the mess hall.
Tur Prikulitsch could order us around as he wished, but he disgraced himself with his coarse treatment of Kati Sentry. And when that backfired, he disgraced himself with his show of sympathy. Because she was beyond correction and beyond help, Kati Sentry showed how hollow his authority really was. In order to save face, Tur Prikulitsch softened. He had Kati Sentry sit next to him on the ground during roll call. For hours she would sit on her quilted cap and watch him in amazement as though he were a marionette. After roll call, her cap would be frozen to the snow and had to be pried off the ground.
For three summer evenings in a row Kati Sentry disrupted the roll call. For a while she sat quietly next to Prikulitsch, then scooted close to his feet and started polishing his shoe with her cap. He stepped on her hand. She pulled it away and polished the other shoe. Then he stepped on her hand with his other foot. When he lifted his foot she jumped up and ran through the assembled ranks, fluttering her arms and cooing like a dove. We all held our breath, and Tur let out a hollow laugh like a big turkey-cock. Three times Kati Sentry managed to polish his shoes and become a dove. After that she was no longer allowed at roll call. Instead she had to mop the floors in the barracks. She took a bucket of water from the well, wrung out the rag, wrapped it around the broom, and changed the dirty water after every barrack. She worked without hesitation, her mind unclouded by any distraction. The floor was cleaner than ever before. She mopped thoroughly, without haste, perhaps out of habit from home.
Nor was she all that crazy. For roll call, instead of Appell she said APFEL—apple. When the little bell rang at the coke batteries she thought it was time for mass. She didn’t have to invent illusions, because her mind wasn’t in the camp to begin with. The way she behaved didn’t conform to camp regulations, but it did fit the circumstances. There was something elemental about her that we envied. Even the hunger angel was baffled when faced with her instincts. He visited her as he did all of us, but he did not climb into her brain. Kati performed the most basic tasks without thinking, abandoning herself to whatever came her way. She survived the camp without going door-to-door. She was never seen rummaging through the kitchen waste behind the mess hall. She ate what could be found in the yard and on the factory grounds. Seeds, leaves, and flowers in the weeds. And all kinds of insects—worms and caterpillars, maggots and beetles, spiders and snails. And in the snowy yard inside the camp the frozen excrement of the watchdogs. We were amazed at how the dogs trusted her, as if this human were one of them as she tottered about, her cap flapping over her ears.
Kati Sentry’s madness never went beyond what we could put up with. She was neither clinging nor aloof. Through all the years in the camp she seemed as much at home as a house pet. There was nothing alien about her. We liked her.
One September afternoon after my shift, the sun was still blazing hot in the sky. I drifted along the overgrown paths behind the mouth of the coal silo. Singed by the summer, the skeletons of wild oats shimmered like fish bones as they swayed among the fiery orach, which had long since turned inedible. Inside the hard husks, the kernels were still milky. I ate. On my way back I didn’t want to swim through the weeds again and so I decided to go a different way. Kati Sentry was sitting by the zeppelin. Her hands were on an anthill swarming with black ants. She was licking them off and eating them. I asked: Kati, what are you doing.
She said: I’m making gloves for myself, they tickle.
Are you cold, I asked.
She said: Not today, tomorrow. My mother baked poppy-seed rolls, they’re still warm. Don’t step on them with your feet, you can wait, you’re not a hunter. When the rolls are all gone the soldiers will be counted at the apple. Then they’ll go home.
By then her hands were swarming black again. Before she licked off the ants, she asked: When is the war over.
I said: The war’s been over for two years. Come,