Deviation Read online

  “Some make love, but the men have to sneak in, and are risking their lives.”

  “What did I tell you?” he laughs. “And you?”

  “Me, no.”

  After a moment, Louis replies, “Too bad,” and turns his back.

  A big hand moves toward me across the space between me and the other bunk bed. Starts groping the blankets. An arm follows, a hairy face appears.

  My throat is dry. I reach out toward Louis. He sits up abruptly.

  “What’s wrong?” He lights a match. He deals a sharp blow to the fingers that have reached my breast.

  The hand retracts like a mechanical device.

  “Leave her alone, she’s my girl,” Louis hisses.

  The hairy face vanishes with a grunt.

  Louis makes me change places with him and moves over to my pallet. I stare into the shadows. In front of me, in the semi-darkness, on the upper level of the bunk across the way, I gradually make out a jumble of bodies from which tangled arms and legs stick out, stretching and contracting like multiple blind antennae of huge snails. I close my eyes, the rancid smell of the blanket in my nose.

  “Squeeze in!” an excited voice yells.

  “Don’t slump on top of me!” another one pants, out of breath. Teasing, suggestive remarks, rude catcalls then spill out, as if a repressed effusiveness, lying in wait, had been given the green light to emerge. Occasional drowsy voices wearily break their silence.

  It’s true, escape is merely a superficial remedy; the essentials remain unchanged.

  Louis isn’t sleeping; he lights a cigarette.

  “Don’t cry,” he whispers. He leans over me. “They’re just a bunch of poor bastards.”

  Having been exposed, I cry even more.

  When I wake up, I feel hemmed in: there are people standing up around the beds, chatting, their heads bent forward under the beams of the upper bunks; others are sitting up on top with their legs dangling over; while others still are milling around in the narrow aisles between the beds, backs leaning against the wood frames. Anemic, evasive faces, dark circles under sunken eyes, stick figures made of rotten, measly wood, entrenched filth.

  Yet observing those sordid, anxious creatures, I feel like I’ve been part of this misery, which breathes around me like swamp air on an abandoned daffodil, from time immemorial.

  Louis’s pallet is empty. There is a package with my name. I take it and unwrap it: in it I find a big piece of bread with two sausages. No one says a word to me. I hide the bundle in my coverall. I go wash up in the corridor, plunging my arms into the bucket and rubbing my face with the bracing water.

  The word spreads swiftly like a gust of wind: “Police.”

  The camp empties. I go outside; to the left of the door, in the courtyard, there’s a gate through which they all leave with a show of nonchalance, scattering along the way.

  It’s raining. The snow has disintegrated into a dreary gray slush.

  I walk until I come to a desolate, welcoming cemetery. I go inside; there are no crosses or cypresses. It seems like the old garden of an enchanted castle where everyone has been turned to stone. I stroll along slowly and say a prayer at random: like when I was a little girl and would amuse myself sitting at the window, watching the passersby and mentally reciting the “Angel of God” for figures whom I chose aimlessly, on a whim.

  I eat my bread and sausage, savoring them slowly, and spend the day there until, turning quickly, I notice that the shadows are lengthening, reaching out everywhere like absorbent stains, and that the light descending through the latticework of foliage is becoming more and more spidery and tenuous. I race out, bump into a red house starkly exposed on the sidewalk, and return to the camp.

  I lie down on my pallet in the darkest corner. The shadows thicken. Louis is nowhere in sight. I’m afraid, what if he doesn’t come back? I should try to get some information. But since leaving Dachau I’ve set myself a goal: to go unnoticed, mix in completely with the crowd.

  I don’t want to die.

  Finally, Louis shows up. I sit up on the mattress. He jerks his head toward the door.

  “Come with me.”

  I follow him happily.

  He turns to me and winks: “Let’s go get to know Thomasbräu.”

  In the mist dissolved by the muted red glow of twilight, it seems to me, in my sudden contentment, that the houses with their intermittently illuminated windows are twinkling at me like the befuddled, shiny faces of regulars in a smoke-filled, crowded tavern.

  It’s as if things were waking up from a hazy languor. Even Louis is different than he was yesterday.

  We go into Thomasbräu. A room with solid tables and benches, walls paneled halfway up in wood, dignified deer antlers of various sizes and branches mounted high on the walls, beer steins. A lot of noisy people, foreigners.

  To the right is another room with small, intimate tables, white tablecloths and small vases of flowers, swanky customers, a subtle chamber orchestra: the Germans’ dining room.

  Louis shows me to a seat in the wood-paneled room, next to a couple whom he greets with a quick wave of his right index finger, and sits down beside me.

  “Here you are, Lucie. These friends will protect you, since I rarely stay at the camp, so I’m putting you in their hands. They already know who you are.”

  The woman is young, with a marmoreal complexion, gentle, remote blue eyes, cropped shaggy hair; she’s in an advanced state of pregnancy. The man has very dark skin and hair, dark eyes; he’s older, with the deep-set wrinkles typical of peasants from the south. He immediately explains to me, in the broken French of emigrants, that the signora is Polish, while he is Sicilian.

  “I’m Italian too,” I say, smiling.

  “Oh.” He nods soberly. “Good,” he says, then proceeds to tell me the story of his companion. “Her husband, a Polish patriot, was shot by the Nazis and she was deported to Germany and placed here to await the delivery. After which they intend to shoot her.” He gestures as he talks, but his tone of voice is composed and his hands sometimes pause in midair. “I love her, I want to adopt her child, they won’t make a Nazi out of him.” His face contracts. He relaxes his jaw: “I want to marry her,” he says with a slight bow to his beloved. “She’s very intelligent.” He smiles at her. “She’s already learning a little Italian. I work for a German civilian and I’m trying to find a way out. I have less than two months’ time,” he says, a gleam of frantic resolution in his eyes. The woman looks at him with patient tenderness. The Sicilian continues:

  “Louis told me to watch over you too. So then, always stay close to Dunja, no one will do anything to you.”

  The woman smiles at me.

  Louis looks at his watch.

  “I’ll leave you now. I have to go.”

  “Go and don’t worry,” the Sicilian replies in French, clapping him on the shoulder with a certain respect.

  Louis waves goodbye to everyone and without turning around goes away.

  At the camp, I lie down next to Dunja.

  *

  The days go by without a ripple.

  Louis shows up now and then, to take me to the movies. He doesn’t talk much. Sometimes I catch him studying me on the sly, but as soon as he sees that I’ve noticed, he won’t look at me again all evening.

  The Sicilian man gives me food.

  “Thank you. But how can I repay you?”

  “Forget it. Louis takes care of everything. All I do is bring it.”

  “But Louis too, how will I pay him back?”

  “Don’t worry about it. If he hasn’t asked you for it, it means he doesn’t want anything.”

  The side door of the camp opens onto the yard of an ice factory, where the French prisoners of war, who are housed on the upper floors of our building, work.

  I’ve never gone up to their quarters, but they say they have a lot more space than us and many more amenities. They are French soldiers who refused to become civilian workers. I discover that they are doubly
well-off because not only are they respected by everyone for practically being heroes of the Resistance, but they also work two steps away from where they live, earn a salary, regularly receive packages from the Red Cross, have proper uniforms that are periodically replaced, also by the Red Cross, and inspire a certain awe in the Germans, on whom they occasionally lavish such unavailable delicacies as coffee and chocolate, which they get in their care packages. Finally, they have all the women they want, between the German girls attracted by the goodies, the strapping military bearing, and the chic French aura, and the women in our camp who look up to them as Prince Charmings, and to whom they resort only in the absence of someone better, and then with a certain arrogant condescension. They do not seem politicized, unlike others I’ve met before. In fact, on the ground floor, where they rarely set foot, they look down on the banished criminals more so than on the new arrivals. Indeed, they only ever show up here in order to choose some appetizing, compliant girl from among the newcomers.

  The ground floor, for its part, liberally returns their contempt, referring to them collectively as the law-abiding ones upstairs.

  We are the unlawful ones.

  Still, they don’t bother anyone and they make it a point of honor never to know anything when the Germans question them about one of us. Finally, when they work the night shift at their factory, they aren’t the least interested in our own comings and goings in their yard.

  On the other side, our odd camp verges on the courtyard of the Labor Bureau: a rather dirty quad, surrounded by low buildings with dust-covered, frosted glass windows.

  Every so often I get in line with the new arrivals at the Bureau to receive, like them, a bowl of soup with two slices of bread, the daily ration the Bureau distributes to those it assists.

  But I have another source of personal income.

  I go to Thomasbräu with a group. I was commissioned by our bunkmates to sell their cigarettes on the black market to the Germans in the non-pariah room, where there are laundered tablecloths, clean doilies, and vases of flowers on the tables. I get a percentage for this job. I know what to do at a glance, can immediately distinguish the tightfisted Germans, the ones appalled by the boisterous carrying-on in our room, the stern, guarded types, and the more indulgent ones—especially the young people and soldiers who enjoy watching the comings and goings in our ward.

  Often I trade the cigarettes for food coupons. Then we eat and sing until the dead of night. Sometimes I sit in a corner and remind myself, “Here I will not do as I did at the K-Lager, in Dachau. Here I will resist. I will hold out until the end. I won’t do anything impulsive. I will be one of them, like them, at all times, and that’s that.”

  But as usual, we are out of money and have to leave the waitresses at the Thomasbräu pawns, which later we will not redeem. Stolen stuff.

  There is a small humpbacked waitress, a spinster who shows great sympathy for all of us, her chest heaving with compassionate sighs, but she is a very greedy, cunning usurer, with bulging eyes that make her look like a fly.

  Most of our time, however, is spent at the camp, where we pass the long hours of the day killing body lice.

  We strip and, by the feeble light that filters through the windowpanes, the grayish light from the yard, we search through our clothes, all of us women in the corner, hunting for those repulsive insects; we ball them up between our fingers like children do boogers, and crush them. I have a smooth rock I use for the purpose.

  Some are very swollen, gray with pale streaks, their step wobbly due to their big bellies; others have dark spots, some intensely brown; the ugliest, the most sprightly, splatter like worms. There, in the cobwebs of light, in the mud-colored shadows of the large room, those multipedes clinging to the fabric of our clothing and blankets gleam like bronze.

  What’s more, I’ve always been quite an expert at this, even at Dachau: at night I wake up to a well-known itch, feel about cautiously, and suddenly pounce on the scurrying insect. Then I toss it on the floor, not bothering to squash it.

  I’ve also discovered that body lice keep you warm.

  Louis was right. It’s not at all risky living a few yards away from the Labor Bureau. It would appear that our lawlessness here is the natural offspring of the Bureau, and it sometimes seems strange to me that I was surprised at first, as though they were in any way opposed.

  Just as incest and adultery thrive in repressive countries with extremely rigid customs, their thousand tentacles protected by a code of silence, undisturbed as long as appearances are preserved, and therefore nurtured by that same intransigence, so we are the most authentic product of the great Nazi machine that manufactures the most obsessive control and discipline in existence, and it is therefore only logical and right for us to be sheltered by its wing.

  Armed with this elementary discovery, I wander without misgivings through the area of the Labor Bureau, smiling at my earlier anxieties.

  I’ve also made several visits to the Labor Bureau building itself, to overhear what was being said about some panicked escapee.

  It’s a yellow building, the walls flaking, with endless small offices lining interminable corridors, large windows with blank, inert light, lifeless employees sagging behind their desks, and long rows of workers used to being obsequious but somewhat disillusioned by the bloodless impersonality of the law. More than anything else, willing to endure it, despite the exhaustion of hours standing in line in front of cramped windows, where the presenting and return of documents that open the way to social assurance is purposely complicated and difficult.

  Sometimes a German escorted by two SS suddenly storms into the camp during the evening roll call or at some other opportune moment and, after stationing his guards in front of the exits, demands the documents of everyone present.

  There have been some fruitful raids. But given the intensity of the criminal life going on at our place, the chances of arrest are minimal compared to those anywhere else, and are not worthy of serious consideration.

  I come to learn that Louis, in particular, is wanted by the police.

  Generally, however, the inspections are harmless. Some Germans burst in, already in a great hurry to get out of this grim, dangerous place.

  If I don’t have time to hide under a bed, I tag along, preceding them, repeating the unintelligible foreign names that they don’t understand, pronouncing the syllables clearly. I accompany them back to the door and they routinely forget to ask me for my documents as well.

  Louis is an epileptic. During his seizures, his frenzy is treacherous, unexpected. His mouth becomes rigid and his eyes remain wide open, unmoving. He thrashes and kicks in fits and starts, his expression demented, but in him even this rage seems premeditated. I sit with him during the long unconscious periods that follow his seizures, and I’m the only one who does, because he has no friends, except for the Sicilian, who is often absent; I put compresses on his forehead while he looks at me with a yearning, sweet expression, not seeing me.

  *

  Sendlinger Tor Platz is a meeting place for foreigners. A large irregular square surrounded by low shops, with a skimpy little park in the middle. There are even benches for Polen and Osten, that is, for Poles and Russians, and cafés for foreigners, Osten included, as the many signs explain. One side of the square is closed off by a wooden pen, the kind in which livestock are crammed during the large regional cattle fairs. I like to wander around in there. This is the foreigners’ market, where they officially have the right to trade clothing, tobacco, and stuff to eat.

  Foreigners of all nationalities, mostly Slavs, push and shove around ghastly red dresses, green socks, brown handkerchiefs, stale loaves of bread, and moldy packs of tobacco, whose price is sky high. They touch the goods, they shrug.

  You think you’re living in a silent film because everyone is jostling and gesturing and none of the buyers speak. All you hear is a muted buzzing, as though from a movie camera.

  At times you witness a fight, silent at first, which
then degenerates into threats from the contenders and incitements from the spectators who egg them on and snicker.

  While I roam around idly, I come across Louis. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t recognize me. He turns away looking irritated. I’m about to call out to him, but he’s slipping a roll of marks out of the pocket of a bony man. His expression is preoccupied and slightly tense.

  I deliberately pass in front of him again and stop.

  “Louis,” I say. The money has already disappeared. He raises his eyes without surprise, looks at me sharply, and disappears. I search the crowd, but I can’t find him.

  I buy a pair of plush clogs with wooden soles for sixteen marks—the fruit of my latest speculations at Thomasbräu—and I have just enough money left over for a pair of panties that make me happiest of all because the rough cloth of my pants chafes my skin. Besides, the overalls that I mended are falling apart and, no matter how many hours I spend patching them, a tear occasionally exposes my skin. And in November it’s cold, a cold so intense that I’m always shivering. Though that’s the least of my ordeals.

  Evening is falling, but I’m so satisfied with my purchases that rather than go back to the camp to look for food, I go into the garage of a repair shop nearby. I feel content: I climb in and out of the trucks, enter the drivers’ cabs, jump on the seats, drift from one vehicle to another.

  I’ve just settled into a nice car, landing with a thud on the soft, springy seat, enjoying myself as I put on airs and act like a grande dame, when I freeze. There’s a man hiding in there. It’s Louis. Actually, he’s not hiding, but is quietly stretched out on a seat, smoking, a folded newspaper in his hand. He lights a match, unfazed, smiles at me. Just then I forget about his stealing and in my euphoria I tell him about my purchases. I show him the clogs and he keeps striking matches to consider them.

  He looks at me without speaking. He no longer has the ironic manner of the other evening. He is always either very shy with me or abrupt or hesitant, as if he were afraid of doing something wrong, before he finally gets up the nerve and speaks in argot.

  He hands me vouchers and money for supper, but as I’m about to take them, I unfortunately remember his theft at Sendlinger Tor Platz.