Partisan Years Pt. 07

He shivered as I stepped towards him, as if in fear, and seized my arm. His clawlike fingers dug into my bicep. I rehearsed our encounter, down to the moment where I would clean the taste of my ass off his cock, down to what I could and could not say.

My feet carried me to the garden plot and the drill yard. Heinrich walked beside me in uncharacteristic silence.

He kissed me. His tongue's probing touch shook me out of my haze.

I pulled away.

"Come on," he said. "Don't be a fool."

"You killed him," I said. It hadn't been in my rehearsed lines.

He backhanded me. My forage cap dropped to the ground.

"You killed him," I said again.

He punched me in the face, I saw a flash of light like a rifle shot in my eye and staggered back. He stepped on the forage cap, his heel on the red star. I lunged at him.

"You led us all into slaughter."

He was off balance and I followed, trying to throw him. But he planted his foot again and twisted me by the shoulders. I landed on my backside and he stood by me. I tried to stand and he slammed his foot into my stomach. The breath went out of me.

"Traitor," I wheezed. He dropped over me, knees on either side of me, his hands on my shoulder.

"What do you want from me?" he said. "What would you have me do? You know this war will not end. You know the union will fall. You know that. But I'm here, stuck in the fucking wood with a bunch of peasants and a jumped up school girl, waiting for a fucking hand grenade or a howitzer shell."

"You should fall on your sword," I said. He slapped me. "You killed your commanding officer, as good as if you'd fired the shell." He pushed his forearm into my throat.

"You foolish communists and your childish virtue. All you want is to sacrifice, to fight and die, for life to mean something grand. But what if it doesn't? Huh? What if this flesh is all there is and the rest is mere illusion?" As he spoke he opened my shirt and tore at my trousers. I flailed to resist him. But it gave him no pause.

"Then we are right," I spat up at him. "And it's you fascists who are wrong."

"Fascist," he said. "Oh I'm not a fascist. They believe in something. I don't believe in anything. I live by my wits and for myself. No principle." He'd pulled my trousers down and my underwear. I reached up to scratch his face, but he ducked aside and forced his hand down to my cunt.

"There's going to be some changes in our relations."

He rubbed one of his fingers across my slit, searching for the opening.

"Now that Vladimir is dead, you're mine," he said.

I felt his fingertip push inside me. I clenched my teeth. Hot tears started and cold anger rose in me, voiceless and terrible. I fought back, crossed my legs, struck at his head. He caught the hand and rolled me onto my front, the way it'd been with Vladimir the first time. Only he kept hold of my hand and forced it up along my spine, until my shoulder burned and I gasped, little waves of electric pain passed along my arm.

"I swear I'll break your shoulder," he said. I closed my mouth, forced my body to be still. He eased the upward pressure, but pressed my hand into the small of my back to keep it pinned, while, with his left hand he got his trousers open and rubbed spit on the head of his cock.

The night air lay cool on my exposed backside. The packed earth beneath me was hard. I tried to dissociate, tried all that bag of tricks to force myself away, and make my body an empty vessel containing, void of its human element, if only for a few minutes. But I could not. I felt the brush of his cock at my cunt lips, felt the tip of him strike my thighs as he prepared to fuck me.

He pushed and my opening burned. The muscles would not give, not fully. I willed them to release, willed my body to lubricate. But my cunt was slow to act and come to its own defense. So many times had I been raped, so many men had hurt me that now my flesh itself finally revolted. I began to panic. His weight on my back crushed my lungs, each breath was no more than a shallow gasp, as rapid as a heartbeat. He thrust harder and I tried to look up, away from him.

Never had I been so acutely aware of the feeling of a man's penis as on that night, beneath him, as it forced inside me, slow and nearly dry. I felt something burning inside me, like the feeling when a carpet, or a rough garment tears loose the skin from your knee, layer by layer, concentrated and enduring, rather than the brief flash of friction. His glans gained the entrance, the shaft following, and he sighed so hard with pleasure I knew he'd held his breath the last ten or fifteen seconds.

Another couple thrusts of his hips, another burst of burn of pain and he was inside me. I cried out, soft. The tears ran and hitching sobs followed, silent lest he hurt me more. Then, finally, the muscles began to relax.

He withdrew and slammed all the way in again, then let my hand go and lay atop me, his fingers trailed in the soft hair at the nape of my neck. He massaged the skin there, absently, his whole frame going languid now that the struggle was over. He was enjoying his conquest, that apex of ownership and control which a man feels always when he has finally, by force, by word, by love, secured the acquiescence of the object of his lust.

I rested my face on the dirt, looking down to the right. The sobs fell away, not fully, not enough, and the nauseating ache that invariably follows a sobbing fit settled on me. At last, I thought, I'd be able to go away, to get the distance, and watch myself again, as if I'd been a man, squatting with a cigarette in his mouth at the edge of the parade ground, too tired to intervene.

But that release would not come. As he began his strokes, I remained aware and within myself. The pain became something more like an intensity of sensation, still strange and unbearable, but not longer agonizing. I could not lay still, but shifted under him, trying to get my breath back. I shifted the angle of my hips, my legs, to make it less painful, to give him fuller access, so he would cum and be done with it and I could slink away to die in the brush.

He obliged me and sped up, one hand on the back of my neck, no longer in a gentle caress, but a crushing force, so that jolts of cold pain shot out along the nerves. His other hand propped himself half-up. He groaned, shuddered, and I felt the rush of his cum inside me. The sobs returned. I tried to curl into something small as he withdrew from me. I'd made it since the abortion without a man cumming inside me, mostly by luck, but it felt so much worse to have this taken from me by him, now.

He rolled me over, forced his cock into my mouth, and I thought that would be the end of it.

I was wrong.

Heinrich sat back on his heels and began to play with my clit then. I drew my legs up to keep him out, but this was a token gesture. He dipped his fingers inside me to wet them, and drew them back over me. He rubbed at it, then slid back in, repeating this over minutes. Without his weight on me, I could breathe, and without him inside me, the knotting pleasure in my legs and stomach started.

Cool spring air on my exposed body; the black night closed round us. Insects hummed in the bushes and low down along the earth, and in the long grass down beyond the tree break. This I remember, together with the flick of his fingers and their searching pull within me. I broke into a sweat.

When he'd gone for some minutes, long enough to hear me start to sigh, he shifted back, pulled my legs apart and readied himself. He was hard again.

Heinrich slid inside me this time, his thumb working still on my clit. He looked down on me, and I threw my arm across my face to keep from seeing his eyes.

My watch sat beside my ear.

And I focused in on the ticks, one, two, three, as I had during my long imprisonment inside the horse carcass. His fingers, his body, moved to a rhythm. Again I found each second intolerable. But in the absence of dissociation, this could serve, this knowledge that nothing would last forever, that he would cum again or tire, or the sky above us would split open with blinding shellbursts, as if the stars themselves could rupture, their screams like the trumpets of angels.

Instead, I orgasmed. It was a pitiful moment, pleasure overwhelmed me, and I felt my clit and cunt throbbing and fevered, my legs shook, my hips sought him, and my own voice whined out.

"Fucking hell."

He came inside me again. He pulled out his cock and watched his cum run from me for a minute.

"Whore," he said.

Then he stood, buckled his trousers and kicked me several times. The blows rattled me, and when he kicked my head my vision swam and I lapsed into a velvet semi-consciousness, pain in my muscles and body like fire burning low.

Something rose to lift me, like a tide, or how Lev had carried me after the shell shredded my calf.

In the darkness that followed, all was fire and soft ash, and I cried out in this empty hell, half-dream, half-memory.

Vladimir was there. But when he tried to answer me, black bile spilled from his mouth and his bones shattered and he fell to ruin on the desolate plain before me.

I woke to Heinrich forcing his cudgel into my ass. Dawn was nearly on us, and I lay naked in his dugout, sprawled on the floor. He raped me again and left the cudgel buried in my ass while he shaved and dressed. Then he drew that iron rod out and bound me to his cot.

He cleaned me, but it was for his pleasure only, then he laid me in his blankets as the light grew bright enough for me to see the bruises on my stomach, on my legs.

I slept again.

This time, I woke to sharp pain in my neck, rasping fire in my throat. My whole body shook. He'd wrapped my belt around my neck, and pulled the end so it constricted all. Blood hammered in my skull like distant thunder. His cock stabbed into my ass, all the way inside me, the pain immediate and overwhelming, like fire, like tearing flesh.

I clawed at the leather, tried to get my fingers under it, tears bubbled up and ran on my cheeks. I tried to get away from him, but with the belt on my neck there was nowhere to go. To fight would kill me.

I tried to plead, but he only thrust harder. After a moment, he let the grip relax and my breath came easier. I dropped my hands to the cot, knotting his blanket in my fists. Then he shoved his fingers into my cunt and pulled back on the belt.

So full, so ruined.

"Cum for me you bitch."

My hands scrabbled at the belt. I was choking. I could half breath; it is hard actually, to strangle someone with a ligature as broad as a trouser belt, but it is excruciating to breath so, to fight the confusion that follows sleep interrupted by so complete an assault.

I shook, down in my thighs, my belly. It might've been an orgasm, it might've been anything, mere reflex, subterfuge, or all of it mixed. He grabbed my ass cheek and buried himself in me as deep as he could.

Then he was done.

I don't know how long I lay on his cot with my belt fixed round my neck, the searing pain falling to its low ebb, as a storm tide falls back to the calm undulation of the sea.

An hour, two?

He left.

Gingerly, I dressed myself, my brassiere, my underwear. After that, from thirst and pain and want of food, my strength deserted me and I lay on the cool earth of the dugout.

What had I done to deserve this? How could one be so cruel? I noticed then that my boots were gone.

He returned in what I took to be the evening. But before he entered the dugout, I heard shouting.

"Where is she?" To my relief, and my horror, it was Lev. I wanted to dress, to clean the blood and semen from my skin, to drink water and eat a full day's ration, shave and bathe and comb myself into the very image of a partisan. But there would be no time for that, only the sullen gawping of the men at a rescued captive.

"Resting," was Heinrich's answer. I heard someone strike him and he called out briefly.

"I'll file court martial charges," this last Kiril Denisovich. "And the commissars will come with a warrant and a bullet just for you."

Lev opened the door to the dugout. My boots were in his hand. Outside, Kiril swore again and again and I heard his boots striking something, striking Heinrich.

"He tried to throw these away," Lev said, his face animated, but distant; his expression was that of a man who understands he is confronting something Evil, but who can face only the smallest details of it at any time. I'd seen it before, on the faces of a peasant as he explained that yes, the Polizei had raped the women, stolen the seed grain, burned the barn and smashed the icons, but that their true evil lay in act of stealing his shoe laces.

I tried to speak, but could not. Then Kiril was in the room too.

"We'll shoot him, we'll put him on trial. The bastard. The thieving, rapist, bastard," he hissed. I tried to protest, because all I could think was that I had no desire to testify (the words here are all I have allowed myself, now that all who ever knew are dead), that if this went into the records and a judge read those words it would be real, not some part of the fever dream of war.

But my voice would not work.

I seized Kiril's hands, still nearly naked, still covered in the shame of my rape, and shook my head. Each time he spoke of prosecution, I shook my head and when he tried to leave to get the requisite forms, threw myself about his ankles.

"What's this?" he said. "Protecting him?"

"No, brother Kiril," Lev said. "Some crimes must go unrecorded."

For weeks I could not speak. At first, I feared it was some damage to my throat, for huge bruises and deep pain plagued me the first days after my rescue. But as the soreness faded and black flesh turned to dull gray and pale yellow, I still could not make my voice work.

The first few days, I was too sick and injured to work or march, and lay under Lev's guard in one of the dugouts. But as May progressed I returned to all my old duties. I even began to attend the conversations between the peasants and our men, though mute. I would scribble notes for political reports and watch the hands and faces of our countrymen as they described atrocity and grain requisition.

Heinrich remained with the detachment, though he seemed uneasy, and he took pains to avoid me. He walked with a limp the first week, and I saw him bathe one day. His flesh bore witness to the retribution my rescuers exacted.

Those in my section were ready to fly to arms, but the rest of the detachment did not care that a commander raped the little kike bitch a little too hard, one too many times.

I felt nothing, for a very long time. I thought, yes, but these thoughts lacked vivacity. No images came to me, only words, and in my mind I heard them said with the flat intonation Kiril used when reading off telegrams from the political directory.

The sun is hot today.

It was kind of those farmers to secret sausages and vodka for us.

Things like that. Color faded from the world, whether from the bleaching effect of the sun on the grass in the parched meadows, or from some inner loss, I was unsure, until one day with Lev beside me in the pale dawn, I realized the clear sky was as gray as ash to me.

I wept then.

Nor could I sleep. Most nights I toiled with my thoughts for a watch or more, while the sentence: If I sleep, he will come echoed in my head. On those nights, I went to Lev and he would hold me and talk of Kiev and the world before the war, of the world after. Slowly, he began to joke with me during the days, and though I still could not see color, still could not think in images, still could not speak, I could grin and even laugh a little.

To celebrate that we had made it a whole year, the men organized a midsummer feast. On the solstice we ate roasted potatoes and horseflesh, for there were no cattle, no pigs to butcher, the Germans had taken them all. We ate, each section with a different village, and as the sun set on my twentieth birthday, I felt all the great loss of the last year well up.

Scrawny men and toothless women, old ladies and young boys, soldiers and farmers, all ate and sang and drank. This day, the Germans could not hurt us. We had weathered a year of war. I will spare you the maudlin reminiscences that struck me as I watched the shadows pool and then spread over the land in a great flood.

Cool blue that rose within those shadows. For the solstice, our year of survival, seemed a triumph, oh yes, but that is the trouble of the longest day: the next is shorter. And though the heat builds in summer and lingers later every year; though the dust so thick as to make your eyes sting and nostrils bleed rises from the roads in that awful heat; though the wheat is only just golden in the fields and the trees are still pale green; the heart knows that spring has passed and now is the start of the long decay.

The effulgent glory of summer stands for a single, perfect day, before the rapt eyes of the world, and declares in fitful voice (so unbecoming such an hour of glory): "All that exists, deserves to perish."

So it is, too, at the brush of a lover's lips the first time, for you know that when you have tasted their tongue and felt the press of their body against yours, that all the possibilities welling in the depths of your heart are foreclosed, and the path before you is the lone one to trod, and with each beat of your heart you are drawn further into doomed pairing, the rush to the orgasm or the notary's stamp, to the grave beyond. This is the terrible fate of the solstice, the same fate of all joy, it contains within it the smallest grain of its own negation.

That was the truth of our final victory of the Germans, but I shall spare that truth for you for a few words more.

Because that night, I saw Lev as I'd seen the German in the Minsk hotel, no longer a comrade or a friend, but a man with a body and a face and the movements of one who has lived, will live yet, and who burns bright with want.

I looked to him and he nodded.

We all danced in the dim glow of fire, all of us, dances from the outer Republics, from Moscow, from half-remembered lessons. Then it was full night, and I could feel fire in my limbs, strength from the meal and courage from the vodka, of which I'd had scarce a glass.

Some of the men had already gone off with the widowed peasant women, to the cheers and laughter of all. But now the night was hard upon us, and exhaustion felled men one by one. And it was just us.

I'd not touched him all that night, though we'd danced. But now, as the music of the peasant players died away, we drew closer. He sang a yiddish song from the pre-war days and I gave my hand to him, and he put his free hand on my waist. A couple of other jewish soldiers clapped the rhythm, then rose and danced with each other. My lips moved to the half-remembered words.

The two other jewish fighters collapsed on the ground, laughing, for one had staggered in drunkenness and pulled the other down. Lev and I were alone among all the drunkards. I felt words vibrate in my throat, but they were not the words of the song. I dropped his hand and seized his bearded face and leapt towards him. He pulled me to him and I kissed him.

I wanted him so badly I twined my body round his; I circled his waist with my legs; he held me upright and I fought for his mouth with my own; I needed every piece of him, every atom, every fiber, every cell.

"I love you," I heard my voice say, between those breathless kisses, "I love you. I love you. I love you."

He laughed as I spoke, and kissed me and staggered a bit with the burden of my body.

"I knew you'd come back," he said.

"Only you and I will know how I survived," I said.

"Because I waited as no one else did."

He kissed me again. Tears ran, his or mine, I don't know, but I tasted them on his lips. And I could feel the fire building in me, feel myself getting wet. I wanted him to fling me to the ground there and take me in front of all of them. But I wanted tenderness too, discretion, so long had all this been denied me. After a moment, I broke the kiss.