Obersturmführer Sarazin had been preoccupied by numbers lately. Especially with two and three. He sought and found all kinds of connections. For the fifth day running (two plus three) he’d had a dream he’d first had at Treblinka. He had residential rights there; he had been a member and later the commanding officer of the guard detachment. The newly-raised Einsatzgruppen would be sent there to be tested, toughened up and tempered like steel.
He could have chosen between Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. That was the number three. There remained Mauthausen and Sobibor — two and three made five.
It would be silly if he had not dreamt it so often. He did not know whether it was a prophecy of the future or something that had happened to him in a previous life. It was about three Jewish women and a train with two engines. The engines uncoupled themselves and came to a halt in front of him. He tied the Jewish women to the near tender by their pigtails. Then he signalled the engineers to go full steam ahead. The two engine drivers sounded their whistles in unison. Three long blasts cut through the air, like horns playing some unknown music. Two engines, three blasts. Two engines, three women with pigtails. Then his numbers got confused.
The advantage of the dream was that he could dream about Jews even if there were none left in the area. He saw this as a personal achievement. He felt himself growing, felt the invisible magnetic force contained in killing, as if he were cutting down tall grain with a scythe, the black earth under his feet and white, wind-tattered clouds against a translucent deep blue when he raised his arm towards the sky. He had killed in many landscapes, now along the banks of the River San, where cattle would one day feed on grass fertilized by countless dead Jews, Gypsies and Poles. Every lizard would be fat with Jewish blood, fish would grow from the nutrients he had provided for them. Blood to him suggested crimson and all kinds of aniline red. He had seen a river turn red. It was to his credit that on historic maps Europe would be marked judenrein, cleansed of Jews. He knew that the Jews were his obsession. He didn’t ask himself why. Poets were guided by their unshakeable intuition, that was how it was. He had one advantage over the circumcised: he saw what they could no longer see.
He stepped into Cubicle 16. He looked about him in the dim light, then shut the door. The ceiling seemed low to him. The prostitute he had chosen and booked for the whole shift was standing by the window, facing the door. Snowflakes were swirling outside. He had no doubt that she had been waiting for him. He could tell at once, washed, with oil handy. She’d be all the more willing to do what he wanted after his self-assured entry. And, of course, because of his rank and unit. Was she taller than him? Perhaps he should will her to stoop a little. She had light, gingery hair. Good. She was better dressed than he had expected. That was probably due to the obliging nature of that cloying, ageing Madam. He noted the lit candle and the shadow that the prostitute’s head cast on the wall, like the shadow of a wounded bird whose head was drooping.
“Here I am.”
Skinny did not reply. She could see he was there.
“I like being pampered,” he said. “Future German children will be born as giants.”
She did not know why he said that.
“I don’t like ducking,” he said. It was obvious that he had come in from the cold.
He straightened up. He had come in as if expecting a servant to follow him. He had walked across the yard and down the corridor with his hands in his pockets, but now he took them out and let them hang down. He still wore the air of superiority he had displayed when the guards helped him with the tarpaulins for his car.
He was her second officer.
“Stefan Sarazin, S S Obersturmführer, Einsatzkommando der Einsatzgruppen,” he said by way of greeting.
He enjoyed the fact that the first six letters of his rank, Oberst or colonel, suggested what he might still rise to during the war.
Was he waiting for her to introduce herselfby her name or only her nickname? For a week now, since Captain Hentschel’s visit, she had been called Lovely Green Eyes. He glanced about the cubicle, noting what she had done to it. She was young and healthy, just as he had been told, but it was hard to judge her experience. Perhaps she did not have a lot, he would see. He decided to put his cards on the table. He had not been able to manage a lot with her ginger colleague on his last visit, nor with the whore with the high ankles who reminded him of a foal. It didn’t occur to him that the fault might be his. The rôles were clearly defined. One knew from the start who the prostitute was and who the client. The military character of the brothel made no difference; on the contrary. And it was not a matter of merit in serving the troops, the army, the Einsatzgruppen; it was a privilege. In the meantime, a lot had happened on other battlefields. He could not guarantee that the girls wouldn’t all be shot in the end. He could tell himself that he wouldn’t only have sex here, but have it with a living corpse. Ginger had disgusted him by talking of her vaginal blood. Later he had, out of that disgust, written a poem about it.
He knew very well in what aspect he was sensitive and why he could not overcome his revulsion at certain things. He felt driven by an impulse not to beat about the bush, but to come straight to the point.
“I’ve never slept with a Jewess,” he said. ‘Tm fussy. I don’t mate with dark-haired, dark-eyed or inferior women, or with those who are shorter than myself. I’d appreciate it if you could tell me that you have never slept with a circumcised one either.”
His smile did nothing to lessen the tight feeling that enclosed her like a hoop around a beer barrel.
“You aren’t going to answer me?” Obersturmführer Sarazin asked.
She had got used to the way the soldiers eyed her all over. She knew the path of their gaze, the way it mapped out what more or less made up a girl, at least from the outside — hair, chin, eyes, breasts, hips, buttocks, legs and crotch — assessing her in a hundredth of a second usually, though sometimes lingeringly. She had grown used to the fact that the men regarded her as a piece of colourfully decked-out flesh. Sometimes, when their glance intensified or became detached, she saw a moment of recognition in their eyes, as though she had reminded them of someone, or they had failed to find in her something that they were looking for. Then she would know that they were comparing her to someone in their memory, or in their imagination, and she had no wish to know who it was — a wife, a mistress, a sister, a whore. At times she felt that a soldier’s glance was casting a shadow, or a different light, over the cubicle. On one occasion, with a corporal engineer, it occurred to her — with a terrible shock — that he might recognize her because he came from Prague and might have seen her in the rolling stock workshop or by the Harmanze lake. She was glad that he was a corporal in the Wehrmacht and not in the SS. It had only been a moment, but it produced a greater fear than she had so far experienced. Under the gaze of the Obersturmführer she felt like a false coin that he was examining before tossing it so that it would flip over and reveal its reverse.