Woman in the Pillory
Brigitte Reimann
Translated from German by
Lucy Jones
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Originally published as Die Frau am Pranger (Verlag Neues Leben, 1956)
This translation published in Great Britain by Penguin International Writers 2025
Text © Aufbau Verlage GmbH & Co. KG , Berlin, 1956, 2018
English language translation © Lucy Jones, 2025
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Woman in the Pillory
Whenever she went along the village road, it looked as if she were walking through cold, autumn drizzle: her head hung low, her back was hunched, and her slight body shivered. She was in her late twenties and had been married for over five years, but strangers could have taken her for a nineteen-year-old.
She stood under the arch of the gate and stared at the telegram. ‘. . . three days’ home leave . . .’ Three days. She shivered more violently and seemed to grow slighter and more cowered. She went into the house, her feet dragging as usual, and put the telegram on the kitchen table.
‘Heinrich’s coming.’
Her sister-in-law was sitting in front of a plate of potatoes boiled in their skins, elbows on the table. She glanced up and said with a deep sigh, ‘About time too. He can make sure that everything’s in order, especially now. We won’t get the spring tilling done without a man around here.’
‘Just three days,’ said the young woman. Three days, she thought fearfully, three never-ending days and nights . . .
The older woman shoved a potato into her mouth. ‘Right.’ She stood up, a strapping woman, hefty, with broad hips and brawny arms, almost a head taller than her brother’s wife. She wiped her hands on her apron. ‘He’ll help out, Heinrich will, somehow. I’m sure he
will.’ She picked up the full milk churns from the bench like they weighed nothing. As she was going out of the door, she added, ‘Make sure there’s something decent on the table tonight for when Heinrich comes—’
He came. When he was standing on the threshold, the huge, heavyset man in his dun- grey uniform with a lance- corporal’s chevron on his sleeve looked as if he would break the doorframe.
His sister clasped her hands around his neck, then stroked the silver chevron. ‘You’re a lance-corporal now!
Done us proud, you have . . .’
He looked over her shoulder into the kitchen.
‘Kathrin!’
The young woman was standing by the table, her shoulders sagging. When he put his arms around her, she started crying.
‘Come, come . . .’ He patted her back. ‘There now . . .’
The young woman wept. He growled sympathetically at first, then impatiently, pushing her away. Her tears left damp stains on his tunic.
‘Why the tears? Has something happened? Aren’t you happy to see me?’
She wiped her sleeve across her face and swallowed. ‘Of course I am, Heinrich.’
He sat down at the table, splaying his legs out, and dug in like a starving man.
‘Home cooking’s the best.’
Small droplets of sweat clung to his forehead.
Kathrin sat perched between the brother and sister, crushed by their warm, bulky flesh, their loud remarks and ripostes, and her husband’s raucous laughter.
Her gaze lingered on his face. It was well-proportioned,
broad, with full lips and a fleshy nose, and brown eyes under gleaming, dark hair. In the village, the women called him Handsome Heinrich. When he’d run after Kathrin Laws, they’d looked her up and down in disapproval. No one understood what he saw in her, she herself least of all. She was a bland, ridiculously reedy wisp of a thing, and everything about her was pale – her hair, her face, even her eyes. She had none of the spit and grit of the other girls in the village. Yet he’d picked her out, along with the old Laws’ acres of farmland, which enlarged his own plot by more than a third.
Now he was sitting at the table in his dun-grey uniform, chewing and chomping, guffawing and jawing.
‘A strange bunch, those Russians are,’ he was saying, ‘sly and dangerous, the lot of ’em. We were marching into a village recently . . .’
How could she have imagined he’d have changed in the six or seven months since his last leave? Had she expected him to be less loud, big and strong?
‘. . . and shots rang out from a farmhouse,’ he continued. ‘Then – peng! Our lieutenant was a goner. Partisans, of course.’
‘My God, they’re like animals,’ Frieda said. ‘Not proper people at all. The whole lot should have been strung up!’
‘That’s what we did,’ Heinrich said, agreeably. ‘But they’re tough, a stubborn lot – they didn’t make a peep. They spit in your face even when the noose is already around their necks.’
The young woman sat there listening, her eyes wide in shock, her face paler than usual.
He thumped her hand good-naturedly.
‘That’s just the way war is. You have to crack down
hard on them. And Russians are different from us, only half-human, get it?’
Kathrin kept her mouth shut, as she had done for years, no matter what the brother and sister thought or talked about.
That night, when she was finally released from his violent embrace, she cried in shame and fear. He was lying on his back, mouth half-open, snoring with a full belly and in rude health. And for the first time in those five years of cowering obedience, alongside her usual aversion and deference, a tiny ember of hatred glowed.
The next day she avoided him. She needn’t have bothered because he ignored and talked over her anyway, like he’d done in all the years before he’d become a soldier. His crude jokes echoed through the house and farm, accompanied by approving laughter from his sister. The siblings strode about the stables and barns. He slapped his sister’s backside. What a capable woman she was, keeping the place in order, just the way it should be.
While she was happy to bask in his praise, Frieda began grouching: they needed a man about the place, otherwise, they wouldn’t manage the tilling in spring. She was no longer in her prime, after all. ‘I’m going to rack and ruin behind the plough, and it’s not like Kathrin can be relied on, that tiny scrap!’
Heinrich stuck up for his wife. ‘She’s not strong. She can’t help that. You’re right, though, you need a man around here.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps I can get you a prisoner of war to help out.’
Frieda raised her hands in protest. ‘I’m not having a Russian here on the farm!’
‘You aren’t afraid, are you?’ he asked, laughing. ‘He
wouldn’t come into the house. He’d sleep in the barn, and his upkeep wouldn’t cost much. But you need a man around the place, Frieda.’
Ignoring her protests, he went to the local farmers’ overseer, a man installed by the Reich Food Estate to supervise forced labour and grain supplies to the front. When he came back, he looked satisfied. ‘They’re going to allocate you a Russian next week.’
The two women sat in silence, the younger one hunched over with her hands in her lap, and a desperate expression on the coarse face of the older one.
Heinrich tried cajoling them. ‘What’s the big deal with some Russki? You’ll manage him, no problem. Won’t cost a thing, and the work will get done. That’s the main thing!’
‘It’s not right, having to take one of them into our house!’ complained Frieda. ‘This bloody war!’
When she caught the look in her brother’s eyes, she shrank back.
‘You have the nerve to say that – you, a German woman?’ He stood in front of her, feet planted wide apart. ‘We know why we’re fighting our war. And you’re moaning about a filthy Russian? Don’t make a fool of yourself, Frieda! A sturdy lass like you! Afraid of a Russki! It breaks my heart to see my lovely fields going to waste . . .’
She couldn’t have looked more remorseful. All contrite and snivelly, she promised not to let him down. Then she tried to cheer herself up. ‘They’re only halfhuman, aren’t they, Heinrich? And we could start on the field up at Hornberg at last . . .’ She talked too much and too quickly, flapping about as she tried to appease her brother. Three or four others in the village already had
prisoners, didn’t they? They were easy to get along with, placid and knew how to work hard. ‘None of them have caused a riot yet, and if you keep a firm hand on them, they can be put to good use.’
And so, it was decided.
On the third day, Heinrich Marten set off back to the front. The women accompanied him to the main town where the station was. When the train pulled in, his sister clasped her hands around his neck, snuffling and sobbing. His wife, thin, blonde and shivering, stood staring up at the carriage window, with the grey March sky overhead. She raised a hand hesitantly, as if forced, while Frieda next to her flapped a huge white handkerchief.
That’s how they stayed in Heinrich’s mind: his young wife, who seemed even slighter and paler next to his large, red-faced sister, one with her hand half raised, the other waving a handkerchief.
As the train pulled away eastwards, the two women walked the few kilometres back to the village and didn’t say a word to each other.
A few days later, Horst Lange, the local farmers’ overseer, personally brought them a POW. While Frieda Marten bargained with Lange in the kitchen, the prisoner stood lifelessly in the yard, bundle in hand, staring at the ground with a dull gaze.
Kathrin pressed her face against the window and watched him, scared and curious.
The Russian was tall and broad-shouldered, his face simple and strong with sharp cheekbones and flat, dark eyebrows. Kathrin had seen Russians now and again. One had slanted eyes and Mongolian features, and she was afraid of him. Recently at the Meinhardt’s farm, she’d had to go past him when he’d been forking manure and he’d glanced up at her as she’d clacked past in her wooden clogs. His dark eyes had only fixed on her for a moment, but she’d felt a deep jolt and had been dogged by a strange unease for days afterwards. She thought he was sure to have been the kind who raped women, killed children and sniped at German soldiers.
The prisoner in the yard raised his head as if he felt her watching him. She leapt back from the window, but for a few seconds, she’d glimpsed his eyes, set in a face that was thick with dirty stubble. Those eyes, so deep blue they were almost black, were set far apart in his grey face, and she realized that though she’d guessed him to be forty, he couldn’t have been twenty-five.
By now, Frieda had sealed the deal with the farmers’ overseer. ‘Heil Hitler!’ He left, and Frieda led the prisoner to the barn, where she showed him his place in the hayloft, which had a tiny hatch he couldn’t wriggle through. The farmers’ overseer had told her to lock the barn securely at night. If he did try to escape, the Russian wouldn’t make it far, though: he barely spoke three words of German.
Kathrin had stayed in the kitchen and was standing by the oven, rearranging the pots and kettle, when Frieda came in. She didn’t turn around when her sister-in-law said, ‘His name’s Alexei and he can barely string together three words of German.’ She pointed to the slip of paper given to her by the overseer, and spelt out what it said: ‘Alexei Ivanovich Luniev . . . funny, all Russians are called Ivan.’
‘Where’s he going to sleep?’
‘Well, in the hayloft.’
They ate in silence.
Then the younger woman said abruptly, ‘It’s still so cold at night. Perhaps we should give him a blanket.’
The older woman looked up and inspected the other’s face in surprise. ‘Have you gone mad?’
‘I just thought – I mean, he’s going to freeze,’ Kathrin mumbled.
‘Then he can bed down in the hay.’ Loudly and sharply, she added, ‘They’re our enemies. We can’t coddle them in our blankets and give them God knows what for nowt in return. They shot at your husband! If you have a woollen blanket to spare, then send it to our men on the front, but don’t give it to a Russian. Sometimes I think you’re not right in the head!’
Kathrin had lowered her head and let the scoldings and accusations rain down on her without protest.
‘Never heard such a thing!’ Frieda’s hand slammed onto the table. ‘You don’t seem to know where your loyalties lie – you, a German woman!’
Kathrin didn’t dare answer back or think about how they still had to bring the prisoner his supper.
They ate quickly and in silence, while the Russian lay in the hay, freezing and hungry, listening to the evening wind squalling around the eaves. He wasn’t sad or angry; he simply accepted this farm as one of many stops on the way to his final destination: Russia, victory and returning home.
And so, this was how POW Alexei Ivanovich Luniev arrived on the Martens’ farm in 1943: placid, dirty and unshaven, with a scant bundle in his arms, not knowing when he would walk out of the gate for the last time.