The Dutch Wife

by Ellen Keith

  The door to the girls’ quarters opened, and Marijke stepped into the room in a simple green dress.

  He approached her, lifting the garland over their heads like mistletoe. “Merry Christmas, my dear.”

  She swatted at the spruce bough and dodged his kiss to examine it. One of the pine cones had gotten loose and dangled from a piece of hardened glue. “You did this? And the candles?”

  “Your gift is on its way but got held up in Berlin.” Karl snuck in for that kiss, removed his jacket and boots and guided her by the hand toward the bed.

  She shook her head. “Enough presents. What am I supposed to do with them?”

  “But it’s Christmas. I want you to be happy, even for an hour or two. Please.” The sleeve of her dress had shifted so he leaned over to kiss her bare shoulder. “You look radiant.”

  From his satchel, he pulled out a bag of nuts, some oranges and apples. Her face perked up.

  “I have wine, too,” he said.

  “This is plenty.”

  She waited, expecting him to undress her, but instead he passed her an orange. The peel fell off into her fingers in a single piece, stirring his excitement as he thought of what else those hands could do. But he didn’t want to rush the night. “Why don’t you get your violin?”

  She nodded, pleased by the suggestion. When she re-entered the room, the neckline of her dress hung lower, and she pointed to the garland with a shy smile. “Did you really make that?”

  “The first thing my mother did every December was fill the house with greenery. It’s not Christmas without it.”

  “It’s not Christmas without family.”

  He tried not to grimace, hoping she wouldn’t ruin the mood, but she sat on the edge of the bed and stared into the candles, the flames reflected in her pupils like embers. Then she raised the violin to her chin and started playing “Adeste Fideles.” He rested his head against the wall and reached out to touch her knee. The music was a salve. It numbed everything: the image of the sculptor’s son in his oversized clogs, the prisoners’ screams from the detention cells, her husband’s name and number. There were no bombs. No orders. No bodies. Just an image of him and her by a fireplace, a chicken rotating on a spit, mulled wine, Axel and Faust asleep at their feet.

  The song ended, cutting off his fantasy. Marijke looked at him. “When the war broke out, did you ever imagine it would still be dragging on four years later?”

  “How could anyone have? There’s a good chance this won’t be our last wartime Christmas either.” He studied her. Her back arched invitingly, and the candlelight flattered her skin. In that light, she was flawless, a Renaissance beauty. “At least I get to spend it in your arms, rather than with a pistol in my hand.”

  His father’s stern voice returned, memories of him sitting in his armchair, reciting the one story he told over and over. “You know, my father was stationed by Ypres in 1914. On Christmas Eve, they placed candles along the trenches and brought in a scrawny tree covered in tinsel. It stood there in the mud, and they gathered around to sing Christmas carols. He said the shooting stopped on both sides and the Tommies poked their heads out into no man’s land to join in.”

  Karl’s chest tightened as the prisoners’ carols echoed in his head.

  “A sign of hope, then,” she said, “that people are still people despite it all. It probably becomes much more difficult to shoot a man once you’ve looked him in the eye and shared a Christmas meal.” She stared at him like she intended to go on but instead reached for her violin again. A cluster bomb of sharp, grating notes. Then she exhaled and started over with something slow and soft and soothing.

  “That was just the first year. Father said it didn’t happen again.”

  After a few minutes, she put the instrument back in its case and grabbed a handful of nuts. “What did you do last Christmas?”

  “I got a week’s leave, so I spent it in Munich with my parents. Nice as it was to see them, too much had changed. Father kept pestering me about work, challenging all my decisions and pushing me to ask for a promotion. Mother always looked forward to preparing a big dinner, but with rationing, well—she wasn’t made to suffer through two wars. She’s taking it quite hard.”

  A hazelnut split open with a large crack. Marijke set down the nutcracker and popped the nut into her mouth without responding.

  “And you?” he asked.

  “We intended to go to my parents as well, but there was a blockade on the trains that week. Normally, we might have cycled—though, of course, we had no bikes anymore.”

  “Oh?”

  Her fist tightened around a handful of shells but then she sighed. “It was fine. We stayed home. I practiced my music and we listened to the Christmas broadcasts on the BBC.”

  The word “we” boomed. Of course her husband had heard her play countless times. He’d probably stood behind her, tracing the delicate spot where the violin met her neck, just as Karl had.

  “What?” she teased. “Are you thinking of arresting me on account of our illegal radio?” As she tended to do, she inched in but left just enough space that he would need to move to touch her. Like she was afraid of admitting what she wanted, of letting herself go.

  “Come here.” He pulled her in, kissed her neck. Her arms, her wrists, her lips. She kissed him back. While he tugged at his socks, she unbuttoned her dress. Her fingers paused at her chest, and she kept looking at him as she took her time unclasping her brassiere. He threw his trousers on the floor, cupped her breasts, wanting to feel all of her, to hear her cry out his name.

  But when he moved to touch her thighs, her husband’s number came back to him. The face from his photo: Inmate 31224. Karl stopped and smacked his fist against the pillow. Only the weak lost control of their thoughts and emotions. And no man in his position ought to feel anything for a whore. She was, after all, a prisoner.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” He pulled himself on top and grabbed her ass as he entered her. She sucked in a breath, her body tense. Her hand reached for his, but then the man was there again, taunting him. De Graaf’s hands on her skin, reminding Karl who had claimed her first.

  AFTER that, Karl couldn’t stroll through the prisoners’ camp as he had before. Any time he spotted a tall man with big ears, he paused to examine his face. Once, he followed someone halfway to the prisoners’ canteen until the stranger turned around. De Graaf haunted him in the brothel, while he got ready for the day, while he worked in his office.

  The bitter rogue in Karl’s head told him to have the man killed, assigned to the ditch-digging Kommando. Better yet, to an extermination camp. More than once, the possibility kept him up late into the night as he studied her husband’s records, searching for signs of weakness in his face.

  De Graaf belonged to one of the two-storey stone blocks near the Little Camp and the disinfection building. Karl made his way there on a Sunday after lunch. His cook had prepared a savoury pickled dish with the roast, and the taste of brine was still making his mouth water.

  Wet snowflakes fell over the camp pitch, the first heavy snowfall of the new year. He tried to imagine himself as a boy, careening around the blocks, packing hard snowballs and dodging attacks. But the scattered prisoners outside ignored the snow. It piled up on their caps as they plodded around with wheelbarrows, bare ankles poking out of their clogs.

  He climbed the stairs of the block to the upper level. A good hundred inmates filled the day room, passing their free time. Some talked at the tables; others lay sprawled across the floor, but it was absurd they could sleep through the racket of voices. Wet uniforms hung from the rafters, adding a damp mustiness to the terrible body odour. A shirtless inmate squatted near him, tugging on his suspenders and muttering to himself. In the opposite corner, a group bickered over something. Karl moved closer. They’d made a checkerboard from a scrap of wood and played with cigarette butts and pieces of stale bread. They jumped up when they saw him, and within a few seconds, everyone was sta
nding at attention. One inmate brushed crumbs from his sleeves as he rushed over. His arm band identified him as the Blockältester responsible for the block’s daily operations. “Good afternoon, Schutzhaftlagerführer.”

  “Surprise inspection,” Karl said. “Line them up.”

  The Blockältester shouted toward the bunks while Karl started down the line in the day room, but he reached the end without stopping. “Number three-one-two-two-four,” he called. No movement, and no one looked at him when he repeated the number.

  The Blockältester consulted a clipboard. “Inmate three-one-two-two-four received permission to visit the library.”

  “Very well.” Karl frowned, frustration tugging at his nerves. He glanced at the bunks in the corner, searching for something to fault. On spotting a mug and bowl that had been left on one of the beds, he walked over and knocked it to the floor. “Straighten up those mattresses. Half rations for everyone tonight.”

  THE inmates’ library took up part of Block 5, the same building that contained the records department. Thousands of volumes crammed the shelves, which the camp had stocked using money from the inmates’ pockets. Sometimes, the families of doctors or political dissidents sent novels. He was sure it eased their consciences to pretend their husbands and nephews were curled up in a corner after a day’s work, thumbing through Moby-Dick by lamplight.

  A prisoner sat at the front desk of the library, sorting a set of encyclopedias. A large sign was posted behind him: Juden verboten. Someone had sketched a prisoner with a hooked nose to clarify, likely one of the camp artists. He again recalled the sculptor’s son but redirected his thoughts to Marijke, her smooth skin and feisty laugh.

  “Can I help you, officer?”

  He moved past the librarian and into the high wooden book stacks. The first row was empty. A pair of green triangles huddled in the third row, whispering over the pages of a thick leather-bound volume. His palms were clammy. He paused, cursing himself, cursing her husband. Then he saw him. Bent over a table, his shoulders towering above the back of the chair. De Graaf flipped the page of his book while Karl stood there watching. His fingers drummed against the book’s spine. Karl’s muscles grew tense as he pictured those fingers grazing Marijke’s naked back, as he heard her moaning his name: Theo.

  The floorboards creaked under Karl’s weight. De Graaf glanced up from his reading, and his look of entrancement dissolved as he hurried to stand up and bow his head.

  “Look at me.” Karl crossed his arms. “What were you reading?”

  De Graaf’s eyebrows hung low over stormy eyes and his voice cracked. “A biography of Rembrandt, sir.”

  “So you think that’s the best use of camp time.”

  He held up his library pass. “I have permission.”

  “You missed an inspection. And we’ve received reports that you’ve been neglecting your work.”

  His giant ears flared red.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “My apologies, sir, but I swear I haven’t missed a day.”

  Karl couldn’t hide his satisfaction at De Graaf’s grovelling tone. “Get back to your block. And no more library visits.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you.”

  De Graaf kept his head low as he retreated. Karl smiled to himself. Despite his confidence that the Nazis would win the war and that this would sever their marriage forever, he resolved to do something to eliminate any last chance of that man ever making Marijke happy again.

  FOR two weeks, the possibilities weighed on him. He could have her husband shot, whipped, hanged in the crematorium, deported. He could tell him about Marijke, but that might also instill in him a will to survive. The more Karl’s feelings for her escalated and she entered his plans for after the war, the more he asked himself how he could torment her like that. What that would make him.

  In mid-January, she asked the question he’d been dreading. She wanted to know where her husband was, if he was alive. Her request was bold, but the anxious twitch in her cheek betrayed her. Karl ground his teeth, unprepared for the bite of hearing the man’s name from her lips. Sensing his jealousy, she curled into him, offering her body as a sedative. But he couldn’t stay hard, because there De Graaf was again, drumming his fingers against her hips. Laughing in Karl’s face as he hovered over a brood of children, all in matching outfits. She tried her best to distract Karl—teasing, caressing, licking—but he became irritated by her efforts and left the brothel early. By morning, he had a plan.

  AT dawn on January 16, De Graaf was rounded up at roll call and sent to the infirmary, where he was charged to the care of Dr. Fischer. It was an open secret that Fischer had forced some inmates to write his dissertation in order to get his medical licence at Buchenwald, and he now oversaw medical experimentation. Tests on the typhus epidemic, lethal injections, hormone transplants in homosexuals: groundbreaking projects that would lead to scientific advancement and serve a greater good.

  According to the report Fischer sent Karl, Inmate 31224 entered the experimentation room at approximately 08:00 hours. Fischer instructed the patient to remove his trousers and lie on the examination table. He took out a syringe, put on his gloves and explained that he was providing a vitamin supplement that would enable the patient to work longer hours, to thrive off a limited diet. The patient winced as Fischer administered an injection to his genitals. Over the next few days, Fischer repeated the injection, noting swelling, bleeding and substantial pain. The procedure ceased on January 19. On January 21, the swelling began to subside, with high expectations for rapid healing. After subsequent verification, Fischer deemed the experiment a success: Inmate 31224, Theodoor de Graaf, was completely sterile.

  After De Graaf was discharged from the infirmary, Karl had him transferred to one of Buchenwald’s sub-camps. Nearby, but just out of reach. De Graaf got assigned to a construction detail, building tunnels and roads—tough work, yet nothing lethal. Karl promised himself to control his jealousy from then on, to let fate step in and have her way. But when he returned to the brothel and told Marijke her husband was alive, the joy on her face gnawed at him for days.

  “DON’T you ever tire of the same girl?” The brothel supervisor stood at the threshold of the prisoners’ brothel, holding open the door as Karl approached.

  “What are you implying?” he asked.

  When he reached the top of the steps, she smiled. She’d removed the jacket of her uniform and unbuttoned the top of her blouse to show off her cleavage. “You know, you’re the only officer who stops by but doesn’t try to coax me into bed.” She slid her arm up along the door frame and studied him. Heat crept up the back of his neck.

  She laughed. “I’m sorry, Schutzhaftlagerführer. She’s a pretty one, but why settle for butter when you could have Chantilly cream?”

  “You laze around in the brothel all day and that’s the best line you can come up with?” He shoved aside her arm and stepped past her. “Stop flattering yourself.”

  He had arrived at the brothel earlier than normal and found it still open for business, with the last round of visitors filing into the waiting room. A couple of prisoners stood in line to pay at the table, but he pushed ahead of them. “I’m here to see Marijke.”

  The cashier chewed the end of her pencil. Of the handful of female staff he’d seen at Buchenwald, she was by far the ugliest. Heavy folds hung from her neck like melted wax, forming a double chin. When she didn’t answer, he repeated himself. She gestured to a bench in the waiting room. “I’m very sorry, Schutzhaftlagerführer, but you’ll have to wait.”

  “You can’t be serious. For how long?”

  “She’s occupied right now. Another girl, Sophia, is available if you prefer.”

  He swallowed and ground his heel against the floorboards before taking a seat. The cashier’s tone rattled him, and he cursed his oversight in showing up during regular hours. For some time, he’d toyed with the idea of banning the prisoners from visiting her, but he was wary of the Kommandan
t finding out. Brandt prided himself on the productivity of the brothel system and on the crop of women he’d selected, and he wouldn’t understand why Karl wanted to tamper with these or why he would sleep with a tainted woman. Whether Karl liked it or not, duty took priority, which meant gaining Brandt’s trust and respect, and keeping his involvement with Marijke as quiet as possible.

  A few prisoners waited on the seats across from him. Carcasses, the lot of them. Sunken eyes and patchy hair. The idea of any of them touching her infuriated him. He debated leaving to save himself the humiliation of waiting, but was too anxious to feel her body, to get a break from the ration reports and Blockführer appointments that had clogged up his day. Five minutes passed. Six or seven prisoners came out of the hallway that led to the koberzimmers. He studied each face, searching for some sign that they’d been with her, although he didn’t know what he expected to see.

  The brothel supervisor strolled into the waiting room. She had put her jacket back on, but as she leaned over to speak to the cashier, she smacked her red lips together, daring him to stare. Karl rose and went right up to her. “Enough waiting.”

  “As I’ve mentioned before, sir, there’s no queue at the SS brothel.” Her tone was condescending, even haughty, and he felt his authority slipping from his grasp. The heat returned to the back of his neck, this time prickling with anger.

  He struck his hand against the tabletop. “This is outrageous! Tell me what room she’s in!”

  The cashier sat very still without blinking, while the brothel supervisor’s lips pressed into a straight line. “Right away, sir.” She reached for the papers on the floor, checked the room numbers listed on them, and nodded for him to follow.

  At the door to Marijke’s koberzimmer, he took a deep breath and then entered to find her sitting on the bed, smoothing out the mattress cover. A calm spread over him, like the relief from a cold compress applied to a wound.

  “Hello, beautiful,” he said.

  She rose and let him take her in his arms, but made no effort to return his embrace.