Forgiving the Angel

by Jay Cantor

Eva didn’t need to reflect. “Blue,” she said.

  Milena opened her eyes and smiled. “So at least we know that you can see.”

  Of course she could. But why would she want to?

  “I’m going to come to your barracks tonight, after everyone’s asleep,” Milena said. She’d spoken of a visit once before, though Eva thought it only another hyperbolic way to assert her independence. “To the duty officer’s room.”

  She meant the room kept free in case a Gestapo officer visited, though in Eva’s barracks he rarely did; the Jehovah’s Witnesses—prisoners of conscience, who could leave the camp simply by renouncing their ridiculous faith—gave no trouble, did their work with tick-tock regularity, and needed few inspections.

  Eva knew women sometimes met in secret, and even that more women touched than were lashed for touching, but to do what Milena described sounded like a form of suicide—and of murder. Guards with wolfhounds walked the camp at night. When Milena was caught, the dogs would tear at her legs until she told who she was about to meet, and no love for another person or love for an image of one’s self was as strong as the bite of a dog.

  Milena understood the silence. “Don’t you trust me?”

  Eva had been tortured by the NKVD and the Gestapo, and could have replied, I trust you as much as anyone, myself included, but the siren sounded, and Milena made a point of rushing off before she could speak.

  4

  THAT NIGHT MILENA STOOD in front of Eva in the empty room and said, again, “What color are my eyes?” This time, she didn’t close them.

  “Blue,” Eva said. “And they look as if Milena has a fever.”

  Milena waved the very idea away. “Tell me about your eyes.”

  “Eva’s eyes aren’t as bright as Milena’s.”

  “But they’re beautiful in their distant sorrow. What about your hands?”

  “Eva’s fingers aren’t as long as Milena’s.” To see even this much felt like touching frostbitten skin.

  “What color is your hair, Eva?”

  “Eva’s hair is drab black, while Milena’s is glorious red.” There was almost no light in the room, but the word made Milena’s hair appear—a fascinating and vivid color, or perhaps it was just that color itself was fascinating.

  “Eva is foolish,” Milena said fondly. “I love her thick, mysterious, jet-black hair.”

  Eva was glad it hadn’t been cut off, and dismayed that she was glad.

  “And what of Eva’s breasts?” Milena asked.

  Eva smiled, as hers were, indeed, more ample, though she’d lost so much weight that they sagged now. “Eva’s dress fits better,” she admitted. And it did; both because of what was left of her figure and because the privileges of the Block Elder included a nicer dress, and better quality linen for the apron. Good wooden clogs, too.

  “And your breasts?” Milena asked again, but this time she gently stroked the sides of Eva’s breasts through the cloth of the better-fitting dress. Desire returned with Milena’s touch—here in the most improbable place. It must be, Eva thought, because they were a little less starved than they were in Karaganda.

  5

  DURING THE NEXT EXERCISE PERIOD, Eva brought Milena a small piece of bread “to stave off fever,” but Milena waved it away. “I want,” she said, “always to be the one who cares for you.”

  Perhaps true. And maybe in the infirmary it was easy for her to steal the food nurses must sometimes leave on their plates. In any case, Milena would only allow Eva to give her one thing, details from her past, though now when the telling became toneless Milena’s questions became much more pointed—what did the cabbage soup taste like to Eva (a rancid water), what did you do when you menstruated (used strips of foul cloth), what was the size of the turnip you said you found and how many fed from it? These queries still felt like a fingernail jabbing into tender skin, but as the spectral fingernail was in some sense Milena’s, it also felt erotic, bound up with, even an extension of, what had been their brief, halting, all-too-partial explorations of each other’s bodies.

  Today Eva described the winter in Berlin, when Paul and she had first met, and a street salesman’s dirty black fingerless gloves. “He had a folding table with children’s pajamas for sale spread out on it.”

  “What color were the pajamas?”

  “Yellow,” Eva said, and saw them in front of her. There’d been a hawk wind that evening, and she’d had only a thin brown cloth coat. “Very clean pajamas, too, as if unused. Paul thought the man must have stolen them from a truck, or how had he gotten a pile of children’s clothes of such spotless yellow felt?”

  Milena, as she sometimes would, repeated the last few words, and Eva followed on after, saying, “for my daughter,” and she added, “by another man.” The words made her almost fall to her knees. “She lives with him now, in Palestine.”

  Milena stopped, turned back, and opened her arms for Eva. The guard shouted, and they each moved away from the other. “You must meet me here later,” Milena said. “After everyone is asleep.”

  That false hope angered Eva. “Don’t be stupid. That would be suicide.”

  “Then imagine it now, while we walk, imagine that we’re together here, and there’s only enough light for us to see the outline of each other’s bodies. I hold you, and stroke your hair, and say to you what you already know, that when you gave up your daughter, you also saved her life. She’s in Palestine, where she’s safe.”

  That might be, but Eva knew she would never leave Ravensbruck, and that her daughter would never know anything else of her but the caricature that her former husband and his family provided of a reckless, fanatical woman, who, at best, ignored her child, at worst endangered her.

  Milena described her hand stroking Eva’s hair, and made ridiculous predictions about Eva seeing her child again. By the time the siren sounded, Eva cried not for the loss of her daughter, but that, except in imagination, she would probably never feel Milena’s touch again.

  6

  NO, SHE WOULD HAVE only the forced march next to the high wall, the choking dust, Milena’s questions, and the details from her own life, each one coming into consciousness as if for the first time, bringing others in its train. The more colors and shapes Eva provided, the more of Eva’s past and its pain returned to her, and the more, too, that the present showed itself, the squat barracks, the thick black truncheons, the hideous tension in the muscles of the guinea pigs’ faces as the guards with those thick black truncheons forced them to swing themselves forward on their crutches in the choking dust. And the more the pain from what she remembered and saw, the more she needed to be with Milena, to talk to her again, to find details that would interest her, because only that allowed her to bear what she felt from the past or the present.

  Was there any way to escape what she saw around her? Maybe she would tell Milena about a vacation her family had spent in a hut in Finland when she was a child. Once she began to speak she would remember all its details, and she might be able to escape there for a moment, to an inner room made from memory where she could rest from the pain of other memory and of Ravensbruck.

  7

  BY MARCH OF 1942, Inge Heschel felt confident in her usefulness to the Camp Administrator and often fell in step with them again. She was accepted without a word, because Inge was an interesting and clever old woman, and because one couldn’t afford the pleasure of a grudge in Ravensbruck.

  Inge’s eyes had small pieces of cloudy membrane embedded in them, and Eva and Milena had to reach out sometimes to guide her away from obstacles. Her hair had gone from gray to white, and her expression was like Eva’s when they’d first met. She usually said almost nothing, only listened to Milena’s questions, and Eva’s details, which today included a chipped knife with a grip of hard black rubber (that the man who taught her to weed had owned), noodles cooked over a fire of sheep dung (when her crew had to work nights on the freezing steppes), the growths on her sores that looked like little black mushrooms (when she had be
en a fool for love and lost her boots), and the huge turnip that looked like a hemorrhoid (and had miraculously fed her whole work team). Sometimes Milena would clap her hands at a detail, as if congratulating both of them. “I suspected that someone who’d hidden from the world the way you had,” she said, “must have done that because she had a great sensitivity to it. You’re like Franz in that way, though his hiding took a different form.”

  But with each object, Inge shook her head with disappointment. “It’s as if,” Inge said, “you’re saying in the horror there was also this.” She stumbled over a rut in the ground. “You’re like Rilke now,” Inge said. “You tell your details like something seen intensely stands apart from the destruction, as if they’re the Angels of the Existent.” She made a dismissive gesture, taking in Ravensbruck, but also the past, the future, air and light, and, apparently, Rilke, too, who she’d also once loved. “But, Milena, you at least should remember your Kafka. Nothing stands apart from destruction—not even the person who says that nothing stands apart.”

  Eva thought Inge was wrong. The details were indifferent, mute, and sometimes part of the horror; yet they were present. Just noticing them made her feel connected to that, even if she couldn’t quite say what that was. Maybe it was endurance; when the things were destroyed—as they would be—something would exist still, however scattered and transformed. But when her consciousness ended, nothing would be left for her, so why was being’s endurance a comfort to her?

  Improbably, Inge smiled. She looked from Eva to Milena, trying to see—or to remember—their faces. “Or maybe,” she said, “I envy the two of you and your game.” She meant their love, and Eva worried it might be dangerous that that love was so obvious, even to the blind.

  They talked of other things. Milena warned them not to go to the infirmary, even with a fever. She suspected that when everyone was asleep, there was a doctor and a nurse who went through the wards and gave some patients lethal injections.

  “If it’s the ones who had been bourgeois,” Inge said, “then they probably do it to steal the gold in their teeth.” She turned to Milena and spoke quietly but sharply. “Tell no one else. If you report them, you accuse the Gestapo itself. They’ll shoot you immediately.”

  8

  BUT WITHIN A WEEK, Milena had told the camp commandant, and perhaps because of a self-possession undimmed by Ravensbruck—though more likely for some reason of Gestapo politics they’d never know—she’d survived. The nurse and the doctor had been arrested and charged with stealing gold from the Reich.

  And maybe because one can’t live entirely in refusal and absence, at the beginning of June, Inge had altered a work list so that the guinea pigs would be spared jobs clearly meant to kill them. Inge’s crime had been discovered almost immediately; the guinea pigs had been reassigned to suffer and die, the supervisor sent to prison, and Inge executed.

  This reminder of how easily they both might die made Eva desperate to see Milena alone again, and she proposed that they use the confusion of the Sunday promenade, and meet in the infirmary, where Milena had said she could get a key to one of the consulting rooms.

  Milena smiled. “Wouldn’t that be suicidal?”

  Did she want Eva to act like a lovesick teenager and say she didn’t care? “I don’t care,” Eva said. And then added, as if she were sentencing herself, “Really, I don’t care.”

  9

  SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 1942, Strauss waltzes played through loudspeakers, and a thousand women walked in twos and threes through the central path wearing nearly identical striped dresses and white headdresses. Guards with police dogs strode back and forth through the crowd, seemingly in time to the music. A woman lay on the ground, trying to cover her head as a guard beat her and screamed at her for showing a strand of hair beneath her headscarf. Eva walked a little faster than the others, and a little to the side with each step.

  Next to the latrines, two gypsy women swayed in each other’s arms, while others stood guard and sang their own music. Eva remembered the once or twice she’d held women before Milena, but always so embarrassedly that she’d gotten no nourishment from it. Failed experiments, she’d thought; her life was only with men. And if today some thin skeptic were to say, Ah, so Milena happened because there are no men here, how could Eva reply, except with a tautology: her love for Milena was as great as her love for Paul had been, and stronger than any embarrassment, because it was for Milena.

  But if Eva were to say that to Milena, she would wave it away as she had the bread. Instead, Eva would tell her about the acidic shit smell of the latrine that was like an ocean you could feel in your eyes and on your skin, and of the lithe twist of the starving bodies, so unlike the heavy gypsy dancing she’d seen in Berlin. That would lead naturally to telling of her grief for Inge, at which Milena would smooth her hair, until the stroking of her long fingers would almost make Eva forget Inge, Karaganda, Ravensbruck, and herself.

  10

  BUT MILENA LOOKED DISGUSTED and angry at her vignette of the dancers.

  “They’d pushed the headscarves aside,” Eva added, as if that might get her audience back. “It made them look like they were drunk.”

  That didn’t help. Milena liked gypsies well enough, she said, but loathed their music, which had been playing day and night in the bar below her in the villa where she had tried to clean herself of a morphine addiction. It had begun after an operation for her leg injury. She’d drifted in and out of consciousness, and each time she had to come back to a world made nauseating by that awful Romany music.

  “I couldn’t have known,” Eva said. Not about the music, or the ski injury, or the morphine, or so much else. She felt forlorn.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” Milena said. “I’m not angry at you.” She’d gotten a letter from her own daughter that day, and it had been, she said, a perfectly nice letter, a polite letter, but it had nothing in it but news of exams, and piano lessons, words written for the censors, when Milena wanted to know … she didn’t know what—but something that would bring her daughter closer, let Milena feel her child’s need, and her confusions. “Some details, something about boys, or about if she’d gotten her first stockings yet.”

  Milena wept. Eva took her into her arms and stroked her hair, glad that she was allowed to care for her this time, though she also, meanly enough, felt cheated.

  Milena talked about her father, a doctor, who would raise her daughter now, “God save her. The man put me in a mental hospital to break up my relationship with a Jew.”

  “Kafka?”

  “No, Polack, my first husband.”

  She couldn’t help herself. “Why wouldn’t he fuck you?”

  The question made her stop crying, and Eva felt the joy of this accomplishment, felt it more sharply, too, than the times she’d helped her own child.

  “Polack? From boredom. But really you mean Kafka. Everyone,” she said, “means Kafka.” Oddly, that made her smile. “He feared the flesh,” she said, “but not like a neurotic—or, no, perhaps it’s the way Franz said, a neurosis also has something true in it that the illness grows around, like a tumor.”

  In this case, that meant Kafka saw that we’re animals with teeth; which was a funny thing to say, because of course many of hers and Eva’s were already falling out.

  “If people are going to fuck,” Milena said, “they mustn’t see each other’s selfishness and violence so clearly. Franz, though, couldn’t not see, and he couldn’t lie to anyone, not even himself. So he still loved me, but he couldn’t fuck me.”

  “Do you think I’m very blind,” Eva asked, still stroking Milena’s hair, which had thinned a little and was streaked with gray.

  “Do you mean do I think you don’t see how vicious I really am?” She looked sorrowful. “Yes, Eva, you make too much of me, and maybe I of you. For example, I think you’re as honest as Franz, even about yourself. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong about both of you.” That made her smile. “But I can’t really see how I could be wrong. I s
uppose it’s like the eye not being able to see itself.”

  “It can,” Eva said, “in a mirror.”

  “Well, that will be the book you’ll write for me later. But I know now I won’t be there to read it.” Neither talking of herself or self-pity were like her, Eva thought; or perhaps she was lost in her illusions and didn’t know what was like her anymore. The idea of Milena’s absence terrified her.

  The music outside was ending. She hurried to have more of Milena, and stroked her back, felt her ribs beneath her sweet, dry skin, and prayed that her touch might give Milena as much comfort as Milena’s touch would have given her.

  Her hands ran over Milena’s ass and legs, and she felt the bones in Milena’s thighs; that touch made both Milena’s body and her own fingers present to her. She looked toward the opaque windowpane, and it undulated a little in her eyes like a lake rippled by wind. For a moment, she imagined that they were on a boat.

  11

  THEY WEREN’T. A few months later transports had come for the cripples, amputees, mental defectives, bedwetters, and asthmatics, and by the winter of 1942, they’d come for the gypsies and the Jews, a few of whom she’d heard try to deceive themselves about men’s teeth, saying they might not be killed immediately, as they, unlike the cripples, were still capable of work. A day after each transport, the dead’s crutches, socks, underwear, and Bibles had come back in the same trucks, present still, and painful to the eye. The SS piled them in the center of the camp, where the promenade had taken place, an outer room filled with details that had accompanied but had done nothing to save the cripples, the gypsies, the Jews.

  At the beginning of 1943, soon after the last Jewish transports had left, thousands more Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs had arrived, but they hadn’t been taken away to be gassed. Instead, they were stacked on large platforms at night, three levels of them to a bunker, and were worked to death by Siemens during the day, as rations were now as bad as they’d been at Karaganda. Still, the Slavs hadn’t always died quickly enough for the Gestapo, and in the evening, when the Polish women lined up just across from the Witnesses, Eva had been close enough to see their lips move in prayer as the shots sounded from the alley behind the camp wall and crows rose from the roof of the commandant’s house.