The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  ‘My mother wouldn’t stop screaming. My brother wet himself as my father took his hand and pulled him away from Mother through the crowd. My mother had implored this SS man, hugged his knees and tried to kiss his hand, I still remember how ashamed I was of her, yes, even in those circumstances: I knew that my brother’s wellbeing was at stake, and I was ashamed of her for humiliating herself. She implored him, kept repeating that he was so little — so little, sir, she said, so little, he needs his mother.

  ‘I didn’t understand any of it. I couldn’t grasp any of it. I wasn’t that young any more, I should have understood, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t conceive of what it meant: labour camp, concentration camp. Camp, camp, camp. It was only hunger that brought me closer to these terms. Hunger was the road to understanding. Yes, I believe that without the constant hunger I would have gone on refusing to understand what was happening.’ She paused for a moment, looked up at the window as if she needed to draw breath, to prepare herself for what she still had to say.

  ‘It’s so ironic that my father and my brother stayed in Theresienstadt, and my mother and I were sent back to Austria. She never wanted to go back there. We arrived in Mauthausen. Do you know this place? No, you don’t; better that way. Mauthausen had a lot of satellite camps. The earthworks, the stone quarries, the granite quarries, work for heavy industry. And it had a lot of brothels. It was a Category III camp, meaning extermination through labour. The only camp in this category within the territory of the German Reich, incidentally. People categorised as anti-social — criminals, ex-convicts, people with behavioural problems — were concentrated there and were supposed to work themselves to death. Why my mother and I were considered anti-social, I can’t tell you. Mother was assigned to work in the quarry. At first I was assigned to the maintenance and disinfection of the brothel barracks, as I couldn’t do the very heavy work on account of my weight. These were the only barracks that weren’t ridden with lice and disease. The brothels were actually intended as an incentive for prisoners to work harder, but pure-bred German dicks often saw action there, too, even though it was forbidden. I saw everything. From the back and the front. From above and below. Most of the women who worked there came from Ravensbrück, and after a few weeks in Mauthausen most of them wanted to go back. At least there they could wait for death without having to sell their bodies at the same time.

  ‘They didn’t even send me out when they started going at the women. It didn’t bother them that I was there, that I was watching them. Some of them even liked it, and every day I waited for it, every day I expected it — expected them to call me over, say lie down, pull up your shirt, spread your legs, suck my dick. I think it was the women’s glances that protected me. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s what I believe. I’m certain — absolutely certain. As the men were mounting them they would turn their heads towards me and look at me, as if to say: I’m doing this so you don’t have to.

  ‘Then along came Martin. Pure-bred Martin was a popular man in the brothel because he didn’t want anything unusual; he didn’t want them to stand on their heads and spread their legs, or crawl around the barracks on all fours, he didn’t want them to hold their arse cheeks apart or grunt. He didn’t want anything like that. He wanted to lie down, sleep with them, get up, and leave. Sometimes he would even hug one of them, if he felt inclined and let himself go. I even saw a tear roll down his cheek once when he came. Yes — good old Martin had a sentimental streak. And Martin stared at me. The whole time. From the moment he first saw me, he stared at me. Hesitantly at first, only when he thought I wasn’t looking at him, then more and more blatantly. Until he only ever looked at me, just at me, while he mounted the other women. I was scared. I didn’t know what it meant. I hadn’t yet learned to interpret his look. The other men looked at me in order to affirm themselves. To see, in my eyes, what unparalleled lechery or perversity they were capable of. They wanted affirmation. And I learned to give it to them. I learned to look at them in such a way that they thought I was impressed. I learned to suppress my sympathy with the women and ally myself with them. With the murderers, rapists, sadists, masochists, with the sick and the impotent. I looked, and my eyes told them I admired them for their sick, uninhibited lust. I learned to do this. Over time, it came more and more easily to me. But Martin was different. His looks were different. I didn’t know what they signified.

  ‘Sometimes he looked at me fearfully, as if he were afraid of me and my presence; sometimes he looked at me just as lecherously as the others, with the same demented, glazed expression; sometimes I even thought I saw in his eyes a cry for help, as if he wished I would go to him, grab his gun, and release him from himself.

  ‘We had been in the camp for four months and twelve days when he spoke to me for the first time. He arrived at daybreak, as I was starting work, on my own. Suddenly, there he was, as if from nowhere, standing in front of me. He asked me if I was a virgin. I nodded. I didn’t know whether that was my death sentence or a free pass. He smiled at me and asked if I would be prepared to go with him. I asked him where to. He grinned from ear to ear and brought his neck close to me. There was the skull, emblazoned on his collar patch. I’d never have thought that Martin — such a normal man — was one of them. He told me he had been assigned to supervise the Wiener Neustadt SS labour camp. The Raxwerke plants were manufacturing goods for the armaments industry; I think by then they were already working on the V2 rockets. He told me he could take me with him, that I wouldn’t have to work as hard there. That I was his personal protégée. That I would have my own room and enough to eat. And he would visit me at night. But only him. There wouldn’t be anyone else I would have to … A fellow soldier had caught a nasty venereal disease; he couldn’t risk that, the hygiene in the camp was a disaster, he would like to have a ‘normal’ love life. Yes, that’s what he said, a normal love life — and I was so beautiful, and my red hair, and …’

  Now Kitty seized the back of Fred’s neck with both hands, pulled her head down and kissed her. She wrapped her legs around Fred’s body and clung to her tightly, like a little monkey. But Fred could no longer stop; she kept on talking, the words seeming to pour from her mouth despite herself.

  ‘I said yes. But I said I couldn’t go alone. I could see my mother wasting away; every day I saw a little piece of her disappear, saw her being broken down. I knew she wouldn’t last much longer. For a moment he was angry, and I thought it was all over. First he cursed me, called me an ungrateful whore, a Jewish pig, but then he calmed down, as if nothing had happened, and he said he’d see what could be done. And before he left he asked me again whether I was sure about my hymen. Whether I really hadn’t let anyone near me. I swore to it.

  ‘He kept his promise. We were housed in an external barracks. My mother and I. She knew exactly what price I had to pay for it, but we never spoke about it. Only that in the nights when my SS man stayed away, she would come to me, stroke my hands, and kiss my temples.

  ‘Every night, as he lay on top of me — that was how he liked it, how he liked it best — he declared that he loved me. And sometimes he even wept when he came. He told me we had to stay together, no matter what happened. That he couldn’t let me go. That he had to stay with me.

  ‘When the air raids started, he put us in his car, at daybreak, in a cloak-and-dagger operation. We drove to Vienna; I remember clearly how my mother threw up when we reached the sixth district. The area where our apartment was, where we had lived. My father, my brother, she, and I. And Martin scolded and cursed her. Looking back, I think he was always a little afraid of her; perhaps he sometimes imagined that one day she would plunge a knife into his back as he lay on top of me.

  ‘We had to stay in the car. He had found us some civilian clothes specially for the journey. Everyday clothes. Perfectly normal. Yes — we could have passed for a perfectly normal family. My blonde mother, her red-haired daughter, and blond Martin. The three of us could have passed for a perfect
family. To some, we might even have looked like a loving brother and sister out with their mother.

  ‘Mother and I spent two days hidden in an insurance-company building that had been evacuated. Then he took us to Mödling, a tiny backwater outside Vienna, to a deserted farmhouse. We had nothing to eat, but suddenly we had hope again.

  ‘He drove back to Vienna. The city was being carpet-bombed, and they needed all their forces to secure the fuel depot. Even when people were saying that the Reds had taken Wiener Neustadt, that it was only a matter of time before Vienna fell to the Allies, he still came to me and lay on top of me. Still talked about a future together in Germany. Said he loved me. Deep down, I was still afraid he might shoot us both like a couple of animals. To cover his tracks.

  ‘And then I said it to him. I told him that I loved him, and that I was looking forward to our German future. Yes: I said it to him. I said it in my mother’s presence. I still remember how she froze, but I was afraid we wouldn’t survive those final days. He kissed me before he drove off, promising he would be back within the week to take us to Germany. I’d gained us a couple of days to prepare our escape and try to reach the Reds or the Allies. I don’t know whether he returned to the farm. I ran away.

  ‘My father and my brother did not return. They both died in that first year in the concentration camp. My father of typhus, and my brother of starvation. My mother …’

  Fred abruptly fell silent, as if she had run out of words. She buried her face in Kitty’s neck and took off her trousers. Kitty now wanted her to go on talking; she asked her, pleaded with her, but Fred said not another word.

  Love was a slow, creeping poison, love was treacherous and insincere, love was a veil thrown over the misery of the world, love was sticky and indigestible, it was a mirror in which one could be what one was not, it was a spectre that spread hope where hope had long since died, it was a hiding place where people thought they found refuge and ultimately found only themselves, it was a vague memory of another love, it was the possibility of a salvation that was ultimately equivalent to a coup de grâce, it was a war without victors, it was a precious jewel amid the broken fragments you cut yourself on: yes, Brilka, in those days, that was love.

  Kitty felt Fred kiss her out of her poisoned sleep with her words; felt that someone was holding her, with black tears and trembling eyelids, someone who had the urgency of a survivor.

  *

  The grey light of the last day of February shone through the flimsy curtains into the room. Fred had risen and was doing stretches, pulling in her legs and extending her arms. Her skin was a translucent white. Blue veins shimmered through in places. The triangle between her legs glowed provocatively red. Eyes squeezed shut in contentment, she stretched in the light.

  Naked and exposed like this, her body suddenly seemed so fragile. Kitty studied it closely, yet it seemed to reveal nothing to her, to tell her nothing, as if this body kept everything that mattered to itself, as if it wanted to be just a body, autonomous, without any visible history, just the pale, white body of a woman. Wearied by the morning’s lovemaking, nothing about it appeared vulgar or even seductive. It seemed to Kitty inconceivable that she had desired this body only a few minutes earlier. She buried her face in the pillow.

  *

  A secret conference took place in the commissariat of the Soviet Navy in Moscow to discuss the construction of the first nuclear-powered submarine, which bore the heroic name Leninsky Komsomol. Afterwards, the naval captain Konstantin Jashi was selected as the project’s deputy manager. He signed the document with pride, pledged to keep these official secrets, and went for a gourmet dinner with scientists and other representatives of the Navy.

  That evening, the Generalissimus was sitting with his entourage in the Kremlin’s lavishly appointed cinema, forcing his men to watch (as usual) one of his beloved American cowboy films, or else a comedy.

  His paranoia had reached unprecedented levels. The randomness with which he would lash out, like a dragon incapable of controlling its fire, was terrifying, and reminiscent of the despotism of the thirties. As if this despotism had been briefly interrupted by the war only to return again now in all its former cruelty. Overnight, he would change his mind; overnight, his generals would fall out of favour. At his dacha in Kuntsevo, a village on the western fringes of Moscow, he humiliated his ministers, made his men dance and sing, made them stuff themselves until they could eat no more and drink until they vomited. The atmosphere throughout the Kremlin, and thus in the entire realm, was wholly dependent on the way he smoked his pipe. If he smoked it cold, it meant arrests and firing squads; if he just held it in his hand without smoking it, he was about to fall into one of his dreaded rages, and one of the members of his court would lose his head. If he scratched his moustache with the pipe — then, and only then, would it be a good day. Turning down an invitation to a drinking orgy at the Leader’s dacha, or even failing to receive the invitation, meant you could be deported, arrested, or shot.

  For some time now, even the Little Big Man had not been able to count on his favour. The Georgian party chairman had recently been deposed; his followers had been arrested; the Generalissimus had even decreed that the Little Big Man must investigate himself. Everything indicated that he wanted to weaken the Little Big Man’s undisputed supremacy in their homeland.

  After the film screening, the Leader ordered cars for himself, the Little Big Man, and three other party functionaries, and they were driven to Kuntsevo. A lavish Georgian buffet was already laid out in his dacha, with copious quantities of Georgian wine on hand. During dinner they discussed the so-called ‘doctors’ plot’. The Generalissimus had just had the country’s leading doctors arrested, including the Kremlin’s own. The majority were Jews, whom he accused of being American agents conspiring to overthrow him.

  It was four in the morning when at last he dismissed his entourage. He even permitted them the luxury of a little sleep. When the Generalissimus had still not appeared by midday, the guards became uneasy. But no one dared wake the Leader, for fear of paying for the disturbance with their lives. It was only towards evening that the senior lieutenant of the guard entered the room where the Leader normally slept on a pink sofa. He breathed a sigh of relief: the Generalissimus was in a normal state of mind; he gave him instructions and ordered him to fetch the post from the Kremlin. However, when the lieutenant brought him the post at around ten o’clock, he found the Generalissimus lying on the floor in his pyjamas, conscious, but unable to speak. He had wet himself.

  His bodyguards carried him into the big dining room, hoping he would find it easier to breathe in there. Calls were made. No one knew who was responsible in such a situation: the Generalissimus had made no provision for it. The Little Big Man, Khrushchev, and Malenkov — the illustrious trio — were informed. However, the Little Big Man could not be reached at first, and no one knew which lady he was currently with. When at last he telephoned Kuntsevo, he ordered the guards not to inform anyone, not to make any more phone calls. Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Malenkov reached Kuntsevo around midnight. Without looking in on the Leader, they informed the household staff that he was merely drunk, and told them not to bother him in his sensitive condition. They then left the dacha.

  It was only much later, in the early hours of the morning, that the Little Big Man also appeared and berated the guards. It was an outrage, he said, for them to be spreading panic. The Leader was snoring; everything was fine. But the household staff would not be reassured. They begged him to call a doctor. They protested that the state their master was in was not normal.

  Deliberations began as to which doctor they should bring in. The country’s leading doctors had been arrested; a Jewish doctor was definitely out of the question, but he had to be a professor at the very least. At seven o’clock in the morning, the team of doctors finally arrived. It is said that their hands trembled so badly during the examination that they had difficulty even
taking his pulse. None of them knew whether they would leave the room alive. That morning, the doctors announced their diagnosis to the assembled Politburo: arterial haemorrhage in the left hemisphere of the brain. His condition was extremely serious.

  Was it relief, fear, or consternation that spread among those gathered there? It was too long since each had discarded his own will, his own opinion, even his own feelings; now they sat like marionettes abandoned by their puppeteer.

  The Little Big Man put himself in charge. His priority now was gaining time for the coming power struggle, although publicly he had to ask the doctors to do all they possibly could to try and save the Leader. Two men from his personal bodyguard were to keep watch at the sickbed; that would make it easier to monitor the situation, the Little Big Man said. To everyone else it was perfectly clear that, after all the years of torment, fears, threats, and humiliation the Generalissimus had inflicted, he believed his turn to wield the sceptre had finally come.

  On the fifth day of his death throes, the millionfold murderer finally succumbed, surrounded by his weeping entourage — including the still-triumphant Little Big Man.

  The Generalissimus would have approved of his funeral. Even dead, he still had the power to kill people. During the service on Red Square on 9 March 1953, hundreds were trampled to death or suffocated in the crowd.