Chapter 53 La Fere2

The headlights were very white, dazzling. I heard the car door slam, I saw his shadow moving toward me . . . The taste for uniforms, you see: he was dressed like an SS officer, from cap to patent leather knee-high boots, he was holding in his hand a cosh – I didn’t recognize him at that moment, he had become so much himself, the blond hair shaved on his temples, the ruthless, limpid eyes. ‘Schnell,’ he shouted. I didn’t even know he could speak German. ‘Schnell, schnell!’ He lashed at my buttocks, while I stumbled along, moving toward a barrack hut in front of me, sliding on the wet paving stones, bent over because of the cold, the humiliation, too. I remember feeling embarrassed because of my hard breasts, the nipples stiff with cold, and arrogant. I was experiencing again the feeling I had earlier in the train, that foreknowledge of the horror – as if everything I had lived till then was only the draft for an ultimate show . . . I fell twice, sliding over the greasy paving stones. I had long streaks of mud all over my body. “He made me enter an old dormitory, then a room next to the showers. He hit me behind the knee and I collapsed on the frozen tiles. He grabbed me by the hair, dragged me to a corner, and tied me with handcuffs to a leaking pipe. He hit me four or five more times, I was screaming, protecting my face. Then he threw his crop on the floor, took out a pair of scissors from his pocket, and started to cut my hair – I used to wear it medium length till four days ago. The locks fell on my shoulders and belly – he was cutting it short, hacking at the mass. “When I came back on Sunday, my head completely covered, when I undressed in my bathroom, and my mirror showed me that poor bungled head, with the white trace of his snips, I didn’t recognize myself – no, it’s not that, I recognized someone who was not me – who was me only externally, but in a few snips, he had made another woman come to the surface. “He tied me up and left me there, all night. I didn’t hear the car go. Night fell, I was alone, I ended up shouting, crying, there was just the sound of the wind, the cold, the damp. All night long. For a moment I was crying so much that I felt nauseous and vomited bile. No, that is not the right word. I was vomiting myself, that’s it, myself. “He came back in the morning, he was still speaking German. He told me I had to choose between absolute submission and immediate death. It was like lightning, you know. The feeling of recognizing a scene one has already lived. The other, in me – not me, for I would have preferred death – the other said she wanted to live, and that she would do what he wanted and that she would submit. “He made her kneel down, while leaving her tied up – the hand-cuffs slid on the pipe, he opened the trousers of his uniform and forced his cock in her mouth. She sucked him as she could, awkwardly – as if all my science had vanished.