Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories (5 page)

“Maybe it was wrong,” I told Stella Johansson, “but you could eat better, dress better—
live
better—if you had a boyfriend. Or several. Ludi did at least . . . ”

While the rest of us were raking out clumps of hair—whatever had grown back after they shaved our heads—when we combed with our fingers, hers looked . . . looked almost sleek. She pinned it up when she met one of her boyfriends. She had a red dress for dates, she had a
lipstick
. . .

“Max Factor Clear Red,” Ludi said. “Just like Hollywood. Just like Rita Hayworth and Maureen O’Hara.” She pouted her lips and the golden lipstick tube flashed. “Hold the mirror steady wouldja? And stop moving it; it’s small enough already.” We were in the supply room again and she positioned my wrist as I gripped the silvery metal handle of a tiny-mirrored dental instrument.

“I don’t know why,” I said aloud to Stella Johansson, “I didn’t think about all those poor people, about how the Nazis yanked their teeth to extract the gold . . . millions of teeth . . . I tried never to look at the mountains of teeth, the heaped up tons of hair when I went past ‘Canada.’ It hurt to look at them. It hurt because you couldn’t help thinking about the millions of people; it hurt because you were scared of losing hair, of losing teeth. Didn’t we suffer enough? Did we have to be ugly, too?”

“You turn people into shambling scarecrows, they’re not ‘people’ anymore,” Stella said. “You wouldn’t hesitate to hang or shoot a scarecrow or throw it in a ditch when you were done with it. It wouldn’t bother you to burn a man-shape you no longer considered a man.”

“Or a woman, or a child.”

She nodded.

“Maybe it was wrong, but I wanted to keep my . . . my woman-shape. Maybe because I was fourteen and never had the chance to be a woman—because of the war, really. I never had a grown-up party dress or went to a dance—all the things in normal times I could have looked forward to in the next year or two . . . and Ludi—everyone really—they all thought I was sixteen, and then it was coming up to April 17th, my fifteenth birthday. Ludi—everyone—thought I’d be turning seventeen . . . ”

“Everyone—except Kasia.”

“Yes, everyone except my mother,” I agreed.

“You’re seventeen on the 17
th
,” Ludi said. “That’s really something special. And we’re going to celebrate.”

“What? How?” I kept thinking about how in general, those of us working in the hospital infirmary lived a little better, but still, I’d lost so much weight I had no breasts to speak of. For at least two or three years I’d looked forward to wearing a bra and now I was fifteen and had the nubbins you’d see on a ten-year old child. I’d had one period—my first—back in June, but like most women in the camp, my menses had dried up. My mother said they put something in the food—she didn’t know what—and that was why the only pregnant women were the ones that had just arrived on the damn indefatigable trains. I don’t know—maybe it was just from being starved—but even if I’d complained back then about the cramps and the low-grade headache, about the messy red napkins and the elastic sanitary belt, even though I griped like my girl cousins and school friends, I’d been secretly pleased when I got my period. Like being admitted to some exclusive club you longed—ached—to get into. But, that had been taken from me, too.

“Up ’til then, even though she said she had Doctor Viktor Freisler wrapped around her little finger, Ludi hadn’t been able to convince me to ‘organize’ the supply room. Oh, I knew she was taking things here and there—bandages, ointments for trench foot—that kind of thing. But she was crafty and she didn’t have to rely on stealing from just the infirmary. She had ‘Canada,’ too. You could buy off an
SS-Totenkopfverbände
—a young German guard—for a half-pint of
schnapps
, or a kiss . . .

“It was about a week before my birthday and Ludi said, ‘You’ve been eating a little better and now that you look a little better, Gia’—she called me that, a nickname for Eligia and I’d never had any nickname before—‘and Rudi’—Rudi was one of her swains, ‘Rudi has a friend named Frederic, and he would like to spend a little time with you . . . ’”

I knew who Frederic was. He had blond hair and green eyes, a grin like my father’s. If he weren’t German—if he were Polish—I’d have had a hopeless crush on him. Still, he was very good looking, and Ludi said he was nice.

“Take your time,” Stella Johansson, said. She could see I was struggling to get this out; she didn’t even glance at the thin bracelet watch on her wrist to check how long I’d been talking. She was very pretty; even the weak, intermittent late April sun brought out the golden highlights in her soft brown upswept hair. She was so much like Ludi, I thought maybe I could tell her everything. Tell her how, without meaning to, I betrayed my mother for a pair of red high-heeled shoes.
Red shoes . . .

Red shoes . . . and a broken tooth.

Stella Johansson was so pretty, I thought she’d understand better—more clearly—if I explained about my father and Ruta and my mother. Surely, as a good-looking
grown-up
woman, she knew the significance—the importance—of physical appearance. “When my father disappeared, there was a postcard,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “That was such a low trick the Nazis played. Giving those early prisoners postcards making them say all was well and that inmates could receive packages. The SS got more goods for the Reich, they got addresses of others who would, in turn, become prisoners. They falsely assured those not yet rounded up that things were not so bad in the camps. All lies . . . and more subterfuge . . . ”

Stella was right about the postcards, but the one written in my father’s hasty scribble also said “I have seen Ruta in the women’s camp.” I never understood why he’d tell my mother that he’d seen the woman he left her for in 1939. Maybe he mixed up the cards and meant to send that one to his brother or a close friend—maybe it was a Nazi prank after they’d beaten out of him the names of his colleagues, the details of his life.

All I knew was they’d been arguing for a year or more. He told my mother that she was sad and angry all the time. She was no fun, she’d let herself get unkempt, sloppy—
niechlujny!
he kept shouting at her in Polish. The other nurses at the hospital worked just as hard and they looked all right. Ruta worked with him in the operating room and
she
looked fine. Ruta liked laughing, liked a bit of fun. “The war is going to kill us all,” he yelled. He was packing his suitcase. “And I mean to have a little joy, a little beauty! Before the Nazis kill us all, I’m going to have just
one
summer rose.
Tylkojeden zanim umrę!” Just
one
before I die!

I was angry at her. If she’d just fix herself up, I said over and over, maybe my father would come back. Instead, two years later there was the postcard from Dachau:
I have seen Ruta!

“I don’t know what your situation was during the war,” I said to the clerk, “but surely it’s a human desire to look your best. A human right—a God-given right.” I seemed to notice for the first time there was a tiny diamond ring winking on the third finger of her left hand. “My mother had her chance—but she said it was more important to live—
to work: therefore to live
—good looks would take care of themselves when there was time that belonged to us again.”

“What happened, Eligia?”

She’s so pretty
, I thought.
Whatever she may have suffered during the war, she’s attractive again. Desirable. She’s engaged. Happy . . .

But could I really tell her? Tell her that Ludi and I stole three quarter-grain morphine tablets to be exchanged in “Canada” for a certain pair of real Parisian red high-heeled shoes to be worn on a special date in three days’ time? That the shoes were safely hidden and I was in a fever of excitement when I broke my tooth the morning of my birthday? Should I tell this kindly Red Cross clerk, whose life was apparently so tidy? Should I tell her . . .

We—Ludi and I—were in the supply room, my confidence was shattered. I had one of the dental mirrors and I was trying to smile so that the broken tooth—the little dog tooth on the lower left—wouldn’t show. “Is it very bad? I’m so embarrassed. That lousy bread! If only I’d had a toothbrush or vitamin C tablets—it never would have happened!”

“You can get it fixed later, Gia—the war is almost over. I’m going to dress you up to the nines tonight—lipstick and everything!”

My head was swimming
. A real date. One of Ludi’s dresses. High heels—from Paris!

“Let’s take two more of the tablets—you have one, give the other to Frederic—he’ll think you’re a movie star and you’ll be feeling no pain—that’s a guarantee!”

As I watched her, she shook out three tablets.

“But, you said
two
—”

There was a fierce rattling sound and the door was flung open.

Standing there, with the angriest look on her face I’d ever seen was my mother.

“What happened, Eligia?” Stella Johansson said again. “Why did we find you—like the female
kapos
and the SS guards who were forced by the Americans—carrying the dead and flinging them into the mass graves?”

It was a punishment detail, I knew—the guards were made to understand what they’d done all during the war and then just before liberation. Running away, leaving thousands to starve, leaving the dead unburied . . . the Americans rounded them up and brought them back.

“What happened? Do you remember?”

But I could not tell her that I stayed mute when Ludi turned my mother in, told the doctor my mother
(a nurse! a healer!)
had been saving other mothers by stilling the lives of their newborn babies. I could not tell her that just two days before the camp was liberated, I saw my mother’s face there among the heaps of bodies no one had cleared from the gas chambers . . . .The frenzied attempt by the Nazis to disguise the horrors of what they’d done all those long years. A final solution. I could not tell her that I knew the war was essentially over, that we’d be free soon, but that I kept quiet to wear red heels and lipstick for my birthday date with the young German who would soon no longer be my enemy. I could not tell her that. I could not tell her I was afraid I’d be beaten—or worse—for speaking up. I could not tell her, that I’d realized—too late—that atonement never makes up for the guilt we suffer, for the sins we have committed. I couldn’t tell her that nothing is ever enough to make up for the sin of silence, but we have to try.

Pretty as she was, I didn’t think she’d understand—
really
understand—what I felt when I looked at the mounds of thousands of the dead, lifted their sagging bodies, inhaled the terrible stench from the pits . . . those beaten, starved, shot, and gassed human scarecrows. She’d never understand, because I didn’t understand it myself. I saw my mother’s face, head turned, her mouth in a rictus, her body lying on its side near the gas chamber door. Her work was done.

“Why Eligia?” she asked again. Above us, the sun disappeared behind sudden clouds.

“I helped bury the dead . . . because . . . it was the human thing to do,” I said, “and I know that from my nurses training, from my work in the hospital.”

Arbeit Macht Frei
.

Work can set you free.

THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN

Neil Gaiman

She has the
dream again that night.

In the dream, she is standing, with her brothers and her sister, on the edge of the battlefield. It is summer, and the grass is a peculiarly vivid shade of green: a wholesome green, like a cricket pitch or the welcoming slope of the South Downs as you make your way north from the coast. There are bodies on the grass. None of the bodies are human; she can see a centaur, its throat slit, on the grass near her. The horse half of it is a vivid chestnut. Its human skin is nut-brown from the sun. She finds herself staring at the horse’s penis, wondering about centaurs mating, imagines being kissed by that bearded face. Her eyes flick to the cut throat, and the sticky red-black pool that surrounds it, and she shivers.

Flies buzz about the corpses.

The wildflowers tangle in the grass. They bloomed yesterday for the first time in . . . how long? A hundred years? A thousand? A hundred thousand? She does not know.

All this was snow, she thinks, as she looks at the battlefield.

Yesterday, all this was snow. Always winter, and never Christmas.

Her sister tugs her hand, and points. On the brow of the green hill they stand, deep in conversation. The lion is golden, his arms folded behind his back. The witch is dressed all in white. Right now she is shouting at the lion, who is simply listening. The children cannot make out any of their words, not her cold anger, nor the lion’s thrum-deep replies. The witch’s hair is black and shiny, her lips are red.

In her dream she notices these things.

They will finish their conversation soon, the lion and the witch . . .

There are things about herself that the professor despises. Her smell, for example. She smells like her grandmother smelled, like old women smell, and for this she cannot forgive herself, so on waking she bathes in scented water and, naked and towel-dried, dabs several drops of Chanel toilet water beneath her arms and on her neck. It is, she believes, her sole extravagance.