City of Women (11 page)

“I try to make it convenient for you,” he told her. She had delivered another sack of rock sugar, but this time had been handed a simple kraft paper envelope, filled with twenty-mark notes.

“You must be rich by now,” she’d said, crouched behind him on the bed, unbuttoning his shirt.

“All Jews are rich. Don’t you know that by now?”

She frowned. “Don’t take it that way. It was only a joke.”

“Would you like me to be rich?” he asked, allowing her to remove his shirt.

“I don’t care,” she answered, brushing her lips across his skin from his neck to his shoulder. “I don’t care about money.” She could feel him breathe in and then out.

“That’s quite a luxury. It’s all I can think about.”

She stopped. Did not pull away, but felt something clench inside. It hurt that
she
wasn’t all he could think about. But more than that, it reminded her of the family he must be feeding and clothing with the money she collected for him in these U-Bahn transactions. The family that was None of Her Business, yet laid a deep and secret claim to him.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she answered. But when he shifted toward her and stroked the hair from her face, she did not let him catch her eyes, for fear that he could too easily read the thoughts that were written in them.

“Do you love me?” she whispered with heat into his ear, when he was inside her.

“I love you,” he huffed.

“And you choose me? You choose me over her?”

“I choose you,” he told her, a growl in his throat as he increased the rhythm of his advance.
“You.”

But even as she gripped him. Even as she tried to draw him so deeply inside of her that he would never escape her embrace. She knew that his choice was only a breath of air.

•   •   •

“F
RAU
S
CHRÖDER
. Heil Hitler and good morning.”

Sigrid turns at the awkward sound of that particular combination, and is faced with the Frau Obersturmführer’s dimpled smile and pregnant belly. “Yes. Good morning,” she replies, issuing a smile in return. “And Heil Hitler,” she adds for good measure.

“You’re going out?” the young woman inquires smilingly. She is wearing a simple but well-cut dressing gown. Blond locks drape her shoulders. Just looking at her makes Sigrid feel like an old rag.

“Yes. To work,” Sigrid says, and locks the door with the key.

“So I understand that you met my brother, Wolfram.”

Sigrid feels something staple her into place. She thinks of the lean man with the gun-sight gaze. “Yes,” she says. “I did.”

“Well”—and this is said delicately—“I hope he didn’t
impinge
upon you.”

“Impinge upon me?”

“Yes. I hope he didn’t
impose
upon your good nature.”

“My good nature.” Sigrid raises her eyebrows. “No, no, he neither impinged nor imposed.”

“It’s just that Wolfram, the poor man, it’s just that he’s been through quite a lot,” the Frau Obersturmführer informs her.

“Yes. His leg.” Sigrid nods. But the woman squints back at her.

“Oh, yes. His leg. That, too. In any case, if you ever feel that he’s been
presumptuous
in some way, please don’t hesitate to inform me. Will you promise?”

“I promise,” Sigrid says, maintaining an even tone.

The woman’s blazing smile returns. “Wonderful. I feel so much better now that we’ve had our little talk. This Sunday, you should stop by in the afternoon for coffee. That is, if you’re not otherwise engaged. I’m sure I would find your company most enjoyable.”

“Really?” She hears herself ask the question.

“I shall expect you at one,” the Frau Obersturmführer informs her.

•   •   •

A
T THEIR MIDDAY BREAK
, she tells Renate, “I’ll have to miss our lunch today.”

“Really?” Renate arches an eyebrow. “Should I be jealous?”

“Only of the war effort,” Sigrid replies. “I promised my mother-in-law I would volunteer at the Party office to help sort out clothes from the collections.”

“Ah, yes. She’s a member of the club, isn’t she?”

“The lady pays her dues. That’s all I know.”

“Doesn’t that entitle you to a few more ration coupons?’

“Oh, yes. One shoe more per year. Color of my choice, as long as it’s brown.”

“Well. At least sorting through coats might help some poor front-liner keep warm.”

“That’s the idea,” Sigrid says, sighing, and shifts the weight of her armload of files.
Warm under a blanket. She can feel his body next to her, still. Smell the scent of sex mixed with the musty wool. The deception of peace in her heart. She had fallen in love with Egon while he slept.

Renate pauses. Files a folder and then gives her a look. “Do you miss him?”

Sigrid flinches. Caught. The flash of Egon’s face across the back of her eyes. “Miss him?”

“Kaspar,” says Renate.

Kaspar. Sigrid opens her mouth but nothing sensible seems to come out of it, and Renate waves her off. “Never mind, never mind. A stupid question to ask. I’m sorry,” she says. But for a moment, her expression has let slip its usual bravado. “It’s only that I surprise myself. I mean, I know that my darling husband is likely screwing everything in and out of a skirt. But sometimes I’m still just
frantic
for him.” She frowns, then shrugs it off. “Never mind. Makes no sense,” she announces, and then frowns again. “Women are such goddamned idiots,” she whispers bitterly.

—

The No. 8 is packed, but a young Landser from a reserve regiment politely surrenders his seat to her. When the bus heaves to a halt unexpectedly, the passengers lean as a body to peer through the windows. Shouting and cries. Whistles screeching. SS Death’s Head troops, armed with machine pistols, are herding a band of civilians out into the street in front of an apartment block. The women are clutching their children. The men are clutching their suitcases. All of their faces are paper white. An old man wears a long white beard and a skullcap. When he falls, an SS man kicks him with his boot, over and over. A curly-headed girl screams at the violence, and suddenly the SS are kicking them all, cursing at them as they are driven into the rear of a transport lorry. Then it is over. The rear of the lorry is clamped shut, and the Death’s Head kommando piles into a massive Opel Blitz troop carrier.The vehicles veer into a horseshoe turn and speed away.

A hefty female police auxiliary in feldgrau coveralls steps up and waves the bus forward with stout authority.

Passengers settle back into their seats. Back into the grayness of their routine bus ride. But Sigrid realizes that she has bitten into her knuckle until it has started to bleed.

•   •   •

A
S HER MOTHER-IN-LAW
salts the potatoes boiling in the pan, she makes an excuse to go up to the Granzingers’. She returns a borrowed baking dish, with a slab of her mother-in-law’s bundt cake on it, with real sugar icing. The children are so excited by the prospect of a sweet morsel that Frau Granzinger must hold the baking dish above her head to make it to the kitchen. That’s when she takes Ericha by the arm.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says to the girl.

Ericha’s eyes lock onto hers. “Yes?” Sigrid flicks her eyes to Frau Granzinger, surrounded by her gaggle as she removes a large cake knife from a drawer. “Tell me,” Ericha whispers.

“Friedrich, wait your turn!”
Frau Granzinger snaps.

Sigrid hesitates.

“
Tell me
, Frau Schröder. Did you come here to bring cake?”

“Ilse! Watch your brother, he’s made a mess.
Frau Schröder
. You must stay for a slice,” Granzinger insists.

“Yes. Yes, of course. Thank you,” she calls back. And then returns to the question in Ericha’s eyes. “I came up here,” Sigrid says, “because you said I must make a choice. And against my better judgment, I have made one.”

SEVEN

T
HEY’RE CALLED
���U-
BOATS
,” Ericha tells her. Those in hiding. “Submarines,” because they are submerged, and must run silently to avoid detection and destruction.

A teenage girl and her little brother are the latest guests to arrive at the pension.
The girl has not removed the Judenstern, sewn, yellow and black, onto her coat. Ericha helps her with a penknife, cutting the threads with concentration. The next day, Sigrid uses her last blue ration coupon to purchase a quart of skim milk for them, which she hides on the outside windowsill of her bedroom, where her mother-in-law is unlikely to find it. But when she brings it to the pension, the brother and sister are gone. She doesn’t ask questions, though the questions are bursting inside her. Where did they go? Who were they? Where were their parents? But Sigrid keeps her mouth closed. The milk goes to a pair of middle-aged women instead, who quote Shakespeare to each other as if quoting from the Bible.

But at night, lying in her bed, Sigrid cannot help but fill in the blank spots. She imagines the teenage girl sneaking a glance at the boys in her school, perhaps, stealing a drag from her father’s cigarette. Imagines the girl’s little brother kicking a ball down a cobbled street beside a canal. Chalking his games on the sidewalk. But these normal lives, which she conjures for the U-boats, are her secret. Her secret war against her own fear. It helps to steady her. Helps to stop her from dropping things. A bowl, a file of papers, her comb as she looks blankly at the reflection in the mirror, and suddenly loses strength in her fingers, as if she has had to divert it elsewhere. To some interior spot of resistance.

That’s the way it is at first. Hiding people is much more draining. Much more terrifying than the games she played with Egon’s black-market exchanges. She sometimes thinks she may blurt something out at the office that will give them all away. Worries that she brings home the smell of their fear to her mother-in-law’s flat. She wakes in a silent panic one night, and is compelled to peer into the wardrobe to see if she has actually stashed a U-boat there, or if it was simply a dream.

But after a month, something begins to ease. She begins to make pathways in her head to accommodate the Pension Unsagbar. Auntie begins to call her Frau Blondi, because it has become necessary for her to have a name. After more than a month, a kind of machinery begins to take over. Her muscles grow used to the routine of breaking the law. She stops dropping her fountain pen, and has quit allowing dishes to slip from her fingers. She finds a small closet in her head, in which she can shut away the fear of hiding an attic full of contraband people from the Gestapo, and begins to mimic her old, bland addiction to routine.

Meanwhile, the machinery works. U-boats in, U-boats out, passed to one anonymous contact after the other. The parcels of black-market goods handed off at cafés or on U-Bahn platforms. Cigarettes, hard sausage, food coupons, powdered eggs, the currency of underground survival. Unnamed faces, fearful glances, anger and disbelief and grateful tears. All part of the procedure of daily life.

Ericha approves. “You’re not such a hausfrau any longer,” she informs Sigrid with satisfaction.

“Is that a compliment?”

No answer to that question. “I need you to do something for me,” she says instead. “But it could be dangerous.”

“You mean
more
dangerous?”

“Yes,” Ericha agrees. “That’s what I mean.”

“Well, what
is
it?”

The girl expels smoke from a bitter-smelling cigarette. “A pickup.”

•   •   •

T
AKING A STEP
back when the bus grinds up to the curb, Sigrid adjusts the copy of the
B.Z.
midday folded in a rectangle under her arm. When the passengers climb down, she watches their faces anxiously. What should she be looking for? A spark of fear? Defiance? Anticipation? Or simply the blankness of habitual suffering?

She realizes, to her own embarrassment, that she is also observing features. Noses with a hook? An Oriental shadow to the eyes? How he would laugh at her for that, she thinks.
Of course, my dear little shiksele. Look for the kosher snout
.

The last passengers disembark, and the Berliners crowding the curb pile aboard. She feels a twinge of panic. This is the third bus that has arrived without results. Has she missed them? Is she waiting at the wrong stop? Has something gone wrong?

She looks at her wristwatch. Not much time left before she is due back at the patent office. Can she wait another three minutes? Another two? How long until someone notices that she has not boarded a single bus? How long before she starts to stand out? She glances at the old man at the news kiosk, filling his pipe. Had she caught him watching her? But then she sees a woman approaching the stop with her two little girls in tow. There is nothing overtly distinguishing about them. The woman is probably around Sigrid’s age, wrapped in a heavy, shapeless wool coat with a felt hat. They have no suitcases, no bags, they have simply themselves. And maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why Sigrid is suddenly sure that she has been waiting at the right spot, after all. The children are hurrying to keep pace with their mother. The woman grips their little hands as if
they
are her luggage to carry. Not as a burden but as the only possessions of value she has left to her.

Sigrid gazes until she feels the woman’s eyes lock onto hers, then she steps forward and changes the newspaper she is holding from her right arm to her left. That is the signal, which answers the guarded question darkening the woman’s eyes.

“Excuse me, can you tell me the way to the zoo?” the woman asks, her voice controlled, but her face bleached by the effort.

“Yes,” Sigrid answers as trained. “It’s not far. I’ll walk with you there.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman whispers thickly. “I was afraid to take the bus.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I was afraid I would see someone I knew.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sigrid repeats. “You’re in friendly hands now. But we must move quickly.”

The U-Bahn carriage rocks with the rigor of the steel rails. Its dim thunder covers them like a blanket, covering any need for conversation. The woman sits with the older girl beside her and the younger on her lap. The children have frothy curls and deep brown eyes. Faces like hearts. The older sits in quiet imitation of her mother’s self-possession. The younger rests her head on her mother’s shoulder, and carries a small wooden tiger, with most of the stripes worn off. When required, the woman gives them brave smiles. Sigrid observes covertly, as if watching some small, inexplicable ritual: a mother and her children. Then looks away and absorbs the high-pitched keening of steel at the turns. The carriage bumping. Exhausted faces across the aisle colored by the low-wattage light. A poster featuring a German mother with her towheaded Kinder as she tucks a baby into its crib
. German women who are child-rich show the same dedication of body and life as the frontline soldier in the thunder of battle. Protect the children
, it commands,
the most valuable possession of our Volk!

She does not take them to Auntie’s pension. Only to the coffee bar inside the Bahnhof Zoo, where she seats them at a table and heads back outside to the street. The blind man’s there, at his post under the bahnhof clock, and she drops a few groschen into his cup, as planned.

“Bless you,” he rasps. Black goggles as dead as night.

“They’re inside,” she tells him.

“Yes. That’s good. You should take a pencil.”

“I should what?”

“You’ve done your job. Take a pencil and go about your business.”

“You mean I’m to leave them there alone?”

“They are not alone, gnädige Frau,” he says, “and neither are you. Now take a pencil and
go
.”

•   •   •

T
HAT EVENING SHE FLEES
to the cinema after supper. The back row of the mezzanine smells of floor mop solution. The newsreel features footage of American soldiers taken prisoners by the Afrika Korps in the Kasserine Pass. The narrator contemptuously describes the American troops as mongrels. But Sigrid finds the faces of the young men heartbreaking. With sand in their hair and sticking to their skin, they stare into the camera like motherless children. She has taken to listening to the forbidden broadcasts while her mother-in-law is at her kaffeeklatsch, hunching by the radio in the standard position, with her ear pressed to the speaker. According to the BBC, the British have hounded the panzer armies in North Africa across Libya to the border of Tunisia. Of the war in the East, they say that, in the face of continued Red Army assaults, Ninth Army has evacuated positions south of Moscow near the city of Rzhev.

On the cinema screen, a squad of panzer grenadiers grin for the camera as they ride the turret of a Mark IV tank across a frozen white field. She allows herself a moment to imagine Kaspar’s face. She pictures him now gaunt and unshaven. His helmet crooked, frosted white, like those of the men in the newsreel. Only without the smile for the camera. Instead, she draws a mild frown of appraisal on his lips.

And suddenly Ericha is beside her.

“Good evening, Frau Schröder.”

Sigrid blinks. “You’re late, I was afraid something had happened.”

“Something did happen. But I’m fine.”

“You’re not going to tell me
what
, I suppose?”

Ericha confirms this by ignoring the question. “You did well today,” she tells Sigrid. “Thank you.”

Sigrid shrugs. Shakes her head as she stares up at the screen. “No thanks are required. I was anxious as a cat.”

“Still. You did what was needed. Our cargo was safely delivered.”

“Cargo? Is this how we must speak now?” she asks.

“I can’t stay long.”

“I thought you would be coming back with me.”

“No. Something came up.”

“Something happened, something came up.” Sigrid frowns with frustration.

“I’ve left a wrapped parcel in the laundry room. There’s a loose brick by the wringer. You’ll see it. I scratched it with a pfennig.”

“Scratched it?”

“I need you to pick it up and bring it to Auntie’s tomorrow night. I’ll meet you there at half past seven.”

“And if there’s a bombing raid?”

“Then the night after. Or the night after that.” Ericha starts to stand, but then doesn’t. “So how did it feel?”

“Feel?”

“You know what I mean. How did if feel to
act
?”

“It felt terrifying,” Sigrid answers. “I felt like I was testing fate at every step.”

The girl almost smiles. “Good. That’s how you’re supposed to feel. It’s what keeps us out of the dungeons in the bottom of the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.”

•   •   •

H
ER MOTHER-IN-LAW
has begun to interrogate her about her whereabouts.
Going to a picture show? you say. What’s it called? Who’s in it? What’s it about?
All questions designed to trip her up; to expose her in some way. Obviously the old woman suspects something, though exactly what, it’s difficult to say. Some kind of unsavory behavior. So Sigrid has launched a counteroffensive. She’s begun babbling at length over dinner, about this film and that. About how gifted is Zarah Leander, how lovely is Ilse Werner, how hilarious is poor Heinz Rühmann, how stern is Otto Gebühr, his face chiseled from a slab. In order to keep the plots straight for these films she never actually watches, she has begun memorizing the extracts in the back of Kino magazines, which she buys, dog-ears, and then leaves about the flat as proof of her cinematic devotion. Finally her mother-in-law gives up a groan. “Enough, enough. If I was so interested in such nonsense, I’d be wasting money as well at the ticket booth.
But enough
,
please.” She surrenders.

That night, when Sigrid returns from the Pension Unsagbar, the old lady does not question her.

Emboldened, the next night Sigrid gathers a quarter stick of chemical stretch butter and two tins of powdered milk from her mother-in-law’s pantry, and totes them in her shopping sack to Auntie’s, along with a head of brownish cabbage and two greasy fish fillets from Hörsig’s, which Auntie fries up in a skillet and carves up into bites, as the cats go mad at her feet. But the cats are out of luck. At this point there are half a dozen people in the Pension Unsagbar to consume the feast. A scrawny middle-aged man with a large black mole on his face who habitually cracks his knuckles and wonders aloud what time it is. Of course, no one in the Pension Unsagbar owns a watch any longer. Watches have been sold long ago. Then there is a young husband and wife with three boys and an old grandpa, whom they all call “Opa.” The husband and wife are so desperately grateful for her help. “To keep the children fed
,
you understand,”
the husband repeats over and over. But the children themselves eat quickly and covertly, as if they fear that the bites of fish and the few chunks of dried fruit may be stolen from their hands. The grandpa just stares backward at a world that no longer exists, or forward at a world beyond his comprehension. When Sigrid offers him a slice of bread with some gelatin spread, he blinks his watery pink eyes and waves it off, saying only, “For the young people.”

Ericha touches her on the shoulder. “It’s time,” she tells her.

At the door, Sigrid gazes at her fretfully. “Where are they?”

“They?”

“The woman and her two girls. Where are they?
Were they caught
?” She asks the questions from the back of her throat, as if she would rather swallow the words than speak them.

“You liked them, did you?”

“I just expected to see them here.”

“Don’t worry. They’re safe enough. Auntie’s is not the only place we use. There are others willing to lend us a room or a bed or an attic for a night or two when necessary. I had to move them to accommodate this lot we just took in.”

“So they won’t be coming
back
?”

“That all depends on how things work out,” Ericha tells her. And then she says, buttoning her coat, “I’d be careful, if I were you.”