up!

  Hey, little fellow! You still alive there?

  And he tried to move his foot to tug at the rope, his only link with the world of the living. But then they immediately paid out more. They wanted him to crawl on. The jaws of the mountain had closed around him.

  When they finally let him out, he begged them to send someone else next time.

  What’s the matter, little fellow? they asked. You can trust us. We’ll look after you. You’re in luck there. You can lie flat on your belly. A cushy job, we wouldn’t mind having it. Or would you rather work on the stone-milling machine?

  Yes! he said, and they laughed at him.

  It was worst after blasting, when the air was full of stone dust and the mountain was still trying to close its wounds. Here and there some scree would fall. Slabs of rock shifted their center of gravity and moved. Everyone knew that the chance of a man’s being buried by a rockfall was a calculated risk.

  Maybe little Mikhail had better go down and see how deep this crevice goes. Don’t worry, little fellow, we’ll strap you into a harness and pull you out again.

  He knew there was no chance of refusing. Slaves have no right to refuse. They couldn’t, anyway. There was always one of the armed German overseers quite close. So he let them tie a rope around him, or a harness when the descent was vertical, and went down into the maw of the mountain.

  Once he fainted, head downward. When he woke up a German first-aid man was kneeling beside him. The people who saved your life and the people who derided you were the same. There was no one to help.

  Perhaps you got used to such terrors. But he became as little used to them as a torture victim gets used to the torture. Far from it. Like a victim of torture, he wanted to die, but not this way, and that is the dilemma of the tortured. He went on suffering, until one day in the autumn of 1944 the solution lay clear before him.

  He had crawled so far into the mountainside that he could no longer hear the voices. Then, suddenly, he saw a faint shimmer of light ahead. It was a white light, not the yellow light of a miner’s lamp such as the one, like the others, he wore on his helmet. The light came from another way out of this world, and he could see it.

  He crawled toward it until he felt that they had stopped paying out the rope around his ankle. He moved back and tried to pull his knee up under his body enough to allow his hands to reach the rope.

  Suddenly he felt that he had experienced this already, this very same thing, and on that first occasion everything had turned out all right. That encouraged him, although he was in the tightest place imaginable, and he made progress only by millimeters until he had finally freed himself from the rope.

  At the same moment he instantly regretted it. How was he to find his way back to the entrance of the tunnel without the help of the others, without the rope? All his panic and horror and his fear of death returned. He tried to crawl a little way back to retrieve his rope. But it was gone. They had pulled it in without him. Now they knew what he was doing. They knew he was trying to find the way out. They knew he had set off for Korcziw. And he once again made haste to move forward. He crawled toward the light, which was still very far ahead of him. No one would come crawling after him, he knew that. No one else was as small and thin as he was. And as he moved slowly forward, hands first, pulling his body after them, as he felt his clothes and skin gashed on sharp ledges, he felt the light growing brighter around him. He heard rain pouring down outside, raised his eyes, and then he saw that the opening ahead was much too narrow for him. It was a trap, and he had crawled into it.

  He was far too exhausted to try going back. Not now. With the clarity of hopelessness he suddenly knew that his workmates would not give him away. At roll call after the early shift they would show the guards the rope. They would invent a death for him, he knew they would. One of the many deaths he had feared daily. Buried under the rubble. Crushed. Suffocated. One of the many deaths intended for him. But they wouldn’t report an attempted escape. They would have been punished in his place. They weren’t going to risk it.

  And wasn’t he as good as dead? Were they necessarily lying if they said he was? Mikhail suddenly realized that he no longer existed. Even if he were to survive, if he found a way out, or back to the main tunnel, he no longer existed. Curiously, this realization filled him with a kind of peace he had not known for a long time.

  He felt like a fox that, after a long pursuit in the hunt, suddenly finds a safe hiding place where it takes shelter, while the pack races over it and on. It was impossible for anyone to find him. That was all he asked. Since that day two years ago his misfortunes had all begun with the fact that, unlike his brother Jossip, he was not impossible to find.

  He laid his head on a rock and fell asleep.

  He dreamt of his dog. The fields of Korcziw. They walked through them together. Together they chased the deer that fled before them. They were as fast themselves, as wild, as bent on blood and prey.

  When he woke up the rain had briefly stopped. He knew at once what would kill him: the cold and his cramped position. The two were in league against him. They overwhelmed him. He could not distinguish between pain and numbness. There was no end to either. He would have had to move to feel them. To know where one left off and the other began.

  Then he could hear the dog again. He was quite close. He was panting. Mikhail heard him whining as dogs do during the hunt when they have found the prey. The supreme expression of triumph, good fortune in the hunt, bloodlust.

  The dog was here. He really could hear him. He thought it possible that he had already lost his mind with cold, pain, and the fear of death. Then he heard voices that did not come out of his dream, voices calling to a dog, sternly, imperiously. Mikhail heard the dog move a little way off. He could sense the effort, the strength of will it cost the animal to obey that human command. He felt the dog’s own disappointment and humiliation. The whole extent of the misunderstanding was clear to him. And although in this case he, Mikhail, was the prey, the game to be ru
n down in its hiding place, the fox in its earth, it was with the dog’s defeat that he felt sympathy.

  He’s started poaching, said a voice. If he doesn’t stop it I shall have him shot.

  What a shame, said another voice. I like that dog.

  Two uniformed men came into Mikhail’s field of vision where he could see only their heads. He had a view of their faces in profile. He saw a cigarette lighter flare up between them, saw the two faces bend over it in turn, saw two cigarettes begin to glow, smelled the cigarette smoke. Mikhail realized that there was a footpath running along the mountainside below him. He had arrived just where the guards patrolled on their daily rounds. They were here. They were everywhere. They would track him down to the very end of the world. He felt like a man who, having followed an escape route for a long time, suddenly sees his tormentors in front of him again.

  Did you really think there was any way of escape? they said. Do you think there is anywhere where we will not be found? Don’t you know that our Reich is everywhere you go?

  It is the quintessence of every nightmare, the most feared scene in every film, the most terrifying experience one can have. It is shock pure and simple.

  Suddenly, seeing the two SS men, Mikhail was wide awake again. His presence of mind, his concentrated strength, his will to survive all suddenly returned, and as soon as they had gone on he began to move slowly back into the mountain. This was no place to stay, not even in order to die.

  And as he made his laborious way back, centimeter by centimeter, forcing his sore body through rock and rubble, lying on his back, dust and debris came falling into his eyes from above, where his fingers had been searching for a handhold. He felt around to find where it came from, discovered a crack widening inward, but had to keep his eyes closed and go on groping blindly as he moved slowly back. He was sure that he could not be seen from outside, which for the moment gave him enough courage to continue, although there was no real hope to justify it. The crack grew broader. Now he could put his arm out through it, and after a few minutes he felt that he could sit upright.