City of Women (10 page)

Only now does Ericha turn her eyes, a trace of anxiety filling them. “She said that?”

“She said that, and plenty more. I understand you were dismissed from the BdM?”

Sharp glance. “So you
are
tied into the gossip mill. Yes, it’s true. I was tossed out.”

“Why?”

“I realize that you haven’t known me for very long, Frau Schröder, but do you actually need to ask that question? Do I strike you as the ideal of National Socialist maidenhood?”

“Was it because of a boy?”

“You mean because they call it the ‘Mattress League’?”

“Is that what happened to you? You lost your virginity?” Sigrid asks bluntly.

Ericha returns the question with a probing glare. “I didn’t lose it, I gave it away,” she answers. “But, no, that’s not why they booted me. I refused to sing a song.”

“A song?” Sigrid repeats flatly.

“The ‘Horst Wessel Lied.’ Since I was in grammar school they’ve forced me to choke on that bloody thing, until one day I simply refused to sing it.” She shrugs. Casually. “And so that was the end of my glorious career in the Bund Deutscher Mädel.”

Sigrid shakes her head. The “Horst Wessel Lied” is a grandiloquent ballad of blood and thunder, penned by the Party’s most celebrated martyr, and officially sanctified as the sacred anthem of National Socialism. “You’re lucky it wasn’t the end of more than that.”

“So I’ve been told over and over. In any case, I was given a choice. A duty year as a domestic or the Land Army.”

Sigrid stares back.

“First,” the girl tells her, “I went to a woman in Charlottenburg whose husband was a manager at the Borsig plant. She wanted me to take her children to the zoo while she bedded down her boyfriends. That wasn’t so bad. I liked the zoo. There’s a splendid Siberian tiger in the Raubtierhaus. But then one day her husband came home from the factory unexpectedly. End of the story. Then next, a woman in Rummelsburg, who would leave her children to me so she could drink herself into a stupor. I could have dealt with that, she only occasionally became violent, but then she fell down a flight of stairs and snapped her neck. So now it’s Frau Granzinger’s.”

“Well, it won’t be Frau Granzinger’s much longer if you don’t buckle down and get to work.”

“That’s why you brought me here tonight? To give me a lecture?”

“No,” Sigrid says. “It’s not.” She breathes in. “I want to know who you’re hiding.”

Ericha’s head snaps around. She goes stock-still.

“I know that you stole the clothing from in front of my door,” Sigrid tells her. “I saw you coming out of a grocer’s with them, and I followed you. Is it the man you were with that day in the cemetery? Has your sweetheart decided to hide out from the army?”

Ericha still has not budged the smallest muscle. She looks frozen in place. When she speaks, her voice sounds very far away, as if she has fallen down a well. “Did you tell anyone else?” she asks.

Sigrid thinks of Renate. “No,” she lies.

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know. That depends on what you have to say.”

“I have
nothing
to say,” Ericha replies in a thin voice.

“And that’s not an acceptable answer,” Sigrid flares. “Now, either you tell me what you’re up to, or I’ll—”

“You’ll
what
? Denounce me? Ring up the police and have me arrested?”

“You think I
won’t
?” Sigrid is gripping the sides of her seat, as if she might suddenly spring from it. But now Ericha nearly smiles.

“That’s correct. I think you won’t,” she says.

“Then tell me what you’re
doing
,” Sigrid demands. “If I’m so trustworthy in your eyes. If your instincts are so
infallible
. What have you got to lose?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because,” Sigrid answers her. And breathes in. “Because I think you are a child. Because I think your tough shell is a child’s façade. And because I think you’re in trouble far above your head, whether you’ve realized it or not.”

“And what if I am? Why should it matter to you?”

Sigrid steadies her stare. “I wish you could tell me,” she says. “Because I’m sure I don’t know.”

The girl goes dead silent, and then starts to rise.

Sigrid’s brow knits. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Leaving,” the girl declares, but Sigrid seizes her by the arm and pulls her back into her seat with a bump.

“You’ll do nothing of the kind, I assure you.”

On the screen Carl Raddatz has just fervently embraced Kristina Söderbaum, but their kiss in resplendent Agfacolor is forestalled by the arching wail of an air-raid siren. First one howl, then another. And another, building to a siren’s song.

“Shit
,
”
Ericha hisses through clenched teeth.

The floor lights in the theater blink on and the projector stutters out. Berliners busy themselves by shoving impolitely toward the exits. Outside, Sigrid takes Ericha’s arm, and feels the girl tense. A policeman is directing people into the nearest public shelter, which is actually the U-Bahn tunnel across the street. The crowd funnels itself down the steps, where the air goes thick with human sweat and track grease. And then when the guns of the Zoo Flak Tower go off, the recoil sounds like iron balls rolling across a concrete floor above their heads. It’s the signal that Tommy will be above them soon. Yet everyone is reasonably calm, or perhaps simply resigning themselves to the routine business of death dropping from the skies again.

The bombers come and make their noise, and even when the lights blink out briefly, no one gets hysterical.
Crying forbidden
. The Berlin citizenry toughening up. Several men pass around a cigarette. Their wives take out their mending. People look for comfortable places to settle. Remarkably, a train passes by, though it doesn’t stop. Lit faces in the windows telegraph past, like creatures from a ghoulish dream. Tommy is not close tonight.

“No bonbons for us tonight,” one of the men pipes up. “Churchill’s after the Siemens factory,” he declares with confidence.

How is it that these men think they know so much? Sigrid cannot help but wonder. Did Churchill ring them up in advance and say,
Relax, gents. I’m heading for Spandau.
One of the wives steals the thought from Sigrid’s head, and speaks as much aloud, followed by some harsh laughter on the part of the fellow’s chums. Sigrid smiles with mild satisfaction, but when she looks at Ericha leaned against the wall, the girl is staring into a dark hole.

“Fräulein Kohl?”

Nothing.

“Ericha?”

Still nothing.

Sigrid takes breath. “There is no reason to worry,” she assures. “The old fool’s right. We’re not the target.”

“I’m not worried. The all-clear will sound soon.”

“Ah,” says Sigrid. “More Gypsy soothsaying.” She says this mildly. But the look Ericha fires at her is anything but mild. “
What?
What’s the
matter
?”

“The girls in my BdM troop,” Ericha tells her in an emotionless voice. “That’s what they used to call me. The Gypsy.”

“Really? Well. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

A pause. “
They
did,” she says.

As the all-clear siren bawls its single note above them, Ericha goes mute and remains so, even as the crowd climbs the station steps and emerges into the darkness of the street. She has taken on the quality of a somnambulist. Not so unusual for a Berliner these days, but the transformation is so sudden that Sigrid feels uneasy.

“
Look,
” she whispers, latching onto Ericha’s arm, “I know I’m often harsh. It’s how I am. But striking yourself dumb won’t remedy the situation.”

Ericha raises her eyes. “Nothing will remedy the situation, Frau Schröder. We are all of us stuck in this mess, until the day when the last standing bricks in this town are turned into rubble. That’s the only remedy we can expect. A clean slate. Counting upward from zero.”

Sigrid stares, half baffled, half mortified. “I think you have gone mad, child,” she whispers.

Ericha does not disagree. “Mad enough to surrender. Come with me, Frau Schröder, and I’ll show you what you’ll soon regret seeing.”

A low bank of cloud cover glows crimson above the burning factory district to the northwest. The stench of chemical-rancid smoke perfumes the air. A fire brigade pumper clangs past them. A few shadows hurry down the opposite side of the street. They hurry, too, until they reach the curve in the nameless street and the
Litfass
pillar guarding the empty windows of the tobacconist shop.

“Last chance to turn back,” Ericha informs her. “Are you sure?”

“
Yes
, I’m
sure
. Now, open the door,
will you please?”

Ericha inserts the key by touch in the darkness. The door opens with a complaint of rusty hinges. Only when they are both inside, and the door is closed and locked behind them, does she tug the chain on a dangling lamp, dimly revealing a narrow corridor with a decrepit carpet runner smelling of burned wood. “This way to Ravensbrück, Frau Schröder,” she announces.

Sigrid recoils.

Ravensbrück is the concentration camp for women, north of Berlin on the Havel. A favorite spot for the Gestapo to send females arrested for political crimes. “Is that a
joke
?” Sigrid frowns.

“You’ll find out,” Ericha replies, then turns and starts climbing the steps.

SIX

I
S THIS STILL A FLAT
?” Sigrid asks when they reach the top. There’s a residence plaque by the door, with a number, but no name, only an impression in the paint where a nameplate had once been tacked. But Ericha hushes her and knocks. Twice. Then three times. The hallway is thick with shadow and stinks of fire rot. The old woman who opens the door is a hefty old Berliner mare, with deep-pocketed eyes and a voice like a shovel full of cinders. “You scared the shit out of me,” she declares crossly, then clamps her eyes on Sigrid. “Who’s this?”

“A friend,” Ericha tells her. “She’s here to help.”

“Help? Help how?” The old woman squints with animal suspicion. “By gossiping to her friends about what’s none of her business?”

“My name is—” Sigrid begins, but the woman chops her off sharply.

“I don’t need to know your name, gnädige Frau, and you don’t need to know mine.”

“Auntie, please,” Ericha pleads aggressively. “You can trust her.”

“No,
you
can trust her,” the woman snorts. Her face drops into a deeply furrowed scowl. “But I suppose I’ve got no other choice in the matter. You’re both here, so you may as well come in.”

The door opens to a squat room crowded with furniture. The air smells of cat piss and lye soap. Sigrid starts to cover her nose, then quickly stops herself. Cats scurry away to their hiding places, except for a giant tom, enthroned on the shelf of a bookcase with a few dirty ledger volumes. The old woman shuts the door behind them and shoves the dead bolt closed.

“This is the lady I told you about. Who gave me the clothes,” Ericha says.

“The clothes . . .” The old eyes squint. “Oh, you mean the one with the fancy fur hat. Quite a thing,” she tells Sigrid as she shambles across the room.

“Do you . . .” Sigrid starts, still trying to knit this together. “Do you wear it?” To which the old woman cackles.

“
Wear it?
Oh,
yes
.” She nods mockingly and poses, as if modeling the sable on her grizzled gray mop. “I wore it just yesterday to the
opera
, don’t you know.
Die Fledermaus
,” she declares with a faux grin, which quickly drops from her face.

Giving the tomcat a gentle shove from the bookcase shelf, she snorts at the absurdity. “It’s all right, Hektor,” she informs the tom, “you’ve done your job.” The cat hops down, and the old woman reaches around and pulls what must be a latch, because the bookcase squeaks and swings out on a hinge, revealing a door in the wall.

“Handy little construction, isn’t it?” the old woman points out with wry pride. “My husband, may he rest, could be handy at times.”

“Where does it lead?”

“You saw the tobacconist on the street? That used to be our business, till the old fool fell asleep at his desk one night with a lit cigar. He was always afraid that his employees were stealing from him, so he blocked off the entrance to the attic stockroom from below and built this door in our flat.” The old woman shrugs as if tossing away the thought. “Now I use it to board my
special guests
. I call it the Pension Unsagbar,” she says. The Pension Unspeakable. “Not exactly the Hotel Adlon, but better than the alternatives.” The first face Sigrid sees, as the door is opened, is thin and peering. An old man staring back with watery, suspect eyes. Then an old woman whose face is as white as powder, her skin mapped with lines, her mouth set in a distant scowl. She gazes out at Sigrid’s entry into the cold, dank space in the way ghosts must watch the living. Ericha steps up and announces, “This lady has come to help. She can be trusted.” But she addresses the inhabitants of the space as if she might be speaking a language they do not understand.

Her body is tight. Her muscles clenching up. A ball of iron is forming in her belly. Sigrid opens her mouth, because there must be some words she can find to speak, but then she fails to find a single one. She can only attempt to blink away a sodden shock that has trapped her as if it were a net dropped from the ceiling.

Swiveling her gaze, slowly, she takes in three children, pale and hungry in the eyes. A little girl with a liquid gaze from under the sable ring of Sigrid’s hat. Twin boys in clothes far too large for them. They couldn’t be much past the age for kindergarten, huddling with blankets in the unheated attic room. A middle-aged Frau slowly rubbing her hands for warmth, her eyeglasses held together by a twist of wire. The Judenstern has been ripped out from her ragged coat by the stitching, but a shadow remains.

Tricked.

Sigrid feels suddenly tricked. Fooled into passing through a door and being confronted by this illegal world.

“Just as I warned you, Frau Schröder,” Ericha breathes. “Was I wrong?”

•   •   •

“S
O
! Y
OU HAVE
gone
mad,
” is all Sigrid says to the girl, as they reenter the street. A quick march down the sidewalk, following the sickly blue beam of her pocket torch. Trying to walk off her anger and fear. The cold in her belly and the heat under the skin. She allows Ericha to fall in step with her, but does not permit her to breach the barrier of silence she erects.

Sigrid carries her silence with an edge, in the same way she carries the fish knife. The sidewalk pavement glows blue from her pocket torch. “Frau Schröder, you must slow down,” Ericha complains. “You’ll fall off the curb in this darkness, and break your ankle.”

“Shut up,” Sigrid hisses back. “Just
shut up
. I’m unimpressed by your concern for my welfare, considering the vat of shit you’ve just dropped me into.”

“
I
dropped you? Oh, no. I was only following orders, Frau Schröder. You were the one who insisted on knowing who I was
hiding
. If it’s a vat of shit, it’s one you climbed into on your own.”

Sigrid frowns with anger at the sidewalk. “Are they all Jews?”

“Mostly, but not always,” Ericha tells her. “Sometimes they’re politicals. Or homosexuals. Or religious. Or all three. It makes no difference. The idea is to stop them from falling into the hands of the Gestapo.”

“By sticking them up in the attic of a burned-out building?”

“Auntie’s is only one link in the chain. We keep them moving.”

“And the police are not bright enough to catch on?”

“Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the channels break down. Sometimes a mistake is made, or there’s just bad luck. Or sometimes there’s a betrayal.” She says this in an offhanded tone. “That’s why we don’t trade in names. Names are not safe. They come as strangers and they leave as strangers.”

“Strangers,” Sigrid repeats. “And how do you feed these strangers without ration coupons?”

“It’s difficult. Perhaps the most difficult thing. It helps now that I’m shopping for Frau Granzinger.”

“You mean you’re
stealing
from your employer’s food coupons?” Sigrid says. But if this is meant as an accusation, Ericha doesn’t appear to notice.

“A few less potatoes. A loaf or two of bread. Some sardines in a tin, maybe? It’s nothing. She gets plenty of coupons, believe me. The NSV is very generous with recipients of the Mother’s Cross. Her children do not go to sleep hungry.”

“So you mean to say that you’ve become an accomplished thief.”

“I mean to say that stealing is sometimes a moral imperative.”

“Ah, such large words. I wonder if the Gestapo will be intimidated by them.”

“If you’re trying to scare me, Frau Schröder, I can assure you that I’m already properly terrified.”

“
No
, I don’t believe you
are
. This is a ‘crusade’ of some sort for you, little one. But have you really thought about the consequences?”

“I know all about consequences, Frau Schröder.”

“I doubt it. But I wasn’t just talking about you. What about the consequences to others? The old woman, for instance, whose flat we were in. You called her Auntie.”

“It’s what she is called.”

“What about
her
?”

“What
about
her? She’s made her choice. Just as I have.”

Sigrid issues her a hard look, then turns away. “Lunacy,” she whispers.

“Yes,” Ericha agrees. “Absolute lunacy.”

“How long have you had them?”

“This group? Only a few days.”

“And you don’t know where they come from?”

“No, I’m not
meant
to know. That’s the way it works. None of us know more than we absolutely must.”

“And who are ‘none of us’?”

Ericha pauses, but then answers. “Others, Frau Schröder. Others with more courage than you or me. But I do my best. And when I have to, I lie. And when I have to, I steal.”

A light sprinkle begins to fall. Sigrid pulls out her scarf and ties it around her head. “That doesn’t make it right,” she says.

“Maybe,” Ericha replies. “But I think what’s right and what’s wrong is a much larger question now. Larger than a few rationing Marken.”

“And you keep them there, in that awful attic, without respite. Like prisoners?”

Ericha shrugs. What else is she supposed to do?

Sigrid shakes her head. “They have no sunlight.”

“During the day there is light that filters through the holes in the roof. Along with the cold, and sometimes the rain. At night they hang up blankets so they can light their candles.”

“And where do they go to the
toilet
?”

“Twice a day, Auntie opens the door for them to use the WC, one at a time. It’s the most dangerous times for everyone. She has a brother, a Party man, who likes to drop by unannounced, and would not be amused to find a Jew in the WC. At night, if they must, they pee in a bucket. We’ve hung a blanket for privacy.”

Sigrid swallows a breath, shaking her head as she runs her hand over her forehead. But the silence between them is a sponge that soaks up the weak spattering of rain.

“So?” Ericha finally asks. “What are you going to do?”

“Do?”

“Is this the point where you ring up the police?”

“No,” Sigrid admits grudgingly. “If it gives you pleasure, you were right about me to that extent. I’m not going to ring up the police.”

“Then what?”

“Then what? Then nothing, Fräulein Kohl.”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry, Frau Schröder, but you don’t get off the hook that easily. You wanted to know all. I warned you, but you insisted. The moment you walked into that room, you committed yourself.”

“Oh? Is that how it works?” Sigrid asks caustically. But Ericha only nods.

“Yes. Morally. That is how it works.”

“I see. Your moral imperative.”

“You told me earlier tonight that you’re a good German,” says Ericha. “Now is your opportunity to prove it. That’s all.”

“I don’t require a lecture on moral principles from a nineteen-year-old.”

“No. No, you who are older and so much wiser, you actually imagine that you can simply close your eyes again and everything you’ve seen will vanish. Go back to your flat, Frau Schröder. Go back to your job, go back to your routine. Convince yourself that there is nothing you can do, as the police drag their victims from their beds.”

“There
are
criminals in this world, child, not just victims,” Sigrid says. “There
are
people who commit crimes and deserve arrest.”

Suddenly Ericha’s eyes cool. “Last spring, there were three girls from a Jewish school for the blind, none of them more than ten. A colleague was trying to move them into a safe house we had at the time in Friedrichshain, but something happened. Maybe they were spotted by someone who denounced them. Maybe they simply stood out too much. But when the Sipo grabbed them off the street, it made no difference how it happened. Only that it had. Three little girls never coming back. So tell me, please, Frau Schröder, what crime do you imagine they had committed?” she asks. “Other than the crime of Jewish blood?”

“You have no right to address me in this way,” Sigrid says, suddenly angry. “You are so incredibly naïve.”

“Really?”
the girl says, steaming. “Because I value morality?”

“Because you think that choices are all
yes or no
, and that there’s
no room
in between.”

“Untrue,” Ericha says. “I have learned that fact quite well. Compromise is the lesson of the day. It’s easy to do. A pregnant woman with a yellow star must walk in the freezing rain because Jews are barred from public transport.
Just don’t look.
A man is beaten by the police in front of his children.
Don’t look.
The SS march a column of skeletons, in filthy striped rags, down the middle of the goddamned
street
. But
don’t look
,” she whispers roughly. “You avert your eyes enough times, and finally you go blind. You don’t actually see
anything
any longer.”

“
Enough
. I’ve had
enough
of this.” Sigrid starts to turn away, but the girl grips her by the arm. “Let go of me, please,” she commands tightly.

“Do you listen to the BBC, Frau Schröder? If you
do
, then you must know what’s in store for the people in Auntie’s attic, if the Gestapo lay their mitts on them.”

Sigrid feels her breath constrict. “The British have always been full of atrocity stories,” she replies. “In the last war, too. It’s part of their propaganda.”

Ericha fixes her closely with overcharged eyes, as if to examine Sigrid from the inside out. “
Now
who’s being naïve?” the girl asks.

Sigrid gazes back at her, blinking raindrops from her eyes.

“Make your choice, Frau Schröder. Unlike those in the attic, you still have that privilege. Yes,” she says, “or no.”

•   •   •

T
HAT NIGHT
, S
IGRID
gazes into the darkness above the bed, and the darkness stares back.

Egon had continued to use her for his black market exchanges. Different places each time. Different faces, too. A tubby Berliner mensch in a greasy hat waiting on the Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn station. A gaunt fellow with very thick eyeglasses and a cloth cap at the Kottbusser Tor stop, squinting at a copy of the
Deutsche Illustrierte
with a wounded infantry Landser on the cover. A whiskered old man who smelled of sour cabbage, waiting on the Prinzenstrasse platform. Always men and always stops on the U1 B line.