Estelle was naked now, and climbed into the tub. Skinny joined her. “Yes,” Skinny said.
Madam Kulikowa taught Skinny to sing “The Cocotte”. There would be an evening entertainment. Did she know “Deeper than the Sea, Hotter than the Sahara”? They might rehearse a cabaret number about Lucifer meeting Beelzebub.
When the full moon wasn’t hidden by clouds and as long as the stars were shining, the wolves seemed white, with huge silver eyes. They emerged from the darkness, phantoms of the night, enfolded in a kind of unknowing. They moved about the snow-covered wasteland wrapped in a cloak of darkness, illuminated by the moon. They made her aware of what humans lacked: fierceness, the dark rays of night. She admired them and she was afraid of them. Now and then the guards caught them in their searchlights. It was a different light from the one the wolves were born into. Day and night made no difference to them. They came from lairs in the quarry and among the rocks. They did not recognize frontiers, any more than the Germans did.
Crows were flying across the same night sky. They could not be seen, like the rats and the wolves, only heard. Croaking, howling and whistling pierced the night. Like unintelligible messages, vague prophecies. Something more ancient than man.
In the morning the guards exercised in the snow without shirts, just in trousers. The S S maintenance staff were extending the gym by breaking down the wall between what had been the cowshed and the stables. The buildings were made mainly of stone, partly from wood. Commandant Trillhase had had the yard paved wall to wall. When the girls had swept the snow away, the stones shone like ancient hieroglyphs. Oberführer Brandenburg-Luttich said once that the stones looked as if they had been inscribed by the Jews who had worked in the quarry. The inscriptions seemed to him like Hebrew letters, or like ancient Germanic runes.
The Oberführer thought that No. 232 Ost was an ideal spot linking them to the front, the hinterland and the Wehrkreis, as if made for defence and attack. He agreed with Oberführer Schimmelpfennig, The Frog, that the substance of which the German soul was made was hardness not compassion. Those who would read the stones would read German.
Twelve: Kurt Wegener, Gerd Wolf, Alexander Penske, Albert Heller-Kaiser, Max Gunther Friedenthal, Martin Schwitzer, Hans-Peter Krume, Kleo Hahn, Fritz Mani, Hans Lage-Hegern, Helmut Binder, Hans Anglia Jürgensohn.
When they had let the water out of their tubs they were to report to Oberführer S chimmelpfennig’s surgery to get an injection against Ebola or Marburg disease, something spread by rats and bats and their excrement. Their temperature would go up temporarily. No cause for alarm. As a special concession reveille the following day would not be until 5.30 a.m.
Big Leopolda Kulikowa got the Pole who came over to tattoo the girls to pull out a painful back tooth for her. She didn’t want to ask the Oberführer, but she needed a painkiller from him. She hated asking for anything. Out in the corridor she spat out some blood.
“You don’t get out of anything on your own — only exceptionally. It’s better with some help. You don’t have to love them,” she said to Skinny, almost apologetically.
Long-Legs called them to the window. For about five minutes a wolf had been dancing, twisting about its own axis as if trying to catch its tail. Abruptly it ran off.
“You can want, but you don’t necessarily get,” Skinny heard the Madam say to Fatty.
Twelve: Reiner Dressier, Rafael Habe, Paul Hoffmann, Klaus Rune, Christian Schulte, Fritz Adler, Seigfried Knappe, Uwe Welt, Demian Schuhmacher, Volker Werner Blind, Willi Lump, Heinrich Burke.
Before lights-out the rats gathered between the latrines. Motionless, they resembled piles of wolf’s hair. Suddenly they would scatter, leaving raven’s feathers behind on the snow.
During the evening a truck from the Wehrkreis delivered three barrels of salted beef.
Over the radio came the voices of three German singers, one of them Lile Anderson. In a direct relay from Paris, Maurice Chevalier was appearing for the benefit of frontline soldiers, war widows and the victims of the air raids on Germany. He sang “Give me Your Hand, Mam’zelle”. The commentator mentioned the soul of Europe and its full stomach. The audience applauded. One mother, he said, gave birth to her baby during an air raid. Her husband, a doctor, had handed the child out through the window to some air defence personnel, so they could take it to a shelter. The child was named Adolf. In honour of the child, Monsieur Chevalier would sing …
The station’s signal faded.
They were all examined during the week by an army psychologist, Oberführer Michael Blatter-Spirit. His dissertation had been about Oswald Spengler; on the extinction of life, on the duty to die. The Frog had his own opinion of Blatter-Spirit. The body knew four million kinds of pain? Could one agree with Arthur Schopenhauer that man’s most essential longing was to be free from pain? Blatter-Spirit could look back on his respectable series of researches. He had studied the psychological features of blond and blue-eyed people over five and a half feet tall. He’d probed into the Viking and Nordland Divisions of the S S that had levelled the miners’ village of Lidice in Bohemia and razed Oradour near Limoges in France. He had examined those who participated in the massacre of Malmédy. One S S man had recalled the end of Oradour. This man had described how it had occurred on a sunny Saturday in the peaceful quiet of a German village. He had exhibited all the qualities of Waffen-S S members — the sons of middle and upper class parents. In Oradour he had killed more women and children than men: 190 men, 207 children, 245 women. Blatter-Spirit had also studied the Germanization of foreigners, that which made the Waffen-S S so attractive to them, a magnet for Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Slovak, Romanian and French SS. The psychologist wore small round spectacles, his eyes behind them shone like opal glass. His face was pockmarked with childhood acne and duelling scars from his days at the German University in Prague.
He took his subject seriously. The army prostitutes must be made to smile.
“Smile at me,” he ordered Skinny.
She smiled at him.
“That’s lifeless,” he said. “Again.”
She had to grin at him 20 times. He promised her chocolate, two hard-boiled eggs and bread with ham.
From smiling lips, he explained, signals went to the brain and triggered energy which — even if the smile wasn’t spontaneous — produced positive effects. He based this on discoveries of the French neurologist Duchenne de Bologne, according to whom a hearty smile (not just a half smile) gave rise to a “play of sweet feelings in the soul”. He was trying to get results that could lead to a general instruction. He glanced at her file, at the questionnaire she had answered.
“What do you know? Rat — rabbit? Ox — cockerel?”
Oberführer S chimmelpfennig remained doubtful about these theories. Either Dr Blatter-Spirit was right, or he was an idiot — and he’d decided which. The Oberführer himself recognized health only, and the opposite of health. Nothing in between.
Over tea Blatter-Spirit expressed the view that Columbus was a Jew. He had brought syphilis back to Europe. And weren’t the Jews everywhere? The two men talked about experiments carried out by Japanese doctors using horse blood for human transfusions. Then they discussed pressure chambers and the point at which a person’s eyeballs popped out.
At daybreak on Sunday repair gangs and teams of camp inmates from Auschwitz-Birkenau and Blechhammer, Monowitz and Gleiwitz, where the rolling stock repair shops were located, arrived at the steel bridge. Under the guidance of railway engineers they reinforced the piers and replaced the rails. In the fierce wind they broke the ice on the river with hand grenades. They encased the piers in heavy timber. There was a sound of gunfire, shouting and the clash of metal against metal. The guards were warming themselves at iron braziers with red-hot coke. A few camp inmates drowned in the ice-cold water.