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 audib