The Obersturmführer's voice, while engaged in such play, drops to a deeper register; normally crisp, his consonants soften like chocolate melted in the pan. The tone makes Anna think of rich, dark cake, a too-sweet dessert that she would cram into her mouth, helpless to stop, until she vomited it up.
He pulls her to him by the hips, positioning her between his knees. Anna can't contain a gasp: his hands are, as always, cold. He lightly bites the flesh above her bellybutton, shaking his head like a dog. Anna feels him grin against her stomach. But when he slides a finger into her, clinically, like a doctor, and pushes her away a few inches so he can watch her face, his expression is grave.
You are the most willing woman I've ever known, he says. It's as though you have some eternal wellspring inside you-here.
He crooks the finger. Anna strains not to react with a sound, a blink, an arch of the back, a moan. She stiffens her spine against her head's instinctive loll.
But the Obersturmführer knows. Yes, here, he says, this one spot, rough as a cat's tongue. You like that, don't you?
He wiggles his finger, as though beckoning to an adjutant, a prisoner, to her: Come.
How very strange to be a woman, he muses, springing himself free of his regulation briefs and pulling Anna onto the bed; poor women, everything hidden from them, on the inside. You see, he adds as he rolls grinning on top of her, I know you better than you know yourself.
Anna thinks that this is true. And that perhaps it is at these moments that she hates him the most, for robbing her of her own familiar flesh by making it respond in such a way, as though it is no longer hers to command.
Every time he leaves, after Trudie is safely in bed, Anna punishes her traitorous body with lye soap and a pumice stone. She fills the bath with water so hot that her skin, that white sheath with its dark freckles that the Obersturmführer finds so appealing, will surely peel off like that of a boiled tomato. Standing nude in the bedroom, she slaps her face, stomach, thighs, but this only reminds her of other activities the Obersturmführer enjoys. She digs her nails into her lower lip, drawing blood. She touches herself between the legs and examines her fingertips: dry when she does it.
One night Anna fetches the sewing bag from Mathilde's bureau and sits naked on the toilet, a hand mirror placed between her feet. She licks the thread and slides it through the needle, her eyes already watering as she imagines pressing it against that tenderest of flesh: how sharp it will be, how cold. Despite her rehearsal, the reality is more painful than she imagines; tears spurt, and she drops the needle, hearing it land with a tiny clink! on the mirror. She is too cowardly; she can't go through with it. Instead, she contents herself by picturing the Obersturmführer's reaction to finding her sewn shut, the stitches black and clumsy against the dark pink folds.
But he steals even this poor comfort from her through a story he tells her one December evening, after returning from a trip that has prevented him from visiting the bakery for two weeks. Anna doesn't know where he has been, but he is particularly insatiable, having been deprived of his pleasures for so long. Dispensing with the scarves and razors, the whiskey and the gimmicks, he takes her three times, always from behind. Anna wonders, as she braces her palms against the wall to keep her head from being bashed into it, whether this predilection is peculiar to the Obersturmführer or if all men have a secret fondness for this position, the woman anonymous, merely a back and jiggling buttocks and a hank of hair, the man pumping like a dog.
When he has finished with her physically, the Obersturmführer again begins speaking, as though resuming a conversation. Anna has become accustomed to this; she should even welcome it, as nothing more is required of her than that she nestle against him with her head pillowed on his chest. But dear God, he is so boring! Complaints about the starchy food; the trivia of his domestic routine-particularly laundry, the Obersturmführer has a fetish about the whiteness of his shirts; indignant analysis of whether his adjutant's smile is insolent; on and on. When Anna envisions hell, she suspects it will look just like this: a gray box of a room in which she is trapped with this man while he talks and talks and talks for all eternity.
Sometimes, if the Obersturmführer appears sufficiently caught up in what he is saying, Anna dozes. At other times, such as now, she mentally lists the maternal chores that have yet to be fulfilled: Trudie must be fed, bathed, tucked in, and lied to. Every night the child poses the same question, making a sort of game out of it. Where is Tante Mathilde? she asks, and Anna patiently repeats a version of the same story she has told the bakery's patrons: Mathilde has been placed by the Work Bureau in an officers' dining hall in Hamburg. Some men needed her to come and make bread for them by the sea, Anna explains to Trudie, and each time the child gazes at the ceiling, says Oh, rubs her blanket against her cheek, and falls asleep. Just like that.
But this evening, Anna's list of tasks is interrupted by a word the Obersturmführer utters an inch from her ear. Auschwitz. So he has been in Poland, then. The Obersturmführer has mentioned Auschwitz before, since he has been arranging transports of Jewish prisoners from Buchenwald to this bigger camp. (The time this takes, which could be spent on other, more worthy disciplinary causes! The hours of maintaining the camp records!) Anna also knows about Auschwitz from the rumors contained in the prisoners' condoms. And rumors they must be, of course; it is beyond belief, what the prisoners say. Marching the Jews straight from the trains to gas chambers, the crematoria? Even the SS wouldn't be so insane as to squander such a massive labor force in the middle of a war, particularly given the invasion of Mother Russia. No, this must be the invention of a mind deranged from overwork and starvation. Such tales grow from such conditions, even as mushrooms will sprout from a pile of dung.
Nonetheless, the repetition of the word makes Anna pay attention, for once, to the Obersturmführer's monologue.
I'm sorry, I didn't catch what you just said, she murmurs.
The Obersturmführer blinks at her as if one of the pillows has spoken; then, looking pleased, he rotates his damaged shoulder beneath Anna's head, joggling her a bit closer. The smell of him, meat and smoke and his Kölnischwasser, 4711, drifts from beneath his arm.
I was just remarking what a help it will be to us in our own experiments, he repeats, the chance to watch Mengele at work. Of course, our chaps mostly prevent outbreaks, preserve the healthy, instead of making great scientific strides. We don't have the equipment for it, for one thing. But we do the best we can; we do our part with what limited resources we have.
And what is it you do? Anna asks.
Oh, the usual. We're trying to develop an inoculation against typhus, for instance-though that hasn't been quite successful yet, as most of the specimens die. But we have made some progress in curing the homosexual disease-you know what this is? You do? You are a constant surprise to me, Anna! Well, as I said, the advances are very small but perhaps significant in the long run, involving castration, that kind of thing. Which is why, as I was saying, it was so instructive to observe Mengele, since on the day we were allowed into his laboratory, he was performing surgery on the reproductive organs.
On a homosexual? Anna whispers.
The Obersturmführer laughs. No, that's nothing to Mengele; that's for pikers like us. He was working on a Jewess, a former prostitute. He was sewing up her-