City of Women (14 page)

“What,
me
? Of course not. When would I ever find the time?”

A blink. And then again Renate laughs aloud. “You are so very entertaining,” she declares.

“I’m so very pleased you find me amusing,” Sigrid says, frowning. “So now would it be permissible to change the subject?”

“Oh, very well, then,” Renate agrees. “Enough about you, let’s talk about me. I’m afraid that my liaison with Gerhardt is running thin.”

“Oh? The wife catch on?”

“Nothing so dramatic. What was once inventive and energetic has become stale and repetitive.”

“Ah. Repetitive. The poor foolish man. So what now?”

Renate releases a sigh that floats along with her for several steps. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I could use a rest.”

“Hmm. Renate Hochwilde without a man to bed,” Sigrid murmurs. “Hard to imagine.”

This is said lightly, thoughtlessly, but Renate looks at her closely.

“You know, Frau Schröder,” she says after a moment. “There are times that I suspect you don’t really like me very much.”

Sigrid opens her mouth to protest, but, “Never mind,” Renate tells her quickly. “I’m sure I’m being stupid. Let’s just walk.” But as they walk, a train passes above them on the elevated track, weighting the air with its iron thunder. Sigrid feels herself close off. Fortress Schröder. It’s her secrets, she realizes. The secrets of the Pension Unsagbar walk between them. The secrets of Auntie’s guests in a narrow, windowless room, huddling under blankets, peeing into a bucket. Every day separating Sigrid, not only from Renate, but from all who do not share that knowledge. Separating her by one more unspoken word, one more degree of silence.

NINE

S
HE FINDS THAT SHE
is eating less. Cabbage stew loses whatever taste it might have had. Boiled potatoes are lumpy as paste in her mouth. She cannot help but think that every bite of food she takes means one bite less for the people in hiding. As absurd and emotional as it may be, she cannot escape the idea that an inverse relationship is at work. More for her means less for them. At the midday break, she leaves her butter-spread sandwich uneaten, thinking she might save it, but then the bread goes green, and she curses herself for wasting it.
Combat spoilage
, the posters outside the dairy shop command.
Now more than ever!

At the Pension Unsagbar, the woman and her two girls have reappeared as residents, moved back from wherever Ericha had been storing them. There’s also an old man with thin white hair and blue veins popping from his temple. The old man is as worn out as an old broom, and never speaks to Sigrid. He nods politely and formally, but never says a word, and avoids eye contact. Only Ericha elicits a whisper from him now and again. He offers a “Thank you, child” when she presents him with a coat that does not have the outline of his Judenstern to betray his identity. The children’s mother, on the other hand, is quite forthcoming. She plays at sock puppets with her girls with exquisite delight. She is always grateful for the help provided to her, genuinely and deeply. Yet she seems to be able to retain a certain central calm; a certain control over herself, as if she is determined that she will not become a victim.

Sigrid finds herself thinking about this woman and her girls. Not meaning to, really, just suddenly wondering, while she’s doing the supper dishes or sitting on the tram—what was their life? Whence have they come? How is it that they were forced to submerge?

So on the next night she visits the pension, with a few tins of tuna fish and a stale loaf of rye, she asks the question she knows she is not supposed to ask.

“What is your name?”

The woman turns her face sharply, as if Sigrid has just stuck her with a pin. Blinks. But then she smiles. She is not a beautiful woman on the surface. Not like the plates in the fashion magazines. Her hair is kinked and reddish brown; her nose is slightly bent, as if it might have been broken years before and not quite healed properly in line. But her eyes are dark caramel, and there is a quality in her smile, in her face, that draws Sigrid in. It is confidence, perhaps. A beautiful confidence.

“Weiss,” she answers. “I am Frau Weiss.”

Sigrid’s expression does not alter at the pinch of panic in her breast. “Frau Weiss,” she repeats, and offers her hand. “I am Frau Schröder.”

The woman must struggle slightly in order to take Sigrid’s hand, shifting the weight of one of her sleeping daughters on her lap. The same kinky hair as her mother’s, but another face completely. Sigrid compares it to Egon’s broad cheekbones, and the match causes her mouth to go dry.

“Very nice to meet you,” Frau Weiss tells her, then laughs without much humor. “Is that still an appropriate thing to say in this situation? I should be saying how grateful I am for people such as you. People with the courage,” she says.

Her smile dims. She touches her lips to her daughter’s forehead. “I can’t imagine what would have become of us. Such unbelievable stories one hears. One simply cannot imagine . . .” The woman’s voice trails off, but then she raises her eyes again. “I thank God that the human spirit is not dead.”

Weiss
, Sigrid is thinking. It’s such a common Jewish name. How many thousands of people carry the name Weiss? It’s only a meaningless coincidence. This could not
possibly
be
the
Frau Weiss. This could not possibly be that same invisible Anna, wife and mother of daughters, who had divided her from Egon. She glances down at the sound of the child’s murmur. “How old is she?”

“My Ruthi?” she smiles. “Only three. But she’s so big. Tall like her poppa.”

Tall like her poppa. Tall like Egon. She looks up from the child’s face to the woman’s. Can she ask? Is it beyond the pale of etiquette when speaking the language of submarines? Where
is
her poppa? Where is your husband? But the question must be printed across Sigrid’s brow.

“We don’t know where their father is,” Frau Weiss says to her, quietly, her eyes dropping as she calmly grooms her daughter’s hair. Her husband had received a letter, she explains, from the jüdische Gemeinde, ordering him to report to the Levetzowstrasse Synagogue in Moabit. It was a spot that had been converted into a transit depot for those awaiting what the SS termed “evacuation.” “Of course, we were no longer so foolish about words as we had been,” she says. “So we decided the best thing was for him to go into hiding.” Frau Weiss takes a breath at the absurdity of it all. “Though we were still naïve enough to believe that I would be spared because of Liesl and Ruthi. What a dream world that was.” And then she raises a light smile. “But fortunately we were able to wake up to reality a moment before it was too late.”

Sigrid swallows. “You have a slight accent,” she notes.

“I was born in Vienna,” the woman replies. “Liesl was born there, too.” This is the older girl with watchful eyes and reddish hair, whom Ericha has escorted below to Auntie’s toilet. “My good soldier, Liesl. She has been such a help to me. So strong and so protective of her little sister. We named her for my mother, and she seems so much like her,” the woman says, then something in her goes silent, even though she continues speaking. “So odd. So absurdly funny in a way. I have lived my entire life thinking that I was Viennese, only to discover that
actually
I am a Jewish parasite.” She shakes her head, as if remembering some bitter foolishness. “We left in ’38, after the Anschluss,” the woman recounts, as she strokes the sleeping child’s head. “We thought it would be safer in Berlin. Isn’t that funny?”

Sigrid cannot prevent herself from asking, “Your husband was with you? In Vienna?”

The woman raises her eyes as if to view Sigrid more closely. “No,” she answers mildly. “He had come to Berlin ahead of us. There were preparations to make, you understand.
Contacts
to be cemented. He had spent a great deal of time here on business over the years. The truth is,” she says, as if this might be a secret she is sharing, “even when we lived in Vienna, he could never stay away from Berlin for too long. This city was his first love.”

“Thank you, Frau Weiss. I’m sorry,” Sigrid says. “I really shouldn’t be prying.”

The woman pauses, machinery working behind those caramel eyes. And then she says, “Anna. My name is Anna.” She offers Sigrid her hand, and Sigrid must force her muscles to keep moving. She must force herself to swallow her shock and accept the offered hand.

“Sigrid,” she replies, clearing her throat of obstructions, swallowing the perfect terror of serendipity swelling her throat.

At that moment, Ericha appears with the older girl. Holding her hand. Speaking in sweet tones. “This young lady is prepared for bed,” she announces. And inserts the smallest of glances between Sigrid and the girls’ mother. The child settles quietly on the cotton ticking folded on the floor for bedding, and lays her head down on a pair of small, perfect hands, folded together. But there’s a deep watchfulness in the little girl’s gaze, as if perhaps she is reading minds. Sigrid turns away, as Ericha tucks her in with a worn wool blanket.

Down in the street, the twilight is ashen and sharply cold. As Ericha locks the door behind them, Sigrid shivers. Wrapping her arms together for warmth, she steps toward the curb. She needs a bit of space to think. She must be clear first. Clear about what she can believe. There are one or two threads that are hanging loose. Egon had said it was his
wife and children
who had received the letter from the jüdische Gemeinde, not him. But it would be just like him to turn that around. To
underscore
his responsibility to his family when making his exit. It doesn’t mean that the scenario she is building in her head can’t be true. And if it
is
true. If the Fates have spun this thread, and she has just met Egon’s wife, Egon’s daughters. Then perhaps anything is possible. Paradise or apocalypse, or something of both.

“So, I’m still waiting,” she says to Ericha.

“What?”

“For a key.”

“Ah.”

“Have you changed your mind about that?”

Ericha examines her with cool penetration. Then answers, “No. No, not at all. Take this one,” she says, dangling the key from a small beaded chain.

“But that is yours.”

“I have another. Take it.”

Sigrid stares at the dangling thing. Then accepts it. Inserts the key into her pocket.

•   •   •

C
LIMBING UP THE STEPS TOGETHER
, she parts with Ericha at the third-floor landing. On the last set of steps, she thinks of the faces of those little girls in Auntie’s pension. Thinks of the shadow wife. Or is Sigrid the real shadow wife? The shadow wife of a man who is himself little more than a shadow.

Why don’t I feel guilt?

The days had grown warmer. The one-room flat where he took her was beginning to smell of a winter’s worth of closed windows. When she wrenched open one of the sashes, the noise of the world outside spilled inside.

“Why don’t I feel guilt?” she hears herself ask.

“Why should you?” he replies.

“I’m betraying my husband,” she answers the open window. “Betraying my marriage. And yet I feel no guilt. What does that make me?”

She’d found him waiting for her on the bed, shoulders slumped against the wall. Still dressed. His shoes still on his feet. She watched him reach for the bottle of schnapps, a cigarette squeezed between his fingers. The schnapps sluiced into his glass. “I’m not your confessor, Sigrid,” he tells her.

She smeared sweat across her brow with her palm. Her words were like sawdust in her mouth. “No?” she says blankly. “Why not? Don’t I deserve a little absolution?”

“Guilt is one of God’s little swindles. And a waste of time.”

“Yes, well, you can say that, can’t you, because you’re barely human.”

Egon released a loud hoot at this. But with the predatory tone he advanced upon her next, informed her that he was growing impatient with her foibles. “You stood in front of a bureaucrat and signed your name under a franking stamp, Sigrid,” he instructed her with a grim light in his eyes. “You’re part of a legal agreement. A name on a file in a municipal registry.”

Turning to him, she asked, “And is that the story you tell your wife, too?” The words tumbled out. She suddenly had no desire to censor herself. “You tell her that she’s simply part of a legal agreement? That her children are nothing but the result of a marriage license?”

“Go!
Get out!
” he bellowed suddenly, spilling his schnapps on the bedclothes. “If you don’t like being with me. If it’s tarnishing your immortal soul, then
go
!
Go back to the bank clerk. Spread your legs every third Tuesday, then masturbate in the dark after he’s asleep, if that’s what your
conscience
dictates!”

Her body vibrated as if she were a taut wire plucked by a finger. She blinked. The color had drained from the room. All she saw was the gray of his eyes that matched the gray of his face, the gray of the walls, the gray of the window light reflected by the glass in his hand. She felt her words emerge in ether. “Why must you be so crude?”

“Crude
,
”
she listened to him repeat.

And then winced as he shattered his glass on the floor. She jumped back a step as if to save herself from his pounce, as if she could. As if she could save herself from the force with which he hurled himself into her body. As if she could shout or shriek or cry out, as if resistance were something she could claim, as he ripped her skirt, tore open her chemise. Her head swam. Her body pinned to the wall. Something fell and broke. He entered her and she swallowed a cry as he bit into the flesh of her neck. “Take.
This
. Back to. Your marriage bed,” he rasped.

Later. Later that night. Looking in the mirror before bed. The welt was the size of a five-mark piece. Pink and purplish, with a raw red corona. She marveled at his madness. To mark her so. To claim her with his teeth like an animal. To care so little for laws and rules and any definition of decency. To act so far beyond the pale. She marveled at his courage.

On the fourth-floor landing of the building in the Uhlandstrasse, Sigrid returns to the present. She has stopped at the top step, and finds herself gazing sightlessly at the door to her mother-in-law’s flat. She feels a dragging resistance at the thought of taking a step further. But if this
is
his family that the Fates have tumbled into her hands, then she must hold them tightly. They are a link to him. A conduit. And something else. Her power over them is her power over him. The invisible thread of synchronicity connecting them, like the seam that threads the darkness to the day.

She turns when the door across the hall opens, and out steps the slim, dark-haired man with his cane. The brother, now dressed in an officer’s uniform heavily embellished with combat decorations.

“I’m sorry. Did I startle you again? I seem to be making a habit of taking you by surprise.”

“No. No, you haven’t,” she says. “I was just thinking for a moment.”

“Were you? How dangerous. I try to avoid it myself.”

She brushes a stray hair from her eyes. “We haven’t been introduced. I am Frau Schröder,” Sigrid tells him, offering her hand.

“Firm grip for a woman. I like that,” the man says. “My name is Kessler. I think you know my sisters.”

“Should I address you as ‘Herr Leutnant’?”

The man looks down at the feldgrau tunic he is wearing, as if he may have only inadvertently put it on. Picked it out of his wardrobe by mistake. Then back at her with the gun sight. “You’re very beautiful, Frau Schröder, even shrouded in those hausfrau rags,” he says. “And I’m a man who can truly appreciate a woman’s body. You should let me see you naked sometime.” He is still gripping her hand until she whips it away. But she does not break the connection of their eyes.