AGNETA wondered what had happened to Brandt. He’d certainly been burnt. Even though the surgeons had done their best for him, his face reminded her of melted candle wax – the features made indistinct, the skin thin and taut across his cheekbones and around his narrow-lipped mouth. His blonde hair, which he wore short, was ravaged to the point of desolation in places, revealing scars and burns over much of his scalp. Most of his left ear was missing and, of course, his arm. It must have been an explosion, she decided. She wondered what he’d looked like before.
‘Don’t worry, I don’t bite. I don’t even bark much.’
She’d been surprised that he’d spoken to her in a polite voice. And that his lips had twisted into what she thought must be his smile. His voice sounded constrained, as though it had been altered by whatever had happened to him.
She and the other women were wary of him – the SS orderlies who he replaced had been free with their fists and curses. Who was to say he wouldn’t turn out to be the same? And it was difficult to read him. Brandt could smile, more or less, and he could nod, of course, but the tiny visual clues that revealed a person’s true feelings were largely absent. Who could tell if he felt anything at all? Perhaps he understood this – perhaps that was why he was so specific in his explanations of what he expected of them.
She realized that she remembered him from before he came to work in the hut. They’d been working in the garden one afternoon not long before and he’d passed on a horse and cart with an older man she knew lived nearby. She remembered Brandt had nodded to her as if he knew her. She’d thought, at the time, that his injuries had made him simple – because no one who passed the hut looked up at it, unless they were SS, of course. The old man knew this – he’d kept his eyes fixed on the road in front of him. But Brandt examined the building without fear. If she’d seen anything in his expression, as she remembered it, she thought it might have been disgust. Perhaps that was another reason she’d been surprised when he’d shown up at the hut.
Perhaps he was a good person. His kindness to Rachel counted in his favour. It was hard to be sure, of course. You would never be able to tell from the camp Commandant’s benevolent exterior that he’d sent countless souls from this world to the next. And how many SS had she come across in the camps who had seemed to be ordinary men, yet had turned out to be monsters? Brandt could be the same – his stiff features gave nothing away.
Then again, it occurred to her, the prisoners’ faces were also masks. They held their emotions tight within, even amongst themselves. How could you trust anyone when betrayal might mean their life as opposed to yours?
Perhaps Brandt was also protecting himself.