City of Women (15 page)

“Think about it,” he suggests, and begins his progress down the steps.

Inside her flat, Sigrid closes the door and stands listening to the rhythmic tri-cadence of the man’s gait as he thumps, cane-boot-boot, cane-boot-boot, down the stairs.

TEN

T
HE ONLY DOLL
Sigrid had ever received was as a gift on her eighth birthday. It was such a delicate thing with a china bisque head; hair like spun gold; rose-painted cheeks; and round, pale eyes that rolled open and shut. Too beautiful to touch, really. Sigrid thought it reminded her of her mother. She can recall her mother’s beaming face beside the doll’s as she presented it to Sigrid after breakfast. The same perfect expression. The star-blue brightness of the eyes.

A waste of good money,
she heard her grandmother grumble
. She’ll have it in pieces in a week.
Sigrid, however, had learned to dodge the Grossmutter’s griping, and turned with a hesitant half smile to her father for her cue. Was it a trick? Should she touch it? Or was it one of her mother’s traps? Would it only be swept from her grasp in punishment for some offense in an hour’s time? Her father sat at the kitchen table in his immaculately pressed white linen shirt and scrupulously knotted necktie. In those days, he and she could still operate inside a small, unspoken, and expressionless conspiracy with each other. When he set down his coffee cup, she caught the edge of a nod.

When she took the doll into her hands, she thought that she had never before felt anything so unwieldy and yet so fragile. The doll’s body was large. The china head the size of a head of red cabbage. But the painted eggshell cheeks were so delicate; they looked like a sneeze might crack them. Sigrid spread a smile across her face, half genuine and half rehearsed. She glanced again to her father for approval of this response, but he had already returned to the frown he wore while reading his newspaper, and had abandoned her to the women’s attention. For the rest of the morning before lunch, she was permitted to “skip” her chores in order to “play” with her gift. But she needed coaching. Instead of cradling it, she tried to make it
do
things. Ride the wooden horse her grandfather had carved for her mother, climb from the floor to the top of the grandmother’s horsehair settee. When she picked up a hammer, to teach her doll how to drive a tack, her mother was compelled to intervene.
This is no way to play with a doll, Sigrid
, she was assured.
You must cradle it, you see. You must cuddle it and give it kisses, thus so
, her mother instructed, then demonstrated. But though her mother sounded buoyantly confident in voicing her directives, there was some backbone lacking from her demonstration, as if she could only mimic an action that she herself did not truly understand. Sigrid was attentive, and repeated her mother’s mimicry with some skill, but honestly, she was relieved when the doll went up in the corner cabinet after lunch, and she returned to her chores, cleaning the squeaking glass windowpanes with soapy water and newsprint.

A week later, to the day, Sigrid bumped into the cabinet while sweeping with the broom, and the doll took a fatal tumble, its head smashing into a starburst of chalky shards, fulfilling her grandmother’s prophecy.

•   •   •

I
N THE ATTIC
she watches Frau Weiss playing with her daughter Ruthi, who is holding her wooden toy. The small tiger, with much of its striping rubbed away. The tiger growls. The tiger prowls up the child’s arm, causing her to giggle. Sigrid watches as if peering into an aquarium. No. Rather as if
she
is in the aquarium, peering out. Watching such intimacy in play is shocking. Oddly embarrassing and certainly inexplicably painful. Yet addictive. She cannot help but stare, crouched in the corner of the room, clutching the blanket she is supposedly folding. So close and easy, a mother to her child. The most natural thing in the world. But not so for her.

“Frau Schröder?”

Sigrid’s eyes shoot up.

“Are you unwell?” It’s Frau Weiss asking. Her little girl holding the wooden tiger, sharing her inquiring gaze at Sigrid. Two pairs of identical caramel brown eyes.

“Unwell?”

Concern levels the woman’s voice. “You looked a little . . . ” she says, but does not finish the sentence.

Quickly Sigrid must absorb the guilty sickness coloring her face. “No. No, not at all. Just tired,” she explains, dutifully returning to her folding of the blanket.

“I think. Well, I
hope
,” says Frau Weiss, “that you know what a heroic act you are performing.”

Heroic? Sigrid smiles grayly. Eyes averted. “I’m folding a blanket.”

“I think you know what I mean. You and the others who risk—” She stops. Glances down at her Ruthi’s head and strokes the little girl’s curly hair. “Who risk so much,” she says in a whisper now. “On our behalf. When so many others have done nothing.”

And for this, Sigrid rewards Frau Weiss’s gratitude by saying, “She must miss her father.”

The woman visibly flinches. A tack inserted into her flesh. “Yes.” Frau Weiss nods, covering the girl’s ears as she pulls her to her breast, as if to protect the child from her words. “Yes, she misses him very much. For many months she was inconsolable. But now . . . well. Now she no longer cries.”

Sigrid lowers her eyes to the child’s small face. For the first time she can identify with her. They both have reached a point where they no longer cry. Where they are beyond tears. And then what sometimes strikes her as she watches the child’s eyes shine, watches her accept a drink of water from her mother, both of her small hands clutching the glass, what sometimes strikes her, strikes her again. Is this what it would have been
like
? If this child had been hers with Egon, is this what it would have been like? If he had planted the seeds of such motherhood in her womb? If their love had been a sturdy enough structure to support that kind of weight, would she have been able to expose a hidden maternity, and love a child as much as she loved him? A child.
Their
child.

—

She goes to a children’s bookshop nearby to look for something she could bring Frau Weiss to read to her daughters. “Something with a tiger in it,” she suggests to the hefty female shop assistant, and is pleased to find that there is a series following the sweetly illustrated adventures of a tiger in the Indian jungle named Bollo. She buys two,
Bollo in the Jungle
and
Bollo Follows the River
. But as the shopgirl is wrapping the purchase, Sigrid notices a book displayed on the desk. It is
The Poisonous Mushroom
, the title printed in the Sütterlinschrift, favored by grammar school primers. On the cover is a toadstool with an ugly caricatured face. The Judenstern is stamped on the toadstool’s trunk and its cap resembles the round fur hats she remembers on the heads of the immigrant Jews of the Grenadierstrasse. “It’s very popular,” the shop assistant remarks dimly, with,
What can one do?
embedded in her tone.

Frau Weiss’s girls are enthralled with the Bollo books, and Sigrid is shocked at the sight of the tears in Frau Weiss’s eyes. “I had forgotten the simple pleasure of reading a bedtime story to them,” she whispers. “It seems I’m always thanking you, Frau Schröder.”

“Please,” Sigrid reminds her blankly, “call me Sigrid.”

•   •   •

T
HE MOON IS OBSCURED
by scudding clouds as they walk down the Uhlandstrasse toward their block, and the street is cold and quiet. Sigrid’s torch exudes its blue glow. Her head is a tangle, but she has taken Ericha’s arm in hers again, in the way she recalls her mother taking her arm when she was an adolescent, and again, Ericha has allowed her to do so without comment. It feels good to be attached to the girl in a small way. To be anchored by this small affection in the blacked-out street. For a moment the war recedes into the nightly rustle of cold in the trees. For a moment she can find that small crevice of sanctuary.

Maybe that’s why the sudden pound of footsteps is so amplified. The man charging in between them out of the darkness, head down like a battering ram. He collides with Ericha with rough intention, unlinking her arms from Sigrid’s with force. Sigrid whirls, words in her throat, ready to shout at such an overbearing example of Berlinische manners, when Ericha seizes her arm. “
Don’t.
Don’t say anything.”

“But that oaf nearly knocked you off your feet.”

“It makes no difference,” Ericha tells her. “I know him.”

“Know him?”

“Let’s keep walking,” she says.

Sigrid opens her mouth, but then doesn’t speak. She silences herself until they turn the corner. “So tell me,” she says. “He’s completely out of sight.”

“Do you recall the day in the park when you saw me with a man?”

“Yes,” Sigrid replies. “He kissed you.”

“To throw off suspicion, he said. To make it look like we’re having a lovers’ rendezvous.”

“That was him?”

“I know him as Johann. He used to supply me with documents.”

“You mean,” Sigrid begins to say, before executing the German glance, even in the dark. “You mean with forgeries?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Forgeries or stolen. They looked very real to me. He was good at pulling them out of his hat.”

“But then?” Sigrid says.

Ericha frowns. “Then
what
?”

“You tell me.”

An expulsion of breath. “But then he started trying to touch me. On the arm. On the shoulder. Moving his hand about. Finally, one evening on the train, he leaned over and whispered into my ear,
I have to fuck you.
”

Even after Egon taught her how to use the word. Even after it freely filled her mouth. She is sometimes shocked by its sudden introduction. I have to
fuck
you. “And what did you do?”

“I let him.” She glances up and then shrugs through the Sigrid’s silence. “You must understand, Frau Schröder, how valuable good documents are.”

“Valuable enough for a woman to
prostitute
herself for them?” Who is that speaking? Her mother? No. The Grossmutter. That is her grandmother’s voice.

“Yes. Valuable enough,” Ericha responds without emotion. “People have died for less. So I didn’t think spreading my legs for him was such a high price to pay. Only now. Well. You saw. There’s trouble there.”

“Yes. Trouble. Next time does he run you down with a lorry?”

“He was just making a point.”

“A point?”

“That he knows who I am. And what I do.”

“And that unless—how did you put it so delicately? Unless you keep
spreading your legs for him
, he’ll denounce you to the police?”

“No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Am I to choose between one of those answers?”

“He’s not exactly an innocent in all this. I know where he lives. He took me to his flat in the Heerstrasse. A little man’s dump. So I doubt he’ll be ringing up the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse as a lark. Unless it’s a suicidal lark.”

“Unless,” Sigrid repeats.

“So now I’m a whore.” Ericha shrugs. “You can add it to your list.”

“I have no list.” Sigrid frowns.

“Never mind. Let’s not talk about it, please. Let’s not talk about anything.”

They walk for a bit like this, two ends of the same silence. Again Sigrid loops Ericha’s arm around hers. And Ericha permits it.

—

The crowd at the cinema is very thin. It’s a bomber’s night. The moon has cleared the night of clouds. Ericha is scheduled to meet a man about rationing coupons. He’s a supervisor at a government printing office and for a price can run off extras. She does not say what that price
is
or how it is to be paid, and Sigrid does not ask. She has posted herself near the door to the balcony, while Ericha sits down in front by the railing. They have agreed on a signal. Sigrid is holding her handkerchief, and if she thinks there is trouble entering, she will pretend to cough. The man beside Ericha is thin and furtive. Sigrid can see him continually glancing over his shoulder. She follows his glance to the entrance, but no one enters. Film chatters in the projector above. On the screen, a spectacle of costumes in an imperial concert hall: women in hooped shirts, hussars in braid, Gustaf Gründgens in a powdered wig seated at a harpsichord. Sigrid attempts to focus on the screen but cannot. Her mind is turning backward. Turning in on itself.

What are you going to do?

I don’t know.

That’s a lie. I think that’s a lie.

The day he left her was hot and sticky. The air filling the flat in Little Wedding was fetid, and she was sweating beneath her dress. He was grimy, his hand rough and unwashed. They undressed each other without words, because they knew that good-bye was the only word left to be spoken. He dug into her body like a cannibal. And when it ended, finally, and they lay on the mattress like two halves of a sliced apple, siphoning breath into their body from the humid air, she closed her eyes and waited for him to say the words.

But she should have known. She should have known that he would not be one to slash the cord between them. That he would put the knife in her hand to make the cut.

She smelled his cigarette smoke. “Anna has been sent a letter from the jüdische Gemeinde,” he said. He seldom referred to his wife by name, and Sigrid had learned that when he did so, it was for the sake of impact. A trick to insert the invisible wife between them.

“A letter?” she repeated, flatly as a question, though she knew what it meant. After the war in the East had begun, so had the deportations. This was an open secret of which no one cared to speak, but it was difficult to miss. The SS had taken to marching Jewish deportees through the streets on the way to the train stations. Men, woman, and children, stamped with the yellow six-pointed star. Old silver beards and babies in the arms of their mothers.

“She’s been ordered,” he said, “to report to the SS transit camp in the Levetzowstrasse in two days’ time. With both of our children.”

Our
children. Suddenly he is claiming his share of them.

Sigrid rolls onto her side and stares blindly at the wall. “What are you going to do?” she asks.

Smoke rises toward the ceiling. “I don’t know.”

“That’s a lie,” she says mildly. “I think that’s a lie.”

She listens to his pause. Then hears him say, “I know a man. For enough money, I can secure a safe place.”