Of course, I am not unfamiliar with hand-to-hand combat, as I showed, I think, on the Iraqi front in the Great War. However, in those cases my adversaries were nearly always gravely injured or else incapacitated by hunger or disease. And later, in my Rossbach period, whilst there were firefights und so, there was no rough stuff, no wet stuff, unless you count that business with the schoolteacher in Parchim, and in that instance I enjoyed a distinct numerical advantage (5 to 1, no?). Anyway, all that was 20 years ago, and since then I’ve just been a glorified bureaucrat, sitting at a desk with my bottom gradually oozing and seeping over the hardbacked chair.
Now I don’t claim you have to be a genius to understand what I’m getting at. I cannot do the necessary — that which would restore order and contentment, and job security, to the orange villa: I can’t beat her up (and then give the giant witch a sound tup in the master bedroom). She’s too fucking big.
And little Alisz Seisser — Alisz is no more formidable than Paulette. She knows her place and retreats to it the very instant the Sturmbannfuhrer starts to glower!
*
‘Stop this snivelling at once. Listen, it happens all the time all over the world. No need to make a song and dance about it.’
The stool, the chemical toilet, the cauldron of water at last starting to bubble on the office hotplate…
‘Oh brighten up, Alisz. A clean termination. It’s something you should celebrate — over a bottle of gin in a scalding bath! Nicht? Come on, let’s see a smile… Ach. Wha wha wha. All right. It’s ½ past. It’s time. Wha wha wha wha wha. Now can you pull yourself together, young lady, on your own steam? Or d’you need another slap in the face?’
… She brought a fair bit of clobber with her, did Miriam Luxemburg.
1st she unfolded a portable stand (it looked like a miniature operating table) and laid it all out on a blue cloth: syringe, speculum, clamp, and a long wooden stick with a sharp, crenellated metal loop at the end of it. The instruments seemed to be of reasonable quality — far, far better than the gardener’s kitbag to which even SS sawbones periodically resort.
‘Is it just me,’ I said with perfect calm, ‘or was there a whisper of spring in the air today?’
A trifle miffed, perhaps, by my repeated deferments of the procedure, Luxemburg gave a wan smile, and Alisz, who had a kind of leather thong in her mouth by this stage, made no reply (and of course she hadn’t been outdoors for a considerable period of time). Wearing a white singlet, the patient lay on the stripped and towel-padded cot with her legs apart and her knees up.
‘How long does it take again?’
‘20 minutes if things go smoothly.’
‘There. Hear that, Frau Seisser? No need for all that song and dance about it.’
I had intended to make myself scarce the moment the business began, as I’m very fastidious about all matters pertaining to females and their tubes. But I stayed whilst Luxemburg applied the cleansing solution and injected the local. And I lingered as she went about the process of dilation — the speculum, with its reverse-tweezer effect. And I remained for the curettage.
It was most odd. I searched my senses for squeamishness — and squeamishness just wasn’t there.
When I drove Luxemburg back to the Hygienic Institute (and handed over the paper bag containing the additional 400 Davidoffs), I asked how long it would take — before little Alisz was her old self again.
On April 20th, of course, we celebrated a certain someone’s 54th birthday. A rather subdued occasion in the Officers’ Mess, with Wolfram doing the honours as toastmaster.
‘Dem Prophet der Deutschen Status, Selbstachtung, Prestige, und Integritat restauriert!’
‘… Einverstanden.’
‘Der Mann der seinen Arsch mit dem Diktat von Versailles abgewischt!’
‘… Ganz bestimmt.’
‘Der Grosster Feldherr aller Zeiten!’
‘… Richtig.’
The only partygoer who responded with any verve, apart from myself and young Wolfram (the dear boy’d got slightly sozzled), was my wife.
‘So,’ I murmured, ‘you’ve entered into the birthday spirit.’
‘I have,’ she murmured back.
Hannah was making a thorough spectacle of herself, as usual. Dressed like a common prostitute, she cheered the myriad salutations (far too loudly), and then devoted herself to satirical titters — aimed at the decorous solemnity of the prevailing mood. I closed my eyes and thanked the Lord: Fritz Mobius was on furlough.
‘Yes, I’m in the birthday spirit,’ she said, ‘because with any luck it’ll be his last. Now how will the miserable little wanker do himself in? I suppose he’s got some sordid pill — you know, put by for a rainy day. Did they give you 1 too? Do they give them to all their key wankers? Or are you not key enough?’
‘High treason. And richly deserving’, I said with composure, ‘of the supreme penalty… Yes, that’s the way. Get your laughing done with.’
I just want to see the look on her face.
It’s aspergegillosis now: fungus on the lungs.
The equestrian academy won’t hear of taking Meinrad back, so I proposed selling him to the schmierig muleskinner — as scrap. The result? Good God, no end of juvenile caterwauling. In this respect Sybil’s just as bad as Paulette. They practically live in Meinrad’s filthy lean-to, stroking him whilst he lies there on his side, panting hard.
You know — I miss Dieter Kruger!
Myself and my muckers had a very good time with him, personally, in ’33, in his cell at Dachau; and he went on to become the wellspring of more vicarious amusement in the period 1934–40. Ach, in my mind I bounced friend Kruger from prison to prison and from camp to camp — I parked him wherever I bloody well liked. And once war neared, why, I had him levelling dunes in Stutthof, quarrying in Flossenburg, licking out the clay pits in Sachsenhausen. Oh, I ran him ragged — and ingeniously enriched his sufferings (solitary, penal Kommando, starvation rations, medical experiment here, 75 lashes there). Anyway, it appears I got somewhat carried away; I overdid it, evidently, and ceased to be believed.
Kruger’s fate was the only thing that held any sway over Hannah. In the old days you could even worm the odd martyred fuck out of her, on the strength of friend Kruger. Ach, how far away, now, those ecstatic meldings seem!
I miss Dieter Kruger.
‘You going to the fireworks?’ asked Fritz Mobius. We were heading for his office, walking past all the file clerks bent over their desks. Bunker 11: Gestapo.
‘The girls’ll be going. I’ll watch it from the garden.’
No talk of Hannah, no talk of spousal discipline: Fritz was darkly preoccupied with the matter at hand.
‘How was your leave?’ I asked (the Mobiuses’ home was in what was left of an apartment block in central Bremen). ‘All beer and skittles?’
‘Oh get away with you,’ he said wearily as he ran his eye down the 1st page of Rupprecht Strunck’s report. ‘So this bastard’s the coordinator on the floor?’
‘Exactly. The NCO, Jenkins, fingered him and then Strunck found his calendar in the tool cabin.’
‘Good. Ach, Paul. No windowpanes, no electricity, no water — it takes till lunch to organise your morning shit. You have to walk 4 blocks to fill the bucket for the flush.’
‘Ja?’
‘Mm. And everyone goes on about potatoes.’ He turned a page and underlined something. ‘There she is, the little woman, boring my prick off about… potatoes. Her mother’s the same. So’s her sister. Potatoes.’
‘Potatoes.’
‘And in the shelter, Jesus Christus, you should see the way they stare at each other’s sandwiches. They ogle, Paul. Hypnotised. It’s pathetic.’ Mobius yawned. ‘Tried to get some rest. So likely. Come on.’