The History Of History Part 7

But she did not lose heart.

The flea market at Ostbahnhof occurred to her. At Ostbahnhof, the bl.u.s.tering men with their long mustaches, the military history buffs, selling books about bunker engineering, FlaK guns, and Werner Heisenberg, would certainly have the Klabunde biography. They had everything that was difficult to find.

Margaret went to bed hopeful. Her speculations would perhaps be confirmed. She would read the testimony of this Ello Quandt the very next day, and perhaps make of Magda Goebbels a heroine of consistency-the hawk-woman at the window a fine and permanently reenn.o.bled sort of Lucifer.

Of course, Margaret still couldn't sleep. She lay in bed not unhappily, however, going over the details of Magda Goebbels's life, becoming more and more entranced by the idea of the woman as self-entrapped intellectual initiating and carrying out her own form of justice. The bedroom, as Margaret had these thoughts, was lifting; the bedroom was lifting and flying.

In the morning she rode her bicycle a long time to reach the Eastern flea market. she rode her bicycle a long time to reach the Eastern flea market.

A great swoosh of upward feeling buoyed her when she was there. The flea market ran in a trough of flesh behind the looming S-Bahn station, parallel to the tracks. The station hovered over it like a giant with wide-open throat. When Margaret emerged into the light and saw the stands crackling with people, she began to buzz happily.

A souvenir collection of ten high-gloss photographs of the town of Kleine Scheidegg in Switzerland; a series of 1930s brochure books, showing large pictures of the Tyrolean alps: Du Mein Tirol Du Mein Tirol, one was called; an aluminum cigarette etui from the Ukraine, emblazoned with the slogan "Slava Oktyabryu" and a rendering of the October Revolution in formalist strokes; a brown leather GDR pencil case decorated with golden fleurs-de-lys; a Berlin guidebook from 1902 with four-color map-Margaret bought all of this, in a burst of something like affection.

Then she got down to the work of finding the Meissner biography. She went to each bookstall in turn. All the booksellers with their beards and gruff ways, heavy books encased in plastic, had indeed heard of it; no one had it for sale. Each one said he was sure another one did, but no sooner was the next man found than he referred her away again. She went down a grapevine of rebuff through the market, all the way to the end. The biography was nowhere to be found.

Now Margaret felt a bit of fever, the kind that had come once when she couldn't find Magda Goebbels's letter. She felt as though everything were riding on not just the content, but the tone of this biography she was seeking, as if it would reveal some s.h.i.+ning, heretofore unimagined subtlety to Magda's friend Ello Quandt, or even suggest some soulful depth to Magda Goebbels's own character.

Beyond the lines of tables, around the corner on a cobblestone side street, the market continued unofficially. In this impromptu aisle, the wares were on card tables brought from home. It was a sad-looking market. A young man with a red face was shouting with another man farther on. "Leck mich am Arsch, du Arschloch." His Berlin accent was heavy. The other man became sullen and silent, his gaze fixed ahead. Margaret glanced over their tables, without any particular hope.

The table before her, for instance, was almost entirely empty. There were only two heavy books lying on it. These were sitting wide apart from each other, carefully placed. Margaret glanced at them and thought they were ornamental Bibles. The books were very thick, bound in leather with gilt pages, Gothic type on the spine. Margaret put her hand out to examine one of them.

She had approached casually, but the young man with the red face whipped around and fixed her with fury. She regretted going near, but she was already in motion-she could not stop herself; she went ahead and opened the book and began to fumble with the tissue-thin paper as if to see the t.i.tle, although after she saw the man's face-it was funny, but she already knew: she was holding Hitler's diatribe, Mein Kampf Mein Kampf.

The book was illegal in this country. She had never seen it for sale; she had in fact never seen an unabridged German edition with her own eyes anywhere at all. Two generations after the war, and the book that had once been in every house was nowhere to be found. She did not know whether the man could be arrested for selling it, or whether she could be arrested for buying it.

It is impossible to overstate how much it meant to Margaret in her present mood-precisely this book.

She asked: "How much?" in a low voice. The man snapped up the other copy and packed it away. At first she thought he would not answer.

Finally he said: "That one is two hundred euros. This one here is two hundred fifty."

Margaret was shocked. "That's far too much."

"Don't buy it then." He turned his back on her.

Margaret had Mein Kampf Mein Kampf in an English translation at home, but the German edition looked nothing like it. What struck her was how carefully the book she held had been designed to look like a religious text. That would be Goebbels's work. She noticed a tiny embossed gold swastika on the leather cover where a cross would usually be. Margaret had a Bible at home that felt just like this, the same weight and leather flop in the hands. The pages in both books were like onionskin, and the smell was also the same. in an English translation at home, but the German edition looked nothing like it. What struck her was how carefully the book she held had been designed to look like a religious text. That would be Goebbels's work. She noticed a tiny embossed gold swastika on the leather cover where a cross would usually be. Margaret had a Bible at home that felt just like this, the same weight and leather flop in the hands. The pages in both books were like onionskin, and the smell was also the same.

She was holding the book under her nose. And right then, to her surprise, just as Goebbels had meant her to, she saw n.a.z.ism as a religion. In a flash, she felt the scope of it, bigger than ever. It was a religion because it steeped everything in Germany in meaning. Fascism had made the world's fluttering sights and frothy sounds, buoyant wares and technicolored sensations full of weight and pith and awesome death for those who could manage to live with its cruelty. Even now: here was Margaret herself, borne up on the tide and design of it, all her landmarks came out of it, her compa.s.s was calibrated to those lodestones. How could it not excite her? Margaret's own ident.i.ty, blank as it had become-her own sense of herself as redeemable-was dependent on it as on the devil; what a role it had to play, if you would let it!

Could she grow out of its soil? What could this moral system teach her, inversely, about how to live and how to discriminate?

Could she manage to reject its songs, its films? Yes, that easily.

But could she reject its ideas, its only slowly dying people, its correlations, its loose ends? What was one to do with the truckloads of lost meaning? The correlations sat now in a garbage dump. Margaret put the heavy book down, her cheeks flushed with shame. She wandered away, so deep in herself she could not see.

Maybe it was the intense of the blue sky over Holzmarktstra.s.se, or maybe she was tired from the nights of insomnia-but all at once she broke through a membrane and thought: I have nothing. None of these things once offered by fascism are things I have in my own life. Nothing means anything to me at all. How could it, without memory?

She walked a few steps farther. She realized with a kind of surprise that her own life had no meaning at all, and with this she was not saying that it had no larger meaning-although it did not-but rather that there were no small correspondences either. Buoyant, frothy, wispy little life.

She was drawn back toward the book. She took a few steps toward the table.

Margaret's mother's family had been loud, her father's family silent. When things happened in her father's family (she remembered her grandfather), they disappeared forever, whether they be double-jointedness or stock market gains, failed marriages or stillbirths, they remained unnoted and uncorrelated. By contrast, in her mother's family, events and characteristics were repeated endlessly, told to laughs or made into a refrain, until everything you did or had done to you was part of the pounding myth, a link in the chain, part of history, part of television. Margaret had not been able to stand it, she had gone the way of her father's family-in silence.

The city had turned to flesh. What if soon she had no choice but to decipher every sign, just as the doctor seemed to want?

Margaret spun around. The young man with the red face looked at her. She said, before she had even made up her mind, so that the words surprised even her: "I'll take it."

"You don't have the cash," the man said quietly. If he was surprised at her, he did not show it.

"Yes, I do." It happened that Margaret was carrying her work wallet with her, the one with the money from selling tickets for her tours. She decided that she would borrow from this wallet. It would make her month very tight. When she handed him the cash, the man did not even look at her; he took the money and made it disappear like a magician pressing it into his palm. Clearly he thought she might grab it back. And perhaps Margaret would have, too. But now it was too late. The man turned his back.

Margaret gripped the book and put it in her backpack furtively, hoping no one had seen her. And just as quickly as the money was gone, her stomach churned. She was trembling, but she could not bring herself to ask for the money back. It was already done.

She walked a few steps. She did not want her own life to signify. But she did want meaning-that sweet sensation of sphericity. The meaning of something else. The meaning of Magda Goebbels's life-the meaning of the lost world lost world.

She would make good on her connection to the hawk-woman. Even if Magda Goebbels had not seen the irony linking her husband's crimes and her children's deaths, even if she had never recognized her guilt, Margaret would begin to know Magda Goebbels's side of it: the primrose labyrinth leading her to justify a social movement of murder, maybe how the philosophy of the madman in his own words makes it all smooth and fine. Margaret thought this would be the single richest trick of her amnesiac's brain. She would allow meaning-but only the meaning of a n.a.z.i.

Riding home on Linienstra.s.se, she pa.s.sed a quiet entrance to an industrial courtyard. As she sped past the dark entryway on her bicycle, she caught sight of a sun-filled courtyard beyond a tunneling entryway. All she saw was instantly gone: the glinting windows, exposed pipes, the ivy and the smoky sunlight. The flas.h.i.+ng pace of the view into the courtyard felt like nostalgia. To think of nostalgia, even without nostalgia itself, was painful and searing.

She bicycled home. She sped down Friedrichstra.s.se. She flew through Potsdamer Platz. Slowly, she began to smile. She had Adolf Hitler's book in her backpack. When she got home she would draw the curtains, shutting out even the hawk-woman, in order to read, and it would take the time out of time: not freeing her from her burden of guilt, not releasing her, no, even weighing her down all the further, but at least now with her cloudy burden no longer unpaired-no longer without an understanding of its kins.h.i.+p, as a small-time evil, with historical evil, which is large, large enough to rest on. For the great arduousness of guilt is its loneliness.

In the next days, Margaret finished the portrait in oils of Magda Goebbels. It was a beautiful piece, and when it dried, she put it on the pillow next to her own. They slept, the flesh woman and the painted woman, one with eyes closed, the other with eyes open.

She read Mein Kampf Mein Kampf according to plan. At every turn, she looked for places where Hitler's sensibility overlapped with her own. On page 65, Hitler asks: according to plan. At every turn, she looked for places where Hitler's sensibility overlapped with her own. On page 65, Hitler asks: Have we an objective right to struggle for our self-preservation, or is this justified only subjectively within ourselves?

And although Margaret knew that Hitler's idea of "self-preservation" was built on a persecution complex, she was elated. In the year 1925, he acknowledged, even if later rejecting, the possibility that his right to act on that persecution complex was perhaps only subjectively reasonable. It seemed akin to her own constant inner quizzing. And it suggested to fervid Margaret that there might be something flaccid and forgiving-not in Hitler's life, but in his character.

Finally, she came to exactly what she had been looking for. She found it in a pa.s.sage of no particular significance: Hitler's description of himself as a soldier, on a transport train during the First World War.

I saw the Rhine for the first time thus: as we rode westward along its quiet waters to defend it, the German stream of streams, from the greed of the old enemy. When through the tender veil of the early morning mist the Niederwald Monument gleamed down upon us in the gentle first rays of the sun, the old Watch on the Rhine roared out of the endless transport train into the morning sky, and I felt as though my chest became too narrow for my heart.

At this, Margaret's own chest narrowed. Perhaps there was nothing in the quotation that justified it, but for one moment, Margaret saw Hitler as young and soft and grasping and sentimental. And she did the arithmetic and figured that Hitler must have been twenty-five when he was on that train. This year, Margaret was also twenty-five.

So she saw herself there. And although to be like him was the opposite of goodness, and even the smell of it made her walk the house weak and bleary-eyed, without blood in her veins, not remembering to open the curtains in the morning or at any other time, afraid of all things light and springing, what could she do? The n.a.z.i past was her encampment now, her nest, her burrow.

ELEVEN * * Sachsenhausen Sachsenhausen

In mid-December, a cold fell over the city. Much to everyone's surprise-for it was uncommon in this part of the country and at this time of year-Berlin fell under a thick layer of ice. Temperatures dropped to twenty below zero, and people, streets, trees, and buildings shriveled into muted silhouettes of themselves. It was so freezing that Margaret didn't know whether her flesh city was still living; the buildings had frozen, had become one with the sandy ground, indistinguishable from stone.

On the coldest of these cold days, Margaret was a.s.signed to give a tour of the concentration camp memorial of Sachsenhausen. Surprisingly, given the weather, eighteen people booked places for the excursion. In the regional express train shuttling north of the city to the little town of Oranienburg where Sachsenhausen spreads its sad cloud, Margaret looked out the window, her eyes slack over the dead plains around Berlin. The open expanses of winter fields were punctuated by bails of hay tightly wrapped in plastic. In the morning light, their frost-covered surfaces smoked like gla.s.s, dull with the secret of cold.

She thought of Magda, and then of Minnebie, whom she had pictured in her mind as looking something like herself. The collapse of Magda into Minnebie into Margaret was not an unpleasant sensation. The sense of camaraderie since the hawk-woman had come and Margaret had begun to read Mein Kampf Mein Kampf was familiar to her: a sense of sure-footedness, of b.u.t.tressing, of walking with a phalanx. was familiar to her: a sense of sure-footedness, of b.u.t.tressing, of walking with a phalanx.

Whence did she know it? She racked her mind. She knew it from early childhood. To be dependent on others without resentment-what a sweet time.

She thought back on her earliest years. The time before her father became sick. She did not have very much of it. She remembered that he sometimes played "Du Bist Verruckt, mein Kind" on the harmonica, and then sang the refrain in a language that, in those years, she did not know. And once, she remembered, he had pulled the Great Dane up on its hind legs and danced with it. How she had laughed! The man who danced with a dog was the man she had loved. This was before he shut himself in his office and before they got rid of the dog.

So the feeling of walking with a phalanx, she decided, also had something to do with the suns.h.i.+ne of the psyche before it is hacked apart.

Around the train car wafted bits and pieces of the sort of conversation that always preceded a visit to the concentration camp memorial. wafted bits and pieces of the sort of conversation that always preceded a visit to the concentration camp memorial.

"Why did Hitler hate the Jews?"

"We'll never know. Terrible."

"One of them bullied him as a child maybe. You know, innocent kids' stuff, but he took it the wrong way."

"Do you think so?"

"Really, he was a weird man, wasn't he."

"What we'd call today a sociopath-"

"Like Pinochet."

"Yes, like Pinochet."

"But the Jews did have all the money, they never minded making a pretty penny off the Germans-"

"But I've heard that his own mother was Jewish-"

"Never mind that, I saw a doc.u.mentary on BBC2 where you could see plain as day he was a h.o.m.os.e.xual."

"Bah! He wasn't any different than the rest of us. Anyone might do the same thing for power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Say what you will, he was a sort of genius."

"The Germans were anti-Semites from the ground up, going back a thousand years," said another voice. "No sense looking at Hitler out of context."

The quick rattling off of chestnuts never ceased to amaze Margaret. It was several British, Australians, and Americans who sat in a group of eight seats facing one another from across the aisle, while a Norwegian couple of middle age sat farther off, outside of the anglophone gathering. A group of Argentine students sat farther away still.

Margaret herself sat with her back to the anglophone group, in a seat where she could hear them but not see them. She was seething with dislike for a particular English businessman. It was because he wore a trench coat-an inadequate coat, given the extreme cold. Margaret knew who would suffer, whose eyes would glaze over with dilettante misery. She knew it in advance. These people would be displeased with her tour no matter what she said, make her feel useless and inadequate, the tour into an endless plodding. And likely as not, she would attempt doggedly, with mounting sensationalism, to entertain them. And because she disliked the Englishman guiltily, for nothing but his coat, she felt the need to charm them all now, impress them, while still on the warm train.

So she popped up from behind her seat and addressed the sitting customers. "Hitler didn't come from an anti-Semitic family," she said loudly. "Here," she said, and reached into her backpack. She pulled out Mein Kampf Mein Kampf. She waved it for them to see, and it was as if she had drawn a lizard out of her pocket: most drew away in disgust, but her despised English businessman leaned forward with a grim smirk that seemed to say, Finally we are getting down to business.

She found the pa.s.sage she wanted with little delay.

She read to them: Today it is difficult, if not impossible, for me to say when the word "Jew" first gave me ground for special thoughts. At home I do not remember having heard the word during my father's lifetime. I believe that the old gentleman would have regarded any special emphasis on this term as cultural backwardness. In the course of his life he had arrived at more or less cosmopolitan views, which, despite his p.r.o.nounced national sentiments, not only remained intact, but also affected me to some extent.

"You see?" Margaret said. "He didn't learn anti-Semitism at home."

"He learned it when he saw what the Jews were up to in Vienna," said the businessman, smugly.

"And what was that?" asked Margaret.

"What was what?" he asked.

"What were the Jews up to in Vienna?" Surely this little man could hear the poison in her voice.

"Well, they had all the money, didn't they now," he said.

Margaret noticed with discomfort that when he spoke she was aware of his social cla.s.s; she disliked British English for its blatancy; she didn't want the information, saw it as a premature intimacy. Far better, she thought, to preserve, between strangers, a veneer of sameness.

"They didn't have 'all the money,'" Margaret said. "The idea is ridiculous. Why do people still believe the garbage spread by the n.a.z.is?" Margaret jerked her head. "If you look at the facts, neither German nor Austrian wealth was concentrated in the hands of the Jewish people; it is horrible how n.a.z.i ideas persist even today." Everyone looked at the ground and there was a heavy silence.

Margaret relented. She said, "But more important: how can you be sure Hitler hated the Jews?"

"Ha," the man scoffed. "Oh, I think he must have. Eccentric guide we have here!" he said to the Australian couple across from him. "Isn't she? Imagine Hitler, wanting to have tea with his Jewish friends? Is that what you'll argue?"

"Hitler didn't have to hate in order to destroy," Margaret said. "He was evil-but evil doesn't need any motivation." She looked out the window of the train. "And people without hatred-are doing evil things everywhere."

As soon as she had said it, this idea struck Margaret very hard. It ground into her. She applied it to herself very broadly.

But then she looked around, and all in a rush she seemed to see the faces of the customers before her as if for the first time. She told them brightly, as an addendum, that Hitler was a vegetarian. This was greeted with general disbelief. Theories of evil came and went. The train clacked northward.

When they got up to the little town of Oranienburg, the wind whistled around the train as it left them behind, making a shriek that the businessman said sounded like an incendiary bomb blowing down from a plane. The remark was met with appreciation. to the little town of Oranienburg, the wind whistled around the train as it left them behind, making a shriek that the businessman said sounded like an incendiary bomb blowing down from a plane. The remark was met with appreciation.

Margaret marched them down the main street, past the gun shop and the florist, avoiding the proprietress of the sausage and beer house, who trailed Margaret in hopes of convincing her to bring the group back to her establishment for lunch.

They walked the same route along which prisoners were once force-marched, all the way down the main road, then out of the center of town. Many of the buildings along the street were abandoned, with vacant lots overgrown.

All around was a winter silence. The cold was so thick it was difficult to breathe. No one spoke, and the silence became tighter. They walked in an involuntary single file down the sidewalk covered with ice, and turned into the last street before the camp. The houses were small. Each one had a tiny garden, enclosed, still, and frost-covered, laden with ornaments; a sundial here and a gnome there. A small dog came and pressed its bugging eyes to a parlor's picture window. When he began to bark machine-gun-like at them, everyone jumped, even though the sound was m.u.f.fled through the gla.s.s. The trees on the street were old and much taller than the one-story houses, these houses both neat and run-down, in the East German way, the windows made into proscenia with plastic lace curtains.

A chorus of cries began to echo in the distance then. No one knew exactly what it was. The sound was horrible. The sounds became louder. As they neared one of the oldest trees, a tree whose roots had piled up the sidewalk, the cries were all around them, and Margaret and the customers looked up. A colony of crows was gathered in the frozen tree, branches spread in the skeleton of a canopy. Between them, the birds were fighting over the carca.s.s of a large white bird. Some of the black birds had b.l.o.o.d.y beaks, and the snowy white bird's feathers, as it was dismembered, became pinker. Margaret felt a drop of moisture on her face, and touched it. On her finger was a spot of blood, fallen from the tree above her. The group of tourists shuddered and skittered toward the camp hastily, like game pieces being slid into a box.

Inside the camp the coniferous trees were low, and the sky tilted in an arch. The natural world made way for an open dreamscape, a geometry of cryogenics. Sachsenhausen, built by the SS in the childish shape of an isosceles triangle, with long walls rus.h.i.+ng off to pine and guard-tower vanis.h.i.+ng points, was a pedagogical place, giving lessons in sharp draftsmans.h.i.+p. The few barracks still standing smelled of paint, mildew, and ammonia; they called to the visitor for inspection, these lone seash.e.l.ls on the beach of weeds. This day, at Sachsenhausen, the great open s.p.a.ce was s.h.i.+ning with melted snow that had, in the extreme cold, refrozen, giving the open tundra a gla.s.sy surface reflecting the blue of the broad sky. Just inside the walls, Margaret noticed that underneath the snow there were mouse tunnels. That is to say, the snow was several inches thick under the ice, and the mice had tunneled inside it. The mice traced vaporous lines under the ice. the coniferous trees were low, and the sky tilted in an arch. The natural world made way for an open dreamscape, a geometry of cryogenics. Sachsenhausen, built by the SS in the childish shape of an isosceles triangle, with long walls rus.h.i.+ng off to pine and guard-tower vanis.h.i.+ng points, was a pedagogical place, giving lessons in sharp draftsmans.h.i.+p. The few barracks still standing smelled of paint, mildew, and ammonia; they called to the visitor for inspection, these lone seash.e.l.ls on the beach of weeds. This day, at Sachsenhausen, the great open s.p.a.ce was s.h.i.+ning with melted snow that had, in the extreme cold, refrozen, giving the open tundra a gla.s.sy surface reflecting the blue of the broad sky. Just inside the walls, Margaret noticed that underneath the snow there were mouse tunnels. That is to say, the snow was several inches thick under the ice, and the mice had tunneled inside it. The mice traced vaporous lines under the ice.

The first stop was the roll-call square. Here, Margaret told the tourists, thousands of prisoners had a.s.sembled every morning and every evening. The coa.r.s.e, sandy earth of the Brandenburg mark was stretched flat, stamped down ten thousand years ago by receding glaciers and sixty years ago by a cement wheel rolled about by prisoners. Today it was a s.h.i.+ning mirror in its cloak of ice. The beech trees inside the camp were large, and their black branches stark in the cold. Margaret spoke of many things-margarine rations, suicide rates among the prisoners.

Jakob Zhugashvili walked into the electric fence around the perimeter of the camp just here, in order to end his life. Margaret's head, as she spoke, seemed weighted. It dropped toward the ground. Looking at her feet, her eyes grew hotter despite the freezing cold, and her vision buzzed. All of a sudden, here at the camp, everything seemed dreadful. But why was her head so hot? Her eyes were itching. When she looked up, the sky was white.

She looked down again. Under her boots, a woman's face glowed in the ice. The reflection of the skeleton trees flashed, and the woman down inside appeared bound; it was as though the trees had dug into her. The woman's hair was chalk-like and her eyes dark.

Margaret reached under her coat and gripped the flesh of her stomach. She pinched hard. She could not afford to lose her sanity here, not while trying to give the tour. She must not. She looked up into the sky.

She led the group to the old infirmary buildings. The customers straggled along behind her in silence. The wind rose, and it sounded like ocean waves drawing back from the sh.o.r.e.

This tour had never been an easy one for Margaret. Early on, she had become accustomed to lying at several points along the way. Or, not lying exactly-omitting, underemphasizing, and sometimes overemphasizing. She was conscious that she did it, but that is not to say she did it deliberately. She had never planned the disinformation in advance. The "lies" had developed over time of their own accord. In each case, it happened like this: one day she looked at the group, looked into their faces, and instead of saying what she had planned to say, something new came out of her mouth, something more pleasing. Because we are creatures of routine and the lie usually went over well (she had only gone over the limit of her customers' credulity once or twice), on the next occasion it came out reflexively again. She had a guilty conscience about it, but at a certain point it became physically difficult to say anything else-as difficult as doing a backbend after years of stiffness. Then too, it hadn't started as artlessly as she made herself believe. It had begun because she couldn't bear the discomfort of trying to tell things in an unshaped way. How much better to make a good tour of it.

Today she started out well enough. She talked about the Jewish children who were deliberately infected with hepat.i.tis. She talked about the SS doctor, Aribert Heim, who pumped gasoline into the veins of inmates to see how quickly they would die, the same Aribert Heim who was sighted not long ago on a Spanish beach, allegedly having lived out his postwar years in South America. She showed the customers where there had been forced sterilizations; she took them to the mortuary and told them that it was here that doctors gave lethal injections to healthy young men who had a complete set of white teeth, so that their flesh could be stripped away and skeletons sold to the universities, the universities who desired perfect specimens; the living humans murdered for the sake of an academic model. Had there ever been-before this-such a motive for murder? She asked this question out loud. She talked about how the prisoners helped one another-when a new arrival came to the camp, a young man who perhaps had a complete set of teeth in his mouth, the old boys knocked out a few incisors, so the man would have a better chance.

All this was true.

But then the next part: "And there was also-" she would start to say. "At the infirmary, there was also-" she would begin. She had tried sometimes like that, early on.

It was not such a big thing. There had been a brothel here. That was all. There was a brothel in the infirmary for the prisoners' use. She had seen the photographs of the women in narrow beds.