The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

117 Not the Right Face 1945

After I tried to escape, I was locked in the room day and night, with a bucket in the corner, like a caged animal. Two big windows looked onto the street. Occasionally I could hear tanks or troops marching by, or shouts and cries, sometimes a round of gunfire with clatters and gasps.

It was a pretty depressing form of entertainment, and I mostly kept to my bed. Birgitte pushed my ration of food along the floor with the tip of her smallest toe and then locked the door, which connected directly to the landing, on the other side of which was the Stettin ladies’ kitchen, the Red Army’s community centre. The partying started after noon and stretched into the night. When I was lucky, no one would show up until dinnertime, although there were seldom fewer than three before dawn, sometimes more. The first week was one long night of panting beasts, smelly sons of Volga and older groaning warlords blowing their load on a fifteen-year-old girl. It was all one big inferno, and no one was better than anyone else. I was numbed by the horror and paralysed with fear. I barely slept, and my dreams were a blaze of infernal flames, although I tried to believe in God during the daytime.

I sometimes heard the finger-eaten woman out on the landing. She either called out for her Johan as before or delivered long monologues on the psychology of women that could have been written by Samuel Beckett.

It was better in the dark because at least I couldn’t see them. The door opened with a flood of light, and Der Nächste would be standing on the threshold, a drunken silhouette who would then close the door and turn into a puffing lump with hands and a hard piece of flesh, uttering the occasional word – ‘Dashenka, Dashenka’ – groping his way into me, and finishing it off in a few minutes. If I was lucky he would die on the pillow and sleep a good while, during which time nobody else would come.

One of them fell asleep before even getting his trousers off. His comrades had pushed him in and he came crawling to the bed. He was an elderly bearded man with little hair and he snored like a horse. I tried to make the most of it and snatched his cigarettes. Where did all these men come from? Russia was like an overturned anthill. There were at least ten of them for every German girl. Some of them tried to be friendly and stroked me like a kitten, trying to convince themselves that they were lovers and not rapists, but they turned out to be the worst pigs of them all when it came to the crunch. But this one was too tired to do anything. He woke up later, though, and started to grope and pant in the dark. A curtain fell over my life, and there was a ten-minute intermission. When the curtain rose again and my heart resumed beating, he had gone back to his snoring. I lay with my back against his, curled up like a foetus, and thought of Mum. Mum, Mum, Mum. I remember your trying on those shoes at the embassy in Kalvebod Brygge, Copenhagen, and the time we fell asleep in bed together, listening to the BBC. I sniffed three times but there were no tears left. In its own way, the man’s snoring had a soothing effect. There were no more noises from the kitchen, and the building had plunged into a kind of silence. The shift was over for the night.

I finally managed to fall asleep and dreamed of hay in the Svefneyjar islands, sunshine, and rolled-up sleeves.

The Russian soldier stirred in his sleep the next morning. Steel-grey light filtered through the two windows, illuminating the few hairs on the man’s shoulders. I felt a strange urge to lightly blow on them, as I lay on the pillow staring at them. The hairs of varying length flickered in the breeze like Icelandic shrubs. Oh, would I ever see anything like that again, see my country again, see… He turned over on his back and I saw his face.

It wasn’t the right face, not the right face at all.

He gave a start, we looked each other in the eye, and our faces assumed the same expression; no father and daughter had ever looked so alike since the beginning of time.

In an instant my life arranged itself into chapters, immovable, cemented chapters, my entire future, like rooms off a giant stairwell. The only thing left to me now was to follow those steps all the way into this garage.

The madwoman could be heard howling. But outside, the birds were singing. The war was over and so was my life.