In November the guards had invited Madam Kulikowa to a dog fight. A sheepdog which had won two fights let itself be torn to pieces in the third. It had no strength left. Its blood splashed all the way to the wall, mingling with the dried bloodstains of the executed.
Oberführer Schimmelpfennig saw a confirmation of the laws of nature in the brutality of the dog fights. The ancient Germanic tribes were instinctively right when, instead of praying, they relied on the flight of birds, the behaviour of horses and dogs; the mirror of lakes, the whiteness of hoarfrost. He didn’t need the whores to confirm his conviction of the closeness of human and animal behaviour. The soldiers confirmed it too. Consciously or unconsciously he felt close to his distant ancestors. Did not the wasteland with the quarry resemble a giant emerging from frozen mist? The rats in the snow with their ravenous teeth reminded S chimmelpfennig of squirrels fanning quarrels according to the wisdom of the ancients, spreading dissension.
He was suffering from insomnia. At night he reflected on the Nazi Movement. The cold and the loneliness stripped from him the veneer of civilisation his medical education had given him. He was reverting to nature, to what perhaps he once had been. It thrilled him to watch animals fighting to the death.
“When dogs have an all-out fight they teach you what’s good and what’s bad,” the Oberführer said to Madam Kulikowa. “They remind you of what’s happening all around you, of what you must do to win. Every bark, growl or bite affirms to me that what I’m doing, what we are doing, is good. You should teach that to your little tarts.”
“Is it the fight that makes you shiver?” he asked her.
“It is the cold that is slow death to me,” Madam Kulikowa replied. And to herself she added: “And you Germans, you, Oberführer Frog, are my rapid death.”
She did not even attempt to clean off the gobs of spit and excreta that had splashed onto her legs. She would have to change her clothes. She washed everything three times. This was not the first time that Big Leopolda Kulikowa had been sick with horror.
The guards chased the victorious dog out through the gate, where the wolves, faster and stronger, would catch him. The guards were keeping themselves warm with tea from thermos flasks. With frozen fingers they were paying their bets and sharing out their winnings. The girls watched from the window.
The commandant of the new Waffen-S S guard detachment, Hauptsturmführer Peter Hanisch-Sacher, who arrived on the last day of November, did not care for dog fights. He brought his Alsatian, Fenti, with him from Bremerhaven and assigned a place for him in the kennels. Stray dogs reminded him of Gypsies: they had no business among the pure-bred dogs in the kennels. Among quadrupeds Fenti was what the Hauptsturmführer himself was in his own eyes. They both had their reputation, race, honour and fame. Dead dogs, savaged and bled to death, reminded him of Jews. In that respect he and the Oberführer understood each other. It was love or at least understanding. The fight itself somehow reminded him of the field prostitutes, though he could not have said why. He turned a blind eye to his men’s contact with the prostitutes — so long as they kept within bounds — because, as he would remark over a glass of schnapps, boys will be boys. He did not question the logic of his superiors who would send one lot of SS men here and forbid the same practices elsewhere. He was not interested in the prostitutes himself. They disgusted him, though he couldn’t stop talking about them.
The fight of the sheepdog, Austri, lasted 35 minutes. Austri cost Sturmmann Ruhe his pay. The dog that killed Austri was torn to pieces by wolves within five minutes. The entrails of both dogs were devoured by rats.
It was 2 a.m. when Madam Kulikowa got to bed, having first sent four girls to the kitchen to peel potatoes for the morning soup. Before pulling up her blanket she went over the day’s events.
When the war was over I would sometimes converse in my mind with Big Leopolda Kulikowa, just as if we were having a chat. Even the best person — never mind the worst — will in the end do what suits them best. Danger merely enhances everything. That was why she felt no qualms at stealing bread, margarine and salami from the girls’ rations. But she gave them underwear, perfume, make-up or costume jewellery when the Germans brought in a crate of what they had stolen or confiscated from the troops.
“It’s hard to go to sleep with cold feet,” Long-Legs said to Skinny.
“Mine too,” Skinny said.
“I feel as if I have a brick in my belly.”
Long-Legs began to tell Skinny that she had once been with an Italian who wore puttees. Then she said: “The first day I came here I saw wolves gnawing a naked body in the snow. What the wolves didn’t eat, the dogs did.”
The Madam did not cry when Oberführer S chimmelpfenning hit her with his walking stick. He had struck her elbow so hard that she couldn’t bend her arm. She would have to massage the major with one hand. A few tears did freeze on her cheeks and she wiped her face with her sleeve. An echo of the 60-year-old lover she’d had when she was 14, who had never hit her, drowned in her silent lament. She cursed the Oberführer.
During the roll-call he had shouted: “I regret nothing. You remember that!”
Three
“No regular duty for you today,” Madam Kulikowa said to Skinny. She told her to have a bath, tidy herself up and wait. It would be an officer — Wehrmacht Captain Daniel August Hentschel. She was to put a saucepan of water on the stove. She would be issued with perfume, oil, fresh clothes, underwear and shoes. She would have extra time for him.
The Madam examined her for a while with knowing, grey eyes.
“You’re still like a cat who’s afraid even of the person who feeds her. If you weren’t in a camp you’d see the Germans like the rest. Anyway, when it comes to it, from the waist down they’re all the same.”
“You haven’t got much light in here,” said Captain Hentschel. “We won’t even have to put it out.”
As he walked in she thought that he had a slight limp in his left leg. The flame of the candle flickered and almost died in the draught from the open door. He saluted with gloved fingertips at the peak of his cap, then took it off. She glanced up at him. An officer, she thought, what did this mean? She must not betray how nervous she felt. He had a thin but big face, a narrow aquiline nose and widely spaced, deep blue eyes. Dark brown hair.
“Absolute hell, driving here, my word! Like skidding on snow and ice into hell.” He sensed her reserve and put it down to shyness.
“Last week the car in front of my Horch ran over a mine,” he continued. “I was half-conscious and I saw a nurse bending down over me. She couldn’t have been any older than you. I was dying with my eyes on her throat, her breasts, and her cleavage. When I came to, another nurse was bending over me, one with glasses, older than my mother.”
He was talking to her easily, as if they knew one another. She breathed in the smell of his greatcoat with its sheepskin lining and thick fur collar, the smell of mothballs, gunpowder, sweat and wet snow. She imagined his weight on top ofher. He was broad-shouldered, tall and looked strong. He had shaved before setting out; his hair was cut short, lighter at its ends, like the hair of the soldiers she had known during her past six days of service. She had a few seconds to look him over. With each soldier she felt like one animal assessing another. She did not want to stare at the captain, the way Fatty would, nor kneel in front of him like Ginger or Maria-from-Poznan.
He was frozen through. With a stiff hand he closed the wooden latch, then pulled off his gloves. His glance swept over the iced-up window. He carried a pistol in a holster. If he knew that he was here with a Jewess he might pull it out. Or kick her out into the corridor. Then they would hang her. On her chest they would pin a notice that read I concealed that I was a Jew as they did at Auschwitz-Birkenau.