The detainee’s face was pulped, frail groans emanated from his puffed and bloodied lips.
A hot anger rose inside her, but she bit her feelings down as Hammerer’s gaze bored into her with a critical squint. When their eyes met, he smiled with scrutiny. She couldn’t say what he had read on her face in response and dropped the eye contact.
Hammerer took a step to Nathan. “I’ve brought with me somebody who can help you remember.”
So, he knows we are acquainted. And for a tantalizing second, she imagined herself on this chair with Hammerer looming over her.
Nathan slurred the words that hit her hard yet gave her a chance for salvation.
“What did he say?”
“He called me a German hussy.”
“You must apologize to the real German lady, dirty Communist,” one of the interrogators ground out between his teeth.
Nathan remained silent.
Hammerer made an explicit gesture to the men. Blows rained upon Nathan, assuaging their anger for failing to break him. Blood coursed down from his nose over his chin and his neck into the collar of his tattered jacket.
It seemed Hammerer enjoyed the physical torment they inflicted. Then, as if tired of watching this futile beating, he waved them to stop.
“Fräulein Kriegshammer, please, translate to him. ‘You will give me the names of your contacts. The co-conspirators. You can do this the easy way or the hard way; it is up to you.’”
“You damned.” The lack of teeth made Nathan’s words slur.
“What did he say?” Hammerer turned to Ulya.
“He cursed you, Herr Hauptsturmführer. I’m sorry.”
Nathan’s remark earned him another punch in the ribs. And another one. Ulya looked away, closing down her emotions as they beat him to a pulp in front of her, extracting horrible animal grunts from him as the blows fell. She prayed he would black out soon.
“Hiding places! Code names!” One of the men spat into his face.
Nathan didn’t flinch. His silence earned him another prolonged beating, but he still refused to speak.
Ulya was too crushed to feel. Pain? Pity? Anything.
Hammerer offered to pause for a smoke. She didn’t reject the cigarette and took some drags from it, willing herself to hide the shaking of her hand.
Suddenly, a hoarse grunting from the prisoner came out.
“What?” Hammerer motioned her to come closer.
She leaned to Nathan and could distinguish him wheezing, “Save my daughter. Kommunisticheskay 11.”
Ulya recoiled, her heart about to give out from the new revelation.
“What did he say?” Impatience in Hammerer’s voice was unmistakable.
“He said he will die like a Communist.”
“These Russian zealots.” Hammerer’s Browning up and ready, his gaze fixed on the crumpled body, he smirked. “How stupid and bold these Communists are. And I don’t even hate them.” He aimed at the man in front of him then, and as though reconsidering, turned to Ulya and handed her his pistol. “You must hate them more than I.” His reaction showed that he caught her shocked look. “What, do you pity him?”
She swallowed. “I don’t know how to shoot.”
His mouth spread into a sardonic smile, he pressed the gun into her palm, guiding her forefinger to the trigger and, holding a firm hand atop of hers, put the pistol to Nathan’s forehead.
“Make it end,” Nathan whispered with a half-opened mouth.
It was his look of begging that made her pull the trigger. Sinew and brain sprayed across the floor. At least, they won’t torture him any longer.
46
Late spring, 1943
Months must have passed before the shock of losing Nathan started to slacken. Still, the memory whispering onto her ear—you, you, you killed him—would come flooding back. The same evening Nathan died, Hammerer’s driver brought her to a brick-and-wood two-story building of which the stone part of the ground floor was blackened by smoke and the wooden part burnt out. He stepped out of the car to open the door for her and to carry her two light satchels to the entrance. She took only essentials, her father’s scarf among them—the most precious thing for her.
Although the house looked lifeless, Ulya could not throw off the sensation she was being watched through the slats of the shutters.
Five wide steps—a single flight—were off alignment and wobbly. The front door was ajar, and pushing it open, Ulya found herself on a landing with two doors. As Hammerer told her, hers was on the left side.
The key screeched in the keyhole. Ulya stepped into a fire-rot smelling hallway with two doorways and set her satchels down on the unkempt floor. After a quick glance around, she entered a room of modest size with a torn tapestry carpet and soot-covered walls. Light impressions in the wall paint showed where perhaps pictures of different sizes had been once tacked. Odds were, it had been used as a bedroom, judging by a discolored, weathered old sofa. Pressed into the right corner at an angle, it blocked the way to the single window. She pushed the sofa aside, setting it parallel to the wall. On the floor, covered with dust, lay an envelope with the Oscar Baumgart photo atelier inscription. She picked it up and, pulling out photographs one by one, examined them. A family group posing for a camera: a man in yarmulke standing behind a pretty dark-haired woman with two little twin boys on her lap, dark-locked, the spitting image of their mother. There were more pictures of the boys together as babies, then a little older, and two of them as teenagers in a gymnasium uniform. Beautiful boys.
In the other, even smaller room with a whiff of dead air, she found a kerosene lamp on a kitchen table and two backless chairs tucked in under it.
Two months later, she was used to the surroundings, but the atmosphere of the house remained hostile. Maybe the memory of another event, which happened days after she moved in, contributed to it. Then, through her only window that faced the street, she saw a haggard woman of about forty, returning home with five girls, each one smaller than the next. On a whim, she’d decided to at
