Long, slow, and possibly too heavy on plot and too light on death for Gurochan. Serious lack of textured, lavish Nazi porn, so I decided to make some.

Novella, rough draft, "complete"--excuse continuity fuckups and romance. (c)19, all rights reserved, do not steal, my harpies are always hungry, and a ton of research went into this, though I took liberties where I liked. Enjoy.

Schadenfreude
19



this one is for my Kaltherzig



EIN: Leere

Kindheit

Twice in his life, Erich saw his father cry.

The first time was when he was six.

His father was sitting at the kitchen table with the radio on. There was a great deal of singing and drums-and-trumpets fanfare, and the roar of a crowd like a lion. . The announcer was very excited, saying Hitler and chancellor and German people as if someone had won something.

His father had his chin propped in his hand, tears flowing down his face. His eyes were closed. He shook as if he were he was cold. His mother stroked his father’s shoulders and kept saying hush, somebody might hear.

Jungenvolk. They sang. They did organized little routines in clumsy child formations. Erich always vaguely thought of them as a dance or a sport. He was too young to realize this Simon-says sort of game had anything to do with soldiers. Sometimes they stood in the warm sunlight fidgeting while a counselor or a visiting Hitler Youth boy talked to them about the Fatherland and their duty.

Most of it went over Erich’s head. There were cookies, and other kids his own age, some of whom even did him the courtesy of playing with him. The grownups were just something you had to wait through, before you could eat or have races or swim.

Once they went camping.

An older boy pulled him close in the dark and kissed him on the lips. It had made his skin feel busy, his tongue feel funny. His heart pounded for a long time afterwards, like he’d been running.

He was eight. All he understood, of any of it, of was that it was fun.

He never told anyone about the kiss. Even then, there had been the sense that this was secret, that this could not be known.

At first he was enough like the other boys to be mistaken as exactly like the other boys. He was only different from them when he was the one wound with skipping-ropes or imprisoned with wooden guns and tin swords. He was the smallest, and never got to be the general anyway. They found it useful that he didn’t seem to mind spending most of the game being pushed in and out of various imaginary jail cells.

He never let anyone, really harm him—his pathological general fear of all adults made him disgustingly perfectly well behaved in front of them, but when pushed among children he’d learned to fight as immediately and as viciously as he could. Most of them let him alone after a try or two proved more expensive than it looked.

He found himself thinking of those prisoner games, later, while their rumors grew louder, remembered the strange hypnotic, stillness, of it, the quiet it seemed to give him to imagine so, loudly, that he was trapped and probably doomed and unable to do anything to save himself.

He never told anyone. It had something to do with that same, secret, he was sure of it.

He could not take his eyes off other boys’ hands, either, and it had very nearly gotten him in actual trouble in school, since it was indistinguishable from looking at the boy’s paper.
His sterling record bought him off with a “Mind your own assignments, then!” that left him crimson for the rest of the class. He could count the times a teacher had shouted at him on one hand.

The terror of adults had evolved, of course; he was still terrified, but he adapted by this obsessive obedience. And here he was, back to the prisoner game. Circles that cost him sleep, night after night, hands holding pencils, and the new men in black you saw on the street sometimes, the ones who seemed to travel in a cloud of winter, of all the faces behind desks that had ever meant you

(harm)

something, unpleasant. The danger of change, and usually for the worse.

He collected the rumors, of Gestapo and the more sinister prison camps. He didn’t believe them, of course, nobody did, they’d never actually, do, those, things. It was only something to add to this, loop, of thoughts in the dark. Just for, variety.

There was something irresistible about it.

There was the blazing flash and fanfare, of course. They went to several of the largest rallies and Party events in the center of Berlin, and he remembered the first one, being small enough for his father to hold him on his shoulders, clinging and feeling much too big for this indignity and then the music and the thousands of feet shaking the earth in perfect time, so far away, an entire army gleaming in red and black and brown, flawless. It went on and on past them, so loud that it seemed there was silence, a seamless blur of shoulder-boards and gleaming guns. That was irresistible the way anything boisterous and proud was, just for the sheer exuberance of it all.

The camps were different. He thought of them the way he’d thought obsessively of the Inquisition, of the claustrophobic terror of an unstoppable army of Persons in Authority who had unlimited power. That was what Germany was fast becoming.

He was proud. It seemed a brave and dangerous thing to be a German, suddenly, instead of a vaguely shameful thing as it had been since The War.

He wondered, what these camps, the new dungeons must be like, and shuddered. Everyone whispered about it, for the same reason everyone looked at car accidents—but nobody seemed to know anything certain.


die Erbsünde
Berlin, 1942

Erich graduated from school at fifteen, with all sorts of irritating honors. He endured a party with mostly extended family, received books and a billfold and money and clothes that didn’t suit him.

Mostly he was grateful to escape the gymnasium. School had been a bland Hell of classes that were much too easy and other boys that hated him instinctively. All the hiding this necessitated gave him plenty of time to study, and he spent the rest of it immersed in books, so many that his teachers noticed, and special credits in German and literature were noted on his record.

His father arranged for him to apprentice in a print shop. He suggested first a newspaper, but Erich was wide-eyed and apprehensive about actually writing anything. He was at his best when whatever-it-was required an eye for symmetry and exactitude anyway. The printshop suggestion was given to him to ponder for a night or two, and he felt mostly pleased with the idea.

His mother made disapproving faces, wanting him to be a tailor and carry on the family business, but she said nothing. His father was the passive one of the two, but he had never allowed her to lean on Erich as she’d wanted to. When he outvoted her, which was rare and always about the future of his son, he was not questioned. Dinner became considerably less edible for awhile, and his mother was still and uncommunicative in a way that would have gotten Erich accused of sulking.

The job was a new terror. He slept for maybe one fitful hour the night before his first day. He would do everything wrong and his mother would make him work in his father’s boutique. He would spend eight hours sweeping, and at the mercy of boys like the ones he’d escaped for these few short vacation weeks. A dozen other tiny fears.

To his delight he found that everyone seemed to use the manners his mother had drilled into him, more or less, and that once he demonstrated he could carry out a task he was left alone. Nobody shouted at him. He ate lunch by himself with a book spread open across his knees, absolutely luxuriating in the peace and quiet.

So Erich spent his days learning to set type, running errands, coming home with ink ground into his hands.

There was a boy, there, who watched him with something like hunger.

There had been no boys like that since that hazy distant kiss in the dark.
He couldn’t help it. His traitor eyes wandered all by themselves, leaving his hands to fumble with letters, to stumble into inkpots, to hold a broom still with dust settling around him.

He memorized this russet tangle of hair, and the most wonderful hands he had ever stolen in long hungry stares—hands wider than his own, with long narrow fingers clever enough to set type small enough to confound some of the other printsetters. After awhile he could recognize the black whorls of fingerprints the boy left on tabletops.

He thought of him far too often.

His father brought home armloads of black and silver, and made SS uniforms far into the night, drinking coffee, his eyes rimmed in red, glasses gleaming. His father wore a swastika-pin edged in gold on his lapel, and when he put his overcoat on he took it off and put it that lapel, instead. So it was still visible.

The money was very good for the first time since the war. They bought a second radio, and a phonograph player.

Erich shook out the tunic of one of these uniforms, almost finished, bristling with pins at the collar. He held it in up to himself in the mirror, drawn by all these stark lines and dangerous glitter. He put it on, with careful gestures of his shoulders, straightened an imaginary tie. The arms hung nearly a foot past his hands.

His mother screamed when she found him. She swung at him with the dustrag she was holding, shouting get it off!

He flailed at himself in confusion, as if he were on fire. When he finally realized it was the uniform she meant he bent his arms back and let it drop to the floor. A pin dragged along the underneath of his jaw.

She went to her knees, picking up the jacket, hands searching it for wounds.

She didn’t speak to him for hours. It made him sick and sad. He wasn’t sure what he’d done so, wrong.


The boy was the print shop owner’s nephew. Emil.

Learning his name had made it infinitely worse; before, he had been the boy, that boy, hardly a noun at all, a vague subject that preoccupied him when he was walking home, a shape and a set of scents (mostly imagined) that kept him awake at night.

Emil and Erich often stayed late at the shop, after the fat squinting Muench and the counter-girl had left. Orders got quite far ahead of what they could possibly produce during business hours. So he and Emil stood for an hour or three, alone, printing poster after poster with a Nazi soldier in the bucket-style helmet, a Teutonic warrior in medieval halberd ghosted behind him. The money here, too, was good.

Erich was clipping these prints up to dry when Emil’s hands closed over his. The boy turned him around and kissed him. This was longer than that kiss in the dark, a strange hot melting, like their mouths were wounds that wanted to heal together. It still made his skin feel, busy. He could not tell their tongues apart anymore, to know if his felt funny or not.

He let it go on for much too long. A tiny noise happened in his throat. He heard his mother saying hush, somebody might hear.

He ducked his head away, slid sideways with his back against the edge of the table. “I’m not like that.”

He knew it was a lie, and that he was exactly like that.

He thought of adding I’m sorry. His eyes fell on another poster, a thick round blonde-and-blue German woman, crowded close on every side with thick round blonde-and-blue German children. An apple-cheeked baby was cradled to her heavy breast.

Emil stepped back, heels clicking angry on the floor. His eyes narrowed. He said nothing at all.

The next day at work they didn’t look at each other.

Everywhere there were constant whispers about the Police.

The arrests had begun with Hitler, climbing from distant-city rumor to wide-eyed cautionary tales over tea. His mother’s bridge group spoke of nothing else, it seemed. A nephew arrested, staggering home two days later bankrupt and bruised. The first stories that started with you know I heard the Jews...and the nods, and nobody daring to disagree with any of it.

Erich listened to these ghost stories, standing carefully out-of-notice range in the kitchen. Communists. He had sort of a vague, commercial idea of what that actually, meant. He knew a few Jews, shopkeepers and the jeweler his mother preferred to visit, but none very well. He had the same general impression of them he did of Bolsheviks—that there was something bad about them, though he could never see what.

He knew that was true of himself, too, though he thought perhaps it was not quite as

In public, people very carefully talked of nothing. The weather. Everyone was so, very, careful.


ZWEI: Abstieg

das A und O
Berlin, 1942

The knock on the door was what he had always expected, thudding through the house and springing his eyes open. He stood up weak as water and started getting dressed.

Downstairs, his father opened the door with pins in his mouth, one arm draped with black and silver.

There was none of the wanton destruction he had expected. It was all terrifyingly civil. The police sat at the dining room table. One of them smoked a cigarette, tapping ashes into an ashtray. They were graygreen and gleaming, all creases and polish. They stared at everything, the furniture, the paintings on the walls, his mother’s curio cabinet with the little carved clocks.

Papers were produced and signed.

His mother stood stunned in her bathrobe staring into the middle distance. Once she offered coffee to no one in particular. Nobody answered her.

His father managed to be coherent and correct, though he couldn’t speak in anything near as loud as even his normal mumble. He kept pushing up his glasses, even when they didn’t need it.

The policeman with the clipboard had to lean inches from his mouth to hear him.

Erich stood dressed, his coat on but unbuttoned, heart slamming so hard it was like the rest of the sound in the room was, underwater. It was a very long time before anyone seemed to notice him.

They flanked him through the front door, and his mother made some kind of a sound, behind them, and that was all. They cuffed his hands behind his back, with no particular animosity, and escorted him to a black car. One of them sat in the back seat beside him. The other started the car, and backed out onto the street. One glimpse through the windowpane, and his father, standing on the front steps.

That was the second time Erich ever saw his father cry, and the last time he ever saw him at all.

On the ground floor it was still a police station—desks and typewriters, offices behind clear glass and offices behind blinds. There was a general sense of organized panic, like in a slaughterhouse. Erich sat on a long bench in a hallway with his hands still cuffed. They ignored him again for awhile. People walked back and forth carrying tea and coffee and paperwork and guns and uniform caps, some of them laughing, some furious.

After a long time, a different policeman collected him and made him sit in front of one of a dozen desks in a long busy room. He gave his name, address, and place of employment. The policeman stood just behind him, just by his left shoulder, half-shouting questions that had become so by rote they were almost incomprehensible. A woman typed his answers out without ever raising her eyes from the keyboard.

He shook continually, so terrified it was like the entire world had been moved ten feet farther from him, divided from him by a blinding sheet of white panic. You were supposed to hear about Them having the boy who used to work in the bakery, or your friend who moved the summer before, or a basement full of Bolshevik state-traitors.

Not, you. They were never supposed to have, you.

He wondered if anything his parents could do would do any good. He wondered if they would even, try. He wondered if the same thing that kept his father’s swastika pin visible sent them back to bed.

None of it was anything like he had imagined. That seemed, unfair, that he’d been forced to spend so many hours, fearing this, and all that preparation was useless now. He kept listening for, screams, mostly from the floor, with the conviction that if there were such, rooms, they would be underground. He heard only typewriters, voices at polite office levels most of the time. Doors opening and closing.

He didn’t wonder, what he was guilty of. His attention kept wandering to that and the panic kept dragging him away from it.

They brought him down a set of stairs, which made the edges of his vision creep in, but it was only to a slightly less official hallway, with bricks instead of plaster and one side lined in bars. There was plenty of light, and it was cleaner than his idea of a, dungeon.

There was still no screaming.

He might just be, released, for whatever it was. Kept for a week or three and sent back home to be plagued by gossip, but that would be, all.

Both cells were identical. One was empty, except for benches lining each wall. The second had four men already in it. The guard opened the door, uncuffed Erich’s hands, and let him step inside. The door clanged shut behind him, locked with a clank that made him think of castles and dungeons.

He sat down in the least-occupied section of bench, wrapped his arms around his legs, thought of, nothing. One man still had on a tie. One still had on pajamas, with a suitcoat buttoned crooked over it. Two were quietly talking, sitting with their backs to the bars. None of them seemed particularly, dangerous. Thank God for that.

The man in the tie was squinting at him, finally he said, “Good evening,” and coughed a little.

Erich dutifully said, “Good evening, sir,” and sat still staring, out through the bars. He would be, polite, to everyone, he would do whatever he was told, he would pray pray pray, and he might, just, be all right. That was the plan, so far.

“I think I know, you, yes...you’re that tailor’s boy. I’m Schiffer, I taught third and fourth year at your school, but I never had you. Had your cousin, I think...”

He slid, just a little closer, two feet or so. He had kind eyes, the patient slow voice of a grandfather. A schoolteacher. Here in, jail.

There must have been a mistake.

“Yes sir,” he said. His eyes stung. He closed them, scrubbed at his face with his hand. He remembered Herr Schiffer with less gray and more brown in his hair, guiding a hopping mess of eight or nine year olds through the school hallways.

“You’ll be all right...these are Germans that have us, it’s not as if we were...the enemy.”

Silence.

“I’m sure there will be a judge, and this will all be cleared up.”

He didn’t say yes sir again. He didn’t think he was capable of it.

“Maybe we’ll pay a fine, or—“

Then there was a scream from very far down the corridor, beyond invisible doors.

They stopped talking.

It climbed in frantic volume, broke off, and started again, less structured, softer, as though something essential had broken already.

Erich could think of nothing but these twenty minutes of distant noise when the guards came to take him. They ushered him in the direction the screams had come from.

Schiffer watched him with wet brown eyes, made a gesture with his hand, one fist tightening just a little. Maybe to wish him luck, maybe just a muscletwitch of, relief, that it was Erich’s turn to go and not his own.

They brought him into a far less modern office, this time. A heavy wooden desk with a policeman sitting behind it, and a second one standing behind him, just to his left, out of his sight.

Erich sat where he was put, in a straight-backed wooden chair, hands cuffed behind him. There was no typewriter here. The man in front of him read through a folder and made notes with a fountain pen on a thick pad of forms. Scratch-of-pen and two men and one boy breathing. Bootheels, passing outside. Silence.

The officer was a half-stone too thick in his stiff-pressed uniform, and he daubed at his mouth now and then, as if he wished for a drink or a cigarette. He never looked up, paging through documents with precise manicured fingers. His voice was heavy on nasal, very aristocratic to Erich’s ears. “You’ve been reported as a homosexual. What we will do, here, today, is take down a record of your testimony before any decisions are made. Now,” he said, more like a closing than a beginning, set down the papers with a tap and folded his hands on top of them.

Erich could feel his eyes, but he didn’t look above the height of the fountain pen. “I...didn’t...”

A cough, or maybe a laugh. “Well, you must have done, else you wouldn’t be here, mmm?”

“But I didn’t do anything—“

The guard behind him wandered closer.

The officer sighed and chose one particular piece of paper. “You’ve been seen at establishments that only cater to this sort of thing. Your guilt is not the question—you are guilty, or you would be home in bed. The question is your willingness to reform, and your loyalty to the Fatherland.”

He could hardly hear this man, now, after the very first sentence his heartbeat had become louder than anything else. “I can’t have been seen anywhere like that, I’ve never been to anywhere, like, that.”

“No?” A flick at the paper he was holding. “Certainly you must have been somewhere. We have very reliable reports. Are we to believe solid German citizens—“ a rattle of paper at him—“or a homosexual? You’re all notorious liars.”

He felt, terrifyingly close to tears, hot and sick. No one had ever called him a liar before. “There must be a mistake—“

Both policemen laughed at that immediately. “Oh, of course. Every man in Dachau is there by mistake, just ask him,” said the man behind him.

He could feel the tears collecting along his lower eyelids, Dachau making it much worse.
The officer dropped his papers again. “You keep denying having been anywhere, but you don’t deny that you are a homosexual?”

“I’ve never really done anything—“

There must have been a signal, but Erich never saw it.

The man behind him shoved his head down, and something heavy slammed into his back, unbelievably hard, emptying him of breath and thought. The pain seemed to come in a reversing wave, the blow pushing him forward and the spreading anguish pulling him back. He thought, my back will be, broken, and his lungs remembered how to expand and he drew in a great whooping breath. He was still mostly folded over. He didn’t want to try to sit up, for fear of finding he couldn’t move.

“I didn’t ask you what you’ve done. I asked you what you are.”

He didn’t realize he was supposed to answer. Another blow, straight across his kidneys, a third in exactly the same place. He screamed until his lungs were empty. When he caught his breath again he was sobbing. He moved to cover his face and his hands only dragged at the cuffs. It was worse than the beating. He was almost a grown man and these men could see him crying like a—

“Are you—“.

“Yes!” he cried out at them, to make them stop, to keep them from hammering at him with that word again. To save himself any more of those terrible blows.

The guard stepped in front of Erich to show him the rubber nightstick. A shiny black thing, an unspeakable thing. But he put it away at his belt, and gripped Erich by shoulder and hair and set him upright again.

The officer was writing something with neat precise little motions. “There, see, if you’ll be reasonable it won’t be so hard.”

“Yes sir,” he said out of reflex, sounding like a child in his own ears. He sniffled, seized with the urge to plead with these men to uncuff his hands. He would have begged on his knees for a handkerchief if he’d thought either of them would give him one without hitting him again. It was all out of proportion, intolerable, unimaginable that he couldn’t just, wipe his damned eyes. He tried to turn his face into his shoulder, but he could only smudge at his cheek and his jaw.

“Well. You understand that this is very serious. It may not seem so to...” a glance at one of his files—“...boy your age, but the State is responsible for the State. A man’s duty is to marry a German wife and have many German children. A man who is so disordered he won’t do that is worse than useless to us—you’re a drain on society, passing on nothing, and you’re dangerous, because you can spread this disease to others.”

Still this sense of, falling, of dreaming. “I know what you’re supposed to do, I was going to do all of that, I...”

He trailed off, waiting for the blow.

Was it true? Had he been going to marry and have children and work in an office and buy a house, all of that you were, supposed, to do?

The officer said “Yes!” and nodded as if this outburst had pleased him. “Now, that’s the right kind of thinking. You see, you’re not even really a young man, yet. If you say you haven’t been involved in this, activity...”

“No, sir...” He hadn’t, really, surely they didn’t mean two kisses six years apart?

“Well, maybe then there is something we can do, if you want to do the right thing, we can rehabilitate you. Sometimes arrangements can be made. You know you’re lucky you were arrested so young. Boys with this disorder are generally hanged without much trouble over it.”

It was delivered rather well, as if he were musing to himself. Erich was shocked into a stillness worse than the sobbing. He had never seen anyone hanged. He could imagine seeing the ground tilting dizzily under his feet, and a crack as loud as the world breaking in half.

The officer left him alone to imagine it for awhile, before he added “I think it’s safe to say we can avoid that with further, documentation, of your sincerity.”

“I don’t....” He didn’t have the energy for understand. It didn’t matter. He was exhausted. The only wish he had left was that whatever it was they wanted, he could give them, quickly, and go back to his cell where Schiffer was and lie on one of the benches and sleep and sleep.

He knew that they were, bargaining over his life. He didn’t know what or what on Earth he might possibly have to bargain with. He’d been nodding for the past minute or three, or maybe since he’d been brought into this fear-drenched room. “I’ll do, whatever you say I should do, sir, just, don’t...”

“All right then, good. Now.” He tapped the pen against his flawless teeth. “The, others, like yourself?”

A blank pause. “I don’t know, any others...”

One slam of the side of the officer’s fist against the desktop. “Come on, really, that’s what this disease is, isn’t it? That’s the only symptom. Of course you know others.”

“...no, I...”

“Don’t you have men that you do these things with?”

They would make him confess it all, his pathetic little everything: “I’ve only ever been, kissed. Twice.”

The guard who had beaten him laughed, but he stopped when the officer didn’t join him.

“I suppose I shouldn’t say it, but I actually believe you. You poor bastard.” He did laugh, just a little. He still had the pen, ready. “Names?”

Stricken. “They...were....I was, eight, the first one, I don’t remember...”

A sharp look that he felt more than saw. “Not a first name, nothing?”

It was just, insanity, did it matter to the police who he had kissed when he was eight? “I really don’t, sir, we were in the Jungenvolk—“ He was thinking, furiously, ashamed of himself, every inch of him waiting to be pushed forward again. He would make up a name for this one, if they pushed him, but the problem, was, Emil...

A disgusted sort of cough from the guard.

The officer wrote down something. “The second?”

He waited for something to save him. There was a prickling like nausea under his tongue. “Don’t, make...”

A frown, the pen hesitating, those eyes on him again. “The second name?”

He thought of Emil and could not remember his face, only his voice, explaining how to center text with amusing arrogance, as if he were more than just an apprentice himself. The name would send that boy into the back of a car with his parents crying behind him, send him out of his life and into a room like this.

They already had him, he may as well blame this, kiss, on himself. “It was my fault, I gave him the wrong, impression....”

“If you’re going to be the sort who would withhold information about criminal activities, there’s nothing we can do for you.”

If I don’t give them a name.....A fake name? He fumbled through his thoughts for a story.

“You’ll hang.”

“Please—“ No good. The crying was hitching through him again. The man took out the baton again, and he screamed even before he was struck.

After awhile, it stopped. He had lost count.

The officer dropped something and said, “Take him outside—“ and the man with the nightstick took hold of his arm and half-lifted him.

That was as brave as he could be, he found

“Emil,” he said. “Emil Muench.”

There. No more soul, now he had nothing to bargain with.

They brought him back to the cell. He limped to the bench and sat down in a new stiff sort of way, kidneys hot with a dull spreading pain that made him feel too heavy. The only thing that had saved him from serious harm during that last rapid handful of blows was that the guard was almost flailing, without serious accuracy. One shot had gotten him across an elbow, and bending that joint was almost impossible. The rest had thudded into his shoulderblades and back, leaving bruises he was sure would last for weeks, but without breaking anything.

Schiffer waited until the guard was gone and out of earshot, and came and sat beside him, fumbling at him trying to feel his head for, fever, as if he had no idea what other kind of gesture one might use on someone, sick. “They beat you?”

He nodded, finding himself panting, as if he’d been running, and shaking in a new loose uncontrollable way. Aftermath.

“What can you possibly have done?”

He didn’t care anymore. “I kissed two boys.”

“They beat you like this for kissing two boys?”

He, nodded. Waited for the face he’d always imagined everyone making if they, knew.

Silence, incredulous eyes blinking at him, and then the tobacco-rasp of a laugh. “I’m glad you didn’t kiss three.”


Now there were four people who knew—two policemen, himself, and Schiffer. Probably more, tomorrow morning—secretaries and file clerks. He wondered if they would tell his parents. He tried to imagine what they would do, or think, and could not.

Everyone would know, after a month or two of bridge games and whispers. He could see this fact, spreading from his one single yes, in widening ripples He tried to imagine, everyone, he knew, everyone he saw, knowing. He managed, a sense of endless time battered with stares, of exhaustion and suffocation and claustrophobia.

There was nothing for it, now.

He lay on the bench with his poor back against the cool of the wall and his head on his coat. Here was the reward he had promised himself, and all he could do was stare through the bars out into the corridor, hurting for all kinds of reasons, thinking, jail, and thinking, Emil.

He cried a little, with the collar of his coat folded over his face. If he just, didn’t move, didn’t change his breathing, just let it happen, he discovered he could do it soundlessly.

A different guard came and collected him, brought him to the same officer. He sat in the same chair, already shaking.

“Well, we’ve done what we can. You’re to go to a labor camp.” A glance at the files. “You’ve got several skills listed here, I’m sure something will be found. You’ll be out in two years if you behave yourself.”

Camp scared him quite a lot, and two years sounded endless when he tried to think of the entire span between Christmases, twice. Still, work didn’t sound so very, terrible. He could make a uniform in two days, and set type without errors as fast as

(Emil)

anyone at the shop, really. He would just do, as he’d planned—polite and obedient—and he wouldn’t think about how long it was. He would think of what a trade up it was from hanging.

The guard uncuffed him. He signed things he wasn’t invited to read.


Something like a week later, the first guard came and took Erich from the cell. He was led outside, and put into a truck. Nine other men he didn’t know were already inside. They closed the back, and the truck drove away.

DREI: Hölle

auslander

All of them in the truck sat without speaking, for what Erich guessed was an hour or three. One man was sobbing, cradling his left hand hidden under his coat, getting louder when the truck jolted over bad paving. Erich stole glances at the others, but all but two were a generic blur of working-class faces.

These two, he thought...might, be here, for the reason he was here. They might have been brothers, but he doubted it. One was dark and lean, with long brown hair and neat brown moustache. He made Erich think of an American cowboy for some reason. The other was thin and pale, unremarkable except for brilliant blue-green eyes. He was younger than the cowboy, by perhaps a decade. He looked, shell-shocked, the way Erich felt.

They sat very close together, each with his arms wrapped tight around himself, hands tucked in, as if to keep himself from being tempted to touch the other. Sometimes their shoulders would press together, and Erich was sure it was deliberate.

He tried to keep them from feeling his eyes. He stared at his own hands, at his fingers winding each other tight, at how complicated the joints and nails and tendons really were. He listened to the crying man, and put his hands in his pockets. He was jealous of a shoulder to lean into.

The trip lasted for days, less than a week, though how much less Erich could not begin to calculate. He was certain there were nights they drove straight on through morning. Other nights the truck would rumble to a stop, and he would cringe in terror, hearing the doors in the front open, waiting for the back to be thrown open and the shouting, swinging guards to drive them out into the night.

Here they would shiver and stare at one another and at the guards smoking with guns lazy at their sides. They would gather wood with guards predatoring them on faster, and once there was a fire they weren’t allowed to draw near, there would be watery stuff that bore little resemblance to soup, and a night of sleeping on the ground, shivering but grateful to be still for awhile.

Erich was, only half-aware of most of this. A great soft sheet of shock was wrapping him tight, and he spent little time thinking of anything on the surface. On another level, underneath this numb obedient terror, he was always thinking, staring at the memorized floor of the truck, at the pairs of feet that shifted only rarely. Then there was a swimming half-sleeping blur of fearful things, a hangman’s noose, the medieval clang of the jail’s door closing behind him.

He was struck now and then, adding new bruises to the set still livid from the Gestapo’s beating, putting layers of darkening color over smaller random marks from lying on stones or being jostled into an edge by a bad patch of road. The first time one of the guards caught him with a short stick of wood he’d sucked in his entire breath, hands grabbing at wood faster, eyes watering in pain and embarrassment. He’d been doing what he’d been told, and it hadn’t mattered. He didn’t dare consider the implications.

ausgesucht

The truck stopped, and after a long pause the back door swung open and two shouting SS officers ordered them out and into a line facing forward. Erich saw a train station spread out behind them, and a great milling crowd, shouting, screaming.

He had been smelling this strange, smell, for miles now. At first he had thought it must be a forest fire, but there was too much of meat and fat in the scent. Now, outside in the orange late-afternoon sun he knew the smell was coming from, here. Every breath seemed, weighted, greasy, making him violently hungry and terribly nauseous, because he’d heard the same horror-stories as everyone else, about the origin of this smell. He had watched the adults over his head proclaim it beyond belief, but none of them had ever tasted this air.

They were off to one side of the train station, lined up now in a tiny sad row of ten, and the officers had spread out to the left and right, flanking a long lean man whose back was turned. He was half a head taller than, everyone. He wrote something with no particular haste in a black leather notebook and turned, taking a cigarette from his lips.

“All right then,” he said, as if he had all the time in the world. “I am Herr Doctor Obersturmfuhrer Kaltherzig. I expect to be obeyed immediately. I do not repeat myself.”

Silence. He took a lazy casual pace or two in either direction, studying each one of the prisoners in turn. Kaltherzig was half-a-head taller than the tallest of them. There was a lot of the bird in him—long, light bones, unspeakable quickness underneath the smallest of gestures. He had fast predator eyes the color of an American gun. His hair hung like it was wet, in a razorstraight line along his jaw. His face was composed of lines so very Imperial Roman the Race Office might’ve used him in a textbook.

“Your current assignments will be as follows. Assignment to a labor detail should take place in the next day or so.”

Erich was too hypnotized to realize he should look down, and he caught a faceful of Herr Kaltherzig’s full attention. There was something like a smile or a threat and then the eyes left him like a knife reversing out of a wound.

He read names and block numbers that meant nothing to any of them. Two groups peeled off, one led by each lieutenant.

The two

(others)

men, he had watched on the truck had been separated.

The narrow green-eyed man stared after the cowboy until the man behind him pushed him. He took one crooked step out of line, as if he might simply join the other, and then turned back and came to Kaltherzig, pleading in Swedish-colored German, and caught at his sleeve, almost kneeling.

Kaltherzig turned, one black eyebrow winging upward as though he were going to politely reply to a, question. He drew his sidearm, and shot the green-eyed man in the head.

The crack drove an involuntary scream from Erich.

There was a thick red spray, wet impacts on the ground. The man’s hands came up one spasm, as though he might embrace the man who had shot him, or investigate the ruin that had replaced the back of his head. His knees were already buckling.

Kaltherzig stepped away from these idiot hands, his lip peeling back in the sketch of a snarl. He holstered his gun and settled his long black coat.

The man fell. He landed on one side. Nothing about him moved again except the crimson triangle, spreading.

The cowboy made an unspeakable noise. He turned after much too long, staring and staring, still in line, half-shuffling backwards, and then stopping. The man behind him tried to push him, hissed something, and then darted around him, wanting none of, this.

The guard shouted at him. He didn’t move.

Erich saw the gun come up and covered his ears, closed his eyes. The gunshot never came. The cowboy must’ve started walking again.

Kaltherzig and Erich were alone with the great spreading pandemonium of selection getting louder and louder around them.

“Name.”

It sounded, too far away. He almost had to lip-read to understand the order.

“Erich Kass, Herr Obersturmfuhrer, sir.”

His voice shook. His ears and his skull and all his teeth rang with the echo and the meaning of that noise. And this officer in front of him was, unmoved. His hands were calm and steady and sure. His eyes hadn’t changed at all.

Kaltherzig did something like a smirk. “You’re with me,” he told Erich. He wrote something short and sharp, and closed the notebook hard so the leather snapped together.

He followed Kaltherzig, away from this pandemonium.

They were walking closer to the smokestacks. His knees did something and he staggered in this, street. Kaltherzig caught the back of his arm, drawing him upright and hauling him along faster. He tried to walk, sobbing, sobbing like a four-year-old, scared, literally, out of his wits. “The ovens...please...”

“We’re not going to the ovens, you idiot. Now move.”

He walked. Sniffled Swiped at his face with his sleeve.

A building labeled DISINFECTION. They walked into a lobby with numbered hooks, about half occupied starting neatly from one and ending yards and yards away. Beyond that a wide expanse of white tile and wet and women, all of them naked. Some of them stared at him, though there were male and female SS herding them, shouting, hitting them to hurry them.

“It’s all right, ladies, this is a pink one. Not interested,” Kaltherzig said. Only guards laughed. If not for the grip on his arm Erich would have slipped and fallen. He flushed, miserable, hating Kaltherzig, hating all these women.

There were more doors, flanked by guards, at the end of this long room. Kaltherzig dragged him through them. There were more of the women here, lined up at a long bank of tables. There was a cluster of people at the opposite end of the room, with something being done in the invisible middle that was making a young woman scream. Most people were ignoring this.

“Move back,” Kaltherzig said. He did not raise his voice. A few moved; the ones who didn’t he simply shoved, sometimes hard enough to qualify as a throw. He took Erich’s arm again and presented him to the end of this table. “Next,” he told the guard sitting there. She said nothing, as if this were normal. She took the notebook Kaltherzig offered and wrote things down and typed something. Kaltherzig took his left arm and shoved up his sleeve.

The needle hurt, buzzing like something you might hear in a barber shop, but it was cat-scratch hurt, infuriating for being done over and over. Erich gritted his teeth and tried not to move. Kaltherzig kept his hand just above Erich’s elbow, but he wasn’t pressing hard enough to really hold him down. He turned from watching the blue numbers inked in, and gave Erich one luminous look without speaking.

When it was done Kaltherzig took his arm again—the right one, Erich noticed—and led him farther on. He gave this new guard his clipboard, and said “Absolutely not!” when she turned to the striped heap of uniforms behind her. She sent a prisoner beside her out of the room. Kaltherzig waited. Erich stole a look at his tattoo. He was bleeding, but hardly enough to run down his arm.

1351519.

He thought he should memorize it, having heard guards shouting at people by number.
The prisoner came back with a striped uniform, folded, and a handful of mostly-pink scraps. Kaltherzig pulled Erich out of the flow of traffic and presented him with this armload of black and almost-white. “Hurry up.”

He started to say, here? but he remembered I do not repeat myself, and took off his coat. Kaltherzig took it from him, but he only held it. He slid off his shoes, fingers fumbling, and was down to his underwear when Kaltherzig said, “That’s enough,” and he put on these strange coarse things. They were new, though carelessly made, and almost fit him.

He turned up the trouser-legs.

Kaltherzig said, “Put your shoes back on.” He threw his coat at him and took his crisp white shirt and the gray trousers that went with his best suit, hundreds of miles away hanging in his, closet, and threw them to a prisoner.

Two pink triangles and two strips of white cloth with his number inked on them. There was a needle threaded through the scraps, holding them together. He stared at them. Kaltherzig shoved his hand towards his pocket, and he shoved them in and stood dressed, feeling, undressed.

There was a car, idling, in this wide strangely-paved street, with a lieutenant at the wheel. Kaltherzig pushed him into the back seat and got in beside him. He sat suddenly cushioned in leather.

There were more gunshots. It took very few of them before Erich stopped cringing, almost stopped, noticing. The intermittent explosions and the sub-threshold noise of distant crying and shouting all began to seem part of the environment, like the weather or that frying-meat smell.

He thought of stained glass windows. One slice of story. It was like that, now. An ugly woman with a blue-black scarf over her head, clinging to two children. His first glimpse of Mengele, though he did not know who he was. A group of three men, an older one and two grown sons, maybe, huddled together waiting their turn with the man in the white gloves, their turn with the pointing cane.

And then the car was pulling away from all this, and towards the wide gate the truck had come in. The car smelled of new and leather and Kaltherzig and cigar smoke.

He sat, still out of phase. He had straightened his shirt and his coat and the new striped hat. He could feel Kaltherzig looking at him.

The hands came at him so quickly he almost screamed. He cupped Erich’s face with his fingertips, like a cage. The gloves were soft as skin. He turned his head left and right, tilted his chin up. Erich closed his eyes, heart triphammering, and Kaltherzig allowed this, pushing his thumb on the point of the boy’s chin until he opened his mouth, touching even the arches of his teeth, closing once around his tongue and almost tugging.

He made some small sound at this, a flinch, and the fingers were snatched out of his mouth and Kaltherzig punched him in the left cheekbone, hard enough to send him over on his side across the seat.

He took hold of Erich’s coat and pulled him upright again and held open his eyelids with his thumbs, tilting him to look into the pale sunlight until tears streamed down his face.

Kaltherzig was expressionless. He might have been examining him for, damage.

He let him go, reached inside his coat, took out a cigarette and lit it.

Erich sat shaking, dabbed at his cheek with one hand. No blood, but a deep pulsing hurt.

“Your hair is much too dark. So is mine. “ Kaltherzig shrugged. “The eyes are incredible, though. Such a tropical blue. How old did you say you were?”

“Fifteen, Herr Obersturmfuhrer, sir.”

“Sir will do. That mouthful is for the idiots at the hospital.” He turned down his window and flicked ashes out into the street.

They passed the gate, driving through a wide almost-garden, neatly laid saplings and carefully kept grass, artistic sweeping flowerbeds that were still gleaming with the last of the late bloomers. The woods were a green darkness an acre or so distant.

It’s beautiful, Erich thought, and surely that wasn’t right at all, with the smokestacks behind them.

There were striped slaves, here and there, working in this garden.

“Can you type?”

“Yes sir,” he said, cutting that, mouthful, at the very last second.

“And spell?”

“Yes sir.”

“All of that, quickly?”

He yes-sirred again. He was finding he could breathe, for possibly the first time since he’d been arrested. If only this man would let him, work. He had done almost perfectly all through school and in all his days in the print shop, never a complaint, praise from every teacher in every subject except for his hopeless but devoted tries at anything athletic. He’d been good at archery and swimming, and that had saved him. He would be, so, perfect, if only they’d let him.

A noncommittal sort of noise from Kaltherzig. “And you can sew, I presume, from your, father, was it? Well enough to mend things, or well enough to make things?”

“Either....both....” and he dared to add, “My father made uniforms in Berlin for many years, I can make one from material in two days, sir.”

Kaltherzig smiled. “You’ll do all of that, and whatever else I teach you, and in two years you might find yourself home, my boy.”

Desinfektionsraum

They drove through what was obscenely like a very nice suburb and pulled into the long paved driveway of a neat sprawl of a house. It was sunset. The camp behind them was already blazing searchlights in white wedges into the almost-dark.

Kaltherzig got out, pulled Erich with him, said “Heil Hitler,” to the driver. He pushed Erich in front of him up the walk, unlocked the door and pushed him inside. A foyer with a marble-tiled floor, everything trimmed in dark wood polished to gleam like glass. The lush sort of quiet that you only found in the most expensive houses. “Don’t touch anything,” Kaltherzig snapped at him, and steered him by his shoulder through a beautiful Norse-Roman sort of living room and down a hallway and through a bedroom so dark all he really perceived was the massive loom of a four-poster bed.

Kaltherzig shoved him into the bathroom. It was a gleaming white box of new tile and chrome.

“Strip. Put everything here,” he said, kicking an empty wicker basket on the floor. He left, the door hanging open

Erich felt the kind of hot miserable swoosh from his neck to his face like sometimes happened before you were, very sick. He took off his coat and put it in the basket. Unbuttoned this slave shirt and put it in after.

It seemed to be harder to move his hands with each layer of clothing. He gritted his teeth and thought of their gruff but harmless doctor at home, and tried to pretend this was, normal. Once he was naked there was that same old odd hospital sense of being cold and bare that never seemed to be there when you undressed to bathe.

He came back with a blank metal can that reminded Erich of paint thinner. He wore black rubber gloves that came to his elbow and thumbed off the cap and pushed Erich so that it was step into the tub or fall into it, and when he was standing there he upended the can and poured most of the contents over his head. It was something blue and stinging and chemical. He choked and spluttered and his left eye burned as if he had shampoo in it only, much, worse.

Kaltherzig leaned over and plugged the tub and turned on both tabs and pushed him down into the bottom and picked up a brush. He started on his chest, scrubbing without mercy, as the water got deeper and hotter around him. Erich squirmed as little as possible, blinking and gasping and trying so hard to be, still, telling himself but he’s a doctor.

He was helplessly reminded of washing a dog. He wasn’t expected to assist or even understand directions; Kaltherzig simply pulled him or shoved him or rearranged him as he saw fit. He poured more of this awful stuff into Erich’s hair and scrubbed this with his fingers, and this part might’ve felt almost, good, if not for the acid-sting so close to his still-burning eyes.

The brush, again, on his stomach, across his chest, gouging at his nipples. He sucked in his breath and, waited.

Kaltherzig scrubbed him down to his toes, back up to the hinge of his thighs. He turned him over, dragged him up onto his hands and knees. Long swipes of the bristles up and down his back. This was almost excruciatingly pleasant at first, that melting kind of satisfying of having all those unreachable itches scratched at once, but the bristles were digging hard enough to sting after a second or two. He had to squirm and Kaltherzig held him by the back of his neck, by his hair, scrubbing hard hard in merciless circles and lines.

The soap burned him like alcohol everywhere the bristles rubbed raw. He couldn’t keep quiet and he finally muffled his face in the crook of his elbow, his hands clinging to his own shoulders, trying to, endure, this. And then Kaltherzig spread the cheeks of his buttocks open with one hand and scrubbed between them.

He screamed.

Kaltherzig laughed and scrubbed more slowly, lingering over the ring of muscle, pushing there with the point of the brush. “What’s the matter? My, boy. Am I hurting you?”

He didn’t know if he was supposed to say yes sir. He didn’t say anything. He was sobbing.

The sound of the can again, and the thunk splash of the brush hitting the water. Kaltherzig let him go briefly, spread him wider—“Get your knees apart.” and then fingers pushed at him, and he had time to think that it felt like two and draw in one anguished breath before they shoved inside him, greased with disinfectant. He dragged them in and out in the same scrubbing motions, laughing at the particularly tortured noises, sometimes repeating a gesture to wring out a longer scream. He pushed those two fingers in as deep as he could, up to his palm, and did some kind of flutter inside until Erich begged him to stop, choking out sir after sir.

Nothing he said bought him the slightest pity. There was the distressing sense that it was all, business, that it must be done as quickly and efficiently as possible, that he was property to be, maintained. The fingers twisted inside him and he buried his wet face in his wet arms and made long ugly cries at the spreading sting in all the tiny secret torn places.

The fingers slid out, so fast it left him with an aching urge to, gag, or cough, and he stumbled over a breath and realized this hysterical echoing whooping was himself, breathing, sobbing, whatever it was, now.

He had almost a second to think it’s over and Kaltherzig picked up the brush again and drew up his balls in one hand and scrubbed here, too, ignoring the agonized howling. He kept on long after Erich had given up on screaming entirely, then drew his penis back between his legs and scoured it off too, drew back the foreskin and scrubbed at the underside and the head until Erich collapsed on his stomach, feet kicking a little, involuntarily, legs still spread.

Kaltherzig threw down the brush.

Erich lay in water almost hot enough to scald him, just on his hands and knees far enough to keep from drowning, crying listlessly.

A beat, and the soft impact of armloads of clothing landing on top of him.

“Wash all that. Clean all this before you come out. And wash yourself with something so that you smell human.”

He turned his head, water lapping at his cheek, clothes spreading in a shipwrecked tangle around him. He said to Kaltherzig’s back, “..what, should I put on....sir....”

“Nothing.” And the door closed between them.

Gehirnwäsche

He wanted more than anything to simply lie there, crying, hands cradled between his legs.

Was that rape? Did that count, or did it have to, be......did you call it that at all, when it was a boy, doing it to a boy?

He’s a doctor.

The soap inside him would not let him be still for long. He groped his way to the toilet and cried a little longer sitting there until the worst of it seemed to be out of him.

Alcohol, he thought, and that was certainly what it smelled like. Like a, hospital.

He’s a doctor. It was to prevent the spread of disease. At least he’d given him that terrible bath in, private.

But he was laughing while he did it, he, was...

He scrubbed out all the clothes, washed himself with a bar of soap as soft as cream. It smelled of Kaltherzig, and stung gently all over again in the places where the brush had marked him like sunburn.

That burning pain inside him doubled him over with cramps now and then . Drove him back to the toilet twice, sobbing between gritted teeth the second time, and finally turning on the taps and kneeling in the tub and washing himself, there, as best he could. Anything to stop that blazing need to, push, or squirm or scream.

It was, softer than he expected. Inside. He could still feel Kaltherzig’s fingers there, as if they were still, there. He washed his hands with the soap again, and shuddered

Was he allowed to do this to him?

He dried himself and the floor and the edge of the tub, hanging the stopper and the brush up neatly.

Why can I still feel him doing, that?

Was it, legal?

He had watched him shoot a man for asking a question. Whatever this was it certainly wasn’t as bad as being shot. Kaltherzig certainly hadn’t taken any pains to hide the

(murder)

execution. And there had been at least a dozen more.

It could have been worse. This had been rather gentle as far as rape could go, he imagined.

Some of the women had been made to strip naked on the ramp, in front of God and everybody. He thought of the woman screaming at the other end of the shower, of a very blond man laughing at her and doing something that he leaned into with his shoulder

He looked at himself in the mirror. Pale. He looked like he’d been crying. No help for it. He was painted with long throbbing swatches of pink, everywhere he was scrubbed and scalded. There were dozens of raised lines where particularly sharp bristles had marked him, not yet red, but angry and pink enough be real scratches in the morning. He washed the gloves and hung up the towel and stood with nothing left do but leave.

He opened the door and stepped naked out into the bedroom.

There was a fire in a vast yawning fireplace he hadn’t seen. It was only just autumn, but there was frost every single night, and he was cold with his bare skin and damp hair.

Kaltherzig was sitting on the bed barefoot in crisp new white shirt and black pants.

(as if I were, contaminated)

Another cigarette was clamped in those perfect teeth. He was pulling on a set of gloves, shorter than the black ones dripping dry in the bathroom. They were white and only wrist-long and they snapped like dangerous. He patted the bed beside him. That flicker again, of being examined and scrubbed and shoved and treated so like a, pet, like an animal.

He thought, he’ll hurt me again, and there was a dull sort of, dread, and again that swooping, awareness, of his nakedness. Suddenly he was so, very, tired, tired after days in the truck and sleeping out alon0e in the dark and being too cold and too hungry and shouted at and hurt, hurt, hurt. He felt his feet move, as if he were dreaming, and he took one step forward, and

Kaltherzig patted the bed beside him

(he might do that for a, dog)

and opened something he was holding and slicked the same two fingers of his right hand. Erich climbed up beside him, waited to be steered. He was handed a pillow, which he stared at, and Kaltherzig sighed and put it down and pushed him down on his face over it so that it raised his hips. And he was crying again, couldn’t help it, had he known how much child he still had left inside him? Could this, doctor, do this to him, in this house that looked just like anyone’s house? He wanted to, go, home, could this happen to him in a perfectly normal bed that someone slept in every single night?

The gun was still in the holster, still on his belt, draped over a lush heavy chair two steps from the bed. He could just see it there, just over the line of the edge of the bed. Erich wrapped his arms around his head and tried to stop the idiot crying. It wouldn’t help.

He’d learned that already.

“Does it hurt you?” Just, calm, almost as if he, sympathized, but not really. The textbook doctor voice. At least he didn’t sound inclined to laugh, now. More sounds of the jar he was holding.

Erich said, “Yes sir,” because he didn’t dare not to answer and he didn’t dare to lie. He just wanted it to be, over. Just, no, more. He would do what he was told for whatever was left and afterwards, that same reward that had gotten him through the very first piece of this—sleep. He would sleep. Sooner or later the pain would stop and he would sleep and it would all, stop, for awhile.

“Are you bleeding?”

“No sir,” and he burrowed his face into the bedspread, to keep his eyes from overflowing, and wound two handfuls of the blanket and tried to breathe, breathe, breathe.

That same noncommittal noise. Fingers, pressing at that aching ring of muscle, again, and he made one pitiful noise and stopped himself, ashamed. He expected that terrible, shoving, slide, but this was not exactly that; a slow petting stroke, smoothing a generous layer of something cool on him, and inside him in gradually deeper presses.

The almost-gentleness of this, and the little matter-of-fact circles to rub the ointment in, left him quiet and almost, dissociated. He was aware of what was going on but attaching very little meaning to sensory data. He felt tended, helpless, and he allowed his legs to be spread farther apart and when both fingers pushed inside him again he only arched his back and tried to breathe, deeper.

“That’s much better.”

He closed his eyes tighter, that same endorphin, whatever-it-was, that always happened whenever anyone, praised him, that starving, feeling. He didn’t know what he was doing, better, so he tried not to, move.

“Push towards me.”

He tried to lean with his shoulders and his back and his hips. He got an approving murmur and that lovely pressing circle harder, slower. “Do you like that?”

He pushed towards him again, chewing his lip.

Kaltherzig held him down with his other hand and pinched, one finger inside him and his thumb outside, his nails digging into the ring of his anus, a sudden startling edge under the smooth glide of rubber. “What was the first thing I ever said to you?”

He was caught, in mid-cry, and he almost felt his brain do a kind of seizure like a butterfly in a jar, trying to, remember. “...that you don’t, repeat yourself...I’m sorry...”

“That’s very pretty, but once you’re sorry—“ a much, harder, pinch, and more pull that made him really scream, one throat-scraping undignified squawk. “—you’ve already done, something wrong. And you still haven’t answered me.”

“...yes! Yes, I liked it.”

One more pull, and a twist with those nails that made him add the sir.

Kaltherzig slid his fingers inside again immediately.

Erich drew in his breath and clung to the bedspread and shook and ground his teeth It was, so....that was the worst, once they were, in, it was easier to, adapt, but that first, push, was such a loud, texture, that it drowned out everything else.

And he did it, again, that gentle rolling push, just, there, and that same blur of blinded and stunned and stricken, a pang with every, single, slide, so hard and unstoppable and sexual that he couldn’t, breathe, past it.

A laugh, and that familiar lingering in places that made him frantic. Deliberate little gestures, and then a mean aching interlude of having the fingers drawn out entirely, teasing outside in pointless little strokes, and then all the way in and just, right, there, a circle that he felt in his teeth and that fluttering push again fastfastfast and he was making a sound like an engine through his teeth, and his knees and his shoulders and his spine pushed him closer to Kaltherzig’s hand.

“It’s your, prostate. That idiot Mengele insists to me that there’s no such organ.” A laugh, and out again. Erich made a noise that embarrassed him, pushed towards Kaltherzig’s hand and stopped himself. Kaltherzig patted him and pushed in again with three fingers, easing off politely when Erich wailed, and pushing in again with that same, inexorable patience. That merciless flutter.

The movement startled him; he would never get used to that serpentine, speed. Kaltherzig was leaning over him, nose to nose with him, that flawless statue’s face so close to his he was afraid to blink for fear of brushing him with his eyelashes. “You’re resisting it.”

“I can’t help it, I’ll, scream...”

A shrug, and that nothing look that wasn’t quite a smile. Those fingers curled inside him, pulled him like a hook, pushed somewhere that made his back come up. Kaltherzig smiled at him.

“You don’t know what that is?”

A thump, inside him, in that immovable place. “Your tailbone.” Another, lift, too slow to hurt him, and the delirium of he’s pushing my spine from the inside, and a moan he forgot to muffle. “I can feel your, pulse, here.....as fast as if you’d been running.....”
A twist that almost hurt, and a shift and a push in a soft place that made Erich feel his pulse, there, too. As fast as if he’d been running.

A laugh, and a thudding push that rocked him on his hands and knees like a shove. He was making the same, sound, every time he managed to draw a breath, face pushed into the bed as hard as he could to drown out this rising and falling wail.

“Now.”

He had no idea what exactly Kaltherzig wanted him to do, but if it had something to do with whatever was at the end of this, climbing, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to.

“No? I’ve never had one come, being examined.”

One, and a try at some kind of, conclusion, from that. Kaltherzig did something like a snarl of frustration and the fingers were almost, snatched, out of him, making him draw up his shaking knees and grit his teeth.

Quiet, for so long that he turned his head to look over his shoulder, blinking through his hair. Kaltherzig was unbuttoning his pants. He turned his face back to the mattress and wrapped his arms around his head again, thinking, sleep, thinking, over, soon. It took longer than he expected and he looked again and got a blur of him with his hand between his legs.

He was expecting that petting kind of stroke again. Kaltherzig grasped his hips and spread him open with his thumbs and pushed inside, a nudge and then a merciless shove with all his weight behind it. He drew in his breath in anticipation of great, rending pain, but there was almost, none, only a deafening sense of being so very full. The first friction inside him was so deep it set his teeth on edge, and there was the first threat of a monstrous pleasure.

He clung to the blanket again, shaken, stricken, mouth muffled open against a handful of cloth. Kaltherzig made some sound behind him, spread him wider, thumbs pressing bruise-hard with that awful squeak of rubber. He was pushing inside deeper still, and there was the first real pain, strange and stomachache deep, that brought a wavering cry to his throat.

Kaltherzig stopped, held himself here. “Put your knees under you, straighten your back.” He did this, sobbing again because it moved this, penis, inside him. Could he do this in a, house.....where people, lived....

Deeper, and that stretching hurt was, gone, and there was that excruciating, slide, and he moaned because he couldn’t help it, and the push of the buttons of Kaltherzig’s pants against his thigh. He leaned forward, hands coming down to the bed on either side of Erich’s shoulders, and there was a withdrawal that really, hurt, and the push inside again and he was pushing, right, there, harder and faster and faster, and he reached under Erich, wrapped one gloved slippery hand around his cock.

Almost a, scream, of dismay, and a thrashing try at squirming that he stopped immediately because of the cock inside him still pinning him down. Long, oiled pulls, his hand wrapped hard, and slower, meaner slams inside him. That seizure in all his muscles started immediately, and he was afraid he would, fall, and the climbing was more like a hook pulling him faster and faster, and he said, “...no...”

Kaltherzig let him go and slapped the right cheek of his buttocks so hard it, stunned him, and he collapsed, the cock sliding out. He was drawn back, impaled again with no mercy, before he could even draw a breath to cry out.

“Don’t you ever tell me no again.”

He was as calm as, he had been all this time. Erich looked at him without meaning to, and those frozenblue eyes were half-closed, mouth slack, as though he were very nearly, somewhere else. Then that not-quite smile returned. He leaned closer, tilted his ear towards Erich’s mouth to collect his noises, rolled his hips in slow irresistible pushes.

Faster. And he pushed Erich down flat and went faster still, and it did that terrible wrong-angle hurt again, and when he screamed long and loud in shock Kaltherzig moaned and went, harder. He hid his face, sobbed, chewed his arm to keep from screaming.

That pleasure had gone with the first bolt of that pain, it started again, more misery than delight, and he was crying without restraint when there were a devastating set of thrusts so hard he was, paralyzed, and he was held down still and it was much, too, deep, and he couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t, move, and Kaltherzig was shaking on top of him.

He took one long breath, and gripped Erich hard enough to hurt and pulled out of him.

Erich didn’t, move, because he hadn’t been told he could.

“Go and clean yourself up,” Kaltherzig said. When Erich sat up he was unbuttoning his shirt, unknotting his tie.


He expected blood, and found none, only this slippery colorless stuff that smelled of, ocean. He understood at once, and he did, what Kaltherzig had told him to do, feeling, very sleepy. The panic had almost gone; the worst of things had happened, would happen again. This beautiful creature would probably shoot him, but he hadn’t, yet.

Kaltherzig said “Come here,” as soon as he’d stepped into the bedroom He was naked from the waist down, shirt on but unbuttoned, tie missing. He had his hand between his legs.

Erich was afraid to look here, for fear of seeing blood or shit. Kaltherzig cupped his head again and pulled his face down. “You know how,” he said.

He had no idea, how.

He wanted to struggle or protest or scream in, outrage, and he still couldn’t look and he opened his mouth because he had to, the fear of the gun beating in his head like a furious bird. He thought, if I’m sick he’ll shoot me, if I can’t, he’ll and he, could, but he certainly didn’t know how. Kaltherzig thumped the top of his head. “Clean,” he whispered, and Erich understood.

He wasn’t sick. He tasted nothing but that strange ocean smell in his nostrils. Kaltherzig thumped the top of his head, less gently, and said, “You can do better than that,” and he squirmed and wrapped one hand around this mysterious cock, drew back this luxurious skin, thinking of expensive cloth in his father’s storeroom. He tried to, imitate, the tiny little list of things that he knew felt good to, himself, during his very few brief and unsuccessful attempts at masturbation. Kaltherzig seemed to, unwind, and the hand came down to the top of his head again, only resting there.

He stayed, far away from himself, doing this, and Kaltherzig pulled him away and said, “Every time, after.”

He said yes sir, thought of the women, screaming, and the shaven stick-men carrying luggage and bodies around in the pandemonium of unloading. Was he, grateful? There were pages in his brain like a book, turning too fast to see, listing and listing all the ways it might be worse, pointing out that at least there was only this, one. Something inside him was crying out—more frantic question than fact—that if he were only, perfect, he might yet avoid that crimson triangle, that fall.

There was still that sense of deafness, as though the gunshots had broken part of his hearing and part of his mind along with it. None of it seemed quite real, and yet nothing that had ever come before seemed as real as this.

“Are you bleeding?”

That solicitous question, again, and that mishmash of images that meant doctor. Hadn’t there always been something of this cruelty in everything medicinal? Flicker of having his tonsils out, crying and crying, and being plied with puddings and yogurts and shaved ice he didn’t want.

“No sir.”

He was pushed onto his face again anyway, spread and dabbed at, gently, and he gritted his teeth and told himself it was ungrateful to still, be, crying. It seemed better if he was quiet; there was less of him, there, when he was quiet.

“No, not yet.”

The jar, again, the fingers inside him slippery with cream. It was over, quickly, this time. Kaltherzig slapped his thigh, shoved him in the direction of the door.

He climbed down, unsteadily, watched Kaltherzig drag and push the covers back and slide under. He didn’t understand. He had his hand on the knob when Kaltherzig came at him, snarling “Where exactly, do you think you’re going?” and gave him a shove that thudded forehead and shoulder into the wall, hard enough to bring him to his knees.

“..you said, to—“

“I said no such thing; I put you, here.” A shove with his foot, thudding Erich over onto his back. “Do what I tell you, stay where I put you. “

Silence, left deliberately awkward. He waited until Erich started for yes sir and did that whipcrack of Selektion voice again. “If you cannot remember that you won’t last a week. And you would be amazed how many boys can’t follow simple directions.”

He didn’t move, didn’t dare a yes sir. The gun, he thought, if that one single hieroglyph, blue-black and unconquerable could be called a thought.

Footsteps, nothing, and the soft impact of a blanket thrown at him.

Nothing. The fire crackling, dying.

When he could move again he wound himself small under the blanket, covered head and all, and waited for the sleep he’d promised himself, trying and failing to think of nothing, nothing, nothing.

Missbrauch, Teil eins

There was a grandfather clock, somewhere in the house. It chimed the hour with an elegant low tone, and he heard twelve and one before there was the longed-for patch of oblivion.

The distant cry of a siren woke Erich when it was still dark. There was a stupid set of minutes when he had no idea where he was, only the confused sensation of this noise that meant he might be late for, something, and the smell of a new house and the blanket trapping his limbs and a thousand tiny aches from sleeping on the floor.

He had dared to slide to the very foot of the bed where a thick narrow rug covered the hardwood floor, and from there he supposed he must have slept, a confusion of dreams, people with scalpels chasing him into trucks labeled SHOWERS.

The memory of where he was came back in one ugly crashing piece, and his throat caught and his eyes filled with tears, and he swallowed and sat up, saw that Kaltherzig was a white sleeping shape in a bed wide enough for a king.

He was afraid to stand up. Finally he folded the blanket in a crouch, and crawled into the bathroom, standing after he’d pushed the door closed behind him. His uniform was dry enough, stiff and as strange as ever. He took his patches from the coat pocket, sewed the pink triangle and his number on the shirt and the trouser leg.

It felt, different, now, when he put it on, and he couldn’t not see this gleam of pink just in his peripheral vision.

Everyone, everyone will know, from a look.

He imagined that was the point of it, a little punishment that never ended and required no effort on the part of the SS.

I didn’t do anything.

I didn’t ask you what you’ve done, I asked you what you are.

He crawled back and sat at the foot of the bed where Kaltherzig had put him. When the clock chimed eight he stretched and sat up, smoothed back that fall of hair, predator eyes still sleepy. He looked down at Erich with no particular surprise or interest. “Can you cook?”

“Yes sir,” he said. Somewhat true, though his mother had never been satisfied with his efforts. He’d been tempted to try it, but the bruise on his forehead kept him too afraid of the doorknob.

“Good, go.” He was dragging through a wardrobe when Erich crept out.

Quiet. Somehow that idea had gotten its hooks in him; the less he spoke, the softer he was when he had to speak, the less noise of opening and closing and footsteps and misery and breathing he made, the less notice he would attract. The less catastrophe he would invite.

He found a luxuriously appointed kitchen, and after much frantic searching to find things he made coffee and warmed bread and cut the green tops off strawberries, trying for things he could make quickly, with no idea what kind of time he had. The warm home-smell of the bread made his stomach knot, but he didn’t eat. He hadn’t been told he could.

Kaltherzig came down sharp as a razor from hat to gleaming boots. He took coffee and bread and lit a cigarette, settled in his armchair, gestured at the phonograph till Erich understood what he wanted and started it for him.

“Everything you touch you put back as you found it,” he said, and that seemed like, enough of a dismissal, so Erich retreated to the kitchen and obsessed over the miniscule mess he’d made.

He washed everything and moved dishes in the cabinets tiny increments of an inch and squinted at the floor to see if he’d missed any crumbs. He thought of the skeletons with the luggage, and told himself over and over that he was lucky, that he would be perfect, that it would be all right.

A different Untersturmfuhrer came in the same car. Erich put on his coat and got in as Kaltherzig gestured.

The dogs did their usual chase-and-bark when the car passed the kennel, piling over one another in their fury to get closer to this possible prey. Erich shuddered. He was afraid to pass too near the officers who had these beasts on leashes.

No trains just now, only the great gate and the tracks vanishing on the horizon line. One of the smokestacks was already puffing bluegray into the air. Guards leaned in black silhouette in the gun towers, smoking or with coffee steaming in one gloved hand.

Everything was so...motionless, as if everyone were always waiting for something.

They drove to a long low neat building, far from the ovens. A double line of those skeleton men was marching across the street with eerie fake cheer, an SS man with a whip behind them. One long stream of numbers and patches rainbowed by him; the yellow star, red, green, brown, purple. No pink ones. He dreaded taking his coat off.

He was expecting to, work, in the hospital, but Kaltherzig steered him through a sort of doctor’s, office, with SS in uniforms and labcoats and various combinations of the two, prisoners and prisoner doctors, patients being led shuffling or wailing or zombiefied. He pushed him into an office with Herr Obersturmfuhrer, Doctor Ahren Kaltherzig painted on the fogged glass and closed the door, closed the blinds, and opened his briefcase on his desk.

Ahren, he thought, and thought it might have been better, here, too, not to know his name.

Out came the notebook.

“Take all of that off.”

Speed was becoming, automatic. That, separation, already happening now, good, it was setting in as a, reflex, how useful, how clever of his mind to take care of him like that. He folded everything, and Kaltherzig took his clothes from him, set them unreachably aside, patted the metal table.

He had to use the little foot-ledge to climb up, and when he slid back his feet dangled. Kaltherzig wrote something down and said without looking, “I’m only going to measure you and photograph you. Nothing so terrible yet. I’ll let you know when to panic.”

That doctor-vibration again, the closest to friendly he had yet seen Kaltherzig. That smile that showed none of his teeth—he had learned the other kind was a sign of, danger.

He said, “Yes sir,” because some kind of response seemed, required of him.

“You’re too small for your age.”

“Yes sir,” he said, blushing a little, as though it were his own fault. He had always been small, had been so little at birth they’d told his mother to plan his funeral. He thought of telling Kaltherzig this, but he didn't.

He sat on the table, naked, suffered the usual routine doctor-type things, tongue depressor and stethoscope and a light shined into his eyes and his ears. Kaltherzig had to lean near him, smelling of that sandalwood soap and other things that might be aftershave, German tobacco and Turkish coffee. It made him think of the couch in his father’s den, soft but too scratchy to sleep on without something between it and your cheek. The doctor nudged at the worst of the bruises, here and there, noted something quickly in his file. Erich flushed again at this—he’ll think I was bad, he’ll ask me what I did to deserve them—but he said nothing about these stigmata of disobedience.

Kaltherzig pushed him back and hinged strange crooked things out from under the table. He pulled up his knees, bent, and hooked them over deep metal saddles, spread wide and strapped on just over his knee, tighter than tight.

Panic.

His arms were strapped straight out at his sides, along little, tables, that swung out, that looked, modified, for this use, from some other more innocuous purpose. Trays, maybe, for instruments. There were plenty of those on wheeled carts. spread out on white cloth in sharp silver rows. His feet were put in stirrups, strapped, pushed up till he could see the ceiling through them.

Kaltherzig pulled his hips forward till he felt the edge of the table below the small of his back. Already this position hurt his, shoulders, the very few inches of his back just at his waist. Straps around his chest, his waist, both wrists. He could not even watch what was being done to him, only a very finite square of white ceiling and wall and Kaltherzig at the foot of the table.

“All right now. You’re to stay spread and be still and be quiet. Don’t distract me.”

He yes-sirred. Swallowed over and over. Blinked very fast. Almost, panted in dread.

A thermometer almost as wide as a finger, shaken while Kaltherzig smirked at him, swirled in a jar and shoved without much ceremony deep into his aching rectum. He was finding it impossible to go back to, quiet. Kaltherzig ignored him, picked up a heavy black camera gleaming with expensiveness and took many pictures, some from inches from his skin, several between his legs, once tilting the thermometer agonizingly to one side for several frames. That lens, an inch from his eye, Kaltherzig so close he could smell something like candied violets on his breath, and the whisper “Don’t blink...two...three..” and the blinding flash and that pop that terrified him no matter how many times he heard it.

The thermometer was withdrawn, consulted, deposited in a waiting bin of alcohol. Kaltherzig selected a terrifying little handful of silver shiny pointed things, but they turned out to be only, calipers, of a sort, or rulers with tiny metal slides. He laid these down on Erich almost, everywhere, little cold metal pricks on his stomach, his hands, his face, and photographed the resulting measurements. He held each testicle separately, making Erich hiss in fear, but it was only the dull prick of the calipers. Then his penis, too, and the gentle grasp and the still lines of Kaltherzig’s shoulder made him twitch and become sluggishly hard. A grin from Kaltherzig without comment, and a measurement for this, too.

Kaltherzig came at him with tiny scissors, cut off a lock of his almostblack hair and tucked it in a tiny envelope. Trimmed his nails in neat little curves with silver clippers and added these too. Fingerprinted him and daubed the blueviolet ink off his fingertips with cotton dipped in alcohol.

Enough of the camera. Kaltherzig sat in his dangerous chair, again, rolled around to one side with an empty large syringe with a long thick needle. He put on the tourniquet with quick careless pulls and took the vein in the crease of Erich’s elbow. It set his teeth on edge, this cold little intrusion, and the pull as the syringe filled with blueviolet blood. He sucked in his breath and exhaled as slowly as he could stand to until the needle was withdrawn, the bleeding stopped under the tourniquet knotted over a pinch of gauze.

Then another syringe, with a needle so short he could barely see it, loaded with a lot of something perfectly clear. “Anesthetic,” he said, and moved down again between Erich’s knees.

How they kept peeling away his layers of, shock. He did not think Kaltherzig could possibly intend to do, that, until he felt the gloved fingers pinch open his anus and the first warning prick of the needle, just at the bottom. “No no no, no, please, no......”

He ground his teeth. He’d forgotten.

The needle was withdrawn immediately. Kaltherzig peeled off one glove with his teeth, and slapped the inside of Erich’s spread right thigh in exactly the same place, hard hard hard, over and over till he was one long scream and there was a red handprint on his leg.

“I’m going to have to teach you about that no when we’ve more time. You’re not learning that one fast enough.”

He tried for sorry a few times . He sniffled but his nose ran anyway.

The pinching little spread, again. The needle, again. This time it was pushed, in, straight into that drawstring-cord of muscle with a tearing little pop he could almost, hear.

He couldn’t scream It was so, very........specific......this one beam of pain like the sunlight through an eyeglass lens, pinning him into this agonized arch. And then Kaltherzig pushed the plunger down, and he could not, be, still, not that he could really move, but there was a sort of a blur of thrashing and tensing and braying out all sorts of unbelievable noise, trying endlessly to, fight, this, hurt, too driven by instinct to realize it was useless. The medicine went in anyway, and it would be worse because of the tension.

Kaltherzig tsked at him and reloaded the needle. “It’s your own fault . You do all that squirming and crying and it pulls the needle around inside you. Nobody to blame but yourself.”

He gritted his teeth and screamed through them from the first pinch. This time it was the, top, of the ring, closest to his testicles, and Kaltherzig seemed to angle it upwards almost under the, skin, and through such a very edge of that muscle-cord he was afraid the needle would just tear out of him if he moved. His arms were so tight they would ache the next day, but from the waist down he tried to, be, paralyzed.

Kaltherzig seemed to just, shove, the plunger in , this time, and his scream climbed in one jump to a pitch that tore him ragged in a second and silenced him in two

He withdrew it. Rubbed Erich’s thighs from knees to groin and back again, pulled his glove on again, never taking those luminous eyes off his subject. “All that over two little shots. Really.” That mean, shallow, twisting pinch, the skin over this terrible hurt tweezed between Kaltherzig’s fingernails, so that he wailed and strained miserably against the straps.

“Are you numb?”

He wasn’t numb. He was one blazing deep pain that seemed to have spread to everywhere between his legs. He shook his head, unable to answer him any other way.

“No? Mmm. Well, at least one of them is certainly a placebo. Control group. Saline or cottonseed oil. Or they may both be placebos, to see if they’re safe.” He shrugged, and picked up the most awful thing Erich had ever seen in his life. He could only conceptualize it as two, shoehorns, attached into the shape of a cone, with something at the wide end like a, trigger. Kaltherzig pulled it. A loud click, and it snapped wide open.

A speculum, though he did not know that word.

Erich watched him lubricate it with something clear, and close it again .

“Now this one is for a child, so I don’t want to hear any complaining, or I’ll use the one for adults.”

He yes sirred, barely able to speak above a whisper. His knees were pushed up farther, his feet up higher, so he was spread spread and there was almost no slack and he pulled and he couldn’t even really, hurt, his own wrists, the straps were that tight and that wide, and the ones at his chest and his waist and his thighs just held him, too, still. He had already half-exhausted himself in pure, tension. He was panting through his teeth, as if the pain had already come and he was already riding it. He thought why must They always do things to you so you can’t wipe your eyes or blow your nose? and he should get a test tube and collect some, tears.

After that, he’s a doctor, they always do things to you that hurt you, everything they do, this is nothing, different.

He knew it was different, and he knew why.

He thought that Kaltherzig did collect tears, just not in a test tube.

The metal cone was not as bad as he’d feared; there were, edges that seemed to threaten a cut without ever actually delivering one. It was so, cold. Then the first, click, and the jerk and resentful sharp ache of this abused sore circle being, spread, suddenly, and the sensation of air inside him, and the climbing sounds of protest he couldn’t muffle.

“What did I say? You don’t want the bigger one, do you?” Another click, and a jolt that hurt a great deal more, and he was spread much, much wider. He could feel himself trying uselessly to close, reflexes trying to push this awful thing out . His breath was coming faster.

Can he feel my pulse yet, through that thing, through the metal, through the glove?

“Stop that.” A slap to the inside of his thigh, mostly painless through the gloves, and then a pinch that hurt very badly. Kaltherzig let it go inside him. “Don’t push. I don’t want to see it move.”

The struggle to, slow his breath, because that was somehow part of it, until he could, relax, so that it stayed, cruelly open but no longer moving except whatever invisible vibration it carried from his pulse.

“Good boy.” And a stroke to his hair that made him crush his eyes closed and keep them closed. “Now you have to be just that still, or it will be worse, and I might really harm you. “ The hand came away from his head, and there was the sound of the wheeled stool, and hands on his thighs.

It moved inside him, and he hissed quietly and was still. A noise he could not identify, and he stole one peek to see the gooseneck lamp being clicked on and swung closer to him. It was better with his eyes closed. Pushes inside him, dizzying. It didn’t, feel, like Kaltherzig doing this to him, as if he could blame it all on the instrument and not the doctor behind it.

Rattle of instruments, and something tiny and specific poking inside him. A pushing slow circle inside, and Kaltherzig withdrew the long swab and dabbed it into a Petri dish and closed and labeled it, and picked up another swab.

There were, dozens. It didn’t really, hurt, but he seemed to be methodically trying to swab, every inch, as far inside as he could reach. And he would tilt the speculum around to reach, behind it, and that hurt like, he imagined the first bits of death by impalement might hurt.

Kaltherzig listened to all his begging as if it were a particularly amusing story.

Erich chewed his lip and squeezed shut his eyes and cried.

A last click, and it closed all at once inside him. It hurt like finally stretching after too-long in too small a seat, and it came absolutely without warning. A murmur from Kaltherzig, and instead of the withdrawal he expected it, turned, inside him, the cold metal handle pressing into his bruised thigh, and clicked open again, turned side-to-side instead of up and down. It was almost a relief to be open again, but the new pressures made him desperate to draw his knees up, higher. Kaltherzig pushed very low on his stomach, seeming to search for the edges of this thing through his flesh, shushed him when his volume started to climb.

The swabs again, briefly, and a sigh and that click and the close again. The metal cone was withdrawn with one matter-of-fact slide that left him hissing again.

“No use. You’re almost too small for the next one up but this one won’t do.” A pat over the handprint on his thigh, and Kaltherzig opened a drawer in the table underneath him. Rummaging. “No, only....” That shrug. The dangerous smile-with-teeth.

This one was, much longer, and not so conical, duckbilled. “For women. It’s the only other model we have here. Supply has been a nightmare the last month or two.” And still, too much, teeth, for Erich not to hear the joke in it.

He meant to use that on me, all along. He does this to

(all?)

of, us....

Kaltherzig opened that same clear thick cream, spread this steel set of lines.

Erich could feel the useless no and he closed his eyes and told himself he would be still even as the, struggle, started inside him like an earthquake. He could not let him do this, anymore. Something inside his, sanity, would break into pieces. He could feel it. And that fear of the gun would not let him try to, explain it, would not let him risk any more bruises.

Slide. Push. The first click, and a vicious intolerable spread. He did a climbing frantic frantic please please, beginning to, hyperventilate It seemed to open itself far less parallel than the first one, much more of a V, and it was pushing his spine and his stomach and his pelvis and it was, too, please

and Kaltherzig said “Be still,” and the second, click, and the, spread

and something in the center of his head, closed. After all these hours of telling himself he was gone he finally, was.

A sharp tang in his nose and the back of his throat that seemed to pull him back up into the world, all at once, nearly choking him with all the sudden there-ness. He caught the ammonia-tang and wanted to scream in pure frustration. Of course it wasn’t that easy. He could faint all he liked; this was a hospital, they could drag him back into the world anytime they liked. There was no exit that way, either.

Kaltherzig leaned over him with the corners of his mouth busy and said, “Welcome back. All rested now?”

There was that joke underneath that, again. “Are you.....finished, sir?” He tried to swipe at his face, found himself already clean and unstrapped, still naked.

“Only in here. Come on, now, we’ll have you sit up till you can walk.” And he pulled Erich up, effortlessly, one hand behind his back keeping him upright. A deep resentful twinge inside him, that hurt he couldn’t get away from. It reminded him of the pink triangle, and he thought that eventually they would have done so many things they might leave him alone to suffer without further effort.

He was dizzy and his stomach hurt again, and he wanted a bathroom and pleaded something along those lines, wavering. It made Kaltherzig laugh for some reason. “No, not now. Come on, get up. Two steps.” He was almost carrying Erich, but his feet were on the floor. His head seemed to be floating independently of them

“Clothes....”

Another laugh “Now, really. You’ll have to get over this silly modesty of yours. No need, no time.”

Kaltherzig opened the door, led him through the bright hallway. The floor was cold enough to make his feet hurt. He followed the white swish of Kaltherzig’s coat. He was crimson from his scalp down.

Nobody looked twice. He could not have said, whether this made it better or worse. He felt, very very outnumbered, and very small, and very far from home. He kept himself covered with his cupped hands; it made him feel, even more ridiculous, but he couldn’t seem to help it.

He found himself missing Kaltherzig’s house, where at least it seemed, familiar, with carpets and couches and curtains and all those normal, house, things. Couldn’t he do this there, without all these eyes and all these people on every side of every door to hear his begging? What went on in this building, that nobody seemed even curious why he’d been screaming, that, long....

Kaltherzig led him into a room so wide and empty it echoed. The walls and the floor were painted a strange flat gray, and there was the umbrella-light configuration he associated with photographs throwing a blaze into one corner, and one camera on a tripod. The door was closed and bolted behind them.

There was an Untersturmfuhrer at a small desk, all blond and blue, with one foot propped up, smoking. He smiled and nodded and Heil Hitlered at Kaltherzig, stood up lazily, stretched and wandered over to the camera, cigar still between his teeth. At the other end of the room were cabinets and refrigerators and long lines with clips that Erich associated with film developing. There was a four-corner assembly of something that shone like hooks in the wall behind the camera set (for lights, he told himself.)

“Lieser, this is my new one.” Kaltherzig pulled him over to the camera, turned him as if he were a, purchase.

Lieser laughed in smoke. “The same impeccable taste as always.”

“Thank you.” He pushed Erich into this circle of light, pressed on his shoulder till he went down on his knees on the concrete floor. “Oh, the fucking slide...” and he left Erich kneeling there, with this frightening blond doll of a man already snapping pictures. He kept his hands over himself even though his back was to the camera.

Kaltherzig came back with a pane of, glass, like a piece of a window, and set it in front of his knees and pushed on the back of his neck till he leaned forward and kept pushing till his face and his shoulders were on the floor, and he drew Erich’s hands behind him and folded them together at the small of his back, pressed him to adjust the arch of his spine

“Just like that. Don’t move.”

He left again, and came back with an iron bar that had a, handle, at each end, and Erich thought, if he hits me with that he’ll kill me, God, God, I can’t, I want—

“Close your eyes.” Kaltherzig was behind him, tapping this awful thing in his hand, and he turned it and held it by one handle and stroked the other down the boy’s spine, stopped, pushed. Pushed harder, and harder still. “Ignore the camera.”

He wasn’t allowed to say no, and he wanted to say sir or please or, something, and he drew in his breath and was caught there, choosing a word, and he settled on “...God...”

“Just don’t move, that’s a good boy. Cry out all you like, there’s no audio this time.”

He didn’t want to cry out at all, but in the end he couldn’t help it. It wasn’t a handle at all, it was, wood, rudimentarily carved into the shape of a phallus, sanded down just enough not to be too dangerous. It was dry, and considerably bigger inside him than Kaltherzig had been, and he was in so much pain already. And he couldn’t ignore the camera, the nasty little pop and the blinding lightningflash and the knowledge that whatever instant that flare illuminated would be recorded for thousands of eyes.

It felt, wedged, inside him, and he chewed the backs of his hands and tried to keep his ass up while keeping his back straight and Kaltherzig would say, “No, arch,” and tilt the stick inside him to make him, arch, and wobble it side to side till he screamed, and push it deeper with thudding easy motions that made him think of a man breaking up soil with a shovel. He had to keep his knees straight under him, or the pushing would drive him down, and he could feel his knees already scraped.

The phallus pushed deeper and deeper, Kaltherzig leaning his weight into it, and after forever of screams it was in to the little flare at the bottom to keep it from sliding in to the bar itself. “Is that deep enough for you?” Kaltherzig said, the smirk underneath his voice, and Lieser laughed behind him, camera clicking. “There’s a bigger one around here somewhere, shall I—“ and laughed himself, through the almost-no and the string of please and don’t and sir.

He went back to that lazy agonizing thudding, tilted it until the involuntary arch and the throat-open scream let him know it was hitting his prostate. “There? Mmm? Stay over the slide or I’ll tear you.”

“You’re going to tear him anyway,” Lieser said. “Admit it.” And the bar tilted inside him, and very nearly did tear him, and there was another kind of laugh as if they were having a teasing scuffle over possession of the handle, before Kaltherzig straightened it and went back to, fucking him with it.

Erich sobbed and sobbed and watched Kaltherzig’s boots between his bleeding knees. He stayed over the slide. He could see it, a rectangle that gave him back the ghost of his naked stomach and his shuddering erection. Every push made him, harder, in spite of the cold, in spite of the eyes. The climb started by itself, pulling him along, farther and farther and farther till he was no longer, exactly, thinking

Faster. Faster. Kaltherzig twisted it inside him and he screamed until the tears he was swallowing stung his throat. He would be still, and they would stop, all of it ended, eventually, he could, sleep. Every push felt like a fist against that terrible inside-place that seemed to be the other end of his, cock, and at the end all he could feel was that terrifying climbing and something like a bright red string from the tip of his cock all the way up to Kaltherzig’s hands, this miserable unending hurt and this terrifying new not-quite, pleasure.

At the end he almost, understood, what would happen, and he screamed in new registers and broke down in a please that went on and on, trailing away into silence as the orgasm took him and he could only shake, suspended.

He thought I’m dying and it arced through him again, the worst pleasure imaginable, a seizure of it that would not let him go, centered in that place where Kaltherzig was slamming inside him with that terrible thing so very hard, over and over and over Underneath it all was the anonymous strange splatter, and the splashes on the glass blocking his reflection, and the erection behind them twitching, wilting.

It was his first orgasm ever.

The bar was drawn out, as if Kaltherzig were pulling back a spear. One last scream at this frictioned scrape.

Kaltherzig leaned over him, and for a moment he thought he was going to, embrace, him, but he only reached underneath and picked up the glass, careful not to tilt it. “Good boy,” he said, and left him there, afraid to move, and carried his sample over to the workspace in the corner.

Erich turned his head to watch him put on new gloves, do delicate things with his sperm and a tiny silver something and miniature glass vials. He wrote on something and affixed labels the size of postage stamps, putting everything neatly in great locked refrigerators, teeming with jars from invisible-small to gallons and gallons, of, something.

Lieser took lazy pictures behind him. Erich wept.

“It’s taking much too long that way,” Kaltherzig said. He came to stare down at Erich, peeling off these thin light gloves and pulling on new ones of black rubber that was so thick the fingers were like the fingers of a mannequin, featureless. “Get up. We’ll try something faster.”

And he pulled him closer to the restraints in the wall.

Lieser snapped one last picture—Erich in a line of distress with one hand stretched so far overhead that he was on tiptoe, while Kaltherzig bolted a rubber-coated manacle around his left wrist

(they’re, working, this is a day at work for them, God)

There was semen in a wet cooling line down his left thigh.

The door locked behind them again while he finished the restraints—hands, wrists, chest, waist, knees, even his neck, all in that same eyebolt-wingnut attached rubbercoated immovable style. Erich was almost, hanging, feet arched to keep the balls and his toes on the floor in a way he knew he had no chance of sustaining. He pulled against them, dizzy, pushed with his buttocks and his back against the bricks behind him. Four inches or so was all the space he had left in the world. His shoulders were aching already.

Kaltherzig was wheeling over a cart heavy with a box of switches and dials, a snaketangle of cords slowly stretching taut behind him. He hummed to himself, something like Orff that Erich couldn’t place, and rubbed something from a jar over tiny circles hooked to wires that fed back into the machine. He seemed to reconsider, and set it down on the sheet of hospital-blue on the tray, nearly crowded off by the heavy machine. It looked, like.....a short-wave radio, maybe? Erich was terrible at machines under the best of circumstances. He could not imagine the purpose of this one, only that there would be pain, and would this ever be over?

“How is your bladder?”

“My.....sir?”

A sigh, that dangerous impatience.

“Bladder, full, empty, which?” He came to Erich and pressed with tented fingers just above his pelvic bone, making him squirm. “Never mind, that won’t do.”

Back to the workspace, back to the machine with a handful of things that dripped a black rubber bulb and tubing, and a clear IV bag. “Saline, electrolytes, actually almost what we use for blood loss. It conducts perfectly.” He put the bag down in a gleaming jellyfish heap on the instrument table, dipped into his inescapable jar and greased this long narrow black tube.

He brought it closer, watching Erich’s eyes, closed gloved fingers around his penis, pinched the head. “It’ll go in easier if you relax.”

And then he understood, and he didn’t dare squirm, and once the very end of the tube slid into the tip of his urethra he couldn’t, move, anyway, only shake and feel this slippery spreading burn move farther and farther up the shaft of his penis.

He was doing the pleasepleaseplease but he’d done so much of that since the Gestapo that it was almost becoming another, sound, noise without sense. Wasn’t that what everyone said to the Nazis, all the time? They could just make it the official polite greeting, it would save so much time…

The camera flared over Kaltherzig’s shoulder.

The tube slid in deeper.

“You’ll feel something, like a pinch, inside, and then it will be over—“

And the worst pang of hurt and burn and the need to urinate or push or shriek there had ever been, God help him, and that knot of nerves Kaltherzig had driven to orgasm by stroking was impaled by this wide slippery tube.

He, shook, silenced, eyes frozen wide wide open. He was paralyzed by a sense of, give, and opening, in a place inside him so tiny and deep that nothing, nobody, should ever have been able to touch him there.

It felt obscene.

The disassociation was, failing him, destroyed by that piercing specific pain, that inescapable sense of a virginity, lost, of this new thing fucking him in this new, place. He could not think of it as the instrument’s fault, now. It felt unmistakably like, Kaltherzig, inside him. It was worse than close to that place inside that ignited that terrible climbing pleasure, it was through that knot of aching nerve, and the twitching little try of his cock to harden again seemed to squeeze at the tube inside the shaft.

That awful muffled pop of a flashbulb, and a violet afterimage burned into his streaming eyes on top of dozens of other blue mirage circles.

He hadn’t had much resembling, coherent thought, since the first few seconds in this room. He cried and pushed his hips against the wall so hard he would find bruises there later, away from this thing inside his penis, unspeakable, please, not, there, and there was nowhere to get away from it, this hand in this glove holding this, tube, just kept pushing it inside him, and then Kaltherzig wobbled it a little, side-to-side, as if getting it set exactly right

A slide so deep and strange it made him quiet again. The hurt had faded, just incrementally, from that first peak of agony, but there was an angry burning point inside him where that miniscule valve had been forced to spread.

The pushing stopped.

“There.”

Kaltherzig picked up the bulb. Watched Erich’s face, thumb and forefinger still holding the tube inside him. Squeezed it. A heartless mechanical spread, in a place inside him so private he could not visualize it.

Black.

A tug at the tube so the bulb inside him pushed hopelessly at the entrance to his bladder. Then the IV bag and the spreading sensation of cold, the bag squeezed in Kaltherzig’s hand held high overhead so that in seconds he was in that mindless place again, squirm, scream, and the tube was clamped and the bag removed from it, his bladder so full and so immune to his pushes that he could only hang, dying to kick or draw up his knees, and stopping each time afraid that something inside him would rupture.

Fingers lifting his penis, daubing something cool on him, and pressing tiny little rubber contacts to his skin until they stuck. More tugging at the catheter. He kept his eyes closed, somehow thinking as loudly as he could no no no, and realizing underneath he can’t stop me saying it inside my head, that’s a little help, just a little—

“Oh, I forgot,” and a laugh that said Kaltherzig hadn’t really forgotten anything. The bulb inside him deflated almost completely. Kaltherzig pulled, and he felt the screams starting and the flash went off again and he found enough rage to think not this time and what was left of the balloon hit this valve in the center of everything and he gritted his teeth and Kaltherzig pulled hard and the spread and the slide and the pain was like nothing, ever, but he clung to this silence, every muscle as tight as a cable.

“Don’t you dare,” came the whisper he half-expected, and a mean push with tented fingers just over his pubic bone, making him grind his teeth so hard to keep the scream to himself that there was a sound like coal over concrete.

“You’re making it harder on yourself.” A laugh again, as if he didn’t entirely mind it, and that low balanced Doctor voice, blasphemously normal.

A snap all through him, as if Erich meant to pull himself free, and both SS men laughed, at this frail furious struggle. “What would you have me do? Sir?” he almost, shouted, and there was more of that laughter. It sounded like a flippant sort of death-wish in his own ears.

“He has you there, Ahren.” The photographer-bastard, more flashbulb, and a lazy plume of cigar smoke.

“So true. Well, my boy, you’re right, I suppose. Kick all you like.”
Those tiny rubber pads, one at the head of his penis, one very low, underneath the base of the shaft. One on either side of his scrotum, Kaltherzig nudging this delicate flesh out of the way with his fingertip. He leaned back, nodded at this arrangement and pulled the wheeled cart with the dreadful black box, bristling with knobs and dials, inset with gleaming face of gauges.

Erich was afraid. If he had understood electricity even a little he’d have been screaming already.

The photographer had given up the tripod and was orbiting them like a carrion bird with the camera, still illuminating them with those lightning-colored flares. Most of the hate Erich could manage was reserved for this perfect Aryan bastard, the instinctive sense that his observer was changing what he observed. Kaltherzig was being—different, though exactly what was different Erich could not have explained. That distant almost absent-minded kindness, or whatever you might call the times when the cruelty waned was entirely absent. There would be none of those low-water marks, here. Not with the eyes of the Reich in Berlin on them through that damned camera.

Kaltherzig was adjusting the tiny dials, and the first edge of current was so faint Erich thought he was imagining this almost audible vibration. Then the current leapt into sharp volume, an edged thing like the nasty thrill that went through you when a bit of glass splintered into an unsuspecting thumb. He closed his eyes again, half panting through his teeth, expecting much worse at any second.

This motion climbed in a sudden crashing way like a symphony coming all at once to forte. That same razorsharp, edgy sense of a high note, and this time it was, everywhere, from the base of his penis buzzing hard into the tip, cupped in a heartless hand around his scrotum. Another climb, and now there was a swarm of invisible knives that climbed through skin and nerve in one jagged blur. He lost the scream, but it was one ungainly noise with more in it of surprise than of real pain. And the uncanny sting split frequencies—there was that mechanically inevitable rhythm underneath it all that made him think of this as, sound, though he knew it was the witchfire stuff that lived in wall sockets.

Another climb. Faster, harder, deeper, and it was burning him, now, it must be, surely he would, smell it, soon enough.

He was tempted to hate both of them, now, in the few thinking places he had left.

There was a very long time of seeming to hang in darkness, in a place like the state before sleep, the pain unimaginable, so large it was almost absurd, such an unprecedented thing he could not really believe in it. The screaming was thrown back at him from all these concrete walls. The flashes that never ended painted the black world intermittent purple. Then there was what he thought of as silence, until he realized it was only the electricity, stopping. It took a long time for his screams to catch up, and when he ran out of breath the real silence frightened him all over again. His limbs were still shaking with the ghost of those jittering knives.

“I suppose that’s enough playing. Are we ready to begin?”

Bastard, he thought, in this new nospace he could hide in.

Nothing would move the way he expected it to. He did a pointless sort of sway against the restraints.

Kaltherzig began it.

He braced himself against the inevitable pain, and when there was none he thought it a trick and dared not let down his guard. This imaginary distance.

He could feel the current drawing lines in the same places he had been so tracelessly hurt before, but this time it seemed smoother, the rise and fall of this wave less drastic and much faster, like being stroked in impossible places by a thousand miniature hands. He could not forget how quickly those hands could become knives, and he fought it as long as he could, determined not to fall easily into this trap.

He watched Kaltherzig nudge this and that, until Erich was gasping and the erection was, mindless, not his fault, he didn’t

(at least before it was, him, doing this to me, this is just being DONE to me, just for that camera, just)

“Open your eyes.” Just as soon as he’d found his way into the black again. It was impossible to hide in that skullspace with his eyes open. Kaltherzig was standing very near him, smirking at his struggle. “You won’t be able to help it.”

(I don’t WANT)

He closed his eyes again, but the black would not take him.

He screamed his way through a punishing blur: thuds like the heel of a hand striking between his legs faster than anyone could possibly swing; a fusillade of blows from imaginary tiny hammers inside the shaft of his penis, and a terrible lightningquake that made him scream and scream, just four excruciating pulses that made him leak a tiny bit of fluid in spite of his erection.

Kaltherzig hissed and pinched the tip of his cock between thumb and forefinger, thick rubber gloves squeaking against his skin. He writhed, the machine at a thick terrible purr he could feel in his teeth, in his lungs, blazing everywhere he was most afraid of being

(hurt)

petted until he could feel it starting again and he closed his eyes and mouth and ears and thoughts and this time there was none of that climbing pleasure in it, none of that overwhelming deliciousness he remembered. This was as much pleasure as a sneeze or a cramp, out of his control, and he felt Kaltherzig’s fingers replaced with cool glass, opened his eyes and saw the cameraflash imprint the doctor’s narrow shadow on the floor, hand and the line of a test tube intersecting Erich’s shadow between his legs.

More black.

His hair was wet in his eyes, stinging with sweat. Kaltherzig was labeling a second tiny flask of his sperm and putting it away. The machine was off, but there was a hot trembling sense of damage inside him, as if he had been deafened.

Lieser left them alone, after applauding for long enough to make his point. Kaltherzig laughed and sketched an elaborate bow. Erich hung, gasping, and Kaltherzig came to him at once and did little miserable tugs until the contacts were removed and coiled and neatly laid on the cart beside the black box. He unfastened Erich’s arms, caught him like an armload of clothes, held him up and unfastened his ankles.

Erich wanted to thank him, but his mouth seemed as vibratory as the rest of him, buzzing as though possessed by bees.

Kaltherzig half-carried him to the chair behind the desk.

Bees, Erich thought again. His head swung forward and thudded into Kaltherzig’s shoulder, and he wanted to apologize, or was it thank you? He was shaking as if the electricity had left traces inside him, jittering back and forth without the wires to run back into. He drew in a breath, and when he managed to talk it was “Please, don’t, please, sir,” as if he were stuck on five minutes ago.

Kaltherzig clapped him on the back and took the cart away. He came back and a silver flask open in his hand. Erich drank, eyes stinging, stomach heaving. Warmth spread through his chest, and he could feel his heartbeat in his face.

The flask seemed to turn itself in his hand, and Kaltherzig rescued it, drank casually and re-capped it.

reitgerte

He dozed on the way home, missing the wide-view of the strangely sculpted landscape that he’d meant to notice again. His legs were rubbery and difficult on the way in, and the setting sun was too bright.

He was steered to the couch and left there, knees drawn up, his shoes tugged off his feet and taken away. More dozing, in that buzzy shimmery space. Background noise of Kaltherzig, typing, the radio playing softly, the clink of bottles from the little inset bar.

He was being tugged at, Kaltherzig’s shoulder sudden and tempting as a replacement pillow. Coffee was put into his hands, with the bright tang of alcohol in it. He drank, wishing for something, wetter, somehow. It was taken out of his hands, vanished.

Kaltherzig led him into the bathroom and mixed something that was not quite salt into
a glass of warm water and handed it to him. It was nasty and sweet-sour-strange and his throat did not want to allow it. He stood already crying after the second glass was put in his hands, full to the very rim, one hand on the aquarium whirl of his stomach. He took one half-swallow. It seemed trapped in his mouth, and his tongue curled with the almost unstoppable need to spit it out. He had to force himself to swallow, and stood shaking, afraid another try would make him vomit.

Kaltherzig watched this disobedience for a minute or two and went out into the bedroom and came back with the riding crop. “What did I say about repeating myself?”

The glass hit his lips; he drank, three long fast desperate pulls, and gritted his teeth around the gag reflex.

“Too late. Put it down.”

He put it down. Chewed his lips.

“Take it off. Everything.”

He took everything off, staring fixedly at the faucet handle on the sink for the cold water. He would be, there, inside those angles of chrome Whatever was next would go on around him. Damn it, it would.

“Can you please, tell me why...sir...” He was down to his underwear. No signal. Maybe in this house he would always be, naked. He slid off his shorts, folded them.

“Because you still hesitate when I give you orders.”

“....yes, sir, I’m sorry, sir...” he said. That wasn’t what he’d meant—he’d meant the purges. Maybe he’d looked at the glass, again, because Kaltherzig added, “That? You’re to have procedures tomorrow. It’s important your digestive tract be empty. It interferes.”

Procedures. Well, that was quite enough conversation.

Kaltherzig broke this interlude by swinging his riding crop and hitting Erich in the stomach. He tried to double over and spread his arms out of the way at once, and did kind of a wobble while he was struck three more times, the last one cutting across his left nipple. Every blow made him, slosh, inside, tightened muscles that were already painfully tight. A gasp, and his hands coming to press flat against this strange spreading sting. He’d seen the whip at Kaltherzig’s belt and had assumed from his very few experiences with being switched that it would be like that only less, terrible, muffled with all that leather. The little tip of the shaft behind the hard leather tongue felt like being hit by a, very small rock, thrown very very hard at close range. And then the hurt spread like the sting of a hornet.

“Pick it up and drink it.”

He did. Kaltherzig vanished and came back with a shot glass, the riding crop in his hand, still tapping everything. He filled the glass twice with golden castor oil from the medicine cabinet.

Erich drank it. Cod liver was worse, and when he turned on the tap and rinsed and rinsed and drank and drank Kaltherzig merely waited politely, doing nothing to stop him.

He had no idea if this had been added to punish him or not. He didn’t dare to ask. Then there were two pills, then gloves again, and a different jar. He put his hands on the sink, spread his feet, closed his eyes.

He told himself one day all this part would be, over, that he would only be subjected to that excruciating s l i d e inside of lubricated fingers in rubber gloves until the measurements and the experiments were, over, whatever that meant, and he would only be subjected to this, for Kaltherzig’s pleasure.

Then it occurred to him that perhaps this was for Kaltherzig’s pleasure, all of it, and that it would never stop.

The smear of lubrication, and that internal little teasing probe, and rustling in the cabinet he didn’t dare watch. New noise from a new jar. A push inside him that he thought was a finger at first, slipperycool and spreading an unnerving combination of soothe and ache. He moaned, and gritted his teeth harder, turned his face into his shoulder.

He didn’t understand until that cool push stayed inside him when Kaltherzig took his hand away to take another out of the jar. That same greased invasion. Suppositories. He thought of them as something for, oh, old people or very sick babies with fevers. He’d heard of them, but he’d never, had, one. Or two. Or the six he finally had, when

Kaltherzig stopped.

“That’s the last of it for now. Stay here,”

He put the jars away neatly, labels turned out. Erich watched this, thinking, so efficient, in every, single, detail. He felt stuffed full, as though he were open, though when he snuck his hand there he didn’t feel open. His face was crimson. He could muffle the crying but there was nothing he could do about the blushing.

He stayed in position, feeling the slow roll of cramps, gritting his teeth and huffing through the worst of them. He thought, I am not here, I am not here, I am not here. His throat hurt.

He had an erection.

Kaltherzig left, came back with Erich’s mostly still-folded blanket over his arm, a pillow held by one corner, and a tall mug of water. “You’re to stay in here. If you get, so much as one corner of either of these wet, you’re to scrub them both and sleep on the tile, and I’ll beat you bloody in the morning”

He was failing, not to be here.

Kaltherzig threw the blanket and pillow down in the farthest corner of the spacious bathroom, next to one of the sheepskin rugs. He set the water on the edge of the towel rack. “If you become very sick, or pass a great deal of blood or feel very dizzy, you’re to sit on the toilet with your head between your knees and call for me. Do you understand?”

Always that question, as if he were, a child, an animal, who was likely, not to understand.

He gave his one line. Kaltherzig patted him.

“Hold on, I’ve something to make it easier....”

More rummaging in the medicine cabinet, and a mewl of dread Erich tried and failed to stifle. He drew in his breath, intending to pull it together, to be a, man, and instead there was a tiny flood of tears and he said, “Please, no more—“ and bit his lip so hard it squirted where it was split. He was horrified at himself, already cringing in anticipation of a real, beating.

“Ah, shhhh. My boy. You’ve got enough in there to keep you busy.” And he patted Erich’s buttocks, just over the crease, low, so that it seemed to jostle him inside, driving him into a moan that was too long. That smile with the teeth. Oh, dangerous.

He was telling the truth. It was nothing else to push inside him or make him swallow. It was a tiny, little, hourglass. Minuteglass? “Five minutes. Twice over is ten.” And he set it on the sink by the taps where Erich could reach it. “After twice you can release those. Drink lots of water.”

He nodded, and that seemed acceptable. “And if you vomit, unless it’s from crying, call for me. Mmm?”

His knees were starting to, shake, from the cramps, and the urge to, push, was already dragging at his insides.

“Good night.” And Kaltherzig closed the door behind him.

He could not have said why, but he held the position for the first rotation of the hourglass, with increasingly frantic subaudible noise going on in his throat, watching the sand with maniacal devotion. His knees buckled in increasing little seizures that were harder and harder to straighten, and his stomach churned and ached and tightened and relaxed.

Sometimes a creeping horror sort of seized his, throat, and something too wet to be a burp would make him taste that poisonous sweet-salt at the back of his throat. His vision was, blurry. He thought, he’s filled me with tortures, from my lips to my asshole, every piece inside of me he can touch except my brain, and he ends up touching that with everything else.

Fingers, pushing inside him, and that wet silk Scotch leather voice saying, I can feel your pulse.

His penis was still hard.

After the sand ran out the first time he made kind of a sweeping dive for a white towel and the minuteglass and spread it on the floor over the soft white bathmat, and got down on his hands and knees with his ass in the air because there was nobody to see him and he had this, instinct, that it would make it easier.

He didn’t turn the hourglass over till he was, settled, figuring to do otherwise would be, cheating, somehow. He was still bent over at the waist, and he tried to keep his knees apart as before, but finally he resorted to holding them together drawn almost up to his chest, one hand holding himself closed, sometimes a finger pressing into that ring of muscle when the urge to push was burning especially bright in those little shallow surfaces of raw ache.

During the peaks he had to squeeze as hard as possible, with everything, from jaw to stomach to thighs to buttocks to toes, just to keep from doing the opposite, the push push push that he wanted more than he had ever wanted anything in all his life. His other hand he kept wrapped around his stomach, sometimes rubbing at the worst of the muscle contractions, sometimes just hugging himself or swiping at his face when the, sobbing, was too much.

The dark wood frame of the little timer showed in white inside his eyelids when he blinked . He thought, he must’ve had others, before, me, to keep all of this here.

The five more minutes of sand ran out after about fifteen years. He’d never moved that fast in his life, and when he could finally, almost orgasmically, give in to that urge to, push, the first real pain hit him.

The suppositories left him in a colorless pool of wax, and that was all. There had been nothing else inside him for hours, now. He’d eaten very little for the trip to Auschwitz and only that light breakfast before that morning. He was only passing nothing or fluid that stung him so badly it made him think of, acid, and he finally took a soft white face cloth and wadded it between his teeth to bite down on, terrified his echoing whimpers were going to wake Kaltherzig.

God, how it hurt, it hurt.

He spent a lot of time in that face-down position on the towels, holding himself closed, sobbing, trying to resist the urge to push again, fearing that hot acid blaze. And then the pills began to work on him, almost as distinctly as a punch; a new muscular sort of urgency to the contractions that very quickly left him with a stomachache. It felt familiar, like the aftermath of too many sit-ups in physical education.

He managed to run a hot bath. He remembered that much. After that it was a Hellish carousel with stops in the bath and on the toilet and to the sink to drink and cling and cry and back again over and over and over He stopped wiping himself after awhile; the touching was too painful, and there was more and more crimson, and he was afraid of getting in trouble for using so much expensive paper.

He drained the water every so often, and filled it with new hot water, half-hoping the noise would bring Kaltherzig. It didn’t. The white of all the marble and tile was a blaze, now. He staggered, swallowed, sweated as if he had a fever. And he was hungry, too, of all things, hunger that gave him new and separate cramps to wrap himself around.

Hours. He was too dehydrated to produce tears, but the crying wouldn’t stop.

He lay in the bathtub shaking, holding the cheeks of his buttocks open to avoid the pressure against his swollen rectum. He realized he was sobbing please, please, able to see nothing but that name painted on the glass, and Lagertzarte, and thinking I need, a doctor...

The echo scared him, but he kept calling anyway, the sobbing starting and never really, climbing, just catching him for a beat or two between words and then phrases, never anything particularly intellectual, just a lot of please and sir. He needed to get up, needed the toilet again, probably, most likely, but the pushing was too much and too soon and he was bleeding, now, into the water.

No knock, and no shouting, either, just the gentle click of the door latch and the knob turning, and Ahren stepped inside, in a black satin robe, hair rumpled and lovely from sleep, squinting at the light in Erich’s general direction.

He just cried. Waited. Even a beating would be better than this, would be, a, distraction, from, this, this pain in this unspeakable place that he could not squirm away from.

Kaltherzig left, returned with a black leather doctor’s bag.

He drained the tub and while it refilled he daubed the inside of Erich’s left arm with alcohol and set a thick sharp needle very expertly into the vein. Whatever he injected was a delicious mercy, wave after wave of painless peaceful calm. “It’s morphine,” he said. “It’ll put you to sleep.”

He was turning off hot-water tap, soaking a cloth with cold water and putting it around the back of Erich’s neck That terrible, stomach-deep, fevered nausea subsided almost, miraculously, instantly. He was handed his cup of water and a pill. He swallowed it without hesitation, drank in long thirsty grateful pulls. The injection was already making him so sleepy it was difficult to hold up his head. He sat in the clean water again and found himself cradled with his head pillowed in Kaltherzig’s shoulder. This bath was nothing like the first, lazy long bare-handed swipes that did very little to clean him and a great deal to sooth him.

Kaltherzig drained the tub, stood him up and covered the bottom with the thick white towels . Erich stayed in it for most of this, while this strange bed was built around him. He did a guided fall down, landed with his head on the pillow. Kaltherzig turned him over on his face and rubbed something on him and inside him that spread cool numb heaven everywhere it touched, and covered him in more towels and the blanket.

“I’ll leave the door open, so I can hear you.”

Erich was alone.

The faucet dripped. After awhile it slowed, stopped He drew his feet up a little away from the tiny warm wet spot. Yawned, in spite of himself.

He was warm. The pains were still there, but far enough away to mostly, ignore . Darkness. He felt, very oddly spoiled, pampered, very......attended to. Young. Powerless.

...sleepy....

Missbrauch, Teil zwei

Morning. He was given black coffee that made him sick to his stomach and the silent tug on his coat that turned out to be permission to lean on Kaltherzig’s shoulder during the ride to work. He hurt. He was weak and his tongue was dry and fuzzy and his eyes were scratchy in their sockets. He was endlessly thirsty. Kaltherzig brought him a coffee mug full of cold water before they went into his office and the door locked and the shades were drawn down, again.

“Undress. Everything. You’re not going to like much of this today, so you might as well panic now.”

As if I liked it yesterday.

Kaltherzig strapped him in with utilitarian silence. Still that sense of being not-quite-real, being moved in this way, and then he was pinned and there was that squeak of the wheels on Kaltherzig’s stool, and he was snapping on gloves and the speculum was gleaming in his hands.

Erich lay watching this as if it were a, play, that distance he had found impossible to cultivate the day before had been there since last night. It didn’t matter what They did to him anymore. His first plan was still the only way. Obey, be fast and perfect and unfailingly polite, and keep all the no inside his skull where it could do no harm. Kaltherzig seemed to

(enjoy)

want to keep him alive, and that seemed a great deal more hope than the skeleton men had. If he could only, let him

(hurt)

do, whatever it was he was trying to do

(for two years)

he could go home. Forget it. Or at least, keep it all in that same safe nospace where nobody could see it.

Parts of him had been silenced completely in the last two days. He was no longer that same boy who had laid out print in a very nice suburb of Berlin.

“Sir?”

Kaltherzig looked at him as if it surprised him to be addressed. “Yes?” He never stopped applying something gleaming and wet to the speculum.

“You said before that I was making it harder on myself. How can I, not, make it harder?”

The laugh was different when they were alone. Less like a general sort of applause for the cleverness of the Reich and more like a real, laugh. “You’re keeping yourself in pieces. You still think of yourself as a rich German boy and expect to open your eyes in your very own room again.”

Another tendril of that irrational certainty that Kaltherzig could read his mind.

Had he just been congratulating himself on the death of that delusion of waking up from all this Auschwitz?

Pieces.

He doubted it would be worth whatever useless comfort he would win, to defend each besieged piece from this SS totality until he was conquered one fragment at a time. He laughed himself, though it hardly sounded authentic. “How do I stop, sir?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll stop you.” And the speculum nudged him in one cold warning, and slid inside.

No faux anesthetic injections or games with smaller instruments this time, just in and spread and that terrible click pinning him open. Stop me, he thought. His hands found the edges of the table and clung there by themselves, as if he could brace himself hard enough to stop the shaking.

Kaltherzig thumped the inside of Erich’s thigh with the heel of one gloved hand. “See? That. Still trying That’s part of the problem. What are you making yourself ready for? What is the point of all this trying?” He hooked a finger in the restraint at Erich’s knee, tugged at it in illustration. “Useless, and arrogant, to think that anything of you has anything to do with the future, now. You’re still on your back.”

His eyes stung at that last. On your back, in his head like those electric hammers, breaking the new fragile shell between himself and the world. Arrogance, and all this wasted struggle. There was a knotted set of seconds, while he tried to puzzle out how NOT to try, and he exhaled and let himself hang, let the table and the straps cup him like a cold hand, let the steel spreading him just, spread him.

“There, much better, good boy.” A stroke along his thigh that ended with the side of Kaltherzig’s gloved hand against his scrotum. A pat. “Whatever it is, it’ll only hurt more if your muscles are tense. That’s always true.” Almost to himself. His eyes were reaching that narrowed-focus of concentration. Erich thought again, helplessly, of an artist deeply immersed in a painting, of his own father’s hands a blur of needle trailing thread.

The speculum was tilted inside him, and he’d given a little mournful worried cry before he thought of keeping quiet. Kaltherzig murmured something that ended in my boy and reached without looking, dragged the tray of instruments closer. He picked up a dangerous silver line that ended in a trigger, wobbled it between thumb and forefinger like a pencil, as if he were considering before he bent his head between Erich’s knees again. A narrow little nudge inside him, strange without the warning-slide of entry first. Those delicate little pushes till this cold metal nose was against his prostate.

Trigger, and click.

The pain was like a bite, specific and deep, and Kaltherzig withdrew it and there was a pull and another flare inside him like this minute bite had been torn, off. It seemed silly to scream so long after the wound, and once he got his breath he only panted, eyes filling with tears because he felt, tricked. Kaltherzig spared him another stroke or two along the inside of his thigh, did things with the probe and a tiny dish, closed and labeled it.

He’s recording me.

A fingertip in an envelope of powder, and the speculum tilted just, so and a feather of a touch inside him and a spreading burn that locked his teeth, betrayed again. “It’s only styptic, you’re being a child. Would you rather bleed into a towel all day, like a girl, hmm? Stop all this noise.”

The speculum was closed, withdrawn, slowly enough to be minimally awful. Erich found that if he let the straps hold him the shaking stopped. The probe was dropped in a bin to be cleaned and a new one chosen. “Two more.”

The no was a nonevent, passing over him and through him without tension. He was learning how to not-manage even that, simply following it with another word, no point, no good, no use, no hope. The apathy and safety of that was much better than his weird fragile distance.

Kaltherzig grasped his left testicle between two fingers, nudged that one cold point hard against him, trigger, click.

This time he screamed before the hurt, and was stricken silent. The reflex to draw up his knees only dug the straps into his thighs. A wave of nausea that shook him like a fever, and that heavy knot of sickness settling low in his stomach. A dip into that envelope again, and the no again, head shaking in spite of himself, feet turning uselessly in the stirrups. Kaltherzig laughed at him and did it anyway.

“Last one.” The emptying, the labeling, the second probe sloshed into the bin beside the first one. The third one picked up from the tray. His penis, held in one gloved hand. Pain like a thorn or a splinter of glass and that sensation of, tearing, again. The room seemed to have, tilted, and he thought for a minute he was strapped to the wall again, and the fear of the electrodes made him open his eyes. Kaltherzig had the powder in his hand, was just patting in it with one fingertip. He lost anything approaching dignity, pleading and sobbing for him not to do it, not to put that terrible stuff on him where he was in so much hurt already. Kaltherzig never hesitated.

“Catch your breath. Get dressed. No more for awhile.”

He caught his breath, the crying still thudding through him in brief bursts like little storms. Kaltherzig picked up these three covered Petri dishes, and left with them. Erich sat at the end of the table, aching. He didn’t believe a word of it. He stood up, waiting for the hot angry little hurts to climb, dressing in abbreviated gestures as if he’d been beaten.

To his amazement he was led to Kaltherzig’s office, presented with handwritten patient files and a stack of blank forms and a typewriter, and left alone. The door was closed and locked behind him. It made him, dizzy, this sudden, workspace, as if the channel had been changed around him while he wasn’t looking. After a moment he loaded the typewriter and started to work. The trembling inside him had stopped by itself after the third page, lulled by this odd interval of normalcy.

Once he was comfortable enough with the alignment and the flow to read some of what he was typing, that delusion ended. And the first stack of photographs that fell out of a file folder started the trembling inside him all over again.

He typed as fast as possible. As perfectly as possible.

Kaltherzig clapped him hard on one shoulder when he saw how few reports were left to copy over. He picked up the finished stack and flipped through them, eyebrows winging up and staying up. He put them down, clapped Erich again, and almost—invited—him to lunch.

It was a short walk through autumn sun to the officer’s mess. Kaltherzig was loose, languid, smoking and greeting the officers they passed. It was too bright after the relative gloom of Block 10. Erich was half-blinded, the din of conflicting smells locking in his throat in a tangle of nausea and hunger. Fresh-baked bread, probably from their destination, grass cuttings and warm brown dirt and that meat-processing greasy undertone. Blur of a picnic by a lake, his mother beside him, a mismatched team of wooden and lead toy soldiers in his hands.

“Easy, now,” Kaltherzig said, steadying him, arm settling around his shoulders more firmly. Low steps he could feel more than see, the shadow of a door, and a room so dim in comparison with the outside Erich blinked in a sea of purple, seeing the ghosts of white tablecloths and candlesticks getting more and more solid. It reminded him more than anything of the sort of restaurant found on the bottom floor of the most expensive hotels. He was put into a seat and he automatically tried to sit up straight, running through a mental list of his mother nagging table manners into his ear.

There was a throbbing vacuum of emptiness inside him, from his lips to the miserable knot of stomach just under his sternum. The room had a severe, unstable tilt. Surreal. From sobbing on his back, to centering type, to trying to decipher which fork he might use.

“Is he all right?” A silky inquiring voice at Kaltherzig’s elbow.

“Oh, yes. Half starved of purges, but the last of the data, I filed this morning. And he’s almost through the backlog from my last boy.” Here he ruffled Erich’s hair, as if he’d learned a particularly difficult trick.

Erich tilted his head back, asked before he could stop himself, “What, happened to the last boy, sir?”

Kaltherzig made a perfect blue smoke ring, holding Erich’s eyes, so that it spiraled up to the high ceiling, and he and this doctor beside him both laughed, as though it were a reply.

“This is Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer, Doctor Mengele, Erich. Mind your mouth, inquisitive boy.” His hand patted over Erich’s mouth, briefly, the gesture like a slap but nowhere near hard enough to sting. Mengele laughed. Kaltherzig kept his eyes, something hard and narrow in them, and Erich thought: he doesn’t like Mengele.

Kaltherzig gestured an invitation to the doctor anyway, and they sat down with Erich pinned between them.

Mengele was a graceful, cheerful menace that reminded Erich more than anything of his mother’s tomcat. He had a glossy sculpted mane of brown hair, and a mouth that made him look eternally amused. His eyes were muddily ocean-toned, always half-lidded. He was the bland kind of handsome that fitted neatly into officer’s tabs. He never looked at anything directly, as if his attention was permanently focused a few degrees out of alignment with the world.

There was a waiter almost immediately, in generic black-and-white like any restaurant staff, but Erich could smell the prisoner on him. He didn’t speak, and wasn’t expected to.

The smells outside had been bad enough, here the air was heavy with real meat cooking, the Christmas tang of baking, the cream-colored scent of white bread underneath it all. He was shaking with hunger, afraid that he would lock if he put anything in his mouth.

Two of these anonymous prisoners brought the same meal for all of them. Erich ate whatever Kaltherzig put in front of him, eyes half-lidded, feeling half-asleep, dreamlike, looped into the conviction for some reason that he was still on the truck and dreaming of Auschwitz.

The first bite of what he supposed was, duck, exploded over his tongue in wave after wave of protein and butter and salt and rosemary, and he had one flickering picture of the skeleton men, and he kept eating, thought back and realized this was his first, real, food, since probably before the arrest, thought I don’t owe them anything, I pay more dearly than any of them do.

Sausage, that threatened him with nausea that never quite moved from his mind to his throat. Once he tasted it all the obligatory fake worries were forgotten. Stewed vegetables and fish baked underneath a golden crust and wedges of strong pink-orange cheeses. Real coffee, thick with cream, gritty with real sugar at the bottom.

He was too tired to do much more than hold himself upright.

Kaltherzig and Mengele were talking shop. What did you have planned? And from Kaltherzig much too useful for that.

He was steered back to Block 10 in a warm luxurious daze, stomach finally full, the tiny pains inside him drowned out by that one wonderful fact. Kaltherzig put him back at the typewriter, murmured “Finish the last few and you can nap until I come for you,” and the door locked behind him. He roused himself into that numb vacant concentration he remembered from studying late into the night for the hated math courses and finished the last dozen or so reports. He stacked them neatly beside the handwritten copies, buttoned his coat and pillowed his head on his arms. The woodgrain of the desk blurred into an auburn plane. It drew into focus again a soft eternity later, with Kaltherzig shaking his shoulder.

That ride

(home)

back, still half-asleep, head leaned again into Kaltherzig’s shoulder. In the drive in front of the house he tilted Erich’s head back and put his, mouth, on the boy’s throat, just over his pulse. He didn’t move, only, pushing, there, with the blunt edge of his teeth, eyes closed in the periphery of Erich’s terrified vision.


Kaltherzig left him alone, at least sexually, for the next three days. There was a strange routine, now, morning, breakfast, and the hospital and typing or filing, lunch in the officer’s mess, and the trip home in that elegant purring automobile. That trip was the most, dangerous, time, and that was possibly an overstatement. Kaltherzig would draw him close, and…feel, him, as if examining his bones, and sometimes he would hold his head still and look into his eyes for an inch or two away, or, smell, him. That was the worst, this predator-sense of breath on his neck, behind his ear, once against his mouth, jaw thumbed open at his chin.

Sometimes he was locked in the office and finished whatever work had been left for him. The second time he’d had nothing left to clean, file, or straighten, and he’d been trying to clean the narrow greasy window-glass with a damp rag and knocking on the door every time he saw a shadow pass. Kaltherzig had opened it, finally, half-angry, alerted by the amused explanation given to him by one of the prisoner-doctors. He had stared at the mostly spotless office and Erich’s terrified eyes, and laughed.

Kaltherzig took more photographs of him, with his clothes on this time, the neat set of face-on, profile, three-quarter with his number clearly visible that the SS required for his file. It reminded him that he was, an inmate. And the photographs he had to re-file with his typed reports reminded him that two years might not be true.

He worked until he fell into sleep on the floor almost as soon as he was horizontal, trying with all of his terrified might to prove that he was invaluable and loyal and obedient and dedicated. That thought would not leave him, the thought he’d had when the first glossy black-and-white of a boy with gaping scream and very-much-alive eyes above an almost finished Y-incision had hit Kaltherzig’s desk.

Will I leave here alive?

Smoke rings, drifting towards the ceiling. He looked at the triple pillars of smokestack and understood Kaltherzig’s reply.

On the fourth night Erich was lying on the floor at the foot of Ahren’s bed, staring up into the dark. He thought he’d imagined the “Come here,” but his fear of making Kaltherzig repeat himself made him stand up anyway. Ahren made one ghost-gesture with a white hand above the dark bedspread. Erich climbed up, the mattress strange under his hands and knees, the softest thing he’d touched except the back seat of the car in days. He’d been caught close, set down between Kaltherzig’s knees with his back leaning against the officer’s chest. Ahren dragged the blanket out from underneath both of them, drew it up and cradled him, mouth finding the joint of his shoulder and neck.

Erich hung, feeling oddly, comforted, warm and safe and trapped, all at once. Kaltherzig leaned, opening the drawer by the bed, steadying Erich with his other hand. They were both naked, and all this long smooth hot skin underneath him left Erich something like, drugged, a daze like morphine making all his limbs heavy. The jar, and Kaltherzig’s hand between them, smoothing that slippery cream on him with sudden startling intimacy. “Does it still hurt you?”

The samples, he meant. “No, sir.”

A nudge, and Erich pushed himself up with his hands, felt Kaltherzig doing something between them, lubricating his cock, most likely. “You do it.” And the head, nudging against him with no pressure at all, defeating him immediately with a strange spreading delicious humiliation. He would be, doing this to himself, participating, this time . He arranged himself and tried to be, obedient, and rocked against this silken pressure until he felt the beginning pangs of penetration, and there was less of obedience and more of

(appetite)

desire in his movements, now. It was, satisfying, unspeakably so, and the farther down he managed to push himself the more intense the sensation of being, filled, of having an unknown hunger finally satiated. It felt dirty, to do this, that much was unavoidably plain across all the other inherent pleasures, and he could not escape from the thought that it was Kaltherzig’s cock and not an insensate instrument inside him, this time.

It was heresy, leaning these two aching centers of forbidden need together, pressing down with his spine and his arms and his shoulders and the roll of his hips, feeling more and more owned with every inch that slid inside him. Kaltherzig drew him close again, wound him tight and they were, rocking together. Erich came almost as soon as Ahren’s hand wound around him, and the tremors took them both.

He was half asleep, after, when Kaltherzig pushed him with one tired hand, until he climbed down and settled on the floor. It was cold there, after the warm soft bed, and somehow unspeakably lonely. He lay blinking at tears that wouldn’t overflow, feeling too cold and homesick all over again. He thought ugly pieces of things, Why doesn’t he like me? What am I doing wrong? until he found a way to lie in a tightly wound ball with the blanket tucked in all around that kept him warm enough to sleep.

Sklave

The door to Kaltherzig’s office was no longer locked when Erich was left there to work. He found himself shared out among the doctors in Block 10, doing clerking and filing in a routine not so very different from his apprenticeship.

Mengele borrowed him often.

The doctor’s hands were quick or languid by turns, investigating everything, only bare when he was washing them, otherwise gloved in black leather or white cotton. He was vain, polished and flawless, gleaming in black from head to toe for his beloved selections, or in loosened tie and flapping white coat in the hospital.

Erich was half-terrified and half in awe of him. Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer. Everyone in his path ran to do whatever he ordered. No one had to explain the power of this man to him. It was almost, visible, around him.

He called him Doctor Mengele, as he’d been told to do, and he continued with the plan that seemed to have at least kept him alive so far—polite and obedient.

Kaltherzig kept him out of Mengele’s clutches as often as possible, he sensed, but for at least a handful of hours two or three days a week he would be sent for, and he spent those hours in a dreamlike daze of panic, listening to Mengele’s instructions as if they were directives from God, following orders with anguished speed and agonizing attention to detail. He was a blur of perfect devotion, and so far it seemed to have accomplished what he wanted: Mengele spoke to him briefly, civilly, collected his files, sometimes presented him with new work, and otherwise left him alone.

He collected reports from the doctors and typed them and returned them, usually by lunch.

Afterwards whoever won the argument would generally take him and use him to record dictation while they conducted monumentally boring examinations into a microscope.

There were no more samples, though from time to time Kaltherzig shut them into one of the examination rooms and injected him with, whatever it was. Or gave him pills, and asked questions and noted the responses, took his vitals after recorded intervals. None of this was particularly unpleasant, though sometimes he felt very strange, fast or slow or hot or delirious. On occasions like those Kaltherzig was very solicitous of him, keeping him provided with drinks and pillows and blankets, sometimes having him driven back to the house and left to sleep on the couch with the telephone nearby.

Sometimes there were miniature kindnesses—a plate of fried potatoes at lunch, made exactly to his mother’s recipe, taken from a letter of hers Kaltherzig never showed him. Wrapped candy that appeared in random handfuls beside the typewriter when he stepped away. Books, and that was the one that caught him, made him cry—two hardbacks, old and thick with tiny print, Norse myths and Greek myths, hours and hours of, reprieve, from this prison place. He sat at the typewriter crying like an idiot, in such a vivid memory of his childhood bed with the patchwork quilt and the great hardback storybook with the picture of Bellerophon falling from the chariot.

He thanked Kaltherzig for them on the ride home so many times he was finally cuffed—somewhat without enthusiasm—and told to shut up. He was given leave to read in the living room if he came to sleep in his usual place with absolutely no noise afterwards.

It wasn’t the gifts—only that, alone, would have made him feel more like a whore than he did already. It was the careful little attention to detail, the inherent sense of a mysterious set of files about himself that Kaltherzig not only had access to, but had studied carefully—it was the, care, or something like it, all of that demonstrated.

Not that Kaltherzig was kind to him in general, by any means.

In the evenings they usually went, home, together, sometimes stopping by the officer’s mess for dinner. Otherwise Erich built something simple from the kitchen that was kept invisibly stocked. Kaltherzig would drink, listen to music, read, type furiously in the corner of the living room he used as a study, or do all of the above in the basement corner he’d fitted as a part-time laboratory. Erich cleaned, straightened, read when he dared, made or repaired uniforms. This last chore he almost enjoyed, the narrowing of focus to these few familiar inches of cloth and thread.

Sometimes Erich was driven home alone, and Kaltherzig would stagger in sometimes close to dawn, drunk and dangerous and filled with unreasonable demands. It seemed he always knew, when the door would be fling open—a few minutes prior his hands would start shaking. There was almost nothing to be done, no level of careful or subservient that was guaranteed to spare him a beating. Sometimes there wasn’t even, a pretense, no words, just the door closing and locking and Kaltherzig staring at him with that terrifying vacancy, eyes not filling with, anything, until he was crying or bleeding or both or worse. It always ended in the bedroom, with the riding crop or the service belt, and Kaltherzig inside him, seeking and finding orgasm without any sort of notice whether Erich was enjoying himself.

More frightening, but less dangerous than the nights when he sat in the den alone, still drinking, listening to music in the dark. On these nights he could sometimes be lured with sex, if Erich was careful, taking off his boots and rubbing his feet without the slightest sound, setting them on the carpet with artisan’s care so as to be utterly silent. This was risking a kick, but if he got them off it would generally prevent kicking, later.

If Kaltherzig nudged him away, he went, keeping his drink filled as unobtrusively as possible, praying he would retire to the lab. If he was allowed to continue he might lure him out of his tie, rub his shoulders, progress till his face was in Kaltherzig’s lap. If he succeeded in his offer of cocksucking Kaltherzig usually went to bed on his own, the violence under his skin mostly defused. Erich would wait a safe margin of time in the dark, let the phonograph shut itself off, and crawl the last ten feet down the hallway into the bedroom when Kaltherzig’s breathing was the only sound left inside.

If he failed, by clumsiness or sometimes nothing at all he could pinpoint, Kaltherzig would hit him, and these times were probably the most dangerous, leaving him with a permanent terror of those hands and the gleam of light from the kitchen on the Totenkopf ring. He had nightmares about just that ring, coming at him from the dark.

If he was lucky he could crawl towards the kitchen. Sometimes Kaltherzig would allow this retreat, and he spent more than one night asleep on the tile floor, afraid to venture outside this so-far safe space.

If he was unlucky, Kaltherzig would pull him back, or order him to be still. He might hold his head still and slap him once, or dozens of times. Once he had let him get as far as the cocksucking and put his hands around Erich’s throat, strangled him till he came and left him coughing helplessly, flailing, vision almost-black, bruises already darkening in layered collars of red. He had been hoarse the next day, and the bruises had been visible for several inches above his shirt. Mengele had tipped his chin back, given him the eyebrow, but left him with files and instructions without further comment.

He supposed they assumed he deserved it, and maybe they were right.

By the time the strangulation bruises had faded there was a new one on his left cheekbone, the center black around two tiny stitches where the ring had opened a cut as wide as a fingernail but so deep it had hung open in almost a circle.

Kaltherzig had laid these stitches in the bathroom, holding his head, crooning that strange wordless comfort at him, doing all the shush and petting that he couldn’t stand against, that made him feel too young to resist. He had let him lie in the bed for a very long time that night, had even lay beside him for awhile, holding ice wrapped in a towel to his cheek, stroking his hair. He remembered being carried to the floor with supplemental pillows and a second blanket. These bribes remained the next night, so he knew he hadn’t dreamed it.

Of course, Kaltherzig must take a turn at playing host, and he told Erich one morning that he was to stay and once-over every inch of the house; he was to admit the cook and the two servers who should be there by two. There was a not-quite-bribe for this one, too—he disappeared into the basement and returned with a suit in a deep cold gray that must have cost four times Erich’s lost one.

As soon as the door had closed behind the doctor Erich was halfway up the stairs, working at the buttons of his shirt. He kept his uniform spotlessly clean, but it was the only clothing he had, and there was nothing he could do for months of wear without respite. He had always been painstakingly neat in his dress, and the desire to be dressed like a

(human being)

citizen again was like an itch between himself and these prisoner clothes.

It needed very little fitting. He careened through the house, finished hemming the trousers and sleeves during brief stops between frantically cleaning things that were already spotless.

Kaltherzig came home at half-past four; three women in neat restaurant dress buzzing around the kitchen and the dining room. Erich had retired to the den, dressed, his own shoes and Kaltherzig’s dress boots just polished to glossy black. That one earned him a clap on the shoulder that didn’t hurt. He looked up, hair wet and slick, newspaper between himself and his one remaining shoe, and Kaltherzig seemed to, stop, just staring at him. He was certain he’d committed some error, but there was only another touch on his shoulder, much softer, and a swipe at his hair. Kaltherzig left him to it without a word.

The house had filled with the wolves rather quickly. Erich found himself surrounded by uniforms. Seven, with two more who showed up after for drinks and cards. At dinner he found himself pinned again, Mengele on one side and Kaltherzig on the other.

Lieser, that awful photographer was there, and he swiped at Erich once as he went by, in what was probably a drunken attempt at a pinch. Everyone laughed except Kaltherzig.

“That’s not exactly becoming of an officer, you know.”

“What, making a try at a boy?”

“Making a try at my boy,” Kaltherzig said, and drew Erich closer, and put an empty glass in his hand to refill.

He’d expected—or maybe hoped was a better word—to eat in the kitchen, to be banished to bed, but he wasn’t sent up till a great many drinks had been poured. He hated Lieser’s eyes on him, and he thought of that glass pane underneath him, of the smell of semen and ozone.

A few weeks after the dinner party, Kaltherzig presented him with a footlocker, and an order to keep all of his things out from underfoot.

Inside was enough of several types of fabric in shades of black, blue and gray to make himself a few sets of civilian clothes. Thread and a scrap yard each of white and pink was on top; another order, one that gave a bitter taste to his joy at being somewhat freed from the prisoner stripes altogether. He was told to wear the stripes should any of the Berlin brass be expected, but mostly they stayed neatly folded in the bottom underneath his slowly growing pile of books—German history and a medical dictionary for his spelling were the newest additions.

He knew perfectly well this was unspeakable wealth, compared to the priceless spoon-and-cup and occasional blanket that was the sum total of most personal property in the camp. He hadn’t realized, though, how it was perceived, until another inmate named Giselle whispered, “Why don’t you talk to anyone? They all think that you’re arrogant.”

From any of the other girls in the medical Block this would have infuriated him, but his handful of brief interactions with Giselle had convinced him of her sweetness somehow, like a light inside her chest she couldn’t hide. He’d stared at her in mute horror, and said without thinking,

“Because I’m afraid.”

She said, “Everyone is.”

He wondered later, lying half-asleep on the floor, whether all this was because they, watched him, found him beautiful, or whatever word women had for men. This melted rather easily into wondering if Kaltherzig found him beautiful, if that was the reason for that stare, for the new clothes. For Group A—the control group in every other experiment he had recorded—written in every single one of Erich’s files. For the books, and the gentle minutes of

(father)

doctor, when Kaltherzig had wounded him badly enough to justify that game.

Would that have been enough?

Surely not, there were prisoners more beautiful than he was. That had gotten him the, audition, but something else entirely was what kept him here.

On the first gift-of-time day, Kaltherzig had taken him in the car after lunch and they had been driven beyond the camp and out into the countryside, autumn-bare fields and the blaze of colorchanged leaves, some trees already bare black lines. He was neatly dressed in new clothes and Kaltherzig had buttoned his coat over the pink triangle with a frown. There was an excitement in Erich’s chest like Christmas had given him when he was smaller. The first thing he noticed was that they had driven, far enough away, or perhaps in the right direction for the wind, for the air to taste of outdoors and sunshine and grass and, nothing else. That meat-processing smell was gone, and only clean things left in its place.

They stopped finally in the long dirt-and-grass drive of a farmhouse, everything drenched in sunlight-gold. Erich was led with increasing delight in knee-high green to a long splintering fence. There were horses; a great long dark stallion that came over like one of Poseidon’s, an arrogant thing that simply had to be Kaltherzig’s horse. He had already brandished the blunt white machinery of his teeth, and Erich was afraid of the same mechanism in the quiet tall mare that wandered up behind him. A rotund man the dappled paste-color of uncooked apple pie had come out with a great show of welcome Erich didn’t think he meant. He shook Kaltherzig’s hand for too long, answered his questions with too much nodding.

Erich was offering the flat of his hand to the mare, but when she ventured close enough to investigate him the fear of the teeth made him draw it back. They laughed at him a little, but the man came over and stroked her, took Erich’s hand and coaxed him to do the same. She was softer than he had expected. It made him think of the rumpled little patch on top of a kitten’s head. The smell gave him some kind of, memory, something to do with games the other boys wouldn’t let him play. Summer. Never mind.

He managed the saddle with a generous help up, and Kaltherzig did something and they were gone, leaving him clinging and breathless and rattled horribly until something clicked inside him and he learned to move with and not against, and the wind in his face was like, flying.

They had dinner served on the deck by this man’s silent wife. After there were too many drinks, and he told a circular set of stories about loose women, gesturing in alcoholic arcs.

Kaltherzig laughed at all the right times, but once his eyes found Erich’s, and there was no laughter there. Something else entirely.

He could not keep his eyes off the horses, and Kaltherzig finally called Erich’s close and helped him mount again. “No farther than that tree, or I’ll shoot you out of the saddle,” he said, and that smile, the real one, eyes and all, that he only seemed to use at the most inappropriate times.

He was as hopeless at horseback riding as he’d been at any other sport., one mess of ache from neck to knees after less than an hour. It was so much, fun, that he hardly noticed the bruises. Once he became reasonably sure he wasn’t going to fall off he started to notice how much farther he could see from so high and how fast the ground seemed to blur by, so far below.

He was exhausted to the point of near-sleep when they drove back to the camp. It was almost dark. He leaned on Kaltherzig’s shoulder without thinking to ask, and was not pushed away. If he closed his eyes he could still, almost see, the ground rushing by underneath him, and it made his stomach do a strange slow wonderful roll. Flying.

It had been a bribe. He knew that. But was there something else...why, for example, had he not taken a friend, another officer....

Did Kaltherzig have, friends?

Lieser. But there was that gaping space of rank, between them.

And there isn’t for you?

Too near, maybe. Near enough to tell tales, or hold grudges. Erich was, safe. A confidante who had no one else to tell.

figuren

There was a birthday party for one of the officers, at the worst of the heat of summer, and most of the SS contingent of Block Ten was at the swimming pool behind the officers’ barracks by half past ten, and in increasing states of undress and inebriation by time a late lunch was brought out, with iced fruit and candy-colored drinks and wide overflowing plates of sweets. Kaltherzig stayed under the awning, hat tipped low over his eyes, but he was down to his dress shirt, unbuttoned and sleeves turned up, and his feet were bare under the cuffs of his trousers. He teased Erich down his pants and shirt, then called him over when he seemed to have forgotten about it, and took his shirt away from him.

There was a girlfriend or three, and Lieser introduced Erich to his flaxen-haired sister, Rosalind, as Kaltherzig’s girl. Erich gritted his teeth, crimson, but she only smiled and took his hand as if he were a, citizen. A Valkyrie, he thought, or a woman like Lancelot’s Elaine might have been.

There was no rhyme or reason to Lieser. Too dangerous. Erich was looking daggers at Lieser without meaning to, and Rosalind caught him at it, but only smiled too, as if they shared a joke.

Erich brought Kaltherzig food he didn’t eat to spare him the walk in that sun, and drink after drink, all of them leaving rum or vodka burning in the back of his throat when Kaltherzig put them in his hands, looking the order at him. It made him thirstier, so that all he wanted was water filled with ice. It made him dizzy and breathless and pleasantly fuzzed at the edges.

Soon Kaltherzig was drunk enough to have acquired that edge of mean, and was teasing Erich that he should get in the pool.

Erich was hopeless at swimming, his teachers from Jungenvolk to gymnasium having given him up to let him hang onto the side of the pool or thrash in the deepest he could touch the bottom.

The teasing crept into an order soon enough, and he sat at the shallow end with his feet over the side, steeling himself. It felt like cold clean heaven, like the antidote to the white dry heat baking off the marble at him.

He slid in, and it was luxury, a shock that was too slow to make him gasp and too total to let him breathe. Kaltherzig laughed, applauded him for a second or two.

It was a delight for the three minutes or so he had to himself before Lieser pushed him under.

Water in a cold chlorine flood up his nose, rushing into his throat, all this tranquil blue clarity foamed into bubbles in his burning eyes. He was pulled out into water over his head and turned loose, thrashing and sinking. He found the bottom by slamming into it and shoved himself towards what he hoped was up and slammed into it again.

He would drown.

And he let himself settle and pushed till his feet seemed to be under him and tried to stand, and pushed and broke the surface and gasped and swallowed more water and sank again.

He had seen Kaltherzig sitting in shadow and he knew which way to run and he tried a flailing half-walk, shoving uselessly at the water with his arms, the urge to cough destroying him, and the edge slammed into him and he pulled and clung and there was air and he could hold himself out of the water, coughing in long spasms that sprayed water onto his hands, hitched in whooping gasps of hot air, blinded, heart pounding.

Bastard.

He actually had one knee up on the edge, only focused on being out and shivering beside Kaltherzig where it was safe, with a drink in his hand, when Lieser caught him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him in again. He was caught in a spray of chlorine, in the middle of a knot of laughter, driven into the water face-first again, coughing underwater in spite of himself. He could feel them around him like circling sharks. He flailed into another pair of hands and was pushed under deeper, the bottom scraping by one elbow and one outstretched hand.

They really will, he won’t stop them, he’d have to walk in the sun to get to me, and flailing, kicking out hard against hands and chests, breaking the surface, crying out

“Ahren!” because it was the only word he could remember.

“That’s enough.”

Kaltherzig had walked, sun or not, and was kneeling by the water’s edge.

Lieser hooked him under one arm and brought him to the side, turning him loose there with no particular malice, swimming off again at once as if he’d lost interest in this game.

Kaltherzig took Erich’s hand and drew him out, let him half-curl with his feet still in the water, coughing. He stayed there, still holding his drink, maybe because it was too much work to walk back just yet, but he had the effect of keeping all the eyes at bay. Nobody wanted to be the one still staring.

“Idiot,” Kaltherzig said finally. “Get up.”

Erich could, he found. The Valkyrie was sitting in Kaltherzig’s vacated seat, holding a glass filled with something the color of snow. She apologized to Erich with her eyes.

Rosalind stole a second as Kaltherzig was escorting an extremely drunken Lieser out to his waiting car. She took Erich’s wrist and leaned as if whispering a secret. “The Reich is mad, you know. My brother was one of you people the minute he was born. I always knew it. Everyone knows it’s really the Jews that are the disease. They’re only locking up inverts for politics.”

And that reckless smile that was so infuriating in Lieser, a little nod as if she meant to encourage him, as if he’d gotten sent to reform school by mistake. This gorgeous Freya of a woman was as mad as her brother. She seemed to think Lieser, who always volunteered for Selektion, who’d fought with Kaltherzig over the privilege of sodomizing him with an iron bar, was an example of how it would come out all right in the end.


With the other drugs, the kind that did change him, there wasn’t always the warning of the examination room. The first time like this, Kaltherzig said to him at breakfast that they weren’t going into Block Ten, that they would experiment alone. He eyed him warily, but assumed it meant, more of the games in bed. The idea of a day of that, playing hooky as it were, made him smile.

He was almost right.

It was two white pills and one yellow pill. Kaltherzig gave him pills often, sometimes telling him what they were, sometimes telling him only to swallow them and stop staring at them like an idiot. He swallowed them. He didn’t ask, and Kaltherzig didn’t volunteer.

Then Erich found himself folded over the table, arms having swept a dish-angel to give himself room, face against the wood and mouth open against it, pushing at it with his tongue. Kaltherzig was laughing. He sat up, embarrassed, stumbling something like an apology around his confused lips, and Kaltherzig put his hand over his mouth and, pulled him that way, and he struck his chest and dragged the chair over behind him, somehow, still that laughing, and he was caught by jaw and shirt and dragged up into Kaltherzig’s arms, feet treading at the floor with his toes now and then in a try at walking. He could see, but everything lingered too long, tilted in no relation to the tilt of his head. Then there was the wide soft impact of Kaltherzig’s bed, the beams of the vaulted ceiling turning over his head.

“That was the funniest thing, you should have seen you....” That laugh in his ear, and teeth in his neck, sending chills down his back and an unmistakable and sharp signal to his groin. He moaned all out of proportion to this horseplay. Kaltherzig stopped, studied his face, laughed in a completely different key.

Blur. This was a new kind of delicious, with the room lit gray-white through the white drapes. Always before it had been night for such games. Kaltherzig could sense the difference, too, or perhaps he only wanted to play games with the effects of this drug. His hands were more attentive, less specific, drawing long sweeping featherlight strokes along Erich’s spine, his shuddering ribcage, to watch him vibrate in gasping shock at the strange echoes of texture and light that followed the path of Kaltherzig’s fingers. The chaos inside him climbed until he was clinging to the sheets afraid he would fall out into nothing if he didn’t, climbed until he was making noises that were meant to be please and Kaltherzig laughed, and then was hot long bones under smooth skin, folded over his back, driving him mad with breath in his ear that made him fear being eaten.

He wailed until the press of Kaltherzig’s cock against the small of his back reminded him of the world, dissolved this single note of terror into a new note of want. He was too far from Germany to remember how he was supposed to act, too far from the source of this drowning delight to do anything but arch and push and hiss until the first real push and the slide inside him, skin on skin with no cream or wetted fingers to spare him, in slow thudding pushes that were so frictioned and perfect he could do nothing but open his mouth and pant a damp circle into the pillow.

Kaltherzig knelt up behind him, touching him only there, only inside, and didn’t move until Erich was a trembling kinetic line of desperate tiny sounds, and laid one hand on his back and pushed all the way inside, pausing not at all for his shrill little climbs at the bright flares of hurt. He drew in his breath to plead for mercy and then the pain was gone and it was only that dissolving itching ache, pleasure on pleasure, and he lay feeling drawn down to a single point, feeling owned. Letting Kaltherzig move him like a specimen.

The snow came, and the artificial lake in the great sprawling gardens and fields that surrounded the officers’ houses froze. Kaltherzig presented him with ice skates one morning, and they spent until long after lunchtime gliding in increasingly less hazardous arcs across the ice. They went into Block Ten after a leisurely early dinner, and Kaltherzig locked them both in his office, and made them both hot cider with schnapps over a Bunsen burner, and told him stories of learning to ice-skate with a handful of older brothers trying to knock him down on every side.

On Solstice morning Erich got up and discovered a stocking nailed on the mantle for him, crammed with bulges that turned out to be maple-stick candy and oranges and a book on Egypt and a polished-wood box that opened into a tiny ornate board and carved chessmen.

Kaltherzig denied it. “It was Father Christmas. I would’ve left you switches and coal,” he said, perfectly airy, expressionless.

Then they washed, and dressed, and Kaltherzig knotted a sharp new tie with intricate black-on-black patterning, straightened his collar, turned him to the mirror so that they gleamed next to each other. He was in the black dress uniform, glinting in that sinister way that made Erich remember the weight of that SS coat on his back, the slippery evilness of it. “Like father and son,” Kaltherzig said, and ruined Erich’s smooth hair by plunking his own uniform cap on top.

The party seemed to start in the officer’s lounge. There was a very long and very formal dinner, during which Erich drank much too much red wine, and Kaltherzig leaned close to whisper a compliment for his manners and the breath in his ear gave him an erection that left him in fear of being called to stand for a toast or a song.

They were crowded into one of a fleet of cars with a drunken Claub, and driven to the Kommandant’s house. Erich spent this wedge of the party in something of a ballroom, while Kaltherzig had time with the brass and he made himself inconspicuous. Then on to the officer’s lounge again, which was peopled by now with drunken Untersturmfuhrers and non-coms. It was here that Kaltherzig drew Erich onto his lap by his collar and slid one gloved hand inside his pants and wound it around his balls and squeezed very, very slowly, very very hard, holding him around his neck to keep his face visible, the rest of them a drunken uproar of laughter at his gagging screams.

The next morning he taught Erich how to set up the chess pieces, the phonograph warbling softly behind them.

Erich never knew which to expect—the thoughtful presents, the hours of stroking with those intelligent hands, or the whip, and more of the terrible, terrible tricks. It was like weather, he thought, crying from a split lip he’d earned trying to lure Kaltherzig out of one of his silent depressions. It wasn’t his fault. It was the whim of a God.

The nightmares from the last time would fade, and then there would be a new indignity.

schwul

In the hospital, they seemed to see him as a privileged favorite, which translated variously to awe, disgust, or a narrow mathematical look he supposed was, envy. He could not stand under the weight of those sunken eyes without seeing himself sleeping curled up on the carpet, bleeding or leaking sperm or both, with his back as close to the edge of Ahren’s bed as he could manage to get so that the edge of the blankets would keep him, just a little warm.

Everywhere he went, seeking records or carrying messages, he felt the wake of staring behind him, the space of silence before the leaf-rasp of whispering. The weight of their eyes made him feel, guilty. He felt so.....fed, beside them, so clean and spoiled and spared. He was ashamed for them to see him, in his own jacket and leather shoes, with his hair at his collar longer than any of the girls was allowed to keep.

Ava was the most tiresome of all the prisoners he knew. She assisted in the hospital, working beside the doctors a great deal. This questionable honor had convinced her of her own importance. He heard her voice over the others constantly, correcting everyone at everything, gossiping She pontificated to any prisoners that would listen about the horrible morals of the girls who whispered and giggled about Mengele’s beauty, and wasn’t it disgusting, just sick?

Once she’d said to Erich, “It must be nice not to worry about food.”

Oh, how tempted he was to just seize her and drag her close and hold her caught and tell her about, oh, any of it.

Any of it.

He would tell her about Ahren holding him down in the bathtub, scrubbing him until he bled, that very first night.

Or about the time in the officer’s lounge. Solstice, in the middle of all the fireplace and champagne and prisoner band and glitter and food and party,

He would offer to trade with her, maybe. Two years of starving and lice for two years of being kept clean in order to be more delightful to make, dirty.

He wondered, what she would choose. Ahren got his share of giggling and whispers from camp girls, hospital or not, and Ava never had anything to say about that.

Some of the camp-inmates outside of the secluded hospital staff, stared at him openly, leaning to whisper to another shaved-and-striped slave, smirking, or laughing. Most of them would’ve killed to be where he was.

That was probably at least half the reason for the open hostility. Being Ahren Kaltherzig’s slave meant clothes and warmth and medical care. Oh, there was the sodomy and the broken finger and the bruises and the sitting in the bathroom bleeding and sobbing with Ahren like a tiger outside the door, but he could eat. And he didn’t have typhus or scabies.

Out in the camp starvation drew skeletons underneath all the faces; men were missing fingers and feet and noses and ears from the cold or the mines, or had gone mad from the crematoriums and the selections.

He shared some of these terrors with the regular prisoners. A mistake or a failure from sickness or weakness could land anyone in an oven, or worse, the jail.

A tiny, embarrassing part of him didn’t think Kaltherzig would give him to Mengele, or shoot him. He would kill him one day, but it would be out of a punch thrown too hard, or a fall taken wrong. It would be a side effect, not a punishment.

He knew the faces, if not the names, of the ones that tended to gawk and snicker and shout slang he didn’t understand in his direction . He never did anything to these tormentors, never knew quite what he might do or what he wanted to do. He would only flush and walk faster.

I have no business being angry at them.

But he was angry, because he knew exactly what they were whispering. Whore and queer in a dozen different languages.

They had done it to the cowboy, too, for the few weeks he had survived, once they had turned him out shaved and striped and with the pink triangle emblazoned on chest and thigh. He had seemed much smaller without his glorious hair, much younger, as if he were becoming the lover he’d lost.

Erich was very, very grateful, he had not become, one of those.

He would probably live through the war. Most of them would not. Because of that he had no right to blame them for their, hate. Their envy. Their snickers and once-over stares and stench and strange insectile possessiveness with everything they touched.

There was something like a laugh inside him, when they didn’t dare those tricks when he was with Kaltherzig.

He had no right to that warm delighted place between stomach and spine when Mengele or Wirths ordered one of them to step out of line, no right to find public floggings or the waiting trucks or the hysterical terror, funny. No right at all.

Versuch

He had come to believe, somewhat unconsciously, that his time as a patient in Block 10 was over. When Kaltherzig locked them both in the examination room and told him to undress it was like the nightmares again, and his hands obeyed as if he were underwater.

If he was lucky it was only an injection. It was quick, and almost painless. Vitals and the light gleaming in his eyes, a swipe of alcohol over his hip and a fine-gauge needle that was a joke after the way he’d been hurt in this room.

He knew better than to ask, but he glanced at the vial before Kaltherzig pushed the tray aside. Serum, NC, and other writing too small for him to read.

Kaltherzig saw his look, again, and said, “The trial phase of a drug to possibly cure your, disease.”

His disease. Flicker of Kaltherzig on top of him, so far inside him it made his stomach hurt, shaking and hissing my boy.

He felt nothing, and by the time he was stationed at the familiar typewriter it was almost forgotten.

He found while typing his own report that he was in Group A, whatever that meant.

He watched what he supposed were pretty girls, listening for some symptom of
normalcy in himself, oddly enough without any real

(fear)

conviction that he was

(in danger)

being changed.


“I have three postmortems today and I think you’re ready to notate for them. You might not wish to eat if you think it’s going to disturb you.”

Postmortems. He had seen bodies, of course, by now, lying where they’d been thrown out of each block when they went in each morning. Walking past an anonymous sort of peripheral shape would be nothing, compared with being shut in a room with an example he could not ignore.

He didn’t eat.

Sometimes he told himself he was simply trying to survive, or to learn so as not to waste this time, but the feverish frantic interest in anything that might prove useful scared him.

He found himself looking out the car windows for bodies, that same, studying instinct, all tangled with his constantly evolving idea of, perfect.

He wondered if he might not, like, the hospital, the busy frightening bustle of it, the chemical smells, the sense that everything was very important. Nothing in all his life, not the print-shop, not Hitler, not anything in school had ever seemed to matter. There had always been this glassy sense of, a game, a rehearsal. He felt nothing of that, here—Auschwitz was more real than anything had ever been.

The morgue, if that was what you called one room with twelve metal tables and four bodies, smelled immediately of something hideous and familiar, and he thought of dusty jars of sweet pickles in his mother’s pantry and covered his mouth and nose. Kaltherzig was already at the desk in the corner, thumbing through a folder, and he noticed and nodded as if he’d expected it. “Come in and close the door. If you breathe slowly and don’t fight it you won’t smell it after a minute or two.”

He noted something, vanished through another door, left Erich standing just inside the room with these twelve moveless shapes. Two of the shrouds were filthy, dark and wet in places and dried and stiff in others. These were less distressing, somehow, than the clean amorphous white ones. Those seemed far more likely to, oh, sit upright and speak at length about Hell or Hitler or the pleasure of worms.

He caught himself and bit the inside of his lip, thought campfire stories and thought of the harmless little heaps with birdbones jutting out in the gutters outside. These were the losers. He was out here breathing and not under a filthy sheet because he was still doing everything right.

He thought what does he see in me? and it made him stand up straight, take deeper breaths, look at the shrouds and force himself to think just meat, just eggshells. Cordwood, everyone said, but it was much too wet and smelled of too much swamp to be a deadfall you could steal firewood from. As long as he kept his metaphors away from

(pickles)

anything wet he would be all right.

Kaltherzig slid up on his tall wheeled stool, pulled back a clean shroud with no ceremony at all, exposed a middle-aged narrow man with oddly composed features, and no real marks except livid purple bruising around his left eye. “Subject is between forty and fifty-five years old….” snap of a tape measure….”approximately six foot one, in good general health. No external damage is visible.”
Erich remembered to write, caught up to most of that. Looked at the bruises around this cold closed eye, wondered if the wet eyeball fluids underneath had gone to jelly. Then he put the clipboard down and made it to the wastepaper basket and did a brief set of gestures but wasn’t sick.
Kaltherzig said nothing, waiting politely, and from the corner of his watering eye Erich could see he had picked up the clipboard himself and was jotting something down, as if he needed something else to look at. Gentlemanly—anyone else might have interpreted that a dozen ways, but Erich knew the truth.

That was the worst of it, and the last of it.

He took notes—Kaltherzig spelled a word for him now and then, and the few he didn’t quite get he faked the best he could, intending to look it up to type it down correctly.

When there was cutting the noise distressed him very deeply, but he breathed fast and hard through his nose and let Kaltherzig’s voice be the only sound in the room, let the ripping wet sounds that reminded him too much of cloth fade to background noise like the rain outside.

Sometimes he was asked to hand Kaltherzig things, and this gave him long strange waves of working with his father, not over bolts of cloth but in the tool shed over a potted rose bush or the finishing touches on a windowbox for his mother.

They broke for lunch, and washed from fingertips to elbows side by side, and when the officer’s lounge closed around them and the smell of roast chicken drove out the last thought of pickles, Erich discovered that he was hungry.

Kaltherzig was thumbing through his notes, eating with those neat precise bird-bites. “You’re very attentive to detail. Very fast,” he said. He gave them back to Erich with that rarest of smiles, the kind that had teeth but still wasn’t dangerous. “If you keep up your behavior I’m going to put a letter in your file in praise of your progress.”

Progress. “Thank you, sir,” hoping that was right. He found he didn’t give a damn about this hypothetical file. He was glowing inside his stomach in a way he remembered and could not place. He wanted that kind of smile again.

They were alone today, and that was a mercy. He wasn’t sure if he could’ve stood this strange exhilaration and Mengele’s tomcat stare at the same time.

That night he dreamed of all those shrouds moving like the surface of a lake in a storm, and hands coming up and the shape of heads and torsos sitting upright in the clean white light of the morgue, and Kaltherzig’s back was turned at the desk and he could not scream and the first set of feet swung over the side of a table and hit the floor, and he woke up all at once gasping, staring up at Kaltherzig’s pale angles and shaking and wet and so afraid at first he had no idea what had happened, thought perhaps there had been a bomb dropped.

Kaltherzig was shaking him, crouching naked beside him, saying irritably, “Here, now, enough, it’s not so bad as all that, is it? It’s a dream, whatever else it is. Stand down, soldier,” and a little laugh, to show he wasn’t angry. He stood up, held out his hand until Erich took it.

He was pulled up and deposited at the foot of the bed, and his blanket and pillow thrown on top of him.

Kaltherzig climbed back into bed.

Erich was lying crosswise at the bottom, on top of the blankets. He arranged the pillow
and covered himself, and Ahren’s feet under the thick comforter slid and nudged at his cheek, curved there softly.

The mattress was a strange cupping luxury underneath him. He had plenty of room, in this aristocrat’s bed, and he stretched a little, quietly, the movements slow and deliberate because he’d learned that was the least risk of noise.

The dream was gone. He closed his eyes, put one hand up and laid it on the shape of Ahren’s ankle under this, shroud. He was warm and narrow and hard and comforting.

The nightmares left him alone, at least until morning.


Kaltherzig had been leaning almost with his head, inside, an opened chest cavity, and Erich hadn’t heard the last sentence. He thought of that very first rule at the instant he asked him to repeat it. Kaltherzig turned, bloody up to his elbows, one eyebrow raised, and repeated it, very, very slowly.

Doomed.

He’d washed his hands, peeled the gloves, and chosen a long wide test tube and a cork to fit it and filled it halfway with liquid soap and corked it. He carried it, outside, and returned without it.

And that was all.

Four hours of work, and notes, and one live experiment with a Gypsy girl who cursed at them both in Romany until she only screamed and dribbled snot down her face till Erich was very close to vomiting. He just stared at the notebook, hand writing almost by itself, daydreaming, clock-watching.

Block Ten was mostly empty, most of the officers long since gone home. Kaltherzig was in coat and gloves when he told Erich to stay, went outside, and returned with the test tube. The soap was frozen inside it. He ran it under hot water and turned it out into his hand, this thing like a suppository for an, elephant, almost as thick as a man’s penis, glistening opaque blue and ominously shiny.

He made Erich lean over a table, drew down his pants and rubbed it against him in a little mean circle to show him how very cold it would be, before he shoved it inside him.

Erich started with no after the very first, instant, of slide, and Kaltherzig grabbed his hair and thudded his face into the table, splitting the inside of his lower lip to remind him about the no business. He pushed this, icicle, all the way in, until both sets of muscle closed behind it, stopping only when it was deep inside as he could get it. The groan had taken the last of Erich’s breath.

He took his leisurely time poking around in a cabinet for gauze. He pushed wedge after wedge of it inside, and Erich shook and gritted his teeth and hated hated hated him, and swore he wouldn’t make another, fucking, sound, but he broke down after the fourth or fifth strange dry drag of the cotton and the first creeping threat of cramps from the cold, the first spreading burn of the soap. He was begging him to stop, please, please. Kaltherzig always won in the end, and Erich always fought him, for a second or an hour, because he just, couldn’t, do this, any other way.

He stopped a long time after Erich started pleading. He pulled his pants up again and straightened his coat and then, scooped him up, like a baby, and carried him outside and into the waiting car.

He spent the short ride home with his face buried in Kaltherzig’s lap, trying with everything he had to follow the murmured directions of inhale, exhale, breathe. He thought, he controls, all of it, my breath, my blood, everything I feel or sense or see. he’s, Osiris....

and the pain would hit him again, and that fearful urge to push against it. He would cling, pleading for Ahren to stop it, please, please. He would be so good. He’d never forget to listen again . He’d pay attention, please, please, god, just, please, stop it, it hurts, it hurts.

Ahren would say, “It’s too late. I can’t do anything about it now. You’ll have to learn to please me the first time if you don’t want to be punished. That’s why I’ve done this to you. Do you understand?”

He hated do you understand. He tried to explain that running thought, and he muddled through it to “...Osiris...”

“My boy.” And Ahren petted him, as if he were pleased with this sacrifice, and traced the shape of his mouth when the burn drove him into a wail, as if he were, measuring. And he said to the Untersturmfuhrer driving, “Take it slowly. I want to enjoy the snow.”



After three injections, the vial changed.

It was not the NC mystery chemical he was always injected with. It was tiny, clear, and unlabeled. “Is it different, sir?” he said, feeling his mouth run dry and his stomach, sort of fall, as though it already knew he was doomed.

“It’s different every time. Give me your arm.”

That, too, was different, the tourniquet, and the deliberate poke in search of a vein instead of the almost-playing stab that he used for the usual intramuscular. Erich chewed his lip and waited to—oh, die, or be torn suddenly with agonizing pain. Nothing. His lips tingled, and his heart seemed to be pounding, but that was probably only fear.

I’m not the control group anymore.

But he’d never seen any record of this change.

Whatever it was, it was Hellish.

By the time they went home he was panting through his teeth, hot and unspeakably thirsty, prickly and driven with twitches. He felt flushed and fever-strange and as though he were caught in the peak of a high panic. Kaltherzig said nothing, checking his pulse twice and his eyes once, and only watching him, as if he expected him to

(change into something else)

get worse.

It got much worse. Erich saw the walk up to the front door, and then he was on the couch, curled in a ball as if he had a stomachache. There was no memory in between, and worse, no sense even of time missing. It was as though he’d missed it in a single blink. He cried out for Kaltherzig, and found him at the end of another of those terrifying no-spaces. “Sit down.” Hadn’t he been lying down? But he was standing, with Kaltherzig pushing him back to the couch. His skin was beating with a sourceless urgency: he had to go somewhere, else, and he had to do it quickly. And then he was in bed caged in Kaltherzig’s arms, crying out that his mind was flying apart. He had been torn out of the world. He could not feel Kaltherzig’s hands. He was trying to tell him to hold him harder, tighter, and he could hear him laughing but feel nothing, see nothing but brightness.

He woke up the next morning alone in Kaltherzig’s bed. Kaltherzig was in the bathroom, shaving. “You’ll stay here. You won’t be able to read for a day or two.”

He sat up, blinking, saw the amorphous blur that had replaced his near-vision. “Will I...go, blind...” Flicker of that needle, dimpling and then popping into a spread-open eye.

“No, idiot. Atropine dilates your eyes. They used it in Egypt to get that,” here he was crossing to Erich, tilting his head, straight-razor dripping in his hand, “particular, effect.” He looked, as though he were taking notes, and turned on his heel back to the mirror.

verderben

The postmortems had begun to feel like, work, like something he and Kaltherzig did together, something official and important.

Live experiments were another thing entirely.

Autopsies were so much, quieter.

There was no warning, this time, only the nudge towards the examination room instead of the office he prayed for the entire drive into camp. Kaltherzig must have smelled his terror. “Not this time, my boy,” he said, with the laugh in his eyes, and handed him the file.

He’d settled himself against the far wall, well out of range of that bastard table, on a twin of Kaltherzig’s wheeled chair.

They brought in a man perhaps thirty, with symmetrical wounds on either side of his chest from collarbone to stomach, but the worst of it was his genitalia—penis and scrotum both seemed to have been, peeled. He could see sores creeping up his stomach, down his thighs. His file gave his name as Gutsherr Bosch. He was one of those genderless, shaven stick-figures they all became after awhile.

He was crying in a vague, inattentive way, as if he’d been doing it for weeks, as if he’d forgotten how to stop. He didn’t seem to see anyone. He had to be lifted onto the table, strapped and arranged, and after this brief swarm of prisoner doctors was swept outside again Kaltherzig pushed his spread knees up higher and picked up a clamp and closed at the base of his scrotum, as close to his body as possible. Bosch broke immediately into an inhuman howl.

Erich didn’t understand. The scream had caught him off-guard. The clamp was blunt, it had to hurt, but surely not as badly as all that? Was it only the man’s lunacy?

Not much later he understood all this howling was for the sake of what would happen next. Perhaps someone had told him, or he’d reasoned it from the clamp in some still-functioning corner of his mind.

Erich sat with his hands still half-covering his ears. He watched Kaltherzig’s shoulders move, heard Bosch make that leap in pitch that he’d come to know meant cutting.

Kaltherzig moved something into a waiting specimen jar. He picked up something plugged into the wall, that made the scream finally crumble into Polish too mangled for Erich to pick up any of it. The room smelled immediately of that smokestack odor. Kaltherzig took off the clamp, and the prisoner-doctor came back as if he’d been listening for this sound. He wheeled himself back, and Erich saw the blood. It took a minute between the red and the essential, vertigo, of it, to realize the man had been castrated.

It was his job to label the jar, too. Drifting inside it were both ruined testicles. Tissue sample, fertility program, and the Institute in Berlin. That smell of not-quite-pickles. He ran to the sink, scrubbed his hands with a speed bordering on hysteria.

Kaltherzig didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He said, “The next one, and coffee,” and that was exactly what they brought him.

He came to recognize the sudden wake of stillness, the clump of staff orbiting a doctor or two, and the silence among the patients when the numbers started being called. Sometimes the death parade passed him by, and sometimes someone crooked a finger at him or tapped on the office door. Then he would find himself with the questionable honor of trying to write down what the doctor was shouting over a shrieking subject.

At first it was only Kaltherzig.

There was that same superstitious dislike of the inevitable nurse or three for a live one. Kaltherzig was always viciously distant to him in front of people. There was an unspeakable intimacy in it, these eyes he was beginning to think of as

(mine)

familiar, focused on some tragedy under his hands.

Erich was jealous of that, concentration, something he had also come to think of as, his.

It was never finished. He would think he had all Kaltherzig’s dangers mapped, and another jagged edge would bite him. Let him ruin some other boy with strange incisions, let girls walk in lovely and be wheeled out re-arranged and lovely no longer. But he stood shaken and sick anyway, Kaltherzig’s evil little murmurs of fake comfort to someone else jangling in his ears.

Then he started recording for Claub, probably his least favorite, a monotonous dry man that reminded him of his old biology teacher. Always children, always a tube up the nose, crying that invariably ended in uncontrollable coughing and usually vomiting Something to do with test serums delivered directly into the lung. All Erich knew was that it was forty minutes or so of revolting boredom, in which he wrote very little, flat dosage and subject statistics, and clockwatched until it was over. At least with Kaltherzig there was this troublesome jealousy to distract him.

Mengele was the rarest, and by far the worst.

The other prisoners were afraid of Kaltherzig. They were terrified of Mengele.

Erich didn’t understand why until the twins, when he saw that charming mask fall for the first time.

Kaltherzig had simply said, “No, Mengele’s boy is busy. You’ll record for him today,” and steered him away from the familiar office and towards the examination room.

He supposed it was a mercy that he had no choice, because he would have done a great deal not to push through those doors. He had heard enough from the office a long way down the hall to know he didn’t want to see what produced such cataclysmic noise.

There was a prisoner-doctor there, a Jew Erich did not know who brought him the files, trying to warn him of something with his eyes. Mengele was washing his hands, singing.

He had always supposed he wasn’t assisting because he wasn’t important enough for Herr Haupsturmfuhrer, Doctor Mengele. Later, he would think perhaps Kaltherzig had been shielding him.

They brought in two dark-haired girls, tiny doll copies of one another. Mengele sat them on the table and took their pictures, smiling for them and mimicking poses to get them arranged. They laughed. They adored him rather quickly. He flashed the camera in his own eyes, did an exaggerated squint, and dared them to do better. Then he asked which was the oldest, and after some argument the girls and their file agreed with one another.

He set the youngest down, off the table. Then he pushed the oldest onto her back, and his assistant held her down, and Mengele pried open one of her eyes. He got that far before she began to shriek, and the twin immediately joined in from the floor. The combined effect was rather like being in a room with two air-raid sirens.

Mengele leaned over, and very softly but very clearly to the girl on the floor, “Stop it or I’ll kill your sister.”

His expression never changed.

Erich was stunned into slackjawed staring by the sheer evilness of this. He had never heard Mengele say anything of the kind. And it worked, instantly—they both shut up and stared at him in something like awe.

The oldest started screaming again when she saw the needle, climbed an octave in shrill anticipation of pain. The youngest didn’t join in.

The assistant finally held a hand over her mouth. He kept his eyes on the floor. The new muffled noise reminded Erich of a neighbor’s dog, a tiresome little thing that would cry at the gate until it was hoarse. Mengele was working on the other eye with a new syringe.

Erich wrote down the dosages rattled off at him, trying to be invisible Subcorneal injection. He could not imagine such a thing, and again that wing of sensation through him, of being chosen-lucky-favorite, of being spared such dramas as dyed irises and deliberate infections.

He traded this double-file for a new one as the screaming pair was removed, the wounded one carried and cupping her eyes, the youngest dragged along by her hand, crying so hard she was probably as blinded as the other.

Mengele was washing his hands again, humming the same marching song.

Kaltherzig informed him on the way home that Mengele had been quite pleased with his work. He supposed that was worth fourteen subcorneal injections.

Erich could not get his mind away from this cracked Mengele mask. He told Kaltherzig about the twins, asked if it was always like that.

“Those twins of his.” Kaltherzig shrugged. “You say whatever works, it’s your job. What’s the difference? Most of them are lucky to last a week. Drive you mad with that screeching. I used to have the office closest to the Zwillighaus. Thank God I was promoted quickly.” He lit a cigar, rolled the window down. “You say whatever works, it’s your job, you know.” Another shrug.

Not a bluff, then, though he hadn’t thought it was. It made it worse somehow that Mengele would kill them anyway, that all that obedience would earn them nothing. He looked at Kaltherzig’s hands and was quiet.

What happened to your last boy, sir?

Cigar smoke spiraling up into the sky.

A day or two later he watched Mengele kneel beside two girls, neatly matched, shaking in their best clothes on the ramp. He always had candy or fruit; he was so pretty and so softspoken, such a little man, so neatly dressed, so calm. They always smiled, so grateful to see a kind face after the long frightening train ride and the shouting SS men. Parents would see this handsome gentleman examining children and break out of line to push their own into his hands, nodding lies at his endless “Twins?”

He seemed to delight in visiting them after the first betrayal, the first time Uncle Mengele led them not to toys or nuts in hidden pockets, but knives and that implacable calm. They would sit bleeding into bandages he had placed over wounds he had made, and after awhile they would be smiling at him again. It took some of them five or six times to learn to cry when he came into the ward, and the new children who adored this nice grownup were mystified.

Hauptwerk

The Hungarian twins made something of a name for themselves in Block Ten as Mengele’s supposed magnum opus. They were eighteen, and the sort of prime physical specimen that did not often come under the doctor’s hands in this lean and hungry time. Erich recorded for some of their photographing—days and days of it, sometimes going on far into the night so that Kaltherzig would go home in disgust, and he would be dropped off after a quiet tense few minutes in the car with Mengele up front by the driver.

The first time this happened he realized he was alone on the path up to Kaltherzig’s house, outside the camp walls, and that he might run. He looked once off into the darkness of fields and woods beyond, thought of insects and dew and hiding in barns and slowly starving, or of Kaltherzig finding him and pinning him down with the black eye of a gun.

He had no idea what direction to run in. The entire idea seemed preposterous. He’d turned his back on the open darkness, tapped on the door until Kaltherzig shouted for him to stop that noise and come inside.

The twins were grinning stupid things, in his unspoken opinion, loud and friendly or incomprehensibly hostile by turns. Their German was awful. They seemed to think they were celebrities, above and beyond the screaming ruined things in the experimental ward. The stares and badly hidden smiles of the young women in the hospital only aggravated this newfound egotism.

Erich feared for his sanity or his soul, because the warm smug little anticipation of their destruction would not leave him.

The fact that his own privilege and safety existed at the same fragile mercy as theirs did not escape him, but somehow that made it more intense, his wish to watch them fall under the knives. They were the tall graceful boys who had kept him clinging to adults like a moth to light, because out of sight of the authorities those were the ones who threw rocks, shoved him down to bloody his hands and knees, stared with smirking words for faggot and nudges for their friends to help them stare.

It was tedious work. Mengele seemed determined to photograph every hairy rippling inch of these drafthorse men, from sole to scalp. Erich found them rather repulsive, contrasting all this overdone bulging and flexing in his mind with Kaltherzig’s marble-pale narrow lines, with his own delicacy.

They were a dirty almost-blonde, light eyes in blue tones, and this broad-shouldered thick heartiness of theirs was something the Reich seemed to hold in high esteem. At least, Mengele thought so. He was delighted with them, his enthusiasm burning in him like a lamp, every motion loose and quick and eager.

They were sometimes almost rude, complaining of holding arms up like so or kneeling for too long, complaining of squinting around purple spots from the incessant flashbulbs, complaining of the food. The petulance made Erich grit his teeth, watching Mengele, almost praying for that mask to drop. He was slippery and obsequious to them, assuring them of their importance to his work, their valuable contribution to medicine, until they were puffed up with pride. He never quite claimed they were special or were to be spared, but he made no effort to strip them of such delusions.

Not at first, anyway.

Erich would watch him make these assurances, arranging one twin while the other balefully waited his turn, and thought stop it or I’ll kill your sister.

Kaltherzig didn’t like them, and he liked their cost in Erich’s time even less. His one brief comment about them was that they were common peasant stock, his sneer making a profanity of common. Erich wondered if Kaltherzig, too, saw long-ago boys who had laughed at his neatness and his narrow long bones, his too-beautiful face, before he had grown into this death’s head soldier nobody would ever dare laugh at again.

But all of the Reich, it seemed, was a system of favors owed and collected, and he was fury-eyed but silent when Erich opened the door and tiptoed in long after sunset.

The photography ended not a moment too soon for Erich, and then it was X-rays for days, and he was spared none of it.. It was the photography again, except without the flashbulbs, endless arranging and sort of a hum and a click, and more of those thick demanding complaints. They seemed rather proud to go about naked, but now the incessant complaint was that it was too cold, the table was too hard, the X-rays made them feel strange.

Mengele smiled and nodded and all but cooed sympathy at these hulking idiots. “Yes, yes, but you’re the best we have,” he would say, pushing an edged mouthpiece that last agonizing inch deeper, to get just one more shot of those big flawless teeth, bluegreen eyes with redgold eyelashes blinking resentfully at him over the hulk of the machine.

Erich rather thought he was enjoying this cat-and-mouse, that he pretended kindness not just because it was easier, but because the betrayal was more deliciously unexpected. It could not come soon enough for Erich.

He knew it had begun when there were Untersturmfuhrers, four of them smoking and leaning in corners, Lieser among them giving him a smile. Three prisoner-doctors were shrinking around them like rabbits around wolves. Two long great metal washtubs were already here, striped slaves leaving little drip-trails as they lugged and emptied bucket after bucket of steaming water to fill them.

Erich chewed his lip for want a smile, and put himself neatly out of everyone’s way. He had the two files open and half-overlapped so that he could write on either without flipping through them.

He had no idea what might happen, but he knew it would end in screams. It always did.

He tried to imagine one of—those, screaming, and a quick trip through the library of noise he’d collected since Auschwitz had become the world gave him no clues. He would know soon enough.

They were brought in bookended by SS. One of them put in a toe as Mengele was making his entrance in a swish of white. He snatched his foot out. started his usual imperious complaint, followed a half-step behind by his brother joining in.

Mengele spared them not a look. He gestured, and the guards simply seized them and shoved them in and pushed them down. These were not quite screams, yet, more indignant shouting.

Lieser drew back from the sloshing fury, shaking water from his splashed sleeve, drew his gun and held it on them with a smile that dripped sweetness and reason. It held them down just fine, and stopped the noise like a thrown switch. Erich’s eyes went from gun to these twins, growing lobster-pink and occasionally making a half-cowed demand, in more of a mutter now. He saw them exchanging glances, and thought they’re beginning to suspect.

The buckets kept coming, and this led to new shouts of protest. Lieser gestured at one of the others, and he shoved the noisier of the two under, head and all, laughed for a minute, and let him go as the other’s hysteria climbed. He surfaced coughing and crimson, eyes starting to glaze from heat and the first real fear. They pleaded breathlessness, dizziness, and the menace-twitch from the guard warned them of being held under again, until they sat panting, staring at one another, at Mengele, as though he might suddenly revert into this fawning adorer again, as if he might save them.

Lieser yawned, smoked, switched his gun from hand to hand, finally put it away and came to lean with his back against the wall beside Erich. They nodded at one another, and that was all. Blaze of hate for this doll of a man that he tried to ignore.

Erich noted the date, time, pondered what he was supposed to write under Procedure, and finally noted submerged in very hot water and a start time. He hoped this was all right. He didn’t dare interrupt to ask. He wondered if they would simply cook them, but surely that would have involved a heat source. He watched the steam, watched their useless squirming pushes to avoid the new buckets of hotter water.

It was strange—this was, wrong, whatever it was leading to, and all his life he’d been taught to tell the authorities of wrongdoing. Mengele was the authorities. This left him in limbo, morally, and he could find no obligation not to steal a tiny bit of satisfaction.

These two must stand in for all. These two would be painted over all the others in his memory that had done him evil and been spared because of their beauty, their muscle and vacancy, those useless qualities that everyone had loved them for. Those useless qualities he had never been able to imitate.

Perhaps those very qualities had been what had led them here. Now that was a comfortably round theory, that his strangeness and their perfection had drawn the same lot, the same disastrous reward.

He thought, I’ll tell Kaltherzig, he’d like it, but that was, what one might think of to a friend. Whatever Kaltherzig was to him, it wasn’t friend—though he was the closest to that category Erich could remember in all his life.

They dragged the twins out of the tubs, both staggering, half-fainting, strapped them down to the twin-tables. Giselle and two other prisoner doctors bent over them with specimen jars and gleaming tweezers, plucking hair after hair. They twitched, squirmed, gritting teeth, growling finally, spitting Hungarian profanity at this maddening tiny pain repeated over and over, pleaded with Mengele to tell them why this was being done, insisted that they would file complaints.

Mengele ignored this, too, as if they were not speaking. As if they were, animals. He took the tweezers from Giselle, squinted at it, pointed out the root of the hair to her, “Like this one, all of them, or don’t bother to put them in,” and was gone in a blur of white.

He went in and out, checking a jar or a hair, pointing here or there where he wanted additional samples. Finally he gestured at Lieser who passed this gesture to the guards, and they were unstrapped, sulking, expecting to go back to the ward, but they were only put back into the tubs, bailed half-empty and refilled with new near-boiling water.
Four times, this loop. They weren’t screaming, not yet, but they were both quiet, sullen, sweating and blinking, wavering and heat-dazed. Their eyebrows were gone, making them look as though their foreheads had grown. One of them pleaded for water, and the guard behind him laughed and pushed him under again, holding him down this time till he was limp when drawn up again, vomiting up the water he’d requested.

They no longer looked at one another.

Mengele finally nodded at the rows and rows of jars, labeled neatly in Erich’s handwriting, which twin, what part of the body the hair was plucked from, date.

“The rest of it,” he said. The twins were taken out, falling from one guard to the other, knees folding too far with each step.

Erich sat in the empty room for a very long time.

Then the twins were brought back, with only Mengele and Giselle. At first he did not recognize them. They were bald, utterly, from crown to sole, looking like great babies.

Their heads seemed much too round, much too pale. They weren’t beautiful anymore—now they were only strange, slippery things, streaked and spotted with scalds and pinpricks of blood. Even their red-gold eyelashes had been plucked out.

And the photographs began all over again.

The screams began the next day, echoing from the wide tiled room with the showers. Erich had plenty of files to carry back to the archives, and through this door he saw only one of them, strapped over a bench like the one used in the roll-call courtyard for floggings, screaming and screaming, looking more than ever like a mutant infant.

Mengele was directing another doctor, smoking far away from his subject. A black rubber bag hung deflating on one of the wall hooks he had stared it in such confusion, snaking a tube between the cheeks of the boy’s buttocks. Erich swallowed hard, thinking for the millionth time that he’d been lucky Kaltherzig had chosen him away from all this. Mengele leaned his head out, said, “Come to the exam room when the noise dies down, boy,” and he’d nodded, white and shaken, and turned with his pushcart of files, feeling guilty in a red slow rush, as if his wish to watch them ruined had somehow made it so.

The other twin joined in soon enough. Kaltherzig was in his office filling out reports, leaving Erich off to one side with the typewriter on a pushcart. He looked up now and then, when the screams had stilled the keys, but he did not comment.

Erich told him of Mengele’s order, certain for some reason he would forbid him, but Kaltherzig only nodded, lit a cigarette and stood up, did the rough pat that Erich had come to secretly regard as—not quite affectionate, exactly, but close. The click of his boots faded down the hall in the direction of the din. Going for a look himself, he supposed, thinking of a ten-year-old Kaltherzig sitting in the school library with an anatomy book open, waiting till the common peasant stock had all gone home to start his own walk in something like safety.

He’d asked Kaltherzig about the tube with the hooks, quietly, not wanting the driver to hear him, and Kaltherzig laughed for a long time. “An enema, idiot. Surely you know what that is?”

He flushed. He did know, from whispers overheard during those talks kids have that unerringly revolve around corporal punishment, excretory functions, orbiting closer and closer to actual sex as years went on. “You, didn’t—“

A shrug. “The purges are the same. They fill your intestines with water by chemical imbalance, and not a hose. I’ll give you one tomorrow and you can decide which you prefer.”

A deeper flush, and he drew up his knees as much as he dared without risking his shoes on the leather seat. He thought of saying no thank you, sir, and looked at Kaltherzig’s still face, eyes on the apple trees outside, and said nothing.

Kaltherzig was a rustling oilspill shape, in the inkblack SS raincoat, sharply belted and gleaming. The sky was crystal-clear when they stepped outside. Erich thought he understood, but he pretended to himself he didn’t. He’d hoped Kaltherzig was teasing, had forgotten, but he was never teasing and he never forgot.

He led him into that same shower-room, closing and locking the door behind them as perhaps one small mercy. Erich was already crying. His one risked please had resulted in “And why did you ask me?”

He had no answer for that, and when Kaltherzig pinned him without another word, with that endless cold stare, he fumbled his hands to his neck and began unbuttoning his shirt.

Kaltherzig left him to this, returning with a wheeled cart that had a black rubber bag already full hanging from one corner. He put this on the hook, trailing that cable and catching the nozzle before it dragged on the floor. He toyed with the clamp, until fluid ran in a smooth clouded-white stream, and clamped it closed again. Erich stood shivering, no longer bothering to cover himself, not in front of Kaltherzig, anyway. He mouthed please don’t, but Kaltherzig wasn’t even looking at him. He took a white towel from under the cart, folded it and dropped it on the tile. “The sake of your knees.”

“Thank you, sir.” He’d learned, too, that orders came embedded in comments, sometimes, and he circled Kaltherzig with hot sick humiliation climbing his throat with tiny handfuls of claws, and knelt on the towel. Kaltherzig knelt behind him, and pushed at his back so that he leaned forward, pushed him again, and he whimpered and gritted his teeth and settled down cheek and shoulder to the floor, arms crossed around himself.

A nudge. Soft cool wetness; cream. He dared a look over his shoulder, and the sight of Kaltherzig drawn in black against this wet white room stilled him, somehow, made him slump and settle and only stare with the one eye that could still see him, watch him smudge this cream along the black nozzle, and he saw Erich looking and did the eyesmile for him, said as softly as if they could be overheard, “See, the girl one—the boy one is like, just a little straight line, like a bit of a pen.” He tilted it, to show Erich how it was rounded and furrowed, each little trench neatly dotted with holes. It reminded him of a watering-can for flowers. “The boy one is worse. Gives you terrible cramps, all that water in just one place. I want you to take a great deal, curious boy, and that can only be done with a lot of care or a lot of pain.”

He was silent, then, and Erich was pretty sure he caught the secret code, and he dared, “Care, please, sir.”

Kaltherzig’s bottom lip moved, not quite a moue, that face he used to indicate he was, considering. “You’ll have to be perfectly good.”

“I will, I’m trying, I will...”

“You’re being perfectly good so far,” Kaltherzig assured him, and set one hand on the small of his back to warn him, drew a line from his waist down his spine to his anus, did a little poke that was almost like teasing. “Deep breath.”

That was an occasional command before a bright, sharp pain, and Erich squeezed his eyes shut, drew in a long gulp of air, gritted his teeth.

“Exhale....slowly....oh, perfect boy.....” That last dissolving into a moan, and it was such a just-for-them noise that he made the same noise in return, and the slow merciless push slid inside him painlessly, frictionless.
He hid his head in his arms, quivering, and Kaltherzig nudged it inside him, moved it side to side, the ridged strange surface scraping across that knot inside him that made him open his legs, that made his cock decide it wasn’t that cold and nudge itself out of his foreskin for a look. “Please—“

“Shhhh.” A circle of soothe petted onto the small of his back, and the thought he’s not wearing the gloves, he always and then the click of Kaltherzig opening the valve. He started a set of whimpers, hugging his head tight with his arms, doing a shuffling little shift that wasn’t exactly struggle, only the expression of how badly he wished to. Kaltherzig’s hand was spread flat across his buttocks, nozzle held between second and ring fingers. His other hand came up, petting those same circles into Erich’s back. He felt Kaltherzig shift, felt him sharing the space of the towel to kneel on, felt him lean over his back in away that was so blatantly the way he, was, when he

(fucks)

drew him close in the dark that Erich moaned again, and there was the first hint inside him of sensation, a fluttering sort of warmth that threatened discomfort and a tongue-curling full pleasure, and then nothing again. Kaltherzig’s hand went under him, and he almost-cried out thinking he would wind it around his cock, but he was petting him, from his throat down to his chest, a smooth gentle circle around his stomach, and then pressing kneading circles there, low on his stomach, moving in lazy up-and-down arcs, seeming to press specifically at structures Erich blushed to imagine, thinking of Kaltherzig again with anatomy books open across his knees. He knows, everywhere. My body is much more his than, mine....

Tiny wet noises, that maybe he was imagining, and a crooked little tightening low in his gut, that felt exactly like the need for a bathroom. He whimpered, climbing in urgency, chewing his lip against the please. Surely it wasn’t supposed to do that. He couldn’t tell Kaltherzig that. He had chewed his lip more than once through being sodomized or having Kaltherzig’s cock deep in his throat when he was sobbing desperate for the bathroom for either reason. One didn’t discuss such things. He was a doctor, it wouldn’t do that or he’d, have...

A wrench of it, tightening and staying, that dull-edged ache and the itch to, push. The one little reflex-spasm that wasn’t quite push had given him an immediate and disturbing sense that he really was, filling with, fluid, and that it might easily leak around this nozzle, and if he did that in front of Kaltherzig he would die. “..sir please sir please it’s working, wrong...please...”

A click. He felt the water stop by some internal ending, and he was half-panting and half-sobbing in gratitude. Kaltherzig knelt up a little, hand wavering the nozzle and making Erich give a pathetic little noise that was half lust and half unspeakable embarrassment.

“Pant. Like me. “ He opened his eyes again, peering over the intersection of his elbows to see Kaltherzig with bared teeth, going hah hah hah. He copied him, not understanding, just obeying, and his hands cupped at Erich’s stomach again, soothing.

That knotted pain tightened, subsided. Click, and the water again.

The next time the cramps hit him the panting didn’t help and the petting didn’t help and he was reduced to please please please and Kaltherzig closed the valve and did something and he felt that sort of balloon open inside him, and it broke him.

That was all; not even wide enough for pain. Kaltherzig made that wordless noise at him, stroking his back. “Not for so very long. And I’ll leave you alone, after. Now why are you crying? It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

He shook his head, crying anyway. “Because it’s....embarrassing....”

A sigh. The petting continued. “But there’s no one to know but me, and I’ll never tell. I don’t record these, the only-us-two experiments.” He looked over his shoulder to check expression on experiments. That smile that meant he was probably, teasing.

He held him there, until he was frantic again, and gave him the little bulb and showed him now to deflate it and left him, with the door locked. There was a stainless-steel toilet in one corner. It was strange to use one with so much open space, but he was in no state to complain. He sobbed, mostly, face covered, grateful to be left alone for this last indignity. Afterwards he showered himself, flushed over and over, feeling very strange, wobbly and unreal and disassociated. Kaltherzig gave him a generous break, and knocked before he came back in. He had a larger bag, already filled.

He lost count.

The water came out as clear as it had gone in. It was sickeningly easy, his muscles too exhausted to resist. Kaltherzig had long since just let him lie on the floor. He curled loosely there, still crying abstractly, but becoming more and more, still, inside. He felt indescribably, obscenely clean, as if everything, ever, had been washed away, down to everything he had believed or thought he understood. This was a new world entirely.

Sometimes he still said please, and sometimes he managed something as long as I’ll be perfect, but it was still fairly, unintelligible. Kaltherzig assured him that he knew all of that, and that he was being perfect, in that distant soothing kind of voice, and the water petted him in soft thudding pulses and he was too tired to do anything but, allow himself to be soothed.

He was pulled to his feet and half-carried to a bench and wrapped in a Wehrmacht-issue blanket that had seen better days. Kaltherzig left him there with another distracted pat to the top of his head. After minutes or an hour Giselle brought him a mug of hot tea with a lot of sugar in it and two blue pills. He suspected she wasn’t supposed to give him the pills, the way she held them almost hidden in her hand.

They made him sleepy, and deleted pains he hadn’t noticed until they were gone .

He hated her. The kindness made him feel, too close, to everything.

The purges made him sicker than anything ever had in his life.

He was afraid to wander any farther from the toilet, shaking and drinking water out of the faucet with cupped hands, already dehydrated.

He was curled on the bench sleeping, hair neatly dripping off the end to spare the blanket when Kaltherzig came and retrieved him.

That velvety spin of Giselle’s secret drug around him, through him, magnifying the motion of his head. Kaltherzig tipped his chin up, turned his face an inch or two to either side, studying his pupils. For a moment he was afraid the doctor, knew, and he feared for Giselle, and then himself.

“You’re being very obedient.”

The drug said it before he could stop himself. He thought later that he’d meant it to be, funny. “I have to, sir, or you’ll shoot me.”

A smile. Not quite the safe one, anymore. “No, you’ll wish I would shoot you.”


The twins were spared for a day or two, while Mengele devoted his time to his visiting wife. Then that knock again, and Erich knew before the file was put into his hands who would be in the examination room.

They were broken down beyond celebrity, crying in that listless nauseating way, strapped to the twin examining tables, knees up and apart in that familiar position. Erich sat with his clipboard, brimming over with a nauseating mix of sympathy and something else that he couldn’t stop feeling.

He had no autonomy except in his head, and it seemed he’d chosen the side of the SS on this one, whether the choice gave him pride or shame or both. Mengele laid out two of everything he still had nightmares about, the speculums, a paired array of the smooth gun-shaped silver things that triggered those biting sample-stealing needles. Now there would be real suffering.

Mengele began with the eldest.

Erich thought, watching the younger watch his brother that this must be the point of bringing them both in at once, to inflict this dread on the one, this humiliation on the other. He watched him spread open, the longest of these sample-pistols pushed in, watched Mengele’s finger depress, and the click, the scream. He watched each testicle held pinned between Mengele’s thumb and forefinger, the tip of a narrower pistol set in the very bulging center of this drawn-taut skin. Another click. Both of them screaming as though that metallic little impact had cued them. The noise made him think of the click of candy, left anonymously on his desk where his forearms would brush it onto the floor, and Kaltherzig’s care not to look at him closely for an hour or three after these presents would appear. A guilty pleasure for both of them.

It was almost worth the memories of years of abuse. Without that grudge, to hold against these—creatures—it would have been a frightening ordeal. As it was the only terror in it was his utter lack of revulsion. He ran through the list of commandments and could not remember them and the gist of it seemed to be that he had no choice and he might as well, tolerate this, however he could.

The twins were unstrapped, each at the end of this session, by then sobbing so they could not resist or really even seem to move. They were leaned over for one more with the sample-guns, pressed and fired just above their waists, one on the right, one on the left. Erich wrote kidney tissue samples and his mouth was dry. He’d thought your kidneys were much lower, covered by your trousers. The testicular samples had been unspeakable horror enough; he tried to imagine, that nipping merciless coring bite, taken out of

(an internal organ)

someplace deeper still. Nothing. A flicker of a try at a memory of getting his tonsils out. No use. He wrote, neatly, set these jars one in each tray per separate twin. He watched.

Speculums the likes of which he had never seen, they opened in an O that grew as wide as the mouth of a milk glass, and he put his hands to his own mouth, to crush down the scream, that he’d been frightened of the tiny cruelties Kaltherzig had given him.

Mengele, gloved to his elbow, and the little internal shock of realizing that really was his, wrist, disappearing beyond the distended red-violet anus of one twin while the other one screamed and screamed at the blank static in his brother’s eyes.

“Gag them, why don’t you? I’ve already a headache,” he said to the prisoner-doctor, and the prisoner left and returned with twin short, thick straps that seemed made for exactly this order.

Flashbulbs.

A week later Mengele tapped on the window of Kaltherzig’s door himself—unprecedented. Kaltherzig did a noncommittal grunt, and the doctor opened it and leaned in just enough to be polite. “Will you take the other one, for the timing?”

“Delighted,” Kaltherzig said, finished handwriting a sentence in his precise little jagged gestures, and stood up, tilting his head to Erich.

He feared a great guignol, but the twins were in the morgue already, blindfolded, strapped onto tilted grooved tables. Kaltherzig and Mengele had a long thick syringe each, and they each chose twins and laughed a little getting themselves matched up, two needles dimpling two hairless chests. Two pushes, and the twins shook, kicking, sagging already against the straps, convulsions getting fainter by the second. Mengele started cutting before the spasms had stopped.

Mundschutz

Erich had grown used to Mengele, the way he assumed the sort of zookeeper who kept very dangerous animals might grow used to them after awhile. It just wasn’t possible to be terrified out of your wits constantly. He’d come to look at him more the way one regarded the sort of teacher that brooked no deviation, that came down immediately on the tiniest infraction and presided over classrooms as silent as a tombs. He seemed to be reasonable enough, until the point at which he’d decided to kill you, and after that nothing whatsoever would change his mind.

Erich was by no means comfortable with him, but he was no longer freezing cold at the sight of Mengele in his white coat and gleaming boots, no longer seized with the urge to find Kaltherzig and ask him an unnecessary question. To, hide, in his shadow.

So he thought very little of it when Mengele crooked a finger and tipped his head at him en route to his office. It was rare but not unknown for Mengele to give him very specific instructions for a file or to dictate a letter. He followed him in, not really worried until Mengele closed the door.

“Now, Doctor Kaltherzig is in a meeting with the you-knows from Berlin. I’m going to give you your injection to preserve the timing schedule. Now—“ and he dusted his hands, opened a black leather bag on his desk, this being the sort of office for filing and not screaming. He drew out a syringe, loaded it from a tiny vial, clear with clear liquid.

Erich had never seen one like it.

He opened his mouth, closed it again.

What could he say? That this was highly irregular? Kaltherzig would be furious with him if he interfered with An Experiment—he’d come to hear the capitalization and the near-reverence in that phrase very quickly here.

He turned up his sleeve, and Mengele daubed alcohol almost at his shoulder, set the needle with deft painless speed, depressed the plunger with that gradual steady push that Kaltherzig only used on him with the kind of drug he got when he couldn’t stop crying. The hurt was a slow little annoyance, more like the aftermath of a pinch than any real pain.

Mengele drew out the needle without so much as a flicker of that pulling sting he was used to, tapped the alcohol swab over the mark. “There! I’m no Kaltherzig, but I think you’ll retain full use of your arm, yes? Erich, was it?”

“Yes sir, thank you, sir,” he said. He was afraid, now, turning down his sleeve.

Mengele opened the door for him with a grand flourish and a pretended bow He went back to Kaltherzig’s office. He felt warm, but that meant nothing. There was no change inside him that he could sense.


Erich told Kaltherzig of this in the car, thinking very little of it by now, simply to let him know Mengele had done as he’d asked. They usually spent a moment or two of how was your day sort of talk when they spent the day apart. He was not expecting the reaction; the unmitigated fury in Kaltherzig’s eyes made him trail off half-through a word.

“What did he give you?” Quiet.

“I…don’t…it wasn’t what you give me. A bigger brown vial, I couldn’t see the—“

“And you let him do this?”

He couldn’t think of an answer to that one; the question made no sense in context. He was Mengele. Of course Erich had let him do this. “He said that, you—“

“That I.” That was really dripping something poisonous.

The familiar jittery electrical fear was starting in his joints. “Yes sir, you, that you were too busy to—“ It failed him. It was the truth, but it sounded like a lie. He should have known this trick for what it was when Mengele threw it down.

He wondered if he would die, if he was dying already.

“Stop the car.”

This was to the driver, who was doing his level best to look as though he weren’t listening. He stopped, and Kaltherzig got out, went to the driver’s door and opened it, gestured out again at the Untersturmfuhrer impatiently, took the wheel himself. He left the man standing dumbfounded in the street, dragged the car into a swerving turn and drove off much, much too quickly. Erich only stared at him. He didn’t dare do anything else.

I’m dying, I must be, he’s going to ask him if there’s an antidote, he’s going to--

This reckless speed threw up dust and left people gaping after them in amazement. The rumors would have already begun, Erich thought, but he could find little concern for it.

Kaltherzig’s jaw was one stack of straight tight lines.

They drove back to Block Ten, stopped with a screeching protest from the car.

Mengele was standing outside already, smoking in the near-dark.

He’d had nearly five minutes to think of something perfect, some flawless argument set in the prettiest submissiveness he could compose.

Of course he drew a complete blank.

“Please don’t,” Erich said, but the door slammed behind Kaltherzig.

Erich got out, thinking to chase him, stop him, but when he caught at Kaltherzig’s sleeve he was turned on, shoved to the ground so hard he stayed there on his hands and knees, afraid to get up. He had never seen him so angry, never seen such a flash of promised Hell in his eyes.

“You told him I ordered this?”

No need to clarify that; Mengele knew why he was there, had probably been quietly amusing himself with guesses as to how long it would be before this confrontation. A shrug, and that maddening smile. “Oh, you know, you tell them whatever will make them docile.”

“What did you give him?”

“Honestly, it’s only a mistake, Ahren, really. The boy is fine. Come in and have a drink—“

“What did you fucking give him?”

That was close enough to shouting to draw new stares. Nobody was stupid enough to come closer, but they were in the center of a cyclone of tilted ears. Footsteps slowed, glances were stolen. Erich had a strange mad flash of desire to cry out for help.

Mengele was nowhere near shouting, but the summer voice he used with the mask was gone; it was the winter voice now, all edges. “The Buchenwald serum.”

And Kaltherzig’s shoulders dropped, just the barest inch, but Erich felt a rush of relief so deep it made him want to bury his face in the ground, sob, scream. He was not dying.

“I’ve had excellent results—“

“It defeats the purpose of a control group.”

“So he’s control for that one, too? Interesting.” A shrug. “My mistake. Herr Obersturmfuhrer Kaltherzig.”

Blatant little reminder-threat that Mengele was a Haupsturmfuhrer.

Kaltherzig had a polite threat of his own. “You’d shoot me if I made an honest mistake while interfering with your experiments. Wouldn’t you?”

Silence. Dangerous territory, this.

Two threats—Kaltherzig’s gun was at his hip. Mengele was unarmed in his white coat. The other weapon was a flicker of labels traded, the wrong chemical injected into the wrong test tube.

Erich forced his eyes back down to the stones under his hands. He kept thinking of Machiavelli and he had to keep his face down, until his smile was under control. He realized Kaltherzig was, winning, and he was torn between pride and worry about what it might be like when this relentless attention was turned on him.

Mengele was quiet, waiting to see what Kaltherzig might do as if it were a, play.

“My work—and my files—are my own affair. Those were the conditions.”

Narrowed eyes to this talk of conditions. A pause. “Kaltherzig, your first duty is to the Reich.”

Kaltherzig was quiet, as if toying with a card in his hands he was tempted to save. Then: “I have four children for the Reich, Josef. How many do you have?”

So that part was true, those particular whispers. He tried to imagine Kaltherzig with a woman, and all he could see was him, cutting, a woman, with a tiny blade as sharp as glass

And Mengele had only one card left. “Don’t you want him cured?”

“Oh, I’ll cure him. When I’m through with him he’ll never want another man again.”

Erich looked to see what Kaltherzig’s face was like, saying that. If it was a bluff, then all of his life had been a glamour, too. It was that utter artist’s concentration that he knew from the hospital.

Mengele laughed, as though that had caught him by complete surprise. “Fair enough. Perhaps one day you’ll share your notes.”

Kaltherzig didn’t laugh. “Touch my work again and I’ll explain to the Institute why all my data is unusable.”

He spun back towards the car, collecting Erich by his hair without looking at him.


Strafe

Kaltherzig pushed him inside as the headlights receded behind them. Closed the door. Locked the door. Stared at him with eyes like snow-colored glass and said “Go downstairs and wait for me.”

Erich ran.

“And take all of that off,” and the clink of bottles, a glass, the doors to the bar.

He hit the stairs at the same run and thought I’ll fall and only because he stopped thinking about his feet he didn’t fall, and the door slammed behind him and he made one bright cry of terror and caught at the chain in the dusty slabs of light from the few narrow high windows. And there was the little L of desks that Kaltherzig used as a lab, a long complicated system of laboratory glass, typewriters, files and books and diagrams propped on tiny easels.

He turned on the long banks of lights hanging over the desks, and the hook on the wall and the rope that hung from it painted their shadows on the concrete-colored wall.

He undressed with fingers that were already cold, sat down with a thump and wrapped his arms around his knees.

But he wouldn’t, he would

(break)

lose his ability to work if he was

(useless)

he, would

It dawned on him then.

He rocked a little, eyes wide and focused on nothing. It was a long time before the door opened at the top of the stairs.

The smash of the door torn open, and Kaltherzig came downstairs drunk and with his tie loose and his hat missing, and kicked Erich till he crawled to kneel under the rope and tied his hands behind him with one tug at a slipknot.

There was no try at resistance this time. He was crying and reduced to a great deal of sir and please don’t hurt me, and none of it made Kaltherzig pause for a single instant. He took up enough slack to pull Erich’s arms up and draw him onto his kneecaps, and tied it off on a second hook in the vertical beam. He had all his weight on his knees, face pressed almost to the floor, anything to get his arms higher.

Kaltherzig sat crosslegged like an Indian, close enough for his boot to brush Erich’s hair, and drank from a bottle and smoked a cigar and said, “Listen to me very carefully, boy.”

“I had to….he’s Mengele…he made me…”

“No.” Patiently, as if it were a shame he was still missing this essential, simple truth. “Not for Mengele. Not for anyone but me. Not for Hitler or God himself, only me.”

Erich was, quiet. Awestruck. Now he understood the magnitude of his sin, and he could hear nothing but his heartbeat, feel his pulse inside the dangerous ring of rope. “I didn’t know…”

Still, patiently. “Yes you did.”

It was true. He closed his eyes, and he couldn’t help saying “…but don’t, break me, please, not that…” and he stopped, thinking it was like baiting a dragon, thinking of knights and armor and having his arms twisted around in their sockets like twigs before
he was shot in the head, or buried alive. Or thrown in an oven.

“Idiot.” A stroke, at his bowed head. “Why not?”

Stunned. “Because I want to stay with you.”

A laugh, a fake one. A blue plume of cigar smoke. “Oh, now you want to stay with me. I thought you wanted Josef to cure you.”

“No, you, I want, you—“

“You’ll have to prove it.” And he unfolded, stood up, and the footsteps moved away.

The rope tugged at his wrists, pulled in inexorable slow motion until he stood, until he was on tiptoe, and Kaltherzig tied it off again. “I will, I’ll prove it, just, please—“

A pull, and he was on the very tips of his toes like a ballet dancer and he could feel himself falling and the first scream through his shoulders and he opened his mouth and Kaltherzig let it go, dropping him back to the slightly less agonizing tiptoe.

Bootheels. A door, opening and closing. Erich realized he’d gone upstairs and left him there.

Hours, maybe. He was wracked with fits of sobbing, in frustration and rage that made him want to stomp or scream or something, anything, to escape this cramping ache that swung from shoulders to calves and arches and toes like malaria pains.

He was moaning I promise when the door opened again.

Kaltherzig came down, took up another six inches of slack, and went upstairs again.

“Are you feeling cured yet?”

Silence, broken by his crying. He could only see Kaltherzig’s boots. He didn’t know what he was supposed to answer and he said “Only for you, I won’t take orders from anyone else, ever again, please let me down let me—“

The boots were dangerously close to the vertical post in the wall, and he knew before the rope was drawn up that this time it was no longer a game, no longer an object lesson, and he screamed screamed screamed, and his feet were treading, air. Kaltherzig tied the rope around the hook. Footsteps up the stairs. The door opening, closing.


He heard and knew very little until his feet were on the floor again, and the rope lowered him into a crumpled tent of crying and then he tried to vomit but couldn’t, and his face was ground too hard into the concrete floor, and his hands were so cold he was afraid they’d have to be amputated. His shoulders felt like his arms were bolted on with red-hot iron bolts, streamers of pain winging down into his back, forward into his chest. He couldn’t move, not even to lean up and spare his face the floor.

Kaltherzig’s shiny toes were in front of his eyes. “Shall I shoot you?”

That lazy cold bolt of the real fear, the gun-fear, the crimson triangle spreading on the bricks fear.

He understood, or thought he did, and said, “No, sir, I want to stay with you.”

The rope was drawn up. He could touch the floor this time, but only just. The door did not open. He heard Kaltherzig sit down behind him, saw the drift of cigar smoke again. He tried to suffer more quietly. All the old agonies were starting up again, with the temptation to lean on his toes again and spare his shoulders seeming to make it worse, making him participate in his own torture.

“I don’t believe you yet.”

The slosh of the bottle.

He came in a drunken zigzag and put the bottle to Erich’s lips Here was whiskey like he remembered, sharp and strong. Kaltherzig was very drunk, and more than that, and Erich thought of the bottles and vials behind them on the desk and tried to be very still, to stop shaking, to do anything or not do, anything to provoke…

He strangled. Coughed. Kaltherzig thudded him on the back, one arm under him with that odd situational kindness, so this would not pull on his shoulders. He let him go slowly so his weight wouldn’t drop, gave him the bottle again to wash down the last of the ache.

“You’re doing it even, now. Trying to be, perfect. You’ll never manage it. Until you can read my mind, until you can think as fast as I can, I’ll always, find a reason…” A touch under his jaw, and the sound of Kaltherzig drinking. The rope drawn up again, and the footsteps, and the phonograph upstairs playing Wagner to suit his helpless noise.

The Odin theme upstairs. A cup of water that he was in tears of gratitude over. The rope was lowered so he could stand on the floor, but not untied. It was graying towards dawn outside the tiny windows “I still don’t believe you.” The lights were turned off, first over the desks, and then the one bulb hanging bare. Grey. He was pouring sweat, from pain or shock or God knew what. He was left alone.

Sunlight. He was in the car, naked, untied, lying with his head in Kaltherzig’s lap. They drove past Block Ten and stopped in the middle of camp, where roll call was done.
Where floggings were done.

There was nobody gathered here, now, and for that he was grateful, but there were plenty to see this, in both black and stripes, people walking here and there, loitering over work. Not that anyone appeared interested. He would be, background noise.

Two lieutenants mostly carried him up the short stairs and leaned him over this odd wooden U. Having his arms forcibly removed from behind his back had made him scream, and the rest of was blurred by the subsiding broken-glass suns in both shoulders

He had seen all this, but never considered it.

Nobody tied him. It would have been pointless, he couldn’t move his arms, and he was too exhausted to move anything else.

Kaltherzig stood where Erich could see him, eyes hidden by the shadow of his hat, hands folded behind him, military still. It was still, a riddle, he knew that much, but he could no longer even begin to try and decipher it.

There were footsteps behind him. Lieser, out of everyone, it had to be Lieser. Because Kaltherzig knew he hated him. Erich closed his eyes, wondering does he want me to ask him to shoot me?

Kaltherzig gestured, and Lieser began it.

After the first blow he realized they weren’t using the horsewhip that was the general favorite. It was a heavy sort of cane that was used for women or children, sometimes, depending on mood and owed favors.

Not that it mattered much.

He couldn’t flinch, or scream, or really even tense, and every time he got a breath the cane drove it out again. He laid what Erich supposed was the usual twenty-five or so, from his waist to his knees, and Kaltherzig gestured a stop. He came closer and stood staring up into Erich’s face, eyes still hidden by that bar of black. “Shall I shoot you?” And this time his hand went to the gun, and he drew it out, but held it lying in his palm as if he wanted Erich to look at it, really look at it.

He didn’t look.

“No, I want to stay with you, sir,” and though most of it had no sound, Kaltherzig must have understood.

He stepped back and said, “Again.”

Erich could only just wrap his fingers around the wood, not even at the same angle on either side, and hardly enough to brace himself, but after Kaltherzig gestured the second stop there was a murmur beyond the square that he could not have been hallucinating. He had still made no sound. He thought with a flicker of amusement that it was because he couldn’t, not because he was brave. That would teach them all about the faggot, at least.

The question again, but the gun kept in the holster—Shall I shoot you? and he thought he would have nightmares of that sentence if he survived this. Want to stay with you. A very long pause and the sir, but it was to Kaltherzig’s back.

He started screaming after the next four, but nobody would ever know it. His vocal cords just didn’t seem to engage; he would scream in air and it would hurt his throat and his eyes and his lungs, and he even tried to, squirm, to stand up, something, to get his hand behind him to close it over the back of his right knee, surely he was bleeding, wasn’t that wetness?

The question. Kaltherzig took one step up the side of the platform, too tall to need those little stairs in the front, and leaned close to him and asked the bastard question.

Erich thought the Devil must have given him the answer out of pity.

“Whatever you, want. You.”

That was the best he could do, and he closed his eyes hoping Kaltherzig understood. He was too tired to fear the gun.

Hands around his chest. The swing of the blue sky. Bleeding, cradled like a child, the tilt of moving down the steps.

Kaltherzig carried him to Block Ten.

Curtains. Whiteness. Kaltherzig saying something very intently in his ear. A mask over his face. Whiteness.

Kaltherzig, an inch from his face: can you feel it inside you?

He could feel several things inside him, in all the worst places, and he was strapped down tight on his stomach with a bright blaze of disconnected hurt from his waist to his knees. His left arm wouldn’t move, and there was a rumor in that shoulder of such deep pain that he was glad to leave it paralyzed.

There was a layer between himself and everything like spun-sugar candy, soft and delirious. Drugs. He sighed, as though he had found himself in a warm bath. This cushioned place was fast becoming one of his two favorite things about Auschwitz.

He said, I don’t know what you mean, and he wondered if he had gone deaf or if they were talking with their brains, like something he’d read with green men and Americans in spaceships.

A touch that was too loud; Kaltherzig’s cheek against his, a cat-gesture that was not quite a kiss and not quite an embrace. Shall I leave you here?

His eyes had closed when Ahren moved towards him so quickly; when he opened them he was only a white coat and the sound of bootheels already out in the corridor. He was saying no, don’t, but there was still no sound. He remembered too late that was the wrong answer.

He dreamed of staircases cut in stone and Kaltherzig carrying him down into the echoing dark, closer and closer to a sense of wide-open space in this mineshaft void, where there were dozens of voices thudding out words more like percussion than language. An orange gleam of torches, and the first yellow tint along smooth black walls, cut with sharp-edged runes ranging from smaller than his hand to taller than a man.

Stone under his back, and this tuneless singing. Kaltherzig with his hand inked black, stroking burning lines onto Erich’s chest. There was a wall of faces around them, he could feel them, just out of view in the encircling dark.

A week later Kaltherzig came in, carrying a clean set of Erich’s clothes. He dressed mostly by himself, needing only a little steadying and assistance with the buttons. He had just been given the pills again, and there was the flare of cold daylight and Kaltherzig’s chest thudding into his cheek, and the car. A wedge of autumn-blue sky through the back window. Kaltherzig pulled him over his lap, pushed up the back of his shirt, stroked at the few lines that crept over the waistband of his pants. “Well, you mark like an Aryan.”

He wanted to laugh, felt his face try it wedged against the seat cushion. “Thank you, sir?”

His shirt was straightened. Kaltherzig rubbed his back in a long circle, his palm flat. Quiet.

“Are you still angry at me, sir?” Fuzzy. The morphine seemed to make his tongue sticky. He wondered if he were allowed to ask that—had he ever been told if he was allowed to ask questions?

The circlestroke didn’t stop. “No.”

He wanted to say do you still like me? but he was afraid Kaltherzig would say something like I never liked you, and it wasn’t worth the risk. “Why did you pick Lieser?”

Oh, no, that wasn’t a good substitution. Damn it.

A laugh, the kind that made Erich feel he was being laughed at. The pills made it seem too unimportant for blushing. “He’s the only one of those bastards I trust.” And he stopped there, as if that were already too much.

“Why didn’t you do it yourself?” Immediately after that he thought it must be something to do with rank, and felt that familiar outside-normal-boyness that the military and organized sports seemed to inspire in him.

“Because I wanted to watch your face.”

Quiet. Treetops, almost all bare, now, a few still blazes of burnt-orange and magenta. He liked the sound of that; it was just right for Kaltherzig, exactly the thing for the perfect coldhearted SS doctor to say. His hand had paused in the course of the circle for just long enough to, let him think of a pretty, mean, that’s-enough-questions line. Erich loved that, quietly, fiercely, that planned and deliberate evil.

“Is it true that…” A yawn he could not help. “…I’m, only in control groups?”

“ Only the ones I’ve put down on paper.”

It was as though Kaltherzig meant to prove it—or perhaps this had started with the morphine. He was given a great deal of that during the week he was bedridden. One morning he was so very intoxicated when he woke up that he had forgotten, all of it, and came stumbling into the kitchen to have a try at making some sort of breakfast, and found Kaltherzig sleeping on the couch, with his feet on the armrest because he was much too long.

The pre-dawn through the drapes made him such a statue of a man, like a Renaissance angel, that Erich stood looking, drugged and dazed and remembering the last week in pieces, and he tried to find an emotion for all of it and all he had was, sorry. Sorry he’d come, so close to a betrayal without even knowing it. Sorry for the trust it might cost him. Kaltherzig opened his eyes, at some kitten noise at the last edge of that thought, and smiled before he, too, remembered who he was. “You should be in bed.”

“In your bed?”

Kaltherzig got up, naked except for black SS issue pants, put his hand on Erich’s back so that he turned towards the hallway automatically. “You’ve been in my bed for a week.”

Again, that was all that came to him. “I’m sorry.”

That just-for-him laugh. “You’ll be in it another week before you can walk without morphine. You’re sorry enough, believe me.”

And then they were both in Ahren’s bed, and he was on his stomach with a pillow wound in his arms, dizzy, and Ahren was stroking his back, drawing lines that hurt with his fingertip. Oh, the bruises. “Stay here.”

Gone, and back with a handful of grease that smelled like Christmas and warmed his skin until he was boneless and making little openmouthed noises of mindless joy.

“Did you hate me?”

Erich was floating, and he had to think about that to understand that it was directed at him. “...never...”

A smile he could only hear, and a long drag of those soft doctor-fingertips, leaving shimmering morphine wakes in his skin, spreading and colliding. “Perfect boy.”

The drugs. Every day, and sometimes Kaltherzig would take whatever he gave Erich, but usually it was the powder and for Erich pills or a mystery needle, and hours of nail-chewing frantic busy or lethargy of almost excruciating sensuality, or things that did nothing to his body but seemed to bend his brain off-kilter so that the most insane possibilities seemed proven. The rumors had begun, out in the camps, that on forbidden radios tuned to forbidden stations they had heard the Russians would be here in six weeks, in twelve at the outside. There was a streak of, hope, outside in the air, and slave-eyes had started to stay on the Nazi guards for longer without fear of a bullet. And guards were coming up, missing. Just gone, and house or barracks emptied.

He tried to ask Kaltherzig about these things, during their drive home. “Never mind it. I’ll take care of you,” he said. He wasn’t looking at Erich. He took his hand, still looking out the window. A truck was collecting wheelbarrow-loads of corpses down one of the side streets. Erich sighed, watched him watch. Leaned his head into Kaltherzig’s shoulder, greatly daring. Kaltherzig turned a little, to better accommodate his neck, and that was all. He thought of wishing for shoulder to lean on, and thought of offering some kind of prayer of gratitude. “Thank you, sir,” he said. Kaltherzig stroked his hand with leather fingertips and did not answer.

Rachen

He supposed he should have known it would not be over, not with Mengele. He would have to have the last word. But Mengele seemed to have gotten a boy of his own, from the frightened face that trailed him since the shipment immediately after his quiet shouting match with Kaltherzig.

Erich found himself more inclined to a tiny bit of human contact with this boy than any other. Nothing so risky and taboo as friendship, but he whispered a hint or a warning a time or two, and did the little invisible nod to him when he passed him. He was much too young for this, perhaps that was why, and nobody’s idea of pretty, but very smart, and terrified out of his considerable wits. Erich thought he’ll never survive the War.

When Mengele knocked he was surprised, but the doctor only opened the door enough to poke his head inside. “Would you like to visit someone?”

Visit. A blank, and a shrug. Apprehension, already, because Mengele was never good news. “Sir...I don’t know, anyone—“

“Of course you do, boy. It’s one like you. He says that you know him.”

Blank. And then the answer.


The patient was in the Experimental wing, was lying in a bed with what seemed like a dozen tubes spreading away from his body in two main sweeps to either side of the bed, like strange veins that would grow wings after awhile. The arms and face above the stained sheet were mottled with—cracks, like a dropped or misfired figurine, as if it were a glazed thing that had gotten too hot and fractured its surface.

He almost, screamed, and then he understood it; a joke, a child-sized sort of doll, to tease him. And then the head turned and he saw the auburn eyes, though the hair that had been the very-same whiskey color was gone save a colorless dust of stubble. There were great blackred, spaces, triangles that had opened in the middle of spreading edges of skin. He raised one stick-thin arm, turned it just a little to gesture at Erich with his fingers, and a crack in his forearm twisted open like an unstitched seam, with red and yellow and white underneath.

“Doctor Mengele said.....I’ve been very cooperative....that he’d send you....if you’d come.” This strange jolting cadence; as if the machines were controlling his lungs, though Erich could see that they weren’t.

Emil.

Erich was, falling, perhaps dying. I did this, I did it, it’s because of me that’s he’s here that he’s this I did it, God oh God—

And Emil said, “I wanted to tell you. I was sorry for telling, Them. Your name.”


The rush of blood back into his face, the motion of remembering to breathe. He could make no sense of it—and then, stillness, and something inside him that had gone to liquid, freezing back into ice, as he understood.

“When did they take you?” He was whispering, like his throat had closed to a pinhole. He had never stepped closer to the bed.

“They made me, they held my head underwater....the batons....guns....” A cough or a laugh. “You were one of the last, I kept hoping, they’d be satisfied, just, be satisfied...”

Oh, yes. Pay a fine. Go back to the unreal world, he had heard this part already. He was seized with the mad conviction that Emil would die this very second and he would never know--“When?”

A slow blink. “Thursday. Just after I’d come from work. My parents were out, I’m so glad, that my parents were out....they still don’t know why...” He seemed to wander off in mid-sentence, face crumpling as though the pain in him were climbing.

Erich had gone on Friday.

A subzero little fall inside him.

It wasn’t my fault.

And as long as Emil wasn’t Erich’s fault, as long as that last and most terrible weight from Before was gone, he realized he didn’t care about the corollary. That Emil had put him here seemed, ridiculous. Kaltherzig had put him here. If Emil had not been the excuse, another one would have been found.

“I forgive you,” he said.

He thought of telling Emil that he had been the same Judas, but he didn’t.

“Will you, touch me? My hand? Nobody but Them has touched me....”

Once he dreamed of such words. This boy seemed so, young, much too young to be interesting now. He was going to laugh like sickness if he didn’t get out of this, thudding, horrified, guilt?

He didn’t move towards the bed. “What’ve they done to you?”

Thinking, infection....

“Put me in the snow,” Emil said, eyes on the ceiling now, almost as if this were a pleasant, memory. “They leave me in the snow, and then they bring me inside and lay me under lamps as bright as suns, until my skin is, burning. It’s burning my eyes. I can, see less and less....then they take me back outside, and put me in the snow.”

He walked, closer, put out his hand and put just his fingers under those fingers. The skin felt like ruined leather, but at least here it wasn’t

(leaking)

wet. Those same long lines that had shown him how to set type, whose fingerprints he had known at a look, peeled down to bone and this dried-paper skin.

Emil signed, and his eyes closed. After a long time he said, “Will you kiss me? Lieser tells me, that nobody ever, will, again. To have him be wrong about that.....” He opened his eyes. Erich saw, that this really was, all he wanted, as a comfort, maybe, a last taste of that sin that brought them here. He was still beautiful, under and around the broken places.

If Emil had talked, second, it might have been Erich in this bed, pleading for a last kiss with the only familiar face he had left.

“No,” he said, and he took his hand away, and stepped back from the bed. His own skin was crawling, as though Death itself were, contagious, as if that turn of cards might leech onto him like bacteria, like ink.

Sadness, but no surprise. “It’s all right, I don’t blame you, you don’t have to—“

But Erich did have to, and he was gone from the bed, and gone from the ward, and gone into the shower room to that metal toilet by the hooks because it was the closest, heaving and heaving and wishing for nothing in all the world more than to be sick, right now.

He wasn’t.

He knelt, wrapped his arms around his face, holding his head tight and crooked as if to hold it together, did something too short and elemental to be crying.

abbeißen

Kaltherzig had heard about it, obviously. In the car he had immediately dragged Erich to him, so that he was half-sprawled across him. He made one edge of sound, in surprise, and thought this was a previous trick, and started to unfasten Kaltherzig’s belt.
“Stop that.”

He stopped, mystified, and Kaltherzig’s arm settled across his back.

It took half the drive for him to realize he was being, held.

He led Erich inside and into the sitting room and pushed him into a chair. “Collect yourself,” he said, and went to the fire without waiting for a reply.

The fire made it better, and the snow outside began to seem like Christmas again and less like, murder. Kaltherzig brought him a deep fine brandy glass half-full of amber liquid. “You’re off, tonight. Don’t expect it often. Drink.”

He drank, pondering off, and said, “Sir, I don’t….”

“Yes you do. One night of, parole, shall we say. We’ll talk and you’ll get drunk and cry over this boy, and I’ll get drunk and keep myself from driving to that arrogant lunatic’s house and punching his teeth in for him.”

He slammed the bottle down, killed most of his own drink, refilled it, set it down with slightly more decorum.

He sat in his favorite chair, cornered to Erich, close enough to touch, and did a gesture-only smile to let him know he was safe. Erich was still wide-eyed over this threat to Mengele’s teeth. Kaltherzig wanted to, defend him? Maybe, maybe only like, territory, or a possession. Something Kaltherzig was allowed to hurt but no one else must touch.
But it melted something inside him all the same.

Talk. He did not want to discuss Emil, or think about him any more than he already did. He settled back, drank again, found his eyes on the ceremonial dagger, the sword beneath it, not quite museum-displayed, but hung very neatly with the flag above them, not very big, but painstakingly sewn out of layers and layers of silk. “Did you always want to be SS?”

“I always wanted to be a doctor, but I wanted to be SS when I saw them burning the books.” His eyes were distant, looking at the fireplace, but seeing a fire a decade ago. “I thought, dear God, it’s criminal…..then I thought, but if I could decide which books were burned, it would be…grand.” A laugh, as if he knew that was inadequate. “Not grand, exactly…the sense you get sometimes when all the future seems, yours.”

The quiet was, familiar. Domestic. He found himself thinking of his father, drinking, with a paper open, his mother with a book. He thought, they might be doing that now. He waited for the pang of homesick, that sense of being displaced. Nothing.

Erich watched the fire with him again, drinking because he’d been told to, thought of the whispers and rumors, the murmurs of Race Institute and Kaltherzig’s family, and that he had been, unsuitable, for anywhere but here. Put here to hide him, not as an honor, put here where he could disguise his tastes as science.

He could understand this, too, though, and whether he believed it entirely, he was pretty sure there was something of truth in it. He could only imagine the frightened fluttering his mother had given him about wives and grandchildren, about morality and rightness, magnified by what he had gathered was a very upper-class family.

There was something here, though, that he needed to work out. Balance in his mind. “Do you think, Mengele, always…..wanted…”

A long sigh. “If I understood what Mengele wants I’d be Kommandant. He’s two men. One man, has a great deal to prove. He loves the trappings, but he’s no doctor. He’s a collector, playing at being a doctor. That archive of his…” a gesture, to encompass all the eyes and catalogues of photographs of grimacing children....”is part of how he, proves...”

Erich thought of the sloshing crates loaded into the trucks that carried them to Berlin. He could not fathom what this Egyptian obsession could prove, except that Mengele could do what he liked. It was all tangled with that sense of medicine being essentially mysterious, his own lack of surprise that such darkness existed under such lies and such tedious pain.

He thought, I wonder if all the hospitals in the whole world…

“The other man is everything Mengele wishes he were. Charming, honorable, handsome, cultured.” Ahren shook his head, drank. “Ruthless. Power is the seam that holds them together. It’s what he really collects, to prove everyone wrong.”

The man who washes his hands all the time. “But, guilt...”

Ahren laughed at that one. “Guilt? They’re animals, all of them. He can hardly help but collect some useful data, even if only by accident. Let him have his projects and his theories. Why not?”

There it was—that same sudden, madness, that he seemed to run into like a wall. Or was Kaltherzig right, and this, misunderstanding, was his crime? All of them were guilty of something, or they wouldn’t be here. Therefore they could be stabbed, shot, set on fire, dragged into Block Ten to assist in research or help defend the Reich or whatever it was called this week.

Circular logic, inescapable, and pointless to reason against when it was clearly true. Every gunshot proved it. The smokestacks proved it.

“Do you think of me that way?” He startled himself, being this importunate. He eyed the bottle with new mistrust. Being drunk made it much too easy to say exactly what was on your mind.

“It’s different for you. You’re a German boy with a criminal disease.” Did he make those last two words into the contradiction they were, or was Erich imagining it?

“He said they put him in the snow for, hours. And then put him under so many heat lamps it burned him, and, blinded...”

“The hypothermia experiments.”

How dry that made it sound, how free of screaming.

Erich thought of shoveling snow, his hands get so cold he couldn’t feel them, and the broken-glass pain in his joints when he warmed them at the fireplace. The winter his father had broken his wrist, and he’d had to shovel all the snow by himself and gloves or not his hands had chapped, cracked until they bled. He tried to imagine putting hands in that condition in hot water.

“They’re taking his skin off in, strips....” He could still see that furrow in Emil’s forearm, open up like a seam needing stitches. The bluest places on his lips, peeling back in great chunks that particular listless white of gangrene. The smell.

He was here because of Emil, and Emil was here because of him, or would have been, anyway, and who knew which of them would have suffered the most by the end?

“It won’t be for very long,” Ahren said, as if reading his mind. “Either it’ll kill him outright or he’ll be selected when they tire of this particular set of reports.”

Erich nodded. As brutal as it was he knew this was meant to be comforting. The tears were there again, because of this Nazi-colored gesture of, kindness. It was both completely like and completely unlike the Ahren he knew, to point this out. “May I...see him again, if there’s a chance, before...?”

Ahren shrugged. Drank. Gave Erich the bottle and waited for him to drink. “If you’re certain you want to do that. I can’t promise, but I’ll look into it.” A cough, and his eyes on something else, and he added, “If you wish, I’ll, end it for him myself. He’s Claub’s, but he’ll give it to me if I ask. He’s a good man. “

Erich felt a strange pang at that. Flicker of the shrieks as one who’d had that terrible lung-tube inserted was dragged in to be experimented on by this good man, for the fifth day in a row. Blood and clots of pink mixed in with the phlegm they coughed up in screaming seizures, collected in Petri dishes scraped across their lips and chins and noses.
It didn’t matter. It was, dying conscience. It was irrelevant.

“I won’t terrify him. And there are a few of the ways that don’t hurt them, from what I can tell.”

Erich nodded. There were more tears at that, but it was all the favor Kaltherzig could possibly give either of them. “Please...thank you....”

“I’ll let on that he pleases me. Claub’ll make the eyes that say schwul at me, but he’ll let me. “

Quiet. Drinking. Smoke rings.

“You don’t think it’s because Mengele.....enjoys, it?” Erich said, tentatively . He wasn’t sure he was allowed to speak ill of The Doctor, though he’d heard Kaltherzig do so.

Dangerous.

What was this unfamiliar little knot somewhere in the middle of his ribcage, this new place that throbbed like a broken tooth when he said enjoys about Emil disintegrating in a bed? Was he angry, at—

“Enjoys it?” Ahren thought about that, lit a cigarette. He exhaled long dragonplumes of smoke, looking intrigued, as if he had never bothered to analyze this. “I suppose he might. I have my suspicions. Mostly, he takes things apart to see how they work, because he thinks eventually that way he’ll learn to build his own. The selections are what he really enjoys. All the pageantry.” A circle of a gesture, with the glowing tip of his cigarette. “A lot of the doctors hate it, I think, but we all draw our share of standing in pouring fucking rain in the middle of the night, sifting dirty crying Jews. You just point during the ones like that. Get it over and go back to bed...”

He thought of Ahren chatting with the Untersturmfuhrers shooting a handful of those skeleton men, against that dark stretch of wall by Block Ten, and that sense of, co-workers, just, talking to spin the shift by faster. “You don’t, enjoy it?”

Quiet. That was the other Scylla and Charybdis that he carried around, inside him, whether that really was joy he could see sometimes, maybe every time, when Kaltherzig was, working.

He took the bottle from Erich and drank, handed it back unsteadily. “Sometimes it has this....energy....fear, all around you, coming at you from all of them. It’s all for you. It makes you.....it, feeds you. It makes you into something they’re not.”

The selections. Mengele like the ringmaster of a terribly subdued circus, directing right and left, ordering some pointless exercise more to humiliate than to test. Kaltherzig with those perfect white German teeth cracking through the green skin of an apple. Those tundra-blue eyes dilating at the exact instant his riding crop slammed backhand into a replaceable face. The enchanted redundant boredom of hours and hours of such casual evil, with snow and ashes piling up on his collar and the clipboard that he was never told to write on. The internal horror the first time he’d realized that he’d been yawning through all this tiresome death and despair for the past half-hour.

“That, and the experiments, still about power. Having your very own victims does something to you, to your....to that space, between you, and everyone else.”

Erich couldn’t stand it anymore. It was that word—victims—and it was that one, little, space, that set of three nesting Vs: the point of loosened black tie, the white above it, and the notch of almost-white skin with the double shadow of tendons, just at the hollow of Ahren’s throat. His eyes would not leave this place, he could not stop, thinking, how it might feel, if Ahren cupped his head and held it there, wound him tight and just, held him there.

He tried to lean forward and slid off the footstool and his hands came up to Ahren’s shoulders and he sort of, nuzzled, and tried to look up and found their mouths together.

The third kiss in all his short strange life.

It was like, leaning, nobody really doing much, just lips petting lips with each of their movements. Ahren...did...something, as if his chemistry changed, as if his breathing was the same speed but, harder. Erich gave up and kissed him, that one change in pressure and lean and pull, kissed him and kissed him with all the heartbroken longing and wishes and sorrow and loneliness of all this Auschwitz time. He was too busy, too drunk to notice that Ahren wasn’t moving.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Against his mouth, in that no-tone that had said go downstairs and wait for me. Erich froze, eyelashes against Ahren’s face.

“Isn’t that the sort of thing that brought you here in the first place?”

Erich still, couldn’t, move. His knee was in the chair between Ahren’s thighs. The fury was so sudden and so total that he forgot who he was, where he was, what this was.

He said, “And you say Mengele is two men.”

Silence.

His heartbeat in his ears like an ocean.

Thinking, he’ll drag me outside, oh God, he’ll shoot me drunk and I’ll die in the snow.

Kaltherzig said “Go to bed,” with something quaking underneath that meant, smokestacks.

Erich drew back from him and, ran.



Upstairs he stood in the bedroom, at a, loss. He had been told to sleep in the bed, and Ahren had said nothing to change that, but he was so, angry....

He gave up, finally, deciding either choice was just as likely to be wrong. Besides, he could not stop staring at the bed in shameless soul-deep longing. He had been on it hundreds of times, usually daily, and as pleasant as it was to be ground into it face-first he sometimes longed to sleep there for longer than the few minutes after orgasm but before Ahren ordered him into the floor.

He undressed, folded everything neatly, considered, and decided he’d been either naked or very quickly ordered to get that way every time he’d been in this bed, and flailed his way out of his underclothes. He climbed in, feeling, decadent, pulling back blankets and sheets and sliding in and pulling them up to his chin. God, pillows. Had he really slept this way for fourteen years? Without doing anything to earn it?

He lay in the dark, smelling Ahren in the pillows, in everything.

He was waiting for footsteps on the stairs, he realized.

Maybe he would come up, and just this once they would both, sleep, up here.

In the bed, together.

Even if it was because Ahren was too drunk to know any better. This once, this one time, to lie awake not wanting to waste it in sleep, with Ahren curled up behind him, warm and loose and breathing so softly he could never hear him from the floor.

He fell asleep, waiting for the door to open.

The next morning a terrible internal slam, like an alarm clock, woke him up. He sat up and almost sprang out of bed, forgetting he had been told to sleep there. He stood disoriented, with his very first hangover beating in his temples, until something of a drunken blur of recollections came back to him.

He tiptoed downstairs. Ahren was still in his chair, kneeling in the seat curled up asleep with his face pressed against the leather headrest, hair mussed, shirt unbuttoned, tie still a black rumpled bar across his throat.

Erich tiptoed back upstairs, and down again with the goosedown comforter from the bed would up in his arms in a bundle so huge he couldn’t really see past it. He made it back to the chair without any noise or falls, shook it out managing not to knock any of the bottles off any of the horizontal spaces they covered. He leaned forward to drape it over his shoulders when Ahren grabbed him at the juncture of his shoulder and his neck, hard, fingers doing some trick that sent terrible pain from throat to knees, driving him down in a dropped heap of bedspread.

Ahren squinted at him, hand relaxing. He let him go, picked up a corner of the blanket and glanced at it before dropping it again. He turned his face into the back of the chair again and closed his eyes.

Erich crouched, trembling, trying to breathe through his nose as slowly as possible. That electric pain subsided.

After awhile, Ahren hadn’t moved.

Erich stood up, one hand finding the armrest as balance an inch from Ahren’s knee. He picked up the blanket again, stood waiting for the nerve, and leaned over and arranged it around his shoulders, drawing up the rest of it to cover him completely.

Kaltherzig opened his office door without knocking, only a few days later. “It’s now. Did you want to watch?”

He found himself nodding.

Emil was in a different room, alone, with less of that snarl of tubes. He looked, frightened, then bewildered when Erich came in behind Kaltherzig. “Emil, this is, Doctor Kaltherzig,” he said, not looking at either one of them, because it felt like his place to do so. Kaltherzig was letting them have this, loading a syringe. “Emil, this is a favor—“

Tears, for his unsuccessful stroking in the dark, with this boy’s hands in his mind burning like hieroglyphs.

“I’m giving you an extremely large morphine overdose,” Kaltherzig said to Emil, softly. “Do you understand? Your options are this, or one of them doing it in the next few days with cyanide.”

Emil turned his head, those furrows cracking open on his neck, and shook. Erich thought he was crying, and he was, but when he turned back to Kaltherzig with those auburn eyes shiny and fervent he said, “Yes, please, God, please, now, please...” The last, climbing, too feeble to be a scream.

“Exactly now? If you like to drink, or eat, or smoke, first, I have a few minutes.”

“No, now. Sir, please, before I....”

Erich watched. Tourniquet, and a deft and gentle push with the needle. Emil’s mouth was shaping thank you over and over. Plunger. Emil seemed to, jerk, just a little, as if the sensation startled him, and his eyes slowly lost focus, half-masted, and he was moveless. He’d only just started to smile, as if he’d fallen into a dreamsea of bliss, caught too soon to even finish changing his face before he drowned.

“Stay with him,” Kaltherzig said. “Or go, if you’d rather not.” He was putting his bag to rights. “He won’t know, and nothing should happen but his pulse will slow and stop. I would warn that he’d lose control of his, body, but there’s nothing inside him to lose, I don’t think.” That thump on Erich’s shoulder, only slowly.

It was true. There was nothing else, no death-rattle or convulsion as Erich feared. He watched, anyway, and when he’d gotten up the nerve to touch one wasted wrist in search of a pulse the way Kaltherzig did to him, it was already cooling, and it seemed to let his thumbs make marks like into bread-dough.

He thought that Auschwitz was all Emil’s fault, and he should’ve thanked him. Then he thought this euthanasia was thanks enough.


Untergang
December, 1945


The Russians were closer.

The Americans were in Paris.

Kaltherzig drank more and more and did other things for which Erich had no name, eating pills and powders and staring with anguished solemn wakefulness at his typewriter, far into the night. He laid out all his Hitler Youth things one night, and wrapped and folded it all and put it away again. That night he got up, stepped over Erich and went out and turned on the phonograph. Erich lay wanting nothing more than to go to him, but he’d heard the bottles on the bar and he was afraid to. He almost slept again, and then he woke up to some sound and was positive he’d heard Kaltherzig, crying. He got as far as the door, and could not bring himself to do it. If he were, crying, he would never forgive him for seeing it. He lay down again, cold, and the room felt strange and empty with the door open and the light on far down the hallway, and the bed looming over him getting colder.

Kaltherzig listened to the old Party songs on the phonograph more and more often.

Erich brought him drink after drink, made endless coffee. Made the few dishes he’d learned Kaltherzig liked, over and over.

He caught Kaltherzig burning photographs, taking them out of frames on the wall and just dropping them from between finger and thumb so that they wafted into the fireplace. Row after row of beaming SS who had just made officer and whose parents would be so proud. Hitler in front of a blaze of swastikas, a shorter row of older faces, and Himmler’s impenetrable glasses-gleam crisping into ash.

He said, “Sir,” before he could stop himself, and had no idea what he might say next. Kaltherzig gave him a glance, a little ashamed, or sad to have been seen being so

(heartbroken)

maudlin. So drunkenly National Socialist.

Watching Kaltherzig mourn the Reich was making it almost impossible for Erich to convince himself that it was merely a streak of bad luck and Germany could not fail to win the war.

He knew, beyond his dark Eden of this house and this man, that the rest of the prisoners prayed for Russia and for the Americans.

He had long since ceased to think of himself as whatever kind of animal they were. Animal, yes, but a different species entirely.

He did his own praying, for a plague to sweep the Russians from the Earth. For a secret unstoppable bomb the Fuhrer was keeping back for dramatic effect to explode millions of wide American faces. But not the Jews, no, he wanted that to go on, and on and on. He wanted the currents of Hell that kept this place inescapable to be endless. He wanted nothing to change, and it was changing like a hurricane was stirring it, and he couldn’t stop it, and neither could Kaltherzig.

He lured him with sex when he could, thinking how strange and difficult this had been at first, and how easy it was now, that he no longer had to think about where he might touch to make Ahren lean into his hands, and where he might touch to earn himself a blow. He knew all the triggers.

He had to be careful, had to sneak away by himself, after, because the tears were likely then.

Had he ever hated this? He was addicted to it, now. He would come twice most of the time, once just at the instant of penetration, and once much later, sobbing for it to stop, driven over the edge by the teeth-jarring violence at the last, when Kaltherzig was too close to care, too far gone for anything but harder.

Then, sobbing, and that climbing sting of semen because he was always wounded, there.

Sometimes Kaltherzig would hold him pinned, laugh at this frantic noise.

Would there really be a time without that?

Sometimes he would push the buttons that led to a beating on purpose, to see Kaltherzig look like himself again. To see that arrogant quintessential Nazi behind his eyes again, to remember the fearful symmetry he’d had at the very beginning side of this dream, at Selektion.

After, he would lie crying, secretly pleased with himself, while Kaltherzig went to bed loose and quiet and calm. He would think at the bastard Russians you weren’t close enough to save me from that one, were you?

He knew better than to ask for kisses, either with word or gestures, but sometimes when near sleep Kaltherzig would submit to being kissed himself, on his fine smooth doctor’s hands and the long sculptured shoulders, on that high broad forehead. He would keep his eyes closed, not moving, only the faintest ghost-sound giving any clue to what Erich suspected was a deep, utterly relaxed pleasure.

Ahren would tell stories, sometimes, in these dark warm interludes, tales of the future. “After the war we’ll go to Argentina. Or Bolivia. There will be a lot of us there. I’ll have a diamond mine and a house in the middle of miles and miles of jungle.”

He would stroke Erich’s spine in that particular way, as if he were counting the vertebrae. “It never snows there, it’s always summer. I’ll keep you naked. And I’ll never let you learn a word of the language. I’ll own you. You’ll never get away.”

Or it was, “We’ll sit in a bar in Rio de Janeiro and it’ll be as hot as noon at midnight. We’ll drink German beer and sing all the old songs. I’ll make you sit on the floor.”

And, “The Reich will call us home, when the Reds have half the world. All eyes will be on Germany to save them, then. Then, you’ll be page to a knight, my boy.”

Fairy tales of scorpions the size of house cats. Carnivorous plants. Fish that would swim inside a man’s urethra and pin themselves there with a spreading fan of hooks. Diseases that would make your skin boil and slide off in wet strips, disintegrate your bowels inside you so that you finally died with your abdominal cavity empty.

There would be wonders, too. Great glaring demon masks of gold and sandstone. Emeralds as green as the jungle, so large they had to be held in two hands. Temples with alien writing and trenches for the blood to flow down from the apex. Mushrooms that brought clairvoyance and visits from the dead, waterfalls that plunged thousands of feet into murderous white rivers. The jungle, jaguars and rainbow-colored birds that could speak like men. Snakes that could swallow him whole. Lush, wet, predator wilderness for hundreds of times more land than Germany had ever covered.

There was a wide and deep Nazi presence, Ahren assured him. There would be a Reichscolony, after awhile, when the chaos died down and they could re-organize.

He loved this story. He waited patiently for all the embedded threats. There was something so very Arthurian about it, the dramatic flight in the dead of night. He was still boy enough to always see it this way, usually with someone eventually having a dagger in his teeth. A long and noble exile in a strange and distant land, trapped and defenseless, only Ahren between himself and this devouring wild.

They began to seem like a great deal more than dreams when Kaltherzig pulled him into the little room they used sometimes to draw blood. He pushed him into that chair with the half-desk, and the restraints hanging down. “You have to be quiet,” he said, softly. “No one can know we’re doing this. If I’m going to take you with me, I can’t leave your number.”

He started to hyperventilate when Ahren strapped his arm down. Somehow this was different than, all the other times. Ahren’s belt clearing the loops meant far more pain than this would, of course it did, but the strange desperation of this, the single light bulb overhead made him think of Mengele and the twins, of those perfectly matched anuses distended purple and spread around a medical-silver frame, and he was afraid down into his bones and his bowels, so afraid his teeth were chattering. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Ahren stopped after the buckle just over his elbow was tightened, and sort of, wrapped one arm around him, leaning Erich’s head into his hip. Stroked his hair for awhile.

“My boy. Before this I was at the front, and I took out bullets deeper and less easy to find than these.” A fingertip across the numbers.

Erich nodded.

“This isn’t a punishment, and it isn’t meant to hurt you. Do you understand?”

He cried, then, looking at the last hanging buckle, eyelashes brushing against the black wool and he said, “I understand,” but he didn’t.

Ahren felt the crying and miraculously, mysteriously stroked his hair again, with more lush gentle contact with his gloved palm, such an unspeakable luxury. And he leaned down and, kissed, Erich’s head, like an uncle might do. It was his fourth kiss in all his life. Had his father ever, kissed him? He tried to remember and only saw the drunken kiss he had given Ahren in the living room.

“As quick as I can. You mustn’t move—“

“Will you fasten the last one, please?” he said, terrified, thinking he felt Ahren move towards the

(knives)

and he added, “Sir,” because he realized he’d, interrupted, and sat shaking and waiting for a blow. Ahren moved like he was nodding, and reached around him in the shape of an embrace and fastened the restraint from the back of the chair, under his free arm and over the shoulder of the one with the tattoo. After it was closed bruise-tight Erich felt, better. Safer.

Ahren sat down, and picked up one of the knives.

Erich closed his eyes, and then opened them and, looked, and Ahren drew a very, careful, ruler-straight line, in his very first cut, from the 1 to the very end of the 9, in the exact middle, deep enough to draw real blood in a pattern almost exactly even from beginning to end. The pain was minimal, pressure, then a cold that flared into heat from the slightest movement of his hand. Ahren picked up a fold of paper and poured a single even swipe exactly along the cut, and dabbed it in with businesslike pressing circles of one gloved fingertip. Cold. Nothing. “Cocaine,” Ahren told him, and, “After this you shouldn’t feel anything.”

Then the first, long incision, from the end of the cut to the beginning, starting at an invisible point outside the numbers. He felt only a faint distant metallic pull, more pressure than pain. He bit his lip and kept his eyes on this intersection of steel and skin and didn’t make a sound. A longer line, with a brief tug of real hurt, and Erich made one single, noise

Ahren lifted the scalpel, a single oddly colorless slice draped over it. He looked into Erich’s eyes and laid the blade along his tongue and licked off this, shred, and swallowed it, and his eyes never moved. He gave him that look as a, gift, for a very long time, before he put the knife down.

He picked up the gauze and dabbed at this wound for a merciless brief second, while Erich breathed through his teeth in agonized hisses. Then the paper and the powder again, and a long anguished exhale as the pain resisted and then, subsided. “Such a good boy, you were so still,” Ahren told him, in that just-for-him voice, and wound him close in that face-to-hip hug again

Ahren leaned over him, needle and thread, and the uncanny pulling of stitches he couldn’t feel. He never forgot it. He wound his free arm around Ahren’s waist and cried and cried, and sometimes Ahren shushed him, but he never stopped, not even when he leaned his hip into Erich’s wet cheek in a rocking, gentle rhythm, as if he were soothing a child to sleep.

The stitches were laid, a neat careful row of nine, one where each number had been. He wanted to scream at each insertion. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but the push and the snap of the tip breaking through his skin was intolerable.

Ahren stood too close to him, and put down the gauze and the forceps and drew his head close again. Erich, understood, and he unbuttoned Ahren’s pants with his one free hand. He coaxed his cock out with gentle stroking motions of his fingertips, trying to make everything, last as long as possible. Ahren grasped his hair, tangling frictioned with the rubber gloves, but for all the hurry of this gesture, he let Erich go at his own pace, gasping or moaning, fingers winding tight or relaxing, but no orders were, given.

At the last possible instant he drew his cock out of Erich’s mouth and cradled his head close, coming against his neck, shaking and holding him so hard Erich couldn’t breathe. He wrapped his arms around Ahren’s hips, holding him as tightly as he had ever wanted to, bleeding against the bandage in a dull pulling hurt he ignored.

Ahren reached down, patted at his neck, seemed to noticed the glove and peeled it off and dropped it. He smeared his semen into Erich’s collar, his hair, and Erich burrowed into his hipbone and moaned and was frightened all over again.

It felt too urgent.

Was his number really gone? He had stared at it for three years now, thinking, that he would stare at it just before he, died. Was it gone, under all this blood and bandage? Did he want it back?

Three days later he drew Erich close, suddenly, in the office where their new and
frightening task seemed to be shuttling documents to terrified inmates who came back emptyhanded for more, smelling of burning paper.

He pushed up his sleeve, and touched the stitches, and Erich saw with a dawning deep terror that Kaltherzig was perhaps close to tears himself.

“It won’t work. I thought, as my nephew, maybe….something….if I had planned it a year ago, even six months ago.” He pushed his sleeve back, straightened the cuff with absurd care, and said very clearly, without looking at Erich, “I can’t take you with me.”

Nothing.

He only looked at his straightened sleeve, shaking, hearing a great roaring like he’d already fallen into a well, somewhere, and the black, would, yes, it would…



Out in the hall, less than an hour later, he came out with an armload of files looking for a cart and found Kaltherzig with his riding crop in his hand. He was in the process of beating some poor prisoner clerk to the floor, screaming, “Neatly! This is still the Reich! Set them down in rows, in order…”

And he seemed to realize how pointless it was, and left off hitting him. He clipped his whip at his belt, came back to Erich with darkness and murder in his eyes. He sat at the desk with the office door locked behind them, and would not be consoled.

He made it until late that night, long after sunset. The hospital was still filled with SS and prisoner staff alike. Now there were documents burning in pits out back, and in the tiny ovens in the lab and the officer’s lounge.

Erich was sitting behind the desk in the chair, his collar loosened. Kaltherzig was packing something behind him. He had been holding the same file that only needed throwing into a box for burning, looking at one of his own rare typographical errors in it, and the crying took him.

Down the hall there was, singing. They were bringing in schnapps and sometimes vodka out of spite.

Kaltherzig came over and watched this crying for a moment, then put the flask to Erich’s lips. He thought of the electricity again, and he swallowed, thinking he might lose too many words if he opened his mouth, fling himself to the floor and cling to Kaltherzig’s boots and beg him not to leave him, beg him to ship him in a crate all the way to South America, or shoot him.

He should have known better than to even think such a thing, should have known by now that Kaltherzig could read his mind.

Kriegsgefahr: Schweigen

Erich felt Kaltherzig get up, and he murmured something, waiting to be pushed and sliding a dejected little towards the side of the bed. The push never came. Then the specific creak and set of tiny metal noises that was the gun in the gunbelt, and the oiled slide.

Dreamlike climbing terror.

He opened his eyes. Kaltherzig was only holding it, finger not on the trigger, pointed at the floor, looking at him in the wedge of bluegreen lamp through the window. Erich couldn’t see his eyes, only the white plane of his chest and the blueblack gleam of the gun. The gun was the center of everything.

No one will come when they hear it. Nothing can save me.

Wide, hot, sickness, fear like nothing he had ever known in his life, a nauseated disbelief that it was now, that he really was like all the other meat, that bullets would rend him in a jerking leaking blaze and Kaltherzig would throw him out on the porch if he wanted to. Bury him in the backyard under hydrangeas.

“Why?”

It was all he could remember how to say.

The gun wasn’t moving. Erich wasn’t moving. Kaltherzig wasn’t moving.

A long sigh, and the arm that led to the hand that led to the gun relaxed, the business end pointed at the floor, a little backwards. “I haven’t, decided. I know that I should. You’re much too dangerous. It’s the reason I can’t take you, but you already know, where I’ll go. And what I’m like.” That last, very quietly, and the gun nudged forward, just an inch, two, endangering nothing but the rug by the bed. Not yet.

“You really, think that?” This was a wound that left the gun almost forgotten, for that instant of understanding. “That I would, tell them...I would never—“

I told them about Emil, and he knows it.

This isn’t the same!

“Why?”

Erich’s almost-last word, handed back to him.

Kaltherzig raised the gun, but only as if to look at it, that ubiquitous set of curves and edges that was familiar even in the dark. The riding crops were hung beside those bastard guns when worn on a belt. Just to keep your eyes and your attention focused.

“Because....because they’d chase you, that’s why, I would...I don’t...I, wouldn’t.”

Don’t make me, don’t make me confess anything else.

“...oh.”

Try as he might, Erich couldn’t decipher a tone, not from that one word—disappointed? pleased? –and the gun did not move.

He was shaking . This always took him when Kaltherzig closed a door behind them, but it was different now, vibrating him like a crooked glass half-filled with water, trembling as deep as his bones. He had always thought it was idiotic, people wetting themselves in books or what have you, out of pure fear, but he could understand it perfectly now. Everything below his chin seemed to have disconnected itself into only this hot anguished shaking. He was tempted as he’d never been tempted by anything to fling himself away from the gun, crying, begging, squeezing his eyes closed and covering his head and praying there would be no gun when he opened them.

“They’ll want you treated. They’ll want to change your mind, undo all my lovely...work...” and the gun came up, and drew a cold curve along his forehead, pushing his bangs out of his eyes. Kaltherzig was not trembling.

Erich narrowed down to that single point, made a broken little noise that wanted to be a scream, expecting the bang and the splatter and the wet drenching his back before everything, stopped. “I won’t let them. I won’t tell them anything, they won’t have any reason to treat me.”

Kaltherzig laughed at that one, and Erich was, ashamed, a little list of scars and wounds and phobias flickering through his mind, and he knew they would, know. He was not like a citizen boy, anymore. He never would be again. He thought of men shooting a dog that has gone too feral to keep, and there were tears, now, leaking out of the corners of his eyes. “Please...”

That graze again, exactly following the edge of his hair. He closed his eyes, teeth chattering together now, breath coming in constricted little pants. The gunsight pushed into his forehead briefly, because Kaltherzig seemed to be, pushed, just a zig rocking him left to right. He was still drunk. “I can’t risk it.” More to himself than to Erich.

“They’d know all about me if I told them about you.”

Laughter—and Kaltherzig turned and sat on the edge of the bed, gun resting easily on his knee, like any sort of thing a man might hold, a piece of bread, a tool. “I doubt it would vilify you in quite the same way it will me.”

“That’s why I wouldn’t tell anyone.” He didn’t believe it, out of his own mouth. The tears were too audible. He meant it, he just thought he sounded, as if he would say anything to save himself.

That, of course, was largely true.

He drew in a deep slow breath, willing his chest to stop hitching, he isn’t, he wouldn’t, just don’t. And he couldn’t help it, that was why he’d thought he’d be taken in the first place, and he said, “If I were with you, you could—“

And Kaltherzig snapped, exploded at him in that familiar tornado of fury, caught his upper arm and dragged him into a stumbling fall, shouldered him into the bathroom so fast the bedroom was a blur of hard edges and he slammed his shin in one white-blue line into the edge of the bathtub and Kaltherzig shoved him in, and he was lying on his back bleeding with his feet flailing up into the drawn shower curtain and Kaltherzig’s gun a single black eye that froze him.

A scream, his hands over his ears, eyes crushed closed, one flickering half-thought, of Kaltherzig’s vanished boys, of himself in this same tub, being wounded, or settling hissing into hot water after all day of being wounded. He dragged his heel over and into the hole of the drain, screaming still because he’d been in the morgue enough times to realize why he was here, in the tub, God God--because of the mess, so that his brain and bone and blood didn’t wind up on Kaltherzig’s immaculately decorated walls, in his soft piled luxury of a bed.

“Stop,” Kaltherzig’s lips were pressed together, and he swiped with his empty hand at the air to indicate the glassy echo of that rabbit-scream in all this marble and ceramic.

He was, panting, now, and he shook his head, tears leaking like they were trying to empty him. “Not like, this.”

That bird-tilt of head, that flickergleam of predator interest. “Not like what?”

“Not like you’re angry at me, not like you hate me. Can’t you do it quietly with a needle—“ A break into real tears, for fear of what he was asking. “I don’t want the last time I see you for you to be mad at me, can’t you pretend?”

He couldn’t open his eyes. He thought it’ll hit me before I hear it, maybe I just won’t know, anything else, suddenly

Kaltherzig stepped back from him, the elbow of his gun-arm thudding smartly into the doorframe. His finger was already off the trigger. He left, without a word, left Erich sobbing in the tub again, for this last new reason.

The ceramic-cold crept into him, back to stomach to arms until he was shivering. He still hadn’t moved. He stared at the bit of the door he could see, positive he was just there, that he would make of him one of those spreading red triangles the second he sat up.

It was his bladder and not his courage that drove him to look. Empty. Silence.

He stood up, crying in a way that would’ve been considered quite heartbroken outside. He didn’t realize he was, didn’t hear himself; it was like a background conversation that had been going on for so long he’d ceased to notice it. He urinated, flushed, and waited for that to summon that single black eye. Nothing.

It was an hour, or maybe only minutes, when he’d put on his pants and a blanket like an Indian chief, tiptoeing through the house, knees still trembly and likely to pretend they were going to collapse him to the floor, dropping an inch or three at random steps.

The bed was empty. The little bedside lamp was on, and the Luger was in pieces on the bed, with no magazine anywhere that he could see. Erich knew almost nothing about guns, but he was pretty sure an empty one was much safer than a loaded one.

A long sigh like his lungs had fallen a foot or two. Kaltherzig was unarmed, wherever he was.

He only happened to catch the little red glowing dot out one of the living-room windows—Kaltherzig, smoking, sitting on the top of the sweep of stone steps that were only a white-carpeted hill down into the yard. A werewolf-shape that would be one of the huskies doing sleepy tail-wagging circles at his feet.

He was shirtless and barefoot, in a crusted-over foot of snow.

Erich opened one of the French doors, immediately frozen by the rush of arctic air. “...Sir?”

Silence, so that he had given it up as one of those times Kaltherzig would ignore him utterly. Then, “Go and make us some dinner.”

Erich got the fireplace started, feeling strange because Kaltherzig always did this himself. His assembled picnic in front of it was mostly finished when Ahren came in, blue and snowcolored as if it had bleached him. He did not shiver, and he didn’t seem to have gooseflesh. He sat across from Erich crosslegged, his SS-issue boxers soaked through. He stared into middle distance, eating only meat and that with his fingers, folding cold carnivore bits of roast beef and baked chicken between those flawless teeth with avian precision. Erich was dizzy, distant once he sat down, and he got up, eyeing Kaltherzig, and made two drinks, greatly daring. If he had ever needed that flash of warmth and spread of shock from whiskey, he needed it now. Kaltherzig took it from him without a word, emptied it. He brought back the bottle.

Kaltherzig: “I put it to my head. After I left you.”

Silence. Erich sat looking at the bread he didn’t want in his hand, tears again in his aching eyes, that hot prickling rush of them. He wanted morphine, he realized, to kill this pain. “Please don’t,” he said, so very softly.

“I realized, if I shot you, I might as well find and kill everyone who ever knew me. Because I will spend the rest of my life fearing that one of them, and anyone else I know will sell me to the Jews. And then I put it, right, here,” A gesture that he turned into a push to straighten back his hair, as though it embarrassed him.

He was staring into the fire. Perhaps he found it soothing. He had come to this place to burn books, had filled file cabinet after file cabinet with strange bloody stories told in Nazi euphemisms, and now he was burning those, too, had done so all day, surely could smell nothing else.

A long drink, a shift to sit with his arms wrapped around his knees . Orange firelight in his eyes. He drank. Erich brought him his cigarettes and a glass with ice that he ignored. Finally out of desperation he brought Kaltherzig’s hairbrush, and to his surprise he allowed this, leaning like a proud cat will lean when he’s lured by the stroking in spite of himself. He ended with his head and one sprawled arm across Erich’s lap, still eyelocked with the fire, making no sound or gesture of pleasure except this appropriation of him as furniture, and an occasional too-long blink and a little slump of unwinding in the lines of his body.

“We should leave every bit of it,” he said, after a long time of silence. “Why should we burn everything? That’s what I want to know. Let them look. There’s much too much of it—they’ll know enough, and they’ll invent the rest. Why let them have history and the world both?”

Kaltherzig held his own hands out, turning a little onto his side, bestowing on Erich as he did so one of his most dog-eared memories of Auschwitz: that warm angular boy-weight, stretched casually across his knees, knowing he was safe to touch like this, like cats wound together in a patch of sunlight. He seemed to be, analyzing them, studying the doctor-soft lines, the straight shiny nails. And then Ahren slid off his Totenkopf ring, that black magick thing more sacred than a wedding band. He slid it onto Erich’s finger, skull turned in towards his palm.

“There,” he said. “That will bring you back to me.”

He drew him close and said, “You’ll come, when I call. Or I’ll have you shot.”


Erich hated Them, he knew, and that was all he knew. He just saw the world entire as a sea of non-Germans, like that sea of stench and noise at Selektion, swarming in with a hundred million pairs of greedy hands. He neither knew nor cared about such sweeping ideas as conquest and genocide. He knew they would destroy his home, and he knew that even thinking of being in his parents’ house in his old bed in a day, or a week, would make him wish Kaltherzig had shot him.

He’d thought of that request, when Kaltherzig had told him he would stay behind. It had quickly ceased to look like a mercy when the gun was staring down at him.

He knew a great many of his accepted truths and derived conclusions were deeply skewed into new Kaltherzig-ordained directions. He even vaguely understood that Kaltherzig had made him this way on purpose, remade Erich to suit himself, done addition and subtraction like a surgeon for the mind until he liked the shape the knives had left behind.

I am a sculpture, he thought, and wrapped his arms around himself. He was smiling. This thought made him feel, beautiful, and it made the same cherry-cordial-fireworks happiness inside him every time he mouthed it to himself. Sculpture.

He knew it was the last night without being told.

They did not go to Block Ten. By now it was an empty building, with most of the dead and dying gone to the ovens like the files. Kaltherzig did not bother to dress. He picked up the bottle he’d stopped on the night before, called it breakfast, and put on the old marching songs again.

There was no dramatic flight. There was only waking up in the bed alone, listening for the siren that never came to mark the dawn. The electricity was gone, and the house was empty and cold.

He dressed, and went down into the basement.

He got as far as bolting the door overhead, turned and could not move, the lamp swinging in his hand, because the rope was just, there, and he couldn’t swallow. He was dreaming the Russians. Kaltherzig was upstairs and would come down and break him and

More gunfire overhead, outside, and the gutwrenching thump of something larger, but far away.

The Russians were too loud for a dream.

He did a waxen stumble to the corner farthest from the door and crouched down, in a nest of blankets between the smooth wooden backs of two wine racks.

He watched the hanging rope. Sometimes the impacts made it swing, just a little, or maybe it was only the flame, flickering for want of kerosene.

He thought it’s all over, everything, and felt all the wide world standing against Germany and this perdition he had come to know as Germany, and his eyes filled up with furious tears that hurt and fell and left wet lines in his hair. That fury he remembered from childhood was all tangled up in it, the fury of the door opening and the merciless incomprehensible grownups putting a stop to something you were

(delighted)

just beginning to get up to.

He realized he was waiting for the door to open above him, for Kaltherzig to come downstairs.

Kaltherzig had not left him to starve, though after four days of cold gourmet food from jars and cans Erich was dreaming of plain hot middle-class fare like fried potatoes and unappreciated luxuries like fresh milk.

He found a lump in his blanket-nest: a dark plain suitcase, with nondescript but expensive clothing and a small paper with a handful of pieces of very plain gold—a band for a woman’s finger, a few links from a lost thick chain. The hard sharp weight of (money?) in his pocket was new and final and a heartbreaking little last gift, like those scattered pieces of candy, like the books. He dug through his footlocker, upstairs, feeling like a thief, and finally found his striped uniform at the very bottom, cap hopelessly crushed. He rolled it as tiny as he could make it, crammed it in his suitcase, slept with it under his head.

At night, as always, it was worse.

He seemed to have spent his life only moving between beds in which he held back tears and tried to ignore the sounds of someone else, sleeping.

That last time, that one night that he had slept possibly twenty minutes, knowing this chance would never come again. Warm in the soft inkblack with snow outside and Kaltherzig naked behind him, Ahren, naked, behind him, arms wound around him like he

(loved)

wanted him there, and the quiet and that sense of the Russians closer, too close, and time pouring out like sand in that minuteglass.

He had wanted Ahren inside him, wanted that one more time, but he had lacked the skill and the courage to communicate this. He was glad of that, now, because that still warm place was the only memory like it he had, anywhere. Ever.

He felt very unsafe, now, exposed and vulnerable and ignorant. It was hard to sleep without Ahren and the gun surrounding him. He had tiptoed up into the house, stood crippled at the top of the stairs by the rush of scent and the again that sudden overwhelming conviction that it was a dream and he had better crawl back down the hall before was caught.

He took one step, then two, expecting to be exploded by artillery at any second, or else scared into a heart attack by the shout from the end of the hallway. The house was empty and he knew it; his eyes knew it, had he stopped crying since he’d woken up alone?

He dropped to his knees, to that same twenty feet of carpet, and crawled into the cold bedroom and lay at the foot of the bed. It smelled of dust and still air.

He looked at the windows, blinking away the blur of tears, until he realized what was wrong; that graygreen gleam of the searchlights was, gone. And he realized that all of it was gone, no Block Ten, no roast duck in the officer’s lounge, no executions with string quartets, no corpses dropped into marionette heaps. No more.

And he would be killed, maybe, though more likely They would find him and bring him back to the printshop and his narrow safe bed in Berlin, and then he really would go mad.

He lost count of the days. It seemed, irrelevant, now.

He tried to stay downstairs, but he found himself upstairs, cringing from the gunfire and occasional artillery thumps that seemed closer all the time. The cringe was due to the noise, not any real fear of death. He didn’t care.

He fell asleep on the couch in the living room, one night, mourning the electricity, pretending he was listening to the phonograph anyway, pretending Kaltherzig was downstairs in the lab, where the spread of scientist glass was filled with congealing mysteries.

Something like a knock made him open his eyes.

There was a Russian, thick as a bear in terrifying fur, just outside on the back deck, tapping politely on the window. A gun as tall as Erich hung from his shoulder, but he made no move towards it. He gestured for Erich to come outside, grinning in a friendly sort of way, and put a hand in one pocket and came out not with a knife or a smaller gun but with something wrapped in paper that was probably food.

He stood up, because here were Authorities and he knew what one did with Authorities—obey. He tugged at his clothes, gestured that he wanted to dress, and the soldier nodded.

He went downstairs, took the little suitcase, some books. He stared sadly at the fading squares on the walls. All the pictures burned, not even one charred fragment of Kaltherzig for him to carry away.

VIER: Vorhölle

Befreiung (verlassen)

Auschwitz was anarchy, now, wandering stick-men, sobbing, madness. The soldier kept his hand on the back of Erich’s neck, saying friend and food and no worry and good boy, safe boy, in very bad German.

There was a howling swarm of the Muslim-men in the wide snowy square where roll-call had been done, back when everything was normal. His guard tried to steer him away from this, saying no, no, no good, but he drew near anyway, watching the kicking howling wild-eyed prisoners, most of them so frail they were more sad than frightening—but there were, so many of them, and all of them wracked with fury and revenge.

Erich saw the gleaming boots, buried under a striped screaming clump of these ghosts, the dark hair.

He screamed and screamed, his suitcase falling and nearly breaking his foot, the Russian grappling with him, saying no, no, a good boy!

He would pull them all off, grown men or not, he was well-fed and still strong and they couldn’t, couldn’t.

Then he saw the blood, and the gleaming kicking boots stopped moving.

He tore away from this rescuer, running, running towards the nightmare space no-man’s land in front of the fence. He waited to be shot down. The man behind him was shouting in Russian. There was no gunshot, and his hands closed around this electric fence without hesitation. Nothing Dead like everything else. He was shrieking, in horror, in fury that this last fucking exit was denied him.

Someone took his shoulder, and he turned, ready to swing, screaming still though he did not know it. One of the prisoner doctors from Block Ten, one of the ones who had worked on the Hungarian twins. He was a skeleton too, but his eyes were still, miraculously, sane.

“It isn’t him. It’s just an Untersturmfuhrer, from Block Eleven. It isn’t him,” he said, quietly, to save anyone else hearing.

Erich’s hands were still on the fence. He stared at this man, not understanding, and shook the fence once, screamed at it in one more broken bark of noise, wanting blue fire to erase him, to stop this, to end this.

After a while he understood this prayer would not be granted, either.

He let it go, and went back to the bewildered Russian soldier, staring slackjawed and still holding Erich’s suitcase like a doorman. He took it back from him, went and sat with his back against Block Ten’s outside wall. He was still, a boy wrapped around a center of nothing.

There was an ugly blur, and a truck and a train, and finally he was deposited in a ruined town that was speckled with white and tan tents, like a crop of mushrooms after rain. Red Crosses marked most of them.

He thought of the euthanasia vans, of the Nazi ingenuity and rewriting of all the world that had made them mark them with the same red crosses, but he said nothing.

Perhaps that was what this would be. That would be fine.

He told the Americans his name was Erich Kaltherzig.

He said he didn’t remember his address, and found after a moment that this was true.

He waited for them to, really question him, waited for his parents to arrive as they invariably would, waited for them to discover he was a real criminal and not a Jew and put him back in a different jail.

They gave him food and took him to a tent with that same red cross painted on the side. A gentle medic in gloves that made him cringe did careful things to the rainbow of bruises he had almost everywhere except his face. He hadn’t realized how battered he was, really, it was so very normal.

There were photographs, again, and he was weary of it to the point of a fit of laughter.

Couldn’t they just transfer his files from Block Ten?

No, of course not. They had burned almost everything.

He closed his eyes and did what he was told and considered himself lucky. His school king’s English, he was finding, was both very different from American English and sadly lacking. It made his mouth dry the few times he had to ask the doctor to repeat an instruction or a comment.

They kept asking what else had been done to him.

He tried mostly waving no until he remembered the English for nothing. His eyes filled with tears in spite of himself, at the humiliation of this, and he covered his face with his hands for a minute. The freedom to scrub at his eyes made it worse.

They moved him to a real bed with white sheets that felt much too wide and clean and big for such a small and filthy thing as himself.

The too-young doctor with those innocent American eyes.

Damn it.

And the woman who’d taken his name, too, sitting in smooth stockings and that faint nexus of perfume, looking at him with her eyes too shiny. It made him feel like an, exhibit, to be so pitied, and it made the urge to submit to all this comforting, worse.

He had no right to any comfort, and they’d have despised him, if they’d known what he was mourning.

They gave him pills. He recognized the floating opiate high almost immediately.

All of it was much too familiar but much too wrong, like those dreams of old schools that have transformed into church-shop-houses.

The hospital smells came and went, and he closed his eyes and was silently homesick until the pills took him.

alles grau in grau malen

They had to transfer him out of the hospital proper, if you could call the sprawling tent-camp outside of half a town proper.

His new room was a foot locker and a cot—in the jail, the only building still in one piece that could hold so many refugees. A dozen other men shared the space with him. The door was open and tied open to the bars with rope.

It was still the worst at night.

Noises of men breathing, turning, asleep and awake, making their own private muffled concessions to various pains.

It smelled of jail, and that was wrong; the jail had been first.

Was he moving through the Auschwitz dream in reverse?

If that were true, at the end of it he would find himself in a home again, possibly with his parents again, and a job and all those beaming expectations and questions about girls and babies and there would never, ever, be searchlights again, no corpses in the street, no hands in the dark. He thought he might explode with only such trivial things to push on him from the outside, to hold him together.

He cried a little, coat over his face. He wondered if they would find out he’d lied, and what kind of trouble he would be in, and why on Earth he’d done it.

He healed. Inexorably, unstoppably. The bruises faded. The myriad tiny tears inside him from seven hundred days of Kaltherzig’s cock and hands and gleaming toys started to, close. The streaks of blood when he wiped himself were less and less. And then there was no pain, and the bruises were down to three yellow ghosts, fading fast.

He was being given back to himself, piece by forgotten piece.

It made him feel heavier and heavier, less and less real. Only the scars were still his, dark red-violet that he might keep for a year or two, till they faded, left him with thin white lines like the ashes of burned paper.

They wouldn’t let him wear the uniform, and his fear that they would wash it or steal it away entirely made him unstitch the collar. He sewed the ring inside it and hung the entire tiny bundle from a shoelace around his neck. It was something to cry over and chew on in the dark.

He wound himself under the blanket when everyone who could sleep was already out, investigated himself with embarrassed fingers. There was that hairline scar on the head of his cock, he’d forgotten that one. They’d never take that one, anyway. Two scars to his name, and counting.

He squirmed up onto his hands and knees, checking the blanket multiple paranoid times. Now and then there was the muffled noise of masturbation, usually politely ignored, but that wasn’t, what this was.

It was strange to stroke that ring of muscle without pain. The tiny little flaps of what he assumed were scar tissue were still there, but he could push a licked finger inside as far as it would reach without a twinge.

It felt, unnatural. Like being ignored.

He thought for a long minute, shoulder aching from having his arms bent behind himself, and pushed in two fingers from his other hand. He thought for another long minute, and pulled, spreading himself open till his eyes watered, digging his nails in. It still wasn’t right, but it gave him the first erection since Ahren had taken his tattoo.

When his fingers were damp and tasted of blood he squirmed his pants up and lay curled with his hands near his mouth, eyes closed, feeling this hurt he had stolen back from them. Wonderful, sick, invisible defiance. And the last blaze of that made him pull his blanket around himself and step out of bed and slide underneath it instead. He fell asleep almost as soon as his head touched the floor.

They would not let him keep the stitches. They had been in for much too long, by now, and were beginning to get grown over with skin. In the end the doctors held him down and a woman that said shh, Mama’s here in German stroked his hair back held a mask to his face. They did exquisitely painful little pulls with tweezers for all of a minute and turned him loose.

He sobbed and would not talk to anyone, not even that same kind woman who brought him sugar cubes and books and a soft emerald-green knitted scarf that he privately loved.

He could never get those stitches back. Ahren had laid them with his own hands. He’d wanted them grown into his skin. Bastards.

She finally brought the morphine, and here was a bribe that always worked.

She was also the one who told him they’d found Kaltherzigs in New York City.

lost

He was on a boat. Perhaps you called it a ship when it was this large. He didn’t know, and he didn’t care.

This was no different from the first jail or the second jail, really—a bunk, with dozens of men, and the claustrophobia and the fear and the long noisy nights by himself in his bed. He cried every single night, and spent every single day walking in something of a daze, memorizing the ship’s few rules and events and showing up for each of them, from dinners and little performances to sermons and bingo games, sitting by himself in the back, talking to no one unless spoken to. This was usually by someone who missed a son, and he was polite but managed to be somewhat, cold, due to the apathy that permeated, everything.

He enjoyed nothing he attended; he was only doing it to have, orders to follow. It was nowhere near enough, it was nothing like right, and he learned to hide in his hat and his upturned collar and his uncut hair, almost collar-long again, now, so that the crying he could not stop wouldn’t attract unwanted sympathy. It wasn’t as if he were, upset, all the time—he didn’t seem to feel much of anything. Nothing registered. But his eyes leaked intermittently, whether his mind was blank or not.

Men in black suits drew him, even in this death-haze of invisible sorrow. He would move, closer, and he knew, damn it, he was not so mad yet as to think he might be on this very ship, but he found reasons to change his seat all the same, until he was so close he could see for certain that it was only another of them, not Him.

There were others with Erich’s criminal disease, to be sure—a boy who had joined him on the railing at a friendly distance, and offered him a very nice cigar.

Erich had looked out into this frightening black the sea became at almost-night, feeling this boyshape a few arm’s lengths to his right, and his eyes and throat hurting and pricking with the first tears he’d meant outside of his bed since Auschwitz.

He’d refused, politely, not hearing himself, not looking, and then looking and seeing the boy looking out at the sea, a young man really, older than he was, relaxed and happy, and not dangerous at all. “I don’t want to bother you, but you always look so sad,” he said, without looking at Erich, and made a smile that was a little like one Kaltherzig had used, the crooked one that meant he was laughing at himself and not at Erich.

“I lost everyone I loved in the war. Excuse me,” he said, and he turned, and ran, only walking, on the outside, so that none of Them would be unhappy with him.

He wandered in case this boy was following him, until he was certain he was alone. Then he ran again until he landed in his bed and slept.

He had been beautiful, this boy. Kind and quiet and too brown, and not tall enough, and British, and not Kaltherzig. Maybe twenty, older than Erich, younger than Kaltherzig.

Not that there was a right age for another boy.

The only time he missed the closest thing to orders he had on this ship was when he fell into this kind of sleep. It felt, almost conscious, like a decision to just, leave. The world was nothing he wanted, and during these times he would put his hand on this hidden ring and fold his blanket over till he could just fit underneath it curled up tiny. The heat and the emptiness would rock him to sleep, usually in a minute or ten, and he would sleep without moving and wake up stiff and sad and drift a little, aware, and if he decided to go back to sleep he could hide again for another six to ten hours. Most of the passengers assumed he was seasick.

There were a few faces he was careful not to attach names to that asked after his health after long sleeps like these, and sometimes he would find a little wrapped package of food from lunch or dinner that would keep, like bread or an apple or cookies. He would announce a general “Thank you,” before going to bed, the next time he happened to be awake and present during the hour or two when the men lounged and smoked and talked a little. There would be a murmur or three, but nobody took credit or blame.

Sometimes he was gone for almost a day, dreaming under this square of blanket in all his clothes, dreaming of hands and a whip and the flowers that grew in the Forbidden Zone. Of the smell of organs in brine, and the smell of Kaltherzig that he never realized was called sandalwood.

It was never long enough.

There was one other man, a German who got farther than the speculative looks he felt from time to time. He was in a half-doze, having given in to the urge for oblivion and dared to ask one of the bartenders for alcohol for one of his smallest gold pieces. He drank thinking that Kaltherzig had bought this for him, schnapps in the wrong sort of glass, and he drank and drank and waited for the quiet that he assumed had to come, that had to be why people drank to begin with, until the bartender laughed at him and ordered him to bed, had given him several bottles, and he’d brought them staggering back

(home?)

to see if it would keep him from dreaming. It was more morning than night, now. And there was a knee on his bed like a hallucination, and breath in the dark that was just, wrong. He turned over and saw a dimly familiar face by the few lamps that were always left on; nondescript and innocuous, hard-worn and old enough to seem as old as Erich’s father. “You—“

Nothing, a blink, and a callused too-thick hand cupping at his face, eyes wide in wonder or horror. Erich slid down, instinctively, shouldering away, hissed a no and then lay shaking in weird certainty that this man would hurt him for this forbidden word. He closed his eyes.

The nudge of weight leaving his mattress.

“I’m awful sorry, I thought you, I’m sorry....”

Footsteps. Quiet.

He opened his eyes to the dim-orange lamp. Gasped for breath. Wound up small and wished for Kaltherzig’s breath above him and Kaltherzig’s gun three feet away and hundreds of SS sprawled out in a black-and-red net to guard their sleep.

He thought the man would never speak to him again, but the next morning he walked into step with Erich in the corridor outside, offering the eternal cigarette, and said again, “I’m awful sorry.”

He was not beautiful, but he seemed sad, and Erich thought how it had felt to have Kaltherzig reject his kiss, and how it felt now to sleep alone. “No harm done. “ He thought of leaving it at that, but added, “I...am...but he isn’t here,” he said. To spare this man’s fear and his dignity.

“Oh,” the man said, walking with him, reflectively. “I’m sorry.”

Erich started to say no harm done again, till he realized what this man meant, realized he was being offered his first comfort over this monumental loss. He meant to smile, and his bastard eyes started leaking instead, and when he tried to do his usual run he was hiding too well in his hair already and hit a doorjamb instead of a door.

Malm, as the man who led him bleeding topside and steered him to a seat with a donated handkerchief pressed to his nose was called, seemed to have been something of an antiques dealer and fancied himself a theater buff. He never made so much as the slightest untoward move at Erich again, but he did lend him volumes of Shakespeare that entertained him while both helping and infinitely worsening his grasp of English

He was, still turned mostly off, but his eyes leaked, just a little less. He felt less, adrift. He felt slightly, a hair’s breadth safer, knowing he could scream in the night and someone who meant him well would come to his aide, if not his rescue.

He read everything given him, sometimes missing sleep to do so, just so he could discuss it with Malm well when next they sat down together. He actually made a few acquaintances, daring to approach people he’d overheard enough to know they were either fluent in English and German, or some sort of authority on English literature. He found that most of his questions and sudden opening of the book to ask a translation were politely accommodated.

He tried to be perfect at it.

He waited all that time for Malm to praise him, to tell him he had read very quickly or understood very well, and he never said a word.

He didn’t like Malm, and that was why he wasn’t sorry, when they arrived in New York and he never saw him again

He smelled much more like a Mengele than a Kaltherzig.


Königshaus

America was a disappointment almost from the second he set foot in the country. There was endless waiting in line, endless forms, and the typewriters. It was all so very familiar. He caught himself sleeping sitting up on the same kind of wooden bench as, before. Listening for screaming from downstairs.

Finally, after what seemed like years but was probably only most of a day, he was taken into a long concrete room, and turned over to a couple that made him stand in the doorway, wide-eyed and desperately afraid and impossibly homesick. This man was, like Kaltherzig, in his long lines and his dark hair and his elegant Roman features, but there was a busy, pre-occupied sort of, mildness, in his tie-straightening and his standing, in his hesitant smile. His clothes looked strange to Erich, as if there were too many layers, too many little ugly complications in American style.

The woman at his side was pure Aryan, more delicate than his long-ago Valkyrie, radiating ice-cold until she smiled, less hesitant than her husband. Centuries of breeding in every line, in her smooth brow and effortless poise in this dingy receiving room.

The man shook Erich’s hand with frightening American enthusiasm, having to walk over to him to do so. He was clinging to the doorjamb with one hand, in misery, shaken and waiting to be pointed at as an, imposter. The softness and precision he felt in this man’s hand told him this, too, was a doctor, even before the introduction. “I’m Doctor James Kaltherzig, and this is my wife, Judith. You’re our....nephew?”

Erich murmured “I think so, sir,” and could not meet his eyes.

A nod, and James touched his shoulder. It was too Kaltherzig, and the tears overflowed, and Erich turned away. Too different, and too the same.

James coughed, a little, and said, “That’s all right, son, they’ve told us you’ve...that you, were...that you’re not, well.” He stepped back, and Judith stepped in, turning Erich towards her in a businesslike fashion, tipping his chin up, attending to him with a handkerchief. It made him feel, very small. Much too small.

He had expected them to speak German, he realized. He felt like a child in an orphanage, expected to sell himself to these prospective parents, and afraid to open his mouth, fearing he’d, scream, or confess, or vomit in pure intolerable stress.

She smiled at him, with that arranged charm-school care, but there was sweetness underneath. It made it, just a little better. Terrible flare of wish to fling himself at this woman, sobbing, in a way he’d never been able to do to his own mother. They were reverses of one another, he thought—this woman was warm underneath a surface of pretended cold, and his mother had been cold and empty, underneath fake smiles and a mother-costume.

She must have felt something of this sudden lean in his muscles, because she made something of a soft gesture at him with her eyes. “James, he’s exhausted. Take us out of here, please,” she said, still looking at Erich.


A doctor. He supposed that much, at least, ran in the family.

He was led to a very nice car, through a terrifying bustle and those buildings that seemed taller than anything should be. The noise, and he leaned too closely into Judith’s side, looked longingly at James just in front of them. The shoulders were right, and the birdlike quick grace in his gestures, but then he would turn those elegant silver-rimmed glasses, and the eyes behind them were too academic to be Kaltherzig’s immovable blaze.

The back seat smelled of leather. If he closed his eyes, he could be on the way home from Block Ten. He did just that.

When he opened them again, they were outside the city, and they pulled finally into a long driveway, and up to a frightening mansion of a house. James carried his one tiny suitcase. Judith held his hand, as if she thought he might run screaming into the thin woods if she didn’t restrain him.

Most of what made him Erich was, disconnected. He felt as if great pieces of him had ceased to function. There was enough left, of his plan, that he would obey and anticipate and be perfect, perfect, but when he wasn’t engaged in this he did, very little. Sat and stared. Went to bed early, in the room that was so nice it made him sad, that they were trying so hard. They had no children, and the room they’d led him to with such pride was done up for a boy a younger than his seventeen—model airplanes, a bookshelf with books for a boy half his age, a rolltop desk with pens and papers and paint and other myriad delights hidden in cunning little nooks.

The books soon vanished, replaced with new attempts. Sometimes he kept one open on his knees to stare through, to make them feel appreciated.

He watched for signs of Ahren in James, having squinted at great heavy photo albums until he finally deciphered that this was the grandson of one of Ahren’s uncles.

He half-wanted to find something, familiar, and half-dreaded finding, too much. James was never anything but polite and kind to him, and that touch on his shoulder was quietly replaced with the occasional pat on top of his head.

Sometimes he heard him on the telephone, with his voice raised, and these times he would lean against the wall in the hallway, arms around himself, listening, waiting. But it was never, anything.

He didn’t know what he wanted out of this man, but he knew he wouldn’t get it.

He wasn’t Ahren.

He didn’t smell the same.

There was no fury inside him, and the occasional stern tone with the housekeeper or their gardener was only a tease, a tiny reminder of the man he’d, lost.

He was tempted sometimes to do something terrible, to see if this man would strike him, to see if that might silence the terrible starvation that gnawed at him all the time. He found himself in James’s den, once, holding a gleaming delicate blown-glass ornament from the lit shelves along one wall. Tempted to throw it. Preferably through the expensive glass in one of the French windows He stared at it in his hands, as if it had leapt there by itself, and put it down, leaving at almost a run.

He realized that his silence and his essential emptiness disturbed them, and there was something of Kaltherzig in them, after all. They were noble and kind and generous, and that made it all worse, made him feel like the lowest sort of thief. He began trying to smile, learning to pretend in the mirrors, laughing sometimes, but it felt wrong, like it started in his throat and not whatever deeper place laughter was supposed to come from.

Judith was almost impossible to fool.

She’d heard him crying, one night, and there had been a tiny tap at his door that he’d squeaked at in terror, suddenly nowhere and everywhere, suddenly waiting for Mengele to come in.

She tiptoed inside with a lush blue bathrobe fastened up to her chin, and her hair around her shoulders, sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand on his back. “Can’t you tell us what it is?” she’d said, softly, after awhile. “Can’t we help you with it?”

He shook his head. Wept.

No, he couldn’t tell them what it was, not even if he’d had the English.

And no, nobody could help him with it.

It was a sin, was what it was. An entire growing row of them.

The papers that Judith showed him and filed away in the office—a birth certificate, and citizenship papers with Erich Kaltherzig written on every one.

As if he married me.

And that was why he’d given the Red Cross that name, wasn’t it? To make it clear whose possession he was, always would be.


He was tutored, with a pointy frighteningly precise man teaching him English . After a session or two Mr. Hadley realized he was an excellent student, and the razor-sharp sort of barking orders ceased.

James asked him polite questions about his skills and his desires, and he answered what he could with increasing fluency. The one question he couldn’t answer: what do you want to do? He said I don’t know, sir, until James gave up.

I want to go home, that’s what I want to do. But the Russians, the Americans, whoever it was, had reduced his home and all that meant to ashes.

He heard James on the telephone in his office, a short time later—failure to thrive.

He didn’t know thrive, but he knew failure, all right, and he knew it was about him.

When James came to find him he discovered him in this boychild room, cleaning like a terrified tornado, running at such a pace he was pouring sweat and leaving more disarray than cleanliness.


“We’ve found a doctor for you,” he said to Erich, across that long formal dinner table that night.

Tears . He swallowed them, already shaking, “Please, can’t you do it, whatever it is, please...”

Judith, leaving her seat, sitting in the empty one beside him, taking his hand. She never touched him with more than one hand, she was too much the aristocrat for that, but the child-shaped hole inside her made her try. He was too big to fit in that hole, he knew.

That cough from James that meant he was embarrassed. “I’m the wrong sort of doctor, Erich. I’m a surgeon, you know. Dr. Zelander is top-notch. He’s a doctor for your body and your mind.”

Erich nodded, but he couldn’t stop crying. Any doctor that wasn’t a Kaltherzig seemed automatically in his mind to be a Mengele. “Please, can I go, sir?”

James sighed. Judith squeezed his hand, looking at him with those blue-blue eyes, and slid away back to her own seat.

“We want you to be well, you know. That’s all it is. I’m going to go with you, and I’ll understand everything he says, and I’ll explain it all to you. It isn’t a punishment, Erich. Nobody blames you for any of this.”

No, perhaps they didn’t, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t his fault.

He mouthed his yes-sir, swallowing tears, drowning in that misery that had been
his since he’d woken up alone in Ahren’s house.

“Go ahead,” James told him, and he fled, to this boy-child American bedroom.

Once here he dragged out his suitcase, opened it on his bed, buried his face in it, in this pile of suits Ahren had bought him, his uniform underneath hidden from all of Them, because they would steal it, trying to make him well. Trying to make him forget. The smell was almost gone, but if he sniffed in deep rapid pulls he could catch the ghost of home.

Dr. Zealander was a wide thick loud man with black-framed glasses that made his eyes swim like fish behind them. He had a great vertical shock of white hair and the sort of red-sprung nose of a long-time drinker, hands like shovels, and a white coat that set Erich to shaking before he was even led into the examination room.

He wouldn’t hear of James going along, and Erich found himself alone with this great deafening man, sitting on the edge of a table as cold as the one in Block Ten, so frightened and so ashamed that his tongue was like sand in his mouth. He was down to his pants, bare feet cold and pushing at nothing.

Dr. Zealander examined him with Prussian efficiency, thumping him here and there—“What’s this mark, here? This one?” and he shook his head and whispered I can’t remember, and the doctor stared at him angrily and said, “Of course you can!”

He shook his head, and then he wouldn’t talk at all.

Dr. Zealander told him to dress again, seeming to have lost patience. He returned with a file, wrote something, set it down and stared at Erich over his glasses. “Now look here. You’re to stop all this immediately. There’s not a thing wrong with you—“a thudding little push into his collarbone—“except laziness and ingratitude. Why, there are men who had to actually fight in the war, that have come back with arms blown off and faces burned down to bone. Ungrateful. You’re sound of body and undisciplined of mind, and all this indulgent wallowing is only hurting your new parents. I don’t want to see you again.”

He told James very little of this, but he guessed from the angry set of his jaw on the way home that James was already privy to this gruff man’s opinion. “We’ll find another one,” he said to Erich.

“Please....he’s right, it’s only me....I’ll do better, I’ll be better—“

Damn it. Tears.

He wished he’d asked that bastard man for a pill to stop him crying. It was like everywhere inside him Kaltherzig had been had filled up with tears instead, a bottomless well of them, that the slightest hurt would pierce into.

A sigh from James. That was Ahren, too, eerie, phonographic, and Erich looked out the window at the trees rushing by, the wrong trees, the wrong street.

“Well, we’ll see,” James said.


He learned to fake normal better.

The next time James asked him what he wanted to do, he said he’d like to sew again, possibly. A print-shop was out of the question, the thought of it filled his mind with Emil, torn like paper.

James came home a few days later with news for him: he had a patient who ran a very upscale boutique, and he’d explained Erich’s situation, and the man would be delighted to give him a try. He would sew by hand or machine, essentially alone, and Erich nodded, gratefully, thanked him multiple times, something in him eased by this thought of, work.

The boutique was quiet, smelling of cloth and dye. His new boss was a Jew, amusingly enough, quite friendly, and so funny that sometimes he made Erich laugh a real laugh.

He did the best work he could, and Blumberg was delighted with him.

After the best part of a year and his eighteenth birthday, he’d saved enough for a deposit on his own apartment.

Judith wept, hearing that he wanted to leave, but James nodded, and told them both that it was an excellent sign, perhaps with too much certainty, as if he were trying to convince himself as well as his wife and his nephew-son-guest.

He helped Erich find an apartment close to the boutique, a wide loft that might have been part of a warehouse or a factory, one great room with a kitchen in one corner and a bathroom tucked beside it, walled off. The bedroom was up a narrow metal staircase, half-walled, comfortably nest-like.

It was beautiful.

It was all wrong.

He cried himself to sleep, alone in this echoing space, holding his little totem-necklace, the collar of his striped shirt still stiff with Ahren’s semen, wound around the Totenkopf ring in his lonely little try at some magick.

He wished for the boychild room back, he told himself, but what he really wished for was the floor in Ahren’s bedroom half the world and over a year away.

It was nice not to have to hide the tears, or his uniform, anymore, but the scent of home had long since faded out of it.

The Americans were all so, loud. Wide, noisy, nosy, busy sorts of people. It was just too much for him, the staring and the shoving and the yelling. He developed a very quick fear of crowds.

The sun felt wrong here, like the color was off, like it was coming from an unnatural angle.

Policemen scared him so badly that he shook like he was feverish when he had to walk past one—oh, and they were everywhere in this dirty city. He just kept expecting one of them to, hit him, or...something...shoot him, maybe. Anything.

He positive he looked guilty of something.

There was nothing for it except to just, walk by, with his knees gone all crooked and his hands holding his coat closed so tight it was like his fingers would, freeze that way. None of them ever said a word. He would probably have dropped unconscious to the sidewalk at so much as good morning.

Sometimes he could see one out of his window, buying something from the hot-dog cart that sometimes parked there awhile. He wondered, sometimes, where exactly they would take him.


He was walking home from the boutique, preferring the half-hour or so to the crowded, terrifying subway, when a beautiful dirty boy with a spill of redgold hair smiled at him, leaning in a doorway, said a number and added “or—“ and gestured at his arm.

Erich was mystified. He thought perhaps he was being mugged, but when he fumbled for his wallet and held out the money the boy smiled, and began to follow him. Then he understood, and flushed, thinking he would tell him to keep it and go away, but he didn’t.


Once in his apartment, this Shawn creature gestured at his arm again, and laughed at Erich’s bewilderment. “The stuff, you know?” Once he’d conveyed that heroin was an opiate Erich vanished into his bathroom and returned with the jar of morphine pills. James Kaltherzig kept his prescription filled, ostensibly for the pain of his never-right-again shoulder, though Erich suspected he understood a little of the true reasons.

Shawn produced a syringe and a spoon and did mysterious alchemy that made Erich watch in amazement, reminded of Kaltherzig’s lab.

“Do you want? You never did it this way?” And Erich shrugged, and allowed Shawn to do this mystery to his own arm, and the warm morphine rush he remembered from Block Ten made his eyes ache, but the numbness stopped it in time.

Shawn caught at him, after awhile, drug-dazed, and he pulled away, terrified he would lose the one and only Kaltherzig kiss that surely still resided on his lips.

This boy-whore stared at him and laughed again. “You’re new as a penny, you know that?”

He didn’t know.

“Well, what did you pay me for, then?”

He didn’t know that either. Finally, without looking, he said he might like for Shawn to hold him. He was shaking with shame even as he said it, seeing the Gestapo in his head, hearing criminal disease in German like a phonograph playing only that phrase.

Shawn seemed unflustered by this—“Oh, you’re one of those.” And he slid over easily, and wound Erich close, and he closed his eyes and listened to this boy’s heartbeat, opium-slow, and pretended it was Kaltherzig. Something like, quiet, inside him, for the first time since Auschwitz had ended. Warm and the salt-sweat scent of this boy, of the river and the city outside, all wrong, but infinitely better than nothing.

Shawn stayed until morning, disengaging and saying he had to go. He stayed for an hour more when Erich offered him more of the pills.

They talked very little.

Shawn asked if he’d been to the clubs, and he didn’t understand that, either. He was given an address written badly on a slip of paper.

He put it in his pocket, where it stayed for three weeks, until he found it in his kitchen half-lost under work orders and client measurements.

He’d looked for Shawn again, and never found him. He thought, madly, that he would give him money and those pills as often as he wished for the sake of the heartbeat under his ear and the smell of boy in his nostrils, but he never saw him, and he was too afraid to try to find another boy like him. He could hardly wave cash at every boy he saw on the street until one of them was willing to take it for being used as a pillow for a night.

This address was in the warehouse district, frighteningly low-class, and tempting.

“Lots of us,” the boy had said.

He could not imagine lots of, us, except in broken lines with pink triangles on each stick figure.

Establishments that cater to this sort of thing.

He drank, swallowed pills, dressed, and went. He thought he might be killed, on the way, on the way home, or in this club. He didn’t care.


Seelisch

He found this club, with no more trouble than a few beggars along the way. He gave out pocket change in exchange for street directions, giving only the street name fearing that he might be found out if he told these poor souls anything else. He found himself in front of a low building, broken-down with boarded over windows, and was amazed to find a pink triangle chalked beside a door that seemed utterly sealed. He stared at this slip of paper, at the triangle, and finally worked up the courage to tap on it. A slot slid open. “Pass?”

He stared at these two piggy eyes, heart slamming. “I’m sorry, I don’t—a boy named Shawn, told me...”

“Don’t know any Shawn.”

He longed to run away, but he’d come so far already. He wanted to see a lot of Us, just once. “He has red hair, he—“ That gesture at his arm.

The slot slammed closed.

He blinked back tears and was trudging away when the door opened behind him.


He paid a wide ox of a man and was ushered through another door into a low-lit room that was almost exactly like the bar on the ship to America had been. He stood just inside, staring, astounded. It looked so very normal. There was music, jangling from a cheap phonograph that seemed to have grown a mismatch of speakers like weeds from its main bulk . There were men and a few women, and a few creatures that might have been either. There were men dancing together, leaning close in dark corners. As he watched, two of them kissed, lingering, with sort of a forehead-nudge after, and laughs from both of them like any young couple.

He had never seen a man kiss another man before.

He had never imagined such a thing. Not in public, not in front of strangers.

He was so dumbfounded by it that he only stood, until the doorman laughed at him and said, “You’re blocking my way,” and nudged him to go out into the club.

A woman—no, a man, maybe? gestured at him almost immediately. He pointed at himself, and she nodded, long white-blonde hair and an aged face tastefully painted, a dress that Judith might have worn, and patted the seat beside her. “You’re new.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He flushed, at that—was he supposed to call her ma’am, or sir? His upbringing wouldn’t let him try a sir at a woman in diamond earrings and such an elegant dress.

“Drink?”

He shook his head. She ignored that, and shouted without looking for someone named Martinez to bring her something fattening. Erich was presented with what tasted like chocolate milk with sugar and cream and some smooth alcohol underneath it. He drank so she would stop staring threats at him. Any more kindnesses this week and he would have to buy dark glasses.

He thought of her as Nana without being able to help it.

“Was it anyone who comes here?” she asked, in that gentle Grandmother voice that he still couldn’t resist. He knew this was a man, but his heart denied it; he could smell the mother in her from across the table. That same wish, to burrow into her, to cry, to cling.

“Anyone....I’m sorry?”

“Who broke your heart, was it anyone here? I’ll go and give him a piece of my mind.”

“No ma’am, it wasn’t anyone here,” he said, flushing. Silly reflex, that, here of all places he could.....admit it.

He was forgetting again to shed his un-American politeness, and she smiled and said “The accent is lovely.”

“I’ve tried to, not have it.”

“That’s what makes it lovely.” She offered him a cigarette, and lit her own when he smiled a no. “Was he, you know.....lost, back there, you know? I heard they killed a lot of us, in all...that...”

“No, it was.....” The scar, under his sleeve in neon. “Nothing like that.”

She nodded, smoked. “You have to climb over it, whatever it is. Find yourself another one to drown in.” A smile; this was an old story.

“There aren’t any others deep enough to drown in,” he said.

“Oh, honey.” And she lit another cigarette, and ordered him another fattening drink, and said, “Dish.”

Telling her his name went quite well, and then all the words stuck in his throat and he sat mute and miserable, seeing that fat old bastard of a doctor glaring at him and telling him how ungrateful he was.

“There’s one sentence in all of it that is the hardest. That’s the one all the others are stuck behind.”

It made him mad, in a hot embarrassed little thump, and he said, “I’m an invert. I’m a man who wants to be with, men.”

There. That would show her.

“Oh?” she said, sipping, as if he’d told her he had a gardening tip she’d be interested in, and not that he was an immoral Hellbound pervert. “Men in general, or a certain man?”

The embarrassment peaked, in a pang like a headache, and she was right; that one had been the hardest. He had been confessing the same sin, over and over again, all his life, and everyone seemed to feel rather let down after hearing, as if he’d have managed some serious evil if he’d only tried harder. “Just the one.”

All of it had been really trapped behind that plain, almost silly little idea.

A woman could shout such a truth on any streetcorner about any worm of a man that struck her fancy, a man the same, crying out love for the lowest sort of diseased dockside whore—but he was forbidden like Galileo, even though he and everybody else knew the Earth moved.

He could not hold that heresy for any man, every authority in the world including the fallen Reich said so, but he could not help himself, and he had chosen, or been chosen by, the most impossible object for this love.

Two years of darkness and death had driven Kaltherzig into him like ink into skin. He could see this inside him like the sickness men got from heroin, and he wound himself up small and despaired that any talking cure, any drugs, anything could ever make him whole.

He sat with his knees drawn up and his arms unconsciously wound around that hole in the center of himself, and thought that he would do anything to have his sickness, fed. Before he starved to death.

He was failing, utterly, to explain to her how it was in his mind, this black fairy-tale place of contrasts that stunned your soul and your mind until you finally, believed, whatever they told you about whatever you saw, because you no longer had the energy to do anything else.

He edited, heavily, confessing only to being struck a time or six and not to any of the other, games. He deleted all the hospital bits except being measured and having seen autopsies. And still when he was finished her eyes were wide and they were both drunk.
It still seemed to be all right.

There was the frozen-solid core of a Marlene Dietrich in her, and he could not help but trust her. She left cigarette butts stamped with coral lipprints in all their empty glasses, and this delighted him so much he wished he could steal one. Just to have proof there was such a fantastic creature in the world, alive to smoke cigarettes in spite of it all.

“I’m a sucker. It’s romantic.” She was quiet awhile, smoking, and said, “One of those that’ll hurt you will, keep hurting you...” a shrug, here—this was an old story, too. “There’s worse things. Sometimes I think alone is worse, but you’re not supposed to think that.”

He didn’t feel like explaining any of, that, either. The extent of how very much of it he, missed. Never mind.


It was weeks later, with these dreams in his head, more vivid than the club in front of him, that he saw the man, a tall and narrow man in a black suit whose lines and angles he knew by heart in the bones of both hands.

He walked closer and closer, eyes dilated so that he presented more of a ghost than the ghost he was stalking. He touched his shoulder, and had almost buried his face in this narrow familiar back when the man turned around, and he was Aryan-blond and had wide white teeth and was completely, utterly wrong. Erich hitched in his breath and snatched himself back, as if burned.

He got as far as “I thought you were—“ and the disappointment and the too-few pills today brought him to sudden tears.

“Hey...” and this massive hand came down to his shoulder, and steered him to a chair before he fell. A wide white American handkerchief was produced and handed to him.

“Get ahold of yourself, come on.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. It was already subsiding He had practice in quiet. “I’m, never mind, I thought you were, someone else, excuse me—” He tried to get up, to flee, to find Nana or an empty chair, and this lamb in Nazi clothing pushed him down again with that same care. He took off the hat and the jacket, making Erich think of an uncle snatching off the hat that had frightened him when he was a baby. He almost laughed, still leaking from the eyes but not exactly crying. “...thank you.”

“I thought...without the patches.....” A shrug, and an offered handshake. “Jason Thorpe. I’m as American as apple pie. My dad brought me the uniform from the war.” Something like a blush, eye-avoidance, and “Some of the, boys, you know....”

Oh, he knew. Better than any of the boys.


Maybe it was a sign.


A criminal disease. Well, he had a criminal disease according to America, too. Queers were just as hated and just as arrested here as in Nazi Germany. They just weren’t murdered for it quite as often.

And when they were killed, it was usually by a civilian.

And when it was the police, they tended to use various forms of the old familiar shot while attempting to escape.

This same strange dogma.

The whites hated everyone else, but especially the blacks. Everyone still hated the Jews, and the Japanese had been put into camps, here.

Things like that don’t happen here. This is America.

He wasn’t surprised.

This wasn’t his Reich, this great grinning self-congratulatory row after row of fat white men in expensive suits, but it was a Reich all the same.

They made a lot of speeches. Everybody clapped. And black men who loved white women were lynched in the liberated South, while the policemen there shrugged and grinned and pretended to be mystified. They sent unimaginable sums of money to the Jews, and forgot they had turned away an entire shipful of them and waited years to notice the genocide. They hired ex-Nazis to spy on the Russians.

They gave him the Kaltherzigs, and school and medical care and those idiotic attempts at psychology.

Most people who caught the accent wanted stories, not revenge.

He was safe here.

He hated it.


The club was a good thing, and he went perhaps once a week, sitting with Nana when she was there, sitting alone or with nameless acquaintances who asked how he was and how his work was going on. And then, one night, the ox of a doorman came running into the club, and said one shouted word. “Raid!”

Nana was there, that night, and she caught Erich and hissed “Run!” at him, and shoved him towards the back. People were funneling out of a door behind the bar, footsteps disappearing into the rain and the dark outside.

“It’s, police?” Erich said, drawing back away from her, a terrible idea growing sudden and clear in his head. The police had been the start of it, before, and it had ended in, home. This was illogical, but alcohol and morphine and grief seemed to correct these tiny insignificant little issues.

“Yes, child, police, now run!” And she let him go, but turned back when she was almost to the door, the room nearly empty, now. “Are you mad, come with me, they’ll arrest you!”

“Just go,” he said, softly, and he turned back to his seat and sat down. She shook her head once, and was gone, sliding her high-heeled shoes off her feet and running as light as a girl into the night.


The police seemed rather amazed that he was standing there. They arrested him, and he shook with numb instinctive delicious fear, sat in the back of the van behind this screen of bars with a few others that had been too slow or run in the wrong directions. He had a dreamy smile plastered on his face that he could not remove.


They brought him to jail. And here it was, the typewriter, the barked questions, the inked fingertips and the flashbulbs. He answered them all, blissfully, soaking up barked orders and shoves like a desert plant soaks up rain. His insides were swirling in warm relief that was better than the morphine had been in his arm, better than the heroin he’d bought once from one of the men in the club.

Police in blue that was almost black. That smell of terror and urine and bleach underneath everything. Rules posted on walls. Guards and handcuffs and finally, it was either-or, here, police or prisoner, it was finally, starting to be the way it was supposed to be.

He was pushed into a cell with the others from the club, one very young man as pale as milk crying a little. He didn’t cry. He settled himself on a wooden bunk and slept, more deeply than he had slept since December, 1945.


Someone was shaking him. A policeman. The questions, he thought, and after that....

He followed, groggy, squinting, and was led back into the room he’d been fingerprinted in.

He was given back his wallet, now empty of money. He signed a paper. And the woman he gave it to said, “Next.”

He stared at her in betrayed horror. “Shall I go back to my cell?”

She snorted at him, her fat face crinkling. “No, you shall go home. Or wherever people like you go. Now get out.”

And he was dragged by the arm by one of these policemen, turned loose just outside the front doors of the station into blinding hot morning sun.

Abandoned, again.

Aller Unfug ist schwer

It took him two months to acquire all the materials, and one solid week of sewing before it was, done. He held it up, inspected everything over and over, seeking pins or a loose seam, for almost an hour before he realized it was, finished. A historian—or an officer, for that matter—would have been hard-pressed to tell it from an original.

The uniform was spread out on his bed before he realized he’d made it to Ahren’s measurements and not his, own.

Not just the measurements, either. Had he planned this with the part of his mind that made the dreams? It was, perfect, down to the rank tabs, down to every last ribbon and trim and stitch.
He picked up the jacket and slid it on, telling himself he was thinking of buying, oh, a dressmaker’s dummy, one of the old German ones with wooden joints and such articulation. A display piece. He planned lighting all the way to the bathroom and stood in the mirror looking at himself, and thought of girls wearing their boys’ jackets, incongruous soldier-colored pieces of darkness against cashmere and a crinoline and a ponytail. He held up his arms, sleeves dangling a full hand past his fingertips, and burst into tears.


He exhaled German tobacco into the coat bundled in his hands. He sprinkled it with whiskey and German beer. He smelled every men’s cologne in one of the big department stores. Not even close.

One night he put the uniform on, cuffs and trouser legs turned up, shuffled to the kitchen and turned on the burner. He laid on it a piece of bacon and a lock of his hair, cut off with a kitchen knife. There was a lot of popping and then thick, greasy smoke that stung his eyes. He stood in it, closed eyes streaming. He felt, hypnotized, as if some kind of darkness he had swallowed in Auschwitz was growing and growing inside him.

No matter what he tried, nothing made it smell like Ahren.

He kept the dreams a secret. They were always the same.

The sex dream was almost tolerable.

He was in the basement of Kaltherzig’s Auschwitz house, with his arms tied behind him, hanging so high his fingers were brushing the eyehook above him. His feet swung in lazy ghost circles. Kaltherzig’s shadow, circling him, and then the very edge of him, hat and hair and gleaming boots, and the whip. The noise was all tangled with the pain. It seemed to almost be the report that caused the hurt.

He made a sad little groan that embarrassed him. It sounded weary, petulant.

He wanted to be unconscious. Left alone.

“How long have I been here?”

A smirk. “Don’t you know?”

He shook his head, and then screamed, feebly, as he was lowered to the ground in a hiss of rope through metal. Kaltherzig knelt beside him, towering high and Lucifer-colored and hard under the line of his uniform pants. “All this time. All here. It’s the experiment.”

He didn’t understand. “The Russians....you, left me, and the Russians came, and then I went to America...”

“Drugs,” said Kaltherzig, patiently. “You go on about your fucking Russians no matter which disassociative I give you.” And a laugh, as though that were ridiculous. “They can’t trade with anyone but China, and that by land. They’ll starve to death. They won’t even need camps. There won’t be any Russians in a year.”

“...no...Germany went into Russia, and they....”

Did they?

Smell of dust, smell of wine from two bottles that had exploded.

“The Americans took, Paris....” The floor was so real and here was, blood, and here drool, from sleeping with his head hanging down. They intersected in a sticky red-brown edge, like the high-tide line he’d seen at a long-ago trip to the sea.

“Mad.” Kaltherzig sighed, and stroked Erich’s hair. “Rocketships, for love of God! Inverts sending little flag signals with handkerchiefs!” He shook his head, with something like pity in his smile. “It works, but it’s driven you mad.”

And Kaltherzig would haul him up again, hanging him so low he could just barely touch the floor, because the squirming delighted him. Laid in with the whip, lazily, a game, choosing one spot as mundane as left-shoulderblade or as excruciating as left testicle and taking drunken messy swings at it, about half on target and half speckling him with blood-blister bruises..

“It’s a dream.”

A terrible struggle inside him. Kaltherzig was always right; that was his one, single imperative. But Kaltherzig was wrong, now.

“This is the dream. I was there.”

“No. Here. You’ve always been here. Where I’ve put you.”

The whip, not the crop, now, the real one, with that serpentine lash and that Selektion crack. Kaltherzig was swinging only at his left thigh, until he was screaming like, vomiting, every blow heaving this throat-killing howl up from his stomach, falling and spinning and nothing he did stopped it, the lash unerringly found that one bleeding white-hot hand’s breadth of agony.

The syringe. That sense of being pieces, flying apart. Sobbing confusion in which he was suspended by the pinprick of a needle in his hip and the burning line around his wrists. The needle yanked out and dropped, the whip uncoiling on the floor under his feet, snapping back up into space, snapping back down into his back. Sometimes now he hung in a strange moveless space, almost as if he had forgotten the whipping and the rope and the basement and even Kaltherzig, his mind, empty, the impacts a soothing sort of shove like being patted.

An entertainment. These were worse than the punishments—there was no chance he would break whatever rules he had about hurting Erich, no chance a cracked tooth or a pulse-rate that alarmed Kaltherzig would save him.

Sometimes he stopped, thudded the handle of the whip between the cheeks of Erich’s buttocks, threatened to push it inside, tugged at his penis, rubbed in the worst place too hard and too fast to do much but torture him. This stimulus was so incomprehensible through the drug filter that he could not distinguish the pleasure from the pain. It seemed Kaltherzig’s rubbing stroke was burning him, and his shoulders has been emptied and filled with molten delight.

That one, he would wake up hard, and with his shoulders aching.

The second one he woke up and generally turned on every light in his apartment, searching for pills as he did so.

He would open his eyes to the ceiling, and find himself on his back in Block Ten’s examination room with new orifices and new tubes inside them and a few for good measure in the standard pre-existing holes. He was breathless. There were shattering clarion cries of pain from places both deep and shallow. He could not so much as tip his chin; something around his neck prevented it. He had no idea how he was wounded, but he was positive the sheet underneath him was dripping-wet with something still, warm.

There was a heavy strangeness in his extremities; and a dawning certainty that his neck was broken, that he was paralyzed.

Kaltherzig was on that stool with the wheels that he remembered so perfectly, sitting at his head and not between his knees.

He knew what Kaltherzig was going to do.

It had driven him quite mad for a multitude of reasons. He was drooling. Kaltherzig lifted out the little trapdoor wedge in his skull, set this pottery bone in a metal tray. “Just like before, after each one, you’ll try to express what you perceive. Yes?”

It didn’t matter what he said. He never answered those yesses anymore.

A greenblack flash and the pouring nauseous ocean of the smell of bitter almond, magnified a thousand times, a tickle like spiders across his chest, an earthquake of electrical buzz that made him snap his teeth and perform excruciating long licking hooks with his tongue in the air, or shout, in nonsense howls and spitting, in obscenities, in words arranged in no logical order..

It was nothing he could help.

It was Kaltherzig, and that black box of electricity.

It was wires in his brain.

He was thrown through a blizzard of sensations and smells, grass between toes and a blister and very cold water and anguish and the smell of burning toast and an infected skinned knee. He had an orgasm out of sheer overload. A sentence in warbling deaf-mute word salad. Tears, under all of this, with what little of him still remained.

(ruined, he ruined me, I)

Between the explosions of Other he cried, begging with nothing left in him for Kaltherzig to shoot him, shoot him. He said very little now, other than this and the pieces of confession Kaltherzig wrung out of him with needles and knives.

Kaltherzig tipped Erich’s head, pretending to listen, and as his chin came down he saw his own limbs, drawn up like sticks and as soft and translucent as, a baby, a corpse.

“All right, breathe.” The glassy sense of his skull fitted together, of being closed like a covered dish. A strap under his chin. “Come, now, all this crying. You’re the only experiment that’s working, we have to analyze how, and why, don’t we?” Kaltherzig leaned over him, straightened the hood, did the eyesmile. “I’ll make you forget it, later. I’ll find the brain cells that have it recorded it and slice them out and swallow them.”

“...ruined...”

“No one would ever believe you anyway.” A pat to that new door on top of his head, edges grating. “You’re too mad to know the difference.“

That glassy grinding lift. Screams that gargled through saliva he could not swallow. That greenblack flare, ozone bang, and the universe peeled back like skin into the ceiling in his apartment.

He would run to the bathroom and either throw up or exhaust himself trying. Stare at the mirror and think, This, is one of them. Just one of the flashes.

There was no chance of sleep after that one. He would sit with American noisy cheerful music on, and every light blazing, shivering with that bone-deep fear infection until dawn. Feeling his skull for a notched scar. Waiting to wake up again, on his back.


Sometimes, especially when he drank but took no pills, he would “awaken” out of basement dream, into the dream of Block Ten, of his skull being lifted.

He emptied the library’s section on dreams. He found that dreaming of being awake, especially over and over, was a very disordered sign, indicative of schizophrenia and related psychoses.

It certainly felt like that, like whatever barriers were meant to exist in his mind were, gone. Just gone. Like falling into deep dark water.

Well, if the brain couldn’t control that, he would assist.

He took morphine Sometimes, heroin, bought in The Club from men whose names he did not know and did not care to know. That usually stopped it.

He found himself searching his head obsessively, even when the dream had not come for weeks, fingertips endlessly pressing the bone for that triangle scar.

People asked him if he had a headache. After a while, he began to.

He didn’t tell anyone the dreams. Didn’t tell anyone about that phrase—bird in the head—that Americans seemed to have replaced with cuckoo. Didn’t tell anyone about the picture in his head, not quite a dream, over and over, of the German eagle like a mad Van Gogh painting, all edges and angles and steelsilver and talons, sweeping across the sky as big as a roc, as big as the universe. All the Reich, covering the world. But it blackened the sky and then there was light behind it, and it got smaller and smaller and smaller, and then it was gone.

Coping mechanisms. If anyone knew he was sure there was some way they could put him in a jail. He’d already tried that, there was no help there either. Only wasted money he’d rather spend on crutches that worked.

The games, with the black rubber gloves and the hospital soap, alone in the bathroom with candles lit and the windows he’d permanently painted over. Different games, each night in turn as well as he could remember them, as well as he could duplicate them. The Solstice game with different gloves, black leather SS gloves he’d bought at great expense from a specialist.

He could never get the hanging right. The closest he could come was to tie a rope from the railing of the loft, tie it to trick cuffs fastened behind his back and step down the last three steps until the rope drew his arms up painfully high. He had tried it with the slipknot, and found himself perilously close to unable to loosen it.

It was too static with no Kaltherzig to threaten him, to drag him up to his tiptoes until he was hysterical, hang him completely, toes brushing the concrete in frantic howling swipes before he let him down to his knees and started to hit him again, harder and harder, finally swinging so that every one struck either between his legs or the backs of his thighs. A long pleading interlude of that, until he stood up and begged to be hung again, instead.

Over and over and over.

He tried to remember it, replay it, but it was too quiet, here. He couldn’t bring himself to scream into his empty apartment.

It scared him, and he was certain it was insanity. But he could not stop doing it. It was a very close cousin to masturbation, but though he was fairly sure They were wrong about that being a sickness, he was fairly sure they would be right about the hanging.
Sick, sick, madness.

But he could not stop doing it.

He had a bad one once when he slipped and pulled on his weakened left shoulder terribly, and he flailed and almost-screamed and thought, the police will find me rotting like this, with an erection, with all these illegal things, and then his thumb found the little safety latch and one of the cuffs opened, dropping him with one arm still twisted up over his head, kneecaps hitting the hardwood floor with a smack that made him groan. He stayed that way for a long time, until he was sure he could stand upright without fainting.

His left arm had never been right after that first time. Now it was much worse. The cure was those delicious blue pills again, around and around and around.

He had to take the uniform to be cleaned. Finally he took it to a costume shop, run by a very Aryan woman, and told her the heartwrenching tale of how this uniform belonged to the Nazi that killed his father, and he desperately needed it cleaned, but he was afraid to just take it into a shop—the war, you know—and was there any way she could possibly?

She listened and nodded and patted his hand, peering at him worriedly over her glasses, and of course she could, and no, no, it wouldn’t cost a dime, no, they paid by the pound, and might she have his number to ring him up when it was finished?

He thanked her profusely, and she smiled and you-poor-deared at him and he left almost sick, hoping she and everyone else failed to notice or at least mention the, semen, and certain that if there was a Hell he was going to burn in it.

That night in the club he drank too quickly, and wouldn’t meet Nana’s eyes. Finally she covered his hand with hers, and said an unspeakable thing. “So did you ever try to find him?”

He stared at her. He didn’t move. He didn’t hear her when she asked if he was all right.

No, he had never tried to find him. No, he had never even considered that.


Geheimkode


Now, for every single second of every single day, he could think of nothing else.

To have him back, with no Russians edging closer and no Americans bullying their way in, to have that jungle quest exile imprisonment. To sleep on Ahren’s floor again, aching with bruises so that no position was comfortable. To never be fast enough or polite enough or quiet enough, ever again. To never count minutes again with no idea what he was counting towards. To never be mind-numbingly, chokingly, disgustingly safe, ever again.

First, he wasted a great deal of reading, and visits to libraries that took him half-a-dozen bus changes, and a notebook that grew fatter and more unruly by the week. Then he gave up this sleuthing business, feeling silly for having tried his hand at detective work to begin with. He placed ads in all the major papers in South America around what seemed to be the, hotbed, of the Reichscolony.

Seeking to return a ring lost in 1945. Generous reward offered for reply. Erich K.

He left a very long number and the contact information for a lawyer in Brazil who agreed to handle the affair quietly for another very long number

Nobody ever asked him anything. No one ever telephoned.

Instead, his papers—his orders--came in a plain envelope postmarked London. A wide fan of English, Spanish, and German that made him Erich Dahl. A single one-way ticket to Buenos Aires. He stared, turning them over and over as though they were mysterious artifacts, smelled them, stared again in something that was almost horror. Finally he folded all of it into his billfold, but he caught himself with it in his hand often, with that magical cream-and-white stack of edges filling up his entire vision.

He did not believe it yet.


He could not sleep. It wasn’t fear of the dreams, this time, it was the memory of the worst time with the riding crop. Ahren had tied him with his arms behind him but pulled up so vertically that be looked like, a muddled Z, bent at right angles, arms, back, legs. The higher up he kept his ass, the less vicious the pull on his shoulders. And the worse the pull on his calves.

Ahren wasn’t satisfied with how far apart Erich could keep his legs in this position so he brought out a long, long board, with a hole drilled in each end, and tied his feet with long skintearing pulls of the hemp rope, so that his feet were so spread and he couldn’t, move, at all, not even a flinch, or he would lost his balance and fall on his poor arms. Then he spread them, just another hand’s breadth, left Erich sobbing for mercy before he’d laid a single stripe.

Damn it.

He’d thought he’d put his coping mechanisms away, but there were three nights left and his apartment was echoing and empty, even the curtains torn down in a frenzy of, ending. He was lying in his bed freezing cold because he hadn’t left enough blankets and he smiled a little in the dark and slid over and put one foot down and then the other and sat down on the floor, hooked one pillow, lay down on the dusty prickling hardwood with the blanket half over him and half under him, feeling defiant, feeling, homesick.

Feeling, aroused.

In the end it was the first time, the terrible flashbulb time with the phallus mounted on iron like a, tool, like equipment, and the thudding like the throwing of a spear, jarring his spine, rattling his teeth, thudding him forward, bloodying his knees. He came in his hand, and thought Kaltherzig whispering clean and licked his hand until it was only wet with spit.

The coping mechanisms had to go. The rest, the really irreplaceable pieces, including the gun and the dagger and Ahren’s uniform, he arranged to have shipped and stored in Buenos Aires. He thought, that Ahren might be pleased, that it would remind him of home.

He tried his own uniform on. It still fit him. And he unstitched the necklace he had made of the collar, and sewed it back on, and put the ring on his finger. He had to wear it on his index finger, and it made him cry a little, thinking of how much bigger Ahren’s hands were than his own.


Nana cried when Erich told her.

“But he’ll kill you,” she said, over and over, as if that somehow mattered.

He didn’t know how to make her understand. Nothing was loud enough or hard enough or long enough or real enough or, good.....enough......

Evil enough. Merciless enough. Unsafe enough.

He could not tell her that he had died, then, in 1943, perhaps on the truck, perhaps on a table in Block Ten, perhaps in Kaltherzig’s basement with his hands behind his back and his wrists bleeding. He could not tell her every minute since the night the searchlights had not sent those white arrows into the dark had been a mistake, a nightmare, a curse.

“I want—“

(him to be the last thing I see. I want the Osiris back, I need the only god who ever)

“I have to—“

(go, I need to go, I can’t wait to)

And he thought: I’m really going.

Erich went to shake her hand, and that seemed all wrong. He hugged her, awkward, leaning down while she was still sitting, and she hugged him back and said, “Will you be happy?”


FÜNF: Paradisio

Himmelszelt Neutrum


Buenos Aires was hot and strange and boisterous and dirty, with air so wet and thick he could hardly breathe, with brown people that frightened him and didn’t understand his English or his German. The food looked poisonous and tasted wonderful, and he remembered Kaltherzig’s tales of golden statues and carnivorous plants and that empty space in the middle of the world was somehow worse, now that the waiting was almost over.

On the fifth night he heard it, outside a bar in actually quite a nice part of the city. The Horst Wessel song, loudly and drunkenly sung in fearless German.

He ordered a beer, bought a round of the same for the table, and after it had been delivered he walked over, smiling, laid down the ring, and said “Heil Hitler.”

He had fully expected at least half of them to pull guns on him, or at least a minute or two of staring. He had not expected to be greeted with embraces and thundering pats on his back that nearly drove him to his knees. He was plied with beer and schnapps and a chair was drawn up and the ring was being picked up and examined. Yes, they knew where Kaltherzig was. Mengele’s protégé, wasn’t he?

Erich gritted his teeth at that one and did a vague sort of nod.

No, they couldn’t take him there just yet, but surely something could be arranged. Who was Erich again? His nephew, and they all nodded and smiled and he drank and cigars were being lit, and pipes and cigarettes. No family left, well, God was good to lead him here, it would be all right now, and the bastards, what a war it had been, what a war.

He hadn’t just, conversed, like this, in German, since he’d come to America. Had he ever managed to think in English, really, had the inner translation ever gone away?

He had always dreamed in German.

The locals let them shout and laugh and sing without the first sign of worry. A few of these dark men with their fast difficult not-quite-Spanish came over and said Hello, and drinks were traded now and then. All perfectly civil.

A Reichscolony, Ahren said in his ear.

And he was asking, could a telegram be sent, or a letter? He hadn’t seen Ahren since The War, and he’d been without family since before that. And again with the beer and the schnapps and the songs, and the assurance that everything would be all, right, now, in that soft familiar Fatherland rhythm.


He turned over the key and the papers that led to his safe-deposit at the bank, along with appropriate money to lubricate this process. A letter would be sent. Two weeks. And he waited and drank and showered and stared at himself in the mirror.

He never took his uniform off, kept it under his clothes in spite of the heat. The other half of this perilous matched set would be with Ahren now.

Three weeks later, he was alone in his hotel. He had concluded he’d been robbed and was drunkenly deciding whether to go back to New York, kill himself, or go and search every inch of jungle himself until he found Ahren or was killed by hostile wildlife..

He was leaning heavily towards the last one.

Then a tap at his door, brown eyes in a brown face, words he didn’t understand and a gesture he did, as of holding a telephone.

He went downstairs, took the receiver placed in his hand.

It was Kaltherzig.

zwei Seelen—ein Gedanke

He said only, “My boy,” and then there was scratchy telephone-line, silence. Erich had never heard him over the phone, but all his nerves recognized him before his mind did. He shook and wept and hitched in his breath, and said, “Sir,” and laughed and laughed.

A click; a cigarette lighter. He thought of Kaltherzig smoking at this very second, miles of jungle and telephone line between them instead of oceans and governments, now. “You’re the only experiment that ever worked, I think.”

“…worked?”

Smoke, or noise from the line, or some sound from Kaltherzig he couldn’t decipher. “I cured you, didn’t I? You’ve never wanted another man again. You’ve been dying without me. Haven’t you?”

Tears. It was true, that was exactly it, dying by minutes, dying like slow suffocation. “Yes, yes, yes...”

That smoke/breath noise again. “I must have cured me while I was curing you.”

Erich deciphered that, and realized it was probably as close to I love you Kaltherzig would ever give him. He sat down, on the floor, with an abrupt thump, phone cord yanking up short and only just still reaching his ear.

“I told you I would call you. Come. Or I’ll shoot you.”

--he’s close enough to do it, himself--

“Yes sir,” he said. The click came after that; he was certain of it.

He had expected the truck for so long that when it finally came, it seemed too square and dirty to be real. No Gestapo to escort him out, not even any papers, and the suitcase in his hand.

The back of the truck was the same.

Erich settled with his back to a wall, closed his eyes, covered his face with his collar.

He was led down a very German hallway and into a darkened sitting room. The scent struck him as soon as he stepped through the door; that mingling of sandalwood, tobacco, alcohol and Ahren that no perfume shop in New York City had been able to give him in a bottle.

His heart pounded that familiar loud ocean in his head. He stared at the shadow in the armchair before him, thinking, really really here.

“Did it hurt when Mengele took off your tattoo?”

A blink, and then he understood. “He didn’t. You did. And it hurt, but I didn’t tell you so because I wanted you to think I was brave.”

Kaltherzig turned on the lamp.

I should

He was the same, perhaps more golden, the suit seeming too bare without all the trim, but the tie was still black and his shirt was still white. His hair was longer.

I should, kneel

After a long time, Kaltherzig turned off the lamp, and said, “Come here.”

Fingers hooked in his collar, drew him down, and Kaltherzig kissed him for the very first time.

(And that's all there is, and they lived happily ever after, and Mossad never laid a finger on them...)

It gave me no option for password or for email, for some reason. Meh. Well, if you wish to reach me, it's thenineteen (at) hotmail.

I so loathe the lack of italics (sigh) I use them constantly...

That was beautiful.
Well done.

Thank you, dear. I was having a very bad day and I appreciate that very much. I hope you got away from Here for awhile. That's really, literally, what I'm trying to do for you (all)

Wow. Very good. I still need to finish it though it's so long. Still, it's a beautiful story so far

I hope you keep trying, I got to take a stab at the early American club scene for glbtq etc people, and the idea of Stockholm Syndrome before there was such a thing.

I'm glad you're enjoying it. I think it loses guro-impetus after Auschwitz, but there's no real help for that if I want to tell the story I wanted to tell (That sometimes darkness calls to darkness and people actually DO get to pair off...: )

I loved this story. Ever so much. It kept me happy throughout the several days it took me to read it. It brought me up from the depressed mood I've been in, always able to lose myself in Erich's story. It was wonderful, one of my all time favorites here on Gurochan.

Could you write more for us?

(beam) Thank you, dear. What a lovely thing to say.

I do have more, at this point my ego is warring with my worry about posting them, but they're hardly spreading any evil sitting on my hard drive.

Tomorrow is long boring Saturday, I'll see if I can fish something out and put it here. You might like the "Lady Stardust" fragment that's up here, but it's not a complete novel like this one.

Just finished reading it. This was so amazing, I dont even know what to say. Thank you so much for sharing with us.

You should be published.
This was really moving, and too amazing to be left only on gurochan.
I loved Lady Stardust as well.
With Adoration,(OmegaAddict@hotmail.com)

I agree with >>18 ... This really neeads to be published.
I stayed up all last night, reading through until I got done. Wow... Just wow.. The best thing I've read in a LONG time.

My dear God. That was amazing. The ending was too abrupt, but that's fine. I cried. What Erich felt was so... So real. I would have just died if he hadn't found Ahren.

Complete this and publish it. Your public demands this.

I think I agree with you, >>20. But I'm always better at putting in than taking out.

It'd get quite a few editing-swipes anyway before going to a publisher, if I could find anyone insane enough to touch this.

Do you think you can repost Lady Stardust? Or maybe you have a site with your works? I just have to read that over~

I'm working on a site. I don't know if I'm allowed to repost it but I'll see what I can do.

Any news yet? *baited breath*

Good God.

That was simply fantastic and there isn't anything else I could say at this point.

I swear I MELTED when I read the last part.

This has been one of the best things I've ever read in a LONG, LONG time. I really hope it gets published as well.

Thank you SO, SO, SO very much for writing this. I won't be able to stop thinking about it after a while.

very excited about reading this, i just need more time. school is really getting in the way

I sat down and read this straight, from 7:00 to 11:33; I literally did not know how late it had gotten until I read the last line of the story.

Holy SHIT!

I really want to just fawn on and on for paragraphs, but that would be annoying. Suffice to say, you totally made my Christmas Break (even if your comma use was jarring in places). I think I'm going to print this story out; that will make it one of only two I've saved that way, ever.

Can't wait to read your other stuff! And see the cover art when this gets published. ;)

This is the best fic I've read. Thank you very very much for this. You just... plucked my heartstrings and played with my heart until they were too raw and sore, but you still made the experience incredible.

Thank you. I don't know how else I would be able to express the sheer adoration and gratitude for this, but thank you.

I love this so much, I can't stop coming back to read it over and over again. I've read 3 times so far. This doesn't deserve to rot away on some obscure website dedicated to Guro; this seriously needs to be published. I would buy it if it did.

I am so happy right now, you have no idea. This was just so unbelievably good.

Fantastic story! Keep working on it. Some parts where a little vague and hard to understand. More detail would be nice but I love this to pieces. I've read it twice in a row and am still trilled with it!

Wow. Just... wow. I started and couldn't stop till the last sentence. This was fucking amazing.

Can you upload this in notepad/word or something like that then give us the link? I'll probably read this story again. I mean, you actually got me to cry!

I love you. This is fucking awesome. This story was so sad and happy and cruel.

You have just made my night, and if you published this, I would buy it hands down. You even made me cry a bit.

And I agree with >>35, you should upload this in notepad/word.

There is perfect, and then there is this. Beautiful, aching, and honest in a way that is nothing short of brutal. It's lyrical and unwavering, full of characters you hate in a way that crawls inevitably toward something else. I love it entirely.

I have to admit that there are only a few published novels that I enjoeyed more then this, Infallibly beutiful! You could become very rich for publishing this, no joke.

I absolutely agree with >>36, I would buy it if you published it and my god, I can't get enough of it. And yes, I have also read this from 9 in the morning till 11 at night.

Fucking love it <3

I have been reading this over the span of a weekend between work and sleep and social.... and it is all I could focus on!

Unbelievable - goregous writing and captivating in every aspect! I will be reading this over and over... and putting on my DS too

<3<3<3<3

Damn this is amazing. Its hard coming by stories like this

contradiction

He’d been good at archery and swimming, and that had saved him.
vs
Erich was hopeless at swimming, his teachers from Jungenvolk

I think you need to look at how much you use commas, as sometimes they seemed to break up the flow in the wrong places and too often.

But.

That is the only qualm I have.

PLEASE. PLEASE GET THIS PUBLISHED. I wish to hold it in my hands ;^; I've already saved it onto my PC for reading when the net is inaccessible. Truly amazing, and I think even people who had no interest in slightly guro styles would find this just as captivating. It was all I could think about for days, and left me stunned; something so bittersweet leaves you wondering just how you're meant to react, happy, sad, angry, bewildered, completely depressed yet pleased all at once XD

Thank you for writing this.

It's been said before, but I'll say it again.

My only disappointment with this amazing story was that I wasn't about to read it between two hard covers!

Bravo. I was swept away and left grinning like an idiot. I can't even remember the last time a story left me feeling this way!

This was beautiful.
Please continue this and possibly get it published.

Wow- I just read this entire thing over three or so hours, the writing is amazing and I felt my self feeling a scary ammount of empathy with Erich

Wow, dears. I had no idea this was still getting hits.

You're all probably correct about the comma usage--got into the habit in a very long novel in first person, because I like the sense of pause as if the speaker is deciding what to say next. Too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing, and I don't want you "jarred" I want you immersed, so when I polish this up I'll reduce the comma overload.

42, you are correct. Thank you for pointing that out. I'll fix it in edit.

I am hopeless at making web pages, but I've finally found a site that lets you do everything from the text to the cover design and provides an actual ISBN so when I get that underway I'll let you dears know. It'd be available via Amazon or special order in stores like Borders or BNN. "Real" publishers I don't think would touch this, and I'd like to have control over content and design anyway, so this solution might be best for me. And you could read it in bed as the gods intended books to be read.

Be well and have fun, all of you : )

This is a copy of a comment I left for the friend who shared this story with me. I think it applies to you, too.

( Even now, those last lines continue to echo in my mind. Those times he spent alone afterward, I was filled with such an overwhelming sense of loneliness, that I desperately wished for all of it to be real. Just so I could hold Erich and love him and promise him everything would be okay. And the first time I cried that wasn't from sadness while I was reading this, I just couldn't stop. Even now, I have the sudden urge to begin crying again. This--It's all just too beautiful that I can't even properly put my feelings into words. This has already become a part of me, the same way Kaltherzig has become a part of Erich, and to exist without ever knowing about <i>Schadenfreude</i> has simply become incomprehensible to me.

I know that I can tell you thank you for the rest of my life and never grow tired. )


This is the truth. I cannot continue to tell you how this blew my breath away, how it knocked the wind out of me, all from the emotion I felt radiating from my computer screen and becoming part of me. Thank you so much for writing this. Thank you so much.

I really cannot wait until this has been published, and if it's alright with you, I hope that you would somehow contact me with the news. Thank you.

Is your e-mail still the same?
I read this and fell in love with it, and have contacted you at the e-mail you left in the first comment post.
If it's not, please leave an updated e-mail in your next reply?

I really am looking forward to you publishing this, but would also be most happy if I could volunteer to illustrate some scenes.
you can contact me if you'd like, at:
moral_extremist (at) hotmail (dot) com

Holy crap this was amazing!
I normally wouldn't read things like this, but this was brilliant and I really enjoyed it.
Actually..I wish there was more, it's such an addiction!
_{And I find myself with the urge to draw pictures... -dies-.}

incredible. i wasted my entire day reading this when i should have been studying. i think you are one of the best authors i have ever read.

I read this for the third time. It's still as beautiful and as heartbreaking as I remembered it to be. Stunning job.

I started reading this last night and found it hard to stop, but I had to. And when I laid in bed I laid in it awake for more than an hour thinking about this. And today right when I woke up and got decent enough to come out from underneath my bed comforter and blanket, I continued reading this and some parts were just simply so realistic, its as if god made this, or as if this was based on a true story. Some parts feel like they've been imprinted in my memory cells. I loved how minor characters came and gone, like in real life. And how the story slowly crept its way out at you. I need to know somethings though.

Was Kaltherzig gay or bi or what? And if he was gay, why did he refer to Erich's gayness as a disease that he would cure and make him straight when he himself had it? I know from reading the end that he was testing to see if he could make Erich completely dependable on him as a way to cure him, and that he himself was cured, but the line where he said he cured himself while curing Erich is so mind-blowing and unexpected that I cant understand.
What DID happen to the other boy that Kalth experimented on?
Did any one know about Kalth being gay if he was?
How did Kalth know where Erich was exactly?
Was that kiss from Kalth the end of this story?
Was every main character actually speaking German and their words were put in English for us to understand what they were saying?
When Kalth was fucking Erich, was he just horny or had he grown feelings for him but didn't want to express them warmthly, and just showed them in his consideration?
Did you just think all of this up, or were there actual people you knew that made you think up the characters?
How do you pronounce Kalth and Erich?
Was all the anal play preperation for Kalth to be able to fuck him, how big is he?
Is Nanna a transexual or a femboy or a manly girl?

I seriously wish the characters were real, and they knew english, and all this didnt happen so long ago so that they'd still be the same age as they were in this story. Im seriously hoping for more chapters of this story, its literally breath-taking. I forgot to breathe during many of the scenes in this story. Sorry that this is a long comment, its just, this story is really admirable...I cant stop thinking about what Kalth said about curing himself at the same time as Erich, or about the sex scenes, and the minor characters, and what possibly might have happened in the future of this story, even though it never existed in actual time. The only bad part of this story was the whole 'were gunna put something up your ass and take pics and hope that you'll cum just from that' Im not a very big 'all about the BDSM' kind of person. But from the whole Kalth's first niceness thing I was hooked.

I read this for days.
I couldn't stop for the life of me.
I don't know... I just felt too much like I wanted to cry or vomit with emotion...
This story was an overload that I just needed and I loved.
There were bits of me everywhere and then there was just too much I couldn't understand.
I...hm. There's nothing more that can be said.
Truly, honestly, thank you.

Is this out of order or what?
Yesterday when I started reading it it was entirely different. Now everything below:

'Kaltherzig smiled. “You’ll do all of that, and whatever else I teach you, and in two years you might find yourself home, my boy.”'

is different than before. It is introducing two Hungarian twins which I haven't even read yet, and I was at the first time they actually had sex. I'm extremely confused. I don't want to read it if it's out of order. Can someone clarify?

And now, just below that chapter, is Mengele suddenly. It keeps changing.

oh my goodness. this made my day/night it made me very happy . i havent read anything with so much emotion since.... never. it was wonderful seeing as it made me cry. my deary you have such a wonderful talent i would love for this to get published. for this i really love you bb. ♥

a bit too many "," and sometimes the text is a bit too chopped up and hard to read, but that aside this is a lovely story. and a happy ending is justified :D

Congratulations... I guess... don't know what else to say, but this is actually perfect. I hope you'll get pusblished if you haven't already. I was surprised over all the details, you must know so much about...the whole subject? Anyway. hugs from Sweden <(^_^)>
Viola

Absolutely beautiful. My eyes stayed wide the whole time I read. Please write more! Please get your stories published. And please stay true to your writing.

>>56
>>57
I came back to reread this masterpiece, only to discover that I have the same problem... everything after
'Kaltherzig smiled. “You’ll do all of that, and whatever else I teach you, and in two years you might find yourself home, my boy.”'
is gone.

Could >>43
or the author upload to rapidshare, repost it on a different site, or fix it on this site? I'm kicking myself now for not saving it to disk immediately.

I'm neither the author nor >>43 but I can upload my doc file.
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e296d7a8e58b5e19c2b435915e8821d7e04e75f6e8ebb871

By the way, can anyone explain why in the end Kaltherzig asked “Did it hurt when Mengele took off your tattoo?”. I totally don't understand this part.

P.S. THIS should be not only published but filmed as well!

63, I think he was trying to verify that Erich was who he said he was.

But yeah, I have to agree with the entire thread on this one. GET IT PUBLISHED. I'd recommend this to all my friends if they weren't squicked by torture. This is really, really good. It goes way beyond good, even. I read everything in three hours, mulled over it in the night, and got up early to post this. You are amazing, and your writing is outstanding. I feel honored to have read this.

My email is thenineteen@hotmail.com Meatspace has been harsh to me lately, and I haven't checked it as often as I wanted to.

If it's giving all of you a problem with order, I'll see what I can do about getting it reposted in the next week or so. If you send me an email, I'll try to send you a copy. Please don't steal it.

Nana was transgendered: a female unfortunately born into a male body. Treatment for this would've been near impossible in that era.

Kaltherzig said to Erich "When I'm through with you you'll never need ANOTHER man again." It worked. He needs no one but Kalterzig, and vice versa.

I'm sorry, high levels of stress right now. I'll try to reply to all of you better soon.

I really needed to hear nice words tonight. Thank you all.

You are an amazing writer. I enjoyed your creativity with words and description and double meanings. Just that alone made reading this story awesome.
I guess the only question i have is, what happened to the other boy (I'm guessing he died, being that he wasn't a successful experiment, but how?)?

great details in the story as well. for some reason, i didn't mind the commas. i didn't think of them as spaces in E's thoughts (they were just weird pauses between words), so i guess i didn't really take in that aspects of the story. but they were interesting.

best story ever! Should really be a novel of some sort...

Bawww'd at the end. Would have liked to see some happy-sex at the finish, but that's all good. Please write MOAR.

Also... if at all possible, would like to see some stories that are happier. That's probably not your thing, but I kept bawling through this whole story and it broke my heart a little.

HOLY JESUS.
I cried at the end.
Ohhh Erich.
You and your hot mansex.
Thank you SO much for the story. It was a real honor to read something of your experience.
You should really make this into a novel! Do you have a Deviantart? You're amazing!

You are godly.

This brilliant piece of literature (that left me speechless, broke my heart over and over, and even managed to physically hurt me to read in some instances) needs to be published, for the love of all that is good in this world.

I was wondering, what does it mean to 'flank someone through a door'? I always thought it had something to do with steaks.

68 (Anonymous) Um, I rather thought that was happy. Boy gets boy, safe from blustery Nazi hunters and annoying tedium. Perhaps I am fucked in the head. ; ) The happysex is actually a good idea, and as another reader commented, the ending does feel rather abrupt. Perhaps an epilogue of a few years later. Kalterzig in a porch swing with a drink in his hand surveying his cocaine plantation and a happily destroyed Erich at his feet. Something.

69: Thank you, Lulu

71: I have no idea what you mean, whether you're being sarcastic, in the wrong thread, or I was drunk and put this in the story someplace. Please imagine a bunny with a pancake on its head.

thank you, 63, I didn't even see that. You are a dear.

I am so glad i found this. I stayed up till 3 am in the morning reading this, not to mention the fact I am neglecting my essay due tomorrow.

But, this was SO worth it. I ENJOYED the emotions you brought out in this story. It's so intense....

wow. I can't think of anything but WOW. Gawd, what a sexy/romantic/incredible READ.

Just what a girl needs in times of stress! haha

Wow; please do publish this. This fic is bubbling with creativity and originality. ♥♥♥♥♥

THIS.

This was the best story I've read in the longest time. Everything, from the beggining to the end was so real, and I loved every second of it.

=< by all the comments, I kinda wished I was gay and into nazzis.

That was completely amazing. I feel like I just walked through fire and it was so, so good.
If you already answered this question then I'm sorry for not reading the comments more carefully-- but have you posted anywhere else or have any other stories posted here? Do you have a fictionpress.com account or something?
I'm new to this website and I couldn't find a profile page for you or even a list of the stories (if any) that you've written.
Thank you again for writing this. I've never read anything quite like it before and you've shaken me in a way that I know will last for days. It's beautiful.
I hope you will be able to get this published and I promise to buy a copy of the book.

Wonderful story, I just had to read it in one go.
I especially like Kaltherzig <3
There are just some tiny mistakes in some of the German words, but nevertheless, the German is pretty good.

I just reread this for the third time <3 I hope you post more writing in the future whether it's short stories or more of the novel you're working.

Oh, it was so amazing... I think I'm in love with both Erich and Kaltherzig.

omg... this was so amazingly horrible and beautiful. thank you.

holy shit...that was so fucking beautiful, i nearly cried, no lie. this whole thing is extremely well written, the description of erichs state of mind throughout is wonderful.

This read like a professionally published work; a far cry better than most, I'd say.

I read it all, greedily, in one sitting. Now I am quite regretful of that fact as it is over and there is no more for me to read.

Bravo. This story moved me more than anything has in a very long time. I know I will be thinking of it for a long time to come.

I...I don't even know what to say. Except for the fact that I fucking love this. You have NO idea. Everyone says it's so amazing and stuff but...oh my gosh. This is just.../wow/. I love Ahren to death, and I found it so giggle-worthy that Kaltherzig means 'cold hearted'. And the Stockholm Syndrome-ness of Erich's behavior just made me squee so bad. To love someone that much even though they've done so many bad things...~ <3
And holy crap, Mengele scared the living hell out of me. I cringed through-out everything he did to the Hungarian twins.
Every character is just so...REAL. Even the ones that are there to be there--the ones that just carry on the story. The teacher from the beginning, Shawn, Nana...they're all just so...oh my God. You're just amazing, okay?
I like, totally love you and I love this and...ffff Ahreeennn. <3

Holy. Shit.

I was hanging out on a board when someone posted a link to here and I decided to read out of curiosity. And this is what I find. You are amazing, hands down. Even with the commas in odd places, I think this story is beautiful. I can feel your characters and their emotions. Ha ha, I'm actually not a big fan of medical torture but your style is incredible. I haven't had time or the patience lately to read through things on the internet, but this was worth it.

I sincerely hope you're trying to get this published.

I'm not even a fan of guro, am quite afraid of sadomasochism and agony and experiments and horrors that only that sort of enviroment could ever create, but I find myself completely enveloped and suffocated in this story. I feel like I can't breathe even though I'm breathing fine, that the air isn't cold or thin or fast enough. It doesn't even feel like writing anymore; after a dedicated 4 and a half hours of just getting slowly shocked and emotionally-connected until my brain turned to mush, I feel like a ghost wandering in Erich's body, in a retale of these real events. I feel just as lovesick and empty knowing that the story is over, but at least mutedly relieved to the standard that Erich did come back to Kaltherzig. Even in all my other rationalities (which are entirely numbed by now) it feels right and natural and its twistedness and obsenity seems vague and less interesting.

I would adore to have this published, and proud to have it on my shelf. It would easily be one of the best pieces of literature I'd own. So maybe I could touch it for years on end but keep it until I can't fathom or remember it, and to pick it back up on a silent night and be swallowed whole in its morbid and hungry mouth. How appropriate to have it maybe leatherbound, or at least a hardback that would show weathering. It'd be nice to look mysterious and foreboding on my shelf rather than some ambigiously titled contemporary book.

Amazing story, I cried almost throughout it all. I would love to see this published... It's absolutley beautiful . This is something I would have my children read when they're of age ( if I ever have any ) right up there with the classics in my opinion. I started reading this at around 6 pm tonight and just finished - it's just so captivating...

please get this published

This story is so amazing!! You truely are gifted and i enjoyed reading this more than any other story i have read before!! I would love to know more about what happens to them both, thankyou so much you really made my year already! Keep up the great work and good luck in the future.

P.S Please get this published i would love to own it as a book!!

Aww damn, you made me cry so hard... but in a good way.
Reading this has been one helluva emotional rollercoaster for me.

(i wish there would have been more to the actual ending, but i'm still in love with this nonetheless)


The most touching, heartbreaking, cruel, saddest, and the most lovely fic i've ever read. In other words: BEST story ever.




PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, THIS NEEDS, /NEEDS/, TO BE PUBLISHED!!!

Incidentally, it is extremely difficult to get publishers to publish something in paper that has already been "published" online on a forum or website.

please tell me you'll continue to post your writing on here- you're my favorite author on gurochan hands down

I'm not saging because this is bad, I'm saging because I don't think this author is on the site anymore.

This is a great story, however, we probably won't be getting any more.

that was amazing. i srsly teared up at the end...and i never cry
best thing i've read in a whiiiile

I'm still here. I come here often for my visual fix, and cannot help checking in to see what you're all saying.

I am a terrible mindcandy-dealer. Irresponsible to you poor dears. Since I've mailed it to a few of you I might as well post it.

92--I give zero fucking damn what "real" publishers like, don't like, want, or think anymore. I'm not wasting time, formatting, postage, breath, or dignity on the bullshit that is the Official Process any more. When this IS in dead tree form, it'll be by my hand and on my terms. Period. The hostile is not directed at you, but at the book industry in general.

Thank you all for your beautiful comments.

I fail at finishing sentences, apparently. "Might as well post it" means to look for a new thread soon. Not sure what I'll post yet, so I'll just put by 19 in the title because I'm an egotistical bastard that way. I mean, so you can find it. : )

>>97

Dude, I thought you'd died or something. I'm so glad I was wrong.

Heh, you're the bastard started being grabby at me mid-attempt-to-post for Hero's Torch (hug) (laugh) Open Office is FILLED WITH THE FAIL AND INFURIATE, or that would've gone much faster.


No, dear. I'm very hard to kill. No worries. I will always come back.

So, any chance of this ever being self published?

I've promised myself THIS YEAR, dammit. I just have to learn how to make a .pdf and get it all formatted neatly, after editing it and fixing the unanimously-too-abrupt ending.

Quality fucking writing. You use language so ... accurately.
I actually happened to quite like the pauses >_> (perhaps maybe you should use something other than commas once in a while).
It's such a pity that I had to strain my eyes reading this on my tiny mp3 player screen when I wasn't on the computer.

Oh, and I hope that give-my-email-to-you-and-you-send-me-a-copy thing is still on?

I cried. swear to god.
It was beautiful

Still on. thenineteen (at) hotmail.com

I like the pauses, I think just maybe slightly less of them would work better. Once again, in this and even WORSE in Hero's Torch, you're looking at a very unpolished text. I am terrible about making myself go back and edit. Too impatient. Thank you again, dears.

Astounding amazing delicious. This ranks up there with my favorite authors, and I read a lot. It was so fantastic. It's been echoing around in my mind for the two days it's taken me to read it (accursed work!) and I positively pleased. I've never read anything with a BDSM lean to it, and didn't really think it was a preference of mine or anything. Holy god, you are amazing. I loved every little bit of it. If you do get it self-published, I will buy it without a doubt, as soon as I can. I'm going to stop my praising now, or I won't be able to.

PS Your fantastic!

I can't seem to label this as fantasy or reality. A bit on the long side but a magnificent work. Long and good enough to be a book. I loved the kinky themes, sometimes with a spice of angst. Not exactly the happiest story I have read but I love how you wrote the ending. The whole thing's flow was smooth. Surprised me at times, since that's a good thing. This could also be a movie! The characters are very unique. Takes a mastermind to create so many.

I really loved your story, but the ending somehow seems to abrupt, and I think you could add a fanservice chapter there.
And then about the first Chapter:
When counting, you say "Eins". In German you say "Ein Apfel", one apple, but when you solely count you say: Eins.
It's only for one, at two and three ect. it's regular....you used it correctly in a later Chapter o.o"

Then sorry for bugging you, but Ausschwitz was liberated on January 45, so it somehow doesn't make sense historically.
But if you intended this from the start then I won't say a thing.

But still I really loved your work! I hope this gets published!

- Inao

I don't speak German and made the chapter heading solely via Google to try to get the 'feel' of that language into a reader's head.

I could've sworn I checked the Auschwitz liberation date, but it's been years since I wrote this, I will check again, when I try to format this for actual printing. Thank you, Inao.

: ) Be well and have fun, dears.

102, If you haven't already, yes, email me and I will send you a copy. This will teach me to read all the latest replies before I reply myself.

I read this masterpiece within one day and God, this is just too amazing for words. I never thought a part of the history of Germany could be told like that and it was just... I don't know. Somehow I feel guilty for enjoying this so much, because a lot of parts of this story were just horrible and disturbing and other parts were so full of...love? I was in a deep conflict of feelings about it but all in all I came to the conclusion that I love just that. This conflict. It makes the story perfect.
When I told my friends about this story they were like "How can you read something like that?" lol - and I answered "Why not?" because you didn't whitewash it. It still felt real.

I need this as a book in my shelf :) Truly a masterpiece. Loved every second of it. Oh a I love that you tried so hard with German words, it always made me smile when I stumbled over a word in my native language.

Mel, Willkommen im Club :P