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Dresden figurines
summer home for the Kaiser. Anna closes her eyes. Even she hasn’t heard this tale before.
Loneliness isn’t corrosive. It is eviscerating.
because some of them are . . . different, like Fritzi?
Whatever the Führer wanted to do, this was fine by me. Q: So you approved. A: Approved, disapproved, it made no difference. Who was I to question such things?
tRumpers
Germany, um, free of Jews. A: Judenrein. Q: That’s right. A: I was too busy to pay attention
Before the war, when Germans were starving, when we had to wait hours for a loaf of bread . . . when there was looting, windows being broken,
A: That is all propaganda.
To be sick with hunger. You do not understand that.
Of course all those old Krauts are Nazis! What else did you expect?
Why must people make such a hoopla of Christmas? It is a wretched holiday, really, one that Trudy has always spent at the farmhouse, sitting straight as an exclamation point in her black clothes while Anna serves more goose and stuffing than the two women could ever hope to eat.
He wears nothing underneath, and his stomach and pubic hair are smeared with dark blood. You see, I am not Santa, he says. I am Saint Nikolaus, and
moue
Anna acts with a primitive cunning she didn’t know she possessed, an innate knowledge of an ancient system of barter;
From his description of these glorious but trying days, she learns that the Jews there went meekly to their liquidation. How, the Obersturmführer asks rhetorically, can one respect a race such as that? We Germans, he says, we place a high premium on obedience, of course, but not at the expense of bravery.
Vaunda liked this
Except for these Special Deliveries: they are less for the prisoners than a way for Anna to convince herself that she is more than a whore, a whim, a plaything; they forge a link with the recent past, during which, though it was unpleasant in many respects, she at least felt human.
She fills the bath with water so hot that her skin, that white sheath with its dark freckles that the Obersturmführer finds so appealing, will surely peel off like that of a boiled tomato.
But dear God, he is so boring!
Einsatzgruppen, the special units whose job it was to come and take away all the Jews. Nobody knew what would happen to them after, and nobody asked questions.
We were still so scared. Even more than before. Scared of what the Nazis could do, for no rhyme or reason, whenever they wanted.
MRS. JACK SCHLEMMER (ANNA).
Pyrrhic
You know my view on such things, she says. Yes, of course, says Trudy, and recites: The past is dead, nicht?
but she can’t help it: 12:13, 1:46, 2:03, 3:01. Why is it that losing a night’s sleep should induce such panic, as if Trudy is squandering precious currency she will never get back?
gemütlich.
understands that not only does the woman know, she is terrified. There is no condemnation in Frau Buchholtz’s glance, only the fear that Anna might have spied some infraction that she will certainly report, well connected as she is. Apparently disdain is a luxury, like sugar or real coffee, that one cannot afford in wartime.
She will have to force the trunk and climb in through the hatchback.
blunt razor, so as you march to the gas chamber your scalp will sting and you will be unrecognizable to yourself, as strange and ugly as the people you see around you, and you will have a dim understanding of why the SS see you as so ugly, as dispensable and interchangeable
Nacht und Nebel.
Anna has noticed a direct correlation between Nazi impotencies and the Obersturmführer’s personal ones.
his zealous adherence to the twisted principles of Partei purity: a sham. He is married, as all top-echelon SS must be, and yet he keeps her, Anna, and seems to care for her. Or does he? This is what Anna puzzles over as she watches him, trying
Very 1984
wedging further between her legs. Anna feels nothing. She has come untethered from herself now, so separate that she is unable to summon any of her usual comforting fantasies.
Raise high the knife! Sharpen the blade to cut the Jewish flesh. Jewish blood will run in the gutters;
Things fall apart, Anna thinks, remembering a poem
Second Coming
ransacking and burning the houses, raping the women, worse than the Russians.
Propaganda
She is coping with her troubles in the Old World way, denial and physical labor; would you rather she vegetate in her room, as so many elderly do?
American concept that it is somehow attractive to air one’s dirty laundry in public. It is everywhere, this ideology:
expiation,
How could you do it?
She should understand
I did it for you, Trudy. Anything I ever did, it was all for you.
She smells like Saint Nikolaus. She smells like the man.
Then he said, I understand. These matters of mistaken identity happen all the time, especially among Jews. Well, then, if he is not yours, you won’t mind if I do this— And he unholstered his Luger and shot Hansi in the head.
because I knew for the first time in my life what it means to be so ashamed that you wish to die.
Because I was angry with my mother. I was angry that she had broken her promise and had not come to visit us and had abandoned us to Frau Potz.
So you see, he says softly, we are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?
Is she supposed to forget
Life is a frosted cake made of worms.
A quiet man, a man apart.
Fresh, this Ami has said; he won’t get fresh with you. What an extraordinary expression! Bread can be fresh, as can vegetables and fruit, flowers and meat. Also fresh is the fragrance of laundry dried in the wind, or newly cut hay. But the interactions between the sexes?
