He pulled her head up by a patch of stringy hair, and I gasped, looking swiftly away, but I’d already seen her, and tears flooded my eyes.
‘Didn’t they teach you not to look in your… training?’ Barbie laughed, and then forced us to look at each other, moving her chair directly in front of mine where he tied her up just the same, only there was no resistance from her; she had no strength. Her bones were larger than mine with flesh in between, a walking corpse if I had ever seen one. She opened her mouth, her jaw gaping open, but no words came out, only breathy moans, and tears spilled over my cheeks.
‘Now,’ the other officer said as he walked around the two of us tied in the chairs. ‘Officer Barbie seems to think he can get you two to talk.’ He laughed. ‘I can’t imagine how he expects to do that, but he does have his ways…’
‘Ja,’ Barbie said. ‘I do have my ways.’
The officer laughed as he left the room. Barbie laughed too, his eyes narrowing as he gazed upon us. I was imagining what he was going to do to us when a very attractive woman about my age wearing a delicate pink dress walked into the room.
‘I know how women like to talk to other women,’ Barbie said, ‘so I’ve invited my friend to our little date. Perhaps you might find her appealing.’
She lit a thick brown cigarette and waved it around in the air as she talked. ‘I do love a good chit-chat.’ She was undeniably French, dressed in the silkiest and most expensive clothes I had seen in a long time, pearl buttons and shiny jewellery around her neck and wrists. She was from Paris, I had decided, with her thick makeup and tightly curled hair—no woman from the Auvergne would look like that in the middle of the day.
‘But where am I to sit, honeybear?’ she said, looking around the room. ‘Wait—’ she put both hands on Barbie’s chest, resting her hands on the breast of his uniform ‘—how do I say honeybear in German?’
‘Honigbär,’ Barbie said before he kissed her.
She giggled and played with the bracelets on her wrist as he got her a chair. Then she sat back and smoked her cigarette, smiling at us as if we were friends.
‘What should we do, Claudette?’ he said.
‘Burn their nipples, honigbär.’ She leaned in, her eyes beady. ‘Burn them right off!’
Barbie ripped open Marguerite’s smock and exposed her breasts, which were covered in pocky, round scars. ‘Looks like you have been through this before.’ He smiled. ‘You interest me more every minute.’
He curled his fingers around the neckline of my smock as if he were about to rip it from my body, but then slowly started to tear it, lower and lower it went until my breasts popped out. He felt me with the back of his hand before cupping each one of my breasts in his palm. Claudette shifted uncomfortably in her chair. ‘But this one hasn’t.’ He put his lips to my ear, playing with my nipple until it got hard. ‘I heard you have the skin of an angel.’
He snapped his fingers at Claudette, and she took several short puffs from her cigarette until the ember burned bright red.
‘Tell us who you are,’ he said to Marguerite, but she turned her head to stare at the wall. I knew our silence was what was keeping us alive—our information had value. She would never answer him. A sinister smile spread the width of his face. ‘As you wish.’
Claudette laughed hysterically, puffing on her cigarettes as Barbie lifted my breast, exposing the plump underside. He snapped for her to give him her lit cigarette, and my feet scraped the floor.
‘No…’ I said, praying for the strength I had when I faced the Milice, but I hadn’t a shred of it left. ‘No—’ The ember glowed, and I screamed a moment before he pressed it to my skin.
‘Tell us who you are!’ he yelled to Marguerite over my screams, ‘and I’ll stop!’ Marguerite wept openly as Claudette lit more cigarettes to replace the ones he’d broken while burning me—three in all—until finally I heard her say something that gave me hope.
‘I’ve run out.’
There was a devilish look in his eye and in his mouth as he searched the room for something else to torture me with, shouting into the air in German. He kicked my