The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

71 ‘Germany Girl’ 1944

That evening we ate in silence. Some grilled fish he had caught in the lake the previous day. I tried twice to smile at him and touch his hand, but he withdrew it and ordered me to put out the fire before it got dark. We couldn’t allow ourselves to sit outside at night, fires attracted guns and bullets. For the first time we went to bed straight after dark without lighting a candle and just lay there staring into that black blotch of ink that follows every sentence in the book of time. I felt this period was bigger than the others. Outside, the forest was buzzing, and I killed time by trying to decipher the sounds but couldn’t attribute them to anything other than the growth of early summer.

Every leaf, blade of grass and ant was busy at work, and each gave off humming murmurs that were inaudible to the human ear on their own but when combined with millions of others created a buzz that was similar to the loud silence of a philharmonic orchestra when the conductor has just entered the hall but no music has begun. Maybe we could expect some music in this hall? Or maybe nature was just saying shush because it wanted to listen to the war news? But there was none tonight. No drones. No trains. The bombs had probably taken the night off in the cities under the western sky, Dresden, Cottbus, Berlin… I pictured dark, smouldering amusement parks swarming with one-legged people.

Occasionally I glanced over at Marek; he seemed to have his eyes open. And his head seemed to be buzzing to the beat of the forest, crammed with thoughts. Gradually it grew slightly brighter in the cabin. At first I thought my eyes had developed night vision, but then I saw that the table under the window had drawn a shadow on the floor; the moon had come out. I tottered outside for a pee. The heat of the elapsed day still lingered in the midnight stillness, and it was clear that the evening shift in the woods was far from over. The mice and ants, maggots and midges were far from being asleep and shifted about in a nocturnal frenzy. If you listened carefully, you could hear the singing labourers in the next anthill.

The moon had risen in the north and seemed to be stuck in the branches like a phosphorescent parachute. Against the starry brightness of the sky, the foliage was black and only stirred when it was stirred. A long-tailed bird suddenly recovered its memory when it saw me, remembering that it had a family in the thirty-fourth tree from the moon, and darted over the roof of the cabin, leaving a shaking branch behind. I watched it grow still again as I added a lukewarm discharge to the forest buzz.

I could see that my roommate was still awake when I tiptoed back in, but he didn’t look at me. I laid my head on the moist-smelling pillow and thought of home. How could this have happened? And why me? All fourteen-year-old Icelandic girls had their maiden years delivered between the blue mountains, in the arms of their fathers and mothers, with the warmth of a bedroom and a slice of raisin cake. But here I’d had to survive from one meal to the next, a lonely kid in Europe, spring after spring. Would the war ever end?

But this was undoubtedly tougher on them – Mum, Grandma and Grandad. Two years had now passed since I’d vanished in time; they had probably given me up for lost by now. I’d written them several letters that I’d taken into post offices, whenever I came across one, and even allowed a postman to grope me in return. But obviously there were no ships from the port of Bremen to the ports of Iceland, and the writing on the envelope, ‘Sveinn Björnsson, Botschafter, Reykjavík, Iceland,’ faded in three different cities.

But what did I know? Maybe Mum was dead? Maybe Dad? Both of them, even? But Grandma and Grandad were certainly still alive. Old people didn’t die at war. That was more for young people. Like Marek and me. Maybe the Polish boy would snap out of his gloom and we’d have a baby in the New Year, here in this snowy cabin, and would then be married in Wroclaw when the bombing was over. I would teach needlework at night classes for female factory workers and return to Iceland every second summer.

Half an hour later, a car was heard. And now the Pole finally moved his head; we looked each other in the eye from our beds, under the table that stood between them. The car sounds were accompanied by an eruption of laughter; they obviously weren’t far away. Then the car stopped and we heard some shouts.

‘Lasst mich raus. Ich muss pissen! Pissen auf polnischer Grund!’ And then more laughter. ‘Polen, ich pisse auf dich!’ Leave me, I have to piss! Piss on Polish soil! Poland, I piss on you!

Marek was about to peep through the window when there was a frightful bang and fragments of glass blasted over the table and floor. The Pole retreated into his bed and buried himself under the covers, while the curious Icelander stretched towards the shattered window with one eye. It was a drinking binge: four SS men on a drunken rampage in an open convertible had halted at about a hundred yards from the cabin, brandishing peaked caps, bottles and guns. Another shot was fired and I ducked for cover. But this time the bullet didn’t hit our cabin; it was probably on its way to the moon, because now they were all yelling something at it in the sky. The plan was obviously to invade the celestial body in the autumn.

I leaped out of the bed, slipped under it, stretched out for my bomb, and then climbed back in again. Marek was observing me, but I didn’t allow him to see my beautiful weapon, hid it under the covers, and clutched it with ten fingers, though not too tightly. We lay stiffly in our beds until they had emptied their guns and fleshy pistols; then we froze in terror. The vehicle could be heard crawling through the undergrowth and, as far as I could tell, was headed for the cabin. Yet again, I went over the instructions on how to use the hand grenade in my mind: ‘You pull off the pin, like this… pull here… and then throw it away,’ I heard my father say to me for the hundredth time.

As soon as the car reached the cabin, I would jump up, open the door, and throw the steel egg. The pin could only be pulled just before. I had to be ‘one hundred per cent sure.’ It took me a good while to break out of my paralysis, regain my hearing, and realise that the noise in my ears was just the buzz from the forest. I hoisted myself up on my elbows and looked outside.

‘They’re gone,’ I said in pidgin German.

The Pole didn’t answer but lay there motionless, with his head under the covers. He was still visibly tense, a bundle of nerves.

‘Germany girl,’ I finally heard him mutter in the corner under his blanket.

‘Huh?’ I said.

‘Germany girl,’ he repeated, and I realised he was speaking German. ‘Germany girl.’

He flung off his covers and stood up stiffly with bursting veins in the middle of the cabin in his wartime underwear and yelled at me: ‘Germany girl!’ Then he ripped the covers off me in one move but was startled by what he saw: a scantily dressed girl with her father’s heart in one hand and her virginity in the other. I managed to hide the former, but he took the latter. By force.