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10 January - 25 January 1952
Yesterday was my thirty-third birthday. I did not mention this to either Anton or his father. I did not care to have them think I was seeking attention. I ended up getting attention I had not bargained for, though.
It started when I had a bit of an altercation with those blasted mules. Santiago, the one Anton and I ride, isn’t so bad, but the other two look at me as if I am poison, and are inclined to kick up their back legs anytime I come close. Old V asked me to take them to the creek for water, and I agreed. Take three animals to water on leads? Like dogs? Surely even I could manage that. Easy peasy.
Not so easy, actually. I took Santiago first. He was all right; he’s used to me, anyway. When I came back for the other two, Pedro lowered his head, and Judas rolled his eyes. I am quite sure if they could have, they would both have spat in my face like disconcerted camels. I gingerly unhooked their picket ropes and instructed them to follow me.
I don’t know if they only respond to Spanish, or if they are just as stubborn as... as mules... but they both promptly sat down and refused to budge. So I got mad and cursed at them (in German, of course, as it is the only language in which I can curse fluently) and yanked on their leads, expecting them to resist, only they didn’t. They got to their feet the exact instant I yanked, which meant I fell hard upon my rear, and I yelled in pain and accidentally let go of the ropes. The mules trotted off in two different directions, and I leapt to my feet and shouted at them. I didn’t know which one to follow, so I picked the one that trotted more slowly and ran after it. I think perhaps it was Judas. Anyway, he increased his speed proportionately, and I hadn’t gotten far before becoming utterly winded, and I collapsed to the ground and closed my eyes. I was done. I didn’t care about these stupid animals. I watered the dust beneath my face with self-pitying sobs.
A moment later a shadow fell over me and I screamed before I took the time to see who it was.
Only Old V, and he looked Very Amused. I scowled at him.
“Having a bit of trouble, are we?” he asked.
“Stupid mules,” I muttered. “Water them yourself.” I stood up and walked indignantly back to camp.
Naturally when he called the truant mules, they meekly followed him to water and back without even needing him to hold their ropes. Of course, he and the mules have plenty in common. That might explain their rapport. Anyway, I glared at him as he came back to camp and wouldn’t talk to him. I was very, very mad at those dumb animals. Clearly my failure to manage them was the height of hilarity for him.
“Did you see?” he said to Anton. Anton grinned. Even Anton found my ineptitude hilarious. Well, then, I thought, I’ll just go to my bed and stay put for the rest of the day.
Happy birthday to me.
Miss Mayer has been glaring at me ever since the mule incident of yesterday, and I suppose it was not very gentlemanly to laugh at her. Even so, I was not prepared for her to go into all-out revenge mode about it—after all, we had been getting along better in the weeks since Christmas.
She stewed on her bed for hours, and when I went to the creek for water this evening, she followed me, still glaring. It was funny in the way that a two-year-old glaring is funny, ferocious but harmless, and I couldn’t look at her because I knew I would burst out laughing. But when we got to the water’s edge, she spoke. One well-crafted, double-edged sentence.
“Is Anton your son or were you a bloody hero?”
I whipped around and blinked at her, stunned.
“Anton showed me your wedding picture, in front of a Christmas tree. His birthday is in March. Even if he’d been born in April like he was supposed to, there’s no way—that’s only four months—”
I cut her off. “Antonia was the only woman in my bed, ever.”
“Were you the only man in hers? I asked if he’s your son, and you haven’t answered me.”
“Of course he’s my son,” I spluttered at her. “You’re baiting me. I’m not playing your games.”
She charged on. “You treat me like an immoral heap of shit because I’ve been forced to sleep with men I despise. I didn’t do any of the things I did because I wanted to. I bet you and your girlfriend had fun sleeping around, didn’t you? Guess what, I’ve never had fun!”
I set the pails on the ground with a slosh and stepped close to her. I must have had murder in my eyes, because she shrank back.
Our eyes locked and I got a grip on her arms (instead of her throat, admittedly a tempting idea). “Don’t you ever cast slurs on my Antonia,” I hissed. “I was her first. Anton is my son. And even supposing she wasn’t faithful? It is no business of yours.”
“It is my business,” she shot back, her voice hoarse with fury. “I have been raped more times than I can count, and the way you treat me, you’re no better than any of those swine. What if your precious Antonia was in my place? Would you have blamed her for something she didn’t want done to her? Would you have taken her back afterwards?”
I tightened my grip on her arms and she winced. But she didn’t stop talking.
“You’re taking out your frustrations on me, and it’s not fair. If you want to fuck me, fuck me. But whatever you do, get your arse off your high horse and stop pretending you’ve never done anything morally questionable yourself.” She trembled with intensity. “None of what happened to me was ever my fault. I didn’t ask for any of it. No matter what Mauritz or any of the others said or did. It wasn’t my fault. Even you said that.” Tears spilled out of her eyes. “I don’t understand real love at all, but it doesn’t mean I’m beyond learning. That boy of yours gets it. He didn’t learn it from you, though. He makes me long to start over. I was like him once. Trusting and sweet and loving. All it takes is one assault.”
“Don’t talk to me about my son,” I shouted at her.
“I’m not going to taint your precious son,” she spat back. “I’m telling you to wake the hell up and realise I have feelings and I want to be treated as if I matter. Not like I’m poison.” Her voice sounded high and fierce now. “The first night here, when I got drunk, I offered myself because it’s all I know. I haven’t owned myself for years. I’m a stupid girl, sure, everyone knows that, but when I lived in England, people smiled and gave my parents sympathetic looks for having produced such a simpleton. Now everyone just... walks over me. Don’t I deserve the dignity of some kindness?”
Before I could answer her, she’d run away crying, and I sank down to the ground and sat, stunned at the intensity of her accusations. Words came back to mind, words I’d tried to forget, another accusation.
You don’t want anything to do with me since Anton was born. Don’t I count anymore?
I ran back to camp sobbing, and dragged my bed back under the wagon, hiding myself under the blanket, trembling all over. I thought: I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I gasped for air and hunched over, burying my face in the ground, ripping out grass as I gripped the fragile stalks in an attempt to anchor myself.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. I am an absolute IDIOT.
What I want is for Old V to hold me tightly in his arms, to tell me “You are enough, just as you are.” The same thing I long to hear my father telling me.
How to convince him I am worthwhile? I suppose I first need to believe it myself.
And I do not.
I did not know I had passed out until I woke under the flickering shade of a tree. I was dimly aware that I felt more comfortable than I had since running away from Mauritz.
Mauritz. My heart twisted. I was so weary, weary to my very bones. I couldn’t move so much as a finger, and my eyelids drifted closed again. Mauritz.
––––––––
When I met Mauritz, I was walking home on Laa An Der Thaya’s main street with a basket on my arm, eyes on the ground as always, talking to myself under my breath, oblivious to my surroundings. Minding my own business.
Until I ran into someone. Quite literally, I ran into a black-uniformed SS officer. I stepped back, jerked out of The World Inside Leni’s Brain, and smiled by way of apology, curtsied awkwardly, and then skittered around him and hurried on my way. I knew better than to insult Nazis, no matter how much I loathed and feared them.
But his expression had surprised me: a sort of shock in the eyes, as if he’d seen a ghost. On the steps of Tante Madeleine’s, I cast a furtive glance backwards. He stood in the same spot where I’d run into him.
Watching me.
I went into a dither and ran to Tante M to tell her about it. She held me tightly and stroked my hair until I no longer trembled. The encounter had spooked me, and every time I remembered he had seen where I lived, I started to panic.
But days went by, and I did not see him again, and I began to relax and move on, until I got caught out after curfew one night walking my bicycle home. I couldn’t ride, but it had a permanent puncture and I often used it as a prop when I was out late on one of my clandestine wireless jobs, in case I got intercepted. My simpleton self could get away with a lot. Everyone in town knew how useless Madeleine Mayer was.
I was intercepted. But not in the way I’d heard of other resistance agents being grilled and questioned. A hand over my mouth, a knock over the head, and when I opened my eyes I was lying on a sofa with a splitting headache, guarded by some annoying Nazi man who seemed convinced he’d landed a Dangerous Criminal. I refused to answer any of his questions, more from confusion and the residual pain in my head than from stubbornness, and two hours later in walked SS-Sturmbannführer Mauritz von Schlusser.
The man from the street in Laa An Der Thaya.
The man who’d seen where I lived.
Get her for me, for she pleaseth me well.
Now it was my turn to react as if I’d seen a ghost. I sat up partway in alarm, but collapsed back, clutching my head with a moan. He sent out the other idiot with a dismissive wave of his hand, locked the door, and sat across from me, staring at me intently with an unrelenting sapphire gaze that penetrated my brain and read my thoughts.
He was forty-ish then, one of those men who age well and probably had no trouble wooing women. There was a highly attractive charisma about him, and his voice, soft yet authoritative, was nothing short of hypnotic. He acted so officious I felt sure I had nothing to fear, if I would only be polite to him. After introducing himself, he apologised for my head, and stared at me for a long time, contemplative, whilst I kept my eyes submissively downcast. That could be considered my first mistake, letting him see my docility, instead of behaving like any real resistance worker might. I acted neither defiant nor demanding; I just wanted to go home to my aunt, have her hold me tightly until everything had come all right again.
After an interminable silence I looked at him at last, shyly. His eyes were still fixed on me, his leg crossed over his knee, boots gleaming, hat on his lap, short sandy hair going grey. Absolutely nothing threatening about him. I had to admit that.
At last he spoke. “How old are you, child? Sixteen, seventeen?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d been mistaken for someone younger. My simpleton air saw to that. “Twenty-one, sir,” I murmured.
His eyebrows shot up. “Are you married?
“No.”
“Engaged? Have a sweetheart?”
“Not really.” I wouldn’t tell this Nazi I loved a Jewish boy, and besides it wasn’t a serious or official sort of love. It couldn’t be, as long as Jews were treated like subhumans. Why did my love life matter, anyway?
He watched me some more. “A virgin?”
I blushed and stammered out defensively, “Of course I am!” And then I straightway wished I hadn’t let him in on that. Too late.
He posed another question. “Are you a member of the Czech Resistance?”
“No.” Partly true. I only helped them in an uninitiated capacity. I had no suicide tablet to get me out of this bind. “I’m a British subject.”
“Why is a British woman in Austria?”
“My parents are Austrian by birth. I was born in England. I came here to help my aunt. She’s ill. She needs a companion and caretaker until she recovers.”
Poor Tante Madeleine didn’t have a clue what I got up to in my time off. Neither she nor my uncle ever dreamed their slightly mousy niece sneaked out in the dark to send and receive messages. I was aware it was dangerous, but it was exciting, and I was thrilled to be useful. Why wasn’t this man asking me why I’d been out after curfew? He didn’t seem at all interested in that.
“And you speak Czech?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Another long silence. “I would like to question your aunt and confirm what you are telling me,” he said, and before I could protest he had risen to his feet, snapped his hat back onto his head and called in the man who’d interrogated me. “Take her to—” was all I could make out before he lowered his voice to a level I couldn’t hear. But the second Nazi escorted me to a bedroom upstairs with an attached bath.
A woman came in, ordered me to strip, and handed over clean underthings and a nightgown. “Bathe and wear these,” she ordered me. “We will wash your clothes. The door and windows are guarded.” She turned on her heel and left, taking my clothes with her.
The bath was heavenly, because I didn’t know yet that I had anything to fear. I soaked for at least an hour, washed and combed my hair, put on the nightgown (the underthings didn’t fit), and sat in a chair, unsure if I was meant to sleep in this bedroom. Madeleine Mayer the country girl didn’t dare climb into that fine-looking bed without permission. So I curled up in the big chair and fell asleep, naïvely trusting in Mauritz’s apparent kindness.
I would never go to sleep so easily again.
In the night the door latch clicked as the door was opened and closed and re-bolted. I was too sleepy to care until a lamp switched on by the bed and flooded the room with soft golden light. Then I realised I hadn’t been dreaming, and I squinted in the sudden brightness, trying to make sense of what was happening.
Mauritz had come in. I felt uneasy and hugged my arms over my breasts in an instinctive attempt to preserve my maiden dignity. He set his hat on a table, hung his tunic neatly on a hook, and sat on the edge of the bed to remove his boots. I watched, unmoving, my heart racing. The man acted as if he did not know I was here.
Perhaps if I held very still...
For five minutes I fancied I had succeeded in Being Invisible. Mauritz undid his tie and began unbuttoning his shirt. I squeezed my eyes closed, horrified at the idea of seeing a man in his underthings, especially a man old enough to be my father and whom I didn’t even know. Good girls weren’t supposed to look at unclothed men until they married, and even then only at their husbands. I was a good girl.
I heard his voice, quite near to me. It said: “Fräulein.” I jumped, startled, and screwed up the courage to peek through one eye. He was still mostly clothed, so I opened my eyes the rest of the way and stared at him, mute, stupid. “Get up, please.”
I obeyed, trembling, still hugging myself. I felt immensely vulnerable with only that thin layer of muslin protecting me from any invasion of my privacy.
“Do not be afraid,” he said. His voice was soothingly melodic, but there was something unsettling in his eyes.
I couldn’t make words. I stood frozen in place.
He stepped closer and lightly stroked my cheek with the backs of his fingers. I shuddered involuntarily at the intimacy of his touch. He walked around me in a slow circle, inspecting me. He prised my arms away from my chest, cupped my breasts in his hands appraisingly, raised my hands to his lips, palm up, kissing one and then the other. He looked into my eyes. “You are a little taller than she was,” he said, “but that is a small thing.” He sounded as if he was talking to himself.
I finally managed to force out some words. “Taller than whom?”
He didn’t answer me, only framed my face with his hands. “Have you been kissed before, my lovely little one?” he asked. My mind spun. I shook my head, throat dry and constricted again with panic. I did not want this stranger touching me like this; I didn’t want to give him any part of myself. I was hardly in a position to refuse, however: too scared to fight, and I couldn’t scream. He seemed to take my silence as acquiescence to an unspoken question, because he leant in and closed his mouth over mine. I tried to back away, to wriggle free, but he had me tightly in his grip and I could hardly breathe. He didn’t only kiss my lips. He got his mouth all over my face, my neck, my hands, and everywhere in between. Still trying to get free, I tried to wipe off his kisses with my nightgown sleeve the first chance I got, and that displeased him. He frowned and yanked off my nightgown with one quick jerk, the fabric screeching in protest as it tore: muslin more eloquent than its wearer. Then it was his bare skin against mine, my wrists pinned to the bed by his hands, my hoarse attempts to protest all silenced by his suffocating kisses.
I did try to get away, I truly did try. No use. He was too strong, determined to have me whether I wanted it or not. Everything about the act revolted and terrified me, and when he had finally done, I rolled away from him onto my stomach and hid my face in the pillow and sobbed, noisy babyish sobs. Josef would never want me now. I was ruined, not a good girl anymore. I felt sick.
“Stop that noise.” Mauritz’s voice, calm but commanding. He lit a cigarette, took a long drag. I could not stop crying, overwhelmed by what had happened. I couldn’t even understand what had just happened. How could I have controlled my tears?
“I said, stop that noise.”
I yelped as he pressed the lit end of his cigarette to my bare arm. I tried to jerk away, but he held it firmly in place. “I will remove the cigarette when you stop the noise.” I sucked in my sobs, desperate, and he took away the cigarette. I stared at him in stunned horror.
“You must never cry,” he instructed. “Red eyes are very unbecoming.” Why did this man, who had seemed so ordinary before, behave now like such an absolute madman?
He dressed again when he finished his cigarette and left the room, locking me in again. I slithered to the floor, comatose with shock for a long time. I was in so much pain I could scarcely crawl to the bathroom, but crawl there I did, desperate to wash away the taint of this vile man. But the water had been shut off, denying me even that simple dignity. I collapsed to the cold tiles, too numbed even to cry. Eventually I hobbled to where my rent nightie lay on the floor, wrapped it around myself as best I could, and crawled under that evil bed, smeared with blood and reeking of man, letting the confined space soothe me like a hug from Daddy or Tante Madeleine. It lulled me into a false sense of safety, like a cat eluding the world, whilst I prayed to die. Over and over my brain replayed what Mauritz had done, and each time it felt more repugnant and terrifying.
I don’t know how long I lay under the bed, but at some point I did fall asleep, since I woke so stiff I could hardly drag myself out. I was hungry and thirsty and bruised, and the burn itched terribly. Mauritz came in after a while and had another go at me. He seemed oblivious to my pain, my pathetic whimpers of agony muffled by his hand or his mouth. He took great delight in all of this, and again I sobbed afterwards, and again he burnt me with his post-coital cigarette, on the other arm this time. I shut up.
I was utterly muddled by emotional overload and physical pain by the time he blindsided me with the news that tore my entire world apart.
“Madeleine Mayer is dead.”
I stared at him.
“Close your mouth, my dear, it is unbecoming to gape,” he said. “Madeleine Mayer is dead.”
“If she is dead, who am I?” I breathed out. Stupid thing to say.
Mauritz raised me to my feet. I gasped from the pain, but he ignored it. “You are Leni von Schlusser. You are my wife.” He slipped a ring onto my finger, and I recoiled, shaking my head violently.
“No—no—” I said, but he interrupted me.
“You are a gift from the gods,” he said. “You are my Marlene back from the dead. You are wasted as a companion for the feeble.”
“You hurt me.” I didn’t know the word for rape in those days, but that’s what I meant. “Please let me go home! My aunt needs me.”
He took another drag on the cigarette. “She no longer requires your services,” he said evenly. (Nothing has ever ruffled Mauritz’s composure, except apparently when his mistress defends Jews or his bird escapes its cage.)
Bile rose in my throat. “What does that mean?” I asked him.
He picked a non-existent bit of lint from the shoulder of my nightgown. “Unfortunately, your aunt had some difficulty with her heart. I’m afraid she is no longer among us.”
“My uncle!”
“He made the mistake of resisting the officer who came to question him and has been shot through the head.”
I stared at him in disbelief. This was a nightmare, wasn’t it, only a nightmare? I would wake up, wouldn’t I?
“You will do well to obey my every command,” Mauritz added. “No harm will come to you if you do.”
“My parents,” I begged. “Let me go home to England, to my family!”
“Too late,” he said.
Was he saying they were dead, too? I couldn’t bear to ask.
Mauritz drew me to sit beside him on the couch, took my unresisting hands in his, and spoke quietly. I found myself gazing at him, mouth open, unable to tear my eyes away. I don’t remember all he said, but it was something like this:
Madeleine Mayer was found dead beside her bicycle this morning, her bones shattered by bullets. She has been taken to the Mayer burial plot alongside her aunt and uncle, whose house has been marked with the words TRAITORS TO THE REICH in white paint. Madeleine’s parents will be receiving a telegram any minute alerting them of their daughter’s death.
Now I understood the real reason for the bath, to get my clothes off me, to disguise some other miserable wretch they wanted people to believe was me. Who was the unfortunate girl whose dead body was supposedly mine? I stared in utter disbelief as he said again, “You are my wife. Leni von Schlusser. Madeleine Mayer is dead.”
I bent my head and sobbed. I was entangled in a nightmare, and I longed to die. I had already sent three innocent people to their deaths, two of whom I knew and loved, because of my clumsy inability to carry out a simple errand without being intercepted. The sobs got me two more burns before I managed to get them in check. Once I had gone quiet again, Mauritz whispered promises in my ear, promises irresistible to almost any girl under other circumstances: promises to dress me, feed me, shelter me, pamper me, in exchange for my services as interpreter and mistress. His touch made me want to recoil as though it were the touch of a snake, but in my confusion and distress I couldn’t think clearly.
I was in shock, and I hurt everywhere. Weak from hunger, my resistance was down. With no way to go home, the fight left me. I didn’t want to be hurt any more, so I gave in.
I am not heroic. I took what seemed the only way; surely the war would end soon and I would be free to go home. Those early days, or months, or whatever, stretched into a grey haze of self-loathing and a stripping away of Madeleine Mayer, layer by layer: first by Mauritz himself, then by Erich and the other guards at Theresienstadt, then by the—that Thing That Happened afterwards. Madeleine withered away in her own head, leaving Leni von Schlusser to emerge from the cocoon.
Leni von Schlusser stopped getting burnt for crying, but she was burnt for other trespasses. Always, always there was yet another thing she couldn’t do correctly.
––––––––
For a few weeks after Mauritz initially violated me, he left me to myself in the room. A maid brought my meals, but she wasn’t allowed to speak to me. Solitude pleased me in most ways, but every little noise set me trembling in terror lest the events of the first night be repeated. They gave me no other clothes, and I paced the room wrapped in blankets rather than wear that torn and tainted nightgown.
The solitude gave me time to heal and more than plenty of time to think, to feel the full weight of my situation. I was aghast at the deadly repercussions of my capture. Were they lying to me, trying to scare me into giving them some information?
What was I to do? I was desperate to get out, to find my family, or Josef, or anyone who might help me get out of Austria.
Except I wasn’t in Austria now. I was in Czechoslovakia, and I was legally dead. My papers had all been confiscated. I had no identity, and no means of contacting the resistance workers who could provide me with fake ID. Not that I’d dare. My Nazi captors did not appear to know of my wireless skills, and I wanted to keep it that way, and I really didn’t want to further endanger lives. I’d done enough damage.
One afternoon Mauritz came in with a bundle, which he carefully opened. “Take off your nightgown,” he commanded. I let it slide down around my ankles and stood there, incredibly embarrassed to have him see me naked in daylight. He handed me a brassiere and knickers, elegant fine silk ones, which fit surprisingly well. He buttoned me into my skirt and blouse himself, smoothed the silk stockings over my legs, hovering. He supervised me as I tried to fix my hair to his specifications. He hadn’t much liked my virginal crown of braids and said he would have someone come in and style my hair properly. He left me as abruptly as he had come, leaving me baffled. What was all this for?
He made good on his word about the hair. A hairdresser came only a few hours later and cut and set my hair. “The colour is not quite right,” said Mauritz, “but we will do that next time...”
––––––––
I heard a rustling sound nearby, but I couldn’t make my head turn to see what it was. I felt as immobile as the day I woke to Mengele bending over me, his gap-toothed grin smug as he told me Everything Was Going To Be All Right Now.
My eyes were closed, but my mind could still clearly see him, could still remember the sick dropping in the pit of my stomach, because I sensed everything was not all right, that it never would be again. Madeleine Mayer had been legally dead for over a year by then. That day, she drifted away into complete oblivion.
Whatever tendrils of personal morality I had still clinging to me shrivelled and died. I no longer cared how much I drank or cursed or how many men I had to entertain. The haze of my life grew greyer and colder, and my heart grew greyer and colder too.
––––––––
Coming alive again hurt. I had started to detect flickers of life returning around Christmas: smoking flax, now quenched. I didn’t want to get off my bed or even move. And it was my own fault for having felt the need to prove Varela worse than, or at least as bad as, I.
The truth is, no matter how promiscuous he and Antonia were or weren’t, they had nothing to be ashamed of in comparison with my load of guilt. They weren't responsible for any deaths.
––––––––
I lay there in Anton’s hammock for hours. The gloom of evening thickened. I ran out of tears and had nothing left to summon even the tiniest jump of startlement when Anton came and put his arms around me. Perhaps he had been sitting near me all the time.
I felt dead.
“Your father doesn’t want me here,” I whispered. I could barely hear myself, and I’m sure I was slurring. “I’m in the way. I should leave.”
“I want you here,” he said, softly, and got into the hammock. He climbed under the blanket and held me more tightly still. The hammock swayed gently. “Papá says when I feel lonely, and I do a lot of the time, to go find someone lonelier than me and make them happy again.”
Anton, lonely and wanting me? Me! He went on, “I don’t know what it’s like to have my mum hold me.”
I said, still stumbling over my words, “I miss having my daddy to hold me. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I might never know. He might have died, not ever knowing I was still alive.”
Then we were both crying, holding each other: two lost children, longing for absent parents.
I abandoned my water pails and walked to a nearby tree, leant back against it, and stared out over the lake, stinging from the woman’s accusations and my own nagging shame.
That I got Antonia pregnant before we were married I would not deny, but we did get married. We’d planned to anyway. It was the other jibe that infuriated me more, the bit implying Antonia had slept around.
I didn’t want to think about Antonia sleeping around. I chose to remember only good things, like the night she first came to my house.
I had worried I’d never see Antonia again after those stolen kisses in the kitchen, but I needn’t have. She turned up unannounced one evening a month later. I stared at her on my back doorstep, a vision within arm’s reach, speechless.
“What are you doing here?” I asked when I untangled my tongue.
“My flatmate Jean is on duty tonight and I was lonely.”
I couldn’t believe this lovely creature had chosen my house to come to, and the atmosphere around us felt veritably charged. I struggled again to get my words out. “How did you know where I lived?” Before she had time to answer I asked, “The cleaning girl?”
She giggled. “Guilty as charged. I found a map of the town, and your name’s on your letterbox. I had a peek at it before I came round back.”
For a moment we both stood there on opposite sides of my threshold, and then she said, “Are you going to invite me in? Blackout, you know.”
“Oh. Yes.” I stepped aside to let her pass and shut the door quickly behind her. “Sorry. I’m a bit antisocial.”
She grinned. “Never mind. You look amazing,” she said. I was in shirtsleeves, with my top buttons undone and cuffs rolled up. I hastened to amend these things, but she said breezily, “You needn’t bother with that on my account.”
I gestured her vaguely towards my front room and murmured something about making tea, and I indecorously left her and vanished into the kitchen to calm myself with a few deep breaths and the comforting ritual of tea-making.
When I brought the tray out, I found her studying the map of Argentina on my wall. It was ragged around the edges and full of coloured pushpins and routes in thread between. “Have you been?” she asked, eyes bright with interest.
“Sadly, not yet. I only dream.”
“A pity,” she said.
“I like the idea of adventure, but when it comes to actually having any, I never seem quite able to pull it off.” I set the tray on the coffee table, poured two cups, and handed her one. She sipped it gratefully and settled into my armchair. I took a seat on the footstool near her. Silence reigned as she sipped her tea and I held mine, untasted, gazing at her. She was so beautiful, and I heard myself whisper, “You look like a queen, sitting there.” She beamed, and I went on, “Like a Polyommatus coridon.”
“Like a what?” she asked, still smiling, but bemused.
I blushed. “It’s a butterfly. Common name Chalkhill Blue. It’s a soft gleaming blue, like the frock you’re wearing. I’m so sorry, I forget nobody else cares for butterflies like I do.”
“No, do go on,” she encouraged me. “As long as you don’t expect an intelligent response from me, I’d love to listen.” She didn’t seem to be mocking me.
I set my cup down and went to the cupboard and beckoned her over. I drew out a glass-topped drawer and pointed to the butterfly in question. “See?”
She touched the glass lightly with her fingertips, her expression oddly mournful. But she said, “It is very beautiful.”
My eyes were on her, and as she gently pushed the drawer back in and turned to look up at me, I heard myself say, “Your hair is beautiful, Antonia.” Impulsively I stretched out a hand and touched it: like silk, soft and clean and gleaming, and I leant down and my lips caressed her face, seeking her mouth. Instinct is a powerful thing.
“How many butterflies have you?” she whispered between kisses. We had been stepping backward all this time towards my couch.
“I have a million inside me right now,” I whispered back. “Antonia, I feel a bit light-headed.”
She gave me a nudge and I collapsed onto the couch and she landed on top of me. She touched my face with light fingers, brushing her lips tantalisingly over mine. My arm circled about her, drawing her closer.
“You’re like a flaming candle,” I said, “and I am a moth—” She silenced me with a kiss so staggering we tumbled off the couch to the floor. She made a small noise of delight as I kissed her throat, and then I realised what I was doing and pulled away, breathing deeply to quiet my racing heart.
“What is it?” she asked, sitting up beside me, concerned.
“It’s not right,” I said. “We hardly know each other. I’m too old for you. I don’t even know how old you are.”
“I’m almost nineteen,” she said softly. “I’m consenting. I don’t want any old boy. I want a man. I want you.”
“I need to think.” I closed my eyes to block out the bewitching sight of her dishevelled hair and the way she was practically purring. I suppose her youthful energies demanded release. I understood. I’d never even kissed a girl until her, and I’d been fine, but now I craved her. I wanted nothing more than to chuck propriety to the wind and follow our instincts, but I had seen enough of life to know there were practical considerations a girl of eighteen might not think of. I ran my hand through my hair and opened my eyes to look at her. “I don’t want to get you in trouble,” I said. “Your parents don’t know me. You don’t know mine. This is all topsy-turvy.”
“You like your life in neat little compartments, don’t you?” Antonia didn’t seem offended, and she was right. I did. Then she added, “I am dreadfully forward. I’m sorry.”
I broke a long, awkward pause by reaching for a packet of cigarettes. “Smoke?” I asked, and she nodded. I lit two, handing her one. For a minute we smoked in silence, side by side, and I felt myself calming enough to ask another question. “Did you come here planning to—” I couldn’t make myself finish the sentence. She knew what I meant. Did you come here planning to get me to sleep with you?
“Not specifically,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have minded.”
I sighed. “You might not believe you’re so young, but you are.”
She laid a hand on my arm. I took another drag and contemplated a while before I spoke again. “I do want it, just—not quite yet, all right? I need to think it over. You deserve better than a one-night stand with anybody. And now we ought to get you on your way back to Bournemouth.” I kissed the top of her head, and in a few minutes only the lingering scent of her perfume, and the heat she had ignited within me, remained to prove she had been in my house.
I sent her back to her colonel so easily.
No, I wasn’t going to think about that. I wasn’t. That was over.
––––––––
If I could show grace to my wayward wife, why could I not extend similar grace to this fugitive woman who simply needs a friend—someone, anyone, to care whether she lives or dies?
I wandered for hours, until the evening air cooled my temper and numbed my regrets. I went back to camp to make things right, but the woman was asleep in the hammock. Anton was beside her, his hand resting on her cheek, also asleep. Both their faces were tracked with tears.
The next morning I woke before the sun rose, and I managed to roll out of the hammock without waking Anton. My intention was to try to sneak off someplace before the others woke up, and get myself hopelessly lost or something.
Old Varela foiled my heroically suicidal plan, however. He sat on a nearby stump as though waiting for me. He beckoned to me, and I followed. Why not?
He led me to the creek, and he sat on the rocks at the water’s edge, his bare feet in the water, his gaze far away. I eased myself down near him—not too near—and watched him surreptitiously.
“I had time to think yesterday, after...” he trailed off, cleared his throat, and went on. “It is true I took Antonia back after she was with another man. I don’t know how you guessed, but it’s true.” Another long pause. “It is also true that I did not treat her as damaged goods afterwards. I know you aren’t to blame for the Nazis preying on you. I’ve been unfair and not at all a gentleman.” He glanced over at me—swift, shy. “Please forgive me. I swear I will try my best never to be unkind to you again.” He blushed a little, and I decided I believed him.
“I never really doubted Anton was your son,” I whispered. “He looks too much like you.”
I inched my hand closer to his in the space between us, and his own hand crept towards mine. He turned his palm up, and when I laid mine there, he held it. Lightly, nothing like the vise grip those same fingers had on my arms the day before—and together we sat watching the sun rise with not another word.
Her hand was ice cold in mine, and I realised with a jolt that this woman’s heart was frozen solid and needed thawing too. It froze, no doubt, with that first assault, and it has stayed frozen ever since, simply to block out the pain coming to life again would cause. She has by necessity trained herself to be hard and thorny, for protection.
That morning, I really looked at her for the first time. She wasn’t classically pretty the way Antonia had been. Striking would be the right word. The morning sun brought out the gold hints in her brown hair and the weary-looking lines about her eyes. Most of all she looked sad. I couldn’t remember having seen her smile in all of the last two months. For so long she had known only manipulation and fear, and she had forgotten how to think for herself, forgotten it was an option to try.
Her voice startled me out of my musings. “I hope you weren’t too hard on her.”
“Hard on—oh, you mean Antonia.”
“Yes. You’re rather terrifying when you’re angry.”
I bit my lip and looked out into the distance.
“You were, weren’t you?”
“I’m afraid so,” I admitted. “But we made up, so it’s all right, isn’t it?” Except those final things we said to each other...
“Perhaps,” she said absently, and another long silence fell. “It’s not always the girl’s fault. You said she was young. I was young when Mauritz—” She cut herself off. “What I mean is, older men aren’t usually very kind to young girls.” She took a deep breath. “Older men can make a girl feel like she owes them, look on her like a blank slate, and she gets tricked into thinking she has power, only—only she doesn’t. It’s all an illusion. Who was the man?”
I hadn’t wanted to discuss Antonia’s infidelity, but Miss Mayer’s perceptiveness again took me off guard. She called herself a stupid simpleton, yet she was intuitive enough to read straight through my evasiveness. I decided I had better answer her.
“She was a driver in the war. Her colonel was older even than I was, and with a wife and children. She loved being the centre of attention, and she and the colonel were always bantering, but I didn’t know until later he’d been pressuring her all that time, trying to get her alone.”
“Before you slept with her?”
“I suppose so. I never asked for details. I guess you could say I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened.” The way I’d rather believe our last conversation hadn’t happened...
Her mouth twitched and she squeezed her eyes closed as if in pain. At last she spoke. “She wanted to have you before the inevitable happened with him. Or possibly someone else had already gotten to her. Your sense of what’s normal and healthy is... skewed when your only experience is anything but either of those things.”
I opened my mouth, but she raised a hand to silence me. “Don’t argue with me,” she said sharply. “I’m a woman, and I know a thing or two about men. I’m not saying she didn’t love you, or that you didn’t love her, I have no way of knowing that, but I do know at eighteen, even at twenty-one, there was absolutely nothing about older men to attract me. There’s a missing piece in all this. I might be a simpleton about most things, but don’t assume that makes me stupid about everything.”
His hand was blazingly hot, as if he’d been at hard labour already for hours; his grip strong but light. He hadn’t let go, even when I’d started explaining to him why I believed Antonia had made the choices she did.
He looked at me, speechless. I knew he hadn’t credited me with any real intelligence, and my perception of the situation had unsettled him.
I wondered what he saw when he looked at me. A tired, worn-out whore?
He was so bronzed and dazzlingly godlike, even unshaven as at that moment. His beard was less grey than his hair, which in his wedding photo had looked the same almost-black as Anton’s. His eyes were so dark, the pupils were practically invisible; his arms muscled and powerful...
Suddenly he spoke, and I jumped in surprise.
“Will you tell me your story, Miss Mayer?”
“Is this an evasion tactic?”
“No,” he said. “I want to understand you, that’s all.”
She stared at me, terror flickering in her eyes, and withdrew her hand to hide her face, battling some inner torment.
After a few minutes her hands dropped away, and something like a mask fell over her face. “What do I have to lose?” she said with a shrug. She started off with a few passing words on her childhood in Swallownest, but quickly moved on to her capture and her time with Mauritz. She was clinical and brutal in her descriptions of his seduction of her, of Erich’s brutality, how she’d been thrown into Theresienstadt for loving a Jew, and how in the years between Theresienstadt and Buenos Aires she’d been sold to any man who could give Mauritz gold in exchange. My heart twisted in horror at the casual way she related these atrocities. For her, this nightmare had become ordinary, expected. No wonder she was so haunted and feral, so hard, so...
So cynical about Antonia.
She began coherently enough, but the longer she spoke, the more frantic she became, and the more difficult it was to follow, as she seemed to be jumping back and forth through time. I noticed one point absent from her narrative: she did not include anything about the dead baby she’d inadvertently mentioned a month ago. She also skirted around the details of how she got out of Theresienstadt, let alone what happened whilst she was there.
“Miss Mayer,” I said quietly, hoping to help her focus. “Tell me how you were able to leave the ghetto. Tell me about your baby.”
My words were darts that found the chink in her armor. She collapsed as she heard them, and I believe she would have fallen face first into the water had I not caught her arms and pulled her back.
At my touch, or at the restraint, she screamed.
Tía Leni’s scream woke me out of a nice dream about cuddling with five kittens, and for a minute I didn’t know what in the world was happening, and I was scared. I ran towards the sound, calling for Papá, and I found them together by the creek. She was crumpled in a heap on the ground with her arms over her head. He was on one knee beside her, his hands hovering a few inches from her shoulders, trying to get her calm. She didn’t move, not even a finger, but she screamed and screamed and didn’t stop until she had no breath left, and then she took a breath and screamed again, a horrible sound like nothing I ever heard before. Papá tried to help her, but she was all fists and trying to hit him, crying and speaking mostly in German, and I ran back to camp.
Miss Mayer would require careful handling, as would any enraged animal.
A mother bereft of her young.
I have never encountered such raw agony in a human being before.
I laid one hand on her mussed hair and spoke in a low, even voice.
“Miss Mayer, nobody here is going to hurt you. Whatever you are fearing does not exist here.”
“It is here,” she moaned. “Everywhere I go I take it with me.”
“What is ‘it’?” I asked.
“My emptiness,” she sobbed, barely coherent. “They didn’t only kill my baby, they carved me out like a Christmas goose for good measure. I’ll never have a family.”
I wrapped my arms over my head, hardly able to breathe, my hair in my eyes, my face against the mossy stone, assaulted by the nightmarish mental images of my unconscious body, sliced open, and of the little person inside dragged out and tossed aside to die. It might have been the spawn of Nazi scum, but it was just as much mine. Even though I hadn’t exactly wanted it, the lack of my consent to killing it haunts me as keenly as if I myself had ripped the babe from my womb and watched it go blue. I’d never have another chance.
“Did you want them to do that?” he asked, his voice softer than usual.
“Hell no! I didn’t even know they were going to!” I was hyperventilating now. Old V’s hand lightly stroked the tear-dampened tangle of my hair.
“Whose was it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I wailed. “Five or six of the bastards ganged up on me, drunk, on New Year’s Eve. Erich instigated it.”
––––––––
I never knew which days a guard would arbitrarily pick on me at Theresienstadt, but it was not particularly alarming that first time. I’d only been there a week and I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know, on that New Year’s Eve, that Erich had told his fellow guards they could have lots of fun with me, and dared one of them to bring me to their party. Serious repercussions would have come from higher up had they picked on a Jewish girl, but I wore no yellow star. They had nothing to lose, picking on me. And Erich had been dying to get his hands on me for months.
They’d been drinking for hours already. Erich, drunk, is possibly the scariest person I have ever encountered. He didn’t even claim first dibs. The perverse bastard wanted to watch the others have a go at me first.
The room had no windows, and in the centre stood a table full of bottles in all stages of emptiness, and there were at least five men there, possibly six. I suppose deep down I knew what they were going to do to me, and I panicked. I fought and I tried to scream, but the biggest fellow clamped a hand over my mouth and silenced me. I’ve blocked out most of what happened after that. All I know for sure is that Erich watched, leering, the entire time, and that each man seemed more brutal than the one before. Everything they did to me hurt like hell, and there was so much raucous laughter. Erich, when his turn came, was worst of all.
Afterwards, they threw me out on the doorstep in the cold, and I believe the only reason I did not freeze to death is because a woman who’d seen them take me risked her life to make sure I got safely to my bed. She propped me up when guards wandered by so they wouldn’t notice me, and managed to get me work doing dishes, so I didn’t have to move much whilst I hurt so badly. I had to steady myself with my elbows on the edge of the sink trying not to keel over. Not from the physical pain only, but a horror inside, sucking out my breath like a vacuum that I could not make stop.
I was too deep in my misery to ask the name of my rescuer, or even to thank her. I didn’t talk to anyone for weeks after. I don’t know what happened to her.
A month or so later, they pulled me out of line again, but this time for an ordinary interrogation. The guards under Mauritz were inhuman and brutal, but they didn’t rape me. They used other methods, doing their damnedest to get me to the point of saying I would do anything, anything to get them to let up on me. The guards had been instructed to tell Mauritz as soon as I capitulated to his demands.
Mauritz’s men worked so hard to brainwash and bully me. That first session, all I could see was Josef’s brown eyes giving me one last heartbroken glance before the life went out of them. They’d held my head in place so I had no choice but to look. But I would have looked. It was the least I could do. I do so hope he understood, that he forgave me.
But as the months wore on, the image of Josef’s eyes became blurred and distorted. I held out for a very, very long time, but eventually the arbitrary torture and hunger and constant cold and exhaustion and the maddening unpredictability of the guards’ whims wore me down.
I wanted out. I wanted to be a human being again. I would die here if I did not escape soon, and getting back to Mauritz would at least mean food and clothes and warmth and a roof over my head. It would be the first step towards a real escape. I suppose I started to look on Mauritz as a beneficent saviour, a way to regain some sense of security.
It would mean I’d be a collaborator again, but Mauritz could keep me alive. It was a means to an end.
“All right,” I told my tormentors, at last, weeping with exhaustion. “I will do anything Mauritz asks, only let me go.”
They made me sign a document with a lot of jargon I didn’t understand, but I got the gist of it. I was Mauritz’s slave for life. They’d tried to get me to sign it for months.
As soon the document was signed, Mauritz ordered me disinfected and brought back to his house, but he did not come to see me. I was left in solitude in my room, a battleaxe-like housemaid acting as guard, seeing to it I ate and drank and bathed. Ravenous and exhausted, I mostly slept and ate. Those flutters in my belly that I’d started feeling a few weeks ago, the ones I assumed were from hunger, had intensified despite now having plenty to eat. And as I lay in bed one night after turning my lights out, I ran my fingers lightly over my belly and felt, as clearly as could be, something kicking from inside.
I bolted upright, my hands pressed to my belly. There it was again.
In a rush I realised I had a baby in there. Instinct alone told me; I knew only the barest rudiments about growing babies, let alone how they got started.
I hadn’t questioned missing my cycles, because I overheard some women in Theresienstadt say they didn’t have them anymore. I thought, naïvely as usual, that being in a ghetto automatically took them away from everyone.
I collapsed back into my pillows, overwhelmed and terrified. Who was the father? Which brutish guard on New Year’s Eve? It had to have been one of them, and how would I ever know for sure, even after the child was born? O God, please don’t let it be Erich’s baby, I pled silently, staring wide-eyed towards the ceiling in the gloom above me, my hand frozen in place over my squirming middle. I struggled to breathe normally, struggled to not remember the cruel laughter and the way the bastards had held me down to make it easier for their friends to have fun with me, but it was no use.
For me, the memory of horrible events is often worse than the experience itself. It takes me so long to process what happens that the emotional response is delayed, and that response is invariably ten times worse than the event which caused it.
My mind whirled with questions. What would happen now? What would Mauritz say? I searched my memory desperately, hoping there might be a chance it could be his, rather than Erich’s or any of the other Nazis’. I convinced myself Mauritz had surely slept with me shortly before going to the camp, and I comforted myself that he would be happy at the prospect of fatherhood, that he would be kinder to me now. Perhaps I could earn his love this way. Didn’t Hitler want all women to be fruitful and multiply? If nothing else, he would surely have sympathy for my condition and not require me to do anything strenuous that would endanger the baby. He would never ask me to interpret at interrogations in this condition! These naïve dreamings gave me hope to eclipse the panic of only a short time before, and I fell asleep with my hand over the little kicking mystery.
For the next several days I spoke to no one, just quietly processed the development in my own head, and waited for Mauritz to send for me, trying to decide how I should break the news to him. I had so thoroughly convinced myself now he was the father, was so sure he would be pleased, I actually began to be impatient that he should come to me. I wasn’t so much excited about becoming a mother as I was at the idea that this would surely create some tenderness between us, and that Mauritz would become a true lover to me. It would gentle and soften him, and we could become truly happy together. After all, Mauritz had a few good points, didn’t he? Compared to Erich, he was Most Benign. And it didn’t seem as if I would be able to go home to England any time soon. I might as well be a dutiful wife and mother in the interim. Even though I wasn’t his wife in any legal sense.
Finally I couldn’t bear to wait any longer, and I asked the maid to go get Mauritz for me. She rolled her eyes, but she rang a bell and asked another servant to tell him he was wanted.
He came in several hours later, after I had had my supper. I felt excited and shy and I ran to him as he came through the door.
“Mauritz!” I exclaimed, trying to throw my arms around him. He held me at arm’s length and surveyed me, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
“Why are you so giddy?” he asked.
“I’m so glad to be out of the ghetto,” I said. “Thank you for getting me out. I’m so glad.”
“You would do well not to forget your discipline,” he reminded me.
“I won’t forget,” I vowed earnestly. “It’s—Mauritz—I’ve discovered something important.”
He cocked his head and fixed his gaze on my face. Probably I looked stupid, and sounded stupid too.
“I’ve just learnt I’m having a baby!” I squeaked out.
He leapt back as if I’d slapped him, and the reaction surprised me so much my mouth fell open.
“What’s wrong?” I stammered, as his hands appraised my belly. Not in the way I wanted him to touch it. His reaction alarmed me: even when inflicting cruelty, he was always so calm.
“Damn,” he said sharply, and he seized my arm and said fiercely, “Whose is it?”
“Well—yours, I think,” I said, baffled. “Whose else would it be?” I didn’t want to remember the rape. I had thoroughly convinced myself by now that this baby couldn’t possibly be anyone but Mauritz’s.
“God, woman,” he spat out, and he whipped around and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?” I asked, my voice high. “What’s wrong?”
He turned in the door and shook his head slowly, his taut face pale, his eyes cold. “It’s not mine, and you’re not having it,” he said, and he shut the door. I ran to it, but he’d locked it from the outside.
“Mauritz!” I wailed. I felt deflated and scared. Why was he not holding me, fussing over me, offering me suggestions for names, the way Daddy did when Mama was expecting my little brother?
I didn’t see Mauritz again for a time after I’d shared my news with him, and asking for him brought no result. My foolish, delusional heart kept hoping he would come back and love me. When the bolt on my door clicked a week or two later, I was brushing my head at the mirror (I can hardly say I was brushing my hair, as it was still extremely short from a shearing at one of my torture sessions), and I turned about quickly with a shy smile, thinking that at last it was Mauritz.
It was not.
Erich sauntered in, closing and locking the door behind him as if he had every right to be here. I turned back to my mirror to avoid looking at him.
He stood behind me, and I tensed, my arm frozen mid-stroke as his hands lightly circled my throat.
“You ugly bitch,” he said with a lascivious grin, and he dragged me off the seat by my neck and ripped off my robe. I struggled desperately to get free. The hairbrush flew out of my hand and shattered the mirror, and he held my shoulders so tightly I could scarcely breathe. He smirked at my round belly. “Told him it was his brat, did you? Bet you didn’t tell him it might be mine.”
I still struggled, terrified. I opened my mouth to scream, and he covered it with one hand. Instantly I lost all sense of time and place; it was New Year’s Eve again, his friend’s hand silencing me.
“No—no,” I tried to say, my words incomprehensible against the hand. He let go and turned me to face him. His eyes glittered and he unbuckled his belt, whipping it off with a crack that sounded like a shot in my pounding ears. “No, Erich, please—”
“Shut your ugly trap or I will hit you with this,” he said. I sucked in my breath, swallowing my cries as best I could, but before I knew what was happening, the belt cracked around my shoulders in a stinging, serpentine embrace and I cried out in spite of my resolve.
The next few minutes were a nightmare dance of me trying to fend off the lightning strike of that evil strip of leather (futile of me), darting from one corner of the room to another, never quite able to escape. His last strike caught me around my naked waist, and I collapsed at his feet sobbing that I would do whatever he asked, only please not to whip me any more. I mustn’t let anything happen to my baby. Whatever else I might be, I was not going to have the death of my unborn child on my conscience too.
Grovelling at his feet was exactly what Erich wanted. Inflicting pain turned him on, and my begging for mercy the final incentive for him to finish what he’d started.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispered sneeringly in my ear as he stretched himself over me. “I got to shoot the elder in charge of your house at Theresienstadt today, for not reporting your pregnancy.”
“No,” I moaned, with another sob.
“And here’s another secret.” He gave me a nasty pinch. “Your Sturmbannführer can’t make babies.”
I have blocked the rest out.
––––––––
I woke the next morning with my welts throbbing, and the rest of my body stiff and aching too. I never understood how Erich did it, how he could make my entire body hurt. I spent the day crying and scared he would come back, or that he had hurt my baby, but the baby wriggled within as before, as if to reassure me it would be all right. I didn’t get out of bed.
When my door next opened, a day after the incident with Erich, I started up violently, trembling like a leaf, fearing he was back.
But it was Mauritz, his usual composed self again.
“Erich came here,” I said without preamble. “Look what he’s done to me!”
Mauritz stood there unblinking. “What did you do to him to make him that angry?” was all he said. I burst out sobbing, pressing my fist to my mouth trying to stifle the sound. I didn’t want to add burns to my current injuries.
But he didn’t burn me. He jerked his head towards the door, indicating I should follow him, and I obeyed, shrugging on my dressing-gown, wincing at the soreness of my beaten shoulders. I pressed my hand to my belly and received a reassuring kick. I’m all right, Mummy, said the baby.
I’ll keep you safe, I told it in my head. I won’t let them touch you.
Leni, you naïve idiot.
––––––––
Mauritz led me at a brisk pace to the kitchen, brightly lit. He bolted the door loudly behind us and I stood, hugging myself in my thin robe, trying not to shiver, my eyes darting about suspiciously.
A man I didn’t know sat there in a chair, calmly smoking. He wore civilian clothes, but he oozed self-important power. I sensed evil in this charming, ordinary-looking fellow with his gap-toothed grin, and I shrank away as he stood and shook my hand with a gallant little bow.
“Good evening, Frau von Schlusser, I’m Dr Mengele,” he introduced himself, stubbing out his cigarette. “Friend of your husband’s. He asked me to come specially, and this is the first chance I’ve had. I understand you are in some trouble?”
I was speechless, mistrustful, and I backed further away from him with my hands over my belly. “I’m not in trouble,” I said, confused what he meant. “Except for Erich beating me, I’m—I’m just fine.”
“Now, Frau von Schlusser, there’s nothing to fear, I promise you,” said Dr Mengele. “Your husband tells me you have gotten yourself pregnant.”
“It takes two for that,” I heard myself retort. “I didn’t do it to myself.”
Dr Mengele threw back his head and laughed. Mauritz stood erect and narrowed his eyes at Mengele disapprovingly. I caught a glimpse of a coil of rope in Mauritz’s hands behind his back and my blood went cold. I shook my head violently.
“No—no—” I protested as Mauritz stepped closer to me.
“We would like you to lie on the table, Frau von Schlusser,” Mengele said. He had stopped laughing, and his voice was calm again as he took my arm.
“No,” I breathed, trying to worm out of their grasp, but I was still weak from my months of deprivation, and the two well-fed men easily overpowered me. Between them they tied me to the table, securing me by my wrists and ankles, immobilising me. I wanted to scream, but I had no voice.
They leant over me from either side, eyes fixed on each other’s for an eternal moment. Their mouths moved, but I heard no sound. The chloroform pad came at my face. Someone held my head in an iron grip. I couldn’t turn away.
The last thing I remember before everything went black was one final flutter from my baby.
––––––––
I opened my eyes again.
The light in the kitchen dazzled me, and I squinted and tried to turn my head. My mouth felt dry as the Sahara and I couldn’t move. The first thing I saw clearly was Mengele’s face as he bent over me, grinning like a demon.
“The operation was successful,” he assured me, his eyes glinting with pleasure.
“What... operation...” I managed to ask out of my dry throat.
“We’ve removed it,” he said casually.
“Removed—it?” I stared at him, uncomprehending. “What is ‘it’?”
“Are you really such an idiot or do you just like to make people think you are?” He stepped back and sat again in his chair watching me with the disinterested analysis one might bestow on a lab specimen. Cold, calculating monster.
I began to remember now, being tied down. I was still tied down, I realised, when I tried to move my hands. I began to panic in a way I had never panicked in my life up to that point. I struggled desperately to burst my bonds; when I could not accomplish that, I burst into tears and began to scream. Mengele stood and slapped me across the face with the back of his hand. “Shut up,” he said, “and stop squirming. You’ll tear open your stitches.”
“What stitches?” I asked, my voice cracked and quavering.
He turned on his heel and walked out of the room, leaving me immobile and fraught with terror.
––––––––
Old Varela looked at me, his forehead creased, his attention riveted on me. “That’s criminal,” he said. “When did they tell you?”
I bent myself nearly double, clutching my violated belly, shaking with the horror of revisiting my living nightmare. I felt him encircle my shoulders with his arms and hold me, lightly. I slumped into him. My tongue was thick, my entire body ice cold. My teeth chattered as I forced myself to keep spitting out these words I had never dared speak aloud before.
“They didn’t tell me.”
––––––––
After a few hours, or maybe a few minutes, Dr Mengele came back into the kitchen, shot me up with a sedative, and untied me. He didn’t carry me to my room. He made me walk. I remember that bit. He whistled cheerfully the whole way, whistled bits of Ride of the Valkyries. There was a bandage around my middle, soaked through with blood: some of it old and stiff, some parts soft with fresh red. He didn’t change the bandage or even remove it to check on the wound. He left me dazed on my bed, and it wasn’t until the next morning that I began to understand. But only just began. I knew they’d taken my baby; they’d cut me open to do that. But I didn’t know what else they’d done until much later.
I spent the next several days suffering as my breasts, cruelly unaware that they had no baby to feed, ached with milk, reminding me constantly what I had lost, and the next weeks tending and washing my own wound, since nobody else saw to it. My belly had become a squishy, uneven thing, and the stitches started to get overgrown by skin before I finally summoned the courage to remove them myself. I was sick twice whilst taking them out, and the incision flamed red and sore for a long time after. I’m surprised I didn’t die of infection. Lucky or unlucky? I don’t know.
They gave me nothing for the excruciating pain. And I waited for my cycles to come back and they never did. I asked Mauritz about it one night when he came in to see me, and he explained what exactly Mengele had done in a tone one might use to remark upon a good bargain advertised in the paper. And when at last I understood, the last piece of Madeleine Mayer died. One day I’d had naïve and girlish golden dreams of this baby. The next day I was just a shell, a body around an empty void. I couldn’t manufacture any happiness for myself. That was why I sought oblivion however I could get it. Drugs or alcohol could deliver. Sleep could not. Sleep was my enemy; sleep brought me dreams, and my daddy wasn’t there to hold me and sing to me until I felt at peace again.
––––––––
“I’m no woman, I’m a barren tree,” I said to Old Varela bitterly, and let out a bark of a laugh. “It made it easy and safe for me to provide favours to anyone who could pay him. He didn’t let Mengele experiment on me, he insisted very specifically what he wanted done and he stayed there to make sure his orders were followed. I so wanted to be like my daddy when I grew up, and just look at the mess I am now!” I gulped down more sobs. “No babies for me, ever. And I wanted babies someday. When I got away. I wanted to be ordinary.”
Tía Leni’s screaming frightened me, and I wanted to help, but Papá shook his head when I tried to come near and mouthed Wait.
So I went back and sat a little ways away from them, far enough I couldn’t hear what they said, but I could see them through the bushes. It took a long time for her to finish whatever she was saying to him, and at the end she curled up into herself like a hedgehog, still making those frightening little sobs.
Then I crept over again, and that time Papá didn’t stop me. I laid my hand on one of hers, the one she had clenched over her face, and I tapped, Tía Leni, take Little Cat. And I pushed Little Cat close and sat back to watch. Her arms swallowed up the cat like an anemone sucking in a fish. Almost immediately she became quiet. Papá looked at me in surprise and whispered, “How did you do that?”
I looked at Tía Leni, whose face had gone grey. Her entire body unclenched and she went limp. Little Cat tumbled to the ground. I glanced at Papá. “Is she dead?” I asked, frightened.
He reached for her wrist and felt for her pulse. “No,” he said. He scooped her up and hurried back towards camp. “Get me all the blankets,” he told me. “Fold them in half and make a bed out of them in your hammock.”
I hurried off to do as he asked.
Listening to her bitter confessions, my own insides wrenched. I remembered Antonia’s growing belly and the delight we’d both shared as Anton grew inside her, feeling him kicking and squirming and responding to our voices. It made me angry that a young, naïve girl had been forced into such an irreversible procedure for no reason other than Mauritz von Schlusser’s wounded ego and obsession with control.
I wanted to be like Daddy, she’d said. I hadn’t thought about the fact she’d have parents wondering what ever became of her, and the pricking of my conscience intensified. I’d made no effort at all to really help this woman, beyond making sure she didn’t die, which I realised now was as selfish a motive as anyone could have.
Whilst Anton went to prepare the blankets as I asked, I held her close to my chest, willing her to be all right. I wanted to kick my own teeth in for having been so unkind and unsympathetic towards her. For the first time I understood with clarity that Nazis remotely bombing Bournemouth was hardly the worst they could have done to Antonia. This woman had survived so much. She needed and deserved only kindness.
When Anton had finished preparing the blankets, I laid Miss Mayer on them and brushed her mess of hair from her face. She remained slack and unresponsive. Anton lay beside her and wrapped his arm over her shoulder, one hand against her cheek, and he tapped against it. Suddenly I understood how he had gotten her to calm down before. He’d gotten her attention with Morse code. I watched him closely. His message was a short one. Please wake up, Tía Leni. But she didn’t move. Whether she was still passed out or simply couldn’t make herself respond, I could not tell.
Anton looked at me. “What happened?” he whispered.
I stared at Miss Mayer and, unbidden, tears slid out of my eyes. For a long time I stood there, one hand over my eyes, struggling to absorb what she had told me, and Anton reached one of his hands to my arm and stroked it, waiting.
At last I dropped my hand. But what should I tell him? “I asked her to tell me what happened to her, what the Nazis did to her. Anton, they—they killed her baby.”
He blanched and glanced at Miss Mayer and back to me. Anton was soft on babies, and I knew that bit would help him appreciate the extent of the horror to which Leni had been subjected, without telling him all the gory details.
“Can’t she have another one sometime?” he asked. I shook my head.
“They made it so she can’t ever have a baby of her own.”
I heard him start to cry too, and I scooped him out of the hammock into my arms and held him tightly. When he’d quieted, he asked slowly, “Is she married to that Mauritz?”
I shook my head. “No. He made her false papers with his name and gave her a ring, but they’ve not really married.”
“Why would he want to kill his own baby?”
Anton would ask that.
“I don’t know.” I decided not to clarify it hadn't been his baby. “He has no love in his heart for anyone.”
“No wonder she’s so scared all the time,” he mused.
“Yes,” I said. “No wonder, indeed.”
When I opened my eyes I saw the piercing blue of the cloudless sky overhead, and I moaned and closed them again. I didn’t want to face light. I couldn’t move. I tried to remember where I was. Strapped to the kitchen table, freshly dissected?
Tía Leni, please wake up. Wake up, Tía Leni.
Who was talking? I didn’t hear a voice, but someone had spoken. Then I felt the small, soft fingertips tapping against my cheek. Anton. A sob escaped my throat, and tears ran out of my eyes to pool coldly in my ears. I could not move.
“Miss Mayer,” I heard Old Varela’s voice speaking gently near my ear. “Miss Mayer, you will be all right. We won’t let anyone hurt you again.”
“Not ever,” Anton added, firmly, to make sure I understood.
I reached out for his hand and managed to tap out, very slowly, Thank you.
––––––––
I went into another slump after that, immobile and uninterested in staying alive for a week or so. Dredging up those memories had been like taking dynamite to a dam. I again begged Old Varela to just let me die, to throw my useless body in the lake, simultaneously cursing him for keeping me alive and sobbing with pathetic gratitude that he had chosen to look after me.
He was no longer merely tolerating me. Something had changed.
In the end, though, I came out of it. Anton and his father tirelessly looked after me, and I liked the sensation of being cared for. And by some unspoken understanding, Old Varela never touched me without telling me first what he was going to do.
He is far more sensitive than I gave him credit for.
Tía Leni has been having one of her sad times again. I’ve sat with her a good deal. Papá told me not to ask her any questions about her baby, and I didn’t, until today.
I guess I know now why sometimes Tía Leni looks at me with an odd look in her eyes. Like sadness, or like need. Like she wants to hold me tight and never let go.
Today, though, I had to say what was in my head. “Can I tell you something?” I asked her as we lay together on her blanket watching the birds pecking around nearby and fluttering in and out of the notro bush.
“What is it?”
“I think your baby was a girl.”
She was quiet a bit. “I think so too.”
“Did you get to see it?”
“No.” She reached up to the bush and picked off a few leaves, nervously picking them to pieces. Her lips trembled and she didn’t look at me. “Anton,” she said, “it’s like an ache that just never goes away. I see children, other people’s children, and something twists inside to remind me I’ll never be so lucky. Do you have any way of understanding that?”
I did. “It’s like me and mum,” I said. “I don’t remember her, but something feels out of place anyway, and even more when I see all my friends with their mothers. A jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing right in the middle.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s it exactly.”
Another long silence. “What would you have named her?” I asked.
“I’ve never thought about it. I really couldn’t let myself or I’d have gone madder than I already am.”
“You know what I’d like to call her?” She didn’t answer, so I went on. “I want to call her Inocencia. And when I am home I’m going to make a memorial stone for her like the one I made for Papá’s cat Mariposa, and put it in the garden so she’s never forgotten.”
She rolled onto her side and wrapped her arms around me, held me tight, kissed the top of my head. “I love you, little one,” she said. She sounded fierce, and somehow I knew I couldn’t ever let her go.
Inspector Varela’s shadow fell over me as I took my last bite of breakfast, and I looked up. “Come to the creek with me,” he said. “I’ll show you how to do the washing.”
I was very willing. After all, I had proved astonishingly inept at almost every other task around camp. Perhaps, if I could make a success of doing the washing, I would stop feeling such an utterly useless sponge.
I gathered the bundle of clothes and dropped them in a heap where he directed me to put them. He casually took off the shirt he wore and added it to the wash pile.
My mouth dropped open at the sight of so much of his rather amazing body, startled afresh by how superior he was in every physical way to all the members of the so-called Master Race I had ever known. He saw me gaping, gave me a half-smile and a self-conscious shrug, and knelt beside me.
He wore a gold chain about his neck. At first I thought the thing attached to it, glinting blindingly in the sun, might be a medal. Was he Catholic? We’d never discussed religion, and he didn’t seem to ascribe to anything particularly. But as he turned back towards me, I saw it was a ring.
“Hers?” I heard myself asking.
He glanced down, as if surprised by the thing hanging from his neck. “Yes,” he said.
I reached for it and lifted it closer to my face in the open palm of my hand. A marquise-cut topaz, modest but perfect, with tiny diamonds on either side. He didn’t protest my examination. “It reminded me of her eyes when they flashed,” he said softly. “They were topaz. Like Anton’s.”
I let the ring fall back against the dark hair of his chest and met his eyes. It made Antonia less of an apparition somehow, having touched the ring she once wore. “I took it off her before we buried her,” he went on. “In case Anton might like to have it someday. This one was my father’s.” He held out his right hand, showing me a very masculine onyx ring. He didn't show me his left hand, the hand with his own wedding ring still firmly in place. I didn’t mention it. Somehow I felt he wouldn’t want to talk about it any more than I wanted to talk about mine.
“It must be nice to have such things,” I said wistfully. “My family wasn’t very well-to-do. My mother had a simple ring, even more so than that one—” I indicated Antonia’s—“and all I have is this spurious wedding band and those lovely but ill-gotten pearls.”
“Ill-gotten?” He sat back on his heels and studied me, puzzled.
“Mauritz got rich off the Jews at Theresienstadt. Gold rings and whatnot—he pilfered so much. The Jews brought all their valuables with them, and Theresienstadt was their stop-off place before being shipped to Auschwitz or Treblinka or wherever, so Mauritz got first choice on a lot of the goods.” The shameless magpie. “For all I know, those pearls he claims he bought for me once belonged to some murdered Jew. But considering what I am, well—” I trailed off, and my gaze turned away from him over the green-blue waters of Lago Viedma.
I felt his hand on mine, light and warm. “What you were, maybe. You aren’t a whore now. You don’t ever have to be again. And it wasn’t your fault, what happened. None of it. Don’t blame yourself, Miss Mayer.”
When I didn’t answer, he removed his hand and said briskly, “Now let’s get you washing these.”
He worked patiently with me whilst I struggled to hang on to the slippery soap and manoeuvre the clothes. He didn’t scold me or make me feel inferior. I felt as if he wanted me to succeed, and that gave me a sort of strength.
After everything had been scrubbed and rinsed to perfection, I laid the wash on the rocks to dry in the sun with a profound sense of satisfaction. At last, I had found a Useful Thing I could do.
Anton, meantime, had finished washing up the breakfast things and came out to join us. His father put an easy arm around the boy and I looked at my hands in my lap, feeling like an intruder, but stealing frequent furtive glances over at the pair of them.
Their hair was getting long, curling under—such thick, beautiful hair, both the grey and black versions of it. I wondered if the father’s would be as soft to run my fingers through as the son’s.
He caught me peeking. I sat up more stiffly than ever, ill at ease, until Anton broke away from his father and came to sit in my lap. I blushed furiously (why?) but I put my arms around him and kissed the top of his head, hiding my face in his hair. It smelled of woodsmoke, a scent which clung to all of us constantly. I liked the smell: homey and comforting, like Mama’s old cookstove at home.
Miss Mayer and Anton have gone walking together, and it’s astonishingly quiet here at camp. I’ve made a few radio calls and caught up on my field notes, which lately have become a little haphazard. I keep starting to sketch flowers or foxes and find I’m sketching... other things instead. I find myself constantly distracted thinking about Miss Mayer’s history, and about Antonia, and lying here in the grass under the trees in the silence, Antonia’s memory feels very close.
––––––––
On Antonia’s nineteenth birthday, I went to Bournemouth.
We had seen each other in passing a number of times since her surprise visit to my house, but only long enough for me to stammer greetings at her. I’d written to her twice and she’d replied, all very proper and aboveboard. Nice, newsy letters on her end, all about her colonel, her flatmate Jean, and wickedly funny comments about everything and everybody. My letters were boring in comparison.
I suppose I thought that if page after page of writing about my cat, my father, my Argentine friends, butterflies, and how strange my family thought I was hadn’t scared her away, my showing up on her doorstep uninvited probably wouldn’t either.
When I arrived, she was ecstatic that she did not have to spend her birthday alone. Jean was on duty all day, and her family was too far north to go spend the day with. “Give me a few minutes to get ready,” she said, and I waited outside by the door until she emerged in a flowery dress and a white straw hat and white sandals that showed off the rosy red nail varnish on her toes.
“You look good enough to eat,” I said, taking her hands, and she winked at me.
“Go on, take a bite,” she dared me, and for a moment nothing else in the world existed outside our kiss.
I leant in close to her ear and whispered, “I really want to be alone with you.”
She invited me in and we fetched things from her room: blankets and supper from her secret hoard of provisions, and set out comfortably side by side, my arm about her shoulder, tentatively, afraid she would shake me off. (She did not shake me off.)
She knew of a rowboat we could borrow, and we set off down the river until we found a secluded and lovely little cove where we tied fast the boat and sat on the grass to have our lunch. It was hardly a glamorous repast: cold tinned beans and hard-boiled eggs and a bottle of Coca-Cola between us. But we were each too keyed up by the presence of the other to notice what we ate. When she’d consumed the last crumb, I put my arm around her again and she leant her head on my shoulder. I confided, “I’ve thought of you all the time. I can’t seem to stop.”
She replied, “I can’t stop thinking of you either. And also feeling frightfully embarrassed over last time. You were right to turn me away.”
“Have you changed your mind, then?” I asked. “About wanting me?”
“Not a bit,” she assured me fervently.
I pulled away from her and lay back on the grass with my hands cradling my head, watching the rustling green of the canopy over our heads. For a long time I was quiet until she plucked a stem of grass and tickled my face with the end of it. “Tell me what you’re thinking about?”
I propped myself on one elbow to be closer to her. “I wrote you how I’ve been the despair of my mother and sisters, trying to tear me away from my real butterflies and match me up with social ones.”
“Yes. It made me smile.”
“I bored them all to tears in no time. I’m not witty or charming. I don’t know how to talk to people, outside an official capacity sort of way.”
“You talk to me.”
“You’re different somehow.” A pause. “You were so kind and interested in me from the start, I felt if I could only be brave enough I might have a chance with you—and then you came purring into my house like a cat in heat and I turned you down. I can’t decide if it was really my sense of duty or merely cowardice. I have never met any woman who wanted me. I’m not sure why you do. I am very boring.”
Whilst I spoke she listened, thoughtful, combing her fingers through her hair slowly. “I’m boring too,” she said. “The real me. The one I don’t let most people see. But there’s something about you, Raymond. I can’t explain it, but you really do seem the most dependable, steady sort of person. And you are gorgeous—don’t argue, it’s true! Don’t you ever look in the mirror?”
“I just see the tweedy failure my mother and sisters not-so-secretly think I am.”
She shook her head and lay down beside me. “Shame on them. How old are you again?”
“Thirty-four.”
“That’s younger than many of the men who chase after me.”
“You seemed—seem—so sure of yourself.”
She smiled brightly. “I’ve dated a lot of fellows. I like the attention. But not a single one of them has been someone I felt I could really trust or count on, you know? I like a handsome face, but you’ve got that and character. And a sort of... unpresumptuous innocence I like too. You’re not being nice to me just to get into my knickers—not that I’d mind, you understand—”
That made me laugh in spite of myself, and then we began swapping funny stories of childhood antics, of our nieces and nephews, our parents. She was charmingly idealistic and opinionated, and the more we talked, the more I wanted her. We lay side by side, not quite touching, watching the leaves above us. During a lull, she turned towards me and laid one hand on my chest as she said, “You are far more talkative and charming than you give yourself credit for.”
“You make me brave.”
“I should think you’d be brave on your own. You’re a policeman!”
“Booking drunks and thieves and chasing off loitering young people is nothing to this.” I let my hand rest lightly on her thigh, stroking it with my thumb. Her breath came faster; her eyes brightened. “What about you, Antonia? Doesn’t anything ever flap you?”
“The idea that some policeman might come along and chase us off for loitering does,” she said, a ridiculous gleam in her eye. She leant in close and whispered against my face, “I know you want some snogging and so do I. Kiss me, Raymond.”
Abruptly the mood changed from easy camaraderie to crackling electricity. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t make a sound. She kissed my mouth to save me the trouble, and I kissed her back until we were both breathless. My hands found their way down her lovely body and up her skirt, and she squeaked delightedly when I worked off her knickers and reached for the fastenings of my trousers. For one brief moment I hesitated, my lips pressed to her cheek. “I shouldn’t do this,” I said.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered fiercely. “I need you now.”
I really couldn't bear the idea of stopping, and I let myself go. It was unpractised and ungraceful and utterly mad, but also so easy. In only a minute we had finished; I lay my ear lightly over her heart and both our breaths came shakily. She trembled in my arms. “Did I hurt you?” I asked, brushing the hair away from her eyes, beyond besotted now.
She shook her head, face shining.
I laughed. “You’re like champagne, my darling. Delicious and sparkling and going straight to my head.” I drew her closer and kissed her mouth again and she giggled.
“This is madness,” she said, “and I want more.”
I may be a man of honour and integrity, but I am a man, not a saint, and she was so full of softness and curves and passion, and my mind as muddled as if I was drunk. For a long time we just touched one another, experimenting, exploring, learning what we liked, before we made love again.
“How are you so good at it?” she asked me.
“I don’t know.”
I was too preoccupied to wonder then how she knew I was any good.
We spent two hours afterwards lying on the blanket on the grass under the shifting green light and shadow of the leafy branches overhead, face to face, earnestly talking, occasionally kissing or touching. We fell asleep for a bit, and when we woke the setting sun told us the time had come to go. She attempted to fix her hair and put her clothes back on (an ivory dress with red poppies all over it; I’ll never forget that dress) and we stepped into the boat and turned back the way we had come. The pinky-gold of the sunset made her hair and skin glow, and I stopped rowing to touch her face.
“This light makes you look like an angel,” I said. I still felt the glow inside me from our union, and had an irrational urge to revisit that intimacy. She beamed at me and tossed her head, setting free one of her curls down to her shoulder. I was speechless with longing, and she, always perceptive of my feelings, winked and leant in close to whisper, “I dare you to make love to me in this boat.” Her hands gripped my knees and her mouth hovered tantalisingly close to mine. The earthy mossy scent lingered about her yet, and it only increased my longing.
I glanced around. We were still in the countryside, outside town, and our only witnesses would be cows, but I hesitated. Whilst I hesitated, she straddled my lap and kissed me in a way that stirred me to action. We didn’t undress, except for the bits that absolutely needed to be out of the way, and went at it. The process felt more natural already, and Antonia was very vocal in letting me know how much she loved what I did to her.
We lay together in the bottom of the boat afterwards, spent and very, very happy. I spun a strand of her hair lightly around my fingers and I said, “I will love you and be true to you until the day I die, Antonia.” She responded by snuggling in closer to me, her smile bright.
It was very late by the time we made it back to her place and I left her at her doorstep. We stood there, unwilling to part, for fifteen minutes, holding each other tightly.
“If Jean wasn’t probably back and trying to sleep,” she confided, “I’d sneak you into my room and we’d have another go in my bed.”
“I loved every minute of today,” I whispered, and I reached into my pocket and drew out a key, which I rather impulsively pressed into her hand. “So you can let yourself in next time you’re in Tangmere,” I explained.
Her surprise was evident. “You are serious, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t you?” I asked. She met my eyes and her expression was wistful.
“I take you very seriously,” she said. “It’s men taking me seriously I’m not used to.” She clasped her fingers around the key, the warmth and affection in her eyes as clear as the surprise had been moments earlier.
“I want to marry you,” I said.
“I’ll think about it,” she promised. And she kissed me again, whispered goodnight, and disappeared into the house.
––––––––
It hadn’t occurred to me to find it odd that she hadn’t once said “I love you” to me. Our afternoon together had been more than a little intoxicating to my muddled, passion-fogged brain, if I am honest. Men can be appallingly short-sighted when in the arms of a beautiful woman. All that matters in the heat of those moments is how good it feels to be there. I was hopelessly in love with her. I assumed she felt the same for me.
But it was also true I really didn’t know her yet.
Inspector Varela has been so much nicer ever since that morning at the creek when I told him about Mengele, genuinely nicer. I think he believes me now, truly believes I am innocent of any collusion with Nazi ideals. If anything, he has become almost too solicitous, too eager to make up for all his previous grouchiness.
Even so, our truce still feels fragile, and I hardly dare say anything, afraid he will get angry again. I suspect he’s afraid to say much too, for similar reasons.
But I feel so much better, cleaner somehow, now that someone else knows what happened. As long as I had it trapped inside, it ate away at me like rust, but now I know that if someday the Nazis do find me and kill me, someone else knows the truth. Someone else can make sure it gets out if I am never able to do it.
Tonight I went to wash my hair in the creek, and when I came back to camp I sat and stared at the fire instead of combing it. I had the comb in my hand, but I didn’t feel like tackling the straggly, tangled mess my hair had become. I’d not had it set or coloured in so long that I looked like a crone all the time. I just couldn’t be bothered trying to do anything with it between washings. I found myself trying not to look in the mirror. Last time I had, I’d spotted a few dozen grey strands that years of colouring had veiled from my eyes until now.
Inspector Varela surprised me by taking the comb from my hand, and he knelt behind me and teased out the weeks’ worth of tangles and knots. He kept combing until my hair was softer and shinier than it had been in months. I closed my eyes, imagined I was still stylish and attractive, enjoying the gentle pressure of the comb against my scalp, and when at last he finished, I let myself relax back against his solid chest.
To my surprise, he did not pull away. He rested his chin on top of my head and put his arms lightly around me. We watched the fire and I thought how I would have stiffened in dread had Mauritz behaved this way, but Varela didn’t frighten me at all. He might be softening me up so I would provide him with favours later, but somehow I doubted it. I had begun to believe Raymond Varela really wasn’t that kind of man.
Whatever his motives, I will take it. I will take whatever crumbs of affection anyone is willing to drop for me.