The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

65 A Polish Stallion 1944

The horse trots on. And quite a lovely feeling to have four legs underneath me. Step by step, he carries me by the edge of a pine forest through the rustling grass. Some bird, undaunted by the war, breaks into flight, singing of summer in Europe, poor fool. The woods are alive and the sun climbs up the dense pine trunks like a sluggish but quite luminous forest cat. The flood of rays occasionally bursts through the wall of pines, stinging my eyes. A beautiful day, a good day. Full of brand-new pain. A fire flickers between my legs. But a maroon Polish horse carries that fire with care. He has lived through four years of battle and knows that his load is a fourteen-year-old girl who was raped last night.

It’s been more than two years since I became an orphan and entered the war from the Hamburg Central Station. I’ve been roaming around the Reich of war, through ruins and raids, seeking refuge in shelters and sleeping in courtyards, attics, here and there, in Münster, in Minden, in Kassel – oh, how many cities they have – and spending the best six months with a family in Munich, until one night they managed to flee to the post-war era. And all this time I managed to fight off the hands of war and keep myself a child, all the way up to this eastern forest, all the way up to last night.

But the morning has brought me a horse, a Polish horse. He’s taking me to a better place. He knows of a better place. He knows of some tiny, peaceful village where no men, soldiers, or hatred live. Oh, but the bareback rocking hurts. Oh, come now, elderly me, come down with a saddle from the ocean heavens above!

Lying on a pillow a whole lifetime later, I find myself peering over the edge of the bed: a fathomless abyss opens up below me. At the dim bottom I can make out a faint glimmer. It must be the sun rising over the shattered continent on a sore horseback morning. And yes, there I am, in the dark embrace of the forest. Slowly advancing like a six-legged ant.

This forest seems more Polish to me than German. There’s something Slavonic about the foliage. Not a tank can be heard here, and all the bombs are fast asleep. They sometimes shine beautifully in the night, under the drone of aircraft in the sky, on the horizon out west. ‘Unlucky city,’ a gaunt woman in the underground shelter had muttered, ‘unlucky city.’ I can’t remember what city it was; they were obviously all unlucky. The frontline is far away, to the east of the Don and to the west in France, but sometimes the line cuts through our heads and down between our eyes. And then there’s nothing to do but shut them when we hear the bombs drop. But now that the sun is plucking its radiant melody on these evergreen violins, not even the whisper of a gun can be heard. Nothing outside the ears. But inside them, armies are marching. I was raped last night.

The horse hangs its head to sniff the trail, which he’s either taken before or is improvising as he goes along. We don’t know each other, just met earlier, at the rosy blue dawn. I call him Czerwony. And he hasn’t objected. Therefore he must be Polish, like the boy who screamed himself into me last night. That was the Polish invasion of Germany. I didn’t want to disappoint him by telling him I was Icelandic. Besides, I was no longer Icelandic after three years of roaming through this war. Unless that is precisely what being Icelandic means: to be tossed from one calamity to the next.

It was a dense, green summer, no different from the previous or following ones, with the number 1944 embroidered on every leaf. Oblivious to man, nature just followed its course. And strange to see flowers and bombs erupt in the same field.