Those Who Save Us (19 page)

24

ANNA LEARNS A GREAT DEAL FROM THE
OBERSTURM-führer,
the first thing being that, postcoitus, he talks talks talks talks talks, a broken faucet from which words pour instead of water. From this, she conjectures that either superior rank precludes private conversation or that the
Obersturmführer
’s peers do not like him well enough to listen.

She learns the difference between Hinkelmann and Blank, although she will never truly be able to separate them: in her mind, they remain a single murderous demigod, vaudevillian and double-faced, blithely dispensing death. In actuality, however, Hinkelmann is the taller fellow, while Blank is the squat bureaucrat, and the former has been considered so effective at his job that he has been awarded promotional transfer to a camp called Mauthausen, where there is a bigger stone quarry.

She learns that the quarry is considered the worst work detail, and that for this reason, to avoid mutinous dissatisfaction, the guards are rotated fortnightly. The prisoners refer to one of the current crop as Gretel because of his feminine prettiness, while another is known as Lard Ass, for equally obvious reasons; it is said that they have a particular friendship, though nothing of the sort can be proven. In any case, the
Obersturmführer
adds, one never takes such rumors seriously, as they are either fairy tales or downright malicious. He turns a deaf ear to the prisoners’ nicknaming the guards, though in other camps their doing so might be considered treason. It is good for them to feel that they have some modicum of power, he explains; this allows them to blow off steam and keeps them from perpetuating other, more serious mischief.

Anna further learns that the
Obersturmführer
was, before the war, a telegram delivery boy and then a police officer. That during the war, he served first at the front, during which he earned decorations for bravery and the craterlike wound in his right shoulder, and secondly in the
Einsatzgruppen,
the SS mobile death units in Poland. From his description of these glorious but trying days, she learns that the Jews there went meekly to their liquidation. How, the
Obersturmführer
asks rhetorically, can one respect a race such as that? We Germans, he says, we place a high premium on obedience, of course, but not at the expense of bravery.

She learns that the
Obersturmführer
’s mother, unable to stomach his father’s tyranny or perhaps simply faithless, ran off with a traveling salesman of wigs; that the
Obersturmführer
reported his father, his childhood nemesis, to the Gestapo as having had repeated sexual congress with a Jewish woman, which, although untrue, earned the man a prolonged stay in KZ Dachau. That the
Kommandant
of KZ Buchenwald, Koch,
does
have a Jewish mistress, but nobody dares say a word, of course. That the
Ober-sturmführer
sometimes suffers wretchedly from insomnia brought on by the stresses and contradictions of his work, and at these times, nothing but hot milk with pepper in it will soothe him.

Much of this information Anna discards, for it is useless stuff. The prisoners will not benefit from it, and as for herself, whom would she tell, and to what purpose? However, she does remember the SS designation for the crime she and Mathilde have committed:
füttern den Feind,
feeding the enemy, punishable, as has been made all too obvious, by death. Anna thinks of the phrase every time she delivers bread to the quarry, which she does every Wednesday evening. It is madness, of course, given her liaison with the
Obersturmführer.
Why, then, Anna asks herself, as she stuffs rolls into the trunk of the tree, does she continue to do it? Unlike Mathilde, it can’t be a subliminal urge toward suicide. If it were just her, Anna, the option might seem appealing, but there is Trudie to consider; everything Anna does, including yielding to the
Obersturmführer
’s demands, is for Trudie. Except for these Special Deliveries: they are less for the prisoners than a way for Anna to convince herself that she is more than a whore, a whim, a plaything; they forge a link with the recent past, during which, though it was unpleasant in many respects, she at least felt human.

So, on Wednesdays, Anna gives Trudie some of the
Ober-sturmführer
’s narcotic milk, which she has been careful to store in the icebox from the week before, and she makes the Special Delivery to the quarry and hurries back to the bakery to cook the drowsy child’s dinner. Thus far, everything has gone like clockwork, but on this particular Wednesday, Anna is late. She has lingered overlong at the quarry, hypnotized into stupid reverie by the sight of the prisoners, hoping against hope to find Max among them. Her flight back through the woods thus takes place in the dark, and as Anna runs, the phrase plays over and over in her mind:
füttern den Feind, füttern den Feind,
like the opening bars of a catchy waltz,
The Blue Danube
perhaps. Clumsy in her haste, she snags a foot on a root, wrenches her right ankle, and falls headlong into the dirt.

And when she finally limps through the back door of the bakery, calling reassurance to her daughter, Anna sees to her horror that the
Obersturmführer
is there. He stands with his arms crossed in the center of the kitchen, a monolith, while Trudie sits red-faced and crying in the corner. Anna hobbles to the child and lifts her. My God, is it Thursday already? How could she have made such a fatal mistake? It can’t be; Frau Buchholtz came for her weekly bread this morning, as she does on Wednesdays, always on Wednesdays, or has she altered her schedule? Or has the
Ober-sturmführer
acted on uncharacteristic impulse and changed his instead? If it is indeed Wednesday, what is he doing here?

Not that this matters: he
is
here, impassively watching the maternal scene.

Where were you? he asks, when Trudie’s squalling has trailed off into snuffles and hitches.

I? says Anna idiotically. I was— Well, the child is sick, you see, with stomach pains, she’s been complaining of them all week, so I— I ran to the doctor for medicine.

The
Obersturmführer
eyes her from head to toe, his scrutiny doing a much more eloquent job of indicating Anna’s torn dress, her scratched and dirt-stained hands, than if he had pointed at or touched them.

Flushing, Anna turns away to help Trudie climb onto her chair.

I tripped and fell, she says; I was in such a hurry that I caught my heel in a grate, and I—Because her back is to him, Anna doesn’t know the
Ober-sturmführer
has crossed the room until she feels his gloved hand on her neck. His kidskin fingers dig into the soft troughs behind her ears, making Anna’s arms instantly numb. She gasps.

I won’t stand being lied to, the
Obersturmführer
says, shaking Anna by the nape as though she were a puppy. Her teeth clack painfully together. I won’t tolerate falsehoods, Anna, do you hear?

I—wasn’t—lying— Anna stutters between shakes. She pulls at his hands, but his grip is like a manacle. I went—to the doctor— I swear!

In her peripheral vision, Anna sees Trudie watching quietly from the table, which upsets her more than if the child had been screaming.

The
Obersturmführer
releases Anna and she stumbles, the wounded ankle sending up a flare of pain.

Get upstairs, he says.

Please—can I at least give her the medicine—some milk—

Now.

The
Obersturmführer
seizes Anna by the arm and half propels, half drags her toward the staircase.

It’s all right, little rabbit, she calls gaily to Trudie over her shoulder. You stay here. I’ll be down soon—

In Mathilde’s bedroom, Anna backs to the window. Despite the time of year, the weather is still deceptively hot; the curtains hang limp as bandaging, and Anna wishes like a child that she could hide behind them. The
Obersturmführer
closes the door quietly, with finality.

Get undressed, he says.

Please, Herr
Obersturmführer,
the child truly is sick, you heard her crying when you came in, she—

I don’t have time for this, the
Obersturmführer
says. Your clothes.

He flicks a finger and sits on the bed, watching as Anna obeys. Inept with fear, she has trouble undoing her garters. When she dares glance up, the
Obersturmführer
is leaning forward, the familiar greedy look in his ghostly eyes.

He gazes at the red indentations the garters have left on her thighs. He likes these.

I’m a busy man, he says petulantly. It’s hard enough for me to take time from my schedule to come here. If you should require something in the future, you ask me first, understand? I expect you to be here at all times, whenever I need you.

Anna nods.

The
Obersturmführer
gives her a grin: all is forgiven, for now. He draws her to him; he cups her breasts and lets them fall, cups them and lets them fall.

Lovely, he says, such delicious bouncy breasts, the very ideal of breasts.

He pinches a nipple, then rubs his fingertips together, blinking at them.

What’s this? he says.

Anna flushes. Downstairs, Trudie is crying. Although the child has been weaned for months, Anna’s body still responds to her pleas for food.

It’s milk, she mumbles.

What?

Milk! snaps Anna, humiliated past caring whether his tone is one of surprise or disgust. Perhaps, if it is the latter, he will take himself away.

The
Obersturmführer
laughs.

Really? he says. And the girl nearly two. Well, Anna, you’ve just made my evening easier: I can have my dinner here. Kill two birds with one stone, as they say.

He takes her nipple into his mouth, drawing milk through the aureole in thin threads. Anna closes her eyes, pretending that it is the child, only the child, but the sensation is wrong, he uses his tongue rather than his lips, and his stubble prickles against her skin. Her hands, rising in instinctive quest to his dark head, encounter coarse, close-cropped hair; she knots them together behind her back, swaying for balance on her painful ankle, staring at the wall. She has learned another lesson from the
Ober-sturmführer
this evening: she will no longer make deliveries to the quarry. It is too dangerous to even contemplate. She has other mouths to feed.

25

COME HERE, ANNA, THE
OBERSTURMFÜHRER
SAYS.

Anna complies. She stands before him, as usual, as he sits on the side of Mathilde’s bed. This is how the game always begins. What Anna can never guess at are the middles or the endings. He will bring a phonograph player from the camp, place a forbidden jazz record on its turntable, and order her to strip to it.
Ach,
never mind, he will say, laughing at her artless burlesque. Or he will command her to stand on a chair, naked and blindfolded, while he circles her, touching her here and there with teeth or tongue or baton. He has poured bourbon onto her shirtwaist and suckled her through the whiskey-soaked cloth. Yes, the
Obersturmführer
is endlessly inventive in this wearisome schoolboy fashion. Has he gleaned these scenarios from the forbidden books in his father’s bedside drawer? Anna pictures the
Ober-sturmführer
as an adolescent, hunched over such a manual in the WC, the door barred, his shorts around his ankles, eyes bulging, and she feels the same cold revulsion as she would for worms writhing on the sidewalk after a rain. She waits now for some indication as to what he has devised this time.

Tonight he wants her passive, to remain still so he can mold her in his hands like bread. His breathing thickens as he undoes Anna’s blouse, unbuttons her skirt, rolls the silk stockings he has brought her down her legs. Anna moves only to kick them free of her ankles. Perhaps he will bind her with them, as he once did, then removing a straight razor from his pocket and shaving her all over: legs, arms, armpits, pubic bone. The hair grew back rough, in sharp bristles that reminded Anna of those on a pig’s hide. It itched for days.

Raise your arms above your head, the
Obersturmführer
commands. Then turn around. Like a ballerina. As a girl, did you want to be a ballerina? Of course you did; all little girls do. Yes, like that. So I can see you.

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 ten-derest 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 ful-filled: 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 pa-trons: 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—The
Obersturmführer
glances sideways at Anna and clears his throat.

—her feminine opening. What happens when she is not permitted her monthly flow? Do the internal organs wither, stop functioning? Fascinating prospect. Impractical for use on the general population, but scientifically . . .

Anna feels her stomach muscles convulsing. Cold sweat breaks out beneath her arms, on her neck. She puts a hand to her mouth as if stifling a belch.

Excuse me, she says.

Certainly. In any case, that’s what Mengele is, first and foremost, a scientist, perhaps the Reich’s most valuable. Though what a surgeon he must have been as a civilian! We stood in the balcony with a hundred others, mirrors placed all about the table so we could see. He must have been under enormous pressure. And the Jewess kept moving. But did Mengele’s hands falter? Not once! Golden hands, as swift as hummingbirds.

Anna knows she is going to be sick. She sits up, breathing shallowly and staring into the hallway; she focuses on the lamplight, lying in a skewed rectangle on the floor. Then a shadow moves, eclipsing it.

Trudie? she calls. Go downstairs.

The shadow doesn’t move.

Anna squints at it. Behind her, the
Obersturmführer
has fallen silent, a bad sign. Anna sinks back onto his damaged shoulder, as he has not yet signaled that he wishes her to do otherwise.

She is coming apart, imagining things, seeing shadows that aren’t there.

Even the way Anna sleeps now is unfamiliar to her: each morning she wakes with a stiff neck, unable to turn her head more than a few degrees to either side. She has slept on her back, her arms flung above her head, in a position of abject surrender.