The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

76 Candlelit Dinner 1944

His name was Hartmut Herzfeld, he was born somewhere in Schleswig, and he had studied to become a writer at the University of Hamburg, literature and art. This all came out on our first date. He invited me to dinner in the Polish farmer’s living room. We sat there, the two of us, over some wild boar in the candlelight, sipping red wine from the Carpathian Mountains. He was a perfect gentleman, courteous, refined, and totally free of philandering. However, I expected he intended to ravish my freshly raped body before he killed me with his gun or gaze later that night. I groped for my good old egg and promised myself I would escape at the end of the deed, before sunrise, for the second time in three days.

It wouldn’t be easy, however. He had two helmeted heads under his command. Karl and a second Karl were eating back in the kitchen, along with their rifles and the moustachioed farmer, Jacek, who had served us chicken legs and mashed turnip. As a middle-aged twentieth-century peasant, he had naturally never boiled an egg in his life until a bullet deprived him of his wife and turned him into an expert chef.

For reasons I didn’t inquire about, this little platoon had been staying at the farm for close to four weeks. My main suspicion was that they had something to do with Hitler’s army-communication network, because from one of their rooms, I could often hear loud conversations in coded language through some kind of talking machine that spurted out crackles and buzzes. But I had obviously shot to the top of the hierarchy of this small community and was now sitting with the top brass in the living room, over crystal and silver, all thanks to my incredible nationality, my wonderful German, and my semi-virginal, yeasted breasts, which had risen in the bowl of war and were just ready for baking. They were like those flowers that smiled just as dazzlingly on the battlefield as they did in gardens at springtime. Nature is blind to the history of man.

‘How many people live in Iceland?’

His voice came like a polished silver fork out of a majestic family sideboard.

‘About a hundred thousand, I think. The last time I was in Iceland was before the war.’

‘A hundred thousand? It’s lucky you weren’t all wandering around Stalingrad,’ he said, grinning.

I didn’t get it, of course, had never heard of that city; besides, my thoughts were elsewhere. But he didn’t lose himself in flattery and continued the conversation in what could be called professional terms. Occasionally, however, I felt I could discern carnal thoughts in his eyes when he smiled at me between morsels or gazed pensively out of the windows full of darkness, allowing the candlelight to flicker over his perfect profile.

I looked out, too, to keep him company. Far off in the eastern sky a light hovered in the air, white and small, like a fading sun. I looked at the man again. He stared at length at the light sinking down the sky and seemed increasingly distant, as if his eyes were busy turning the light into a poem. But once it had vanished behind the treetops on the other side of the field, he snapped out of his reverie, straightened in his chair, and raised his eyebrows and glass.

‘Yes, war.’ There was a strange tone in his voice. ‘There are many wars in every war.’

He chucked the words out of his mouth like pebbles into the dark. I was meant to hear them ripple on the surface of a lake far below and sense the depth they contained: this man was standing on the edge of an abyss.

But I was too preoccupied with the circumstances, appearances on the surface that a fourteen-year-old girl couldn’t see beyond: it was here that I sipped red wine for the first time (I’d drunk schnapps with three men at a train station once), was on a date for the first time, was probably in love for the first time. Because, despite the circumstances, this was an extraordinarily romantic dinner. There we sat as two grown-ups (oh God, oh God, I still get butterflies from the thought, this freshly liberated thought of the young me who walks into the living room in the body of a child but turns into a woman the moment I sit down, just because of the way he pulls back the chair and invites me to sit with humble elegance), with three courses and sixteen years between us, a German and an Icelander, in a country house in the middle of Poland, on such a hot and still night that not even the candle noticed that the window was wide open as it gently illuminated this strange encounter. The flame played against the crimson wine in the glasses, and I sensed a bright red glow inside it that couldn’t be pinpointed because it seemed to dwell inside the wine and shine from there, such a strangely intense red in the almost black liquid, like a soul in a military uniform.

Then he lifted his glass, not from the bowl but from the stem, like a true man of the world. My eyes locked on his pale, elegant, and sensitive fingers. I was suddenly so obsessed with his hands that I almost fainted. This would often happen to me in later years when I developed a crush, infatuation, or fixation. Fingers, hands and elbows had the effect of a drug on me. I was just so happy and surprised to see that my love had hands and not wings as I had imagined.

The most romantic thing, though, was the glow from the tiny, shiny swastika on his chest. I felt ashamed, but there was no denying it: Hitler’s cross had the same effect on me as a beautiful rose. Nothing is as seductive as a taboo.

Beneath, there was the simmering awareness of the weapons we were both carrying (for safety I had shoved the hand grenade into the pocket of my skirt), and they were engaged in an erotic dialogue of their own: barrel and egg. I have to confess that there are few greater turn-ons than the knowledge that your host intends to murder you with a revolver once the carnal dessert has been consumed.

‘But you probably know that you Icelanders are an extraordinary nation.’

‘No. The only extraordinary thing about us is that we exist at all. That we survived this long. If we were to vanish in the morning, no one would miss us.’

‘Oh yes. There are people who would miss you. People who believe Icelanders are the original Aryans who preserved the true spark of our race. That it was through you that Old Norse mythology came into being, yes… if not through you, you at least preserved it… and that it is the only true cultural heritage we Germans have, unlike ancient Greek culture, for example, which is totally unrelated to ours. Iceland would therefore be our Hellas, our Athens. The promised land.’

I’d heard my father say this hundreds of times. My eyes were glued to his swastika pin as I pondered on an answer.

‘Hmm… mythology…’

He halted his wineglass a moment as he was lifting it to his lips, chuckled lightly, and then took a sip. ‘You don’t like mythology?’

I had developed an aversion to mythology at an early age. It’s one of the most ludicrous pranks mankind has played on itself, to have created these superhuman models, giants and monsters to fight against and suffer from the comparison: an endless source of unhappiness. Why can’t we just content ourselves with being human?

‘No, gods are so boring.’

‘Oh? How’s that?’ he asked. Was that a grin in his eyes?

‘Perfection is no fun. I once met a man who was so ungodly and earthbound that he was already half-buried, as he said. His legs were missing. And yet he was one of the funniest men I’d ever met. He didn’t survive the night, but in my mind he remains immortal. Three years later I think of him more often than of God, or what’s called God.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He killed him.’

‘Who?’

‘God killed him, out of jealousy. Because he was funnier than He is.’

‘Are you funny?’

‘Not as much as you.’

‘Me? Am I funny?’

‘Yes, in that uniform.’

In those years, people’s words sometimes gambled with self-destruction. You could dig your own grave with the things you said. The war had gone on for so long, and the soul was so weary of the constant threats to its life, that you sometimes unconsciously flirted with ways out of it. Or was it the romantic element in me, maybe? Maybe it was an attempt to talk him out of those clothes that fitted his soul so badly? He took it rather coolly.

‘Don’t you like… don’t you like the uniform?’

‘Yes, but not on you.’