On the night, the prostitutes were made to parade in the guards’ gymnasium, which had been created by joining the former stables and the cowshed. The radio technician had installed some equipment, and the music came from Festung Breslau and Radio Flensburg — the bands of Peter Kreuder, Eugen Wolf and Barnabas von Geszy-Huppertz. They had to go out into the fog to visit the latrine.
Skinny was snatched up by Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin. She tried to dance a waltz with him, but the Obersturmführer had no idea how and she was not much better. He told her, as he stepped on her toes and got his rhythm wrong, that in Bremen he had seen U-boat crews fraternizing with Czech, Italian and French singers and dancers. Also with some Viennese. The Austrian girls enjoyed socializing.
“That would probably suit you too,” said the Obersturmführer. “Perhaps,” she answered.
She lit the candle in her cubicle. They had not yet been told to pack up. She lit the stove. How long before it got hot? About ten minutes, she said. He wanted what he had wanted before — that she tie him to the bed. He was almost apologetic. With his squeaky voice this sounded ridiculous.
“Nothing human is alien to me,” he croaked, aroused. In his gaze, somewhere deep down inside desire, there was an uncertainty, something he didn’t understand himself, something he could achieve only in a brothel. It was a child’s and at the same time an old man’s request for something that he wasn’t sure he was entitled to. She knew that she must look at him as if at a beast, a worthless beast, to make him want her at all. She must place him on the lowest rung of the ladder.
“Surely you’re here for me?” he demanded. “Or aren’t you an army whore?”
She had noticed earlier, in the gym, that he’d been drinking. His eyes were sunken, his chin hung down almost to his throat, to the hollow where his chest began. He seemed exhausted. He lay there, stripped to the waist, as emaciated as before. His misty irises and pupils had lost their brightness. His eyes looked lifeless. She felt the sudden tension, almost a spasm, in his body. He tried to find a more comfortable position, and opened his mouth. He squirmed, as if overcoming the spasm, before raising himself and trying to tear free from his fetters. Then he went motionless.
“Now,” he croaked. There was insecurity in his voice, anger, something between shame and insolence. He was breathing heavily. He assumed that she’d realized what had happened. His chest was rising and falling, his ribs sticking out. The corners of his eyes were moist.
“It’s my birthday today,” he said.
He was 27. He felt as if he had disgraced himself, but it had only happened in the presence of a whore. If it came to it, he could easily order her to be flogged or put to death. If he wanted to, he could shoot her dead without another thought.
They could hear the dance music coming from the gymnasium. In the background was the thunder of heavy guns. They could make out the croaking of ravens, the howling of wolves and, as always, from the corridor the squeaking of rats.
She waited for Obersturmführer Sarazin to free himself from his bonds, remembering him telling her that a friend had taught him how to tie and untie eight kinds ofknots.
“Don’t say anything more,” he ordered, although she hadn’t spoken.
“You know me by now … you know me quite well by now. But I don’t know you so well.”
By the light of the candle the scar around his forehead and his hairline had the colour of garnets. He was lying on the blanket. He left the cords on the bed by his side, unlike the previous time, when he had immediately wound them up and put them in his pocket.
“Lucky for you that you obeyed me. Everything I want is mine. Now, here, at once.”
He looked at her clothes. Madam Kulikowa had fitted them out with the best things she could find in her boxes, including brightly coloured silk squares, the kind she herself wore round her neck to conceal the wrinkles of her throat. The Obersturmführer was resting. He did not care for chatter with prostitutes. He liked her underwear, her revealing bodice when she leaned over him. Again he noted that she had half-childish, half-adult breasts.
Obersturmführer Sarazin came from Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He showed her a photograph of him standing in front of a tavern with a wooden crucifix and the letters I.N.R.I, on the spot where someone had been killed. He was seventeen then. He was wearing embroidered lederhosen and hand-knitted socks. On the snow there were black patches, maybe wine.
He held her fingers between his lips, from one corner of his mouth to the other.
They had used dogs against the saboteurs who derailed the train. Each member of the Einsatzkommando had his own Alsatian or Dobermann. The Jagdkommando had been provided with a reconnaissance plane, a Storch, which had been fired on with rifles. He told Skinny that he and his animal had followed the tracks through the snow. They had been three days on the move, not allowing themselves to rest. He had lived on dry salami, bread, and a few pieces of fruitcake he’d received for Christmas. He had washed it down with schnapps from one flask and water from another. He always stuffed his side pocket with food before any action, as an emergency reserve. He was obsessed with hunting these people down. Once he had caught them he was gripped by melancholy. He could not explain it. Close up, the saboteurs were a pitiful sight, in spite of their frightening appearance. They were like lamps with tiny little flames about to go out. They stank of vulgarity: unwashed, uncombed, in sweaty rags. Their equipment was enough to make you weep. And that rabble had been chased by the foremost élite units deserving of a worthier adversary.
He must have been drunk still. He claimed that the cubicle looked different from last time.
“Your shrine,” he observed. “Your sphere of repose. Your place of thanksgiving.”
He had brought her some amber beads; he would not wish her to think him mean. She had better not ask whose neck he had snatched them off. He laughed. How many welts did she have on her behind? It would give him pleasure if she kept the beads on. Amber reminded him of ash wood.
She turned away from his breath, the sour smell of a smoker. His body smelt of dry sweat. She felt the presence of those he called saboteurs.
“Even if they hadn’t confessed, their time was up,” he said. “Always sentence them, never pardon them.”
“Move over to the window,” he ordered. She was afraid he might fire at her, as last time he had on the wolves.
“Your back to me.” She did as he ordered. “Now turn round and face me.”
“You should be proud of your white skin,” he told her. “You promise a good seed.” Some tribes, he explained, could be admitted to German blood. They were working on it at the Office for the Consolidation of Germandom. Detailed plans had already been made. “In the right proportion inferior blood — so long as it’s not in the majority — dissolves in pure blood.”
She was thinking of what Beautiful had done. And how ridiculous it was that she had survived even Long-Legs.
The Obersturmführer explained how, from spring to autumn, he fished the Polish rivers. He no longer felt quite so much in a foreign country; he had come to feel at home. Eels did very well in rivers with dead bodies in them. They grew fat even from dead horses. As for bream, perch and carp — one of his friends called them the rats of the rivers — a hand grenade was more effective than any fishing line.
He told her about a transport of French Jewesses from Drancy near Paris. The French police had rounded them up, 2,000 of them had been under 15 years of age. A man in Bordeaux had given them false papers. She would not believe how many Jews there were in France, but their arrogance would encounter German thoroughness. Those girls had been too weak for work. Guided by searchlights they had gone into the darkness. The sheer force of the crowd had pushed them into the underground rooms. They had looked like a monstrously large flower of a water lily, with 2,000 blossoms, soon to be devoured by a carnivorous plant. They had stood for a day and night on the square before being sent to the gas chamber. They had arrived in the morning and their turn had not come until the evening of the following day. Some had fainted; some had wet themselves, or thrown up. Fortunately, the Jewish Moloch devoured itself.