Das Mädchen

She lies in her striped honeymoon gown glazed with dirt and scabs, all life has fled from her and the music that echoed from her core is silent as the rot of her dead flesh. I stand over her in my simple gray tweed suit, no longer a soldier but a citizen, weeping ashes that were flesh, with lips bleeding from the blisters of tormented fits in my sleep. The skull and crossbones on my lapel reflects the sun and makes an amulet that sweeps across her naked flesh until it is shadowed by low-flying birds that become steel and paper bombers flying to Berlin to kill our blue-eyed dream, our beloved fatherland. She loved that skull and crossbones pin, which was once on my hat, as though she cared not for what it represented. It was “charming,” she called it “and shiny.” She noticed I polished the silver, my attention to detail. Still faithfully wrapped around her thin beautiful finger was the engagement ring I made for her. It was a simple piece of brown twine I had given her when she accepted my proposal to be married once my wife was dead and the war was over. She didn’t know the condition concerning my wife, but I couldn’t let that spoil our romance. I lied and told her my wife was dying of a dreadful and unfortunate disease. Nazism is a disease, I justified. I would kill my wife with no reservations.

“Shiny things get taken,” I said to her first at the gate, “even crowns—the kind that princesses don’t wear.”

“I am no princess, sir,” she returned politely, assuming my obvious inference. “But I love shiny things,” she remarked smiling at the pin, as though the silver skull would smile returning her pleasantries. Those days were as dead and buried as the mass pits of thousands of Jews which are being tossed in the mouths of giant dirt holes by their fragile limbs. I cannot smell them as the English soldiers smell them, bent over at the knee, vomiting. But standing there I relive them for what more do I have than them? Than her? I am a man who has been reduced to reveling in memories, not even as though there is a full collection of memories, only one brief page in which I ever loved anything. So I continue, smiling between tears and those soldiers puking recalling das mädchen.

I had never been skilled in dallying or weak to the pretexts of beautiful women. But I was a waffling mess in that moment sitting there in front of her at our introduction. “Oh, but you are!” I replied perhaps over zealously to her previous denial. “Princess of Bergen-Belsen I declare you!” It may have been considered a mockery by anyone else but she took it as a compliment, as I intended it. I showed her my mouth, amusing her by pointing with my tongue to shiny crowns I had implanted before the war at the University which her father happened to attend. Her father, whose name and age I had recorded previously but already forgot, was the man who preceded her into the camp. My table sat inside the gate in the mud and although I was a captain, whose responsibilities were far greater than inventory, my attention to detail and lack of confidence in my inferiors to record names properly, put me in that seat. She stood there nervous with her grandmother’s locket in a clam-shut palm. I tried to convince her to give it to me for safe-keeping, but she declined. Of course, I could have taken it, but I let her keep it. I took her red petticoat in hopes I would return it to her someday. She hid the locket under her tongue for a few months before she found a place to bury it until the war ended. A dirt pawn. She danced over where dairy cows grazed before there was a war and an inferior race to purge and I watched her, marveling at her grace. Sometimes it rained but she took it like applause. I gaped at all the little steps of her little feet to Die Kleine Meerjungfrau, her only ballet she performed in Hamburg only last year.

I loved her from the moment she came into view wearing that red petticoat, stepping daintily across the mud in ballet shoes, seventeen in a line of thirty three Jews, seventeen years old by coincidence, fresh and without the cynicism of her elders. She was naïve and didn’t seem to belong to anyone or anything, floating about like a dandelion spore, not even committed the ballet in which she was so skilled. It was as though she was a fly, stuck to no ideal, no principle or no life. She smiled, then practically danced into the stockyard not deterred by jeers or the mud, nor by the horror of her living area, the lack of sanitation or fresh food and water, as though she was impervious to the nightmare, dreaming a different dream with eyes wide open, and as though she couldn’t smell the death that sat down upon this former cow pasture strangled by an ominous barbwire fence.

She couldn’t have come soon enough, like a dream in the dearth of my existence, or a deluge of water in the thralls of dehydration. I had nearly committed suicide twice before I saw her. Her lips, naturally matched the red of her petticoat. Bombers flew overhead in the bright blue sky as we spoke that first day and she looked up like a flightless bird, one with wings clipped yet to understand her condition. Her chin was so subtle and her throat exposed and pure. So sweet she spoke, “Clara Von Burk, seventeen, sir,” that rather than keeping my eye on the swirling ink of my proud penmanship, I faltered and looked up. Her hair was brown and to her delicate jawline, her eyes the amber color of Captain Kruger’s American whiskey in the bottom of the glass in the shots we took after long days before heading home to our miserable wives. Her lips divine cherries in my boyhood palm and every other article congruous to the last, every feature of her unblemished face remarkable of its own merit. Seeing her I realized the blonde hair and blue eyes of the Aryan ideal bores me and I, despite the affliction of my uniform, do not share my wife’s or my government’s ardent beliefs that we are somehow right in what we do. Yet, here I am. And perhaps that is a testament to my weakness, that I feel it is wrong, yet I am unequivocally involved, my hands although not eager, bloodier than most. It wasn’t merely how beautiful she was, it was the smile on her face, the life in her eyes, her youth I wished to drink like a vampire drinks, and what cannot be explained by someone as ineloquent as an officer in a German death camp. But I failed her. I didn’t live up to the brown twine ring nor the nights we shared in my office when she was thankful to have a toilet and things I brought her from my wife’s cabinet and jewelry box. Things that made her feel human for a while—the shiny earrings that dangled from her delicate lobes and the perfume on her skin.

There is no modesty in death but I haven’t the will to cover her naked body. There is no hope for her to stand again and show me the steps of the little mermaid, explaining to me kindly the tragedy of what I do not understand, like art in a museum, or the opera, or politics, to my detriment. I read the play when I went home a few weeks after we met and I didn’t feel the passion she had for it until I saw her perform it so divinely and without the benefit of an orchestra or a proper stage. I brought her food which at first she proudly refused, but after a few weeks of hunger, which she took for payment in dancing for me all those steps she once danced on a stage in Hamburg. How I dreamed of seeing her perform after the war! To whisk her away to a hotel and spoil her with chocolates and affection! That page of a memory expired and my tears bathed the dirt and her sore skin, scabbed over from the fleeing lice, the pattern the louse wore leaving in her the disease.

I was recognized standing there over my beloved mädchen, yet to decide what I was going to do with her body. The English liberated the camp and I, pretending to be a local volunteer, buried thousands of dead Jews, none of whom I really recognized before I found her—although their names I surely inscribed into a ledger. I drug her aside and stared at her. One of my former sergeants informed the English officer that I was Captain Hugo Klimt, who had escaped from Bergen-Belsen only a few weeks before the English arrived. I was arrested immediately and taken into what was my office where an English Major, Major Kettering, asked me questions that was an awkward sort of interrogation. “Are you Captain Hugo Klimt of the SS?”

“Ja.” I refused to speak English though I knew it well until it was clear he would have to call upon one of my former inferiors to translate. Being that I wasn’t confident in their capacity to do so accurately or articulately, I spoke their English.

“Why did you return?”

“I was in love with the girl. I hoped she was still alive.” I said pathetically.

“Why did you flee?”

“I killed my wife and Captain Kruger. I had a plan for the girl and I to escape, but she declined.”

“She refused to leave a death camp?” he countered sardonically smoking a fat cigar. He puffed rings of smoke and watched them hang there.

“Yes,” I said calmly holding back my tears. I recalled the story to the major and his subordinates, one who took transcription. I didn’t know I had the capacity to weep so heavily, drinking what was left of Capt. Kruger’s American whiskey, which was kindly offered to me by the major. The cigar I refused. I recalled sitting in my office, Capt. Kruger sitting dead with a hole in his thick head staring at me from across the room. He had large brown narrow eyes and a passion for death that I lacked. I knew the allies would invade the camp and we would be forced to bury the dead or die with them. The officers and anyone of importance would be arrested and certainly face trial for the atrocities committed under our direction. Stacks of bodies were the evidence, rotting in piles around the once lush pasture that was a now a field of dirt and rock, as though alien to Earth. We hadn’t perfected the efficiency of disposing of what he we had mastered in killing. We hadn’t time yet to burn or bury the piles which were covered partially in snow from a late snowfall, which the girl last danced beautifully in I recall. The vultures, crows, and rats were grateful for our incompetence. The dirt is no place for a lady, and life is no place for a monster that lets what he loves die in it.

“Why didn’t she leave with you, Captain?” the Major asked.

She refused our escape for she couldn’t remember where she had buried her locket. I waited at the hole in the fence in my automobile dressed as I am now dressed—as a civilian in clothes from my youth, when I was as young as her. I even wore my hair the same way and sprayed myself with cologne for the first time in a dozen years. She came to the hole as I directed her to do and cried out that she couldn’t find it. I begged her to come but she wouldn’t go. Her father and mother had died a month earlier and her sanity was delicate at best.  “Komm schon, Clara! Sie müssen laufen!” I shouted repeatedly. I knew the spotlight of the tower would soon sweep over her. “Warten! Warten! Bitte!” She replied. “Ich kann nicht ohne ihn verlassen.” She would not leave without the locket. Then there were the ominous low flying birds that became bombers flying the other way towards Berlin. It was too late. I had to leave her, Capt. Kruger knew I killed my wife and I shot him shortly before the escape. Das mädchen, he called her simply when we got drunk on his whiskey. Das mädchen! Das mädchen! He repeated, teasing me for my love. I had strangled my wife that morning with pleasure. She was a Nazi bitch who smothered in me any liberty, spirit and humanity. She relished the smell of death on my uniform and visited the camp with the other officer’s wives, proud as peacocks for their government’s extermination of the vermin. Death being easy to me. So easy. Those who made me killers I killed. And I will no longer wear the uniform.

            “And you found this girl’s body?”

            “Yes,” I said weakly.

            “I have always been a fool for a love story, however, demented it may be. For the girl’s sake, I will allow you to lay her to rest, Captain, and for the sake you killed your own. It’s like trying to kill yourself, or what you have done. Something in you isn’t like the others. Not that you’re better, only that you understand you are evil.” The Major puffed the last of his cigar and snuffed it out into the base of Kruger’s glass ashtray. The sound of the machines making pits outside of the office bellowed in the bowels of the room. I drank the last of the whiskey. What was left in the bottom of the glass looked like the color of her eyes and I smiled sadly. Then he stood up and directed a soldier to take me and give me what I needed to bury the girl then bring me back to the office. The soldier complied and retrieved a shovel from a supply vehicle and allowed me to lead him to the body. There she lied when we returned in the same position. I wept so intensely that I could barely stand. I used the shovel for support. Two soldiers placed her on a stretcher and the soldier who had been given the order by the Major told me to pick a spot where I wished to bury her and make it quick. I looked at the field where she danced, what wasn’t pitted by the machines already, and I remembered her last few steps. They always occurred over a certain spot.

            I dug furiously. I remembered I had left an item in the office and I asked one of the soldiers to retrieve it for me. He looked at the soldier who had taken the original order from Major Kettering, who nodded in affirmation, then walked away to get it. I softened the ground with my tears. I was once so ashamed to weep but now it seemed like dozens of years of repressed emotions poured out of me. Bombers flew overhead that would soon become blackbirds. Her ballet shoes were worn through and her feet were scabbed and frostbitten. How did I ever neglect her so terribly? Why didn’t she come? One of the soldiers helped dig and with his work Clara’s grave was finished in an hour. I almost resented him for helping for when it was finished all there was left was to put her in it—to give her to the earth. The soldier returned with the item I requested. It was Clara’s red petticoat which I had kept in my office for the day she was free. At last, it came. I climbed inside the hole and said a few words in German before taking her in my arms, wrapping her in that coat, and lowering her to the bottom. From my pocket I pulled my luger and placed it in my mouth. But I didn’t pull the trigger as I intended. I choked on the steel. The soldiers shouted at me in English and turned their weapons towards me as though that would be effective. It is all they knew how to do for they were merely soldiers after all.

            After I lowered the gun they looked at each other. Nothing shocked them—they were long-since desensitized to the horror of humanity as I had been. They were too far into war to be shocked or appalled. Had I pulled the trigger they would have simply kicked my brains in the grave and buried me there with her. It would have been a far more romantic end to a tragic story but it wasn’t the end. My head buzzed like a hive full of whiskey bees. Instead of pulling the trigger, I withdrew the luger and laid it beside Clara in her grave. I reached up and one of the men helped me out of the pit. I looked down onto my little mermaid in the ground and wept more. Then I shoveled the dirt onto her until she disappeared. It was a dozen or so shovelfuls when I noticed the shiny silver object. I picked it up in my hand and stared at it in the sunlight. It was her locket. I put it in my pocket and continued burying the only person I had ever loved in this world.

            I stood trial for over a hundred thousand counts of murder, not one of them for Capt. Kruger or my wife. The enormity of my crimes seemed impossible for the prosecution and judges to comprehend. They were robotic in their approach, stoic perhaps. While I was being tried I was held in a small cell were I recalled Clara and the opportunity I had to save her. I was visited by a small white mouse that crawled through a tiny hole in the wall who I named Snowbell. Snowbell told me stories of life outside of my cell where I stayed locked up for nearly a year before the verdict was finally conferred upon me—guilty of all counts. I was relieved that I would be executed but instead I was sentenced to life in prison. Three years I spent locked away with no visitors when I was informed by a sympathizing guard that my conviction was overturned. I was given my gray tweed suit and allowed to leave. I took the train back to Berlin and found it in chaos. The communists, who were perhaps the only collection of assholes more terrible than the Nazis, were in control. I didn’t know the city any longer and for better or worse there was no feeling of German pride. The skull and crossbones I wore on my lapel to remind me of Clara was criminalized. They snuffed out every implication that they were ever guilty of such crimes they hired me once to perform. But they were all guilty by their indifference. Nazism, the disease, was eradicated from the country and even a mention of it could lead to prison or execution. I took a train to Bergen, which was no longer stained with the smell of death. Then I took a train to Hamburg and watched The Little Mermaid. I imagined Clara dancing and her perfect toes playing across the stage the way they did in the dirt of Belsen. She had mastered the dance. But I still didn’t understand it. Then I saw her—in the same red petticoat—but I let her go for I knew it was not her. It was only my imagination. Then I took the train to France in hopes that someday I could forget das mädchen.