“I’d know if you lied to me.” He gave a brief smile. “We’ll see.”
She was afraid of the ambiguity of his remarks. She looked for something in what he left unsaid.
He decided to play with her a while longer. She had a nice little oblong face. He felt the heat coming from the flue and from the cast-iron barrel of the stove. A few red-hot cinders were dropping through the grate. He found it agreeable to stand in the warmth and look out of the window at the blizzard. So far it had not abated. He hoped it wouldn’t bury his car. He looked again at his prostitute. Her colour had come back, but the general impression was still one of pallor. Was she perspiring too, or did it merely seem so to him? And was she half-closing her eyes, perhaps looking at his pistol?
“Are you afraid to die?”
“Why?”
“Are you questioning me or am I questioning you?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“In a while I shall know more about you than you do yourself.”
He didn’t know yet if he would reward or punish her. Was she undernourished? Compared to her, his own features were bursting with health. He thought of Pomeranian Jewesses. They were dark-haired, though some of them had ginger hair like the girl before him. The Einsatzgruppen had used them as targets for their machine gunners.
“You might think I’m obsessed with the Jews,” he said. “But it’s handed down from generation to generation. It gives me self-confidence, as if I were drinking life-giving water.”
After a pause the Obersturmführer said, “We don’t have anything to regret, wasn’t it the Jews who claimed that a good lawyer was better than the truth?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
She tried to answer politely, with humility rather than rebelliousness.
“How come you speak German?”
“I learnt it.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Did they tell you I liked redheads?”
“No.”
“Girls with long legs and your complexion? What did they tell you about me?”
“Only that you would come.”
His eyes seemed to her like a well without water. Or a puddle which had dried up after a shower. She thought of the muddy bank of the Harmanze lake. She resisted speculating who the Oberführer was; it was enough to know what he had come for. What he would want. There was brutality in his eyes, and a moment later also sickness and fastidiousness. At once determination and confusion, a kind of uncertainty which was confirmed by his words. Why had he asked her if she was afraid of death?
He had chosen Skinny because Ginger had failed him the last time. So ein Luder! She had been given a flogging. For a third complaint she would go to Festung Breslau. He had stayed to watch the Madam flog her. After the third lash on her bare bottom she had kissed his boots. And Long-Legs was too big for him. How much did a girl like that eat? And how much, it occurred to him, did a thin girl like this one, get into her stomach? Maybe she had threadworm, like he had had as a child. It amazed him, the number of superfluous and useless stomachs Germany was nourishing. Weren’t the simple soldiers, the workers and the peasants and the teachers, right when they said that he who does not work, neither shall he eat? The Nazis had widened this to include the unhealthy, the incurably sick, the feeble-minded, the ailing. One had to have the courage to cut into one’s own flesh. Cut out all tumours, large and small. Perhaps he should tell this little whore how they brought up their children in ancient Sparta, how the king erected a small rail over an abyss and if an infant lost its grip and fell into the abyss he would congratulate its mother for having spared Sparta a weakling. The Nazis would transform Germany into a modern Sparta.
“I distinguish between a well-intentioned inferior race and an ill-intentioned superior race, which includes also Germans. You’re not one of them.”
“No,” Skinny said.
“Not even partially? Some of your tribe got as far as Berlin.”
She heard familiar voices from the neighbouring cubicles. The girls were hard at work. Sometimes a soldier cried out, sometimes a girl. They were ridiculous, animal sounds, and she tried to shut them out. Maria-from-Poznan had learnt to fake a whole scale of cries and moans, from ecstasy to gradually abating satisfaction. Some soldiers gave free rein to what they could not permit themselves elsewhere, either because they weren’t allowed to or because they felt ashamed. Sometimes the soldier and girl would laugh together. Skinny could imagine what seemed laughable. In addition to the brutal and wild element, something childlike would come back to them — something that was receding from her.
She would not have to be with anyone else today. The Frog had let them sleep last night from 8.30 p.m. to almost 4 a.m. They had been cold, wearing their pullovers under their blankets and coats. Madam Kulikowa kept reminding them that they were a lot better off at No. 232 Ost than in prison, where she had been prior to a concentration camp. The prostitute with whom she had shared a cell had given birth to a boy. They had beheaded the woman for high treason against the Greater German Reich.
“You haven’t told me much about yourself,” he said.
“I don’t know what you want to hear.”
She was being careful, but in a different way to when she had been with Captain Hentschel. Since then she had six days’ more experience. Yesterday one of her soldiers had wanted her to sing. They all wanted something she couldn’t provide. The soldier had wanted her to dance for him. He wanted to feel as ifhe was in Morocco, he’d said.
The Obersturmführer stamped his hobnailed boots to shake off the remnants of the snow. He took off his cap. For the first time she saw the scar on his forehead, just under his hairline.
Stefan Sarazin had joined the Hitlerjugend at sixteen. His first service had been with the Verfügungsgruppen from which later developed the special units for the extermination of the racially inferior east of the Oder. They included the Sipo and the SD, the Sicherheitspolizei and the Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS. Now he was serving in a disciplinary unit made up of six Waffen-S S members under punishment. It was their chance to atone for their offences and to win new spurs.
After the Anschluss he had been present when the Verfügungsgruppen destroyed the synagogue Hitler hated, just as he hated all Vienna, that nest of Jewish, Czech, Hungarian and Balkan rabble. Before they set fire to the synagogue they attached three bundles of hand grenades under the huge olive-wood crown, as large as a horse’s behind. They celebrated with a march, complete with music — fifes, flutes, drums and bells. The pavement had echoed with their steps and every third man in each rank carried a burning torch.
“Have you had a good sleep?”
“I slept.”
“Good. I gave orders that they should let you rest. You have me to thank for that.”
“Thank you.”
“That’s right. Richtig. Very good.”
This whore was a little ashamed. Shame and fear were all right in a prostitute. It was merely a case of mixing the correct dose, as the old German alchemists knew! He stood with his back to the stove and gave her a lecture, to make sure she knew in advance that it was an honour to be with him. His Einsatzgruppen were uprooting the world where people were living in luxury at the expense of others. She could be sure of one thing: the key word was Endlösung, the Final Solution. It was a breathtaking concept. The end. Ruination. After this end nothing would follow. He had more pity for a worm than for a child that would grow into a Jewish vampire.
“The end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. It’s like a poem. Or like a mathematical equation. The interplay of numbers. Do you understand?”
Should she say she understood? She didn’t understand at all.