Lovely Green Eyes

by Arnost Lustig

  At Auschwitz-Birkenau she could return to Block 18 at the Frauenkonzentrationslager, where she would find her mother and friends. Here she was alone, with no-one to appeal to, nor any wish to.

  The water in the pot on the stove had been bubbling for a while.

  “That’s for me?” the captain asked.

  “We’re ordered to heat water.”

  “You’re slim,” he said. He thought of the resilience, freshness and flexibility of everything that was young, like springtime grass, an autumn breeze or the smell of pine. His glance passed over her crotch.

  He was treating her like an Aryan man would an Aryan girl. It changed her voice, made her more forthcoming without wanting to be. The captain was undressed now. She avoided looking at his body. He was big, everywhere. Big feet, hands, stomach and chest. In a moment he would begin to explore her with his hands like a blind man, or like an animal tasting the flesh it was about to tear off the bone. She was aware of his size, of his giant’s hands. His chest was overgrown with short fair hair. The skin around his genitals was reddish, almost purple.

  “Do you like the dark?” the captain began to whisper.

  “I don’t mind it,” she said softly.

  “You can blame me for everything.” His voice was already a little hoarse, “fust do with me what you do with everybody.”

  She straightened up so that she could look into his eyes.

  She poured hot water into the basin, glad that she could do something other than what she was about to do. She added some cold water from the jug and tested the temperature with her fingers to make sure it was right.

  “Do you want soap?”

  “You think I should?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did you do it with my predecessor? How do you like to do it?”

  She smiled to avoid an answer. Would he regard her smile as a promise? In matters she knew nothing about she was guided by instinct. Her mother had been right. She soaped him, washed him and dried him. She closed her eyes as if some soap had got into them. He let her wash him, not saying a word. He had not touched her yet; he let her touch him.

  “You’re very young,” he said. “You’ve got good hands. Good fingers.”

  She knew that this wasn’t true – she had calluses on her hands. But she couldn’t tell him what they came from. The ropes of the boats on the Harmanze pond, repairing the roads in the Frauenkonzentrationslager in Auschwitz-Birkenau, gravelling the paths to the houses of the SS.

  Madam Kulikowa had urged her girls not to underrate the importance of the first touch of their hands. If a girl were nervous her hands would be sweaty and cold. Talking too much was also off-putting; to know when to shut up was an art.

  His next question took Skinny by surprise.

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “In Prague.”

  “When did you leave?”

  “Three years ago,” she said.

  “Did you sit at the back of the class?”

  He was teasing her! Did he expect her to tease him?

  “You’re tall,” he said.

  “I don’t know about that.”

  He looked at the bed. “Won’t you sit down?”

  “If you wish.”

  She sat down, folding her arms over her chest and crossing her legs. She was unable to cover her crotch.

  “Are you ashamed in front of me?”

  “No,” she replied.

  “Not a little bit?”

  “A little bit.”

  She blushed. He thought it rather funny that she should be ashamed. The smell of the coal enveloped the cubicle. It was burning slowly because it was damp.

  “You’re pale,” the captain said.

  “I haven’t got any disease,” she said. “I’m healthy.”

  “I hope so. Do they let you out to get some fresh air?”

  “We sweep the courtyard and clear the snow by the gate.”

  “Your skin’s almost translucent.”

  “We don’t get much sun.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  He stepped up to her. He seemed like a giant.

  “Permit me,” he said. He sat down next to her. Sitting, he did not seem quite so huge.

  The captain touched her behind with the palm of his hand. She was afraid of crying out in pain. She had a festering sore there where she had been whipped by an SS man for not getting off the train quickly enough on the night they had arrived at No. 232 Ost.

  “Who did this to you? Does it hurt?”

  “Not so much now.”

  “Looks like a wound from a whip. Or a cane. You don’t see what they flog you with?”

  Could his mood change from one moment to the next? There was almost anger in his voice, a new shade, the irritation of a soldier who could not avoid seeing who was firing at him. He had not missed how she’d flinched. Had his voice become more severe? At that moment she could visualize him as a commanding officer or the father of an adolescent girl.

  She was waiting for the captain to pull her to him and to roll on top of her. She almost wanted it now. She was not afraid of him, she was afraid of giving herself away. He had so many questions, and every one of them was uncomfortable because it meant too many answers.

  The captain lay down beside her, although she was still sitting. Was he waiting for her to lie down beside him? She didn’t know what to do. He stretched and she could hear his joints click. He seemed to her like a tree, like a block of wood. He lay there as if he had known her for a long time.

  “In the officers’ mess you’d look good at my side. You’re pretty.”

  A little bony though, he thought.

  She still had her arms crossed over her chest, rigidly. He let her sit there, legs crossed. Did he want her to uncover herself, to drop her hands and open her legs? Madam Kulikowa had said that she was all arms and legs. And it was true. The captain raised himself on his elbow.

  “Permit me,” he said again and what she had thought an unfriendly tone had now disappeared from his voice. He gave her his enormous hand.

  “You shouldn’t look at me like this,” he said hoarsely. Alarmed, she forced herself to say: “I’m not.”

  She half turned so as not lie on her wound. The captain understood.

  “Did they do this to you here?” he asked.

  “I had a fall.”

  “Where?”

  She hesitated with her reply and was afraid the pause between question and answer might be too long.

  “On the ramp, by the siding, when we got here a week ago. It was still dark. There was a rush.”

  “They brought you here at night?”

  “Yes. Loaded us up in the dark, too.”

  “If you ask me, it looks like a hunting crop. At the Kriegsschule in Potsdam we had riding lessons. At home I was taught how to ride and handle a horse by my father and his groom. We kept horses. I don’t just drive a Horch or a tank.”

  He told her in a whisper that her childish voice reminded him of a distant holiday in the Alps, when he was twelve and was seduced by his first prostitute. Then he told her of a prank at his officers’ school. As cadets they had blown pepper into the nostrils of Colonel-General von Lothar-Jünger’s horse. The horse, inevitably, had thrown him as soon as the general mounted. Later, over cards and wine, the cadets had argued about whether it was right to torture a horse like that.

  The pillows in all but Madam Kulikowa’s cubicle were of tow-cloth sacking, filled with sand. The sand grated.

  “That’s not the prettiest sound,” said the captain. “Know who you look like? Our first Hungarian maid. She was 14, getting on for 15. Heaven knows what’s become of her.”

  “First they look at your feet, then at your eyes, and next at your breasts. It’s a good idea to stretch, that way they look fuller,” Madam had told her.

  She was lying here with a German officer. Nothing to be proud of. A week ago it would never even have occurred to her to imagine this. Then she had been dead
even though still alive. Since that day her flesh had proved to twelve soldiers each day that she was still alive. She thought of the engineer who had complained that she was lying there like a frightened cat. She did not wish to punish her body for what she could not change. She forced herself not to resist. She was nervous, and had forgotten the oil. He saw her glance towards the bottle. She tried to free her hand and reach for it.

  “You think we need that?”

  He was watching her. Over the past days she had learnt how a famished soldier encounters a body, his body meeting hers, and how that made her struggle with herself. She felt a distance growing inside her, a distance produced by closeness.

  He was dissatisfied.

  “You’re acting like a virgin.”

  “I can’t do it otherwise.”

  “You can’t do it at all.”

  “I want to.”

  “Go on, want it then,” he said hoarsely. “You should want what I want.”

  With his palms he parted her legs. He half opened his mouth. She could see his strong white teeth. He was breathing hard. He pressed down on her with his chest so that she felt the wood of the bed against her back and her hands. She knew he would manage even without the oil. She knew by now what the strength of a man meant, multiplied by anger.

  Twelve times a day – by way of exception today only once with the captain – she let a stranger do with her body whatever he liked. She felt ashamed not only for herself, even though there were no witnesses. She must not show it. She must not think of whose turn it would be next. The second, the third, the twelfth man. She concentrated on the fire in the stove, on the firewood she had put on it. She had diarrhoea and a headache. Fatty had thrown up from a headache that morning.

  “You smell rather nice,” the captain said. “You’re clean. I appreciate this. You make me think of a bed of heather in the forest.”

  He was listening to the artillery fire.

  “I hope you’re not afraid.”

  “No.” She had learnt to differentiate between lies and lies. The best lie was the simplest – almost the truth.

  “I’d like you to want what I want.”

  She did not have a high opinion of her body. She thought of an ocean, deeper than anyone could fathom. Of a night so dark that the day would never dawn. Of fog, with wolves emerging from it, close to the walls of the estate. She could hear the squeaking and scurrying of the rats as they disappeared into the dark corners of the corridor. The captain’s features grew tense. It was beyond seriousness, almost a grimace. It took her breath away. She didn’t know what would happen next. She was falling into a void, into darkness, into a chill that was different from the outside air. She felt a pain in her crotch, a swelling of her skin. Everything was the captain’s body and then her body. Behind her she heard the voices of her father, mother, her brother. She did not want that. She shut her eyes, but she could not shut her ears. She thought of Big Leopolda Kulikowa’s advice. The soldier is a snake; the girl is a gullet. She felt in herself water, emptiness. Then fire, friction, pain.

  She understood something she had not understood about her first drop of menstrual blood. At 15 she realized that there were things she would not confess even to God.

  The captain’s breathing was getting louder and faster. She thought of steep slopes, of flat fallow fields, of the abandoned mines at Auschwitz-Birkenau. She thought of the bloody skin of animals.

  “You are like a humming bird.” the captain whispered.

  “Would you like some oil?”

  “No.”

  She shut her eyes. She felt ashamed. She was like the gate of the estate No. 232 Ost with its imperial eagle and swastika, a gate entered by whoever chose to, whenever they chose to.

  With his lips close to her ear the captain murmured something about a sun-drenched shore on the Arctic Ocean. Of marble cliffs he had read about the night before. Of the language in which their distant ancestors communicated in Paradise. Of giddiness that rose and fell, of communication without words.

  He regarded her as one of them. Exactly what she both wanted and did not want. She heard shouting, something beyond words. What did he get the Iron Cross for? For what had he been proposed for the Knight’s Cross, and for what did he, by way of reward, obtain permission to visit No. 232 Ost? She thought of his pistol. Had she reconciled herself to being embraced by a German officer?

  “Do I seem too big to you?” he whispered. “Too rough?”

  He seemed to her like a hunk of raw meat. She knew that she was acting like a bad whore. In Germany it was better to be a bad whore than a good Jew.

  Her stomach ached. She had long known that life was a trap. Most of them were caught in it. Had she ever been free? Yes, she had, when she was at school. But what were you to do once you were inside the trap and did not want to die? She did not want to think of why she did not wish to die. Everything was a trap – her breathing, the captain’s breathing, the light, and the sounds from outside. The wolves, the crows and the rats. She was scarcely aware that she was naked. Her body, too, was a trap in which she herself was caught.

  The captain had satisfied himself. It did not matter to him who it was. But it was she, the youngest girl in No. 232 Ost. Not that bad really, but not all that good either.

  “You’re not very good, but you’re better than bad,” he said.

  It was something between a commendation, a reproach and a warning. She did not know what she could have done better. She had simply been there, letting him maul and grind her body. She was with him, he was with her. That was what was keeping her alive, just as her work in Dr Krueger’s surgery had done at Auschwitz-Birkenau, or the work on the railway carriages, or catching fish, collecting eggs from gulls’ nests, or pulling drowned bodies from the Harmanze pond. She wondered if it was worth the price paid for it, but she was better off than tens of thousands of others. She kept repeating this to herself. She was better off. She was paying for her life with her crotch, her thighs, her arms, legs, lips, fingers, tongue – and her soul.

  That was what it was like, and she knew it could not be otherwise because that otherwise meant the gas chamber, the crematorium and ashes. Suddenly she hated Captain Hentschel, the German army captain and son of a prominent, blue-blooded family, for whom, as to so many other Germans, war was merely a job. A job, just as auditing the books of business people had been a job to her father – business people who had envied his mathematical talent, his analytical skill, his friendly nature and his piety when they met on Friday evenings in the synagogue.

  The captain had come inside her in three convulsions that shook his whole frame and twisted his features into a grimace that suggested the final exertion of a dying man.

  After a while he asked, “What was your first time like?”

  “It was here,” she breathed.

  “You were a virgin?”

  He took her silence as assent.

  “Was it strange?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  The captain asked no further questions. She was almost grateful to him.

  “It’s cosy in here,” he said. “War is beautiful. After all.”

  His words surprised her. There were things she did not understand, but she was glad he was talking. All he wanted from her was to listen. He began to tell her about a woman named Lilo.

  She was a nurse. One night, after her 18-hour shift, he had taken her to a gutted farmhouse. She smelt of disinfectant, of the blood of the wounded, of medicines. They lay on their backs, close to each other. He kissed her hair.

  “Close to her, I sensed life as strongly as when I went into battle the first time. She whispered to me that together we would kill death.”

  He paused.

  “You know, we Germans are in love with death.”

  He was talking to himself, to his dead lover. For her, death had been neither the sister nor the mother of beauty.

  She remained silent. His words seemed ridiculous, nonsensical. “It was late August and we watched
the showers of meteorites.

  A rain of shooting stars in an August night. Lilo called them laurel tears. It was the ioth of August, Saint Laurentius’ day. Fireflies.”

  “She knew more about war than she wanted to know. That was her second year out east. Kursk, the great tank battle, was in her bones.”

  He paused, then continued.

  “I too know more about war than I would wish to. The beautiful side and the merely necessary one. What about you?”

  “I’m new here,” Skinny answered.

  “Who initiated you?”

  “We aren’t supposed to talk of anyone we’ve been with.”

  “I can see we’re not suited to polite conversation,” he said. “I only talk to you, but you don’t talk to me.”

  “I answer you.”

  “When I was a little boy our parents took us to the Savoy Alps in France for a winter holiday. The mist in the valleys had a similar colour to this fog here. It was beautiful, unattainable and sad. At lunchtime, as we sat in the dining room, the sun lit up the snow-covered trees and shrubs so fiercely that for just a few moments it was as though they were made of glass. They had an almost surreal brilliance. Father pointed it out to us. He loved the snow, the mountains, winter. In the evening, at the Golden Court Hotel, father showed us Mont Blanc in the moonlight. He had tears in his eyes.”

  Did it amuse him to confide in a little tart who did not have much to say for herself? She realized that he was treating her as if he wanted to make her a friend, or create something memorable between them.

  “I’m feeling lonely. I feel lonely wherever I am.” Then he said: “I kill in order not to be killed and I experience life most intensely with people like you.”