by Ellen Keith
It took three minutes to get to the prisoners’ brothel. He arrived out of breath. Pushing past the cashier, he moved straight for the koberzimmers. He ran from one to the other to check the peepholes. Naked, uninterested girls, skeletal men. Another guard touching himself, almost drooling. Karl stopped at the second-last door. Inside stood Hoffmann, his trousers around his knees. Marijke at his ankles, still dressed. Karl yanked open the door and rushed at him with his fist raised. The amusement on Hoffmann’s face turned to shock, and Marijke looked up at Karl with glazed eyes. Karl swung at Hoffmann, who ducked out of the way, knocking Marijke aside.
“Get the fuck away from her!” Karl swung again, but Hoffmann was already moving toward the door. Then he was gone. Karl ran over to her, tried to shake her awake. Her skin was grey and beads of sweat covered the back of her neck. “Marijke, it’s me. I’m here.”
He lifted her onto his lap, but she still didn’t move. Her pulse flickered like a fading light bulb. The brothel supervisor and cashier watched as he carried her out of the brothel.
A girl poked her head out of the sleeping quarters and rushed toward him. “Sir, where are you taking her?”
He didn’t waste time on an answer. “Marijke, love. Wake up. Talk to me.” Her hip bone jabbed into his stomach but she didn’t move. As he approached the infirmary blocks, he told her about the Americans, about the evacuation list. He told her he wanted them to stay together. “We’ll find a place in the middle of Bavaria, somewhere in the forest by a lake. I’ll build us a little chalet and we’ll live there in peace, just you and me and maybe some children one day. No war, no politics. Stay with me, darling.”
Her body remained limp. As he reached for the door of the infirmary, a yellow glow fell over her face. Her lips were parted, like she wanted to say something, but her eyes stayed shut. Her eyelashes looked almost white.
A nurse in a blood-spotted shift glanced up as he pulled open the door. “Schutzhaftlagerführer. Good evening. Is everything all right?” He stopped bandaging the prisoner in front of him and came over to examine Marijke.
“She fainted,” Karl said. “She needs attention.”
The nurse looked around as if trying to direct his attention to the lack of beds. Dying prisoners in every corner. The stench of piss and death. Karl brushed past him and carried Marijke toward the end of the hall.
“Where’s the doctor?”
“Dr. Fischer is in the operating theatre. I’ll tell him you’re here.”
Karl looked down at Marijke. “Isn’t there a different doctor available?”
“Dr. Wagner is scheduled to begin his shift in half an hour.”
“Find him,” he said. “Tell him it’s urgent.”
The nurse hurried off. Karl scoured the hall for somewhere to place Marijke. He didn’t want to pack her in with all those dying men, but he relented upon finding an empty cot with proper bedding between some of the bunks. He laid her on it and squatted beside her, stroking her wrist. Within minutes, Dr. Wagner arrived. When he saw Marijke in her brothel clothes, he seemed surprised but started to examine her without any remark. “She’s probably suffering from exhaustion. I’ll have to check her further. I suggest you leave her with me.”
Just as Karl was about to refuse, he remembered Brandt’s meeting. He stepped forward. “Listen, Wagner. She needs to be taken care of, just as you would any woman of good German blood. Just as you would your wife. I don’t want any questions.”
Dr. Wagner rubbed his temples, and Karl noticed the fatigued lines on his face. “Please,” Karl said, “just make sure she gets better. I’ll come back in a couple of hours.”
WORK tied him up for the rest of the night. The communists had grouped and were putting up a good fight, trying to thwart the evacuations by refusing to work or to show up at the muster grounds for roll call. The evacuation list Ritter had compiled contained twenty-five thousand names, but a good six thousand were in blocks that showed mob resistance, so it was going to be impossible to get everyone out. Karl signed his approval and set off to find Brandt for a final check. But as he carried the stack of pages, he couldn’t ignore the weight of the lives in his hands, those words on the leaflet. He knew he was diverting these people from liberation, and if the conditions en route were as harsh as he imagined, a great many would die. He flipped through the stack of paper, scanning the list of prisoners from Ohrdruf until he found De Graaf’s name. Visions of Marijke came to him, of the future they could have together, of vacations in Paris, of pushing a baby carriage alongside a Bavarian lake. He slipped the page back into the stack and proceeded into Brandt’s office with the first sliver of satisfaction he’d felt in days. If Buchenwald was going down, at least Marijke’s husband would go down with it.
KARL took Marijke’s hand in his. Her forehead radiated heat, and she was still sleeping. It was two o’clock in the morning, so everyone in the infirmary blocks was asleep, except for the doctor, who had locked himself in his office with a bottle of gin. The rancid body odour was inescapable. Karl debated the risk of taking her to the SS infirmary. Brandt would be too busy to notice, but Karl had to admit she’d be much safer among the prisoners when the Americans arrived.
He bent over her and stroked her cheek. Her curls knotted around her face. He thought about lying down next to her, but what would the medical staff think? Besides, the cot was far too small. For a few hours, he stayed by her side. She stirred, though never woke, but other patients did, and the sight of their withered limbs stretching out from the bunks terrified him. How had it come to this?
Just before dawn, he returned to his quarters. An hour or two of sleep and then he had to be up to report to Brandt.
Chapter Twenty-Four
LUCIANO
JUNE 13, 1977
BUENOS AIRES
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN DAYS THAT LUCIANO LAY THERE in his cell, fighting off hallucinations, or it might have been a week. He tried to pray, tried to compose a letter to his father, but thoughts passed through him like coloured bars of light. When he did break past the delirium, he remembered what Shark had made him do and wished he could return to that hazy state of madness, because in the real world, the world of the prison, he could no longer hide what he was.
In the fifth grade, he’d run a three-legged race beside the lake in Parque Tres de Febrero as part of his best friend’s birthday party. Luciano was paired with one of Héctor friends from swimming, a boy named Ricardo. Ricardo had tugged Luciano along the path, had laughed as he stumbled to keep up. They crossed the finish line with a face-plant, beating Héctor and his partner by half a metre. Ricardo rolled over, his arms covered in grass stains, and gave Luciano a huge hug. Luciano knew right then that the warm, tender feeling that rose up in him wasn’t supposed to happen.
For the most part, he assumed he’d done a good job of hiding it, joining the soccer team like his father wanted, checking out car shows and going on about hot girls, dating a few of them.
One Saturday in January, he and Fabián had gone out cruising in Fabián’s mother’s car. A heat wave had settled in, and the line at the local ice cream parlour stretched down the block. Two girls huddled together, licking their ice cream cones as their bronzed legs and bare shoulders caught the sun. Fabián slowed down and whistled, making them giggle, and they came up to the car as soon as he pulled over. A flick of Fabián’s head sent Luciano into the back seat so one of the girls could take the front. The other one slid in with Luciano. Within a few minutes, Fabián was cupping his girl’s thigh, and the girl in the back had her arm around Luciano, who sat stiff and awkward for the entire ride, without taking his eyes off Fabián’s hand. Later, once they had dropped off the girls, they drove home in silence. When they passed a strip of love motels, Luciano nudged Fabián. “Boy, the things I’d like to do to her.” Fabián kept his eyes on the road and didn’t answer.
Another time, Fabián left a corduroy jacket at his place to give away with a pile of Luciano’s old clothes. Instead of donating it, Luciano
left it hanging on his bedpost so the smell of his friend was always close. He thought of how he’d gotten hard watching the sweat drip off Fabián’s back on a school trip to the rainforest, his frantic rush to cover himself with his backpack. How badly he wanted something to happen, anything. Then he thought of Shark, of the dream of Fabián in the white room. He curled up in a ball again.
A tap came on the partition. “Luciano?” Gabriel whispered. “Are you okay?”
“How long has it been?” It hurt to speak.
“Two days, I think.”
“Have they given away my job?”
“Not yet, but they will soon. Can you sit up?”
He used the wall to pull himself up, gritting his teeth to kill the groans, and once he was sitting, he felt a small victory.
“Luciano?” Gabriel paused. “It doesn’t matter, you know. They leech on to anything they think can destroy us.”
Luciano shifted uncomfortably. “What doesn’t matter?”
“You’re a good person, that’s all. Don’t let them win.”
Dear Papá,
I need your advice. Papá, I can’t stop—I’ve been lying to you, to a lot of people, trying to fake too many things. Like Camila. You met her outside our apartment one Sunday, remember? She’s tall and freckled. She’s always laughing. A tango instructor and a psychology student. We dated for a few months. Fabián kept bugging me to ask her out, so I did.
In the beginning, she and I hung out on the weekends—dinners, movies, walks in the park. We held hands, kissed a bit, but nothing else. Papá, I couldn’t pretend I had feelings for her. She felt like a friend. I started helping out at her tango classes, so we’d spend less time alone, but when Fabián asked how things were going, I told him everything he wanted to hear.
Luciano sighed, picturing Fabián’s sly grin as he stuck out his hand for a high-five. “Che, I told you she was into you. I knew it,” Fabián kept saying, while Luciano admired the taut muscles in his friend’s neck, tried to pinpoint the perfect stubbled spot to kiss, to swirl his tongue against.
But Papá, I couldn’t—every time I looked into her eyes, I felt like a liar. Like I was betraying myself.
He knew Camila had sensed this whenever he touched her, had seen it in the gap he left between them in the booth at the pizza place, the way he’d looked away when she changed clothes after class. When she had ended things, he wasn’t surprised. She deserved someone who would fall for her, but he didn’t know what he deserved after so much deception.
And, you know, the worst part of hiding things is that it makes me feel so isolated, like nobody out there really knows me. Not you, not even Mamá. You all see pieces of me, the parts you want to acknowledge.
But you know, I think you have your own secrets, secrets hiding behind your blank face.
A few weeks before his capture, Luciano had cut through the Rosario on the way back from soccer practice. A storm was rolling in, and the swans that swam between the paddleboats moved for shelter as the park cleared out. When he passed through the gate to the gardens, the buzz of insects picked up and the air took on a perfume. There were roses everywhere—red, pink, yellow—lining the walkways in tidy rows and creeping up the arbours. The first raindrops began to fall, and he was about to break into a jog when he saw his father sitting alone on a bench, surrounded by tulips so dark that they appeared black. His father hunched, staring into a growing puddle, a newspaper clutched on his lap. His hand had twitched against the headline.
Papá, you didn’t see me in the park the other week, but I saw you. When the thunder started, I expected you to get up, but you didn’t move. You sat there while the rain fell harder, soaking you, dripping from the brim of your fedora. Still, you didn’t move. I debated calling out to you, but instead I stood and watched. You looked like a stranger, a very old, lonely man.
That’s what I’m afraid of becoming.
Tell me, Papá, what is it—how do you manage to keep track of all your lies? How is it possible to lead a double life for so long without going mad?
ONCE his wounds had healed more, Luciano listened for the footsteps of any guard but Shark and asked to work again.
When they brought him downstairs with the other workers, he became suspicious of the guards’ willingness to accept him back and spent the first morning shaking in the photo lab. Gabriel had the task of creating microfilm copies of files in the archive. Because Luciano had used microfilm for university research, the guards told him to help.
They stood in an area that had been sectioned off as a darkroom. Other prisoners around them leaned over photos and documents. Nobody talked or looked at them. Luciano pulled out the first file, which contained information about a girl who also belonged to the JUP. Although they had attended different schools, the file mentioned one or two names he recognized, other members with whom she was associated. Her file ended with a letter L, which, according to Gabriel, stood for “liberated.” The next document concerned a twenty-year-old boy, a Montonero who had been captured three months earlier in an ambush at his home. When he had failed to come home, they took his mother hostage until he showed his face. Luciano’s insides crumpled as he saw the letter on this file. He had to stop checking.
Gabriel showed him how to position the file under the microfilmer, how to set the exposure and how the images came out. The whirrs and clicks of the microfilmer soothed Luciano, brought him back to his university library, but every time he heard a guard marching in the hall, he paused, terrified that Shark might appear in the doorway.
At one point, a guard came and escorted them to the bathroom in the basement. On the way back, Luciano spotted Shark. He stiffened and watched as Shark half-helped, half-tugged a woman across the basement. Her pants were wet at the crotch, and she cringed as she held her huge belly. The other guard pushed Luciano toward the photo lab, but Luciano turned in time to see a man in a white coat open a door and usher her into a room. Her shrieks filled the basement in bursts for what must have been hours, until, after one long, gasping moan, Luciano heard the howl of a baby.
The noise picked up, turned into high-pitched sobs, until everyone paused to listen. But it sounded misplaced, unreal. He tried to picture the baby in the other room, the tiny fists unfurling, but all he could imagine were those metal bed frames. He thought of his cousin’s birth, how he’d been allowed to watch while his mother helped with the delivery. The doctor had snipped the umbilical cord and cleaned the baby before placing her at his aunt’s breast. Luciano imagined that happening with this newborn, but then he recalled what Gabriel had told him. Once the mother had nursed the baby long enough for it to gain an ounce of strength, the doctor would take the child from her arms and give it to the navy, which would adopt it out internally. By the time some navy family brought home the infant, the mother would be dead, and that child would grow up swaddled in secrets and lies.
The baby’s cries abated but kept echoing in Luciano’s head. He thought of the pregnant woman who had been in the cell next to him, about her dead husband, and he wondered how long she had left. Plenty of young married couples had joined the insurgent groups, including a bunch of his friends in the JUP, but he hadn’t considered that many of the women would be pregnant or already mothers. Did they understand the danger they were putting their children in by getting involved? Or had they believed that they had to act for the sake of their children’s future?
He grabbed another file and stared at the stack that awaited conversion. His hand tensed around the document, the paper creasing under his thumb. So many names, so many faces that would be written off as “missing.”
He unrolled the end of a coil of film and fed the long brown ribbon into the microfilmer. On the table beside him sat two full rolls of government secrets. While waiting for the machine to start up, he picked up those rolls, considered their size and weight. Small enough to be stashed away, tucked into the waistband of a pair of pants, the lining of a bra. Nodding to himself, he positioned the first record, anoth
er victim marked with a T. He took a shot of it with the microfilmer, put it to the side and readied the next one. But when he had filled up the entire roll, he didn’t switch to a new batch of files. Instead, he reached for a fresh roll of microfilm and secretly started again on the same set, making a second copy of each file.
Dear Papá,
Borges once called this city a place “as eternal as air and water.” But it seems like we’re bringing it down upon our heads, doesn’t it? Soon there will be nothing, nothing left to his Eden but rubble.
Luciano tried to picture the lecture halls at university, the soccer pitch, his neighbourhood. He longed to wander the streets again, beneath trees with corkscrewed trunks; he longed for spring, when blossoming jacarandas rained purple over the city, for maté sipped between friends, for bookstores that smelled of must and ancient mysteries.
Papá, when this ends, when the military is defeated, the truth will come out. The people—no, we—we will restore this city, this country to its rightful state. And the dead, the missing, we’ll offer them whatever shred of honour we can. You think it’s best to stay quiet, stick with the flock, even if the flock is headed in the wrong direction. You’re wrong. We have to fight. We have to do something; we have to do anything we can, to show them they won’t succeed with their plans. That we won’t let them win. Argentina needs us, all of us.
GABRIEL no longer had to wear the hood. The officers said he was “recoverable,” that they planned to reintegrate him into society. They either tried to turn their prisoners into their little pets or put them down. Dogs, a hawk, a shark—Argentina was no longer a country of people but a fighting, snapping, growling pack of wild beasts.
After the beating from Shark, Luciano’s clothes had become starched with blood, but he wore them to work several times before anyone said anything. During a bathroom break on the third day, one of the military officers passed through the basement and frowned at the sight of Luciano. “You’ve been working in this?”