Ashley lay on his back in his bed, sunken down into the silk sheets with a thick goose-feather duvet pulled halfway over him. His eyes stayed stuck on the ceiling as the voices of The Chordettes rang out from the player in the living room.
“And so he kissed you, just like that?”
Stam, who was lying beside him, responded, “Yes.”
“How rude.”
“He’s not a courteous person,” she replied. “He’s ignored me until very recently. I don’t really understand.”
“Eh, puberty,” Ashley responded dismissively.
“Boys have crushes before puberty,” Stam countered.
“Yeah, but it’s like that nun said: you’re weird and ostracized, and potentially, a normal girl could compensate for that by being more outwardly sexual to anyone receptive to it or easily taken-advantage of, such as a younger boy,” Ashley mused. “David was banking on more or less the same idea: that you’d be more susceptible to his advances because you’re an outcast.”
“That’s very calculated.”
“He’s a teenage boy,” Ashley answered flatly.
Stam considered this while the music continued; the girls beckoned to “Mister Sandman,” and Ashley paused to listen.
“Anyway, I never had the opportunity to go to a dance when I was young. That wasn’t the sort of thing we did back then.” He said. “I used to love to dance—but that was a different time.” Ashley moved to get out of bed; the iron frame creaked like always as he sat on the side. Stam remained fixated, as Ashley had been, on the ceiling.
Ashley looked at the nightstand clock out of habit. Whatever the time was, it didn’t appear to matter to him greatly.
“All he wants is to have sex with me,” Stam continued. “Does he think going to a dance would make it happen?”
“Of course.” Ashley snickered. “It’s romantic, and romance works. They all think that way.” He stood up and started to leave the room, but stopped by the door. “Ahh, I guess I shouldn’t say that.” His voice sounded guilty. He turned back to Stam and she glanced over to him. “Most teenage boys are that way,” he corrected himself.
“Not you, though.” Stam smiled.
Ashley laughed, knowing Stam’s dry tone had obscured a joke. He chuckled. “Yes, except me,” he said as he passed through the doorway and into the kitchen. Stam heard the music stop as Ashley removed the vinyl record from the player. The silence was followed by a squawk from Sydney: “Never Sunday!”
“You’re a good bird,” she heard Ashley reply.
“Good bird.”
“And you’re so clever.”
“Clever!” Sydney’s pride was palpable even from two rooms away.
* * *
Next door to Gunther’s home—the opposite side from Jens’ family—lived the Mohns. They had replaced the Fischers, a Jewish family of which all Gunther’s memories were fond. Though he saw them regularly until he was six or seven years old, it was made clear one day by Gunther’s father that he was never to associate with them again. Not long after, the family up and vanished, and hardly a day had passed before the Mohns moved in. At the time, it failed to seem as sinister as perhaps it should have.
Jens and Gunther discussed the Fischers at one point during training, only to be overheard by Heinz, whose assertion was that they had surely been exterminated. It was the first occasion on which Gunther had heard the word used in such a way, and naively, he dismissed it as Heinz simply being crass and cruel, but now he had to wonder.
Gunther’s eyes followed a patrolling guard as he passed. Regardless of how used to sleeping on the hard dirt he was, the evening’s events—and the dying yelp of the Romani girl—were enough to keep Gunther awake through the night. His thoughts jumped from recalling the Fischers, to Martin’s bizarre death, to Jens, and to the terror he’d felt at the sight of the Soviets. Though it seemed to take a small eternity, the sun at last began to creep into the sky above. It was a relief, despite the quick onset of activity and shouted orders. Gunther shambled about, feeling corpse-like between the stress and sleeplessness, but he managed to force the occasional “Heil Hitler” or salute as necessary. Before long, it was another full-fledged morning quickly dissolving into an afternoon as the troops began packing their possessions and spoils.
Gunther came to a stop as he noticed a discarded pamphlet lying in the dirt. On the cover was a grimy illustration of a hulking, hook-nosed, hardly-human creature with wild, curly hair and sharp fangs standing in an inferno captioned with the words “The Jew: the inciter of war, the prolonger of war!”
It looked nothing like Herr Fischer. Nobody looked like the monster on the pamphlet.
He looked over to Heinz, whose head shot back and forth with attention and fascination between each speaking Einsatzgruppe officer. He hung on the Hauptscharführer’s every word, and for the first time, the boy ceased to seem like merely a nuisance; he had become terrifying. It was sickeningly clear how far Heinz would have gone had that girl not been killed. Heinz was scarier than a Jew or a Bolshevik.
Gunther examined his rifle—he had grown so used to holding it, it felt like an extension of his hands. The day before, when he’d fired it at his unseen aggressors, it wasn’t impossible that he had shot one of them. It wasn’t impossible he had killed someone. He hadn’t done it because he was ordered to, but simply because he was scared. Maybe that’s what it was all about: the Germans—his countrymen—and their fear.
As his thoughts wandered to darker places, he considered what it would mean to shoot Heinz. If ever he had known someone who might deserve such a fate, it was him. Gunther didn’t need a pamphlet to explain why he needed to be afraid of Heinz, but he knew the truth in his heart: it was neither right nor reasonable to kill him. There was no one who deserved to die.
Gunther could see the Einsatzgruppen gathering for their departure from the village. He started toward them, fighting a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as he counted the four remaining boys from his squad. Trying to ignore his illness, he bent down to pluck up his few belongings, but paused when he heard a strange noise from the east. He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but no one else had seemed to notice.
He shrugged it off and started toward the clustered group. He gave a cursory glance back to the dense woods from which the sound had come and only felt more unsettled. He was almost sure he had seen something, but it must have been an animal.
Then, with all the suddenness of the first ambush, a horrible sound tore through the trees: a deafening series of rapid bangs, ricocheting bullets, splintered wood, and finally, screams.
“Over there!”
“Ostorozhno!”
“Fire!”
Both sides were shouting orders which could only barely be heard over the gunfire. Somebody nearby was howling in agony, but he couldn’t say whether it was a German or Soviet. All Gunther could think to do was dive to the earth.
“Bystryeĭ!”
He was too terrified to look up—he kept his face planted in the dirt.
“Fuckin’ Ivans!”
That voice sounded like Heinz.
“Granata! Lozhisʹ!”
The shots subsided noticeably, abruptly followed by a loud explosion—a mine or maybe a grenade. It was far off, but Gunther still felt a ringing in his ear afterward, which only worsened with the renewed gunfire. He couldn’t tell if it had only been seconds or if it had already stretched to minutes, but he finally brought his eyes up to look around. At least five of his own were sprawled in the dirt or bent over logs. Lutz was on the ground, and so was the Hauptscharführer; they weren’t moving, but Gunther couldn’t see if they were hurt.
He lay there, petrified, while the fighting went on.
“Ne ostanavlivaĭtesʹ!”
Someone dropped beside Gunther. He winced with fright, afraid for the worst, when he felt a hand pat him on the back.
“Hey, you okay?”
Gunther glanced up to see it was one of the Einsatz-gruppen.
“Hurt?”
Gunther shook his head. The officer grabbed his hand, “Get up—hurry,” and pulled Gunther to his feet. He dragged him for a short distance, and then, using the momentum, Gunther managed to keep up with the officer as they ran together out of the village and into the woods. Bullets followed, whizzing through the air all around them, and though it soon seemed they might escape the mayhem, Gunther jerked to a stop and toppled into a tree trunk. There was a feeling in his stomach—kind of in his side—unlike any he had ever felt before. It was wet… and warm.
He slid to the ground.
He couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t stand up.
He felt sick and his skin was flushed. His vision washed away just as he witnessed the Einsatzgruppe beside him reach to pull the pin from a grenade, unsuccessfully, before buckling over amid a red spray from his chest. He fell onto his back across a stump with his arm outstretched and the bomb still dangling from his finger.
The world flickered and phased in and out. Gunther couldn’t think clearly enough to be scared anymore.
In one last wave of semi-conscious energy, Gunther turned over on his back and clutched his hands against the wound in his abdomen. He could feel blood not trickling, but gushing through his fingers, running down his stomach, seeping into his sleeves, into his gloves, and into the dirt beneath him.
He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hear. His body was numb. He thought he was screaming—or crying—but he wasn’t sure. Reality was more than half gone; all was dark and the world had muted.
This was it. Just like that, he was to meet death.
Comments (0)
See all