the blood sheeting down his face.
No, and I’m not fucking crazy either. Get it yourself.
Hinkelmann or Blank pivots, gaping at his SS brother in burlesque amazement.
Did you hear that? he asks. Did you hear what he said?
He delivers a kick to the prisoner’s kidneys, driving the man face-first into the mud, then clubs him in the head, across the shoulders, on the back. He flips the prisoner over with his foot. He waits until the prisoner has regained consciousness, then stands on his throat and presses down with his full weight. The prisoner’s limbs flail, his hands scrabbling for purchase on the officer’s boot. When he has stopped gurgling, Hinkelmann or Blank bends over and peers into his face. Satisfied, he administers a last kick.
Another one shot while trying to escape, he says. Did you get that, Rippchen?
He turns to an adjutant standing a few meters away. Orating like an actor projecting to the last row, pantomiming the act of writing down the words, the Unterscharführer bellows: Shot—while trying— to escape.
I got it, Herr Unterscharführer, the adjutant reassures him.
Behind them, the prisoners continue working, with a bit more energy than before.
Jesus Christ, Blank or Hinkelmann says, frowning at the smudges the prisoner’s death grip has left on his boot. Give me some of that.
His partner hands him the cognac.
Neither notices a third officer who has arrived during the beating. This fellow, whose decorations proclaim him to be of higher rank than Hinkelmann or Blank, is bigger than both, dark-haired, sober. He moves with purpose to the pair and holds a brief conference with them, his voice pitched too low for his words to carry. The Unterscharführers react with indignation.
Come on, Horst, Blank or Hinkelmann says. You’ve had this shit detail. You know how it is!
He swirls liquor from cheek to cheek and then spits it onto the ground near the corpse.
The third officer says something else, and Hinkelmann or Blank gives an extravagant salute.
Yes SIR, Herr Obersturmführer, SIR, he says, and gestures to the adjutant, who blows a whistle. The prisoners each pick up a rock, form columns, and run double-time to the entrance of the quarry, helped along by blows from the Kapos. The Obersturm-führer lingers behind, inspecting the dead prisoner.
Suddenly, as though he were a dog scenting the air, the Ober-sturmführer’s head snaps up and rotates toward Anna. He stares in her direction, and Anna thinks for a moment that he is blind. Then she realizes that this is, of course, not the case; it is simply that his eyes are so light that he appears from this distance to have no pupils. Yet even after he turns and leaves, Anna’s fear of him is so great that it approaches superstitious conviction. Somehow, the Obersturmführer has seen her. He knows she is there.
She huddles behind the tree, her hands over her mouth to stifle the tiny, terrified hitching noises she makes as she weeps. How can human beings do such things to one another? What thoughts ran through the prisoner’s mind as his life was squeezed out of him, as he looked up at a slice of Blank’s or Hinkelmann’s face, knowing that the foot on his throat belonged to a man with the same skin, blood, the same basic tube of meat between his legs, as his own?
Eventually, when it grows dark, Anna undoes the sack and shoves the rolls into the rotted hollow of the pine as fast as she can. Somehow she remembers to scrabble beneath the big stone for the condom. Her hands are shaking so that she tears the thin greasy membrane while excavating it. She stuffs it into her pocket nonetheless and picks up the empty flour sack and flees in the direction from which she came.
16
BY DECEMBER, THE RESTRICTIONS OF RATIONING HAVE tightened even further. Weimarians exist on a diet consisting almost solely of lentils and turnips. They queue in lines for hours for the privilege of purchasing meat so gristly as to be inedible; they come to blows over bones and hooves for broth. The forests of Thuringia are said to be devoid of game. The loaves Anna and Mathilde produce are heavy as rocks and in fact often contain small pebbles, as even the flour provided by the SS is substandard.
Nor is food the only thing in short supply. Gasoline and cigarettes are used in lieu of money. Thread, so necessary for mending clothes already worn for three years or more, is nowhere to be found. And the Reich