“Have you ever been to Galicia?”
“No.”
“It seems to me that each one of those 43 days I’ve shrunk a little.”
“Better not shrink any more,” Skinny said.
“It’s already three o’clock. It’ll be foggy,” Estelle said.
Madam Kulikowa put Beautiful’s belongings in a sack and tied it up with string. The gold coin bearing the head of a Russian Tsar went into her own pocket. What plans did the Germans have for them?
Twelve: Robert Kaiserhof, Günther Bomber, Friedrich Ochse, Siegfried Jawornik, Kamil Ficke, Johannes Bonner, Fred Spirit, Hans-Fritz Beyer, Jeremias Archer, Klaus Landmann, Jürgen Kihalek, Adalbert Schönfeld.
Twelve: Jochen Reitmann, Hans Deutermann, Maurice Snagenberg, Willy Steyer, Heinrich Streber-Munte, George Bittner, Hannes Schlafrock, Helmut Winkler, Karl Sachsenberger, Arthur Rota, Frederick Gaube, Thomas Binder.
The Madam massaged the major’s shoulders, the muscles below his neck and around his shoulder blades. The major liked this, just as her cat Rosina had back at Kopernik Street. She told him how, in Warsaw, they used to dance the cancan for special guests. They would not have been ashamed even in front of professional dancers. Good Lord, the things you can express with your body! They wore high-quality black tights which did not wrinkle, which showed not the slightest crease even during the wildest movements, high-laced boots of the finest calf leather, long full skirts whose hems they would hold raised between thumb and forefinger from beginning to end, and white lace panties made even more dazzling by the spotlights. She could still hear the deafening applause, the flourish of the band, the air electric with desire, the readiness of the best of them to come up to all expectations. She still heard the clinking of glasses, the popping of champagne corks — the most expensive and sometimes also the cheapest — and the shouts of “Bravo, bravo!” — that went on so long that they had to repeat the number. And shouts of “Sto lat” and “Zivijo, zivijo,” until these were replaced by German “Prosits,” but not for long.
Major Karl Maximilian von Kalckreuth screwed his monocle in place in order to see her better. He too remembered a cancan, in Germany, at the Salon Kitty. The girls right by the footlights, almost above you!
Madam Kulikowa proceeded to massage the major’s thighs with a dedication and strength he did not expect from her. She was thinking of the hairy legs of the 60-year-old lover she’d had when she was 14. To the Germans all hairy men were gorillas.
*
Long-Legs was executed three days after Beautiful poisoned herself. Present at the execution were The Frog, three soldiers, a doctor and Madam Kulikowa as witnesses. Maria-from-Poznan and Ginger held the Madam responsible.
An Unterführer in the Waffen-SS, 37 years her senior, had complained about Long-Legs. He had asked where the Polish rivers, the Oder, the San and the Vistula ran. The answer he had wanted was “to the German sea”. Germany was everywhere. Her answer instead was that she couldn’t care less. She wasn’t here for a geography lesson. He told her she looked like an emaciated mare and she retorted that his face was like pork schnitzel, already hammered but not yet breaded, whereupon he spat into her face that she was a sea sow. Finally, during an unsuccessful coitus interruptus, she reached out and stole a ten-mark piece from his trousers on the chair. She was not co-operative — the most common complaint at Feldbordell No. 232 Ost. She created a hostile atmosphere, he claimed. She made inappropriate jokes. This should not be tolerated. She had disgraced his uniform, his self-assurance as a soldier, his honour. He had been fighting since 1939. He deserved more than this.
“You’re a whore if you give them what they want, and a whore if you don’t. The bastard. He kept talking about the battles in Flanders in the First World War, when men died like flies. He said that their bodies manured the soil. The old bastard even talked about them in his sleep,” Long-Legs told the Madam.
That morning a sapper sergeant had said to her that if her legs were just a little shorter and her wrists a little slimmer she could be an actress. He had seen Lady of My Dreams and had sung her a hit from it.
But none of this mattered any longer.
Long-Legs undressed by the back wall. She was allowed to keep her boots on. She folded her clothes and underwear into a neat bundle, as if it was important to her. She held the bundle under her arm; it warmed her side a little. The crash of the salvo, which she heard, and the flashes, which she barely saw, went through her like demons of grief. The bullets smashed her teeth, as they were later to smash those of Big Leopolda Kulikowa. At the end came the sharp, clear report of the Oberführer’s Luger.
That same morning Ginger was taken away by the Gestapo. A letter from her had been found on the body of Sturmmann Manfred Bormann. She had got him to pass on 632 marks from her to someone else.
Thirteen
Maria-from-Poznan told them how the local population would organize hunts for people who escaped from concentration camps. The Gauleiter, she said, announced rewards to be paid by the municipal office. For proof of capture it was sufficient to produce the ears, the nose or you know what. People were making a tidy heap of money. The girls imagined bloodstained noses and black wrinkled skin.
“People take what they can,” she explained.
She also told them how she had come home one day and her father had welcomed her with the words: “You look terrible. You’ll end up as a whore.” That was the first time that she had been paid for it. Her father had searched her and taken every last penny.
“My father was always right,” she said.
Why didn’t the Jews straighten their noses with a hammer? On a Saturday, so she was told, a Jewish woman would not wash her child even if it dirtied itself up to its ears. If their roof went up in flames over their heads on a Sabbath, they would not throw even a bucketful of water on it. She did not care a damn about what they considered holy. They were the most opinionated people in Poland. And at the last moment they suddenly declared themselves to be Poles. A Sarah suddenly became a Nada, a Rachel or Rebecca became a Natasha or Elizabeth. A Cohen would become a Medzurecki. Some Poles would give them shelter — her neighbours Irena and Janek Komacki had hidden a deaf-and-dumb Jewish child and now they had lost five of their own. They had been taken to Germany, five fair little boys with blue eyes. They would turn into Germans. When they grew up they would not know anything. They had been hanging them publicly in Chopin Square, and soon the Jews would no longer creep through Poland.
*
Twelve: Gert Harlan, Heini Rothmund, Max Huber, Kurt Prestell, Richard Knoll, Fritz Salzburg, Volker Horn, Hanspeter Jasper, Valentin Heinzle, Balder Spert, Hansi Weizmann, Rudolf Hasenfratz.
Twelve: Berndt Junghans, Ludwig Wagner, Hannes Kerl, Fritz Lochner, Karl Jorg Owerger, Horst Beckenbauer, Karl-Dietrich Dolfuss, Sepp Gruber, Heiden Heyst, Julius Stack, Heini Forstmann, Gerdhard Streicher.
The guard detachment of Hauptsturmführer Peter Hanisch-Sacher decided to hold a party before their departure. At first The Frog wouldn’t even consider letting the prostitutes take part. But the Hauptsturmführer persuaded him at the card table. He would forget about the debt of honour of the previous evening, when The Frog had lost 150 marks. Why shouldn’t the girls have some fun for once, regardless of the situation at the front? What about the inspectors from the Wehrkreis who recovered two Junkers aircraft the day before? He’d been told that champagne flowed in rivers before they started the propellers the next morning.