The Soul Of A Thief

He was ever surprising me with some unexpected and outlandish task. But this one surpassed all other previous orders. I had by then survived three additional combat adventures with the unit, admittedly all of them barely witnessed as I crouched in the lee of the Colonel’s charging silhouette, yet the prospect of my deflowering summoned a fear beyond that of physical wounding.

On that glorious summer weekend, the troop, under temporary command of Captain Friedrich, was enjoying a brief rest and recreation in Munich. It was only the Colonel, myself and his driver, Edward, who traveled the bomb-pocked Autobahn down to Salzburg. I had never been to this magnificent city of medieval castles, classical concerts and springtime carnivals, and initially I felt blessed at having been selected for the venture. The Colonel was to attend a conference of high-ranking SS officers, hosted by Heinrich Himmler himself, and he had even invited his wife to join him at the Schloss Reichenhall Hotel.

Have I failed to mention that Himmel had a wife? Oh yes, the Colonel was married, and had three young daughters as well, all of whom lived on the outskirts of Munich. I had foolishly anticipated a rather relaxed episode, full of high-born officers and their gowned wives, all dancing Viennese waltzes and sharing feasts excavated from some secret privileged stores. Yet now, the summer excursion filled me with foreboding.

Arriving in the city, which did not at first glance appear to be suffering the later stages of the war, Edward and I escorted the Colonel into his hotel. We remained some paces behind, carrying his modest valises and map cases as Himmel strode into the wide lobby, stamped to a stop and threw his arms wide to the sides. A trio of small blonde girls in white frilled dresses ran to him and leaped into his arms, and as he laughed and kissed and tickled them, his wife approached as well. She was extremely small and trim, wearing a prim gray suit, with her dark blond hair pulled tightly into a bun, and she placed a white-gloved hand upon my master’s shoulder and offered him a taut cheek. In turn, he slipped a hand behind her head, angled his chin and kissed her hard upon the mouth, and then he roared with laughter as she stepped back, blushing and smoothing her suit coat as if it had been soiled.

A pair of bellmen quickly recovered the Colonel’s valises from our hands, and Himmel turned and strode to us.

“You will stay at the SS barracks on Wandersee,” he said. Then he looked at me with a harsh squint. “Execute your assignment, Shtefan, and report to me in the morning.”

I saluted and clicked my heels, Edward mimicked me, and we departed as I blew out a long, trembling sigh...

* * *

I sat stiffly beside the aging corporal in Himmel’s staff car as a cool night breeze wafted from between the dignified edifices of Salzburg and the wheels trundled over rain-polished cobblestones. I released the stay of my collar and pushed my field cap back onto my head, scratching my brow and trying to imagine just how to go about this. Edward was silent, though he smiled a bit and smoked as he drove, and initially I thought him not to be privy to the true nature of Himmel’s order. But then, he spoke.

“So, Shtefan. I assume you’ve been ordered to fuck.”

I looked at him. “You know?”

“Of course. It happens to every virgin in the troop, though there aren’t a lot of them by the time they get to us.”

He was clearly enjoying this and speaking loudly above the engine rumble, and I wanted to shush him, even though certainly none of the pedestrians we passed could possibly overhear.

“I...but I...really know nothing about this.” I fidgeted in my seat. “How to go about it...”

“Well, you’ve stroked your own cock, haven’t you?” he posed as he finger-brushed the tips of his graying mustache.

I must have blushed a deep purple crimson, for the corporal glanced at me and nearly choked on his own laughter. I had meant that I had no idea how to go about locating a willing volunteer, rather than the exact physical logistics of sex. Of course, that knowledge evaded me as well, but he went right on before I could explain.

“It’s pretty much the same,” he said with a shrug. “But here, once you get hard, you just stick it in and pump until you squirt. If she isn’t wet, you can slap some hair oil on her. But believe me, as soon as you see your first pair of tits you’ll come to attention right quick!”

I began to perspire, my heart palpitating. I wiped my palms on my trousers. We passed a pair of pretty young women in long dresses and high shoes, and I imagined in my panic that even if both of them stood naked before me in the most luxurious and inviting of bedroom suites, my body would simply freeze and refuse to do my bidding. What would happen if I were, somehow, somewhere, able to find a cooperative woman, and then be unable to perform? Would Himmel have me summarily shot? Would my war record file read, in summation after so many life-threatening combat excursions, “Executed for refusal to perform his duties”?

“The very first time can be hard, though,” Edward continued. “No joke. If you’ve never had your hand up a girl’s dress before, you can panic and shut down, and your cock’ll just hang there like an earthworm.” He paused. “Have you?”

“What?”

“Stuck your hand up a girl’s dress?”

“No.” I swallowed.

“Outside? Ever felt one’s tits?”

“No.” I was growing sullen at this point.

“Well, then, you might have to drink some schnapps and loosen up. Of course, sometimes drinking too much can make you soft as pudding.”

“Edward.” I was gritting my teeth. “This isn’t helping. And where shall I supposedly find this sort of woman anyway? At this hour? In a strange city?”

“Listen, boy. All cities have whores, and I know where the whores are in every city. I can smell them from ten kilometers out.”

“Whores?” My nose bunched up in disgust.

“Yes, whores! Of course, whores. What’d you think, that you’re going to fall in love in one hour, buy her a ring, marry her and fuck her by dawn?”

“Gott im Himmel,” I groaned, and I reached up for my cap brim and pulled it down over my face, folding my arms and pouting.

We did not speak for a while. Edward smoked and hummed an annoying ditty as he drove, and although he issued no lyrics to accompany the melody, I was rather certain it to be some lewd rhyme which made him merry in his head. His gay mood depressed me even further. My mission seemed utterly impossible, no less than being ordered to steal a ring from the Kaiser’s finger while he bathed in a tower of his palace, surrounded by armed footmen. Yet I was determined, in my stubborn adherence to the slim precepts of romance, to at the very least seduce some young, lonely, comely, and desperately charitable female of my own age, or thereabouts.

“So?” Edward finally said. “No whorehouse?”

“No.” I pouted. “Never.”

“Fine, then.” He shrugged. “You can try here.”

The Kübelwagen broke out into a large cobblestoned square. In its center was a towering statue of Beethoven, and as the night was pleasant and devoid of the threatening drum of aircraft engines from high above, the Salzburgers had come out to stroll and chat. Small groups of various ages milled about, and surrounding the square were a number of brightly lit taverns, their music and the laughter of their patrons echoing between the edifices.

I fastened my collar, set my cap smartly on my head and disembarked from the staff car. Edward fixed the hand brake and exited himself, brushing cigarette ashes from his tunic.

“Where are you going?” I asked him.

“With you, of course.”

I frowned. The odds of my finding this night’s love dropped like a brick from a Bavarian steeple, as I imagined his crude and portly form accompanying me.

“I think I can manage alone, Edward,” I said as sternly as I could.

“Maybe.” He arched his brows in doubt. “But if you make a pass at some officer’s daughter and wind up in the clink, it’ll be my ass as well as yours. So, I’m coming along, for my own safety.”

I placed my hands on my hips, mimicking one of Colonel Himmel’s most infamous postures.

“And how am I to succeed with you shadowing my every effort?”

He smirked at me then, shaking his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay in the shadows and just watch your back. At any rate, in two hours you’ll be begging me to help you find a nice, clean little whorehouse and get it over with.”

“Humph.” I straightened my shoulders and strode away toward the first tavern that presented itself, hearing Edward’s boots clicking on the stones close behind. I would certainly show him. Yes, I would. I would march into one of these merry little enclaves and have a drink at the bar and strike up a conversation with one beautiful young miss. And I would charm her with my Viennese gentility and regale her with jokes and compliment her person and her scents and her magnetism, and soon she would be batting her eyelashes at me and blushing and whispering hints of a private room nearby in the servants’ quarters of a town councilman. And long before dawn we would be making mad and passionate love, for perhaps the third or fourth time, upon all manners of furniture and with utterly ecstatic abandon!

Two hours later, I emerged from the fourth such establishment. I was utterly defeated, and hoping that the sheets of brothel beds were at the very least turned over after every ghastly visit.

“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 worthwhile 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.