This is a piece of flash fiction I wrote in a feverish upswing of my writing pendulum. It's been rejected enough times to offer for free. It's usually rejected with praise for the writing but nevertheless shitcanned because the subject matter is incongruous with the magazine or anthology's overall theme (there's just not a lot of Holocaust fiction that tries to understand the German's side of the atrocities committed).
When my wife read it, she couldn't separate the I of the narrator and me, her husband, which made for a pretty comical discussion. It's told from a German housewife's viewpoint.
------
I Know Their Number
In the half-light of dawn, I watch Hans harness Elke to the wagon, breath steaming, while she champs and stamps and nudges him to get the carrot out of his pocket. He is too busy coughing to notice. He doubles over, and coughs into his sleeve, over and over. When he straightens, he looks at the house, furtively, but doesn't see me watching from the window.
The ovens burn today, and the great plumes of black smoke rise toward the low clouds, smearing the sky like charcoal on gray linens. I can see the pillars of smoke, past the row of houses across the lane and dairy, past the Breitenau church steeple. They blot out half of the sky.
From where I sit, I watch as Hans drives the wagon to the dairy and men load gray pewter jugs of milk into its bed. Hans coughs as he greets the dairy-workers, raising a pallid hand. They place great wax covered wheels of ripe cheese alongside the milk. The men handle them like munitions, reverent, silent, cold.
I can see their faces, the men. White faces trying to smile and failing. The ovens are running today and the men can't smile. I watch from the window.
Hans signs a ledger and reins Elke and the wagon east, towards the camp and his rounds.
Frau Kurst stops for lunch and we eat tinned sardines on crackers. Her boy, Wilkens, is Schutzstaffel, unlike mine, who is dead. Wilkens sends sherry and schnapps and French cigarettes. She shares them with me and we smoke and drink and watch the traffic on the lane in front of the dairy. After she leaves, I do laundry, but it's near impossible on days like this. The clothes only turn more gray.
In the evening the wind changes and turns west north-west. Ash begins to fall from the sky, like snow. Hans is coughing when he turns into our courtyard. Elke hangs her head, weary.
In the quiet stillness of night, we make love. He moves against me in desperation, kissing my breasts, then buries his face in the crook of my neck. He gasps and I don't know if it's because he can't breathe or because of his orgasm. He coughs afterward and blood flecks his handkerchief.
He smokes and watches me from the bed. Naked, I rise and fill a basin and wash his semen from my thighs. He likes the heaviness of my breasts, the thickness of my thighs and I like to please him. I hate the way my skin looks old now, mottled and loose, but Hans doesn't seem to mind. The washcloth turns gray on my skin and the water in the basin darkens.
"Ilsa, we can have another." He says this as if it will bring my baby back.
I wash my thighs and look at him. He's lying there, staring at the ceiling, a cigarette held loosely between his index and middle finger. Hans has always had fine, articulate hands. Smoke drools toward the ceiling. He turns his head and looks at me. Then touches himself, still smoking.
"Come back to bed and we'll try again."
We'd married young and lost our boy Ernst to the Jungsturm and then lost him forever in the Berlin firebombings. But I can't have another. Once the ovens started running, my periods disappeared, like a well going dry.
Hans has his cough and I'm not a mother anymore and the sky is gray.
I can see Hans' eyes become lidded, and close. He is more ambitious than his body. His snores sound like the whisper of a broom sweeping a hearth, sooty and black. I go downstairs and sit at the window.
Later, after all the lights in Breitenau have dimmed, I wait for the rumbling. I drink the sherry Frau Kurst has left me and smoke cigarettes until my breath becomes a rasp and my throat hurts. Occasionally, I hear Hans shift and cough in bed.
The rumbling grows. And then trucks are in the lane, passing the dairy. Hans sleeps above me, unknowing.
The trucks pass and I can see the pale faces staring between the slats. White skin and luminous eyes look out from the truckbeds. Twenty trucks roar by, each one massive and black and salted with staring white faces. They see me.
In the morning, the pillars of smoke still hang over Dachau. The ovens are running.
Arbeit Macht Frei.
Hans coughs as he comes down the stairs. I don't tell him about the trucks. He doesn't need to know. He doesn't need to learn how many passed, where they were going or who they carried.
He coughs into his sleeve, trying to hide the blood, and walks out into the gray morning to harness Elke.
I know their number.
Posts
