Lovely Green Eyes

by Arnost Lustig

  “People take what they can,” she explained.

  She also told them how she had come home one day and her father had welcomed her with the words: “You look terrible. You’ll end up as a whore.” That was the first time that she had been paid for it. Her father had searched her and taken every last penny.

  “My father was always right,” she said.

  Why didn’t the Jews straighten their noses with a hammer? On a Saturday, so she was told, a Jewish woman would not wash her child even if it dirtied itself up to its ears. If their roof went up in flames over their heads on a Sabbath, they would not throw even a bucketful of water on it. She did not care a damn about what they considered holy. They were the most opinionated people in Poland. And at the last moment they suddenly declared themselves to be Poles. A Sarah suddenly became a Nada, a Rachel or Rebecca became a Natasha or Elizabeth. A Cohen would become a Medzurecki. Some Poles would give them shelter – her neighbours Irena and Janek Komacki had hidden a deaf-and-dumb Jewish child and now they had lost five of their own. They had been taken to Germany, five fair little boys with blue eyes. They would turn into Germans. When they grew up they would not know anything. They had been hanging them publicly in Chopin Square, and soon the Jews would no longer creep through Poland.

  *

  Twelve: Gert Harlan, Heini Rothmund, Max Huber, Kurt Prestell, Richard Knoll, Fritz Salzburg, Volker Horn, Hanspeter Jasper, Valentin Heinzle, Balder Spert, Hansi Weizmann, Rudolf Hasenfratz.

  Twelve: Berndt Junghans, Ludwig Wagner, Hannes Kerl, Fritz Lochner, Karl Jorg Owerger, Horst Beckenbauer, Karl-Dietrich Dolfuss, Sepp Gruber, Heiden Heyst, Julius Stack, Heini Forstmann, Gerdhard Streicher.

  The guard detachment of Hauptsturmführer Peter Hanisch-Sacher decided to hold a party before their departure. At first The Frog wouldn’t even consider letting the prostitutes take part. But the Hauptsturmführer persuaded him at the card table. He would forget about the debt of honour of the previous evening, when The Frog had lost 150 marks. Why shouldn’t the girls have some fun for once, regardless of the situation at the front? What about the inspectors from the Wehrkreis who recovered two Junkers aircraft the day before? He’d been told that champagne flowed in rivers before they started the propellers the next morning.

  On the night, the prostitutes were made to parade in the guards’ gymnasium, which had been created by joining the former stables and the cowshed. The radio technician had installed some equipment, and the music came from Festung Breslau and Radio Flensburg – the bands of Peter Kreuder, Eugen Wolf and Barnabas von Geszy-Huppertz. They had to go out into the fog to visit the latrine.

  Skinny was snatched up by Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin. She tried to dance a waltz with him, but the Obersturmführer had no idea how and she was not much better. He told her, as he stepped on her toes and got his rhythm wrong, that in Bremen he had seen U-boat crews fraternizing with Czech, Italian and French singers and dancers. Also with some Viennese. The Austrian girls enjoyed socializing.

  “That would probably suit you too,” said the Obersturmführer. “Perhaps,” she answered.

  She lit the candle in her cubicle. They had not yet been told to pack up. She lit the stove. How long before it got hot? About ten minutes, she said. He wanted what he had wanted before – that she tie him to the bed. He was almost apologetic. With his squeaky voice this sounded ridiculous.

  “Nothing human is alien to me,” he croaked, aroused. In his gaze, somewhere deep down inside desire, there was an uncertainty, something he didn’t understand himself, something he could achieve only in a brothel. It was a child’s and at the same time an old man’s request for something that he wasn’t sure he was entitled to. She knew that she must look at him as if at a beast, a worthless beast, to make him want her at all. She must place him on the lowest rung of the ladder.

  “Surely you’re here for me?” he demanded. “Or aren’t you an army whore?”

  She had noticed earlier, in the gym, that he’d been drinking. His eyes were sunken, his chin hung down almost to his throat, to the hollow where his chest began. He seemed exhausted. He lay there, stripped to the waist, as emaciated as before. His misty irises and pupils had lost their brightness. His eyes looked lifeless. She felt the sudden tension, almost a spasm, in his body. He tried to find a more comfortable position, and opened his mouth. He squirmed, as if overcoming the spasm, before raising himself and trying to tear free from his fetters. Then he went motionless.

  “Now,” he croaked. There was insecurity in his voice, anger, something between shame and insolence. He was breathing heavily. He assumed that she’d realized what had happened. His chest was rising and falling, his ribs sticking out. The corners of his eyes were moist.

  “It’s my birthday today,” he said.

  He was 27. He felt as if he had disgraced himself, but it had only happened in the presence of a whore. If it came to it, he could easily order her to be flogged or put to death. If he wanted to, he could shoot her dead without another thought.

  They could hear the dance music coming from the gymnasium. In the background was the thunder of heavy guns. They could make out the croaking of ravens, the howling of wolves and, as always, from the corridor the squeaking of rats.

  She waited for Obersturmführer Sarazin to free himself from his bonds, remembering him telling her that a friend had taught him how to tie and untie eight kinds ofknots.

  “Don’t say anything more,” he ordered, although she hadn’t spoken.

  “You know me by now … you know me quite well by now. But I don’t know you so well.”

  By the light of the candle the scar around his forehead and his hairline had the colour of garnets. He was lying on the blanket. He left the cords on the bed by his side, unlike the previous time, when he had immediately wound them up and put them in his pocket.

  “Lucky for you that you obeyed me. Everything I want is mine. Now, here, at once.”

  He looked at her clothes. Madam Kulikowa had fitted them out with the best things she could find in her boxes, including brightly coloured silk squares, the kind she herself wore round her neck to conceal the wrinkles of her throat. The Obersturmführer was resting. He did not care for chatter with prostitutes. He liked her underwear, her revealing bodice when she leaned over him. Again he noted that she had half-childish, half-adult breasts.

  Obersturmführer Sarazin came from Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He showed her a photograph of him standing in front of a tavern with a wooden crucifix and the letters I.N.R.I, on the spot where someone had been killed. He was seventeen then. He was wearing embroidered lederhosen and hand-knitted socks. On the snow there were black patches, maybe wine.

  He held her fingers between his lips, from one corner of his mouth to the other.

  They had used dogs against the saboteurs who derailed the train. Each member of the Einsatzkommando had his own Alsatian or Dobermann. The Jagdkommando had been provided with a reconnaissance plane, a Storch, which had been fired on with rifles. He told Skinny that he and his animal had followed the tracks through the snow. They had been three days on the move, not allowing themselves to rest. He had lived on dry salami, bread, and a few pieces of fruitcake he’d received for Christmas. He had washed it down with schnapps from one flask and water from another. He always stuffed his side pocket with food before any action, as an emergency reserve. He was obsessed with hunting these people down. Once he had caught them he was gripped by melancholy. He could not explain it. Close up, the saboteurs were a pitiful sight, in spite of their frightening appearance. They were like lamps with tiny little flames about to go out. They stank of vulgarity: unwashed, uncombed, in sweaty rags. Their equipment was enough to make you weep. And that rabble had been chased by the foremost élite units deserving of a worthier adversary.

  He must have been drunk still. He claimed that the cubicle looked different from last time.

  “Your shrine,” he observed. “Your sphere of repose. Your place of thanksgiving.”

  He
had brought her some amber beads; he would not wish her to think him mean. She had better not ask whose neck he had snatched them off. He laughed. How many welts did she have on her behind? It would give him pleasure if she kept the beads on. Amber reminded him of ash wood.

  She turned away from his breath, the sour smell of a smoker. His body smelt of dry sweat. She felt the presence of those he called saboteurs.

  “Even if they hadn’t confessed, their time was up,” he said. “Always sentence them, never pardon them.”

  “Move over to the window,” he ordered. She was afraid he might fire at her, as last time he had on the wolves.

  “Your back to me.” She did as he ordered. “Now turn round and face me.”

  “You should be proud of your white skin,” he told her. “You promise a good seed.” Some tribes, he explained, could be admitted to German blood. They were working on it at the Office for the Consolidation of Germandom. Detailed plans had already been made. “In the right proportion inferior blood – so long as it’s not in the majority – dissolves in pure blood.”

  She was thinking of what Beautiful had done. And how ridiculous it was that she had survived even Long-Legs.

  The Obersturmführer explained how, from spring to autumn, he fished the Polish rivers. He no longer felt quite so much in a foreign country; he had come to feel at home. Eels did very well in rivers with dead bodies in them. They grew fat even from dead horses. As for bream, perch and carp – one of his friends called them the rats of the rivers – a hand grenade was more effective than any fishing line.

  He told her about a transport of French Jewesses from Drancy near Paris. The French police had rounded them up, 2,000 of them had been under 15 years of age. A man in Bordeaux had given them false papers. She would not believe how many Jews there were in France, but their arrogance would encounter German thoroughness. Those girls had been too weak for work. Guided by searchlights they had gone into the darkness. The sheer force of the crowd had pushed them into the underground rooms. They had looked like a monstrously large flower of a water lily, with 2,000 blossoms, soon to be devoured by a carnivorous plant. They had stood for a day and night on the square before being sent to the gas chamber. They had arrived in the morning and their turn had not come until the evening of the following day. Some had fainted; some had wet themselves, or thrown up. Fortunately, the Jewish Moloch devoured itself.

  He asked her to clean his uniform. And could she sew a button on the pocket in which he carried his emergency rations? He liked everything neat and tidy. He would wait in bed.

  “The world is divided into Jews and non-Jews, into a pure and an impure race,” he said. “That is the only boundary human history acknowledges. That’s what future anthropologists, philosophers and astronomers will write about.”

  The fire was going at last, the flue turning red-hot. She went to get a needle and thread, then sat down on the edge of the chair on which he had put his clothes. The Obersturmführer remained lying on the bed, whistling to himself.

  She didn’t know that a Moloch was a Phoenician god personifying the creative and destructive force of the Sun, he thought. But at least she knew about the poets. Die Sonne bringt es an den Tag) Nothing new under the sun.

  “Es kommt der Tag,” he said. The day will come. “One thing you should know, a thing the whole world should know. Even a defeated Germany will not fall upon its knees.”

  She had learnt to sew on buttons while still at home – with a little shank so that buttoning up would be easier and to stop the button from tearing off. She caught sight of the lines on the Obersturmführer’s face and around his mouth. He shut his eyes. He was sleepy; the music worked like a lullaby. They were playing a Strauss waltz, one that started softly and went on for a long time. Violins, a zither and clarinets. An echo of warmth, domestic comfort and everyday worries. “Tales from the Vienna Woods”.

  Once Skinny’s mother had danced with her father to it. She finished wiping clean his uniform. The button was sewn on. The waltz swayed on for ten minutes or more. The Obersturmführer was snoring. From her sock she retrieved the screw of newspaper. She did not have to hesitate now; none of them would be there for much longer. They would not leave the prostitutes behind without guards. She had to be careful and quick.

  Skinny looked at the Obersturmführer’s closed eyes, his purple lids, his depraved features. She shook some of the powder into his schnapps flask and the rest into his pocket, taking care not to touch the cyanide, the Zyklon B. She pictured Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin of the Einsatzkommando der Einsatzgruppen from Garmisch-Partenkirchen standing near the tavern by the wooden crucifix. She saw Beautiful, Ramon, her father. The waltz was coming to an end with a roll of drums. She imagined the Obersturmführer in the middle of a punitive action, taking some bread out ofhis pocket, some salami, and washing it down with schnapps for courage. Or in a camp, watching those young French girls.

  She stoked the fire. The scrap of paper flared up, the letters on it burning first. She closed the stove door. The clash of cast iron against cast-iron woke the Obersturmführer.

  “What’s the time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can hear music, so it can’t be very late.”

  “No.”

  “Have you finished the job?”

  “It’s been finished some time.”

  “That was quick. Let me see.”

  She handed him his tunic. He was satisfied.

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “You didn’t tell me to.”

  “You should guess what I want and what I don’t want.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re working for Germany.”

  He laced up his boots with their 38 nails in each sole. Casually he smoothed his greasy hair, and put on his cap to hide his scar. “We’re in a war of races,” he said. She watched him dressing.

  “I’ll tell you one thing and you’d better remember it,” the Obersturmführer declared. “I didn’t know what beauty was till I came out here to the east. To find you’re allowed everything. That there’s nothing at all that you can’t do.”

  “Beauty is beyond morality,” he went on. “Beyond good and evil. Beauty is Germany, the Waffen-SS, the Einsatzgruppen, the Jagdkommandos. The bomb that drops on an inhabited site. A town consumed by flames. Anything that dissolves into nothing. A captured enemy division turned into ashes like those vermin at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Majdanek. The hand grenade we thrust between the legs of that Jewish prostitute. I pulled the pin and watched from a distance as she lay there, with her hands tied, screaming, and then turned into a firework.”

  He remembered the smell, the burnt flesh, the incinerated skin and bones, the hair flying in the wind like an old man’s beard.

  “A pity those scribes weren’t present, the ones we burnt at the stake along with their books. Beautiful is whatever dissolves the ugly, the unnecessary, the subversive.”

  She assumed that he expected no reply from her. It was one ofhis outbursts. He was intoxicated by it.

  “You’re young. Beauty is not just a picture. Beauty overturns what we’ve become accustomed to. Nothing we’ve known before can withstand it.”

  She kept silent.

  “Beauty is death,” Obersturmführer Sarazin said. “My lover. The most faithful of all. If I didn’t know what death was I wouldn’t know what beauty is.”

  She could not avoid his eyes. She felt as if she were sinking into dense fog, the end of which she couldn’t see. She was desperate not to arouse his suspicion.

  Some of the girls were busy in their cubicles. The Oberführer had had to turn a blind eye. Skinny returned to the party. Estelle was missing. It was just after n p.m. and “The Emperor’s Waltz” went on and on. She didn’t even notice which of the guards she danced with.

  “Let’s get back to our posts,” said Oberführer S chimmelpfennig finally.

  During the night a truck from the Wehrkreis arrived with a barrel of salted h
errings. Later that night the Oberführer was visited by a liaison officer from the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler. The officer was Himmler’s personal representative in the region. He brought The Frog his evacuation plans.

  In the morning Skinny watched a guard stripping his rifle on a green blanket spread on the snow. He cleaned every single part, then oiled it and reassembled the weapon. He looked at it lovingly.

  Major von Kalckreuth was with Madam Kulikowa in her room. He remarked that the high command in its bunker in Berlin was like the crew of the Titanic. The ship was down at the bows, but the band went on playing military marches.

  “We’re waging a war of cannibals, my dear,” the major said.

  His remark caught the Madam by surprise.

  “We were close to victory, and that made us giddy. It made our heads spin. The worst people are those who think themselves invincible to the very end.”

  Twelve: Hjalmar Steinbruch, Hubert Donnerstag, Haraki Trinkiewitz, Jürgen Heck, Horst Geuss, Dieter Fritzen, Ulrich Kohl, Manfred Kollmann, Hannes Lurke, Bragi Kleist, Otto Fest, Adolf Eiermann

  In the afternoon the weather cleared. Later, there was a blood-red sunset before the sun disappeared in the patchy clouds. Dark mountains seemed to tower on the horizon, with a fire burning on top of them and spreading towards both sides. Skinny had not seen a sunset like this before. The wind was howling outside the window. She listened to forces she did not comprehend. The sky had dropped lower. Darkness fell on the plain and in the cubicle. Ice was forming on the window and on the grille, white at first and almost transparent, but slowly darkening. She felt a fear that she couldn’t name. At the moment when her twelfth soldier, Adolf Eiermann, pointed to the bed, the wind suddenly dropped. She closed her eyes, sensing that there was something in the air, new and unknown, something imminent.

  After they’d had sex, the soldier dressed. The slightest sound could be heard – the rustle of the cloth, the scrape of his puttees, his bootlaces being tied. Snowflakes began to fall into the silence, a heavy snowfall.