Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  One day in June of 1944, with no warning, many Germans came and took every person her age and put them on a train, loaded them into a boxcar, closed it, and transported them away. All the girls were crying. It happened around noon, and they were rounded up and brought to the railway station. They told them not even to bother changing clothes, just took them along in whatever they were wearing, and she learned later that her father couldn’t find her when he came back from camp, and fell to his knees and wept, but there she was, in a boxcar, jammed in with so many other girls, and no toilet. They had to pull up a plank and make a hole in the floor.

  It was a long train, and they had been picked up from a place where they had been working with shovels; they had to climb up into the boxcar without even the kind of plank that cows go up.

  “They just pushed us in there and closed the door. These Germans didn’t scream at anybody, didn’t beat us, but they were very strict. People were in there already from other places; they kept collecting people at each station. Later, after more stops, it was jammed.” She would never forget what she saw on this train to Germany. “No painter could make that picture. On all faces, only fear, as if life had ended, horror had followed. It was dark inside. And then we had to make that hole in the floor of the train.” She doesn’t remember what tool they used; maybe there was already a little hole and they widened it with their fingers.

  Valya never saw even one town and doesn’t remember anything about Poland except that she was told, yes, you are crossing Poland. And then they came to a transit camp, where they were told to line up and take off their clothes, and their teeth were checked as if they were horses, and every other part of their bodies, and they were given injections, all in a line naked, both men and women. It was very uncomfortable; they didn’t know what was going to happen next; they were all standing there nude without really knowing what was to come. She didn’t feel ashamed, because everyone else was also without clothes, but it was uncomfortable. To this day Valya thinks the injections given them on that day kept her from getting pregnant later.

  Then they were given back their clothes, and this time they were on that train for a week, with just a little food, a spoonful of soup, and room to sit down on the floor, which was better than when this train first went from Byelorussia to Poland. But everyone still had a bad expression, as if they were going to be executed. Even now Valya can’t stop crying when she remembers.

  Eventually they arrived at Frankfurt am Main and stayed in a camp with wooden houses and heard that Germans burned a lot of people in giant stoves, but all these girls she was with were young and were going to be put to work, not killed, although anyone was in trouble who looked a little like a Jew.

  In camp, their beds were made of wood, no blankets, no pillows, and by preference they slept outside in warm weather. A little later, they were given wooden shoes with hide inside and jackets that bore a special signature, OST, so everyone would know they had come from the east.

  Every morning at seven they would walk downhill from camp to take a train to Frankfurt am Main, where they would work all day, and not return until late at night. She was in this camp for nine months. Valya never saw anyone get shot, although a few young girls died of disease, malnutrition. But there came a day, in April 1945, when a train didn’t come to pick them up for their job and they were forced to go to work on foot. Now they could see that American planes had come over the night before in a bombing raid, and Valya saw a railroad track standing straight up in the air. She was afraid to return to camp for fear of another air raid, so she stayed alone in Frankfurt while a friend started back, but not too many minutes had gone by when she thought, “What am I going to do here alone?” and so she ran to catch her friend. At camp, people said they were going to be evacuated, and everyone was afraid. Would they be put into stoves and burned?

  People started to escape and, with others, Valya went down a hill so steep they had to slide down parts of it. They also had to cross a valley beyond this hill, and a small forest, and a couple of houses, and a German, who came along with their group, showed them how to hide in a storage bin below ground, and there they stayed for ten days with no light, until the war was over.

  Valya heard that it had all been craziness up above while she was below earth. When she came out ten days later she didn’t even know that the war had ended, but this German had saved her group, since their camp had been destroyed in a battle between Germans and Americans. It was then that she saw Americans for the first time in her life. There were a lot of Negroes. She remembers that they looked nice; they looked happy and alive, and so well built. They were proud they had liberated people. It was the first time she had seen smiles in a year. Valya thinks that even when she dies, she’ll remember this day and how it was when she came out into the light and it was as if her life had started again.

  Valya remembers one American soldier who came up to her, offered his canteen, and gave her a big piece of chocolate. It was the first time in Valya’s life that she tasted chocolate, and there was wine in his canteen. So there she was, never drank alcohol before either, and suddenly she didn’t feel well. There, full of happiness, she still had to throw up.

  The American officers said, “If you don’t want to return to Russia, you can stay here; we’ll try to help you with jobs.” But Valya felt she couldn’t stay on the American side. She loved her father and missed him a lot. So those of her friends who also wanted to go home were sent to a transit camp—Russian Reevaluation Camp—and there they were mixed in with thousands of people in Frankfurt an der Oder in this Russian camp where they waited. By now it was June again, and she worked in nearby fields, separating good grass from bad for cows, then milked cows, then was put to work in a small butter factory and was promoted and even put in charge because she worked so well. Here in the butter factory she met a man she loved very much, but he was only there for two months. He was tall and very shy, a modest person, a very good person, and you could hardly say they were dating, but they would meet each night after work and kiss. He never even touched her breasts. He proposed to her and said, “When we are back in Russia, we’ll marry.” And she had a dream that she was kissing him and kissing him and couldn’t stop, but when she told this dream to her girlfriends, they said, “Listen, it means you will never see him again.” It turned out to be true, because the Russian Army needed him, and she didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. She cried then. She loved him so much, because she had never seen such tenderness in her life. He had been close to her for two months and never asked her once what happened to her face. He treated her as if something very special were true of her, whereas when she met the man not long after who would actually become her husband, he asked her on their second meeting why her cheek was the way it was.

  She married this second man, but she always felt more comfortable with the first one. She never saw him again, even though they wrote letters back and forth. Even when she was married to her husband she wrote letters, but then she stopped. For in spite of her face, this second man had married her, so she felt grateful. She was afraid to lose him. Therefore, she stopped writing.

  Later, the first man wrote to her that he was married to a schoolteacher and that they went to theatre a lot and to cinema, and added, “I knew you only for two months, but my heart belongs to you.” And even though she didn’t have anything sexual with him, she loved that man very much and believes that if he’s alive now, he still loves her.

  After he was gone, she kept working at this small place they called a butter factory, and a soldier who was assigned to a hospital nearby would come to her dairy to take food to the man who would become her future husband. Valya finally asked: “For whom do you take all this?” He said, “There is one lieutenant who is sick and I give it to him.” She said, “Okay, give him my best regards and tell him we want him to be healthy.” She said it just to be nice to someone who was ill. But when the soldier came back, he said, “This lieutenant, he sends you best regards too,”
and it turned out later that her husband-to-be had been told: “You know, there’s one girl who works there, she’s so kind and nice, she even gave food to me.” Soon enough that lieutenant was put in charge of the whole butter factory, and he turned out to be tall and as strict as a German. Then one evening every other dairy girl decided to go to the movies, but Valya—she doesn’t remember why—stayed home. Perhaps she was depressed. She saw somebody walk by in a leather jacket—even now she has this leather jacket—and he looked at her and said, “Why didn’t you go out?” Then he recognized her and said, “Okay, let’s introduce ourselves to each other,” and as people of his rank usually did, he invited her to his office, and she went there and they talked. He said, “Let me hear your story.” She told him everything. Then a friend of his came by who could play the piano, so this officer said to her, “Do you dance?” and since there was nobody around, he invited her, and then he said, “Thank you for your regards.” It was then Valya understood that this was the sick man to whom she had sent all that food.

  He was married. That is, he had been married in 1939, but his wife sent him only one letter in four years and then she divorced him in order to marry a pilot. This tall man told his story, and then said he had never had any children with that wife. He showed her a picture. His former wife was very attractive.

  This officer was fifteen years older than Valya, and very severe, but he was nice when he danced. It was just that by the second evening, he asked her about her face, and she was offended and cried all night once she was alone. Only later did she tell him she was upset about it, upset because he certainly didn’t know her, but already he was kissing her and asking her questions.

  He was very intelligent, very cultured. After they were married, she discovered he actually had great tact and it was not possible not to love him, but it was a different type of love than she had had before. First love is first love. This man that she would marry was tall, slender and handsome, and not only elegant and intelligent on their first evening but remained so all their life. He always behaved in a calm, neat manner, very elegant. At the end of their life together, just a few years ago, when he was very sick and had a high temperature, he was so neat that when an ambulance came for him, he said, “Valya, do you think I can go without a tie?” She did not know whether to laugh or to weep.

  They stayed together through most of that following year in Germany, nine months. They met in August of 1945 and were married in May of 1946, and Ilya—that was his name, Ilya Prusakov—courted her in a proper way. He protected her and treated her with great tenderness. She never thought they would marry. He treated her very nicely as a person, and she liked him, but he was often sick. He had gotten some kind of disease during his campaigns. Once in this period he was taken to a hospital and she couldn’t even find the place—it was that difficult for her to visit; but when he came back, he said, “You know, you did so much for me when I was in trouble that I’ll always take care of you. I’d marry you if you’d agree, but I know you’re so young—I can’t propose marriage to you because there’s such a big difference in our ages. Maybe later on you’ll find someone else and I’ll be jealous. So I’d like to propose to you and to marry you, but it’s up to you to decide.”

  Of course, he had a very serious inflammation in one of his bones, and after that he had another illness where he ran a high fever and had to go to another hospital, but he sent out word. He asked Valya to bring him chicken broth. It was not possible to buy a chicken, so Valya found a Polish woman who spoke German and took her to another town to find one, and Valya brought it back and made some soup. Then Ilya asked her to bring tea, and he wanted it to be of a certain temperature because he felt more comfortable with warm liquid, so she ran with it to him because she was afraid his tea would turn cold. Then there were other things she did: She repaired his clothes, and was happy to do it. She wanted to do it. He said that even if she didn’t want to marry him, he would always take care of her. He said, “I’ll always help you; I’ll train you and teach you to be a typist. I’d always like you to be near me.” But, in fact, she agreed to marry him. She had expected he would propose.

  It also turned out that this fine officer, Ilya, had suffered several serious war wounds. Not only had his leg been badly injured by machine gun bullets, but he had been near some explosion that had left him with a condition called khontuzheniy. It meant he’d been close to some explosion, and his brain had suffered a shock. Concussion.

  Meanwhile, the butter factory was closed, and because Ilya wished to keep Valya near him, he arranged to give her a job, and she cooked for Russian soldiers and officers.

  She was so full of energy and so sweet and happy and so much on the move that Ilya began to call her volchuk, which is a toy like a top, brightly painted and always moving, very funny, very gay, very energetic, always moving. She, in turn, called him Ilichka. When they decided to register their relationship and be married, he went to Potsdam. She didn’t even have a nice dress, but he bought her a beautiful one, with embroidery, and she remembers that they went by train from Berlin, and Valya was very happy because now she knew she was going to be married, since he had told his relatives.

  Back in Russia, they moved in with his people in Arkhangelsk. That was more difficult. Arkhangelsk was all the way north of Finland. Now they were no longer just two, but part of a large family, way up in the far north. Ilya did not change when they got there; never in his life did he offend her or insult her personally, and she soon loved him so much that when he would come home from work, she would look at him with such admiration that his mother would say, “Don’t show that much happiness. Don’t look at him so much that evil comes.” Yes, it was dangerous to let the devil know how happy you were.

  All the same, thirteen years of living with the Prusakov family were to follow. Of course, that was not a surprise. Before they registered their marriage, Ilya had said, “Valya, I want to tell you that I’ll never leave my mother.” So Valya was prepared to share her life with his family instead of her own, and she knew that his mother had a very large influence on him. Ilya’s first wife had been a woman he brought back from a holiday in a health resort, and his mother, Tatiana, had not been happy about it. In his mother’s opinion, when a man goes to the Crimea on vacation, meets a woman and marries her, it’s a bad idea, and very uncultured. You don’t know this person; you have fun for a few weeks, then you marry; such a woman is tricky—she trapped him into marriage. Ilya’s mother said it was not a serious decision. Just passion, not marriage, and his mother had been right. It didn’t last through a bad war.

  When Ilya came back with Valya, however, Tatiana accepted her. So did all of Ilya’s sisters, more or less. Everybody, however, was surprised. Ilya was such an attractive and educated man and he had married a woman who had a problem with a burn mark on her face. Everyone said, “Couldn’t he find someone who’s his match?” And, of course, they talked about it. But Ilya did like young women, and she was young.

  In the beginning, Valya couldn’t get used to such an educated family as these Prusakovs. She was, after all, from a village. Later on she would learn, but at first it was not easy to do what was expected. There were so many new persons that she felt a little bit closed. Still, she was always trying to learn, and Ilya’s mother, Tatiana, taught her a lot.

  Tatiana was a very good cook. Since Valya was always around her, she learned to be better in the kitchen than Ilya’s sisters. It helped that Ilya never made excuses about Valya; he said, “This is the woman I love”—that was it. He had brought her from Germany. If you don’t love a woman, you don’t take her home with you.

  In their first years together, Valya wanted to have children, and every month she would cry, and Ilya would always say, “Don’t worry.” Now, she wonders if he was ever truly upset about it. When he was old, he even said to her: “Maybe it’s good we didn’t have children: Look around. Nowadays, children are not really good.”

  Of course, there were always lots of people
around. In Arkhangelsk, they lived in Tatiana’s apartment, which had three rooms. First thing Tatiana said was, “I have five daughters. Now, you’ll be my sixth.” That pleased Valya so much that she fell in love with Ilya for a second time, because she realized he had a happy family life already, and so if he had chosen her, that meant he really loved her. It wasn’t as if he just needed her. Besides, his family lived together with love like Valya’s family, but in a different way, more grace. More cultural. So she could love him more, because he changed her life for the better.

  But she didn’t have much freedom. Everyone’s eyes were always on her, and she remembers that once when they were in bed, she even cried because she did not feel alone with him.

  One night, they brought out an album of photographs, and Valya had to think how different it was from her family, where they’d never had anything like that, so poor. So she was embarrassed when they sat around their big table and his mother asked, “Now, tell me your stories, tell me about yourself.” Fortunately, Ilya’s mother then said, “You know, Ilyusha’s first wife was brought up by a stepmother.” Valya got upset, so she touched her husband’s foot under the table, and he touched back, which she understood to mean, “Don’t tell her,” and she didn’t. But later on her mother-in-law asked, “Why do you always talk about your father? Why do you never tell me anything about your mother?” So she confessed. She, too, was brought up by a stepmother.

  In this Prusakov family in Arkhangelsk were Ilya’s sister Klavdia and her two children, Marina and Petya, conceived from separate fathers. There was also another sister, Musya, and still another, Lyuba, who lived with them, but the center of this household was Marina, Klavdia’s daughter, who was five years old and very pretty and very bright. She had large beautiful blue eyes, and her grandmother more than admired her. You could say that Tatiana was completely in love with her. Marina was not exactly spoiled, but she was izbalovanaya, which is a little nicer than spoiled, for it means somebody who may have been loved too much. There was certainly a tendency to deal with Marina more leniently than a strict parent might accept. But she was a child you could like, and in school Marina got very high marks, and all her family was for Marina.