working on their own brothers-in-arms. They would rather hack off a leg than try to save it for you.” Schorner’s right hand went to his eyepatch. “You would come to me tonight?”
“Sturmbannfuhrer, please. Promise me you will try. For that . . . for that I could come.”
As Schorner’s eyes bore into hers, Rachel felt wretched and ridiculous. What was she offering? To have her body, the major had only to lock the door and bend her over his desk. She could not afford to scream, much less fight him. Yet that did not seem to be how he wanted things to happen.
“Perhaps,” Schorner said carefully, “I could help about the medical inspections. I could send word to you just beforehand. You could clean your boy up a bit, so that he wouldn’t be eliminated for sickness.”
Rachel put her hand over her mouth. “But then Dr. Brandt would see him up close and clean. He might decide he wants him for the medical experiments. Or for — you know what.”
Schorner threw up his hands. “There is only so much I can do! That is the system. I didn’t devise it. I am merely trapped inside it, as you are.”
Rachel let this remarkable statement pass unchallenged. But in a way, Schorner was right. He could only do so much to thwart the desires of his superior officer. It was a miracle he had offered even this much. Of course, he didn’t have to live up to his word. And he would probably grow tired of her after a few nights. Then what would she do?
“Frau Jansen!”
“I’m sorry, Sturmbannfuhrer?”
“Come to your senses, please. We are agreed? You will come to my quarters tonight?”
Rachel felt the coldness of a crypt seeping out from her heart. “Tonight,” she said.
Naturally it was Weitz who escorted Rachel to Schorner’s quarters. The camp was dark, blacked-out to conceal it from Allied bombers. Once she was inside, the physical act happened quickly. The major had obviously been waiting at the door. She did not fully undress. She merely became bodiless for a few minutes, a mind that absorbed the inanimate environment around her. Cherry furniture, of which Schorner had a few nice pieces, scrounged from God knows where. A phonograph, an old gramophone that clicked steadily, insisting that the end of the record had been reached. A framed picture on the wall, the obligatory stern-faced father and mother, with Schorner in front in civilian clothes and a tall, smiling young man beside him in a Wehrmacht captain’s uniform. His older brother, of course. Also a little blond girl, smiling at the level of Schorner’s belt. There were other photos stuffed between a bureau mirror and its frame. A group of gray-uniformed men standing in deep snow, and beyond the snow a white haze of sky split by bare black trees. A pile of burning scrap metal behind the men materialized into a tank that would never move under its own power again. The men’s faces were grim, but every man was touching a comrade in some way, as if to reassure himself he was not alone on the great white plain.
Rachel had assumed that when Schorner finished she would be told to go back to the women’s block. Or at least
Schorner led her into his front room and bade her sit down in a wing chair. He poured some brandy, which Rachel left standing on the low table before her. Then Schorner simply looked at her. To Rachel the room seemed filled by a brittle silence. She did not feel particularly uncomfortable, or particularly comfortable either. She simply noticed that the major’s quarters, unlike the Jewish women’s block, did not stink of sweat and disinfectant and worse things. It smelled of leather and gun oil and faintly of cigars. While he sat there watching her, she wondered if she was a different person for what she had allowed him to do. She didn’t feel different. At least not any different from when she had walked in the door fifteen minutes earlier. But perhaps she was not thinking clearly, like a person who has had a limb torn off by a shell.
While Rachel sat thinking these things, Major Schorner began to talk. It struck her as quite odd, the things he said. He began by talking about the city of Cologne, how he missed it. And then about his older brother. He talked about hunting trips they had taken together as boys. He required no response from Rachel, only that she listen. She was glad he had not done all this talking before. Somehow she knew it would have been more difficult to block him out. To erase him as a person. After some time talking like this, he fell silent again. He studied Rachel with a wistful intensity so great that she suddenly realized she knew what he was thinking. This strange certainty gave her the courage to ask a question.
“Who is it that I remind you of, Sturmbannfuhrer?”
Schorner answered effusively, as if during all his silence he had been waiting for her to ask this very thing. “A young Fraulein from my hometown. Cologne, as I told you. Her name was Erika. Erika Moser. We were sweethearts from a very young age, but no one knew it. She was the daughter of a rival banking family. You’ve read Shakespeare, I’m sure. It was the Montagues and the Capulets all over again. The coming of Hitler made things even worse for us. Unlike my father, Herr Moser openly condemned the Fuhrer and anyone who supported him. He was an arrogant man — too powerful to eliminate — but Goebbels forced him out of the country in 1939. Erika stayed behind to wait for me.” Schorner swallowed and looked at the floor. “It was a mistake. She was killed in the British thousand-bomber raid of 1942.”
Rachel listened in amazement. It was all so unbelievable. One imagined SS officers to be monsters, sterile machines that obeyed orders to rape and massacre — not human beings who quaintly compared their childhood romances to
“You went to university?” Schorner asked suddenly.
“Yes. At Vrije. For two years only, though. I married before graduating.”
“But that is excellent! Now perhaps I can converse for a while in words not prescribed in the manual of orders. I told you I was at Oxford, didn’t I?”
Rachel could hardly believe he remembered, he had been so drunk. “Yes, Sturmbannfuhrer. You said you were a paying student. Not a Rhodes scholar.”
Schorner laughed. “That’s right. My father wanted me to be the German Asquith. Strange, isn’t it?”
“Strange that a man like that would let his son join the SS.”
“
“You swore the personal oath to Hitler?” Rachel asked quietly.
“Yes. It didn’t seem such a difficult thing to do in 1936. Now . . . well, let us say that the SS is not the ideal organization for an educated man. Not even for a half-educated man like me. Educated men tend to ask questions, and questions are
Rachel’s curiosity struggled with her fear of provoking retaliation. “But even if the SS began as an elite unit, how can a man of your education ignore the things they have done over these years? What I have seen myself — the stories I’ve heard. . . ”
Schorner’s face seemed suddenly to grow heavy. “There are excesses, certainly. There are things I do not agree with. War brings opportunities to men who in normal times suppress darker appetites. You should see what the Russians did to some of my friends.” He curled his lip in disgust. “But frankly, if we win the war, none of that will ever be brought up in polite conversation, much less in a court of law. The butchers will be heroes.”
Rachel was too stunned to consider her words. “If you win? Surely you don’t — I mean,
Schorner smiled with surprising confidence. “That is exactly the problem we are working on here at Totenhausen. I almost told you the other day.” He leaned back on the sofa, a man in a good humor, munificent in his superiority. “What is this power you have over me?” he asked. “You make me want to pour out my soul. What a fool I am, telling all to a woman.”
Yet he did not stop. He seemed to enjoy the absurdity of the situation. “Frau Jansen, what I told you about
