by Ellen Keith
Papá, do you remember Bariloche last year? That first night of our ski trip, you said you felt like you’d returned home. There was . . . you seemed happy in a way, content for once.
Luciano breathed in, imagining the sharp resin of evergreens, steam from apple cider thawing his eyelashes. Log-framed buildings with wooden balconies, the crunch of fresh snow under their skis. The night they arrived, his father had taken them out for fondue and grinned as he told tales of skiing in the Alps with the grandparents Luciano had never met. Stories about mulled wine and bringing three pairs of socks out snowshoeing because one was never enough. He even told a few jokes. For a few hours, they acted like a normal family. The next day, however, his mother had returned to the hotel early with a headache, leaving Luciano and his father on their own.
It was too good to last. When you and I walked back through town together . . . fuck, was that ever awkward. We had absolutely nothing to talk about. I kept trying to think of something to say and ended up making some dumb remark about how we had good snow for snowmen, like I was still a kid. You gave a snort and nodded, and stopped to pet one of those massive dogs that paraded around the square for the tourists. The really big ones with the barrels, St. Bernards.
His father had spent a good minute with that dog, crouching to scratch its ears, praising its thick coat, calling it a braver Hund, as if it could understand German just because the breed came from the Alps. Luciano watched, transfixed, as the creases in his father’s face softened like wax in the sun. Papá had thrown back his head and laughed as the dog’s paddle of a tongue smeared across his chin.
While I stood there trying to come up with some interesting fact about those dogs to tell you, I felt like an intruder, like I was spying on a private moment through a one-way mirror. You didn’t even notice when I ducked into a chocolatier’s.
He had helped himself to the samples: alternating bonbons with white-chocolate logs. Now, his mouth watered as he thought about that tiered fountain spewing hot dark chocolate. He had just reached for his fourth piece when he glanced out the window to see that his father was no longer alone.
Then those men showed up. Old men, even older than you, with friendly eyes. They acted like they knew you.
Luciano had shoved one last bonbon into his mouth and stepped out of the shop. The men were speaking German. His father nodded and responded, but when Luciano went over to greet them, his father warded him off with a flick of his hand, so he waited by the display of truffles until they laughed, clapped Papá on the back and carried on.
When I asked who they were, you said “old friends” and left it at that. Ashamed of me once again . . . isn’t that right, Papá? Embarrassed by my baby face, which you think is too soft for a man. Embarrassed by the way I wear my hair long and loose around my forehead. Or were you afraid I’d make another stupid comment, complaining about how my calves ached from skiing, or telling them that I aspire to be the country’s next great poet? You made me wait out of sight in the corner like an unwelcome dog. Actually, no, even that dog was allowed to hang around your heels, nuzzling your legs as you patted its head. Good boy, you said, good boy.
WORK dragged on at ESMA, and while this gave Luciano some sense of routine, it was a routine that was never short of pain or suffering. Even those words no longer sufficed. He would have to devise a new vocabulary to capture the normalcy of terror.
Throughout his life, he’d told his mother around dinnertime that he was hungry. But “hungry” failed to capture what he felt at ESMA, an ache that wormed its way through his body, attacking every corner, leaving his dry tongue with a revolting taste, his limbs weak and every movement an effort, like he was being consumed from the inside out.
When he wasn’t fantasizing about steaks and passion-fruit ice cream and pastries oozing dulce de leche, he anticipated his next shower. He tried to remember what it was like to feel clean, to smell of soap and watch his skin turn pink from the spray of hot water.
LUCIANO stood beneath the showerhead, shivering from the icy drizzle. The temperature roused his tired bones, made his veins sing. The sensation transported him to a Patagonian lake, where he dove from a dock and broke through the water’s mirrored surface. He clung to this daydream while scrubbing himself and stared at the concrete walls until they became foothills thick with pine trees, a lone boat bobbing along the shore.
The shower shut off automatically. Luciano wiped the drops from his eyes and let the bathroom come back into focus: the fluorescent lights, the slick floor, the curve of asses rising off skinny frames, penises hanging shrivelled and limp. He glanced at the other men. Gabriel reached for his shirt, wet hair plastered to his legs. Their bruised bodies were wasting away from disuse, but something inside Luciano still stirred. He tried to imagine what it would be like if Gabriel were to come up from behind, pull him in for a kiss, holding his warm body close while they grew hard together.
As he dried off, he felt someone watching him and looked up to find Shark leering by the sink in the corner. Luciano swallowed and finished getting dressed, trying to hide himself as much as possible in the open room. His arms tingled as he pushed them through his shirtsleeves and bent to tie his shoelaces. A guard cuffed him, but right before the hood slipped over his head, Luciano spotted Shark staring in disgust.
The other guard arranged the prisoners in line. Handcuffs rattled as the prisoners shuffled out of the bathroom, but a tight grip pinched the back of Luciano’s neck, holding him back.
Shark shut the bathroom door. “You’re a maricón, aren’t you?” His low voice hissed in Luciano’s ear. “You think I can’t see that?”
A blow to the shoulders knocked Luciano to the ground. His hands flew out but failed to brace his fall, and his head smacked the tiled floor, sending bright colours kaleidoscoping across his vision. He curled up to shield himself from the kicks to his ribs, his stomach, his balls.
“Get up!” Shark pulled Luciano to his knees and yanked off his hood, tearing out a few hairs along with it.
In the sudden brightness, Shark was standing over him, undoing his belt buckle, his fly. He pulled Luciano by the hair, shoved his face into his stiff cock. “You’ll like this. Show me you’re good for something.”
Luciano’s scalp roared. Everything went foggy, but he did as he was told. Shark thrust into him, clenching a fistful of his hair, rocking onto his toes and letting out staggered grunts. “Faster.”
Pressure against the back of Luciano’s throat. Flashes of the older man who had once eyed him invitingly from the other side of the Subte platform, Gabriel’s wet body, and Fabián, sunbathing shirtless in the park, the trail of hair on his stomach leading down into his shorts. Fabián. He closed his eyes, pretending this was Fabián, that he finally had the chance to touch him, to pleasure him.
His teeth scraped skin, prompting a hard smack. Luciano began to gag and tried to pull away, but Shark held him there. Then he wanted to scream, but deep down, he knew he deserved to be punished. Punished for his urges, his secrets. For watching the guys change after soccer, for collecting fantasies about Fabián while he was supposed to be dating Camila. He deserved this. All he could do was stare down at the mildewed grid of grout between the floor tiles and try to block out the guard’s groans.
Soon, Shark’s body grew tense, his breathing fast and heavy. With one hand, he leaned to brace himself against the wall. Luciano didn’t look up, but sensed the guard’s face twisting in pleasure. With a sudden jerk, Shark pulled out, yanked Luciano’s head back and came with a deep groan. He zipped up his pants and pushed Luciano to the floor, kicking him in the shins. One blow after another. Blood trickled down Luciano’s forehead. Shark started to yell, but the words blurred beneath the pain as Luciano’s body curled against the impact. He begged for help as loudly as he could, with the hope that someone would come and put an end to it all, but no one did.
LUCIANO sat at a white desk in a small, white room. He held a pen in his hand, but otherwise the desk and the room were
empty. The door opened and two guards entered, dragging someone who was also in white, his face covered by a white silk hood. The guards dropped the prisoner in the centre of the room and slunk out, leaving the man in a heap on the floor.
“Get up.”
Although he hadn’t moved his mouth, Luciano heard his own disembodied voice. The man stirred and magically rose in a single, fluid motion. He stood with his legs wide, hands bound behind his back, and from this movement alone, Luciano knew who it was.
An index card covered in Luciano’s handwriting appeared on the desk. Name: Fabián Sanmartino. The clatter of the handcuffs against the floor made him look up, but nobody had entered the room to unlock them. The hood followed the path of the handcuffs, drifting like a leaf caught mid-air.
Fabián stared at him hollowly. His jaw looked freshly shaven, his complexion flawless, but one eye had swollen almost shut. “You did this to me.”
Luciano shook his head and tried to rise but felt weighted to the chair. “No, no, I didn’t. Don’t you have any idea what you mean to me?”
“They think I’m just like you, but I’m not. You betrayed me.”
“No. Impossible.” He tossed the pen aside, but it stayed poised above the desk, and he watched as another line materialized on the index card. T, for transferred. Dread seeped into his core. “Please, you have to understand; I would never do anything to hurt you.”
Fabián took a step backward, his dark hair stark against the whiteness. From the neck down, he blended into the sterile surroundings.
“Please, believe me!”
Another step, and another. Fabián’s outline grew fainter, but he kept walking back and back and back until, finally, he became part of the walls themselves and vanished.
Luciano blinked hard, willing his beloved to return. When he opened his eyes, he was still alone but had returned to the confines of his hood. His head throbbed. A scab at his temple chafed against the fabric when he tried to roll over, making him curl into a ball. Somewhere, the sound of a door opening. Lifting his hands to cover his face, he tried to protect himself from the expected beating. This sent a shooting pain down his arms. His ribs felt like they’d been crushed and were floating around his stomach. The blow never came, but he thought he heard a stadium full of voices laughing, singing, crying.
The jagged corner of his chipped front tooth nicked his tongue. He parted his lips. “Please, water.” Once, twice, he asked, but he couldn’t tell if he was yelling or whispering.
The sounds around him faded. Then came the strike of a match in the far corner of his cell, and shadows emerged through the darkness. A flame flickered before a hand rose up to shelter it. The clinking of glass followed. When the hand dropped away, the flame had grown to a soft glow. The light came from an oil lamp, and the shadowy figure holding it perched on a stool in the corner. The stranger raised the lamp, while his free hand slipped off the hood that covered his head. Luciano realized the stranger was himself. It was him as he had once appeared: unmarred, tanned and fit, his gaze calm, pensive. And while he wore the same clothes as Luciano did right then, the fabric bore no stains, no rips or missing buttons.
Luciano sat up and pulled himself into the opposite corner, pressing his knees to his chest. The pain was gone. He waited for his other self to make a move, but nothing happened.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, certain he was dead.
The figure placed the lamp on the mattress between them and adjusted the brass knob to raise the flame, casting shadows on the opposite wall. Luciano looked to the left to find another figure sitting there, a small boy with thick hair and grass-stained shins. The boy smiled up at the darkness with Luciano’s own electric-blue eyes.
In awe, Luciano extended his hand, but when the boy turned his head, he stared right through him. A great sadness welled inside Luciano, but before he said anything, the first figure pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit another match. The smoke whirled, clouding the space between them with the aroma of cinnamon and lemon, his mother’s scent.
When the smoke cleared, a third figure crouched in the final corner. This time, a far older man, a Luciano with hunched shoulders, spidery hair and a large mole on his cheekbone. Leaning on a wooden cane, he looked to the floor as if searching for something.
This older one frightened Luciano. Unlike the others, he had never been real and might never exist in the future. Luciano noticed his shackles were gone. Luciano got up, moving toward the others, seeking their comfort. The figures turned to him, but suddenly appeared vapid, like they had no souls, and the colour drained from their skin as the light in the cell grew dimmer. The lamp had run out of oil, the wick burned to its end. Luciano fixated on its final murmur, watching the flame shudder until the instant when everything disappeared again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
MARIJKE
APRIL 2, 1945
BUCHENWALD
A NASTY BOUT OF NAUSEA FOLLOWED MY ARGUMENT with Karl. I woke up the next day with the feeling that someone was trying to scoop out my insides. At breakfast, the others drank our ration of coffee substitute, which had grown tasteless as the war dragged on. But that morning, I couldn’t get within two metres of my cup without making a staggering run for the bathroom. Every half-hour, I sat down to relieve myself and bit my tongue to cut off my nervous whimpers. Edith had never returned to the brothel after falling sick, and two other girls had disappeared since then. Would I meet the same fate?
All morning, I lay in bed, clenching the bedpost and wiping the sweat from my forehead. While the others cleaned the brothel, I tossed from side to side, curled into a ball, but nothing calmed the nausea. Karl haunted my thoughts, begging me to listen, telling me he wasn’t the man I thought he was. I love you, Marijke. The words reverberated, growing louder until they blocked out everything else.
As Sophia entered the bedroom, she saw me struggling and hurried over. “What’s wrong?”
I sat up, clutching my belly. She grabbed an empty wastepaper bin and thrust it in front of me, but I pushed it to the side.
“It’s Karl,” I said.
“Karl? That’s why you’re sick?”
I made room for her to sit beside me. She folded her darning into the pocket of her skirt and waited for me to speak. “Don’t feel you have to tell me, Marijke.”
There was a quietness in her tone, a sort of hurt that made me realize how little attention I’d paid to the other girls since Karl had freed me from the other visits, how focused I’d been on myself. Every night, when the brothel closed to the prisoners, the girls returned to the sleeping quarters, muttering complaints and swapping shreds of gossip over the night’s men: who had lasted the longest, who was the most attractive. Time had twisted those nighttime visits into a sort of game, but this did little to mask the repulsion that lay beneath it all. I hadn’t taken part in that post-coital ritual for months. By the time Karl left the brothel, the other girls were asleep.
“Do you think,” I asked, “do you think that the Nazis are all evil? I mean, truly, deep down?”
“I know what you think.”
“What?”
“You talk of Karl like he’s some Romeo, like you could live happily ever after if the Allies and Axis powers could just put aside their differences and make up.”
“Karl is different. He barely believes in the Reich. All he wants is to be back in Bavaria with his dogs, a quiet life. And he’s sweet to me, he says he loves me.”
“He’s infatuated, Marijke; he loves the idea of you. They’re ruthless, those men. They care only about people who look and think exactly like them. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was all switches and gears under those uniforms. You saw what he did to those prisoners.”
I swallowed, remembering the colour of that man’s beaten face. “I know. That was awful. Beyond awful. But he wasn’t beating them himself. What if he was just following orders? He would be in just as much trouble if he tried to defy the Kommandant.”
Sop
hia shook her head. “Listen to what you’re saying. Even as a German, I won’t defend those barbaric men. He’s bewitched you.”
Hearing that launched me into another dizzy spell. I reached for the bedpost. His face was there, those beautiful blue eyes, darkness rising up behind them like flood waters. Was I going mad thinking like this? Nobody but a fool would look at Mr. Hyde and see only Dr. Jekyll. What was stopping me from hating him?
Sophia brushed her hand through my curls, her skin cool and soothing. “Think about what you really believe, what you expect to happen when the war ends.” She got up off the bed. “But for now, just lie down. I’ll cover the rest of your cleaning duties and figure out what to tell the others.”
She tucked me in and I rested my head against the wall, wishing I could block out the feelings that swarmed around me and fall asleep dreaming of Theo.
When I woke an hour later, the nausea had faded. Afternoon sunlight pierced the windows, shining spotlights on the floor, and the sound of chatter drifted into the room. I pulled myself out of bed, pushing thoughts of Karl to the back of my mind.
The girls sat around the table in the day room, telling stories of life in Berlin before the war: of felted, feathered hats, of silk gloves and secret affairs spilled over glasses of brandy. They talked of cabaret and jazz, a daring music that challenged so much of what I’d learned in my classes at the conservatory. But Sophia said the jazz musicians had disappeared; Hitler didn’t like the blacks, either.
I told Wilhelmina I was sick and requested the night off. She nodded and made a note on her clipboard before going off to fetch me a cup of hot water.