“Nature’s laws of heredity are undeniably true. All living creatures, humans included, are subject to these laws.” Fräulein Langefeld talked and walked, swinging her stick. “Note that humans are not all equal, but rather they are of differing races. The drives and strengths that create cultures are rooted in a race’s genes…”
Sarah felt that this lesson, these words, had been rolling in a circle, always arriving back in the same place. It was a strip of paper looped and twisted, giving it just one side. Her left eye was twitching, like a wasp trying to escape the drapes and return to the sun. Staying awake was the mission; Elsa would have to wait. One move at a time. Sarah leaned one elbow on her desk, propping up her head and covering the offending eye with a clenched fist. She had noticed at breakfast that there was still dried blood under her fingernails.
“The success and final victory of our great task depends on the law of selection, on the elimination of those with hereditary illness, on the promotion of genetically strong lines and on maintaining the purity of the blood…”
Out of the corner of her working eye, she could see the Mouse staring off into space, her mouth hanging open. Sarah was irritated by the small girl’s lack of survival instincts. Maybe the National Socialists had that right, she mused. Maybe some people just weren’t supposed to make it.
“In the case of plants and animals cultivated by humans, care is taken to weed out the less valuable. Only the useful and valuable genetic material is preserved. That is also what nature wants through the law of selection. Should we not do the same with people?”
Sarah hated herself, suddenly and deeply, with a strength that made her want to vomit. She might be a flea, but she knew she wasn’t part of this animal.
“This fulfils the command for loving one’s neighbour, and is consistent with God-given natural laws. The persons affected by the law make a great sacrifice for the whole of the people.”
Sacrifice. For the first time since Memorial Day, she thought about the Sturmbannführer. She’d heard that he was crying by the piano day and night now. She wondered what he had sacrificed, or rather who…
“In Upper Bavaria, there were twenty-five beds for the mentally ill in 1901. In 1927, there were four thousand. If this trend is allowed to continue, how many beds will be needed by 1953?”
Sarah came to attention. She couldn’t juggle the numbers, they kept slipping away from her like a handful of sand. A few hands were raised until it was no longer safe not to do so.
Don’t ask me. Don’t choose me.
“Mauser? Do you not know?” barked Langefeld.
Not again.
“Er…seven thousand, nine hundred and seventy-five,” the Mouse announced brightly.
There was a gasp of admiration, followed by a series of sharp inhalations as one by one they realized the error.
“Mauser, you are as feebleminded as the retarded children in those hospital beds. Think. What is the correct answer?”
The room was silent except for the tap-tap-tap of the Mouse’s leg as it quivered beneath the desk.
“It’s an extra three thousand…nine hundred…and seventy-five…plus four thousand…is…”
“No, you imbecile. Stand up.” Langefeld towered over the girl, her feet apart, ready to strike.
The Mouse’s chair scraped along the floor. “I don’t understand. It’s another twenty-six years…”
“You don’t understand anything, do you, Mauser? You’re a moron. What are you?”
“A moron.”
“Schlafsaalführerin, what is the answer?”
Liebrich jumped to her feet as if she had touched an electric fence, panic in her eyes. “One hundred and sixty times four thousand, which is…one hundred and sixty thousand, times four, which is…”
“Close enough, girl, sit.” Liebrich collapsed back into her seat in relief. “See, Mauser? Everyone knows the answer except you. Now the Schlafsaalführerin has given it to you, can you tell me what would happen twenty-six years after that?”
“I don’t know.” The Mouse’s voice was so small it was barely audible.
“How is that possible?”
Langefeld shrieked. “You’ve been given all the information you need.”
“I don’t understand…” The Mouse was crying now.
Langefeld grabbed the Mouse’s wrist and dragged her to the front of the class, knocking into desks and scattering books and paper on the floor. She hauled the girl onto the dais, her bare shins cracking loudly on the wooden platform. By the time the Mouse was shoved against the blackboard, tears were streaming down her face.
“You’re a parasite, Mauser, an imbecile living off the Fatherland. What are you?”
“An imbec…a para…a…”
“Give me the answer in five seconds or I’ll take the skin off your palms.” Langefeld’s own shoulders were rising and falling in excitement.
“I don’t – I mean—”
“Five…”
“No, please…”
“Four…”
“Please!”
“Three…”
“No—”
“Two…”
“I…I…”
“One…”
“ENOUGH.”
Everyone froze. The room went silent except for the whimpers of the Mouse. Sarah was standing in the aisle next to her desk, hands at her sides.
“What did you say?” gasped the teacher, her face red.
“Enough. She doesn’t know. She isn’t going to know, so LEAVE. HER. ALONE.”
The clock ticked.
“How dare you—”
The wave of righteous madness was ebbing, leaving Sarah with the feeling of being soaking wet in a rising wind.
“Leave her alone,” Sarah said again, this time quietly. “No one is learning anything when you pick on her.”
“Don’t you tell me what to do, you little Hure, don’t ever tell me—” Langefeld could barely get the words out. As she stepped off the dais towards Sarah, she was so furious that she was shaking, her hands opening and closing on her wooden rod. Sarah saw only spite and hate leaking out of the woman’s soul.
The scale of what she had just unleashed hit her, turning her bowels to water.
Ask for forgiveness, beg for mercy.
Don’t you dare.
Sarah took a step forward and stuck her hand out, palm up in front of the teacher. She braced herself, feeling her leg muscles tighten.
“You plead for mercy or I swear I’ll flay you alive.” Langefeld raised the rod above her head. The wall clock ticked.
Sarah closed her eyes. “Just get on with it,” she said with a sigh.
The first strike was a thousand nettle stings. It wasn’t just her hand. She felt it down her arm, through her elbow, tightening in her neck like a tourniquet. She felt a flurry of panic in her chest that demanded she run, escape, fight back.
You are fighting back.
The second blow was worse. It was every burn, tear and scratch, every rip, twist and pinch, returning to remind her of what she’d forgotten, in just one instant. Sarah clenched her teeth together until her cheeks hurt.
She began to unpick the stitches over her misery and anger, to prise open the box where she hid the horrors, desperately trying to feed the seething, teeth-grinding fury and its insulating arms.
She gained a moment’s clarity.
You can hurt me. But you do not scare me.
She opened her eyes and looked at Langefeld’s lipstick, with its creases revealing the roughness of what was underneath. Smack. She saw the beginnings of lines around Langefeld’s mouth. Smack. The faint diamonds of sweat building on her top lip and the few stray black hairs that the tweezers had missed. Smack. Her bared teeth, yellowing from coffee and cigarettes. Smack. The roots of her hair, black where it had grown since the last bleaching. Smack.
This hurts. This hurts so much. I could cry and squeal to make it go away. Make it stop.
No, it can only hurt me. I know what that is, so I will not fear it.
Sarah noticed the flecks of brown in Langefeld’s green irises. Smack. The veins in the whites of her eyes gathering in the corners. Smack. The mascara congealing in the eyelashes. Smack. Smack. Smack.
Use the fear. Fear is an energy. Break it up and build something new.
The stick caught in her fingers on the upswing. Don’t look at it. They had begun to curl with the bruising. The hand looked red and torn, but it was numb and Sarah could no longer feel it. She was winning.
She looked up into Langefeld’s eyes and saw the merest hint of uncertainty there.
Sarah smiled.
The woman dragged Sarah by the hair down onto her desk with such violence that the other girls scattered to get away. She held Sarah face down on the wood and slapped the rod across her back. Then did it again. And again.
Sarah closed her eyes. Fending off the squealing, howling little girl inside her, she searched for a memory, somewhere to go, a place where she had never been in pain or frightened or hungry. There was nowhere. If she ever had been happy, she could no longer remember it.
The frantic blows had no rhythm now. Her back was one endless fire, annihilating all her thoughts, stripping away the defences to her fear and agony.
She just let go of your hair.
Then Sarah realized that she had little to lose, little to hope for, nothing that she wanted or needed, nothing she could imagine that could ever be a reality – except for this to stop. And nothing could carry on for ever.
She just let go of your hair.
Sarah twisted like a corkscrew and as the next blow hit home across her chest, she grabbed the rod with her good hand and twisted it out of Langefeld’s grip. She rolled off the desk and staggered to her feet on the other side.
Her feet slid away from her and the floor seemed to be pitching upwards. She tried to look Langefeld in the eye but couldn’t focus. The wood in her hand was slick with blood and Sarah couldn’t think why. The stick…
She jammed it between the legs of the desk and pulled violently. It snapped into several pieces, leaving a thirty-centimetre piece in her hand. She waved it in the air and then tossed it across the room. Sarah’s chest rose and fell, as she faced Langefeld across the desk.
Sarah, the dirty Jewess. Beaten but not beaten. A warmth spread across her face. She wanted to smile.
“I’m not scared of you.”
Langefeld turned the desk over with a scream and punched Sarah in the face. Sarah saw a burst of bright lights, like New Year’s fireworks. Langefeld threw her into the next row of desks and she crashed to the floor. The other girls began screaming and pushing to get out of the way, knocking furniture over in the stampede.
Langefeld reached down and pulled Sarah to her feet before hitting her again. This time there were no sparks, just a dull greyness with only the vaguest feeling of hitting a chair and landing on the floor.
Sarah saw the ceiling, the peeling plaster, the heaters that were never on, the missing bulbs in the light fittings. There was more screaming, noise of a struggle and swearing. Langefeld loomed over her and drew back a fist, but her swing missed as Sturmbannführer Foch wrapped his arms around her and carried her away.
Sarah closed her eyes.
She could feel crisp golden crust breaking between her teeth, soft white bread, creamy cold cheese and slices of tangy sausage… As the dream dissolved to the metallic taste of blood in her mouth, Sarah remembered being happy.
“You’re in here far too much, you know that? Mouth.” Frau Klose shoved her thermometer under Sarah’s tongue and manoeuvred her face from side to side. A few days later, her fat lip was already healing, but her eye was still swollen. “You’re very clumsy.” She yanked the glass out of Sarah’s mouth and stood up to examine the mercury under a light. “Let me see your back.”
She pulled Sarah’s nightdress up to her neck and saw a series of horizontal welts running down from her shoulder blades to her backside. Still visible under the antiseptic cream were the scabs where the rod had broken the skin.
“Even the army doesn’t flog their soldiers any more. That woman is everything that’s wrong with this country,” said Klose, more sad than angry, reapplying cream where it had rubbed off.
“Thought you didn’t like us.” Sarah squirmed. Each stroke was exquisitely sore.
“I don’t. If someone dropped a bomb on this place with you all inside, the world would be a better place. Still, she’s gone now.”
“Where did she go?” Sarah was surprised, even pleased.
“Away from here, with her suitcase packed. That SA Arschloch insisted. He had to be stopped from putting a bullet in her head. Lunatics running an asylum, in every sense.” She began to prepare a syringe. “You should thank your little friend for fetching him.”
“Who?”
“What’s she called? Mauser. Off like a shot as that obrzydliwa suka laid into you. Found the one person here who would give a damn. Clever girl.”
Sarah cried out as the nurse pushed the drug into her back. “What about my hand?”
“What about it?”
“I still can’t feel one of my fingers.”
“Can you move it?”
“Yes.”
“Then get over it.”
“My wrist is sore,” she complained.
“Because she broke it. Rest it. Wipe your dupa with your other hand.”
Then Sarah thought about the Captain, about Elsa, about bombs and flattened cities.
“When can I get out of here?”
“I’ve seen to your friend. Not over the hump, but he’s alive. Still sleeping. I gave him some more sulphonamide, but I had to keep some back for you, you selfish ksie˛z˙niczka.” She collected her things. “Stay in bed. If you rub that back on anything, you’ll look like a washboard for the rest of your life.”