Kapo, p.23
Kapo, page 23
The man seemed to guess this, for he turned his head more to Lamian, but did not show unease or anger; the eyes which were narrowed in suspicion now relaxed, the forehead grew smooth, and the lips parted to expose an uneven thicket of teeth. “Want some company?” A hoarse, tremulous voice, the kind Lamian would have expected from someone much older and less confident in bearing. And in the man’s dark eyes, too, there was now a humble expression. Lamian nodded, and in the same moment realized that he had misunderstood the man completely.
Looking him over more calmly now, he noticed how the fabric of his white shirt was slack, the collar ends pilled from rubbing, and his dark suit shiny from many ironings; the man himself, wiry and brisk at first glance, was in fact undernourished and nervous.
He was waving to the waiter now, and that wave was timid, too eager, as if in fear of not being noticed; and when the waiter came over, the bony man said, “The same again? All around?” in a hurried, quavering voice, as if afraid that Lamian might change his mind. Then he slid lightly from his stool, stood behind it, and tugged at the young woman. She looked at him in surprise, then hopped down, high heels clacking on the floor, dress climbing to her thighs before settling back into place and smoothing itself out. The bony man grabbed her arm and moved her to the place he had just vacated. “In the middle, in the middle! Ladies in the middle, that’s the rule!” he said, baring his crooked teeth as he sat her on the stool next to Lamian’s. “How about introductions!” Their hands crossed paths, fingers jabbing, because the man was too impatient to keep to the order he himself proposed, so that the names, too, Lamian, Karlo, Danica, were barely distinguishable as they tumbled over one another.
Lamian didn’t mind: the names were probably false. The bony man was the intermediary, the decoy who helped the young woman strike up profitable acquaintances. This was now confirmed by the waiter, the way he placed their drinks before them—first Lamian’s, then the young woman’s, then the bony man’s. The waiter turned to Lamian with a confidential wink: “On your bill?” Lamian agreed, and was in fact pleased, because by fulfilling their hopes he became a desired and even pampered personage, the center of attention here at the left end of the bar. Male and female alike revolved around him, both making themselves useful. He no longer had to lean over anyone’s shoulder to see the young woman; she was looking him right in the face.
He clinked glasses with her, then, as an afterthought, with the bony man. Tilting his glass, he peered with satisfaction along his cheek, watching her arm, her stubby hand which lifted the glass to her lips, lips that parted and arched like two leeches, and he watched the pale skin of her face stretch and gather as she swallowed.
Now it was he filling her—or so he felt—stretching her, parting her lips and pressing them to the rim over which those teasing swallows were made. He was her master, and she the woman on whom his attention focused, and this made him master of the entire bar, of the murky red volcano hole he had dropped into, a shaft full of night, with all its seething, intense sensuality.
Enthroned on his stool, which a moment ago was so uncomfortable but now seemed to have grown, elevating him above the others, he passed inspection on the company under his command: the bony man who helped the young woman by bringing her to patrons who took a fancy to her; the couple dancing in the background and the man at their table, all part of the bony man’s retinue; the musicians who played and the waiter who served, and the man, too, at the other end of the bar, because he did not interfere, a loner who already regretted being present at the amusements and celebrations of others, just as Lamian would be regretting it now if the young woman had sat at the right end of the bar instead of the left.
He could imagine how he appeared to the man who sat apart: clinking glasses with the young woman and her escort, haughtily asserting himself as the drinks he paid for were poured down that soft, supple throat. Proud of a conquest that had in fact been handed to him on a platter, on the tray before him which held the empty glasses. But the waiter was already approaching, lids lowered slyly over weary eyes, face indifferent as he muttered through the mustache that spread over his fleshy lips, “Another round?” At which the young woman and the bony man nodded energetically, so another round, of course.
They were getting him drunk, disarming him for some swindle, but he knew that that was one of the conditions, part of the understanding. Just as those two classmates of his, in the nightclub on Jelačić Square, had met this condition—although he didn’t ask them about it afterward, pretending not to remember their outing together, which he had got out of just in time. For it was this condition, this swindle, that he had fled that evening, the moment he grasped the purpose of the three fancily dressed women who came up to them with encouraging smiles, like the smile on the bloodless lips of the bony man.
He felt himself sinking, giving in, as he emptied glass after glass, allowing each empty glass to be replaced with a full one, with the young woman and the bony man, allowing the swindle to tighten around him, and the young woman’s stubby hand raising the glass on its narrow stem, her lips fitting themselves to the rim, the stretching of the skin of her cheeks awakened in him a feeling of possession, of mastery.
Now everything was smooth and settled, even the conversation that sprang up between them—nothing to do with what he was interested in, nothing about the young woman and her intermediary. What they said was already forgotten in his tipsiness. It was terse, like the words exchanged with the waiter, all gestures and monosyllables, apropos of nothing, for nothing was happening except a repetition of what had already happened, drawing him deeper into acquiescence: permitting what was happening to continue and to be consummated.
In the mirror, meanwhile, he saw a change at the rear: two more couples had arrived, sat down, and they began to dance, so that the space among the tables was now filled with figures bobbing, gliding, bending over, throwing back heads and shoulders, intersecting like crowded type on a page. Then he saw the gleam of a bald head and the glint of eyeglasses in the red gloom, and only after verifying that the man at the right was no longer there did he realize that it was he, the old man he’d ignored, arm now around the waist of a thin, long-nosed woman with a shaggy head of hair, the same woman who came in with the bony man.
They were all in the trap, then, and resistance was futile. Lamian put a hand on the young woman for the first time, on her shoulder. It was soft and full, and the cloth of her dress was warm. You could squeeze it without fear of damaging it, like a good mare or a good piece of machinery or furniture, made of firm stuff, firm and yielding at the same time.
He lay the full weight of his hand on her, and she turned to him and asked, “Do you want to dance?” “But I’m already dancing,” he said. He felt heavy, rusty. He had not danced to music since dancing school in Bjelovar, in his second or third year in Gymnasium. After a torturous several months of practicing steps, he was promoted to full-fledged participant in the dances, which he never attended.
Seeing her surprise and puzzlement, he pointed in the mirror, at the bald fat man and the long-nosed brunette. “You know them, I guess. They’re your friends, aren’t they?” This seemed to unsettle her. She turned to the bony man, who peeked from behind her, smiling as she explained something in his ear. Her shoulder lifted, its heat filling the gap between Lamian’s fingers, and now, through her, he was in contact with the bony man, who looked sharply at him, unblinking, his smile frozen. Then the man got down from his stool and went around to Lamian.
“Are you tired?” he whispered. “Ready to turn in?” When Lamian didn’t answer, unable to think of a reason why they should suddenly want to get rid of him, the man added, rolling his eyes, “She could go with you.” Lamian sighed with relief. So the hard part, the preliminaries, was over; we have reached our goal. He nodded, and the waiter, who was watching carefully, tore a page from a notepad and added up some numbers.
As Lamian paid, the woman also slid from her stool and smoothed her dress with both hands. He got down with a hand from the bony man. All three were now on solid ground, which listed slightly, and they proceeded to leave, accompanied by music as the dancers kept bending and intersecting, the bald man among them, his head on Long Nose’s shoulder, his glasses peering from behind her tangled curls.
Now they were outside the entrance, in the light. A solemn silence, as in a waiting room for saying good-byes before a journey. The bony man took the young woman’s arm and muttered, “I have to stay. You know, with my friends. But I’ll have expenses, know what I mean?” When Lamian failed to comprehend, he slipped his hand inside Lamian’s coat, their fingers meeting, and together they took out his wallet, and then, from it, together, two five-hundred dinar notes. The man disappeared, whisked away behind the green plush curtains, leaving the two of them alone to start up the stairs.
Lamian found it comical, the solemnity, this silence after the din, this light after the darkness. He expected some new noise to deluge them and bring them to their senses when they reached the lobby. But there was no one on the landing, and the reception desk was far away, lost in shadow. When he stopped and asked himself if he had to go over to the desk, he was answered by the clink of the key in his coat pocket. He could feel its chain and tag through the cloth. He put his hand in, grasped it with his fingers. The young woman looked upward, and they continued upstairs.
They could have taken the elevator—accessible, he remembered, on every floor—but he felt incapable of making any suggestion, and she probably didn’t know there was an elevator, or didn’t want to oppose him.
They climbed, meeting no one and without exerting themselves, for their pace was slow, each out of regard for the other, arms bumping against one another. Thus they reached the fourth floor, only slightly out of breath. He pulled the key from his pocket, checked the number and compared it with the number over the door, turned the key in the lock, and only then removed his arm from hers to let her cross the threshold first.
He turned on the light, locked the door, followed her into the bedroom. She had already turned and was waiting for him. “Where’s the bathroom?” she asked, separating bathroom into distinct syllables, as if he were deaf. When he pointed, she went quickly by him and disappeared. He was left alone.
HE SAT DOWN IN THE ARMCHAIR FACING THE BATHROOM door. That was the way it always was: First take care of physiological needs, so as not to be reminded of them at an inopportune time, and so as not to put any pressure on the lower regions of the body, which will come under another kind of pressure.
He heard running water. In the camp, too, that came first, right after jumping from the cars, and with no shelter other than human. You asked someone to stand there as a screen, because the SS didn’t allow the new arrivals to soil this initial assembly point. But that didn’t stop them from feasting their eyes, from shouting: What a round, white bottom just popped out of those crusty underpants—makes you feel like tearing into it, like fresh bread. In the dressing room, too, they gawked, lingered there after giving instructions on how to hang up the clothes, and there would be those who pushed some young prisoner, when she was disrobed, into a corner, to give her a good going over while she squealed in terror.
He, too, had gawked—why not?—even though he knew, like the SS men, that in ten minutes they would all be dead. After those living skeletons he looked at day in and day out, it was irresistible to see some lovely body reach unselfconsciously for the clothes rack. And now, too, he could peek through the keyhole or open the door a crack—the young woman hadn’t locked it. He knew he’d see a beauty, curvaceous and voluptuous: that much he had been able to assess even through her clothes. And he had held her, squeezed her a little, felt her flesh. But what good would it do him, when he felt no desire. He had felt no desire for the young woman, not once, not even in the bar as she sat next to him with her legs crossed, or when the bony man hid her from view and he thought he had lost her, or when she was restored and offered to him and he lay his hand proprietarily on her shoulder.
All that had evoked only the memory of desire; nothing in him, no part of him had been stirred or tensed, nor was it now, as he sat in the chair facing the bathroom door, listening. His body hung limp. Fatigue? No, surprisingly, he didn’t feel tired. He simply drooped all over, like a rag, and felt no need to do anything else. He waited. It was the man’s part to wait, the woman’s to ready herself, to make herself desirable.
She was certainly readying herself; the rush of water had long since stopped. Perhaps she was drying herself, having no doubt washed, or was standing before the mirror reviewing what she had to offer: face, shoulders, breasts.
Perhaps she had undressed and was lifting each breast with two fingers, checking its firmness, seeing whether it returned quickly to its hanging position, as one checks the firmness and flexibility of the springs in a couch or armchair. Now she was a spring to be lain on, and he was the buyer. The man was always the buyer, for he could earn more than the woman; he made war, he conquered and killed, acquiring those extra goods she needed, goods she wanted to inspire him to continue acquiring in the future.
And the camps were made by men, not women. The SS men brought in the SS women; the male Lagerführer made prostitutes into female Kapos.
Lina, who delivered women to Lamian in the abandoned toolshed, had been a prostitute. Handing over her wards in return for the receipt with their numbers on it, she licked her thin lips, as if lapping up the semen that had spurted onto them, swiveling her fat belly as if straddling a nozzle. Perhaps the barter which brought her silk underwear appealed to her not so much for the underwear itself, which it was unlikely anyone would see on her, as for the exchange of goods and bodies, albeit bodies not her own, and out of obedience to that hard male muscle that demanded obedience.
That stiff member that lifted the riding breeches of the strapping Kommandoführer at the camp entrance, where units passed five abreast on the way to and from work; or on the ramp where the newly arrived women prisoners were unloaded; or on the parade ground, to the tapping of riding crop on boot leg, leather against leather, sinew against sinew, until everything rattled and cracked, just as bones cracked beneath burdens and blows. Gabelić, with legs planted wide in gleaming boots, in front of the headquarters building tapping his whip on his boot leg, the terror of domination, the horror of submission, foreshadowing the fall into blood, the death rattle, one’s own mother—docile, smiling timidly, lips already acknowledging her guilt—falling beneath the leering cutthroat, who spreads her legs and penetrates her with his hardened muscle, at the same time using his knife to cut ribbons of flesh from her withered breasts.
It’s my own mother I’ve brought to a hotel room, it’s her legs that I’ll spread, it’s she in the bathroom getting ready, adjusting her submissive smile in the mirror, to please me. A cold sweat engulfed him. But he resisted it. He hadn’t tried to help her, in exchange for the gift of climbing boots to Jozo, because he was afraid he’d find her with her legs spread, legs raised around the hairy neck of some Ustaša, and that then he would go mad and attack. In Gradina, as he accompanied the convoy of prisoners across the Sava, he had looked for her face, her submissive face, afraid he would find it, recognize it. He had watched the Ustaši pounce on the women, ripping off their dresses and spreading their legs, and was relieved not to see her there among them, she was somewhere else, safe, out of his sight, and that was why he never again looked for her, nor for his father, contenting himself with the report that Jasenovac had slaughtered all the Jews, every last one, had thrown them in the water or buried them. So wouldn’t it be justice for her to appear in this bathroom doorway? Naked before him, as he had never seen her, because she always covered herself in his presence, therefore as only his father had seen her. Lamian had sensed, only sensed, the naked body from which he had issued and in which he still wanted to hide whenever they beat him or forced him to beat others.
Her submissive smile above withered breasts, the gentleness of a woman who knows she must be subjugated, that she must serve instinct, slashing, murdering instinct, even though she doesn’t understand it. Or did she understand it, as they all understood it, learned it so quickly, like Lina licking her lips and thrusting out her belly even though no one wanted her, in those silk panties over a bloated spider’s belly and drooping bottom? All her wards had understood, eating the bread and butter and ham, drinking the warm milk, and kissing him on the mouth after every bite and every swallow, as he commanded, and allowing his hands to squeeze their breasts and thighs, and lying down on the mat spattered with the slime brought forth by the previous woman.
It was all the same—marriage, the bar, the camp—everywhere the fabric dropped to reveal that crevice from which we all came and to which we all wanted to return, devoting ourselves to that end by blackmailing, buying, knifing.
By now he nearly hated the young woman primping in the bathroom to please him. Yet how much less, how much milder was the force he could use on her. How much better off she was with him, because he would do her no harm, even though he could, locked up with her like this in a room with a bath, in secret, no one knowing of their shared seclusion.
The bony man knew, but he would keep silent, since he, like Blockelteste Lina, was the intermediary who had supplied the victim. What if Lamian were to beat her, gagging her first with some rag so she couldn’t scream, what if he whipped her on one of these beds, taking pleasure in his omnipotence and her contortions? What if he tied her up and tortured her all night, her moans through the slaver-soaked gag for him the music of utter submission, then threw her out the next morning, scantily clad, battered, teeth broken? Like a whipped bitch she would drag herself through the lobby past the reception desk, not making a sound, and wouldn’t stop until she reached the sublet room she had somewhere, and she would be happy to have been left alive, and too terrified to complain to anyone.
