Lovely Green Eyes

by Arnost Lustig

  Adler would not find it easy to write his book about the concentration camps. All around us there was a tinkling of forks and spoons, a clatter of plates, a hum of words, snippets of conversation. It was a fine sunny day, the war was over.

  “You can share our bread, boots or cigarettes,” Skinny said.

  Colonel Weiner was taken aback. “We share the terror of death,” he replied.

  Skinny thought of her father and mother, and of her little brother who, in her mind, would always remain little, never grow up and never grow old. She thought about what she had shared with him.

  Slowly, as if we had known each other for years, Colonel Weiner said: “Terror, but also hope.”

  He called the waiter and paid. He left a tip on the table. We felt close to him and distant at the same time without being able to explain why. He got up, politely said goodbye and walked out. We never saw him again.

  We tried to laugh at everything one could laugh about and at everything that suddenly seemed too much. Deep down perhaps we laughed at ourselves. A trap for ourselves and others. We kept bandying proverbs about; possibly because we believed there might be some wisdom in old sayings. It occurred to Adler that we would not find it easy to use words now because it was doubtful how much validity each of them still had, even though a word might sound reliable.

  Wasn’t it ridiculous that 10,000 years ago people believed that the soul resided in the teeth? Later they thought it was in their shadow. The Jews discovered that the soul was in the blood, including the blood of certain animals, which was why they should not be eaten. This was not something we worried about in the restaurant of the Jewish Community. But as far as Adler was concerned, or myself or Skinny, they could, as a memento of the good old days, have served us boiled or fried pig’s blood – even in tins with German labels – and we would have polished it off.

  Adler began to think that a person’s soul was in their words, in the events they had lived through. In communicated and uncommuni-cated experiences or what was left of them. Perhaps for all three of us this was the case. Our talks often turned to memory. How long did reminiscences survive? Would one cancel another out? Was it possible that after some time a person no longer knew what had happened to him, what had happened to others, or what he had merely heard?

  “So we haven’t learnt anything?” Adler suggested.

  Did we at times have the feeling that we hadn’t escaped the camps at all? Skinny must sometimes have imagine that what caused her itchiness on a hot summer’s day was not her sweat or the fierce sun, but the ashes of her little brother Ramon, getting under her blouse or into her lungs.

  I went dancing with her at the Blackbird’s Nest in Nârodni Street, next door to the Adria building. We paid five crowns for admission and then sat there until 3 a.m. over a single glass of lemonade, scarcely even sipping it. The head waiter had plenty of paying customers and the musicians couldn’t care less. We always had a table for two, with a vase of artificial flowers, a cut-glass ashtray and a snow-white tablecloth, just like a palace. She was bound to see the shadows of her parents on the dance floor.

  “In a little while I’m off to bed,” she said finally.

  “It’s like it was in the Electrician’s House,” I joked, referring to our dances in Terezîn. The music at the Blackbird’s Nest was the same as the Germans had played in their officers’ mess and the Kameradschaftsheim, which we used to listen to secretly from a distance, as if it were forbidden fruit, even though it was behind a timber wall separating the ghetto from the road leading out of it.

  The head waiter was very friendly, he never passed our table without a smile. He must have been in his forties.

  “It’s nice here,” she said.

  She was afraid that the authorities or the school would investigate her past until they dug up what she was not willing to tell them. She tried either to forget about it or, at least, to distort it for herself. She fashioned her own world.

  “What did you tell that rabbi of yours?” I asked.

  “I didn’t tell him everything.”

  “It would have been too much for him?”

  “What would have been too much for him?” she asked cautiously.

  “We both know what.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Don’t you feel corrupted?”

  She looked at me questioningly, and then a little smile appeared on her lips. For me, it was a beginning after the end of the world. It was a smile ofhelplessness, embarrassment or shame, but at the same time one of hope, determination, a decision to live, perhaps not as before. A page torn out from the Book of Destruction which Rabbi Gideon Schapiro had told her about in Pecs. The rabbi was a new milestone in her personal history, and hence also in mine. Unlike the Book of Good Deeds, which writes itself, the Book of Destruction is written by many hands.

  She needed to get it off her chest and this was the evening.

  “Do you know what shocks me? The way I simply accepted the death of so many people, including my family. Losing a brother was as natural as Sunday following Saturday. Maybe it was just fear that it would break you otherwise. You put it away somewhere, even though it pressed on you from all sides. You promised yourself you’d mourn later, when you had more strength. Where did this hardness, this indifference spring from, this numbness or whatever it was, when you knew perfectly well that you’d never really be able to come to terms with it?”

  She paused for a moment before continuing.

  “I’m afraid I may be capable of watching one person after another die. Am I sick? Infected? Has it corrupted my soul? I don’t want to kid myself that it’s a question of strength. The death of one, two, thousands or even a million people no longer means what it once did. To me it’s more important that I’m still alive myself. So someone dies, even someone very close to you, and you just go on. You must always go on. And this is where I have got to.”

  “Amen.”

  “Yes, amen.”

  “It’s also where I have got to.”

  I was reminded of an ancient saying, dug up by someone – what reason cannot cure, time will.

  We went out nearly every evening, dancing, to the cinema or the cabaret. They were playing wartime hits – “Under the Old Lamppost”, “Ciribiribin” and others. Skinny was startled when the girl announcer said that the arrangement had been sent from Terezin by Fricek Weiss of the Ghetto Swingers. It had been passed on by a friendly gendarme. That was in 1944, the year that the Germans prohibited dancing in Prague. Fricek Weiss died in a gas chamber because he wore glasses, the announcer said.

  Eleven

  Twelve: Hermann Ritter, Tobias Zluwa, Dieter Schramm, Ebergardt Kassner, Edward Petzina, Uwe Deutsch, Joachim Arnheim, Oswald Funcke, Ernst Jensen Bessel, Otmar Strasser, Kundar Jäckel, Peter Heiden.

  Twelve: Korb er t Grünn, Bruno Jechmann, Kar tin Klause, Edmund Baumgartner, Pranz Gregor, Hannes Bäck, Ewald Herder, Quido Haasse, August Keitel, Ernst Traurig, Katthias Dofleben, Lothar Kemnitz

  Twelve: Rudi Schlaff, Wolf Köhler, Pritz Dimmel, Heinrich Presser, Hans Dorpmüller, Wilhelm Kleinmann, Gund Kleimer, Pritz Seidel, Albert Steinfuss, Karian Schulte, Hans-Peter Schullmann, Walter Pechvogel.

  “My mother was killed by a car last year,” Beautiful said. “Forty-three days later my grandmother died. Forty-three days after that my aunt, my mother’s sister. Soon I will have been here 43 days.”

  Skinny did not know how to answer her. Was a person’s fate determined before they were born? They were sitting in the latrine, suffering with diarrhoea. Beautiful saw herself differently from the way the soldiers saw her, or Madam Kulikowa, or the other girls, who were all jealous of her and watched whom the Madam sent to her. There was insecurity in her blue eyes.

  “I’ve got enteritis and I’m cold,” Skinny said. “I don’t want to sit here longer than we have to.”

  They had been eating frozen potatoes for three days running.

  “It’s one of my bad days,” Beautiful said. “But I don’
t want to blame myself for having been born.”

  “Not a good day for me, either,” Skinny said.

  The sentry was circling the boarded hut at a decent distance. They could hear his footsteps, his hobnailed boots. After a snowfall, before the snow was cleared, the sentries walked noiselessly. They waited for him to pass. The military censors had held back a postcard sent to Beautiful because it had a grease stain on the stamp carrying Adolf Hitler’s face.

  “I never was a virgin,” Beautiful said.

  Skinny was listening to the wind. It came from the north; there had been no snow for two days.

  “I don’t want you to be afraid of me,” Beautiful continued. “When I’m with a soldier I think of a tree whose sap is oozing out. Or a stone from which someone is trying to squeeze blood. I feel like a garden where no-one plants anything, they only pick the fruit. And it’s not that tree in the Garden of Eden. I think of gardeners who don’t tend the soil. I think of my mother before she died.”

  She handed Skinny a carefully folded square of newspaper.

  “It’s what they kill the Jews with. Don’t spill it. It comes as a powder like this or in crystals. A Scharführer gave it to me. He explained that it’s a mixture ofhydrogen and hydrocyanide. They call it Zyklon B.”

  “What did he give it to you for?”

  “He had nothing else to give me. He probably didn’t want to carry it about with him.”

  “What am I to do with it?”

  “I’ve got some for myself. I carry it in a sock.”

  “You think I want to kill myself?”

  “Who doesn’t sometimes?” Beautiful smiled shyly.

  The latrine stank of quicklime. When they talked or breathed through their mouths the stench was not so overpowering.

  From the bridge came the clanging of a train. A military transport.

  “Always reminds me of the train which brought me here,” Beautiful said.

  Skinny rolled the folded paper into her sock as Beautiful had done. She too thought of the train on which she had arrived.

  From the waiting room came the sound of music – works of the Strauss family. Skinny thought there was too much blood even in the waltzes: “Vienna Blood,” “The Emperor Waltz” and “The Blue Danube”. Madam Kulikowa played “Vienna Blood” at least five times a day.

  The guards were singing “Heimat, deine Sterne” from the film Quax, the Pilot without Fear or Blemish. It was a marching song for hobnailed boots.

  In the officers’ bathroom used by Hauptsturmführer Hanisch, the commandant of the guard detachment, stood an earthenware bathtub on cast-iron lions’ paws – booty from a Polish home in the early days of the campaign. The water was heated by oak logs; the beech had all been burned. The guards had chopped down trees far and wide.

  Their tour of duty was coming to an end; they were getting ready for the front. They were half drunk. Now they bawled “Alte Kameraden”. The Waffen-SS, the most Aryan breed under the stars. They felt like stars themselves. They would shine in the sky long after they were extinguished on earth. They were putting up a Christmas tree in every room.

  The River San shimmered under the light of a low moon, like a herring gradually vanishing in the distance. The wind changed its force. Its howling reminded her of those she had lost. Father, mother, Ramon.

  The guards were singing “Muss i denn, muss i denn …”

  The ravens by the gate attacked. The biggest of them hacked the tail of the dog that had snatched some food from the kitchen. Another tore meat from its teeth.

  The soldiers in the waiting room were watching the winter lightning. “You count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder. Then you divide by three to see how many kilometres away the thunderstorm is,” one soldier said.

  *

  Twelves Uwe Biheller, George von Zucker-Kreiss, Robert Albert Altmann, Gustav Leibnitz, Pranz Kraft, Hannes Czech, Andreas Heismeyer, Konrad Engelbert Schiese, Jennings Hörbiger, Jochen Hütter, Hugo Hensckel, Karl Haasse.

  Twelve: Hubert Schiller, Theo Zander, Udo Wulff, Schenk Kraut, Gerry Schödl, Axel Alfred Röhm, Wolfi Wolf, Henning Wegeberger, Adolf Winter, George Sonnenglass, Rudolf Remnitz, Hans-Jochen Hauser.

  The cold did not let up even on Twelfth Night. An S S man, Hauptsturmführer Wolfgang Tropp, was approaching the gate. His horse could scarcely drag itself along. With his heavily gloved hand the S S man stroked its mane. Suddenly the horse sank to its knees. The Hauptsturmführer only just managed to get his feet out of the stirrups. The horse was dying. For a moment he hesitated. Then he drew his pistol.

  “All right, boy, all right.”

  A shot rang out. The Hauptsturmführer slung his leather bag and rifle over one shoulder, unbuckled the saddle and laid it over his other shoulder, and then the canvas blanket which had covered the animal’s back. Without another glance at the animal he strode to the gate.

  The wolves came bounding out of the quarry. The S S man dropped his load. Legs apart, he emptied half of his magazine at the wolves to drive them away from the dead horse, but it was useless. He kept the remaining bullets in case the wolves attacked him. They began to tear at the flesh of the horse. The snow beneath the animal’s body turned red.

  At 2.30 a.m. the brothel was awakened by a huge crash and the crunching of metal against metal, followed by the sound of twisting steel, crushed metal and splintered glass. The front locomotive had turned over, the one at the tail end of the train had jumped the rails. The carriages rose up and settled on their sides. The steam whistle didn’t stop even though the engine lay like a wounded beast rooted to the ground. The carriages looked like toys flung down by a child. Steam was escaping from both engines with a furious hiss.

  The guards ran out into the darkness with rifles and stretchers, their dogs on leads. The maintenance crews followed them. Into the shouting of military commands and the barking of dogs came the explosion of a second charge. The fire, the smoke and the shouting were carried beyond the river by the wind.

  Searchlights went on at all four guard towers. They lit up the train, and you could see far into the wasteland. The sidings were a huge lighted target.

  Oberführer Schimmelpfennig blew his whistle. The sound mingled with the hooting of the railway engine. The cook struck the iron rod by the kitchen. When the train’s steam whistle fell silent there was the sound of screaming, crying and shouting.

  “Bandits,” Ginger said hoarsely.

  “You really must be stupid,” Long-Legs said.

  Stars stood out in the sky. Eight carriages had left the rails. They were piled end to end. The carriages were green, red and blue. The sleeping car carrying Waffen-S S Obergruppenführer Walter Rudi von Kammers was crushed. He’d been on his way back from a conference at the Führer’s headquarters. In his locked briefcase were the directives of the commander-in-chief of the eastern front forces, Heinz Guderian, and in his head he’d carried the echoes of futile concerns: Germany would bleed to death unless troops were transferred from the west to the east. His body, as much of it as could be extracted, was carried out by the guards. Both charges had been detonated before the engine reached the bridge, which was undamaged.

  Oberführer S chimmelpfennig was assigning tasks. The Dirnen, the field whores, were transformed into nurses under the direction of a group of Brown Nurses who had been travelling in the blue carriage.

  “I’m not ruling anything out,” said The Frog.

  The Brown Nurses, whose carriage had been attached to the train at Festung Breslau, were under the command of a woman officer, an Obersturmbannführer of the Medical Corps, Mathilde Kemnitz. She looked like a hospital matron.

  The air was filled with the moans of the injured. Smoke was rising from a tanker, lit up by flames. The nurses, along with servicemen, guards and maintenance workers, carried the injured out of the train and put them on stretchers and blankets. The less seriously hurt clambered out of the carriages themselves. Now and again the flames soared up, illuminating the catastrophe with shad
es of light which redoubled that of the searchlights.

  Skinny had never seen anything like it. The plain had acquired a different appearance. She could not equate the death of Germans with that of her own people. The pain perhaps. But there was a connection missing. The train had been going to the front. She realized that she had to move if she was going to keep from freezing. All around her she was aware of a tremendous effort: she would join in it only to the extent she had to. She had the impression that The Frog was rather pleased to be faced with such a challenge, with a disaster. Perhaps this was the moment when he could cover himself with glory. He was continually in motion, not stopping for a second.

  To move meant helping those whom she would have preferred to help to their graves. That was how she felt until she looked at their faces.

  The guards and maintenance men came along with oxygen cylinders, cutting gear and more blankets. The searchlights focused on the accessible side of the train. The burning tanker proved impossible to extinguish. There was a northerly wind, but mercifully it was not snowing.

  “Heil Hitler!” The Frog greeted the officers. “Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!”

  “I heard you the first time, colonel,” one of them grunted.

  Schimmelpfennig organized the sidings into an open-air field hospital until the ambulances, summoned by radio, arrived. He believed that every test would further temper him. This knowledge imbued him with furious energy. He wanted everyone to tremble before the wounded majesty of the Reich. In his hand he carried an axe. He thought of the opportunity that now presented itself to him -to emerge from the twilight of No. 232 Ost. He made himself visible to ensure that there were witnesses to his prowess. He did not want his involvement to slip into the shadows or to be forgotten.

  Behind the train stretched the wasteland, full of treachery and the still untamed strength of an enemy that seemed to have launched a personal attack on him.