Roots of Evil(94)

Supposing that like Faust, I sold my soul to the devil during those nights in Vienna’s Old Quarter, or on any one of the nights since? And supposing the devil has been stalking me ever since, watching his chance to settle the account…? Aha, there’s Alice Wilson, he might have said. I think it’s time to call in the debt on that one. Quite a lot of self-indulgence went on, I see. A great deal of money spent on personal adornment – a good deal of fornication as well – oh, and a bastard child: dear me, she’s had a very good run indeed, this one. A very extravagant ten years. It’s certainly time for the arrogant little sinner to settle my account.

There were forty-five women in Hut 24, all of them sleeping and eating and living in the cramped barrack-like room with the single lavatory and washbasin, and the flimsy wooden-structured bunks for sleeping. As far as Alice could make out, most of them were innocent of any crime other than the crime of being Jewish, although there were one or two whom she would not have cared to meet in a lonely dark alley. Best not forget that Buchenwald, whatever else it might be, had originally been intended for political prisoners. Best, as well, to keep the baroness firmly in the background, and simply be Alice Wilson for the moment. In any case, very few people would have recognized the svelte sleek Lucretia von Wolff in the raggle-taggle creature living in Hut 24 and working in the munitions factory in Weimar each day.

They left for Weimar every morning after the 4 a.m. roll-call, and after the meagre breakfast apportionment of a slice of bread and a tin mug of coffee. Alice hated the dry bread and the watery milkless coffee, but she hated, even more, the factory where they sat at wooden benches, mostly sewing coarse uniform cloth for the German armies.

But surely there would be a way to escape, and surely she would find it and get out, either as Lucretia, or more likely as plain ordinary Alice Wilson, who had been used to hard work and subservience, and to an unobtrusive, unremarkable appearance. Yes, if she got out of here, it would have to be as Alice.

When the prisoners went to Weimar they marched in step, the guards walking alongside the little group. At times, to vary the monotony, Alice thought how Conrad might write music to fit the marching steps of them all. It would be thin, metallic music. Staccato. Clip-clop, tap-tap…Death-by-work…Death-by-work…

Conrad. Was he being forced to work in the same way? Was he allowed music? If they were denying him music – even the tinniest of instruments – he would never survive, for music was his life and his breath and his food, and without it he would succumb to the blackest of black despairs.

He had once said to her that he was a pagan. ‘I worship life and laughter and good wine,’ he had said. ‘And love,’ he had added, his eyes slanting with mischief. ‘I worship love, of course. “Some toward Mecca turn to pray, but I toward thy bed, Yasmin.” You are my Yasmin, Alice.’

‘Rot,’ Alice had said, after she had got over the extravagant romanticism of this sufficiently to remember Conrad’s most recent entanglement with a red-haired Florentine actress from the commedia dell’arte. ‘Utter rubbish. If you worship anything at all, you worship music.’

And so Conrad, who worshipped music, might die if they took that away from him. Alice wondered how she would bear it, and then she wondered whether it would be worse simply to lose him without knowing what his fate had been.

After a few weeks the staccato music of the prisoners’ weary footsteps and the grinding pain of working for twelve hours at a stretch, and being constantly, achingly hungry and thirsty, changed. Now the music drummed out a different rhythm. I-must-get-out…I-will-do-anything…

I will do anything to get out, thought Alice. There is nothing I will not do.





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT




There is nothing I will not do to get out…

But it gradually became clear that escape was impossible; the prisoners were closely guarded, and in the first two weeks of her imprisonment, two young men – Russian Jews – were shot for trying to climb over the electrified fence by night.

Nightmare visions of Conrad, hungry and beaten or lying dead in some wretched unknown grave, haunted her, and to quench them she began to look for SS men who might be open to seduction; when you have been living in hell you will take the devil himself to bed, and although Alice had temporarily abandoned the idea of escape she thought she would not flinch from one or two sessions in the guards’ quarters if it would improve her lot, and that of her companions. Hot water for washing. Better food – or at least more substantial food. Clean clothes occasionally.

I’d do it if I could, she thought. Yes, but how can I exert any kind of seduction technique with my hair chopped short, and the smell of sweat on my skin, and wearing this shapeless half-shirt, half-dress they give the prisoners? But she was prepared to try, even though she was already recognizing the black irony of her situation. Not so long ago my most pressing concerns were whether to enamel my nails silver or scarlet, or the problem of obtaining eyelash-black. Now I’m contemplating going to bed with men who are sadists and torturers and murderers, just to get a few extra slices of bread.

From time to time, news from the outside world reached Buchenwald. Germany was being mobilized for war, although it was being said that Herr Hitler did not really expect to have to fight any kind of war at all. Against this was the fact that Hermann G?ering, always the evil genius of the Nazi Party, had lately announced a fivefold extension of the Luftwaffe.