“Nix Panienka” (No girl), one of them slurred.
Thankfully I wasn’t a good enough substitute, and leaning against each other, they slithered off. When the drunken shouts stopped and the truck’s diesel motor clattered to life, I assured Trautchen that the danger was over. She was trembling, so I doubt she noticed that I was, too. I lay back down and she brought her head out from under the covers. She pressed herself against my body and kissed me on the mouth. A soft warmth overtook me.
We remained locked in an embrace for a few moments, then she ran her hand over my body. I held my breath. In the darkness I was sure she was turning expectant eyes toward me. My time in the camps had rendered me impotent, but I was hoping that her caresses would cure me. I began to panic. Nothing was happening down there. It would be unbearably embarrassing to tell her the truth. She wouldn’t understand, since everyone in Wustrow seemed so ignorant about the camps. Where the hell is Arthur? Why hasn’t he checked to see if everything is all right? Was he that sure I could keep his niece safe or was he playing the sly matchmaker?
“Dass kann ich deinem Onkel nicht antun” (I can’t do that to your uncle), I lied.
She untangled herself from me and dropped into the chair, sobbing convulsively. I couldn’t stand it. Embarrassed and feeling guilty, I slinked out of the greenhouse and spent the rest of the night on the dock. When Trautchen announced the next morning that she would feel safer hiding at a neighbor’s house, Arthur gave me a strange look but never asked any questions.
The Soviets had requisitioned the front room of a small house by the marketplace for the mayor’s office. The room was empty except for a wobbly table and two mismatched chairs.
“Will you help me as long as you’re here?” Arthur asked.
“As your secretary?”
“No. You’ll be the putz. The two of us might be able to put some order to this mess.”
Putz was German slang for “cop.” Me a flic, in Germany?
“Why not,” I said.
“If the Führer could only see us now,” Arthur laughed as he dragged one of the chairs behind the table and completed his first mayoral duty, making himself comfortable.
Mrs. Novak made me an armband with Polizei stitched on it.
My main function was to take reports from the rape victims. In Arthur’s ledger I would write the woman’s name, put little crosses for each occurrence, and then lie that I would notify the Soviet commandant. The ledger was filled in no time, and I wondered how many bastard Russian children were now on their way. The biggest problem, though, was that venereal diseases of all kinds were spreading like wildfire through the countryside, and there was no medicine to treat them.
My knowledge of languages was Arthur’s greatest asset. Displaced people trying to make their way home came to the office every day, and it was my job to decipher their needs. When a group of Greek Jews came looking for help, we conversed in Spanish, a language that had been handed down to them when their ancestors fled the Spanish Inquisition. English was the only way I could communicate with a Serbian professor. With Jews who had been rounded up during Rommel’s campaign in Libya and Tunisia, I spoke French. Unfortunately, on matters of repatriation, the most I could do was point them in the direction of the Soviet garrison, but few dared to seek them out. Rumors were rampant that the Red Army was rounding up able-bodied refugees to rebuild the devastated USSR.
Arthur and I were able to provide short-term shelter to some of these errant souls, leading them to the still-vacant country manor.
I would ask any female I even suspected of spending time in a camp if she had crossed paths with a young French girl with red hair who had been in Auschwitz. The answer was always the same.
During dinner one night I made the mistake of talking about all the crosses in the ledger. Mrs. Novak was devastated. Feeling guilty, I tried to lighten the mood. “It’s ironic. There’s no happy medium.
Here are all these women, many of them now widows, who during the war dreamed of tender, romantic companionship. The Russians are only helping them catch up on lost time.”
I thought it was funny, but Mrs. Novak was incensed and stormed out of the dining room. Arthur shrugged. “You shouldn’t have joked about that. My wife has no sense of humor about those types of things. She was raised by a stern Lutheran mother who believed sex was dirty.”
Oh, you poor man, I thought.
Mrs. Novak gave me the cold shoulder for days, which made staying under their roof unbearable. On reflection, I realized I had messed up, but I didn’t think my off-color humor was crude enough for an apology. To my surprise, the following Sunday Mrs. Novak invited me to go to church with her.
“No disrespect, but four horses couldn’t drag me there. The clergy of all religions make a good living selling you a hereafter that they have no proof exists.”
“Well, I read the Bible every night,” she shot back.
“The people who wrote the Bible all those years ago would be writing romance novels now.”
“Your soul will burn in hell.”
Mrs. Novak was spitting mad. I thought she might even slap me, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “Mrs. Novak, the Bible says God created man in his own image, right? Well, I have seen men at their worst, and if there is a God he had better get off his ass and find a new blueprint.”
She never asked me to church again.
One morning a Cossack colonel, wearing a Persian lamb hat and black uniform weighted down with medals, rode into Wustrow on a white stallion. I watched from the window as he tied his horse to a lamppost next to “city hall.” With a cartridge belt slung across his torso, saber, and polished black boots, it was as if he had charged straight off the pages of War and Peace. As a child I attended a performance of the Don Cossacks with my parents, but none of those men cut such an impressive figure. Arthur and I froze when the colonel stepped inside our office. It seemed extraordinary that a man dressed for a ball at the Summer Palace would want to speak with us.
“My name is Boris,” he announced in Old German. “For the time being I’m the senior officer of the garrison.”
He explained that he and his soldiers were passing through with a massive herd of cattle that they had driven all the way from Bavaria, and he was now waiting for transportation either by sea or rail. Otherwise he would have to drive the cattle through Poland, which meant he wouldn’t reach Russia till the onset of winter. The herd and his men were now camped at the lakeshore.
Hesitantly, I asked the colonel if he had learned German in school. He fixed his gaze on me and furrowed his brow. “I was adopted by a Volga German family whose ancestors had settled in Russia centuries ago. When the Germans approached Stalingrad, they were all deported to Siberia.”
When he learned that I was from France, he demanded that I be the one to shave his head every morning. I didn’t dare refuse.
Was he under the impression that every Frenchman was a barber?