I felt her breath and the warmth of her body. As she thrust the eggs and her hands deep into the pockets of my tunic, her fingers pressed against my hips. My startled eyes rolled in my head, as I waited for the order to disengage. But the order didn’t come, and the bold fingers of the enemy kneaded my flesh through the double folds of my pockets.
“For the love of God! Danke schön… Danke schön!”
I wanted to make the quickest possible departure no matter what she thought of me.
She was now so close an embrace seemed inescapable. Her smile was one of certain anticipation, and her eyes were rolling feverishly.
Mein Gott!
I braced myself for her cry of “Ourrah pobieda.” There were two possible courses of action, as I saw it. I could withdraw in a hurry and risk cracking my skull at the bottom of the ladder, or counterattack, rolling my adversary into the hay.
However, these calculations came too late. The woman, who must have weighed at least twenty pounds more than I did, suddenly enlaced me, adroitly pushing me to the left, so that I lost my balance. I found myself gesticulating in vain desperation beneath a massive enemy. One of her hands was already busy with the fly of my new synthetic trousers. The eggs in both pockets were broken, and my gun, which was slung behind my back, was no use to me.
If the Fuhrer ever saw me like that, I’d be thrown out of the Gross Deutschland for good, shipped off to one of the Brandenburg disciplinary battalions. To complete my downfall, my ravisher, who was clearly more accustomed to manipulating an axe handle than the personal appendage in question, had grabbed me, and was making me jerk and shudder like an invalid with a severe case of hiccoughs. I might perhaps have been able to oblige her, if the Polska, in the height of her frenzy, hadn’t suddenly flung up her petticoats over the obese folds of her stomach and thighs. This spectacle destroyed the minimal desire my predicament might have aroused in me, and the delicious memory of Paula offered a contrast which was too absurd. With a brusque twist of my body, I freed myself from this female in rut, who was exciting herself without any cooperation from me. Her somewhat porcine face, in which, a few moments before, I might have found a certain charm, now wore an expression of bovine ecstasy. I stood up and turned out my pockets, which were filled with liquid egg and broken shell. My companion regained some measure of self-control and tried to laugh, suddenly afraid that her audacity might provoke severe consequences. In a flash, I was at the bottom of the ladder, gesturing to the women to bring me something to clean off my jacket. I myself was worried about the consequences the stains on my uniform might bring down on me. I tried to look furious, but an overpowering sense of inadequacy made me flush hotly instead.
The Polska, half smiling, half uneasy, led me over to the house. We went through a door which opened outward, down a few steps, and then through a second door which opened inward.
The house was built into the ground to a depth of about two and a half feet. We came into a dark, low-ceilinged room with a single tiny window, whose yellowish panes admitted very little light. The building was divided by a heavy wooden grate — one side was for people, the other for animals. This explained the fetid smell which I noticed as soon as the door was open. A couple of pigs were being fattened just beyond the grate. The wide benches built against the grate and covered with straw ticks were obviously the beds. An old woman turned toward us as we came in. She smiled with the indifference of a sphinx, I doubt if the idea of “a German” even existed for her. Two children were playing on a woodpile which stood in the middle of the room. The Polska brought me some water in a wooden dipper, like the ones used in Russia for measuring millet. I had to take off my tunic, and reveal the extent of my deprivation. The pullover my mother had sent me over a year and a half before no longer had any sleeves below the elbow, and the waistband had become a scant, lacelike fringe.
I was preparing to wash my tunic when the Polska took it from me. She rubbed the stains between a round stone and a stiff straw implement shaped like a large cork. With a graciousness which almost excused her excesses of a few minutes earlier, she returned my tunic, which was clean once more. I didn’t dare smile lest I rekindle her amorous fury. However, all of that seemed to have been forgotten. These Polish peasants seemed curiously primitive, living wholly in the present, unburdened by any thoughts of the past or the future. I said goodbye, thrusting out my stiffened arm in a regulation salute.
While the old woman on the bench smiled — a smile which seemed to cross a gulf of several millennia — the younger one rummaged through a heap of cooking pots which stood on the table. She found an egg and held it out to me.
I accepted it, not knowing what expression to put on to disguise my embarrassment. The egg recalled the loft of recent history. I could feel myself blushing as I went through my pockets for the correct change. However, the woman gestured to me that I need not pay. Still embarrassed, I withdrew in a flurry of “danke schöns.”
I had already taken a few strides away from the house when the door behind me opened again. The woman stood there calling me, holding out the gun which I had left propped against the table.
How humiliating!
I recovered myself with another sequence of voluminous thanks, and feeling ridiculous, straightened my back and tried to look stern, to make up for what had happened. I knew that this episode was destined to lighten the evening hours of these people, and found it hard to forgive myself. What an idiot — to survive the battle of Belgorod, only to get my pants torn off by a fat Polish mama! I might be a proud member of a proud regiment, but all I had to show for it was a single egg, and an experience I wasn’t going to disclose in a hurry for fear my friends would rip off my pants again, to make sure she hadn’t stolen anything.
“Why didn’t you tell us right away?” they asked me later.
“We would all have gone there, and all insisted on it. Reprisals, you know!” Spring burst out with sudden brutality. On the Eastern Front, things were going from bad to worse, but our training continued in the spirit of an athletic team preparing for a competition. Even more extraordinary, our schedule of exercises was markedly reduced, and we were often given free half days. These were in fact necessary, to give us time to forage and keep adequately fed. Our official rations had been cut back again, and now amounted to a starvation diet. The two villages closest to the camp had almost nothing left to give us, and we had to go farther afield in search of the calories which were largely consumed by our comings and goings. We took up fishing in the Dniester. Unfortunately, we had neither the proper equipment nor any local knowledge. Three times, Herr Hauptmann Wesreidau went with us. As an officer, he had appropriated a certain number of explosive devices, which made the operation profitable. Some pools produced giant fish.
There was also an accident. Two fellows who went out to look for food disappeared. Their friends said they’d gone toward the mountains. Two days went by without any news of them. No one knew anything about them in the villages where we asked. It sounded like partisans. We sent out two search parties, which did, in fact, run into partisans, and suffered five stupid deaths without finding a trace of the missing men.