I’ve only finished Chapter One and I already despise Pussy.

Pussy betrayed her village and her people for the sake of mere preservation—saving the body while surrendering the spirit. She is the classic “damsel in distress,” a trope I’ve loathed since childhood. While I loved The Legend of Zelda, I never looked for a “white savior” to rescue me from the tower. To wait for a “sugar daddy” (or momma) to fix my life would be a fundamental betrayal of my own essence. 

Even Pussy’s savior holds her in contempt. Kurt Werner doesn’t love her. She’s just a messy necessity in a village that hates him. As the passage shows, Kurt Werner’s “rescue” is actually a form of deep-seated repugnance:

He hated Pussy, who was always full of whims, who slept until noon, who was always complaining about being bored, and who never even dreamed of making the bed or tidying up the room. He thought with repugnance of the tumbled bed, of the dirt on the floor, of the hair curlers and nail scissors strewn among the breakfast things on the untidy table. He longed for the neat, well-kept little flat in Dresden and Louisa with her everlasting duster in her hands. … He hated his own clumsy, dull. witted, lousy, diseased, frostbitten soldiers. And most of all he hated this village, where he had been marooned for more than a month now-this dark, secretive village where the people walked past him with their eyes fixed on the ground, where he felt hatred in every heart and that whatever he might do to them he would never get what he wanted: fear and obedience.

Wanda Wasilewska, The Rainbow

Werner is marooned in a village of people who walk past him with “eyes fixed on the ground.” He can’t get what he wants—fear and obedience—from the villagers, so he takes a hollow version of it from Pussy. But even she feels the void. When she asks Fedosya why she is looked at as if she “wasn’t a human being,” the answer is simple: she isn’t. By choosing the safety of the occupier over the struggle of her own people, she became a sometime thing. She sold her soul to the devil, and now she’s just waiting for the realization to catch up.

Kurt Werner can attempt to reduce the village to ‘fear and obedience,’ and he can reduce Pussy to a series of ‘whims’ and ‘messy breakfast things,’ but he can never grasp the essence of a soul that refuses to be bought.