Playing for Time (19 page)

The loss of their property, whose replacement they would now have to spend weeks “organizing” with their bread rations, depressed the girls utterly. Now hunger would rack them further still.

Marta passed haughtily in front of us, carrying a bucket. She went out into the wind and rain—we got water from outside, from the taps of the hut opposite, the lavatory block. She came in again with the same expression of icy indifference. The full bucket tugged at her thin arm, transforming it into a gaunt vertical line, a sort of rod of bone ending in a bucket slopping with water.

“Ah, it’s Marta who’s going to wash the floor,” I commented automatically. “Who punished her, and why?”

“Why, does she interest you?” muttered Florette.

“Yes, look at her. She can hardly stand and yet she’s carrying that bucket as if she couldn’t care less.”

“Don’t you worry about her. With what her sister brings her from Canada, she’ll soon be back in form.”

“You don’t seem overfond of her?”

“Well, she’s a great faultfinder, and her pompous way of talking High German annoys me. She’s been brought up like a princess; she’s probably never done any dusting even. She’s the kind who doesn’t like to soil the tip of her little finger.”

On her knees, Marta certainly looked very clumsy; she had plunged her cloth into the water and hadn’t wrung it out enough, so that it spread enormous puddles of water. I’d have liked to help her, but the girls wouldn’t have allowed me to, and I had no desire to provoke another lecture on charity. Her lovely statuesque face expressed nothing except a real weariness.

The call of a runner announcing an SS warden—we were being treated to the works this morning—immobilized us. I’d never seen this one—she was a real Kraut: gaunt cheekbones, a heavy jaw, deep-set blue-green eyes with sharp brow ridges, blond but lacklustre hair. What did she want here? Her attention was caught by Marta, still on her knees amid her spreading puddles. A look of satisfaction crossed the bony face. Towering above her, legs apart, hands on hips, she planted herself a yard or so away from the toiling Marta; her whole mass of flesh and bone seemed to judge her work reprovingly. Her look expressed such disgust that a shudder of concern passed through us all. Was she going to bawl:
“Aufsteben! Raus!”
and take her off to Block 25? That was her right: Marta didn’t know how to wash this floor; unable to perform her task, she was botching it, and that merited the death penalty. For this Nazi, it was evidently more important to be able to clean a floor properly than to play the cello.

We didn’t have to wait long; with a violent kick of her boot, the SS sent Marta to the other end of the room. I saw Little Irene go pale. Marta stood up coldly.

With a swagger, the German declared, “I’m going to give you a lesson.”

Then we were treated to an astounding spectacle: the virago tucked up her skirt and knelt down. Head high, looking superior, she seized the cloth in both hands and squeezed it powerfully into the bucket; then, with quick skilful movements, she mopped up the puddles and embarked on a masterly cleaning of the floor. We had to admit she knew her stuff, the bitch.

In stunned silence Alma, Tchaikowska, Founia, and Marila didn’t miss a moment of the sight: it reversed the established order of things. There was absolute silence, broken only by the sound of the rubbing of the cloth on the floor. Petrified, we contemplated this woman who had the power of life and death over each of us, on her knees in front of Marta, serene and erect but not at attention. Marta was only seventeen, but she was observing the SS woman at her feet with utter insolence. Her expression fascinated me. I wasn’t the only one; there was admiration in the eyes of Little Irene, a tender admiration I wouldn’t have thought her capable of.

When she came to the end of the room, squeezing her cloth for the last time, the warden got up, and the pitch of our anguish rose. She pulled at her skirt and looked Marta up and down contemptuously, then said, chin high: “That’s how you wash a floor; now you know.”

“
Ja
, Frau Aufseherin!”

There was such arrogance in this reply that I saw Alma swallow desperately; one didn’t confront SS, or attempt to stand up to them. Calmly, the German turned her back on us and went out. Our room had never been so clean.

The laughter we’d been holding back burst out all the more violently for being triggered off by fear. The event had indeed been exceptional, not only because we had seen an SS on her knees washing the floor, proud of having perfectly accomplished such a “marvellous” task, but because something had occurred between her and Marta, even though we’d have been hard put to it to say what. Coldly, with the overweening air of a member of the Prussian gentry, Marta informed us: “That woman was the maid of all work in my father’s house.”

Then she calmly took her cello and went to sit in her place.

The news was astounding, and naturally required some comment.

“All I wonder,” Jenny said in amazement, “is why Mrs. Mop didn’t send her to take the air in the crematorium.”

“My God,” Clara cut in, “she’ll send us all to Block Twenty-five. Just because of that idiot.”

“Don’t be crazy! The woman’s so dazed by her own propaganda that she thinks we were lost in admiration of her, scrubbing the floor like a loon!”

“Come off it, though,” Jenny persisted. “Did she take what she saw in Marta’s peepers for admiration? She’d need to be even stupider than she is!”

“I must say I liked Marta’s courage. To brazen it out with that SS woman when she had more to fear from her than any other. What nerve!”

This praise, coming from Little Irene, brought a gleam of jealous disquiet into Florette’s eye.

We never ceased bickering over this incident; it entered our mythology, and as we gathered round the stove at night, chewing our bread, each of us would tilt it to suit her own particular purpose. Jenny turned it into a sort of cardboard cutout of the mock-heroic type, where Marta, in the triumphal attitude of the noble explorer, received the obeisance of the conquered chief cowering at his feet! With Big Irene, we entered the sugary domain of the novelette: the former maid flew to the help of the mistress she’d always secretly admired. Lili used it as the basis for a tragedy, whose first two acts we were acquainted with but whose third was to be devoted to the vengeance which was going to wreak havoc among us all.

Observing Marta, I thought how irritating she must find these commentaries. Silent, haughty, self-absorbed, she was visibly elsewhere. I tried to imagine her walled domain: did her dreams encompass an unknown partner or did she enjoy a romantic solitude?

Marta manifested a distrust of everything that wasn’t her own world, and this limited her relations with the girls. “She doesn’t even meet us half way,” Florette would complain, exasperated by this attitude. I realized that shyness had a lot to do with it, that she was ill at ease in this odd world which was ours; she found it as worrying as everything else that hadn’t been codified by her milieu. Even the long conversations she had with her sister Renate, two years older than she, were reserved: they might have been figures in a painting by a minor master of the English school, “Young Ladies in Conversation.” Renate too was very beautiful, but Marta had some special promise, as of imminent incandescence.

Beside her Little Irene was strangely silent, taking no part in the interpretation. I’d been waiting for some sort of clear statement from her, Marxist in tone, on the concepts of serfdom, proletarian revenge, something incontrovertible; but she seemed absent, so distant that she made a clumsy movement causing her neighbour’s bread to fall from her hand.

“Oh, I’m sorry!”

“That’s all right,” said Marta, bending down.

Quicker on the draw, Irene picked it up and handed it to her. She murmured thanks and her cheeks darkened.

The brown moss that did duty as hair gave Marta the look of a little boy. Her mat complexion, long-lashed dark eyes, clearly denned mouth and the proud way she held her head reminded me somehow of those Berber adolescents one sees leaning meditatively against doorposts in pictures of Moroccan medinas.

She raised her head towards me, and her thoughtful look came closer to home. For a moment I thought she was going to smile, and that reminded me that I still didn’t know what sort of effect that would have on her face. What a strange girl; her hidden frailty was apparent to me, fleetingly, at that moment.

I was alone by the stove. As usual, Ewa and I had been reciting poetry to one another: it was our way of keeping in contact with the other world. Florette, chin on knees, Anny and Big Irene had listened to us. Clara, in a corner, a scrap of mirror in her hand, rehearsed her songs to herself, studying her expression. I had told them an installment of the
Picture of Dorian Gray;
each evening, from memory, I “read” them a chapter before they went to bed. The dormitory was now asleep, with an odd sigh, a groan, a childish mutter from the depth of a dream. Numbed by the warmth of the stove, I was daydreaming; when I left its circle of warmth it would be cold, and I dreaded that moment.

A piece of music I wanted to write—a symphony, no less— was taking shape inside my head. How one could feel the urge to create in such a place I don’t know, but then how could one want to do anything at all?

“Am I disturbing you?”

It was Marta; in the long nightdress which her sister had given her, she looked like a demure schoolgirl, but dreadfully thin. Furious gusts of wind were driving the rain against the windowpanes.

“To think that a few days ago Little Irene was drawing lilac and talking about the spring!”

Marta was enthusiastic: “She draws very well, don’t you think? I’m better off with a bow, myself!”

“Better than with a cleaning cloth!”

She gave a quick, reticent little laugh.

I continued: “You were marvellous. What a wonderful reversal of roles. You were the queen and she the slave.”

“You know, in our house, she was never treated like that. We looked after her well, very well. We had a cook, a nurse, and a chambermaid. Actually, I might not have recognized her—I didn’t see her much. She did only the rough work.”

She gave another unobtrusive little laugh. “She’s right, I certainly don’t know anything about housework; I wasn’t brought up that way. How could my father have thought that such things would be useful to me? I went to the University and the Conservatoire. Music took up much of my day. My parents used to entertain a lot; my father is a successful lawyer. We felt sheltered, protected. We wore the star but we’d never been worried. My sister and I were arrested in an unexpected way, in the street, in a roundup, and as we were Jewish, we were deported.”

A slight smile softened the cold lines of her face. I could easily imagine her with a chignon at the nape of her long, fragile neck. Women grumbled: “Quiet! We can’t sleep.”

“Marta, we’d better go to bed or she’ll come down on us like a ton of bricks.”

Unconvinced, she nodded, wished me good night. I almost expected her to hold out her hand like a well-brought-up young girl and, thinking of this gesture, I realized that we were totally cut off from it, that it was something forgotten, a movement for a civilized world. In bed, I thought of Marta; this evening she seemed so totally different from the heroine of the other morning. I didn’t know why, but I felt she was somehow slightly pathetic.

A furtive shuffling, the wood of my bed creaked, and a head appeared: it was Marta.

“Fania, are you asleep? Am I disturbing you?”

“No, not at all, come up here beside me.”

She climbed up and sat at the foot of what served me as a bed. “I can’t sleep, I’d like to talk to you for a bit.”

“Lie down here, we can talk more quietly.” Long and thin as she was, she occupied almost no space. The fact that she had dared to make this approach didn’t seem to me in keeping with her distant manner. She must have had something to say to me. She sighed slightly.

“When I came out of the Revier, I was glad that there were French girls here—you have a lighter way of taking life, you laugh easily, and I thought I’d be able to speak French. I’ve grown fond of your literature, particularly your poets.”

I doubted whether she had climbed up here to talk to me about poetry. Lying slightly stiff at my side, she continued in a more worldly fashion. “I’m very fond of Little Irene, she’s very intelligent. One can talk about so many things with her. I’m not so fond of Florette—she’s hard, there’s something uncouth in her that inhibits me; she so easily loses all sense of proportion. One person who strikes me as remarkable and well educated is Ewa; she’s intelligent, too. But Irene’s intelligence is more positive, more concise; Ewa’s mind is made for poetic speculation, whereas Irene’s is constructive. The sort of mind we’re going to need after the war!”

All this was chatter of no importance and I let it pass. A silence fell; Marta moved slightly, breathed a bit more nervously, then gently asked: “I may be disturbing you, but I’d like you to talk to me about Irene.”

“Which one?” I asked provocatively.

Suddenly cool, she answered: “You know which one.” There was another silence.

I told her what I knew about Irene: that she belonged to the Communist Youth movement, about her action in the Resistance alongside Paul. When I told her that they’d both been taken to the fort of Romainville to be shot, that she’d been in the death cell and known those uncertain dawns when one waits for the door to open on the chaplain, I sensed that she was moved. She was living through Irene’s anguish; this daughter of the upper classes was burning with the unknown faith of political martyrs. I talked to her at length about Irene’s positive character, about her sense of duty imbued with dialectical Marxism, her exemplary behaviour in our block, her imperviousness to our bursts of ill-humour and our collective hysterics.

She was satisfied; her heroine had passed the test. “That’s just as I imagine her. I like her way of behaving with the SS. She’s not big physically, and yet she has a firm, unprovocative way of looking them in the eye, of standing in front of them, which impresses them. They respect her. Also, I love her face; she’s so beautiful, so much more so than I am…”