Once the initial shock and the exhaustion of the gruelling journey had worn off a little, the days inside Buchenwald had begun to blur into a sick bleak misery that seemed to have no end. Alice had found this almost more terrifying than anything she had yet experienced, because once you were caught in it you began to lose count of the days, and you stopped caring which day or which month it was anyway. But earlier on she vowed to keep careful count of the days, and she scratched a rough chart on the edge of her wooden-framed bunk so that she could cross off each day and know how much time had passed.
Some of the women with whom she shared the hut – Hut 24 it had been – believed themselves to have died, and to have gone to hell. This was the real hell of the preachers and the rabbis and the priests, they said with fearful eyes. This was the place where you paid for your sins and who knew how long that might take? Alice thought this a na?ve outlook, but once or twice she found herself wondering whether there was some form of retribution at work. Supposing this is the reckoning, she thought – the payment for those enchanted ten years? For having Conrad and Deborah, and for all the extravagances and the fun and the admiration.
Supposing that like Faust, I sold my soul to the devil during those nights in Vienna’s Old Quarter, or on any one of the nights since? And supposing the devil has been stalking me ever since, watching his chance to settle the account…? Aha, there’s Alice Wilson, he might have said. I think it’s time to call in the debt on that one. Quite a lot of self-indulgence went on, I see. A great deal of money spent on personal adornment – a good deal of fornication as well – oh, and a bastard child: dear me, she’s had a very good run indeed, this one. A very extravagant ten years. It’s certainly time for the arrogant little sinner to settle my account.
There were forty-five women in Hut 24, all of them sleeping and eating and living in the cramped barrack-like room with the single lavatory and washbasin, and the flimsy wooden-structured bunks for sleeping. As far as Alice could make out, most of them were innocent of any crime other than the crime of being Jewish, although there were one or two whom she would not have cared to meet in a lonely dark alley. Best not forget that Buchenwald, whatever else it might be, had originally been intended for political prisoners. Best, as well, to keep the baroness firmly in the background, and simply be Alice Wilson for the moment. In any case, very few people would have recognized the svelte sleek Lucretia von Wolff in the raggle-taggle creature living in Hut 24 and working in the munitions factory in Weimar each day.
They left for Weimar every morning after the 4 a.m. roll-call, and after the meagre breakfast apportionment of a slice of bread and a tin mug of coffee. Alice hated the dry bread and the watery milkless coffee, but she hated, even more, the factory where they sat at wooden benches, mostly sewing coarse uniform cloth for the German armies.
But surely there would be a way to escape, and surely she would find it and get out, either as Lucretia, or more likely as plain ordinary Alice Wilson, who had been used to hard work and subservience, and to an unobtrusive, unremarkable appearance. Yes, if she got out of here, it would have to be as Alice.
When the prisoners went to Weimar they marched in step, the guards walking alongside the little group. At times, to vary the monotony, Alice thought how Conrad might write music to fit the marching steps of them all. It would be thin, metallic music. Staccato. Clip-clop, tap-tap…Death-by-work…Death-by-work…
Conrad. Was he being forced to work in the same way? Was he allowed music? If they were denying him music – even the tinniest of instruments – he would never survive, for music was his life and his breath and his food, and without it he would succumb to the blackest of black despairs.
He had once said to her that he was a pagan. ‘I worship life and laughter and good wine,’ he had said. ‘And love,’ he had added, his eyes slanting with mischief. ‘I worship love, of course. “Some toward Mecca turn to pray, but I toward thy bed, Yasmin.” You are my Yasmin, Alice.’