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Lovely Green Eyes

Page 24

by Arnost Lustig


  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.”

  Fourteen

  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.

  “That swine, the Oberführer, is right. You need Arschaugen here, eyes on your arse. Eyes in front and behind,” she said.

  Ravens were strutting along the top of the wall, forming an irregular, glossy black line. They turned their heads to the inside of the wall. Suddenly they rose up over the estate. A fraction of a second later came the explosions of the dynamite charges. Three times the birds circled over the cloud of dust. They flew over the carcass of the silver wolf, which the rats were gnawing at. Then they wheeled towards the wasteland, towards something that humans had nothing to do with.

  The evacuation had proceeded quickly. The alarm had sounded, and within minutes they were away.

  Skinny escaped the night after the S S men shot Smartie because she had laughed. She had muttered something about the clouds being high and the mountains even higher, even higher than the sky. She came from a little town called Ub on the Tamnava River.

  Maria-from-Poznan was shot by Sturmmann Friedrich Zeitler. There had been something between them at one time. The group had been given orders to march at a fast pace. Those who couldn’t keep up were to be given a bullet in the back of the neck. Sturmmann Zeitler had ordered her to walk faster. He didn’t do so twice. They were sinking into the snow, exhausted even when they’d set out. They were given nothing to eat. The column waited for no-one, the S S men were in a hurry. They could sense the Russians at their heels. It was Skinny’s worst day. When night fell they were still walking. Now and again a shot rang out. She didn’t have the strength to look back, to see who it was this time.

  During the night she and Estelle used the straps from Big Leopolda Kulikowa’s case to tie themselves to each other. The Madam had bequeathed them her warm u
nderwear, 2,000 marks, 10,000 Polish zloty and a gold coin bearing a Russian Tsar’s head. They waded together through snow, ice and mud, walking on the railtracks and tripping over the sleepers. They were like sisters. They had no strength to talk. The thought of the Einsatzkommandos floated through Skinny’s mind. She was lethargic, but she did what she had to do. One of them dragged the other and then they changed places every half an hour. They remained somewhere in the middle of the column before they separated from it. The S S men did not bother to stop them from looking for a place to sleep.

  Near Katowice Estelle was torn to pieces by Dobermanns. Skinny hid in a coal truck at a railway station, under a tarpaulin she’d found in a railwayman’s hut. She did not know what would happen. The brothel was behind her. In front of her was nothing.

  Fifteen

  That was the story of Skinny, Hanka Kaudersovâ, or the part of it which stood before me as if it had happened to me. In Prague after the war she wore a smile on her lips, a smile fed by embarrassment, the incredibility of what had happened, a sense of both shame and guilt, but also of innocence. It was not easy to explain. Perhaps one lives with a certain time-lag, like a clock that is slow. Or an echo. One could say that our bodily “I” moves forward, while our mental “I” has halted yesterday or the day before yesterday. She retained her eyes in front and at the back – her Arschaugen, to use the Madam’s expression. What lay behind her was like a landscape speeding backwards past a train. Sometimes in sleep she would see a pair of colourless clouded eyes. It was not only Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin who had made her accept the morality of the age – kill or be killed. Those who were in the first war, like her father, had brought it home with them. When it came to a bayonet charge it was either you or me.

  No-one ever told her of Stefan Sarazin’s death and she made no attempt to find out what had happened to him. The war had buried him like so much else and so many others. Sometimes she would see herself sitting with her back to the stove, sewing his button on, or pouring the powder into his flask. Now she no longer cared.

  In the street she would return people’s smiles, like a person greeting neighbours. Good morning, good afternoon. She was like a boat floating on an unfamiliar ocean, drifting from a darkness that only she knew into the light that was common to all.

  She wanted to believe that she came from a world which was already gone. From a nameless land to which only she had given a name. A mirror in which she alone saw her face from the other side of time.

  In its reflection she also saw Wehrmacht Captain Daniel August Hentschel. He had already left Cubicle 16, and was walking down the long flagstoned corridor which stank of rats. He hadn’t promised her anything he could not fulfil. In retrospect, if she dismissed a lot of things, he now seemed to her better in some ways. She did not wish to seem unjust, and gratitude had something to do with it.

  She was always meticulously dressed and made up, the sleeves of her blouses always down to her wrists, and she was determined not to show her stomach to anyone.

  It would be simple to say that she survived with the help of her body, that she reached down to the roots of her strength to overcome herself. She was lucky that she was young, healthy and tough, capable of any work including the hardest, that she had had the presence of mind – if one can put it that way – to make the ultimate effort at the right moment. That was all. The body. But the body was never on its own, just as the soul was not. What was a person to do if, having been born into this kind of world, she wanted to survive?

  Even in the lives of the happiest of us there is a touch of despair. Even from the worst a seed might spring. But a seed of what? We all have in ourselves contradictory tendencies – for self-destruction and for survival. Explicable tendencies, conscious and subconscious ones. She knew that anyone might cross over, from one day to the next, to become one of those in misfortune. Morality might turn into a labyrinth. She had been through a lot and she was young. It appeared as if her life was still ahead of her. Only yesterday she had stood on her own against a great Reich which had no place for her. A Reich which had confronted the world and which had tried to exterminate those who, through some mistake, had already been born.

  She found it difficult to ensure that the echo of the words German or Germany did not immediately conjure up a panorama of burnt villages, devastated towns, shattered families and countless humans murdered, tortured or crippled in the name of racial purity; not just a vision of brothels in the east and in Festung Breslau, or wherever the Herrenwaffe set foot. She realized, as the rabbi had, that to condemn all this in words would not be enough. She absorbed it as the liver and kidneys absorb substances, and she tried to pump it out of herself again as the heart pumps blood into veins and cells. Like the rabbi she was not sure if there was any point in talking about it, in bringing back those echoes, because it would be equally ill-advised and criminal to forget even the smallest part.

  She sometimes remembered how Captain Hentschel had walked out to his Horch. She was standing by the frozen window of her cubicle. He had walked to his car with cautious heavy steps, over the swept but ice-covered stones. Before taking his last step he had turned. He could not have seen her. Or was she mistaken? He had aroused something in her. It was only a glimmer of something. Perhaps if he had not turned she would have wiped him from her memory. He would have vanished from her life just as his Horch had vanished into the blizzard. She had stood by her frozen window, almost invisible, and his look remained with her. Why?

  I never formed a clear picture in my mind of Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin of the Einsatzkommandos der Einsatzgruppen. I didn’t really want to. But Adler knew why he wanted to be a judge when they were in short supply. Skinny, of course, was entitled to be both judge and executioner.

  She felt in her bones that it was better not to know certain things, not to remember certain people. That was easier said than done, as she’d once remarked to Estelle. She remembered Sarazin yawning and telling her that this was how the world would yawn one day if anyone who survived told their story. But what about his eyes, I wanted to know. Did they really have no colour at all? They did, Skinny told me. She just could not remember now. Lies had been like the clothes she put on, like the water she quenched her thirst with, a handrail she held on to. She had not forgotten her fear, just as she had not forgotten her diarrhoea.

  Had she been afraid of Sarazin? Yes, certainly. He’d personified for her a Germany that she had not imagined before. In Terezin, the Germans in SS uniform had still seemed comparatively civilized. But they had two faces and they quickly revealed that second face, in the first seconds at the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. That was a world without masks. Sarazin’s eyes remained deep inside her like devil’s eyes gazing at her through the mist, through the night, between valleys and mountains, through the lowlands and wastelands of her soul.

  I reflected on the nature of the love that caused such anxiety to both Skinny and me, but at the same time, gave sense to everything. At 16 few people talk about beauty, they just let it warm them, as if in sunshine. With Skinny I felt as if I were on a raft on a turbulent river. Ahead was the bank, where we would land and tie up. To begin with, a small wooden hut would be enough for us. We could sleep under the stars before the dew came down or the frost bit. Then we would see.

  When he realized that I’d fallen in love, Adler thought I had gone out of my mind – although he did not criticize my choice. I asked myself the question, on Skinny’s behalf really, how so many people could have lived in safety, out of the wind, when those colourless milky eyes were fixed on her.

  “If you add it all up, we were lucky,” she said.

  “Who’d add it all up?”

  What we call luck has a thousand faces. Who can tell how much it consists of other people’s bad luck? She had created armour for herself, a shield close to her chest, the way gamblers hold their cards to prevent others from peeping.

  Adler thought she was tired. He had his own explanation for her reticence. Li
ke the rest of us she was suffering from an incurable disease which one must live with. After the war it was important to forgive others for that very thing we hoped they would forgive us for. Skinny, Hanka Kaudersovâ, was 15 and six months when she got to Feldbordell No. 232 Ost and she was still two months short of 16 when the war ended. She could not forgive what was unforgivable. She did not get free of the net in which they had caught her.

  Looking back, she tried to sort out what had been important at No. 232 Ost. She had arrived there unprepared, and survived. She had asked her body to hold out, and it had. She had asked her soul and conscience not to condemn her. But how could she have talked to, lain with, breathed the same air as, her murderers, the murderers of her parents and brother?

  She soon discovered that life belonged to the living. For the dead, there was only honour, all the honour she could give them. The soul, too, was an empty place, like that place in her abdomen which her mother had told her about three years earlier. No-one would get to it if she did not let them, no-one without a key. Never mind how many bodies had forced themselves on her.

  There were days when I felt I might be given that key, even though I had doubts about it on that train ride to Moravia.

  “You know,” she said to me. “They say that when Big Leopolda Kulikowa was about to die she shouted at the execution squad: “God is my pimp!”

  The whole time before and afterwards, Skinny, Hanka Kaudersovâ, later my wife, was flesh and blood. A soul in which remembrance and oblivion contended. Her eyes had looked on the devil twelve times a day or more, as had the other girls – every day except Sunday and sometimes Sunday as well. Her eyes had seen good and evil.

  When Skinny was fifteen, getting on for sixteen, she had clear skin, shiny hair – carefully brushed and growing long again – and lovely green eyes.

 

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