“I’ve learned to count the time, not the number of bodies,” Estelle said. “How many hours I still have left.”
That didn’t sound like a reproach.
“Yes,” said Skinny.
“It’s a shift, like the laundry women, coal miners, or the girls in the weaving shop. Like the girls in the bakery kneading dough.”
“Perhaps.”
“If somebody asked me what I’ve learned here, I’d say: To lie and to die.”
“We aren’t dead yet.”
“Twelve times a day,” Estelle repeated. “Today fifteen times. I don’t know where my family are or what has happened to them. My father, mother and sister. I drown it all in a lie.”
The water splashed. Estelle was not lying now. Skinny began to suspect what was behind Estelle’s confidences.
“I’d like to be able to handle it like going to work.”
Skinny looked at her. In Estelle’s voice rang an echo of what she heard within herself. Estelle had never spoken in this way about her family. Was it better to know that they were dead or to be tortured by the uncertainty that she heard in Estelle’s voice? No-one knew who they killed, who starved to death or who was lost somewhere. She had been putting off her questions and her doubts from the first day she got to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her family. Now this seemed far away and long ago, but it was neither.
The tubs stood about three yards from each other. It didn’t matter where each had come from, from what country or what region. Things vanished under a sea of ashes, of mud, of snow and ice, like abandoned islands in some nocturnal icy ocean. She washed herself thoroughly, everywhere, even the soles ofher feet. Who knew what she had stepped on when she came to the tub barefoot?
In the sixth tub someone was singing. Ginger?
Estelle washed herself with a large natural sponge which the truck from the Wehrkreis had brought. The men used them for washing the Oberführer’s car. Skinny’s ears were full of water. Estelle offered her the sponge.
“Thanks.”
“This soap is like sandpaper.”
In the yard outside, the troops, ready for departure, were singing a song about Hitler. She could hear the shout Heil three times, and again three times.
“They are pigs,” Estelle whispered.
Skinny was anxious not to catch something from the water when she had so far avoided infection from contact — or so she hoped.
“They think that we are the pigs. Me and you,” she answered.
“If someone accused me of stealing your nose and we both knew that it wasn’t true because you have a nose on your face, I’d still feel guilty.”
Estelle had never said anything like this to her before. She felt again that an inexplicable closeness to her, which she felt even when her friend was withdrawn. Skinny knew what it meant to feel guilty for what she had not done but would perhaps be capable of doing, though — fortunately or unfortunately — the opportunity would not arise. The idea seemed to bind them together, quite apart from what they had in common. They were also bound by what Estelle had said about her family, who were missing somewhere.
“It’s what the cold and the snow are doing to us,” said Skinny.
“I don’t know what the snow is doing to you. I heard they’re going to send us Italians. Men from Sicily have never seen snow. They’ve already had Slovaks, Estonians and Hungarians here. The girls before us had Frenchmen and Flemish.” Estelle paused.
“Right to the last moment I didn’t know they were sending me here. There was talk of the ‘Hotel for Foreigners’, of some knocking shop for workers on ‘total employment’. Sometimes they have Waffen-SS brothels directly in the camps. I’m almost glad I don’t have to make my own decisions about myself. They told me I’d be an entertainer. I didn’t know what that meant. I thought it wiser not to ask. It was enough to be alive, the Oberführer said. His assistant was a whore they’d discharged from Spandau prison. How are you feeling?”
“How do you think?” Skinny asked. “Fine.”
“Like me,” said Estelle. “Before or after?”
“I close my eyes,” said Skinny.
“That helps?”
“I don’t want to see anyone.”
“Is that possible?”
“Perhaps.”
“I didn’t know what eyes the devil had. Or his brothers. It never occurred to me that the devil had a military rank, from Obersoldat to Oberführer. Or that he wore a smelly uniform and didn’t wash his feet. Perhaps I should learn to shut my eyes like you.”
It was said of Estelle that she was waiting for two gunners who shared her. The fact that the story came from Maria-from-Poznan was enough to make people doubt its truth. Maria was known as “The Toad” because she had cold lips and, as one soldier put it, everything that should be the very opposite was as cold as a dog’s snout. As for passion, she could at best talk about it. She was both cunning and stupid, as Long-Legs described her. She made up for her lack of beauty with perfidy. Beware of ugly people, Long-Legs insisted.
The worst thing, though, was to fall for one of the soldiers. Those who drafted the regulations knew very well why an enduring relationship, for the same reasons as kissing or other amorous engagement, was forbidden. Only intercourse was permitted.
Was it not dangerous enough for Estelle to have such raven hair and even the hint of a moustache under the nose? Were her father and mother ravens? Who knows who her father and mother are, Maria-from-Poznan said to Ginger in the latrine. They were with Smartie and Long-Legs, so she quickly shut up. It could get to the Oberführer’s ears.
Estelle interrupted Skinny’s thoughts.
“That Obersoldat who told me I had eyes like black coffee has had his number come up.”
She didn’t say “And a good thing, too,” but her voice implied it. There was something in Estelle that Skinny couldn’t understand. Everything was boiling down to a struggle with time.
The water in the tub was dirty now. Blobs of Vaseline were floating on its surface. Uncleanness washed off from their skin, out of their pores, from under their nails. Anything that did not readily dissolve needed vigorous scrubbing.
“I feel swollen,” Estelle said.
“I don’t see why.”
“As though I was made of water instead of flesh and blood.”
“You’re made of flesh and blood, all right.”
“Mucous membranes and glands,” Estelle corrected her.
“You seem normal to me.”
“Like a lake when it overflows. Maybe they are normal discharges.”
She told Skinny that for three nights running she had dreamt that they’d cut her in two with an axe, from her skull through her body to her crotch, and that both parts were alive and in the course of the night came together again and that she returned to her cubicle.
“I can pretend anything now.”
“I can’t manage that,” said Skinny.
“I’m swollen like water,” Estelle repeated.
They both climbed out. They dried themselves vigorously, to set the blood flowing through their veins and to get warm again. They dressed in haste.
“Do you ever feel as if your blood is freezing inside you?” Estelle asked.
On Sunday orders came for them to dig a well. Water from the cistern would be for the guards only. They could melt some snow in jugs.
Skinny dreamt about rats. They were scurrying over the snow, down the stone floor of the corridor, between the water tubs. They talked to each other. An old rat said to its young: “What you can’t avoid you must endure.”
They appeared in her dreams with the bodies of other animals, dogs, foxes, wolves or fish, but always with rat’s heads. When she opened her eyes they were gone. When she closed them, there they were again, running in front of her. They were shouting words of advice to her, but she could not remember a single one.