At that time mobile x-ray units were making the rounds of the schools. On the pretext of the fight against tuberculosis, the Germans were collecting data on the racial composition of the population of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia — on the percentage of the population suitable for Germanization and subsequent assimilation. The family had been almost glad to escape by being sent to Terezin. S S and SA men were photographing girls aged from thirteen upwards in the nude. Later the photographs were sold in nightclubs.
“Dropped off for a while. What’s the time? How long did I sleep? Come to me. Why are you so far away?”
The captain was wide awake. It was after midday. She returned to the bed. His body and the bedclothes smelled of sleep. He sweated a little. If she understood his expression, she knew what it meant.
“Are you here?” he asked after a while.
“Yes,” she answered.
“I wouldn’t swear to it.”
She lay down by his side, closing her eyes. He could do with her whatever he wanted to. She didn’t want to have a part of it other than with her body. She heard him say that she was looking at him as if she were looking into water. But she was anxious not to make him angry.
“Do you always keep your legs together so tightly? Do you never relax? Or have you got cramp?”
He didn’t like the way she pressed her lips together either. Her youth he accepted; but stubbornness, or what he thought might be stubbornness, he would not. He couldn’t and didn’t want to admit that she might feel an aversion to him and he could see no reason why she should be afraid of him.
He wanted her to sit on him. It was pleasant to look into her face.
A few cinders dropped, spitting, through the grate.
“It’s warm here,” he said.
They heard the door of the next cubicle open and close. The captain got up as he was and walked over to the window. The blizzard had moved off beyond the river. She looked at his huge body.
“Soon we shall be defending ourselves on the Oder,” he said. “An hour or two from Berlin. Many hounds — death of the hare. We’re a tough nut; they haven’t got an easy run with us. But we don’t have an easy run with ourselves. We’re a big country, even if we’re small. A mere ninety million Germans. But we’re our own worst enemies. I could explain to you why we’re withdrawing, if you’re interested. As Frederick the Great said: He who would defend everything will defend nothing.”
He knew that army whores didn’t concern themselves with the technicalities of warfare. They did not care about strategy or tactics, positional fighting, or defence in trenches protected by minefields, let alone about Operation Barbarossa or the Blue Plan which replaced it because the original Blitzkrieg did not allow for retreat. It was ancient history by now that at the beginning of the campaign the men didn’t get winter clothing or boots because it was believed that they’d be home before the winter. Was it true then that pride came before a fall? If you want to know what winter means, he thought, you should spend a day in the east. That’s what the pious old women on his mother’s side used to say. Wer andern eine Grube gräbt, fällt selbst hinein. He who digs a hole for others will fall into it himself. He smiled.
“War or no war, millions of women throughout the world get pregnant each day. More than those killed on all fronts. Added to this there are five times as many men crippled as killed. Think how many broken families that means. Good manners command the cripples to make room for their rivals and withdraw with their tail between their legs. I see them terrified of dusk, of the approach of night, of the expectations of their wives.”
He was watching the wolves in the half light.
“The worst thing is the frosts.”
For her the worst thing in Poland had not been the frosts.
He turned away from the window to face her.
“You’ll have pretty hair when it grows again. I like redheads. Do you get it from your mother or your father?”
She took a second to think of a reply. “From my father’s mother.” Captain Hentschel began to dress. “Light the candle, will you? I can’t see my boots.”
He was thinking that the enemy had approached within artillery range. Today it was heavy guns; tomorrow it would be machine guns. Gone were the days when they’d advanced with the wind behind them. Now they were retreating. They were being chased back to where they had come from.
“The fog is at home here.”
She noticed that he had not put his pullover on. It was lying on the chair.
“Keep it, I have another.”
“Thank you. Shall I get dressed?”
“Put it straight on next to your body. That’s what Lilo used to do.”
From the pocket of his greatcoat, which he had put on but not done up, he produced a flask. He unscrewed the cap. His holster was still on the hook.
“Yes, you can get dressed,” he answered, “but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. You’re a feast for the eyes when you’ve nothing on. You haven’t got much of anything.”
“No,” she said, almost against her will.
Again she thought of her father. If he were to see her like this, with a Wehrmacht captain, and this enormous pullover over her naked body … It went down to her thighs. Would this be a greater dishonour to her father than if he saw her dead? It was her body she had killed, not the religion of her ancestors. To her father, as a whore she would be as good as dead. Should she be glad that her family no longer existed? She felt the coarse bulky wool on her; she was warm and realized how welcome the pullover was. Did she know where the captain had got it? She knew where he had got his greatcoat. She might make the excuse to her father that she had not been with the captain; he had been with her. Would her father believe her if she lied and said she would rather be dead? It would only be half a lie. Had she committed a sin by wanting to live?
“Will you have a drink with me?” the captain asked.
He poured himself a thimbleful and drank it in one go. He poured out another. She expected him to drink that too, but he handed it to her. He was treating her as no-one in the brothel had treated her before.
She stood by the bed in his pullover, no longer wondering whether it came from the store at Auschwitz-Birkenau. She knocked the drink back in one gulp, like the captain, and started coughing. The captain laughed, it was a chesty laugh, deep and grating like his voice.
He poured himself a second shot and drank it in one gulp.
“Yesterday I killed a Russian who’d killed a comrade before my eyes. I grabbed a rifle and struck his head, perhaps 15 times. You can’t control yourself when your blood is up. What can be worse than seeing a comrade killed at your side?”
Did he assume she was on his side? The S S men in the camps had expected total submission. They believed that the conquered should feel honoured, should appreciate and admire their conquerors. It was the only glory, reflected glory that could fall on them before they perished.
Beneath his greatcoat she could see an Iron Cross. Who knew what he’d got it for? He had been to Auschwitz-Birkenau for a share in the loot held in those huge stores of everything that her father, mother, grandmothers, aunts and uncles and untold others had regarded as indispensable to life, and of which they had been stripped. That, in her eyes, made something cling to him, as it would cling to Germany to the end of all time.
As he poured his third shot he said: “Even a German sometimes forgets that he is a German.”
She did not know what that meant.
“Do you have a shop here for the troops? They do at some brothels.”
“Not here.”
“I’m leaving you a few marks. 30 enough?”
She was overcome with shame. The same kind of shame as when she stood before him naked.