Lovely Green Eyes

by Arnost Lustig

  “I shouldn’t have done that – fired my last round. A soldier should save that for himself. What do you think?”

  She remained silent. Only later did she understand why he’d said that. He was not as simple as he pretended, even though some of his sentences were assembled as though from a child’s building set.

  Just as laboriously as he had opened it, he shut the window. She was glad the glass didn’t fall out.

  “Practice kills boredom,” he said. “It passes the time.”

  He saw that she was cold. Closing the window did not immediately warm up the room. “Put some more fuel on the fire,” he commanded.

  He carried the chair to the stove and returned his pistol to its holster.

  “I’m a good shot,” he said.

  She went to stoke up the fire, relieved to get to the stove. She put three shovelfuls of coal on top of a birch log. It was damp. She warned the Obersturmführer that it would smoke for a while. She shut the stove door, taking care not to soil her new clothes, then waited for his instructions.

  “They ought to supply you with anthracite,” he said.

  “I take the coal from the pile by the kitchen.”

  “It’s Scheisse from the mines further up the river. I hope they ship the better coal to the Reich.”

  “It doesn’t draw well.”

  “You should have put it on earlier.”

  “I put on two shovelfuls.”

  She picked up a rag and mopped up the little puddles that had formed when the Obersturmführer opened the window. It was almost dark. Sarazin hung his belt over the back of the chair. She washed her hands and lit a candle. The candlelight gave the evening outside a purple hue.

  Again she saw the scar on his head. It went from the roots of his hair along his forehead and circled his skull.

  “I prefer wolves to people. At night they pursue the moon. Ifs a world we don’t know yet.”

  He spoke in a different tone from when he spoke of the Jews. Snow and blood, he told her, were pure colours for him. They marked the purity of the territory, the purity of the thought that inspired him: Germany from the Rhine to the Urals; with its allies from the Bay of Biscay to Latvia. Conquered territory on which – one day -vast numbers of Germans would live. A Nazi structure similar to a system of dykes. Rivers flowing into a German sea. A wonderful ocean not yet on any map. Compensation for centuries, or millennia, when they’d had to crowd into territory smaller than their worth. Just as Germany was once almost lost on the map of Europe, so the subjugated countries would now be lost within Greater Germany.

  “No more rotten wooden synagogues, which burnt more quickly than showy Viennese stoves of marble and granite with false oriental decorations, as if they stood in Jerusalem. If the circumcised were given a free hand, there’d be Jerusalem everywhere. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “You aren’t saying either yes or no.”

  “I’m saying yes.”

  “Jawohl. That’s what I like to hear. Schon gut…”

  He thought of what he’d had to give up in order to purify himself, to liberate himself.

  She was looking at his holster. How many bullets had he left? Surely he would have more than one magazine and changing magazines was easy? Perhaps he wouldn’t wish to shoot again and make her freeze in the cold draught.

  “Stoke up as much as you can,” he said.

  “As you wish.”

  She piled more coal on and raked the grate from underneath. The heat breathed into her face, her hands, her chest. Whatever she did, the damp brown coal would burn slowly. Again the place would be full of smoke.

  “It’s smoking,” she said cautiously.

  She could not be sure of the meaning of anything he said.

  “You like mucking about on the floor?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Isn’t it more comfortable in bed?”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  No-one had come yet without wanting what they all wanted. It might be the last thing they ever enjoyed. She shouldn’t expect more from his babbling than simply a preface to the usual. She did not wish to think of her back, her belly, her joints. She would have to rely on being young and in good health. Nor was there any point in tormenting herself with thoughts of sin. Whenever she undressed she persuaded herself that she was slipping on a protective ring. Or that she was hanging on to a weir or to rocks in a river in flood.

  She felt beads of perspiration on her forehead, and wiped them off. She concentrated on the stove, on the coal box and what was left of the firewood. She stretched her fingers which had been gripping the coal shovel. The mist in the Obersturmführer’s eyes was fixed on her. She knew what this meant.

  There was silence in the cubicle. Only the wick with the little flame spluttered.

  “I’ll mix you with a drop of my blood,” he said.

  On his uniform there were ribbons – the Iron Cross, the Blutorden, the Nazi Party’s Blood Order. From the pocket ofhis tunic with its silver buttons he produced some cords.

  “Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hang you. Are you afraid?”

  “No,” she lied.

  “If you had a sister I’d need both of you.”

  “I haven’t got one,” she said.

  He lay down, still dressed. He spread his arms and legs. Was he going to order her to undress him?

  “We’ll have a little excursion. Somewhere you haven’t been before,” he said.

  He ordered her to tie him to the head and foot posts of the bed; by his wrists and ankles, as tight as she could, each hand and leg separately. The ropes had buckles. He hoped she would express no astonishment.

  “We’ll make time stand still,” he added.

  That was it, round the wrist. First one ankle and then the other. Pull hard. Or wasn’t she strong enough? That might be bad for her. He wouldn’t like to have to complain. Three floggings meant the wall or the “Hotel for Foreigners” at Festung Breslau. He did not wish her to protest or to have to command her. On the other hand, she would not be sorry if she did what he wanted. His voice was hoarse. Surely she realized that not all men were alike?

  “Haven’t you tied anyone up before? Well, you can learn from me how it’s done. I’m glad I am the first. You too will be the first – after a long time.”

  She was confused by the way he was acting. He was speaking in a jerky sort of way, no longer so haughty. Creases had appeared on his forehead, running across his scar. Why did he want this from her? There was impatience in him, almost anxiety that she might not do what he wanted of her properly. There was no longer the aggression or the self-assurance there had been when he had spoken of the inferior race or when he was shooting at the wolves. He had changed as though at the waving of a wand.

  She tied him up the way he wanted. She avoided his eyes, concentrating on what she had to do and at the same time trying to detach herself from it.

  “Freedom,” whispered the bound Obersturmführer. “Do you hear me?”

  In the corners of his mouth there was a trace of arousal as well as anxiety or uncertainty. Tied up on the bed, the Obersturmführer looked like a captured animal. Or like someone who had voluntarily surrendered. She had never seen an SS man like this.

  “I appreciate military qualities in a girl,” he whispered. “Keenness and obedience.”

  He cleared his throat and swallowed. He was seeking a more comfortable position. The bed shook. He didn’t seek love or proximity as others did. He didn’t admit to himself that this was so because he himself was incapable of such things. He refused to regret what he was missing. What were prostitutes for? This, too, was free and he did not have to share any feelings of exclusion or inferiority. Here, no-one had vanquished him.

  She was waiting for his next instruction. He told her to undress.

  “I know how to tie and untie eight different kinds of knots. A friend from the navy taught me. He’d been three times in the brig on the cruise
r Tirpitz. He’d slept with négresses”

  She folded her dress and underwear and placed them on the chair by the stove. She took off her boots and pulled off her socks and stockings. It was warm in the cubicle now, but the floor was cold. For a moment she thought of Long-Legs who complained of cold feet.

  Skinny felt alarm bells ringing inside her. She saw what at first glance was invisible. All the colours and shapes, all the outlines of mouths, jaws, noses, lips and irises suddenly turned into mist. She could not afford to make a mistake. She would always be on the losing side. She was very different from Ginger, who would get closer to men the worse they treated her. She couldn’t show gratitude as Maria-from-Poznan did to someone who treated her body as a butcher’s dog would a bone.

  “You’re too far away. Come here, to the bed.” She obeyed.

  “Unbutton me.”

  She knew that what he wanted her to unbutton was not his shirt. She half-closed her eyes, and tried to stop her hands from trembling. He mustn’t sense how unwilling she was. It took her longer than it should have done. She heard his squeaky voice. His head was tilted back and it was hard to understand him. Maybe Madam Kulikowa was right – there were worse things. She let her hands do what they had to. He couldn’t see, he only gave her instructions as if he were telling her how to lead a horse to stables or lean a bicycle against a wall, or thread a needle. Then his voice grew weak.

  “Are you looking at me?”

  She raised her eyelids. “I see you,” she said.

  “You’re no good.”

  She felt like an actress who had forgotten her lines or who had not studied her part.

  He was irritated. Again she had witnessed something that should not be seen. She could feel the anger rising in him. She would have preferred the candle to go out, even though the Obersturmführer could not see it. He was gazing at the shadowy ceiling behind his head, at the beams and the wall. She did not know what to do. She was bending over him like a nurse over a strapped-down patient. She thought of Stefan Sarazin’s injury, of his name, of the origin and the consequences of his scar. She had no idea that he was getting aroused by the memory of how, long ago, he had asked his mother to feel the hardness of his penis. It had taken a while before she did. In her caring and good-natured way, she had expressed admiration, but then made him feel foolish by reminding him “My boy, I’ve seen you like that a thousand times.” He hated the bitter-sweet tone his mother had used.

  Skinny noted his ecstasy, in which she played a lesser role than she realized. She closed her eyes.

  “Yes,” he whispered as he taught her how to touch him. He sounded sick, pitiful, helpless and angry.

  “Yes, Yes.”

  The small flame of the candle was now elongated, but flickered continually.

  “You’ve got stupid hands,” the Obersturmführer croaked. “Utterly useless.”

  His eyes misted over. Outside an engine was revving up. One of the buses waiting until its complement of 52 men was ready.

  “Am I as white as ash wood?”

  The Obersturmführer’s face turned rigid with a spasm. He began to convulse. The bed beneath him creaked and groaned, the straw emitted whistling sounds which accompanied his panting. Slowly he became quiet.

  Outside a column of trucks was leaving. There was a lot of tooting. A detachment of SS volunteers were arriving. They exchanged Waffen-S S horn signals. Hungarians were singing an incomprehensible song. It seemed to her that she caught some Slovak words, but she wasn’t sure.

  He freed himself from his bonds, even though she had tied him up so carefully. This small victory restored a little of his self-assurance.

  “I’d thought you’d be more skilful,” he said. His face seemed to have shrunk a little after his struggle with the ropes. “Perhaps I am somewhat unusual. But that’s what I want. No-one is ever bored with me.”

  What else did he expect, apart from what she had already done?

  “If you want to be an actress,” he said, “you must act in the play that I am writing for you.”

  She did not know how to answer. She was waiting to see what the Obersturmführer would say next.

  “I can tell you’re new here,” he said. “To judge by your skill I’d say this is your first day. Perhaps the second.”

  “You know how long I’ve been here.”

  She was used to that kind of complaint. They didn’t want her to be passive, but she couldn’t imagine an alternative. She wished she could be dulled to an extent that would relieve her of thought but not the capacity to do what she had to do in order to survive.

  When he told Skinny to lie down on the bed with him “like a married couple” it didn’t seem ridiculous. It was better than if he had beaten her.

  She wished she were more mature than she was. She could pretend to be, just as she was pretending that she had been born into an Aryan family. She was surprised at how quickly she had adjusted; she didn’t have to feel that she was lagging behind. She couldn’t afford to. In some respects she had already caught up with Ginger, Maria-from-Poznan, and Estelle. Maybe even with Long-Legs.

  Skinny tried to take her mind off the Obersturmführer’s body and her own. She thought of Maria-from-Poznan, who rolled her eyes when she heard something that she didn’t like. According to Ginger, Maria rolled her eyes about like a merry-go-round, so that one of her soldiers mistakenly took it for an expression of ecstasy.

  “Better to be blown up by a shell than sleep with a Jewess,” he said. “We can proclaim with pride that the Einsatzgruppen are the war. It is through us that Germany will become great, just as without us it would go under. Let me tell you, I would kill my own father and mother if they stood against the Reich. Or a brother, if I had one.”

  Eight

  Obersturmführer Sarazin vividly remembered a punitive action in Pomerania, an action he was ordered to carry out by Karl Jäger, the commander of the Einsatzgruppen battalion. It took the rounded-up men, women, children and old people well into the night before they had dug a pit big enough for 5,000 people in the clearing of a pine forest. The soldiers ordered them to strip naked. There was a fresh breeze, a full moon and a cloudless sky. He would never forget that night, the scent of resin, the silence of those they shot one by one or in groups. He remembered clearly the way they fell or slipped into the pits, leaning forwards or kneeling, as the firing squad ordered them to make sure they dropped inside.

  They advanced from the edge of the forest, one line after another, in groups of about 50 or 100. The firing stopped at about 20 minutes after midnight. The soldiers were anxious not to let those merely wounded at the bottom of the pit scramble out through the mass of cooling corpses and escape under cover of darkness. To make quite sure all were dead Sarazin gave orders for salvoes to be fired into the pit. He set his men an example by emptying several magazines himself. Then there was no need to post more than two men as sentries on each side of the mass grave.

  He ordered tents to be pitched, so they wouldn’t have to sleep in the open, and gave instructions for reveille at 4 a.m. He arranged for the clothes of the dead to be packed in crates. He had a special tent put up for the representatives of the local administration, including the mayor, to ensure that the men, both volunteers and those hired as casual labourers, could begin to fill in the pit with clay at first light.

  He was not afraid for himself. Only once had he had three sentries guard a spot where he spent the night – in an abandoned quarry -because he could not be absolutely certain that some Polish or Jewish bandits were not still hiding out nearby. He valued his life higher than the lives of bandits, and hadn’t blinked an eyelid when the Gestapo chief at Auschwitz-Birkenau informed him of the number of transports they processed there every day and night, or of the burning of the bodies in their own fat, even though that required using precious petrol.

  He was quite used to the sight of a yellowish mass of corpses interlaced with each other like plaited rolls or Christmas loaves, piled from one side of the pit
to the other, a mass of arms, legs, stretched necks and lifeless heads. Before falling asleep he relived the operation, the shots ringing in his ears – volleys, single shots – the orchestra of machine guns. But what he saw the following morning was beyond anything he had seen before – and he had seen plenty. It was an image worthy of a great poet, horrible and beautiful, because exceptional. He knew that this was something hardly anyone, and certainly none of his friends in the hinterland, had ever seen. For a moment it took his breath away. The dead, piled together in wild confusion so tightly there was practically no space between them, all of them the colour of a yellowish candle, had begun to move. None of the bodies remained still. They moved in waves, they shifted like branches rocked by the wind. He knew that they were not alive. He had already, by the light of a flashlight in his tent, begun to write his report.

  They were dead. Even if some escaped the shootings they would have died of their wounds down in the pit. He had an accurate record of the number of rounds fired. His corporal had completed the account of ammunition, fuel, provisions and the number of trucks employed. The dead mass was moving its arms, legs and heads, hair was being ruffled, their lips and eyebrows were twitching and their eyes were being opened. Not even their genitals remained at rest, male or female, behind their pubic hair. What was going on? He rubbed his eyes. Huge numbers of rats were scurrying among the bodies, gnawing at the dead, creeping into their mouths and other orifices, into their armpits and between their legs. There were probably more rats than bodies. He felt sick. He wanted to vomit. He covered his mouth with his hand and felt a spasm in his guts. Blood rose to his head and into the scar round his scalp. He leant against a tree, but after a few seconds pulled himself together.

  The sentries and the locals saw the same sight, but they had probably seen it before and didn’t seem surprised. The workers picked up their shovels and began to fill the pits. They were paid by the hour and already had forms in their pockets for the next job, also filling pits.