Forgiving the Angel (17 page)

Eva, though, had nothing to add, or perhaps not sufficient interest in adding it, and Inge went on with her crying while Eva went on combing through her hair and crushing the lice between her ragged nails.

In Ravensbruck, Eva had the green insignia of a Block Senior, which made it possible—though with some risk—to visit the new arrivals during their exercise hour, and, since Inge might be an ally here, a place where she had very few, she made that effort.

She spotted the small philosopher at the back wall of the camp, and she was glad to see that Inge hadn’t had her hair cut off; she wouldn’t have any additional reason—beyond Eva’s having destroyed her faith in Stalin—to resent Eva. Another woman, taller and younger, who dragged one foot when she walked, made her way alongside Inge, and both stopped when Eva approached. “Milena from Prague,” the tall woman said, and extended her hand. “Please don’t give me one of your German handshakes. My joints are terribly swollen.”

Eva took the woman’s palm. It felt pleasantly warm, but Eva had seen two women who’d held hands beaten to the ground in front of this wall, and the shorter one of them had died of the wounds to her spleen. She dropped Milena’s hand. Still, Eva’s spirit rose to the surface for a moment, and even looked about. The tall woman had a prisoner’s pallor already—the Gestapo’s jails, no doubt—and her boots were too large for her.

Even that much looking made Eva feel nauseated, like a starving man who ate too large a meal. But before her spirit retreated, she said, “You look like a scarecrow.” Eva was surprised by her own words, and that there had been words at all, but Milena laughed at them in a companionable way.

The path where they stood was a thin strip between the back of the barracks and the high masonry wall topped with electrified barbed wire. The inmates had to walk in a dreary line for the full exercise period, breathing the dust made by their own boots as they walked in a dreary line for the full exercise period. Even the guinea pigs who had been given gangrene in experiments at the infirmary had to lug themselves about on their crutches.

Women tried to push by them, one or two of them kicking at Eva’s calf—these were probably the party militants among the newcomers, already briefed by the comrades about Eva’s “lies.” Milena ignored the other prisoners, and her attitude struck Eva as entitled and presumptuous, but also fascinating, as if Milena thought she was still a free creature.

After a few moments, the three walked together with the others, and Eva was conscious of Milena’s right hand by the side of her dress. It made a slight perturbation in
Eva’s spirit—a reminder of similar foolishness in the past. She’d grown fond of the man in Karaganda who’d shown her how to chop weeds, and his death had made her forget the simplest things. Someone had stolen her boots, and her feet had gotten sores that had become infected.

The Czech woman had been a famous left-wing journalist, and though Inge had told her Eva’s story, she said she wanted to hear directly from her that Stalin could really have betrayed every internationalist principal and delivered antifascist refugees over to Hitler. “I like to ask questions myself,” Milena said, “an old habit—”

“That liked you,” Inge said, “and stayed and never gave notice,” Rilke being to Inge, Eva supposed, what hair had been to the women in Alexanderplatz Prison, the thing that she must not lose if she were to remain herself. To Eva, Rilke’s poetry was another thing, like hair, for which she no longer had a use.

As to Milena’s questions, Eva knew she’d gain nothing from answering them. When she’d first arrived at Ravensbruck, she’d talked honestly about the slave labor camps, and the Communists took their revenge in ways as dangerous as spreading lies about her (to the inmates they said she was an informer, to the SS that she was a dangerous malcontent) and as petty as kicking her calves when History offered them the chance. But she saw a testing look on Milena’s face, and though she didn’t know what capacity Milena felt she was examining, or by what right, she responded, “Yes, that is what the party of the Workers’ Fatherland did to those who took refuge there from fascism.”

Milena asked more questions, and Eva had gotten as far as her flight to Moscow with her husband, a candidate for
the Central Committee of the Internationale who’d disagreed with Stalin, though that may not have mattered very much in his arrest. Everyone substantial had been swept up, and, as in her case, many who weren’t.

But before the NKVD came for her, the siren sounded at Ravensbruck, the guards began to shout, and the dogs yearned forward on their chains. Milena turned as she rushed away, and said that she hoped Eva would come again to tell her more of her story.

She doubted it. Even with the green armband, she would need a plausible excuse if a guard stopped her, and if the guard didn’t like her story, or her manner, or was in a foul mood, she could lose her position as Block Elder, and even be sent to an isolation cell in the Punishment Bunker, where she knew she would retreat the rest of the way inside herself, and even the last, small remnant of Eva would disappear forever.

Still, the possibility that this woman wanted to hear more had reminded her of a time when she’d still occasionally felt the absence of a friend, a time before she’d learned that any organism may at some point need your ration of food more than your companionship. And that night, as the Witnesses slept or prayed quietly, she heard herself say
Milena
aloud.

FIVE MORE TIMES THAT WEEK, Eva took the risk needed to walk with Milena underneath the wall with the death heads painted on it. They were almost always joined by Inge, though the older woman said little.

Milena never mentioned her own hands again, or the hunger that all newcomers felt (which was, by the way, much less than it had been at Karaganda), the pain in the legs from work, and from standing in rows for hours morning and night to be counted and recounted, or the savagery of the guards if you strayed from your row—all the things about which new prisoners complained until they saw that the same pain already filled every other consciousness to the brimming point. Instead, Milena asked Eva more about her arrest, the prison in Moscow, the camp at Karaganda, and Eva answered, though to her own ears her account was like the rest of her existence: distant, colorless, and at once frightening and boring.

It was to Inge’s taste, though. One could tell, she said, that Eva had seen the emptiness of all the goals of this world. “Eva’s like Franz Kafka,” Inge said. “Or his Hunger Artist.”

“Who’s Franz Kafka?” Eva asked, though she did not much care.

“Franz Kafka,” Inge said, “was a great writer.”

“And he was my lover,” Milena said.

Apparently, that was momentous; Inge stopped walking and was pushed into Milena by some other prisoners, but she had the good sense to jump away, as if Milena’s body had been electrified.

Kafka, as it turned out, had been a Jew from Prague who’d written in German, and Milena had been his first translator into Czech. At the time, Milena lived with her husband in Vienna, and at first she and Kafka had corresponded about difficulties in his text; but her own pain had spilled over onto the page, and she began to write of her unfaithful, feckless husband, Ernst Polack, and Kafka had written of his loneliness and fear. In this way, they’d fallen in love. “He was not like anybody I’d ever known,” Milena said. “He never took refuge in blindness, in enthusiasm, in some conviction, the way the rest of us do. He let everything hurt him directly. It was like Franz was naked while everyone else had clothes on.”

Milena and this peculiar-sounding man had only ever spent a few days together in the flesh, and to Eva it sounded as if all they’d been able to do was embrace. The siren sounded before Milena could tell them the thing Eva was surprised to find that she was a little curious to hear—namely, why the two of them couldn’t fuck.

FOR THE FIRST TIME, hearing Eva’s story of Stalin’s camps produced a good result for her listeners. Inge and Milena had become the center of a tug-of-war between her and the party, and the Communists had seen to it that Inge was made secretary to the camp supervisor, and that Milena got a place as a clerk in the infirmary. These examples of the party’s benevolence were meant to prove that Eva must have lied about the nature of Communism, and so of Stalin; QED: the camps didn’t exist.

To show the party that they no longer believed the Trotskyite’s lies, the two of them were told to break with Eva completely, and though Inge didn’t kick her when she passed by, she did dutifully turn away and pretend not to know her. Milena, though, continued to walk with her, which moved Eva deeply. No one had ever made a choice like that for her before; nor had she, in the past, chosen anyone, even her own child, over the party.

Milena said she did it because she needed to amass material for the book she’d decided she and Eva would write after the war,
The World That Was the Camps
. But that reason was nonsense. Milena couldn’t write down any of what Eva said, and couldn’t possibly remember it. The idea of a book must be meant to help Eva believe that the Nazis would be defeated, that the two of them would be still alive when the camp was liberated, and that the Soviets would
not be the army to do that, in which case Eva would be arrested again, and probably shot. All of that was far more hope than Eva could manage.

Like most things that asked for a response from her, Eva felt Milena’s questions as an annoyance, but each time Milena asked, she found that, to her surprise, she answered. Today she spoke of the transport that had taken her to Karaganda.

Milena stared up at the electrified barbed wire, where a gypsy had recently lost part of her hand as she tried to escape. “There are,” Milena said, “no scarecrows in your stories.”

It took Eva a moment to remember. “You mean no people like you?”

“No, not that.” Milena shut her eyelids and stumbled forward. “What color are my irises?”

Eva didn’t need to reflect. “Blue,” she said.

Milena opened her eyes and smiled. “So at least we know that you can see.”

Of course she could. But why would she want to?

“I’m going to come to your barracks tonight, after everyone’s asleep,” Milena said. She’d spoken of a visit once before, though Eva thought it only another hyperbolic way to assert her independence. “To the duty officer’s room.”

She meant the room kept free in case a Gestapo officer visited, though in Eva’s barracks he rarely did; the Jehovah’s Witnesses—prisoners of conscience, who could leave the camp simply by renouncing their ridiculous faith—gave no trouble, did their work with tick-tock regularity, and needed few inspections.

Eva knew women sometimes met in secret, and even that more women touched than were lashed for touching,
but to do what Milena described sounded like a form of suicide—and of murder. Guards with wolfhounds walked the camp at night. When Milena was caught, the dogs would tear at her legs until she told who she was about to meet, and no love for another person or love for an image of one’s self was as strong as the bite of a dog.

Milena understood the silence. “Don’t you trust me?”

Eva had been tortured by the NKVD and the Gestapo, and could have replied,
I trust you as much as anyone, myself included
, but the siren sounded, and Milena made a point of rushing off before she could speak.

THAT NIGHT MILENA STOOD in front of Eva in the empty room and said, again, “What color are my eyes?” This time, she didn’t close them.

“Blue,” Eva said. “And they look as if Milena has a fever.”

Milena waved the very idea away. “Tell me about
your
eyes.”

“Eva’s eyes aren’t as bright as Milena’s.”

“But they’re beautiful in their distant sorrow. What about your hands?”

“Eva’s fingers aren’t as long as Milena’s.” To see even this much felt like touching frostbitten skin.

“What color is your hair, Eva?”

“Eva’s hair is drab black, while Milena’s is glorious red.”
There was almost no light in the room, but the word made Milena’s hair
appear
—a fascinating and vivid color, or perhaps it was just that color itself was fascinating.

“Eva is foolish,” Milena said fondly. “I love her thick, mysterious, jet-black hair.”

Eva was glad it hadn’t been cut off, and dismayed that she was glad.

“And what of Eva’s breasts?” Milena asked.

Eva smiled, as hers were, indeed, more ample, though she’d lost so much weight that they sagged now. “Eva’s dress fits better,” she admitted. And it did; both because of what was left of her figure and because the privileges of the Block Elder included a nicer dress, and better quality linen for the apron. Good wooden clogs, too.

“And your breasts?” Milena asked again, but this time she gently stroked the sides of Eva’s breasts through the cloth of the better-fitting dress. Desire returned with Milena’s touch—here in the most improbable place. It must be, Eva thought, because they were a little less starved than they were in Karaganda.

DURING THE NEXT EXERCISE PERIOD, Eva brought Milena a small piece of bread “to stave off fever,” but Milena waved it away. “I want,” she said, “always to be the one who cares for you.”

Perhaps true. And maybe in the infirmary it was easy for her to steal the food nurses must sometimes leave on their plates. In any case, Milena would only allow Eva to give her one thing, details from her past, though now when the telling became toneless Milena’s questions became much more pointed—what did the cabbage soup taste like to Eva (a rancid water), what did you do when you menstruated (used strips of foul cloth), what was the size of the turnip you said you found and how many fed from it? These queries still felt like a fingernail jabbing into tender skin, but as the spectral fingernail was in some sense Milena’s, it also felt erotic, bound up with, even an extension of, what had been their brief, halting, all-too-partial explorations of each other’s bodies.

Today Eva described the winter in Berlin, when Paul and she had first met, and a street salesman’s dirty black fingerless gloves. “He had a folding table with children’s pajamas for sale spread out on it.”