The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

79 Morning with a Dead Man 1944

The Polish nocturnal butterflies sang their song, and trains came and went. In the space of a night I’d turned fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. I fell asleep all caressed and sore from bliss and woke up when a clap of thunder released its downpour. Hartmut stretched out to close the window. We lay there like a loving father and daughter and listened to the sky pounding the earth, a hundred million drops lashing against it. We had no future, but the moment kept us tight together, and what was life but a morning hour in the arms of a man? I started to think about all my misfortunes, the days of hunger on the streets of German cities, long nights in underground shelters, and the rape in a Polish cabin, and it all seemed so trivial now that I lay with this handsome man on the peak of ecstasy.

‘I was lying. I was a virgin. That was my first time.’

‘You… what a rascal you are. And are you maybe thirteen years old?’

‘Yes. I’m going to be confirmed next spring,’ I said in a mousy voice, waiting for him to finish laughing. ‘What were you writing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Yes, what? You’ve got to tell me. I gave you my virginity; you owe me.’

‘A poem.’

‘I thought so. A poem? About what?’

‘Oh, just… some old-fashioned, romantic nineteenth-century nonsense.’

‘Don’t be like that. Can I read it?’

‘No.’

‘Are you allowed to write poems if you’re in the SS?’

‘No. Only kill.’

‘What’s it like… to kill?’

‘He who kills dies. He who is killed lives.’

I didn’t quite get the answer, but stored it to understand it later.

‘But aren’t you… don’t you believe in the… swastika, then?’

‘Do you think Christ believed in the cross?’ He blushed as he said this, felt ashamed of the comparison. ‘Forgive me, I’m no Christ.’ (At this point the newly kissed girl felt like correcting this good man.) ‘And yet I’m still… yes… I can say that I’m being crucified.’

Outside, the rain lashed against the windowsill, fields and countryside. Dawn broke feebly, watery grey upon the horizon, like a shoal of herring in the ocean darkness.

‘Have you ever… killed anyone?’ I whispered into his bristles.

‘Only myself.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m a condemned man.’

‘Huh? What for?’

‘Cowardice.’

We were silent a long time. I sat up in the bed to contemplate the moment. He was staring at the ceiling, the whiteness, and I at him, the white in his two eyes. The rain subsided as the light grew. The yellowing windowsill, as hard and thick as stone, gave off a peculiar glow in the grey dawn. And somewhere Czerwony was standing in his four-legged sleep, good old workhorse.

‘Why… we can just flee! Here out of the window!’

‘Flee? Where is it possible to flee to? There are eyes everywhere in Hitler’s Reich. A friend of mine was killed on the run, like an animal, shot in the back. Besides, I’d rather look my… my mistakes in the eye.’

‘Your mistakes? It’s not because of your mistakes that the army wants to kill you. We can escape to Iceland!’

All of a sudden I saw a man standing in the cabbage patch outside the window. I covered my chest. He had a rifle on his back and glanced over his shoulder. Our eyes met for the briefest of seconds before he looked towards the woods, but his glance managed to express a whole sentence: I despise you, you little whore, you and your nocturnal pleasures, but I won’t torture you to death, I’ll look away, because a condemned man is entitled to enjoy the fruits of life before the final curtain falls, the fruit that will then rot as soon as he’s gone, ha-ha-ha. (The eyes are generally far more eloquent than the mouth and tongue.)

‘Who is it? Karl?’ Hartmut asked.

‘Second Karl,’ I said, lying down again and cuddling up to him.

‘Yes. They take it in shifts.’