Lovely Green Eyes by Arnost Lustig

Author:Arnost Lustig [Lustig, Arnošt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-487-1
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Published: 2011-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

“Are you afraid of me?” the Obersturmführer asked.

“Perhaps.”

“Would you kindly decide on yes or no?”

She did not know which way to move.

The Obersturmführer pinned her legs down so that she could not move. The ceiling seemed to her to have dropped lower. You are a whore, so act like a whore, an inner voice told her. Do what he wants. But what did he want? She would understand if he struck her or shot her. Why else had he picked up his pistol?

Her legs turned numb like blocks of wood. The Obersturmführer forced himself, now flaccid, between them, colliding with her protruding pelvic bones. She changed into clay kneaded by strange hands. She tried to receive the Obersturmführer, but he was incapable of achieving what he wanted. The world shrank for her to a pain in her belly, to smells and sounds, to the impacts of abdomen against abdomen. He was holding down both her shoulders with his left arm; in his right hand he still held his pistol. He had more strength in one arm than she had in her whole body. He must surely feel, if he was capable of feeling anything, that giving him what he wanted was not a matter of good will. She was gasping for air. In her mind she was withdrawing from him.

“I’m doing what you want,” she said.

“That’s what you think. To you it’s all scheissegal. Are you or are you not a whore? You’re useless.”

She no longer wanted to consider whether wanting to live was wrong. Nor why she was born. If somebody had asked her, she could now say what a human being was, and what one was not. What it meant to have been born a girl. A spiritual poverty seemed to envelop her like a foul smell. Within her she heard an echo that she could not silence. She did not want to make the excuse, not even in her mind, that her father’s God had sent her here when she had been due to die in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She knew she had volunteered.

The Obersturmführer would not let her move so she might lie more comfortably.

“Stomach ache?” he asked.

“No,” she lied.

“Why are you gripping your belly then?”

“I only put my hand there. I’ve nowhere else to put it.”

“Do I have to tell you where you should put your hand?”

The question remained hanging in the air. She did not say no, but her lips formed the word. “Lie closer to me.”

“How close?”

“Do I have to tell you?”

She felt as if she was on fire. She thought of Dr Krueger’s human guinea pigs, of his daughter Hannelore who had been serving in Alsace. The day the doctor got his promotion he received two telegrams. The first informed him that Hannelore’s legs had been torn off by a mine. The second was a congratulatory telegram from the head of the Kraft durch Freude organization.

Oil brought her some relief from his desperate efforts. Above her was the breathless depraved 26-year-old face scarred by sleepless nights, punitive actions, a hundred terrors associated with his massacres.

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