The Soul of a Thief Read online

  “I told you,” Edward said without genuine reproach, but rather a melancholy tone in concert with my defeat. After all, he knew that the Colonel expected him to guide me in my quest, and to assure its success.

  We stood in the square just outside this latest tavern of disaster. Edward was smoking, and as always he instinctively offered me the cigarette tin. Though I had always declined before, in this instance I succumbed, and he nodded and lit my smoke with an army lighter. I coughed terribly, waiting for the rancid substance to somehow calm my nerves.

  There had certainly been an abundance of suitable women in all the establishments. Of all sorts of ages, shapes and sizes, they laughed and danced and drank from deep steins of watery wartime beer. They leaned upon the shoulders of rough-looking army officers, and they pressed their cleavaged bosoms against coarse uniforms and lifted their legs to show their calves. And although in the course of two long hours I managed to elicit a dance from one matronly, middle-aged, half-drunken farm woman, essentially I felt like a boy on his first deer hunt, staring wide-eyed at the potential prey and clutching a weapon I had no idea how to use correctly. Utter disaster.

  Simultaneously, Edward and I crushed out our cigarettes, sighed, and remounted the staff car. He did indeed seem able to follow the scents emanating from some distant house of ill repute, though in fact he was simply observing the direction taken by wandering army troops of the lower ranks. A quartet of half-inebriated panzer drivers sang “Ach du lieber Augustin” as they staggered along a narrow road, elbows locked and joking about the deleterious effects of alcohol on proper erections, and Edward knew to simply tag along with the car.

  He stopped as we approached a row of tall, narrow, three-story apartment buildings. Their faces were of broken brickwork, and they were squeezed together like gravestones in an overcrowded cemetery. Two of the buildings had large street-front windows, with heavy brocade curtains and a reddish lamp glow bleeding through the frays. Apparently, this was a signal which clearly spoke to the corporal, though it was unrecognized by me.

  “Come, boy,” he said, and I steeled myself and followed him into the first such building. He passed through the heavy front door without so much as flipping the iron knocker, and immediately we found ourselves in a dark and decrepit sitting room, occupied by an elderly matron cocooned in a threadbare housecoat and woolen slippers. She sat upon a worn purple divan, reading a pfennig novel by candlelight, and I prayed that this gray-haired matron was not the only prospect in the house. She looked up and grinned, her mouth a garden of broken teeth.

  “Guten Abend!” she croaked. “Your pleasure, gentlemen?”

  “Yes, that,” Edward snapped. “If there’s anything here to please us.”

  “Einen Moment.” The old woman struggled to her feet and hobbled away somewhere, while I jammed my hands into my pockets, looking about at the fading portraits of German composers and Alpine apple orchards, and attempted to summon my most casual whistle. It was nowhere within me.

  A pair of women sauntered into the room. The first of them was black-haired, middle-aged, and powerful in the appearance of her musculature beneath a heavy emerald dress. The thick makeup upon her face looked almost clownish, her lips heavy and blood red, her eyes outlined in inky borders, and the upper portion of her dress was unlaced, revealing a bosom that appeared to me to be as large as the rump of a pig. The second woman was somewhat more youthful and substantially smaller of stature. Her dark blond hair was braided into “strudel” coils astride her ears, and her attire resembled that of a beer-garden waitress, replete with its white bodice and billowing short sleeves. Upon her feet she wore high black boots, laced up the center to her shins, and her face was also overly masked with paint. I tried to blur the image of her mouth, for its lipstick was somewhat askew and I dared not imagine the cause.

  “You take Sylvia?” The old woman, who now peeked from behind her prostitutes, gestured at the larger of the two women and winked at Edward.

  “All right,” he said, and I was immediately grateful, as he was clearly volunteering to mount this creature in deference to the better choice for me.

  “And you want Heidi, ja?” The old woman lightly slapped the rump of the blonde “waitress” as she jutted her trembling chin in my direction. Heidi smiled, showing a chipped front tooth and the tip of her tongue.

  I managed a nod, even as I experienced an icy chill throughout my spine.

  “Twenty reichsmarks apiece,” said the madame, very curtly.

  “Ten.” Edward snapped a reply.

  “Fifteen!” The old woman raised a gnarled finger.

  I was then engaged in turning my trouser pocket inside out, and counting some rumpled bills and coins.

  “I am afraid I have no more than ten,” I stuttered.

  “Ten it’ll be, then,” Edward said to the old one. “Or nothing.”

  “All right.” The madame stuck her thumbs in the belt of her housecoat. “But you can fuck them for fifteen minutes. No more.”

  “Half an hour,” Edward shot back.

  “Twenty minutes!” She returned his serve.

  I was certain I would require no more than a paltry minute myself, and only that if my already rebelling penis would suddenly take flight in an Olympian miracle.

  Edward took the black-haired wench by her wrist and immediately moved toward a creaking stairway, and as he passed me by he whispered, “Just think of Ava Gardner.”

  I stared after him. I did not know who that was, and was lost for a substitute image. I found myself temporarily immobilized, while Heidi lifted the hem of her dress and too mounted the stairway. She stopped after a meter’s progress, turned to me and beckoned with a finger, and I swallowed hard and followed.

  Within a minute, I found myself standing before her in a small and dimly lit room, rather like the cabin of a steamship. There may have been a washstand, a small desk and a single chair, but I do not really recall, for my eyes were locked on the narrow bed covered with rumpled and graying sheets.

  Heidi immediately plopped herself down on the edge of this newlyweds’ paradise, sitting quite erect and spreading her boots. She regarded me with what she might have supposed to be doe’s eyes, and placed a flirtatious finger in her mouth. With her other hand, she quickly lifted her dress and gathered its hem about her waist, revealing short, puffy white bloomers encasing her bare thighs. Then, with the practiced grace of a magician’s assistant, she quickly dragged them off, down over her knees, and allowed them to hang about one ankle, while I stood there and stared at her in utter shock, as if the furry mouth that now presented itself to me was the maw of a dragon.

  I could not move. My hands were clenched into tight fists, angled straight down astride my trouser legs, as if I might be at attention on parade. My breaths came in short rasps of panic through my nostrils, and although I tried with every muscle to summon some sensation in my groin, in truth I seemed to be utterly paralyzed from the neck down.

  The woman giggled then, which quickly shot my face through with a roaring blush. She seemed to believe that my paralysis was simply a temporary lack of ardor, perhaps akin to a stubborn auto engine requiring coaxing on a winter morn. And so, she quickly unlaced her bosom bodice, slid her hands inside her upper dress, and scooped her breasts out into the air, where they settled upon her torso like a pair of cycloptic jellyfish. This attempt had no effect whatsoever, other than to further widen my eyes and tremble my knees.

  For a moment, Heidi cocked her head at me, then quickly leaned forward and reached out for my tunic. I watched her hands as they deftly flashed the flaps aside, unbuttoned my braces, and within an instant I was standing there with my trousers and shorts about my boots. As she gripped me in her hand and opened her mouth, I confess that I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed. But it was all to no avail, as her enthusiastic tongue and lips managed only to soak me in a warm sort of slime, through which nothing worthwhi
le of me emerged.

  “No, my dear?” She finally spoke, perhaps thinking that some romantic lingual engagement might encourage me. “Then let’s try it this way, Schatzi!”

  She suddenly fell back upon the bed, raising and separating her legs as she dragged me down, my body stiff as bone in every place but where it mattered. And I fell upon her, bumping hair muff to hair muff, flesh to flesh, and she twisted and bucked and ground her hips and gripped my buttocks and bit down onto my earlobe. But we remained unjoined, and I felt nothing more than sublime humiliation.

  At last, she ceased her futile efforts and turned her head to regard a cuckoo clock on the wall. “So, that’s it, poor boy!” she exclaimed as she jumped up.

  Within a minute, I was fully dressed and outside on the street, waiting for Edward as I cursed Himmel and Hitler and the entire Reich, not to mention God, who was equally the culprit...

  * * *

  “You didn’t?” Edward was driving once more and regarding me, post-confession, as if I had failed to feed my own starving child. “What do you mean, you didn’t?!”

  Silence for a moment.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You didn’t even try?”

  “I tried. She tried. All of the angels in Himmel’s version of hell tried.”

  “Was there something wrong with her?”

  “I have nothing with which to compare.”

  “Well...did she have some hideous scar or something?”

  “I believe she was biologically normal.”

  “Then what the hell was wrong?”

  “Nothing happened. I couldn’t... It wouldn’t...”

  He paused for a moment, shaking his head slowly and sadly. “And you paid her as well.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ten reichsmarks. And now you’re broke, to boot.”

  “My poverty is hardly of great concern at the moment.”

  We drove in silence, like a disenchanted couple, both pairs of eyes forward yet seeing little more than images of our Colonel’s express disappointment, which was bound to rise along with the morning’s sun. We found ourselves headed back to the Beethoven Square, which seemed as appropriate as Napoleon’s return to kick the corpses at Waterloo.

  “Ohhh.” I finally blew out a sigh. “I want to get drunk.”

  “That’s certainly not going to help.”

  “At this point, Edward, it does not matter. I am hardly going to attempt this again.” I fished in my pocket and found a few remaining pfennig.

  “All right, then. What the hell.”

  We soon found ourselves once again in one of the taverns on the square. At this juncture, Edward seemed quite spent, and I was not surprised given the physically hardy appearance of his recent paramour. He wandered over to a table in one corner, collapsed into a chair and waved at someone for a large beer.

  The establishment was full of Wehrmacht officers, all laughing and drinking and hurling jokes across the room at their compatriots. Many of them were crowded about large round tables, some with local women pulled onto their laps, and more than one enthusiastic game of cards was being played out. Crackling music was loudly expressed from a gramophone atop the tavern bar, and the open floor between the bar and tables was full with quickly prancing couples, some swaying and clutching enormous beer steins. All in all I must have saluted twenty times as I carefully shouldered my way between these men, the long oak bar eventually appeared through the crowd, and I swam to it like a drowning sailor spotting a bobbing timber.

  Exhausted in spirit and body, I climbed up onto an empty stool at the very farthest corner of the bar, placed one elbow on the polished and puddled wood, and rested my forehead in my hand. I had arrived at a very dark place in this stage of my life. It seemed that, until this night, my adventures in the army had been, although life-threatening, also exhilarating in some sense. Yet now I wanted none of it, and the reality of my predicament had come tumbling down, the realization triggered by the failure of my most basic libidinous necessity. I was hardly a man, and what made me think myself capable of surviving in the world I now inhabited? If I could not meet this most simple challenge, what might my master next present? Some task that would surely mean my death, instead of my humiliation. I began to plan my escape, knowing full well that desertion would also mean certain execution if I were ever caught. I nearly sobbed.

  “And what can I do for you, handsome boy?”

  I lifted my head. The barmaid, whom I had not heretofore noticed, stood directly in my vision. I noted first her smile, for it was warm and very wide and replete with fine teeth, without a hint of decay or breakage. Her long brown hair was pulled behind her neck, and her matching eyes were wide and friendly. She wore a very modest dark blue dress, buttoned tastefully to her throat.

  I grimaced more than smiled, and I touched the brim of my cap and then removed it. “Is the beer expensive?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.” Her smile warmed further. “Five pfennig.”

  I frowned and shrugged. “I am afraid I have only three.”

  “As I said, three pfennig.” She winked.

  She turned away for a moment, and her movement appeared to be nearly a pirouette, for in an instant she faced me once more, a high glass mug with a snowcap of foam in her hand. She plunked it down on the bar before me, and I pushed my last scraps of pay across the wood.

  “Danke,” I said as I pulled the heavy glass closer.

  “Bitte.” She nodded. Then she glanced up at a clock on the wall behind the bar, and she smoothly removed a white apron, folded it and tucked it away somewhere. “I think I’ll have one as well.” She poured herself a similar helping of beer from a huge keg, then pulled up a stool from her side of the oak and perched upon it. She raised her glass in my direction.

  “I do not want to make trouble for you,” I said, glancing about for her employer.

  “I’m off now. A girl deserves a rest, don’t you think?”

  She clicked her glass against mine and sipped her foam, and I watched her as I did the same. She grinned as she swept a slim white line from her upper lip with her finger.

  “I’m Francie,” she said.

  “I am pleased to meet you. I’m Shtefan.”

  She looked at me then, slightly tilting her head. One must realize that we were forced to speak very loudly above the din.

  “You are wearing SS tabs, Shtefan.”

  “Yes.” It was curious to feel that I was unworthy of such a dastardly coterie of warriors.

  “I always think of them as older, and larger. And killers. You don’t seem to fit the image.”

  “I’m just the commander’s adjutant.” I was desperately uneasy with this young woman. She was pretty and very open, and I was the world’s most pathetic fraud on every front.

  “Ahhh.” She nodded and sipped some more, and I did the same, and we watched the room and were silent for a moment. Then, “And how old are you, Shtefan?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “I am twenty-three.”

  “I wish I was twenty-three already.”

  Naturally she did not understand my wish, being unable to connect it to my sexual status.

  “And what are your tasks, for your commander?” she inquired, then suddenly touched her finger to her lips. “I should not ask you that. It might be a military secret.”

  She was not joking, but I suddenly began to laugh. It came from somewhere deep and melancholy, a well of irony in my groin, and I had no control over the bitter mirth that racked my body as I threw my head back and tears actually sprang to my eyes.

  “Why is that so funny?”

  “My tasks...” I could not breathe, I was laughing so hard. “I...I must...”

  “You must what, Shtefan?”

  “I must lose my virginity!” At this point I was holding my chest, and I had to replac
e the mug upon the bar or spill its entire contents. “That’s the horrendous secret that must not be divulged! That is the shame for which my Colonel will not stand!”

  I do not know why I vented my pain thusly to a stranger, but perhaps I could no longer contain my frustration, and she seemed a likely creature to sympathize. Eventually I calmed myself and settled back into silence. I held the mug with one hand, and with the other I rubbed my brow, and as I dared to look up at her again, I found her regarding me with the empathy of a kind nurse.

  “Yes.” I nodded. “So foolish, isn’t it? That’s what’s important in the military social scale. To be one of the men, to be undistracted by adolescent fantasy. And it’s an order, not a request. Isn’t that so cruel?” I paused and sipped, then raised a finger. “Believe me, I’ve tried to obey. I have tried all night this very night, but it seems the pathetic, romantic images of my youth have enslaved me with an inability to execute this task on command. I wish I were such an animal, but I am not.” I restrained myself then, my voice falling to a murmur. “I apologize. I should not be so crude.”

  Another long moment of silence passed between us, such as it was among the raucous music and laughter. Francie seemed to be thinking, looking off into nothing, and slightly nodding her head as if a rush of warm memories passed before her eyes.

  “And, so?” She regarded me again. “What shall happen to you now?”

  “Who knows?” I shrugged. There was no point in humiliating myself further.

  “Did you try a prostitute?” she asked plainly.

  I blushed so deeply then, a wave of shame washing from my neck and up to the roots of my hair. “Yes... But it was no good.”

  “I did not expect so.” She nodded once again. “Young men want to be gentle, although they will never admit so. Young men must pretend to be virile and uncaring and always prepared to take such a reward, paid for or not, but we know it is all a lie.” She placed her fingers lightly on my sleeve as she drank a long pull with her other hand. “The truth is, young men just want to be kissed.”

  I nodded in agreement, although I was utterly mortified at this juncture. Her words comforted me little, as I did not need a psychologist, but rather a miracle.