The tummy-ache won’t go away.

It feels like my intestines are refusing to obey the orders issued by my stomach. They’re in revolt: twisting, cramping, making odd sounds, gurgles, as if there was a voice in my belly moaning and groaning. Frau Lotte says I’ve got diarrhoea from an illness I caught from Bibiana. But I don’t have diarrhoea. I’m the one who sees what goes into the toilet bowl. Nice consistency, a bit hard sometimes. I can tell by the sound my turds make when I push them out. Plop! Plop! Mortar shells.

A stomach-ache at my age is a sign of Psychological disturbance. You don’t even know that, useless Sister? Simply put, it means something’s wrong in my head. As a result of stress, or a traumatic event.

I haven’t done anything for days. I stay by myself most of the time. Lotte is with me in the house, but she’s always got her nose in her dossiers, filing index cards on children for whom she now has addresses, sticking on code letters or colours. Anyway she doesn’t matter; she’s too ugly, too old. She’s not a real companion.

I don’t want to learn nursery rhymes or do arithmetic like I used to.

All I do is daydream. I replay the recent days as if I’m watching a film: waking up early, getting dressed in my funny costume of rags, Bibiana arriving, and then us setting off into the countryside, hand in hand.

Hand in hand.

I go back over our long walks, the chasing games, the tickling, the laughs we had together. I picture Bibiana’s face, her bright, blue eyes, her cheeks freckled by the sun, her blonde hair that had begun to grow back without lice. Sometimes, I can even hear her voice.

And I think about all the children we came across. When we went into the Polish women’s homes, we would stay there an hour or two and I had time to play. Occasionally things didn’t go well because I’m pretty nasty, I like to give orders, yell, be the boss. I even whacked a few little Polacks on the head with my Thor’s-hammer-Excalibur-sword, or knocked them to the ground and stomped on them—to copy the SS soldiers in the streets when they decide, just like that, on a whim, to attack a Pole. That’s when Bibiana pretended to reprimand me with a smack; the truth is she just tapped me on the bottom. I liked that.

I miss all that, and meeting all those mothers and children. I hate idleness. I’ve had enough of playing by myself upstairs in the bombed-out house.

I sit on the ground for ages, daydreaming, no longer aware of how my body works, but swaying backwards and forwards. When she sees me like this, Lotte grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me. ‘Heavens, Konrad, what’s the matter? Would you please stand up straight? You look like an old Jew praying!’

Bitch. She knows how to touch a sore spot. I leap up straightaway and raise my arm in a salute to show that I am not an old Jew. I am the prototype-child-typical-of-the-pure-Aryan-race! The perfect specimen, conceived according to the wishes of Reichsführer Himmler. The protégé of Doctor Ebner. The mascot of the Lebensborn program. Sieg Heil!

She’s the one who must have Jewish blood, she’s so old, so ugly. I don’t know why Doctor Ebner doesn’t put her through the selection process. They wouldn’t have to measure her nose or her forehead or the position of her ears or the height of her cheekbones—it’s perfectly obvious that nothing in her face corresponds to the standards of the Nordic race. As for her eyes, they’re small and black like ball bearings. Like the eyes on the teddy bear that I found in the room of the boy who used to live in the house. He must have been very attached to it because it was snuggled up in his bed, under the blankets. I took out my anger on that bear and tore it to shreds. I yanked off its nose, its eyes, and ripped open its belly, until there was nothing left of it. That filthy disgusting Polack bear!

The older I get, the more I realise how weird and full of contradictions adults are. The Brown Sisters attended courses with ‘physiognomists’ to be able to tell, at a single glance, whether a person can claim to belong to the Nordic race or not. Haven’t they ever thought of standing in front of a mirror? Of requesting their own ‘relocation’?

As for the rocking—my mouth open like I’m swallowing flies, my gaze blank—somehow I manage to cut down on it; otherwise they’ll think I’m mentally retarded and send me off to be ‘purified’.

But I’m not retarded at all. In fact, I know exactly what happened to Bibiana. It wasn’t because she was hungry that she ate the addresses in front of the Sister. It was her act of rebellion. And rebellion gets punished. Very severely. The first few days, when no one came to get me in the morning, I asked, ‘When will Bibiana come?’

‘She’s not coming. Not today, not tomorrow. She is no longer a member of our team,’ Frau Lotte said stiffly, careful not to make eye contact with me.

A code sentence. The first possible meaning: Bibiana suffocated on the paper she swallowed. Not likely. Second possibility: she ended up getting that shot in the head. Far more likely. Lotte pulled me aside when Bibiana started snacking on the paper; she took me to my room so I wouldn’t see what happened next: the other Sister calling the soldier, and bang! The soldier fired. I’ve seen a lot of this, whenever I play sniper games in the house and look out the window. SS soldiers get a group of men or women guilty of sabotage and line them up against the wall, and bang! bang! they execute them. Or else they kill a bunch of innocent people to punish the guilty ones they haven’t manage to arrest. Or else they lock them in a church and set fire to it.

Third possibility: Bibiana was sent back to Ravensbrück. And if she’s not dead yet, it won’t be long.

Or else…

Or else, there could be a fourth possibility, one that doesn’t relate to the Sister’s code language, but to my own. Bibiana is the Lady of the Lake. She has returned to the magic waters where nothing can ever harm her again. All I have to do is drink from the goblet of immortality and I’ll be able to join her there. But when? The Reichsführer Himmler’s search parties had better hurry up and find that damn goblet.

Why did Bibiana decide to rebel? When she was gobbling the papers, did she think about me, even for an instant? Why did she introduce me to the feelings of hand in hand, hugs, laughter, chasing games and then abandon me?

I’m angry with her. Too bad if she’s been killed, after all!

I need my mental picture of her to join up with the others in the back of my dolichocephalic head, in the mixed-up compartments of my brain, the ones that are gradually heading for oblivion. I’m young, so it should be quick. But in the meantime…

I’m suffering.

Especially because Lotte has put me on dry rations—she’s sticking to her theory that my stomach-ache is due to some kind of diarrhoea. Rice, steamed carrots and quince jam. Not only is it disgusting, but I feel even worse, because I’m totally constipated. My belly is rock-hard from all the accumulated shit that can’t get out. In the toilet just now, I let loose a series of farts so deafening it sounded like machine-gun fire. If there were living creatures in the toilet bowl under my bum, they’d never have survived such an asphyxiating attack of gas. Despite the pain, the idea makes me laugh. They should launch me from a plane over an enemy target: my exploding gut would cause as much damage as a bomb.

I’m still laughing as I leave the toilet, and then sadness overwhelms me. I get dressed in my Polish-child costume of rags and put myself to bed. I rub my nose in the stinky sweater full of holes and the filthy pants; I breathe deeply and I feel better. I can pick up Bibiana’s smell in a few spots.

Lotte tells me to do some drawing to distract myself. It’s more so that I leave her in peace to file her index cards and write up her reports. ‘Oh, that’s so pretty!’ she says, glancing at the paper I’ve scribbled on. She has no idea what the picture means: the horizontal lines of black crayon are her. Dead. And the big blobs of red everywhere are her blood. Because she got shot in the head.

I can’t sleep at night. It wasn’t the same when I was driving around with the Sister, or out walking with Bibiana. I’d come home tired and was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. But there’s a lot of disturbance in the house. Doctor Ebner comes back late with Herr Tesch and other important people, and they never stop talking, arguing. There’s often shouting from the study.

And the SS officers get together in the dining room and put on really loud music. Sometimes I sneak out of bed and have a look. They’re all drunk, because of the schnapps, and surrounded by lots of women. At first I didn’t understand what they were doing, but then I did.

Some evenings, the women arrive all dressed up, with lots of make-up. They eat masses of things you can’t find anywhere in the country now (sweets and chocolate), they dance with the officers, laugh, drink lots of schnapps themselves, or champagne if it’s there, too. Afterwards, they take off their clothes, or stay just in their panties, or bra. Or just their stockings and high heels. They lie down on the rugs, or on the table, right in the middle of the dinner plates that haven’t been cleared away, or on an armchair or couch. Or else they stay standing, leaning against the wall, and that’s when the officers come and put their dicks inside them. It looks like that makes them laugh more than the alcohol. When they push their mouths onto the officers’ mouths, their lipstick get smeared all over their faces, as if they’re bleeding. Those women are German. They’re prostitutes, whores. They’re paid to have sex with the officers.

On other evenings, the women are Polish. I can tell because they’re dressed like peasants, they don’t wear make-up, they don’t dine with the officers, they don’t say a word and never laugh. Quite the opposite. They don’t drink either, or sometimes the soldiers force them to swallow a big slug of schnapps and they nearly choke. And when the soldiers’ dicks go inside them, some cry, or scream; others grit their teeth until it’s over.

The whores have sex with the higher ranked officers, and the Polish women with the ordinary soldiers. The whores shout, ‘Yes, yes!’ And the Polish women, ‘No, no!’ The soldiers rape the Polish women.

I watch all this very carefully. It’s interesting to know how babies are made. Because some of this intercourse will produce babies for sure. Watching up close while people have intercourse will increase my knowledge quota and develop my thinking processes. No one will ever be able to spin me tales about babies arriving in baskets delivered by storks, or any other such nonsense.

Is that how I was conceived? With a blonde German whore who took off all her clothes to let the Aryan’s dick enter her? Was she drinking schnapps and laughing, or was she crying and gritting her teeth?

I hang around the house for days on end, spying on the whores and the soldiers, which means I stay up late, so I’m tired enough to sleep most of the next day. Time passes faster this way.

But I’m soon bored again. Once you’ve seen one couple having sex, seeing it over and over adds nothing. It’s always the same. And, anyway, I never see Bibiana among the Polish women, even though I keep looking for her. She must really be dead. I’ll have to get used to the idea.

I notice that, once they’ve finished their business with the women, some soldiers drive off in the middle of the night. I wonder where on earth they could be going at that time? I’m so curious that one night I stow away in one of their cars.