Lovely Green Eyes

by Arnost Lustig

  Suddenly Skinny felt like telling him that she was 15 and Jewish. But only for a hundredth of a second. Instead, she walked over to stoke up the fire. She thought of her race and his. Of her legislated uncleanliness alongside his immaculate race. The things the captain had told her were intended for the ears of a pure-blood. If he knew that she was Jewish he would treat her like a diseased person whose skin was covered with impurities. He would shrink from touching her, he would let her be exterminated.

  “We lost 20,000 men,” the captain said. He did not say when.

  At Auschwitz-Birkenau as many as that died in a single day and night, 20,000 people were the cargo of a mere four or five trains, each with 50 wagons, arriving from Prague, Warsaw, Copenhagen or Paris, from Bordeaux, Oslo, Berlin or Bremerhaven.

  Soon none of this would interest anyone, anywhere. The victors would remain, the vanquished would disperse like vapour, blown by the wind to the Arctic Ocean. She knew everything about what she was not supposed to speak of. She no longer wondered how much of it was illusion. She took in what he was saying; she no longer asked herself why.

  Four

  On one occasion 50 girls from Block 18 had been driven to the No. 2 crematorium to clean up whatever the S S ordered them to. Skinny had found herself in a large underground room with three light bulbs in wire frames on the wooden beams across the ceiling. On the walls, where the concrete was cracked, there were brownish stains, just as there were on the floor and ceiling. No-one said that it was blood. It could have been blood and probably was. At first they felt a vague sense of relief at the thought that they were in a shower room. The door with a small window, of glass so thick that it seemed like translucent concrete, stood open against the wall so it wasn’t possible to see if there was a handle on the inside or not. The outside handle was of massive steel with a lock and a bolt. They understood that they were in a gas chamber. They were scrubbing the floor of a gas chamber. Skinny saw before her the rough concrete on which the bare feet of children, women and old people had stood; all of them together. Now the chamber was empty and there was no smell of gas, only an odour of decay, of a subterranean place. Under the ceiling, along the beams, ran the electricity supply in steel conduits, half sunk into the concrete so they couldn’t be torn out. The walls looked as if someone had emptied countless vats of water from above, water that had run down the sides and left stains, perhaps from sweat, or fingerprints, or torn skin. Or perhaps someone had hosed the walls down with a water jet. None of the women or girls said a word. They were overcome by a horror they dared not show.

  An S S man watched them clean up, then said, enough, that would do. They were marched upstairs with their buckets, rags and mops. Possibly they were the only humans of their race who had been in a gas chamber and emerged alive.

  For Skinny the concrete floor was fixed in her mind’s eye; she saw the little hollows she had noticed in the floor. What had caused them? They could have been made by hobnailed boots, but she knew that by then people were barefoot. What had caused those countless little grooves in the floor, like footprints? The image of the gas chamber was imprinted in her mind and would remain with her, she knew, for as long as she lived.

  It was said that in Bordeaux a rail traffic controller wondered why the trains that left packed with thousands of Jews (as he had worked out for himself) all returned empty. In Vichy they had the exact numbers and the papers. They knew that 75,000, including thousands of children, had been rounded up with the help of informers who were lining their own pockets. All the French Jews were picked up by the French police. The Germans only looked on. An NCO who had come from France had told the traffic controller that the Red Cross workers there had recorded 50,000 children without parents. The adults had disappeared as early as the time of the evacuation of Paris, or they had been killed.

  “We have sex to convince ourselves that we are still alive,” Captain Hentschel said. “Isn’t it the same for you?”

  “I don’t know,” Skinny answered quickly.

  “I like it to be nice. I don’t like to feel like an animal. Or if it has to be like an animal, then an agreeable animal. And this must apply to both sides. Even from the waist down you don’t have to be an animal.

  “Ludicrous, isn’t it,” he said, “that my ancestors took their wives, daughters and children with them into battle. When things got tough, the wives bared their breasts to remind their warriors of what the enemy would squeeze in their hands if they let them win. We didn’t lose even against the Romans. If you want evidence, look at the fair-haired and blue-eyed Italians. I often look back to the days when we occupied lands beyond the Elbe.”

  He mentioned Prague. It gave her a small jolt. In the cubicle, with Captain Hentschel, Prague seemed to her more remote by a dimension that could not be measured in miles any more than her experience could be measured in light years. Prague to her was a vanishing image, a dying echo, a star fading in the night sky. She did not want to think about the city that had been her home, a city that continued to live regardless of what had happened to so many. Prague was vanishing in darkness and mist, beyond a snow-covered wasteland by the River San, distant and unreal like the destinies of the nameless.

  Then he spoke of the front near Moscow. The Germans had hoped to seize the Russian capital by a lightning campaign as early as the autumn of 1941. Their machine guns had mown down the enemy troops, wave by wave. But there were always more, like locusts. The Russians had to step over the mounds of their own dead. Suddenly Captain Hentschel’s troops had stopped firing. They understood the signal the enemy was sending them and they were seized with horror. The Russians had more men than the German army had ammunition.

  He had given orders to open fire again. His men did not obey. He had drawn his pistol, ready to pull the trigger. The massacre continued. They could go on killing the enemy’s troops indefinitely, but they could not defeat them. And now they were retreating.

  “It’s difficult to fight an adversary who doesn’t care if he wins or loses.”

  Captain Hentschel again embraced her childish body, intoxicating himself with her, as he did with his own words. He squeezed her girlish breasts with his cobra-like hands. He tasted the trembling in her that stemmed more from her fear of an attack of diarrhoea than from his excitement. With the tips of his fingers he stroked the tattoo on her belly, a belly that was already a woman’s. He didn’t mind the blue letters that spelt Feldhure.

  In the waiting room Madam Kulikowa put on another record of Strauss waltzes.

  “When I was a little boy,” the captain said, “my mother sang sombre German songs to me. They were songs about vampires who drank virgins’ blood, about the ash from which we Germans have sprung and which we revere, about the black steed which draws the night from west to east, and about the eagle which lets loose the wind at the northern end of the sky. There were songs about the goddess Freya, and about the spring under the tree of the world. She believed these tales like the Bible; they were in her blood. She regarded me sternly, lovingly and mournfully.”

  He paused.

  “My mother believed that no woman got the husband she deserved. Her own mother died young. She hadn’t been married long. When a woman couldn’t find a husband the matter wasn’t discussed. And they all acted as if children were brought by the stork.”

  She did not know yet that Wehrmacht Captain Hentschel’s visit would serve to erase any future negative reports from Madam Kulikowa’s book – complaints by rank-and-file servicemen, not by officers.

  She tried not to look at his greatcoat on the door. The captain had thrown his khaki pullover with its suede-patched elbows over the back of the chair.

  “You’re looking at my pistol?”

  She flushed. “No. At your pullover.”

  “Officers up to captain have a Luger; from captain up, a Parabellum. Would you like to hear about my first year in service?”

  She tried to turn on her side, so she wouldn’t press the sore on her buttock.

 
; “When one of my comrades is killed I go to let his wife know. One day, a fellow student from the Kriegsschule in Potsdam – he’d been mortally wounded – asked me to tell his wife how he fell. I rang the bell, she opened the door, and immediately she knew what had happened. She threw herself round my neck. Her child was with his grandmother in the Lusatian region on the Spree, and within a few minutes we were in bed together. It was an animalistic moment, the magnetism of the body – older than you or me.”

  He was visiting some other corner of the world, even though he lay next to her. He was fitting the curves and hollows of her body into his memory – that childish body she had made older.

  She could not guess what the confidences of a Wehrmacht officer could mean for her.

  He was watching the skin on her temples. Her tired eyelids. The blue and purple veins on her breasts. The white frostbite patches on her cheeks. Her short, gingery hair. He could see her pulse on her temples. He watched the arteries on her throat, wrists and the inside of her thighs.

  “We’re not allowed to kiss,” she objected weakly.

  “You’re not much good at it. I’d like this a thousand times every day. Ten thousand times.”

  What could she or should she talk to him about? About her twelve soldiers? Out of the question. Was she to tell him that, during the act, her blood hammered at her temples? That she had continuous pangs of conscience and moments of panic about being found out. That at each act of intercourse her father, mother and brother were present? They watched so that she should not forget them – and to judge her.

  “Some things we ought to be grateful for,” said the captain.

  He did not expect a reply.

  “How often do you cut your toenails?”

  “Every third day,” she lied.

  “You scratch.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re good when you’re bad,” he said. “You’re good even when you draw the worst out of me.”

  Then he asked her if she liked anything of what they were doing. The captain’s whisper was again becoming more intimate. He was stronger than strong, she thought. He did not himself deny what he had come for.

  “My adjutant says, T kill, therefore I am.’ For me, my existence is confirmed when I am with someone like you. I do it, therefore I am.”

  He was inhaling her smell. It reminded him of a little warm calf he had seen in a shack in Russia, tied to a post which held up the roof.

  He was aroused by the girl’s youth, rather than by her skill. She must know that she was an incompetent whore. He savoured the slope of her shoulders, the arches of her arms when, at his request, she lay on her stomach, her breasts pressed against the sheet. Her concave stomach formed a curve which reminded him of his mother’s Venetian glass. He perceived her body as an ear of young grain, still growing, springy, soft and firm at the same time. When she half turned the way he wanted, her back was like the smooth shiny parquet floor in their drawing room at home.

  She did what he wanted, it was more comfortable and less painful for her than lying on her back, rubbing her wound.

  He kissed her wherever it occurred to him to kiss. It was shameless and, to her, unaccustomed; was it normal for him? She was terrified that she might not be clean enough. She curled up into a ball like a hedgehog, wishing she could retreat into a shell. He handled her like a new-born child. He could not get enough of her.

  “Don’t we, in a whore, love what we love in ourselves?”

  She felt what was bringing her closer to him and what made her hate him. Was it possible to admire him for one thing and to pity him for another? She was confused. She was afraid of something immediate that she could not overcome. He was the first person that had made her feel sorry for German soldiers killed in battle and for their wives, their children, one of them somewhere on the Spree, where barges and freighters were carrying coal. The captain was enormous, handsome, a stranger, and she wished he would remain just that. She wanted to keep a cool head. She did not move at all. The captain provided all the movement. He rolled away from her. He was relaxing, satisfied. He let her hand him the towel.

  We’re all fools, he thought. He was lying there, still embracing her.

  “Green eyes, ginger hair,” he said. “I know what I’d dress you in and from what I’d undress you again.”

  “Do you know why a soldier most wants a woman before battle? Or immediately after battle? It’s a reward, or a token of a reward, the one thing that frees him from his bonds. You know, to his mother, his father, or to his children, his wife and family, his country and all his worries.”

  From the army kitchen came the signal calling the guards to a midday meal – a spanner being struck against an iron bar like a gong. She was hungry; she had visions of food – hot soup with fried pieces of bread and bacon, boiled beef with gherkin sauce and potatoes.

  “How did you get here?”

  “Via a camp.” She thought it safer to tell him the truth. She held her forearm with the tattooed number out to him. “Where you got your winter equipment yesterday.”

  “Is that so? Why did they send you there?”

  “There were a lot of arrests in Prague after the assassination of Heydrich.”

  “That was in ‘42.”

  She froze, but kept her presence of mind as in all moments of danger. She knew this side of her temperament – she would tremble with fear up until the very moment of decision. At that instant some unknown force liberated her from it, from all unnecessary thoughts, hesitation or doubt. A fraction of a second when she made her decision. So far things had gone well. Now she had to wait for his reaction. She wondered if he was trying to prove her a liar. Had she already made a mistake that would cost her dear? She felt his questioning eyes on her. He was wondering.

  “What happened to your parents?”

  “I think they were killed. They took us to the camp and then they sent me here, along with my papers. They’re with Oberführer S chimmelpfennig. “

  “What did you do at the camp?”

  “They did x-ray experiments on me. They sterilized me.”

  His expression told her that he understood. She came from that Czech region where, as Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich had declared, the Czechs had no business.

  “Did your parents have anything to do with it?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll never have children,” he said slowly. “Maybe that’s a good thing. For them and for you.”

  He was running his fingers through her hair. She hated those wandering fingers, but she lacked the courage to flinch.

  “If war is a game, then we’ve lost already,” he said. “We started something we can’t finish – others will finish it for us. It will not be what we’d planned. If we had won, our victory would wipe out the mistakes and obliterate the crimes we have committed. As it is, we’ll be remembered only for our mistakes, our excesses. Only the complete picture determines the value of everything. We have sentenced ourselves to prolonged insignificance. Perhaps for ten, a hundred, a thousand years. Then we shall be known again for what we are good at. Manufacturing motor cars, cameras – anything. My father knew August Horch, I even think he named me after him. Horch began as a foreman at Benz & Cie. They entrusted him with the production of cars. You probably aren’t interested in a universal joint or in chrome steel gears. My Horch is a 1939 model. They no longer make it. If we’re blown up – my car and I – we’ll both end up in a museum.”

  He laughed. He pushed the blanket off, feeling warm, and fell silent.

  She listened to the wolves on the plain, to the footsteps in the corridor, to the bell of Big Leopolda Kulikowa.

  “You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to. I don’t wish to interrogate you, that’s not my business. I’m only asking out of curiosity. Have you got any brothers or sisters?”

  “I had a brother. They separated us when we got to the camp. I never saw him again.”

  “What age? You’ve no idea where he i
s?”

  “No. He was 13.”

  “Perhaps they put him with a family that had lost a child.”

  “It’s possible,” she said.

  “Would you like that?”

  “I’d like to believe he was alive.”

  “They could have put you with a family too.” He wondered how she would get on in a German family. Would his family accept someone whose parents had been killed for the assassination of the Reich Protector? Was she really as old as she said?

  “Did they teach you anything after school?”

  “Hairdressing,” she said quickly.

  She had a sudden vision of Slavomîr Slâma from their block of flats in Prague, and just as quickly it vanished. In 1941 Mr Slâma had begun to learn German so that he could cut the hair of Wehrmacht soldiers. He ordered German colour magazines for his salon, including an issue of Der Adler with pictures of airmen, planes, balloons and Zeppelins. The airmen on the cover were laughing. Her brother Ramon had stood outside the window, looking at the pictures. They were all still alive. Lying here naked in bed with a German captain, she could not reproach Mr Slâma. For the past eight days she had concealed her Jewishness. A few clever questions would be enough to make her give herself away.

  The captain began to speak again.

  “Funny, at the beginning of the campaign the enemy hardly interested me. I was only interested in how much Germany was growing. I experienced the friendships that war offered, it stripped me of all worldly ties and money questions. How willing women were in wartime. How everything tested you: were you up to it or not, what effort could you make? What you would eventually return to. And what would never be the same again.”

  “On my last home leave in Berchtesgaden I went to the home of a fellow officer. I couldn’t find his father or mother, his brothers or sisters, to tell them that their boy, recently awarded the Iron Cross, was well, in good shape and happy. I couldn’t even find the house. There was only a big bomb crater there and they were still clearing up. There are more of those craters in Germany than mouse holes.”