“I hope so.”
“Almost,” he said.
His forefinger moved down her nose and stopped at the tip.
“We all have our secrets,” he said.
He had told her some of his secrets. He acknowledged his Aryan god and those who were next to him — Reich Marshals, Sturmmänner, Scharführers and Oberführers. He acknowledged brutality as the supreme virtue, as the call and command of nature. He had no consideration for anybody; he asked no-one for permission, he needed no witnesses. He lied, stole and cheated just as others breathed. He was not constrained by rules and broke them whenever it suited him. He did not allow himself a moment’s respite, not an hour, not a minute. He did not burden himself by respect for family, parents or children. He considered it his duty to denounce — just as throughout the Reich children denounced their teachers and teachers their students, parents denounced their children and children their parents. His honour and pride were of a special mould. Ahead of him he saw a victory such as had never been won before, and no price was too high for him to achieve it, even if it cost his life. He believed in his race which would prove its worth to the extent that he prevented its dilution by other races. He made darkness and shadows subject to himself. He saw himself as the light. To him the key to the secret of life was obedience.
“They won’t forget us,” he said.
“No,” she agreed.
Behind them they left a desert, a depopulated scorched earth. And indelible milestones of history. From the Kristallnacht, when throughout Germany synagogues and Jewish shops were going up in flames, Jewish business people disappeared in the darkness from the southern border of Bavaria to the North Sea, and the Germans exacted a fine of a billion marks for the damage — the burnt or destroyed property and the danger to human lives — though they themselves had caused it; all the way to their Blitzkrieg, their lightning war, which had already gone on for six years.
They appropriated a Czech town, Terezin, and turned it into a transit station. They established camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and their crematoria. Skinny did not have time to reflect on this at length. It came to her with him, as it did with every soldier before and after him. She saw the Obersturmführer’s world and she felt his finger on the base of her nose for what seemed like an eternity. She wished he would take it away.
“Würden sind Bürden,” he said softly. Honours are burdens. When he whispered his voice wasn’t so squeaky. “Die Sonne bringt es an den Tag” The sun reveals all. He would test her, in a while she would see how. They would discover who each other was.
“Don’t you confide in one another who each of you is?”
“No.”
“Can I believe you?”
“Yes.”
“No-one told you, before I got here, what I would want?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not. We are forbidden to lie.”
“Do you remind all your visitors of what’s forbidden?”
She remained silent. She knew from Long-Legs what to do to prevent herself throwing up. She thought of her taste buds, which were at the tip of her tongue and not at the back of her throat. She had been feeling sick for a while.
He touched his scalp.
“I got this from an ambush, on the far side of the quarry, where you’ve probably never been.”
“No.”
“I’ll find a doctor in Germany who’ll glue me together again,” he said. He ran his finger along his scar.
He struggled free from the blankets, pulling them off her too. She had a little lipstick on, her arms and legs were weak, and in her face the kind of fear children have when they have done something wrong and are waiting for punishment. A whore’s failure was not exactly high treason, but it was close to it. To stand up, to overcome, were Aryan virtues. She had to meet three fundamental conditions — obedience, devotion and willingness to co-operate.
“You should be glad I chose you. Your turnaround time here must be faster than our fuel convoys.”
“I am glad,” she lied. She avoided his eyes.
“I started on a poem entitled “All Rivers Die in the Sea,” he confided. “It could even be a song.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Death interests me. It is like a cat that won’t come to anyone it doesn’t like. Death is also like a dog, a faithful fighting companion. You’ve got to pay for this realization. In the past it was enough for me to swear allegiance to my commanding officers and to the anthem of the unit; ‘May death be our companion in our black column’s fight’ Have you ever heard the men of an Einsatzkommando sing? The words, the tune, the sound of hobnailed boots are like a north wind. Our war cry is lively and sad, foreboding and joyful. We are like tempered steel. That is what the east has done to us. I’m not bragging.”
“Yes,” she agreed softly.
“We were born for death, that great bubble. Every one of us may proudly proclaim, T am an oak and an ash’.”
He should read to her what Nietzsche had written. Wild beasts with unclouded conscience, monsters filled with jubilation.
“He probably said this about us even before we were born.”
She should learn that too. It heralded the revolution which meant blood. An eye for an eye. Yesterday a peasant had cut off the foot together with the boot of the dead Scharführer Meinhofer. She should not be surprised if on a German foot she saw felt boots cut from prisoners of war. The girls were protected here as if they were in the Garden of Eden. They should lick the boots of all officers.
If he told her what their daily service had consisted of since 1941, she would appreciate everything. She would absorb their principle, that nothing that befalls an inferior race is terrible; it is necessary. It would be boring if it was not also exalted. Yes, brutality was exalted. For him it was enough to compare German towns and villages with those in Poland.
“In Russia I saw hovels with trampled earth for a floor. In the middle, tied to the post which supported the roof, was a goat or a calf. Villages without men, with swarms of black flies in the summer and worm-eaten corpses in the winter.”
In one village they had ordered wood to be piled up for the bodies to be burnt. Afterwards, women and children scrabbled about in the ashes looking for wedding rings on the charred fingers of corpses.
The Obersturmführer climbed into the tub; ordering her to wash him down with the water that had been heating on the stove. He drew up his knees, leaning his back against the slime-covered rotten wood. He got her to scrub him with a brush and then to rub him dry. Swarthy as his face was, his body was white.
He ordered her to rinse herself in the tub after him, and then get back into bed with him. He picked up his pistol. Now his scar reminded her of a thistle. Under the bed she saw his boots with the several rows of hobnails in their soles.
He got her to bring him his field flask from his tunic pocket. He unscrewed the little beaker, and filled it slowly, carefully, almost to the brim, and drank it quickly. Then he began to speak again.
The history of the Jews was a story of cunning, fraud and deceit. They were all liars. The worst crime of the circumcised was their assertion that all men were equal. There were only two solutions, converging in Entjudung, the liquidation of the Jews, in the Endlösung, the Final Solution.
There had been a lecture for the Einsatzkommando der Einsatzgruppen about their conflict with the Jews. Strength was more than truth, they had been told. Power is the bride of the bold. The clenched fist, ready to strike the enemy, was more convincing than the outpourings of all aesthetes or the books written by the hooknosed since the beginning of time.