Lost City of Women

After Neufchateau and south of Strasbourg came Germany in spring before any buds or blooms. The muddy roads and hedgerows of Vosges dug by centuries of wagon traffic were replaced abruptly at the Rhine by rigidly engineered modern highways, and picturesque farmhouses from Monet paintings changed to gingerbread houses out of a Grimm’s fairy tale.

Lieutenant Colonel Floyd Crane, US Army Medical Corps, sat in the passenger’s seat with one combat boot wedged against the map box to steady himself as the jeep sped along a highway frontage road. The thick tread of the jeep tires made a high-pitched drumming noise on the asphalt. Crane was attempting to let the pale sunlight and cool air penetrate his heart. A tired heart he suspected would not have increased tempo if a bullethole appeared in the windshield in front of his face---would not have been all that moved if the bullet killed him. Crane wore a surgical apron beneath his army field jacket that was stiff and rust-colored from dried blood and a steel helmet with a red cross on a white background painted on the sides.

Two slaughterhouses had hit head-on during the night at the Elbe River and Crane was the unit heart surgeon. He had spent the long night fixing young men’s broken hearts. The night had been a blur of white linen and bloodless faces so white it hurt his eyes to look at them. The only relief had been the red-black arterial blood. As he rode in the jeep, Crane drew a deep breath through his nose and exhaled slowly through his mouth.

“Got a girl back home, Colonel?” The corporal looked over at Crane as he was absorbed in the passing spruce forest along the frontage road. The driver made an incredulous sound in the back of his throat and said, “Don’t tell me you’re one of these guys who’s married to the Army?”

Crane honestly didn’t know if anybody waited for him at home.

“I got two,” the corporal bragged. “Got my high school sweetheart back home. And I met this English ambulance driver who still writes me. Those English girls are crazy. Should get you one, sir.”

The corporal looked to see if the young lieutenant colonel was watching the German forest for an Englishwoman hidden behind the trees like a wood nymph. He looked at Crane’s hands, which were red and raw. Crane put his hands in his field jacket pockets.

Crane was younger than the corporal, which was strange, but war was made up of years of unbelievable moments. He could have been mistaken for a resident wearing his father’s army field jacket except for his hands. He had gone from the most junior surgeon in the unit to the commanding officer as he sat on a splintery pine latrine seat cut from a shipping crate in Tunisia. As he read a month-old copy of Stars & Stripes, a stray artillery shell landed in the tent where the entire staff of nurses and doctors was operating. The impact of the round rang with Old Testament finality. When the unit landed in Italy he had been surprised how dirty his hands would get beneath the vulcanized rubber gloves, and between patients he was constantly scrubbing his hands and fingernails with caustic green soap. His field hospital was among the first to land in Normandy and he washed his hands in a steel helmet filled with seawater between patients---so many his hands had become sore and raw. Until the cold January morning in the Ardennes Forest the duty nurse walked into the pre-op tent and caught him scrubbing his hands until they bled when there was no one to operate on.

The corporal shouted over the loud humming tires. “Look, sir, our boys on the road.”

A column of soldiers was marching single file on the shoulder of the highway carrying their Springfield rifles over their shoulders.

Crane looked down to make sure his hands were hidden in his pockets.

One of the soldiers in the column stepped out of the file and waved the jeep to a stop. The soldier was wearing the three chevrons of a sergeant.

“What in hell are you doing?” the sergeant berated the driver. The sergeant saluted Crane and with one fluid motion used the same hand to rap the corporal on the side of his steel helmet. “This road ain’t secured, yet. You want to get your ass shot off?”

The corporal defended himself quickly. “We’re trying to find the lost city of women they’re talking about on the radio. We have some sulfa powder and DDT for them.”

The sergeant shook his head doubtfully at the medical boxes in the back of the jeep. “There ain’t no city full of women around here, you dipshit. That’s just a bunch of Wolverines trying to capture medical supplies.”

“Baker Company was just there,” Crane said. “Just show the corporal how to get to the coordinates.”

The sergeant snatched the map from the corporal fast enough they did not both have possession of it at the same time. “Baker Company’s a bunch of homosexuals. This here’s Able Company, Colonel. We banged broads from the Casbah to Paris. I’m telling you, if there was any pussy within twenty-five miles of here my compass needle would point me to it.”

While the sergeant was distracted by the map the remaining soldiers drifted apart, found something to lean against and lit cigarettes.

The sergeant leaned on the engine cowling of the jeep to share a secret with Crane. “When we get to Berlin, I’m going to get me one of them frauleins who can carry two of them big beer mugs on her tits.”

Crane watched the sergeant scratch his balls as he read the map. His lips moved as he read. Crane asked, “Is that two on each one or two total?”

The sergeant told the corporal harshly, “Turn around and go back to this last checkpoint and head east. That’s the direction with the big E on your compass. Time yourself down this road for ten minutes and turn north again. That’s the big N on that compass of yours, genius.”

“Thanks, sarge.” the corporal said.

Crane settled into the uncomfortable seat. “Good luck with the girl with the, ah… the beer things.”

As the corporal worked to turn the jeep around in the narrow road, Crane could hear the sergeant shouting at his men to get back into formation.

Once he got the jeep into high gear, the corporal reached into a pocket of his field jacket and produced a Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate bar. He handed it to Crane. “Here you are, sir. Whole city full of women. Might be somebody you like. The boys all say the girls in Germany will do anything you want for chocolate.”

Crane turned the chocolate bar over in his red hands and examined the wax paper wrapper. The Hershey’s bars were an improvement over the Ration D Bar and the little Choclettos that came in the K Ration dinner, but they were not what the company sold for candy bars. They were formulated to not melt in the South Pacific. He put it in the breast pocket of his field jacket.

They left the highway at a checkpoint where two bored military policemen had set up a gate by using a flagpole from the local post office demasted during an artillery barrage. The flagpole still bore the state flag of Hessen and Crane studied the flag out of the corner of his eye as he waited for the corporal to catch up on the latest bullshit with the MPs. Twenty-six divisions all along the Rhine, the MPs say gravely. Two hundred facing the Russians. Hessen. Home of the Hessians who had fought against the Colonials during the American Revolution. Birthplace of the Brothers Grimm.

The corporal drove along a narrow mountain road, slowing at every tributary to the north to check for signs of heavy vehicle traffic. Crane saw the solider first. He pointed and said, “Over there.”

A solitary private sat alongside the road with the butt of his Springfield rifle on the ground between his boots and the barrel over one shoulder. The soldier was intently studying the grass in front of the toes of his exhausted combat boots with an expression Crane had never seen before.

“Baker Company,” the corporal said. He stopped the jeep.

“Hey,” the corporal called out. “You with Baker Company? We’re looking for this city full of women they’re talking about on the radio. They requested medical supplies. We brought everything we could spare."

The soldier looked up from the grass to the boxes in the rear of the jeep. The puzzled expression on his face made Crane and the corporal turn in their seats to look at the boxes of medical supplies in the rear of the jeep.

Crane asked, “Something wrong, soldier?”

The soldier did not respond.

Behind the soldier the road became a tunnel formed by overhanging branches of twisted oaks that had been stripped of their leaves by the winter. The branches formed a sort of mad pipe organ that made a sudden spring wind sound like a ripple of children’s laughter from Hansel and Gretel. Crane caught the scent of sewage, but this was immediately intermingled with another, far different smell. It was a smell unmistakable to even those who had not smelled it before. It was the smell of death---not the smell of fresh death or even a few days infection from the battlefield. It was the smell of long suffering death. A smell so foul that it was no longer unpleasant.

The corporal asked anxiously, “Is it through there?”

The soldier then swiveled himself on the ground to look behind himself through the trees. He seemed to think for a long moment. He then nodded twice, very slowly, without saying a word.

The corporal nervously tried to start the jeep even though the engine was running and the starter gear gave out a harsh clatter against the spinning flywheel.

Passing through the tunnel of trees the jeep emerged into a wide, shallow valley that was filled with a gray fog. Crane’s feet began to instinctively push hard on the floorboard of the jeep to push away the realization of what lay before them.

The heavy gray fog was not a fog at all, he could see it was a camp. The gray was not gray, but the black and white stripes of prison uniforms that filled the valley for as far as the eye could see. Tall barbed wire fences were strung between space-age looking porcelain high voltage insulators and wooden guard towers stood equidistantly along the perimeter. Long, squat barracks floated like a squadron of barges in the grayness.

The jeep seemed to be drawn towards the camp entrance without the corporal steering and pulled into a long entryway between the encircling arms of two wings of the camp. There were bird-creatures clinging to the barbed wire with their talons. Thin skin was stretched tightly over bald skulls and purple circles surrounded bulging eyes. Other bald skulls bobbed above the shoulders of those against the wire fence, watching the jeep. Many of the bird-creatures stood featherless in no uniforms at all. Crane could count every rib of their ribcages beneath the milky skin. The naked creatures had peculiar flaps of skin on their chests and where their stork-like legs came together at their wide, flat pelvis bones, he could see the bird-creatures had once been women.

The corporal stared straight ahead and gripped the steering wheel tightly. He stopped the jeep where two iron gates to the camp had been thrown open. The aviary was open, yet the birds remained inside. The steel barbed wire resembled silver-plated briars, a trophy for the best kept enchanted world. Above the gate the words Arbeit Macht Frei were sewn into the silver briars.

Once the jeep engine quit, Crane could hear a groaning like an old rattan rocker. His mouth was dry. He tried but couldn’t clear his throat. He said hoarsely, “My God in Heaven.”

The corporal climbed out of the same side of the jeep as Crane. He followed so closely he bumped into him. They walked among the listless creatures, careful not to touch them. They watched as the creatures walked in jerking, wobbling gait like marionettes. It appeared touching them might knock them over.

One of the marionettes wobbled past. Nothing he had seen in grainy photographs in back pages on the forbidden shelves at medical school library helped him comprehend what animated creatures with no muscle attached to the bones. He found himself looking into the air for strings, but saw only the smoky overcast.

At one of the camp buildings half a dozen US Army soldiers had used blocks and tackle and dunnage made from railroad sleepers to lower a large diesel generator off the roof. The soldiers were watching one private, a tall Nebraska farmboy, as he spliced a thick electric cable to the generator.

Crane looked over the shoulder of one of the privates. “What’s going on?”

The private saluted. “Our lieutenant left us behind here to see if we could get one of these generators running the well pumps. Maybe at least get some water going.”

The building the soldiers had taken the generator down from was a solid concrete bunker with a heavy door that resembled a bank vault door. The heavy door was standing slightly ajar and the dull sunlight filtered inside. Inside Crane could see piles of the marionettes with their strings cut. Their distorted breast sacks and masses of black public hair in tall, twisted piles of spindly legs and arms. Crane looked above the door and saw the word Brausebad painted in orderly Bavarian letters.

“What’s it mean?”

The soldier replied, reluctantly, “It means showers,sir. These generators were up there on the roof and they piped the exhaust down into here. It must've smothered them.”

Crane asked, involuntarily, “Why?”

The soldiers looked among themselves for an answer. Found none.

One of the soldiers asked, tentatively, “Is there anybody else coming?”

Crane stared at the soldier. “Who?”

“You know. Help.”

He shook his head. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

Another soldier vomited without bending over.

Crane put his red fingertips on the bank vault door where human fingernails had scratched gouges into the solid steel. “Who are they?”

“See them patches, sir? Kowalski says those are Jew signs. They’re like crosses to them.”

Crane moved to where one of the naked birds had fallen from its nest and lay on the ground. Only the arms below the elbows still bent, the last effort it could make to right itself. The eyes bulged through the papery skin of the lids when the bird blinked. He knelt on one knee and rested his forearm across his thigh. He had seen hearts that had been shot with bullets. He had seen hearts hit with jagged shrapnel. In those brown eyes he saw the voltage of electricity firing the nerves to contract the atria alternately with the ventricles in the moment to moment miracle called life.

He pulled the Hershey’s chocolate bar from his jacket. It was brittle from the cold. He snapped off a small corner of it. The mouth was like a badly healed wound over skull teeth. He placed the chocolate between the lips and used one finger to help close the jaw.

Unexpectedly, the cadaverous mouth turned into a small smile. The woman said, “Ich träume von Schokolade.”

One of the soldiers groaned.

“What’d she say?” Crane asked.

“Nothing, sir. It’s nothing.”

The corporal had been watching carefully over Crane’s shoulder. “What’d she say?” he insisted.

The soldier placed his hands on his hips and shrugged. “She said I dreamed about chocolate.”

The corporal took a few retreating steps backwards and collided with one of the birds, knocking it sprawling to the ground. The creature made no sound. The corporal broke into a run towards the jeep. He gave a sharp, sudden howl. “People can’t do this!”

“Corporal!” Crane stood and shouted.

The corporal reached the jeep and began throwing the medical supplies into the road. Crane ran after him and wrestled a box of DDT powder away from him.

Crane shouted, “Pull yourself together, corporal! Where in the hell do you think you’re going?”

“People can’t do this! It’s not people who did this! You know what that means? With all these weird Jewish signs? This is the work of the Devil. The Devil did this and he’s going to come back here tonight and if he finds us here…”

Crane exploded and grabbed the corporal’s field jacket in both red hands and twisted the collar so sharply the older man let out a painful whelp. “That’s enough!”

A memory popped into Crane’s head and he released the corporal so suddenly he fell backwards to the road, hitting his elbow on the spare gas on the back of the jeep and it made a short, deep note. A memory that had lain dormant, incubating. Twenty years.

The eyes behind the rows of barbed wire lining the entrance watched him. The steel helmet was heavy. He lowered himself to the ground and picked a few pieces of grass that grew on the side of the road. Closing his eyes, he held them to his nose to see if they smelled like mint. He held his eyes closed and concentrated, listening to his own heartbeat. When he opened his eyes he looked out through the barbed wire he could see a great, undiscovered country.

A long, sawing moan began to rise over the entire camp, ringing the barbed wire. The corporal pushed himself away from the open gates a few steps on the seat of his pants, but then sat still