Once again he’s singing, quietly, melodically. I enjoy hearing it. He’s upstanding, frank and clean. But he’s also distant and alien and so unfinished. Whereas we Westerners are old and experienced and tremendously clever – and now no more than dirt beneath their boots.
All I remember about the night is that I slept deeply and soundly, that I even had nice dreams. It took me a long time to ferret the Russian word for ‘dream’ out of the major – I spent much of the morning trying to convey the concept some other way: ‘movies in the head’, ‘pictures when your eyes are dosed’, ‘not real things in sleep’. Another word missing from my soldiers’ dictionary.
At six in the morning the major knocked on the door of the back room for the Uzbek, but there was no reply. He called me over, anxious and upset, worried that something might have happened to the Asian, that he might have fainted or been attacked or even murdered. We both rattled the handle and knocked on the wooden panel. Nothing, not a sound, but it was clear that the key was still in the door. No one, not even the Uzbek, could sleep that soundly. I ran into the front room, shook the widow awake, and whispered our concerns in her ear.
‘Come on,’ she yawned. ‘He just wants to stay here alone and then try his luck with you himself ‘
Herr Pauli makes frequent mention of the widow’s feminine intuition and ‘feminine wiles’. But in this case I don’t think she’s right, and I just laugh at the idea.
Finally the major leaves, after repeated glances at his watch. (A Russian make, as he proved to me when we first met by showing me the manufacturer’s mark.)
Scarcely is he out of the door but who appears in the hall, well rested and smartly dressed but Mr Uzbek himself!
He moves in my direction, looking at me with his swollen little eyes, now strangely clouded over, and pulls a pair of silk stockings from his coat pocket, still in their paper wrapping. He hands them to me, saying in broken Russian, ‘You want? I give to you. You understand me?’
Clear as day, my chubby dear! I fling the front door wide open and show him out. And now be gone,’ I say, in German. He understands and saunters off, giving me a last reproachful look as he stuffs the stockings back in his pocket.
One up for female intuition.
A little after three in the morning, still dark. I’m all alone, in bed, writing by candlelight – a luxury I can afford because the major has provided us with an ample supply of candles.
All through Thursday our apartment was bustling with activity. Three of Anatol’s men showed up without warning. They sat round the table, chewing the fat, raucous as ever, smoked, spat on the floor and mucked around with the gramophone. They couldn’t get enough of the C&A Textile Company advertising jingle. When I asked – in a panic – about Anatol, they merely shrugged their shoulders, but hinted that he was likely to be back. Before I forget: the regimental baker reappeared wearing his white smock and repeated his stock question. Didn’t I know of a girl for him? He’d give us flour, much flour.
No, I don’t know of a girl for the baker. The drink-and-be-merry sisters are dearly spoken for by the officers. Stinchen is safely hidden away. Lately I haven’t heard or seen a thing about either of the concierge’s daughters; I assume they’ve found shelter somewhere. One,of the two bakery salesgirls has left us, and is said to be hiding in another basement. The other is being kept out of sight in the small room behind the shop – so the widow has learned – where they blocked the door with a large chest and covered up the window with Venetian blinds. It must be pretty dark and gloomy for her. In theory that leaves the young woman who looks like a young man – 24 years old and lesbian. From what we’ve heard she’s managed to escape the Ivans up to now She goes around in a grey suit with a belt and tie and a man’s hat pulled down over her face. As it is, she’s always worn her hair short at the back. So she slips right past the Russians, who think she’s a man; they aren’t familiar with such borderline types. She even goes for water and joins the queue at the pump, smoking a cigarette.
Pauli keeps cracking jokes about her, how he hopes she gets a proper reschooling, how it would be a good deed to send some of the boys her way, Petka, for instance, with his lumberjack paws. Slowly but surely we’re starting to view all the raping with a sense of humour – gallows humour.
