Commander Amanda Nightingale

by George Revelli

  Silently the two girls rose from Amanda but there was to be no release from her ordeal, because Phoebe's powerful hands still pinned her arms. Connie and April retired to a corner and watched horrified as the beating was resumed with a venom all the greater because it had become personal, woman to woman. Phoebe's arc was lower now. She simply went onto her toes and ground down into the crotch of the feebly tossing Amanda.

  "For God's sake, Amanda, apologize," Connie shouted.

  April said, "I think we had better send for the CO. I can't watch it any more. Look at her. She's as white as a sheet."

  If Amanda had been wearing her shorts, the beating up would not have seemed so brutal. It was the obscene nakedness of her that added to the agony of her helplessness. Phoebe was beyond stopping. She could not stop because even Amanda in her pain could feel that her tormentor was approaching one of the climaxes of her life, and she sought to cling to her reason until it had come and gone. Phoebe's red glistening face was above her, looking down on her with an expression in which Amanda recognized love as well as hate.

  As Phoebe felt the moment about to spill into its fleeting eternity, she went slightly off balance. Her face came very close, so close that her lips brushed Amanda's, and as they did so, Amanda jerked her head up, her neck scrawny and veined as a turtle's. Her skull rammed into Phoebe's face with such impact that she saw stars. Nothing more of her strength remained. Her head fell back. But Phoebe did not hit her again. Amanda opened her eyes and through the red mist of pain, saw Phoebe staring down at her with a perplexed, crossed look in her eyes. Then two great gleaming marbles of red appeared at each nostril, elongating to ovals. Before they could drop onto Amanda, Phoebe had covered her face in her hands. Blood seeped between the fingers. Without a word, Phoebe rolled off Amanda and lay on her back. For a moment the two girls lay side by side, as they might have done if they had been in bed together, Amanda unable to move.

  Then Phoebe screamed., "Get the doctor! My nose is broken!" The blood was too much for her hands. It rolled down her face, into her mouth, over her chin, onto the floor. She screamed again. "Get the medic! I can feel the bones in my face moving! For Christ's sake get the medic!"

  Connie shouted, "I'll go. For God's sake, April, help Amanda on with her shorts!"

  Amanda cried with pain as April eased her shorts up her thighs until she was covered. April took Amanda by the arm and gently helped her to her feet. The pain in her groin was almost unbearable. She could not stand straight but was clamped unalterably forward, like a boomerang. "Oh my God," she gasped. But the sight of Phoebe almost made her forget herself. Blood was everywhere. Amanda had never seen so much blood. Phoebe was drenched in blood, scrabbling in blood, sobbing sobs that bubbled with blood. There was a scuffling of feet outside and shouts. The colonel came in, followed by the doctor and a dozen officers and orderlies, male and female.

  "What the devil has been happening, Amanda?" the C. O. demanded while the medic stooped over Phoebe. The CO. sounded aggrieved. "We were waiting for you girls in the mess with drinks. What is going on?"

  "Get a stretcher," the doctor called. "She has a multiple fracture of the nose and cheekbone." There was a rush of chaotic movement. The CO. looked, astonished, first at the screaming Phoebe. Then he regarded Connie, whose right eye was completely closed by a huge bruise. He turned to regard April whose right cheek was a hideous mash of blood, nail marks, and ribboned skin. He turned to Amanda leaning painfully against the fireplace, her only visible signs of damage being a heightened colour where she had twice been slapped.

  "Good God, Amanda," he said. "Really, you play too rough. We'll have to send for a new P. T. instructor from London, and heaven knows when these two officers can show themselves again in public. You must really keep your animal high spirits for roughing up the Germans."

  For a moment Amanda's mind was uncomprehending of this verbal chastisement, directed at herself of all people. And then she started to laugh. She could not stop. Laughing hysterically she limped away, shaking off all offers of help, and staggered to the bathroom to clean up for supper.

  * * *

  How long she had sucked she did not know. It had all begun in her sleep, and the nipple seemed almost to have disintegrated in her saliva, a soft crime with a tiny, rubbery core inside. Amanda was frightened now, of and for herself. She felt the woman stir in the blackness and stopped, not daring to remove her lips, in case their very removal would draw attention. The possible consequences of what she was doing terrified her. But why were they there at all, two women in the darkness, naked? She heard the woman mumble to herself in a half sleep. "Schön", she muttered. "Schön." Amanda felt despair. The German words, the throbbing ache in her breasts, told her that it was no nightmare, but unrelenting reality. She was indeed a prisoner in occupied France, in the hands of the Nazis, at the mercy of the Gestapo, the S. S., and all their horrid instruments of persuasion.

  The woman too was rising to wakefulness and all at once she sat up. Amanda lay back horrified, wondering what would happen when the woman felt the cold of the saliva like a puff of air on her chest. She was stretching up into the dark and the window shade rose and the room filled with dawn light, the dawn that had become so familiar. Amanda squinted upward and looked into the smiling face of Erika Sass. "Guten Morgen, Liebling," she said.

  "Guten Morgen, Fräulein," Amanda replied faintly. She smile a crooked smile, a smile she would not have been able to explain even to herself. Sitting up and looking down, Erika seemed to be a different human being from the tormentor of the night before. Her dark hair was tousled. Her myopic pupils almost filled her eyeballs. It occurred to Amanda that she had not seen, in adulthood, another woman naked except partially at the Turkish Bath in Russell Square, and she realized that Erika had a figure that a photographer would consider absolutely perfect. Erika gave a sleepy laugh, descended on Amanda and gathered her in her arms, kissing her. Amanda kissed back excitedly and she had a comic thought which almost made her laugh. Two girls caressing each other seem to be all breast. It did not remain like that. Erika swivelled to redress the balance, and for an hour drew Amanda through corridors such as she had never known, in which tongues lashed out like fists into humid fissures, where tiny heads bobbed, ducked, disappeared, and finally, when cornered, puffed up and spat.

  Afterwards, the sun colouring the small schoolroom gold, they lay on their backs side by side, smoking with exhausted lips.

  "Let me start from the beginning," said Erika. "There should have been four of us, Heini, Bimbo, myself and another officer called Bernhard Mueller. We were in Paris, all had Urlaub, how do you say Urlaub in English?"

  "Leave."

  "Leave at the same time, so Heini knew of this place in Normandy which had been evacuated of all its population, because it is where they think you are going to invade. We decided to come down and have a few days fishing and playing bridge."

  Amanda snorted. "Fishing, bridge, pah!"

  "But Bernhard got drunk in Paris and his leave was cancelled. Your party was captured, just by luck, bad luck for you, by a Wehrmacht platoon joining a Wehrmacht convoy going to Paris. Your comrades were brought to us. One of them was so terrified he kept pouring out all his story, although we were not interested at all. All we wanted to do was fish. The other Englishman…"

  "Neither was an Englishman," said Amanda sharply. "One was an Irishman, and the other a Canadian. There's a big difference."

  "Well, the dark, good-looking one…"

  "Rory O'Donovan."

  "He was so disgusted with his comrade's performance, he made a dive for the window to try and escape, so Bimbo had to hit him. Bimbo is terribly strong."

  "That I know," said Amanda, with feeling.

  "Heini handed the two men over to the convoy commander, but persuaded him to leave you behind. They were friends, and the commander could guess why!"

  "Bastards," Amanda murmured.

  "And the rest you know."

  "I don't know anything at all
," Amanda exclaimed. "The scream! I heard a most frightful scream. Bloodcurdling."

  "That was Heini's imitation. He does it to scare Russian prisoners out of their wits."

  "He succeeded remarkably well with me. But here. Now. Why am I in bed with you and not with one of the men?"

  "I claimed you," Erika said lasciviously. "I pointed out that I too had rights as a German citizen."

  "Don't talk rot. But who are you? How is it you all speak English?"

  "School. Heini went to Oxford or Cambridge or somewhere. I don't know where Bimbo learned it. He's a farmer. I worked as a secretary to an American firm before that wicked Roosevelt brought America into the war."

  "Please, Erika… your name is Erika, isn't it? I am trying to understand and I am beginning. I realize now that this whole thing was a beastly, improvised joke at my expense. That I can understand and even appreciate. But if it was all a joke and you are all nice people, why did you have to hurt me so horribly. And humiliate me."

  "A practical joke is always humiliating," said Erika. "And the hurt, Liebling, was your imagination."

  "Imagination! Are you insane! My breasts are black and blue and hurt like hell."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Of course I'm sure!" It was a question so absurd that Amanda could scarcely even begin to address it to herself. She felt her bosom tenderly. "Of course they hurt."

  "I shall show you something," Erika said. She pushed down the bedclothes and opened her thighs. "Look."

  The insides of her thighs were covered with old fading bruises and welts.

  Amanda examined them, intrigued. "I noticed them vividly when I was doing to you what you were doing to me… I just don't understand."

  "That was done by Bernhard Mueller in Paris. I am periodically whipped raw. But never quite enough. It was the same with you."

  "That's not true," Amanda screamed. "It was the most painful experience I have ever known."

  "Was it?"

  "Of course it was. You were watching it, like some kind of female Inquisitor, or something."

  "Was it? Think!"

  "Are you out of your mind? And yet…" Amanda stopped.

  "Yes?"

  "Well. I don't know. I knew after a while I could endure it. Any amount of it. It could not have broken me. When it stopped, I was in a ghastly way… sorry. I knew it meant that something worse would happen, something I couldn't survive. I suppose… I have only thought of this now… I wanted the whip back." Amanda sighed. "I shall never understand. Cheltenham was no training for this."

  "Sit up," Erika commanded. "I am going to tell you something. I am going to learn you something."

  "Teach me. Not learn me."

  "Never mind. There is something that Scappini calls the Scappini Rule of Thumb. He believes that women are divided equally into those who find sensual pleasure in pain and those who don't."

  "I belong definitely to the latter," said Amanda with emphasis.

  "But do you? You have already said that perhaps you don't. Those who enjoy it, enjoy it to be inflicted on the… in German the errogenischen Zonen. And he says — our master in these strange tastes, our second master after Mueller — that it is scientifically easy to determine at once the one species of woman from the other. Scappini will punish me for telling you this. He would prefer his experiments to continue without the woman's consciousness of them."

  "How?" Amanda hugged her breasts.

  "By her instantaneous psychological reaction when pain is inflicted."

  "Gosh!" said Amanda. "What about my instantaneous reaction last night when that Schweinehund Bimbo was thrashing me?"

  "Yes. But that was psychological, not physical. It was because you were frightened. You have just told me you wanted it to go on. Suppose the same scene was done over again but instead of being frightened, you wanted it?"

  "Never," said Amanda. "It has probably scarred me for life. I only hope my English upbringing will help me to overcome it. I think you are mad. If you aren't mad, then I am."

  "Don't interrupt. This is the way to differentiate between the one kind of woman and the other. Like this. I take the nipple of your breast between finger and thumb, so. I squeeze just a little. Now if at this point you say 'Ach, das tut mir leid, and push my hand away, you belong to the group which does not enjoy pain. But I see you do not push my hand away although I am squeezing quite hard now."

  "You are hurting me," said Amanda firmly.

  "But you are not struggling."

  "Ouch!" Amanda insisted.

  The vice of Erika's fingers tightened. Amanda made no sound, but her head went back as slowly as a silent film in slow motion. Her teeth clenched. Tiny beads of perspiration appeared on her brow.

  "I am squeezing as hard as my fingers have strength," said Erika, delighted. "Ask me to stop and I'll stop."

  Amanda had gone as tight as a bladder. She brought her hands up as if to tear Erika's hands away, but all she could do was to cup it in her hands, holding it as though it were a chalice. A thin spume of saliva fell unnoticed from her hanging lower lip.

  "Tell me to stop, Amanda," Erika squealed. "I shall stop as soon as you ask me. You don't have to beg. Just say stop. Don't forget you are in pain there to begin with."

  Amanda sat rigid, her mouth opened as wide as it would go. And it was not Amanda but Erika who gave way first, collapsing. "Ach, Du lieber Gott!" she said, "you have exhausted all the strength in my fingers. Look. They are trembling. I could not keep up the pressure for another second."

  Amanda fell back on the bed, hugging her breasts, saying nothing. She turned around and buried her burning face in the pillow while Erika stroked her head. "Erika," she said at last, her voice muffled. "Could I stand it if, say, Bimbo did it?"

  "Of course."

  "Crumbs!"

  Amanda thought some more. "I seem to have read somewhere… oh dear, I know so little about life, my father protected me so much… I suppose I must have read it in the News of the World, or something… that some men like it too."

  "Yes, but Heini will tell you about that too. He will tell you that in men it is not natural. It is pervert… that is right, pervert, nicht? Men who like to be beaten by girls dressed in leather and high-heeled boots…"

  "Goodness gracious, I never heard of such a thing," said Amanda shocked.

  "These belong to some strange class of manhood which I don't know anything about, and I'm sure Bimbo and Heini don't either. But in a woman it is natural, like childbirth. Heini says a man can suffer for the pain of Mary much more than for the pain of Jesus, which is difficult to imagine anyway. When you awaken to it for the first time, as you did last night and again this morning, it is a kind of being reborn. A new virginity to lose all over again."

  "God," said Amanda. "What kind of a woman have I become? I obviously haven't changed. I'm still the same person I was yesterday, last week, a year ago. I have always been like this but didn't know it. I remind myself of some ghastly old print by Hogarth or Goya." She turned on her back. "I wonder if I got it from my mother. Of course, Daddy would never think of such a thing. I wonder if Jennifer likes it. She must. Jennifer likes everything."

  "Who's Jennifer?"

  "My young sister." Amanda became petulant. "It's all very well to talk. You had your fun last night and I suppose I had mine, because you say so. But supposing I had been the kind that didn't like it, who says, 'Oops, that hurts'."

  Erika smiled sweetly. "Schätzchen, we can't pick and choose among the spies we catch. They are not that common."

  Amanda said, "I need a cigarette."

  Erika wagged a finger negatively. "Not until you do it to me."

  The girls became like animals. "Turn this way, so," Erika panted. "And like this. See we are like two pairs of scissors interlocked. Ah! Who needs men?"

  And it was thus that Bimbo and Heini found them when they entered sleepily, without knocking, scratching their behinds in their army pyjamas. They contemplated the scene with interest but the girls were
working too hard to look up. Each man took a girl by her armpits and they came apart with a snap, cursing. Two pairs of legs, one long and slim, the other long and heavy-thighed, thrashed the air side by side, like a can-can chorus, two tortured madonnas, and the rising sun spun on its axis. The sky flashed purple and red, as Amanda's horizon of human experience widened yet further.

  * * *

  Barefooted, wearing only her army shirt, she wandered alone through the warm grass outside, chewed a blade of grass and contemplated her extraordinary situation. The spring sun shone, the grass crackled warm underfoot though still slightly moist with the last of the morning dew, and Amanda was replete with café créme and Butterbrötchen. Her two male captors sat on the banks of the stream two fields away and contemplatively fished, ignoring her. She could flee, but where? And without clothes? There was still this eerie emptiness everywhere as though only the four of them inhabited the earth, along with birds that sang, and an occasional squirrel in the cypresses.

  Her bosom ached. Her whole body pained her in one way or another, from her mouth to her buttocks, and now, alone and in the fresh air, she tried to compose her feelings into some kind of focus for the three unchosen companions with whom she had already experienced so much. She was aware that she felt emotions toward them such as she had never felt toward any other human beings. It was not hate or love, nor even any calculable combination of the two.

  Erika first. For Erika particularly she felt sensations completely new. For the first time in the presence of another woman she felt… relaxed. All her life it seemed she had been on the defensive. Always she had had to fire the full battery of her many attributes, her staggering beauty, her education, her social position, her athletic skill, her intelligence, against attackers who were intellectually smaller than she, who hated her, envied her, toadied to her, told lies about her behind her back, and even assaulted her physically. There was no Machiavellianism in Erika's nature, no emotional manipulation. Erika asked nothing of Amanda except pleasure. Amanda was certain that Erika liked her, simply, uncomplicatedly, and was grateful to her for liking her that way.