The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

75 Crackling Gravel 1944

The horse was standing in the yard as I approached, limping slightly in the final stretch. Beside him was a skinny, stooping man with an autumnal moustache, chatting to him in Polish. You didn’t have to be a great poet to realise that this was the reunion of two friends.

The farm buildings were dark, traditional post-and-plank log structures with red French windows. But they had an exoticism about them; their craftsmanship was somehow slightly more fanciful than the more utilitarian German farms. Polish farmers clearly had more time on their hands between chores than their German colleagues and could dabble in carving patterns in the eaves and ridges.

Czerwony turned his huge head and watched me hobble into the yard. He then stood there like an awkward country bumpkin who doesn’t quite know how to introduce his girlfriend to his father. Or did he resent the fact that I’d hopped on the back of the tank?

‘Good Hitler,’ I accidentally said in my bad Polish, instead of saying good morning. The old man greeted me without a handshake. The still heat of the sun buzzed in every blade of grass, and the gravel crackled like fire. How I loved that weather, me the Ice Maiden – I’ve always been such a tropical animal. I turned to the workhorse and scratched him under the jaw, feeling the perspiration in his greasy beard. He placed his forehead against my chest and pushed me away. If it had been meant as chastisement, the horse was quick to retract because he then stepped forward and placed his forehead in the same place again, between my breasts. I pointed out the wound on the horse’s right flank to the farmer, and we scrutinised the bleeding scratch the barbed wire had left on his thighs. With a profound glance, the old man thanked me for returning his best horse. Decades later, a horseman told me that some horses are incapable of finding their way home without a rider.

I noticed one of Hitler’s soldiers in the yard, gazing out at the countryside. Despite the heat, he was wearing a long leather jacket and a peaked cap, and he held his gloved hands behind his back. The farmer disappeared with his horse, and I stood alone in the yard with the Nazi officer. Judging by his manner and dress, he had to be high ranking. He turned and advanced wearily towards me. He moved gracefully but without arrogance, with his head raised high but his muscles fully relaxed. His gait suggested some hidden brilliance. Was he armed? Of course he was armed. I surreptitiously groped for my grenade. It was at the bottom of the sack I carried over my shoulder, I could feel its hard shell through the canvas material. He approached with slow steps on the hot gravel. Was he going to kill me?

My fear vanished in the face of an overwhelming fact: as the officer drew closer, I realised that this was the most handsome man I’d ever set my eyes upon. Forehead, eyebrows, cheekbones, lips. I was awestruck. The leather boots, jacket, gloves. Wasn’t he warm? With a smile that half closed his eyes, he offered me his hand without removing his gloves. I had learned in Inferno High to avoid this kind of man assiduously and knew very well that there is nothing worse than a wicked man’s kindness. I took his hand with quivering lips.

‘Pleased to meet you, young lady. Where do you hail from?’

‘From… from Germany.’

‘From Germany to Germany. Everything is Germany now,’ he said, waving his hand over the Polish field. ‘Except for our house back home. That’s empty.’ He cast a vague and strangely dreamy glance towards the west. ‘And where are you headed?’

I didn’t like all this courtesy. Why didn’t he just growl at me?

‘The horse… brought me. I don’t know… I… initially I’m from Iceland and—’

‘What? Iceland?’

I’d said the magic word. He’d stumbled on a rare specimen. He babbled something about Iceland, the blue north, walruses, and romanticism and I don’t know what, because my ears were deafened by my eyes. He was about thirty. Under other circumstances his face would have been considered perfectly handsome, but now it was fatally handsome. It possessed an exquisite pallor that evoked words like corpse and death mask. For some strange reason these words came crawling out of the dark cave of my mind into the moonlight that emanated from the officer’s forehead. Those words precisely and no others. Like two hairy, earth-burrowing nocturnal animals.