The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

77 A Field Sparrow 1944

He was a disappointment to me. He turned out to be neither the Nazi he was supposed to be nor the poet I had imagined. He was only beautiful. As beautiful as a shiny doorknob that fits nicely into one’s palm and bows its head when asked to open a door and then closes it again and shuts up for the whole night. He escorted me to the bedroom where Jacek had prepared a bed for me, and then wished me good night. As polite and neutral as a doorknob. And I had thought he had his eye on me. But no. He didn’t even want to rape me, let alone kill me.

I was appalled and couldn’t sleep.

Maybe he didn’t want me because I was dirty and soiled by another man? These things didn’t pass unnoticed by a sensitive poet. Maybe I was damaged goods for the rest of my life? No, with him, with that holy man, I’d become pure again. Love would save me! But what was I thinking anyway? I who was still so sore and numbed by that horrific event. Yes, of course, it was best this way, to sleep alone tonight and recover. But still, no. I longed for him like a thirst longs for water, and lay in bed with a stomach as taut as a stretched spring: the slightest touch from his finger would have catapulted me out the window.

Aargh and grr!

The next day he picked up the conversation where he’d left off at breakfast and lunch: ‘Tell me more about Iceland. Are there many cars there?’ Then he had to leave the farm for dinner. Second Karl drove him in the sidecar of his motorbike. I ate with Karl, who devoured his meat like a wolf (jerking his head back with every bite) and told me he was an apprentice with a blacksmith in Saarbrücken, a young lad with coarse features. He was bright red in the nasal area. It was as if his big nose had been pressed into his face only last week and the skin was still recovering. He had no interest in Iceland and was capable of talking about only one subject: flyovers, which he felt were a major innovation, if not Germany’s greatest contribution to civilisation. ‘These aren’t bridges over rivers or lakes, but roads, other roads. Flyovers. Think about it. Flyovers.’ Yeah, yeah. Get away from my ears, as far as you can, so that the bomb that kills you doesn’t burst my eardrums.

Class divisions in the army were, of course, merciless. Unschooled helmets got dispatched to the front by the more highly schooled caps. Brains are the currency of life. And Hartmut had a whole treasure chest of those, whereas life had dealt the Karls only a handful of loose change. But the peculiar thing about intelligence is that it is rarely accompanied by good luck. It’s the moderately intelligent men who are the most successful in life; they have enough wits to elbow their way through a crowd, but not so much as to make them shy away from the podium. The most pernicious specimens in any society are always the so-called uneducated intellectuals: the mediocre minds and phoney-schooled workplace preachers with artistic ambitions gone sour, or the megalomaniac dwarfs who inflate their egos with bullshit. That is why we never see truly cultivated people as prime ministers, just air hostesses and solicitors.

Although I spoke only equine Polish, I chose to talk to Jacek instead of that oaf of a blacksmith. The farmer was a calm and brave man whose serene temperament reminded me of Jón in Módárkot, a man who appears later in my story. He was a prisoner in his own home here and was forced to slave away for soldiers who were a lifetime younger than he was, had occupied his land, sent his sons running, and killed his wife in the shed. But from his manner one could see that his soul hadn’t been conquered. He undertook all his chores at a sluggish pace because inside himself he had managed to conceal his vast green pastures, which the Germans had never set their eyes on and over which their war birds would never fly. It was an immense property; it therefore wasn’t easy for him to move about the house and kitchen with all that inside him.

They came back at midnight, Hartmut and Second Karl. I waited with a calculated, nonchalant air on a chair in the kitchen, stooped over a Polish crossword, with my cleavage on view and bare knees in the air, by the open door, like an amateurish whore. But none of it came to anything. There was a dark cloud hanging over Hartmut when he appeared in the hallway, and he headed straight for the bathroom. My knees were starting to hurt when he finally reappeared. He cast a furtive glance down the corridor and into the kitchen at the bare-thighed tart who was sitting there, but I got nothing from that glimpse. It was fleeting and vacant. He then walked into his room and locked himself in. And I could dismantle my whorish pose.

I played around with translating his name and discovered that Hartmut means gallant, and Herzfeld, heart field. It couldn’t have been better. As the days passed, I totally lost myself in that field and aimlessly roamed through it like a disoriented field sparrow, rummaging and pecking for that bloody heart hidden between the blades of grass. I was insanely in love. In the morning I came across him in the hall as he was standing in front of a small mirror on the wall, combing his hair back. I froze on the spot with a gaping jaw and couldn’t snap out of it until he had completed his task and glanced at me, flashing a smile and winking before he rushed past. I staggered into my room and had to lie down, knocked out by his cologne. Day and night I could think of nothing else but that pure forehead, that straight nose, and those soft, thick lips, high cheekbones and strong chin. And yes, those eyebrows… so perfectly drawn! Oh my God, his eyes… His hair was blond but always darkened by water combing or the shadow of his cap.

Yes. There was some shadow over him, if not inside him, that I couldn’t quite fathom. Wasn’t it fun being an officer in the most victorious army history had seen? No, there was something troubling the Valiant Heart of the Field. The look in his eyes seemed to be somehow drowned in ink, and although he had a bright smile, it reached me like a watery glimmer from the depths of a dark cave. Bit by bit I realised that this beautiful boy had lost all joy for living. The little he had shown me on the first day seemed to have completely evaporated. One night he left the farm and came back with a heavy brow. Next day: no more questions about Iceland. Just rye bread with butter. He grew paler and more taciturn by the day. But it must have been the poet in him. Isn’t that what poets were normally like? With paper-white faces and heads full of ink?

My crush on him, though, magnified in direct proportion to the darkening of his soul. I cared nothing about his mood, so long as I had his face in front of me. Love is sparked by two things: surface and substance. For a first-timer, the former was more than enough. I went out to the stable to talk it over with my best friend Czerwony; he was disapproving of it all.