They carried the meal from the kitchen to the dormitory. A slice of black bread. Dora swallowed hers, swilled it down with foul brown liquid.
‘What is this place?’ she said to the woman sitting next to her, an emaciated creature, her face lined. Gaps in her teeth. Her name, Dora learned, was Collette.
Collette coughed, a deep phlegmy caagh.
She could have TB, Dora thought, she’s thin enough.
‘You haven’t guessed?’ Collette said, adding, ‘It’s a brothel. For the soldiers. A Soldatenbordell.’
Dora swallowed. This was what Knackfuss had in mind. To be forced. Over and over.
‘Who are you all?’
‘Nous sommes prostitués,’ Collette said, added, ‘from France, mainly. What you English call “tarts”.’
Dora didn’t let on she wasn’t English.
Collette’s eyes grew round and she smiled, a grin wide enough to crack her fragile skin. She must once have been beautiful, Dora could see, with her clear cheekbones and high forehead. Two soldiers were standing in the doorway.
‘Uh-oh,’ Collette said. ‘Nearly time.’ She was still smiling, gums raw and bleeding. ‘How come you’re here?’
‘I was caught,’ Dora said. ‘Nursing a sick man.’ She added, ‘A runaway. From the OT.’
‘Nursing?’ Collette said. ‘Are you a nurse?’
Dora nodded. ‘Midwife. Une sage-femme.’
‘That will be handy,’ Collette said. ‘I’d rather you fix us up than the cow in the Revier.’
It took Dora a moment to register what Collette was saying.
‘You get pregnant?’ Dora said. Her period had been due when she was arrested, but it hadn’t come yet. It was being here, the shock and stress of it all. She knew the biology, the hypothalamus gland couldn’t cope, closed down, ceased producing the hormones.
‘Of course,’ Collette said. ‘You’ve never done this before, have you?’
Dora shook her head. Collette placed her hand on Dora’s arm.
‘Courage,’ she said. ‘Don’t think about it when they’re going at you. Be someone else, somewhere else, in your head, when it happens. And laugh, inside. Oh,’ she added, ‘and listen. They think you can’t hear, but if you keep your ears open, you can learn a lot. That way you’ll survive.’
Dora’s legs grew weak. ‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘You can,’ Collette snapped. ‘If you want to live.’
The soldiers were banging their batons on the door frame and the women began to push themselves up from their bunks or the floor where they had been sitting.
‘Why are you here?’ Dora said. ‘What did you do?’
‘Do?’ Collette winked. ‘A brothel is a good place to hide a man. Listen,’ she lowered her voice and added, ‘Agnes Moreau. Thick with the Nazis. Kapos do their dirty business for them. Be careful.’
Dora nodded.
‘But she likes her smokes,’ Collette went on. ‘Give her all the dog-ends you find. That’ll keep her sweet.’ They began to file out, shuffling in ill-fitting shoes. ‘We’re called asocial. But we’re necessary for their war effort, to keep their men virile.’ She laughed again. ‘Work that out.’
‘Were you all prostitutes?’ Dora said.
‘We are now,’ Collette said. ‘Right in the belly of the beast.’
Dora had been assigned to the officers’ mess, Agnes told her. ‘Hand-picked. For the top brass. Being pure Aryan, and that. Don’t want the hoi polloi fucking you up.’
Dora moved her head, but the smell of Agnes’s teeth curled up her nose anyway.
The same SS officer reserved Dora for himself. He was, she learned from Agnes, on leave for two weeks. Dora braced herself. Shut her eyes, clenched her teeth. What had Collette said? Be someone else, be somewhere else. He forced her legs wide and she lay stiff and passive, hating him. On the third night, he rolled back, naked, one arm behind his head.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Hauptsturmführer Maximilian List, Kommandant von Baubrigade I,’ he said, ‘Neuengamme. Im Alderney.’
He said it to impress, but Dora pretended not to understand and showed no recognition. There was something absurd, she thought, about this man boasting his importance with his member lying small and limp on his groin.
‘I was an architect before the war,’ he said. ‘In Berlin. Beautiful buildings.’
Then why are you building hell now? Dora thought. ‘Great plans,’ he went on. ‘When this war is finished, we will rebuild the city. Have you been there?’
He leaned on one elbow, looked at her. Dora couldn’t work out why he was talking to her. This was not what she expected, not what he’d done on the other nights. His eyes were pale and grey, flecked with gold, his features even. He was a youngish man, a few years older than herself. A captain already. Kommandant, no less. He must have made an impression on the bigwigs in Berlin.
‘No,’ he said, not waiting for her to answer. ‘Of course not. How could you have been there?’ He smiled, reached over her for a cigarette, and lit it. ‘An avenue of splendours. A people’s hall. The Führer’s palace. Such magnificence to come.’
The smoke blew towards her. Dora crinkled her nose.
‘You are a beautiful woman,’ he said. ‘Don’t pull a face. There, look.’ He stubbed it out hard so it snapped in two, and the tobacco spilled out across the ashtray. ‘I have finished it. It won’t bother you anymore.’
He picked up his clothes from the floor and walked towards the bathroom. Dora listened as he splashed the water, heard as he sang the opening lines of Liebchen, ade. Darling, goodbye. It had been one of her favourite songs, a big hit just after her father died, the year she left Berlin, so it had a special memory for her. He had a good singing voice, a powerful baritone. She hated him singing this song, as if he was wrenching it from her, gouging it out of her memory. But he was giving it back to her too, reminding her that beyond this room with its flock wallpaper and Persian rug, there could be a man who sang a love song to his sweetheart.
He arrived promptly at six the next night.
‘You know how I like my scotch,’ he said. ‘You know my tastes.’
Routines, too, Dora thought. This is not a man who likes surprises. She poured the scotch.
‘Take off your clothes.’
Dora breathed hard, clenched her teeth, yanked the dress down over her thighs. She was already raw and chapped from the ersatz soap they had to use and the rayon dress caught on her rough skin as it fell, a thousand needles pricking. She winced, glanced up. He was looking at her, studying her. He put down the glass and walked towards the bed.
They lay together after. Dora tried to think of the word. After he had expended himself, as they had the night before and the night before that.
‘And you?’ he said. ‘What did you do before the war?’
Why should she converse with him? She was his prisoner, his plaything. He wasn’t interested in her. Talking would give him the wrong impression. She was under duress. He had to know that.
‘I asked you a question,’ he said. ‘I expect to be answered.’
Let him wait for an answer. She wasn’t one of his subordinates.
‘We can do this two ways,’ he said. ‘I can tell you’re not a professional prostitute.’
Dora watched him from the corner of her eye, his mouth stern. The muscles in his jaw twitched once, twice.
‘But make no mistake. I can treat you like one if you choose.’
She heard the threat behind his words. Collette had told hair-raising stories of men with quirky, brutal needs. List had been straightforward in his desires. Now she saw his menace, the lust for power and pain.
‘Or we stay civilised,’ he went on. ‘Whichever you prefer.’
Dora felt a lump in her throat, and her eyes stung. His voice was cold, contemptuous. He’d been well-mannered so far. Why rouse his anger? Why make things worse?
‘I was a nurse,’ she said. ‘A m
idwife.’
‘A noble calling.’ He spoke quietly. ‘I know your number. Two hundred and seventy-one.’ She felt his fingers walk towards hers across the sheet and he brushed the back of her hand with his thumb. ‘But not your name. What are you called?’
Dora swallowed. He sounded soft, conciliatory, stroking her hand as if they were romancing, as if no threat had just passed between them.
‘Dora.’
‘That’s pretty,’ he said. ‘Like you.’
He turned to lie on his side as the mattress bounced up, down. She could feel his breath close to her face.
‘I hear you’re Swedish.’
She was waiting for this moment, for someone to question her, find her out. Lies have short legs. Well, let them do with her what they will. Anywhere would be better than this.
‘Born in Stockholm, I’m told,’ he went on. ‘It’s a beautiful city, is it not?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said.
‘Oh? Why not?’
She could own up, admit who she was. Get it over and done with, packed off to Germany. But the thought terrified her. She remembered her geography classes from school, Swedish cities close to the Arctic Circle, Luleå, Kiruna. Would he know those? Take the risk. She braced herself. One more lie.
‘I wasn’t raised there.’
‘But you weren’t raised in Jersey, either. So where were you brought up?’
‘Luleå.’ She hoped she sounded Swedish. She had no idea how it was pronounced.
‘Luleå? Where’s that?’
‘In the very north,’ she said. ‘In Lapland.’
‘In the Arctic Circle? Land of the midnight sun?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Almost.’
He rolled onto his back, reached for a cigarette from the bedside table and lit it. ‘I always think that climate and landscape build character, don’t you?’
‘Perhaps,’ Dora said.
‘So how would you consider the land of the midnight sun influences the Swedish character?’
Dora couldn’t imagine, said the first thing that came into her head. ‘It makes us pessimistic in summer,’ she said. ‘When it’s light all day and night.’
‘How come? I would have thought you would be happy for that.’
‘We know it will come to an end.’ Dora thought fast. ‘And in the winter, we are optimistic, because we know it cannot last.’
He laughed, from the belly, so the bed shook, his mouth wide open. He had a gold tooth, lower premolar, left side.
‘I like you, Dora,’ he said. ‘I will look out for you.’
I never forget a face.
He stubbed out his cigarette, stood up and dressed. She lay still, stared at the window, couldn’t bear to watch as he pulled on his trousers and tucked in his shirt, ordinary things that suggested he, too, was a man. He stood by the door, his cap under one arm. He raised his other, ‘Heil Hitler.’
Heil Shitler. Schmittler. Dora picked up the cigarette butt. A useful currency.
He reserved her for his exclusive use when he was there, and demanded that she was, as Agnes put it, ‘clean’ for three days beforehand.
‘List’s special whore,’ Agnes Moreau said. ‘The SS get all the privileges.’
Dora was glad. He was not like the others with their cut and thrust and cold indifference.
Some were lonely men who wanted companionship. Family men, from the GFP or the Wehrmacht, who missed their wives, SS on leave from France, or the Low Countries. They’d try to kiss Dora, touch her breasts, hit her when she stiffened and curled her toes, pushing their hands and faces away. Put a bit of life into it. Why should she? She cared nothing for these men, their needs, their isolation, their infidelities. They could do with her what they wanted, but she would not give them the intimacy of a kiss, the satisfaction of a caress. There were others, perverts who despised her, debased her, brutalising her with foul language and unnatural needs and who left her bruised and sore, and in despair.
Once or twice they introduced an Oberstgruppenführer or some other big shot from Germany or France, offering Dora like a delicacy.
‘Don’t resist,’ Collette said. ‘Just gets them madder. It’s not worth it.’
In the belly of the beast. She and Collette and the other women, even Agnes, they were the true face of war, they paid the real costs. The Trojan War, Dora thought, would have had a very different hue if Briseis or Chryseis had told the story, revealed the impotency of Agamemnon, his need for women to satisfy his manhood.
Agnes made sure Dora had no rough trade before List’s arrival. She knew which men to divert elsewhere, so Dora read the clues, knew when he was due a visit. List was not like the others. He behaved well, mannerly. He must be from a good family, Dora thought. He was familiar now, his body known. He called her Dora. Doralein.
He didn’t dismiss her as soon as he had ejaculated. Didn’t shout, get out, as if she was the unclean sinner. He talked about his wife and young sons, laid his head next to hers on the pillow. He was a long way from home, lonely. She could smell his shaven skin. He was a fastidious man, clean, careful. She supposed that came from his training. Architects had to be precise, saw beauty and form in three dimensions.
‘Do you like music, Dora?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I would like to be able to render music in my buildings,’ he said. ‘To make a sound wave into a structure. Don’t you think that would be sublime?’
He was talking to her, one to one. He did that now. She’d lost count of the number of times he’d come to her. It was autumn already, and she had been here for months. Sometimes she wondered whether he came to Jersey just to visit her, and he came often. He was an intelligent man, engaging. She had to admit his idea was novel.
‘It would be wavy,’ she said, adding, ‘I thought architects liked straight, classical lines.’
He lay back, and shut his eyes for a moment. ‘You’re right. A sound wave oscillates. Perhaps it’s the energy I’m thinking of. To capture that in a building. Oh, Dora,’ he rolled over, placed his head on her stomach. ‘I have such dreams, such plans.’
One evening, she ran her fingers through his hair without thinking. Fine and straight, different from her own coarse, curly hair, or Geoffrey’s thick black crop. She had known men like him in Berlin, urbane, sophisticated, professional men. She saw them at the opera or the theatre when she went with her father, in those halcyon days before Hitler came to power. What Vati would have called suitable men, eligible men. She could have fallen for a man like this, if they’d met under different circumstances. Maximilian was an oasis in a rough, stone-strewn desert, compared to the other men she had to endure in this prison. She tried to think of Geoffrey, but their last conversation, about the way he had behaved towards Vanessa, had made her doubt him, his integrity, his loyalty. The memory of him was fading. Time and place, she thought, shrink. List would call it perspective, the way trees in the distance looked smaller than those close up, the way life’s experiences became dots on the horizons of memory. Geoffrey was there, gone, and List was here, now, in this room, in this bed. Could they have even met in Berlin? In the foyer of the opera, perhaps?
‘We can mould wood or steel, curve and bend it, for our ships, submarines,’ List was saying. ‘Our aeroplanes. We have the science, and the skills. So why not build concert halls like that? Great opera houses? Wrap ourselves in a womb of sound? Or let it dance like a living organism? Do you see, Dora?’
He pushed himself onto his elbow and reached across for his jacket, pulling out a pencil and a small notepad.
‘Look.’ He sat up, crossed his legs. ‘I have this with me always.’ He tapped the notepad and balanced it on his knee. ‘I jot down ideas, inspirations. Let me show you.’ He slapped the space next to him. ‘Sit here.’
Dora leaned into him as he turned the pages. There were sketches of trees and plants, clouds and waves. There were designs that followed the shape of a branch or leaf, mimicked the fluidity of form and movemen
t.
‘Sit still,’ he said and shifted his position. He lifted the pencil, looking at her with an intensity that was both detached and passionate. ‘Don’t move.’
‘I have to breathe,’ she said.
He sketched her for a few minutes, then smiled, stopped, turned the page so she could see it. ‘There.’
A few simple lines but he had captured something in her face, an openness, a happiness perhaps. He had made her beautiful. Is that what he saw?
‘Pull your hair back, on top of your head.’
Dora piled it up, twisting the curls and knotting them. It would hold for a moment.
‘And lie on your side.’
She slid down on her elbow and stretched herself along the bed. She could hear the scratch of his pencil as he drew her naked body.
‘I should design you a house,’ he said. ‘Perfectly poised. Like you. In repose.’
‘How could that be?’
He waved his hand, soft undulations in the air. ‘I’ll ponder it,’ he said. ‘Give me time.’
‘I’d like to see that,’ she said. She was content to give him something of herself, if only inspiration.
‘I’ll call it after you. Das Dora Haus. Would you like that?’
He pushed himself up and dressed. This time, he leant over and kissed her forehead.
‘I have so many ideas,’ he said. ‘You see, I will become the most important architect this century has seen. I will stretch the boundaries of what’s possible, design living organic buildings. And you, my dear, have given me something special. You are my muse. My beautiful, beautiful muse.’
He walked towards the door, and turned. ‘I will be back in a week or two. I will look forward to that with huge pleasure.’
Dora smiled and nodded. Me too, she found herself thinking.
Agnes kept a close eye on them all, tipped off Nurse Hoffmann at their monthly check-ups, who needed a scrape, who didn’t. Dora didn’t require Agnes or Nurse Hoffmann to confirm what Dora knew herself. The SS didn’t use protection.
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