When she was gone, and what sounded heavy
enough to be an outside door had slammed shut behind her, the man
who meant to have his way pulled a tiny wooden chair up to the side
of the bed and sat down. For a long moment he was silent as he
studied her face. It never seemed to occur to him that she might be
just as curious.
There had been a Ukrainian guard at Chelmno
whom everyone called “Goliath”—he stood out in Esther’s memory as
the biggest man she had ever seen. This man must have been just as
big, perhaps even a shade taller, but strong and graceful-looking
where Goliath had been merely heavy with huge, clumsy lumps of
muscle. This man seemed all chest and shoulders inside his white
shirt, and his enormous hands, one of which was covered across the
back with a flat scar, were almost beautiful.
He was handsome in a brutal sort of way, but
the brutality seemed to be more something that life had done to him
than part of his own nature. It was a strong face—that was the word
that kept corning into her mind as she looked at him. His hair was
golden and a little too long, as it he had forgotten for some time
to have it cut, and his cold blue eyes were at once fierce and
quiet. His face was like a mask behind which he was waiting for the
treachery of strangers.
It occurred to Esther that this was the first
time in many years she had been alone with a man inside the four
walls of a room and did not feel herself to be in danger. It was as
if he belonged to some different order of creation and had never
learned to. . .
“You had a visitor yesterday,” he said
suddenly, in a voice that suggested nothing. “A lawyer named
‘Plessen.’ What did you have to say to each other?”
Perhaps he didn’t mean to, but he made it
sound as if he were accusing her of something. But of course the
attorney Plessen had told lies, and perhaps not to her alone.
“He said he was from my aunt in
America—Trenton, New Jersey. He said he was appealing my case to
the military governor.”
“He was not from your aunt. He was from Egon
Hagemann.”
At first all she felt was the surprise—just a
kind of stunned sensation, passionless, crowding out everything
else like the noiseless white flash of an explosion. For an instant
she couldn’t even grasp why she was so astonished. Even the name,
at first, seemed connected to nothing.
And then this cooled into fear and then, that
almost forgotten emotion, shame.
Yes, of course he was accusing her of
something. She could feel her face going hot with shame as she
realized that he must know all about Hagemann, all about the things
that had happened at Waldenburg. She could see it in his eyes that
were so careful to remain impassive as they searched her face. Of
course he knew. Who could help knowing about Esther Rosensaft, the
little whore who had stayed alive by letting the officers and men
of the Waffen-SS do whatever they liked with her?
“I didn’t know. I didn’t. . .”
“Did he ask you anything? More important, did
you tell him anything?”
“No—I mean, yes.” Her voice was thickening
and she felt an almost irresistible urge to begin sobbing. Why did
this man, this particular man, have to know about Waldenburg? “I
mean, what was there to tell him? He wanted to be sure I was the
right Esther Rosensaft. There was a guard standing behind me the
whole time. What could he have asked me?”
“That s a good question.”
He rose from the chair—he just seemed to go
up and up—and stepped over to the window and glanced outside, as if
he were expecting someone. The sun caught the planes of his face so
that the cheekbones seemed to gleam.
“I’m told Hagemann was pretty fond of you,”
he said finally, not moving from the window. He seemed to be
looking at nothing. “Is that why he wanted to get you out of
Mühlfeld?”
“Colonel Hagemann used to tell me about his
other women—the ones he’d had in Russia and Poland before it became
my turn. He liked to. . . They all died.”
She sat up in bed and let her legs swing over
the edge until she could touch the floor. It was something of an
experiment; she would be glad to find she could get up. She didn’t
want to talk to this man about these things while lying back
against a feather pillow.
“He was going to kill me. He told me often
enough—we would have little ‘rehearsals,’ except that I never knew
if. . . I’m sure I would be dead now if the General had not
intervened. No—” She shook her head bitterly, wishing she could
find a way for once to hurt a man back. I don’t imagine Colonel
Hagemann would rescue me from prison for sentimental reasons.”
She would not cry. She had been through far
worse moments than this, and she was weary of always giving men the
satisfaction of their little victories over her, as if the only
pleasure life held for them was to humiliate Esther Rosensaft. She
would not cry.
And when she was quite satisfied that she
would not, she looked up and saw that this man was once again
studying the view through the room’s only window. He hadn’t been
watching. He had afforded her a moment of decent privacy, just as
if she had a right to it. It was like a revelation.
“What do you mean when you say the General
“intervened’? Do you mean von Goltz?”
“Yes, von Goltz—General von Goltz. He was not
as bad as Hagemann.”
“He gave the orders.” He was looking at her
now, and the muscles in his jaw were visible under the skin.
“Did you know him?”
“I arrested him. I watched him hang.”
His blue eyes were no longer so cold now. Now
they seemed to want to burn through her, as if he had hated her all
his life.
“I—he saved me. Twice. What you say is true,
but he is dead now and I have no right to kill him all over
again.”
“You were his mistress.”
“Yes. I had no choice about that either,
except between that and death.”
She looked into his face, his hard,
implacable face, and felt a strange kind of grief, as if this were
the first time she had been brought to see everything she had
forfeited by allowing herself to be taken out of that winding
column of the condemned at Chelmno. He was no one to her, but she
had lost him—that day, now. She had traded her decency for her
life, and now she felt sick with remorse.
“I’m sorry—I wasn’t there, so I have no
business passing judgment on you. Probably no one does.”
“Are you one of the Jews?” she asked.
Suddenly it seemed the most important question in the world.
“No.”
. . . . .
Esther had just finished her bath and was
drying herself with a large white towel—it was one of the most
voluptuous experiences of her life—when a clock tower that must
have been several blocks away struck twelve. She could only just
hear it. It made a little puffing sound, like someone hitting the
soft earth with his fist.
When she came back out into the bedroom, she
found that Sonya had brought her some clean underwear and was
sitting on the chair, doing her nails with a file.
“You want to borrow it later?” she asked,
flourishing the thing in the air. “Inar brought it to me yesterday
from the International Zone. It’s such a fight to put oneself back
in order after a stretch in jail. I still haven’t got the smell of
that prison soap out of my skin.”
“Inar?”
Sonya held the nail file level about a foot
above her head and scowled to indicate whom she meant. It was
enough—Esther nodded and murmured a little assenting sound.
“And, no, he’s not my boyfriend, so you don’t
have to look so miserable. He was just being considerate. He’s
actually a very kind man, although you’d never believe it to look
at him.” Sonya laughed as she blew on the nail of her little
finger. “Don’t worry, he’ll get around to you when he’s had a
chance to relax a little. I’d give another five months in
Mühlfeld—well, at least another three—if he’d show half as much
interest in me.”
“He wants me for something else. He doesn’t
even know I’m alive, not in that way.”
“Oh yes he does.”
Esther couldn’t have brought herself to make
a reply. She had imagined the capacity for simple embarrassment,
that mingling of confusion and something almost like pleasure, was
a thing that had died in her a long time ago, but it seemed
not.
“You just give him a little time to breathe,”
Sonya went on, her attention complacently absorbed with the details
of her manicure. “He doesn’t think there’s enough of him left for
all that now, but he’s as human as any other man. I saw the way he
sat watching by your bed last night, looking down at you as if into
a mirror. Maybe he doesn’t know it yet, but it wasn’t all just
revenge or politics or whatever in hell he thinks he wants. There
was something else too. But take my advice and let him figure it
out for himself before you set the hook in him.”
“I’m sorry.” It was all that Esther could
think to say. “I didn’t mean. . .” She sat down on the edge of the
bed and picked up a piece of the clean underwear, looking at it as
if she had never seen its like before. She let it slide over her
fingers and into her lap.
Sonya seemed to think she was being very
comical.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, trying not
to smile too widely. “He’s not really my type. Not that I’d turn
him down—I wouldn’t say no to having those hands sliding up my
dress one time. But you could say he doesn’t fit into my plans. I
want a man who’s close to forty and about ten pounds overweight, a
man who makes a salary and likes to garden. If he’s been married
before and has a couple of children, that would be another point in
his favor—I’m not sure I’m still young enough to have any children
of my own. I’ve got to look out for my retirement. I’m too old to
have time for white knights like Inar.”
. . . . .
+The hardest part was maneuvering the casket
down the stairwell. Christiansen had carried it up on his back, but
there hadn’t been a body in it then.
“You’re going to be Sonya’s mother, all
packed up for burial in the family plot in Konstanz. I have the
death certificate, the export license, even a receipt from the
cemetery for a down payment on the grave site. If they’ve been told
to look out for a woman, they’ll have Sonya to look at.”
Esther had taken it all in, saying nothing,
solemnly working away at the carton of ice cream he had brought
her—she needed a little spoiling after four months in the slammer,
and the poor little chit looked like she could also use the
calories. Her eyes were large and full of misgivings.
“What if they want to look inside?” she asked
finally, pointing with her spoon at the black wooden casket that
lay on the hearth rug like a corpse in its own right.
“You’ll be made up to look old—I have a
rubber mask and coverings to make your neck and the backs of your
hands convincingly withered. You’ll be deep asleep, so deep they
won’t even be able to see you breathing. We’re going through the
checkpoint at night, so they’ll only have klieg lights. Everyone
looks dead under klieg lights. You’ll make a very plausible
cadaver. “
He tried to smile, probably without much
success. She was right to think it was a screwy idea—more right
than she could ever imagine.
“Will they be looking for me?”
“Difficult to say.” Christiansen shrugged and
began to light a cigarette. “They will have found three bodies in
that burnt-out ambulance, but between twenty-five pounds of plastic
explosives and a full gas tank those three will probably be a
little difficult to identify, even as to sex. We’re hoping the
Russians will be a few days figuring out that you weren’t
incinerated too. We’re hoping that for now they won’t have any
clear idea what last night’s explosion was all about.”
That line of conversation didn’t seem to be
making her any happier. Apparently, in spite of everything, Esther
Rosensaft hadn’t yet learned to be indifferent to killing. It was
probably a point in her favor. Christiansen decided to change the
subject.
“You haven’t finished your ice cream,” he
said. “What’s the matter, didn’t you like it?”
“It was fine. I just seem to have lost my
appetite. I’m sorry—it was very kind of you.”
It was late afternoon, and she had been up
and walking around for hours. Now she looked tired. She sat in the
chair, her shoulders slumped, her skinny little arms dangling in
her lap. She was like a weary child—the short black hair, the eyes,
the whole bit. It took an effort to remember that she was not a
child, that she knew her way around men and a good deal else, that
she was probably perfectly aware of the sort of impression she
could make on a big, dumb Norwegian by playing cute and helpless
and full of finer feelings. It was worth reminding oneself that
getting sentimental about Esther Rosensaft wasn’t going to help
trap Colonel Egon Hagemann. Esther Rosensaft, after all, was
supposed to be the bait.
“Finish it anyway. I don’t want your stomach
to start growling at the wrong moment.”
He spent what was left of the daylight
attending to the lady’s makeup.
Mordecai had found the mask and all the rest
of it. Mordecai was better at finding things than anyone
Christiansen had ever known, even in the army. All that was left
was to fix the hair and blend in the edges.
It was decided not to use a wig. A wig was
too easily detected and, besides, they only wanted to make her look
around sixty. Christiansen decided to strip some of the color out
with lye and leave the rest.
“Where did you learn to do this?” she asked.
She was in her slip, sitting between his knees while he worked on
her hair. She kept glancing up at him, which didn’t make the work
any easier.
“In New York, playing the theaters. I was a
musician, but you learned to do a little of everything”
The theaters? Are they nice?”