City of Women (16 page)

“You mean a hiding place,” she says.

Silence.

“And you would go with them?”

“What other alternative is left?” he asked thickly and spewed smoke.

Sigrid said nothing. There were other alternatives, of course, that she could think of. At least one. But she did not dare speak it aloud. She dared not even form the thought fully in her head. The two of them together as one. Unencumbered by his wife, by his children. She waited, instead, for him to speak it. She allowed herself to balance on the edge of the razor’s blade, waiting to see if he would answer his own question. And when he did not, she let herself tumble from the edge to the safety of irreparable loss. “No other alternative,” she finally whispered. “None.”

Only now did he touch her. Only now, after she had exonerated him from making the unspoken choice, did he lean his body toward hers and lay his hand on her naked skin. Oddly, she felt his touch only as a weight. She had suddenly gone numb.

“It’s not what I want to do,” he told her.

She permitted her eyes to flick across the drab pattern of the wallpaper. “I think,” she breathed, “that is a lie as well.”

A sneeze brings her back. The drab man from the printing office sneezes. Honks into his handkerchief. Sigrid blinks and works to peel away the cling of memory. Suddenly Ericha stands and marches away. Something is wrong. Sigrid readies herself to follow, but as Ericha passes her, the girl rasps out a single word—
Stay
—and exits so quickly, the old usher doesn’t even make it to his feet before she is gone. Sigrid feels her belly clench as she glances at the printing office supervisor, who has also risen to his feet, and is now standing haplessly, gazing at Ericha’s invisible wake. She watches him clutch the briefcase in his hands as he makes his way through the rank of empty seats. When he passes Sigrid on his way to the balcony doorway, she dares a glance at his face but there’s nothing
to
his face but an arrangement of features. A nose, a mouth. Nothing in his eyes. Nothing at all.

Sigrid waits until he is gone, then quickly picks up her bag. Outside, she must cross the street to catch up with Ericha. “What
happened
?”

Ericha shakes her head. “Something was off. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something . . .
off
,” she repeats. “He was trouble.”

“You mean an informant?”

“Maybe,” Ericha answers. “I don’t know. Just trouble. He was too fidgety.”

“Well, perhaps it was simply nerves. He was, after all, breaking the law. Believe it or not, some of us mere mortals still get anxious over that.”

“I have to trust my feelings,” Ericha replies.

“So no rationing coupons, then, because a man was
fidgety
. Who do we go to
now
? Can you steal enough of Frau Granzinger’s food to feed four mouths?” Why does she feel the need to lash out at the girl?

“I’ll find somebody. Somebody else.” She is struggling to light a cigarette from her packet, but the match does not cooperate.

“Here. Let me help you.” Sigrid frowns, but the girls pulls away.

“I don’t need your help, thank you. I have learned how to strike a match.” And finally she manages. At the steps to their door, Ericha posts herself by the curb.

“What are you doing?” Sigrid inquires.

“I want to smoke for a moment, if that’s permissible.”

Sigrid exhales and goes up the steps alone. Inside the foyer, she stops to unlock the postbox. Nothing but a thin envelope, which falls out of the box and onto the crumbling tile. When she bends to pick it up, someone enters behind her. Ericha, she assumes, until she feels a hand on her body, and turns to see a face.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” the man inquires. “Have you been thinking about me?”

But it’s not the ghost of Egon Weiss. It’s the Frau Obersturmführer’s brother, Wolfram, out of his uniform and in a dark wool chesterfield and roll-brim hat. His body close and full of warmth. Leaning into her on his cane. She catches a sharp scent of schnapps on his breath. “Both the ladies of the house are out till ten at least. No one in the flat. And if you’re squeamish about using another woman’s bed, we can use the sofa. Or the floor.” She gazes back at the hunger in his eyes.

The front door opens again, and this time it
is
Ericha. For an instant, the girl freezes at the sight of the two of them pressed against the postboxes. Then, “Pardon me,” she offers coldly, before brushing past, head down, shoulders squared as she clomps up the steps.

“You know, if she’s jealous, you can bring her along,” Wolfram proposes. “I find a threesome to be an efficient use of wartime resources.” He has taken her hand in his and guides it firmly inside his coat to the hardness in his trousers.

Sigrid stares. Then removes her hand. He does not attempt to stop her, nor does he follow her, as she begins to climb the stairs, the echo of Ericha’s footsteps above her. All she hears him say is, “An empty flat till ten.”

She thinks that Ericha might be waiting for her halfway up until the sound of the door thumping closed to Frau Granzinger’s flat cancels the thought. Suddenly she feels very angry. Angry at this girl, at the war, at the carpet on the steps, at the wallpaper. At simply everything. She thinks of pounding on Frau Granzinger’s door, but before the thought forms fully she has passed it. On the landing outside of her mother-in-law’s flat she can hear some Viennese schmaltz playing on the wireless. She’s mad at that, too. Mad at the air she is breathing. She starts to claim her key from her bag when she realizes she still has the single piece of mail that fell from the postbox clenched in her hand. A dingy salmon-colored envelope bearing a Feldpost number. She glares at it, then rips it open and refocuses her glare on Kaspar’s handwriting. His penmanship was once very neat. Very beautiful, in fact. Ordered and perfectly fluid. But now the writing on the cheap piece of military stationery is tight as a screw, one turn away from threading.

Dear Mother,

I finally received Father’s sweater that you patched for me. I am wearing it now. I think about him sometimes, in this sweater, sitting in his chair, smoking his pipe with the newspaper open in his lap. Who knew I would ever be wearing it as a soldier? Best to you. And please tell Sigrid to send some more Pervatin.

He writes to his mother
, she thinks. Not to her. Not to his wife. There are only instructions for
her
, to be passed along the chain of command. Tell Sigrid to send more Pervatin.

She finds that she has crumpled the letter in her fist.

From below she listens to Wolfram’s three-point thump ascending the stairs. Growing closer.

•   •   •

H
E IS EATING HER ALIVE
, out of her clothes. Her blouse half off, her brassiere shoved up: naked from the waist down, save for her Kaufhaus nylons. As he gains his rhythm, his trousers down only far enough for him to unleash himself, her skin is scoured by the thick Persian rug. Egon used to take her on the floor like this. She didn’t like it then. She felt as if he were trying to drag her down, to demonstrate his dominance, to hammer her like a nail into the hard wood. It would often bruise her, and she hated that. Though sometimes she would observe those bruises in the mirror, alone, and feel love for them. But with Wolfram, the floor is the level she craves. No beds. Nothing so lofty. She digs her fingers into his hair as she feels him working her toward climax, feels the scream building in her, to which she knows she cannot give voice. When it comes, she bites his shoulder to silence it, and listens to the sound of his pain.

ELEVEN

T
HE
T
OMMIES COME
and the Tommies go. Two raids in three nights, pummeling the factory districts to the north and east. The
Deutsche Wochenschau
shows soldiers serving bombed-out Berliners from portable field kitchens called “goulash cannons.” On the screen, everyone is grinning. But at the patent office, there is talk swirling about the aftermath that does not make the newsreels. The school gymnasiums as temporary morgues. Corpses laid out in rank and file for identification. Fragments of bodies in metal tubs on trestle tables.

At the Pension Unsagbar, there’s been an addition to the guests. A man in his middle forties. Sallow skin. A wing of greasy hair combed over a balding head and a pair of searching eyes. Grayish stubble on his chin and an absurd Führer mustache on his lip. He owns a dog-eared deck of cards, which he uses to lay out game after game of solitaire. He glares down at the columns of cards on the floorboards. Deuce of clubs on three of diamonds. Red on black on red.

“Who is he?”

Ericha is restocking the pantry shelves with a half dozen tins of canned sugar beets. “You mean what is his name?”

“I mean where did he
come
from?”

“From his accent, I’d say Moabit.”

“That’s very funny, but not what I’m asking.”

“He came through channels like everyone else. He calls himself Kozig.”

“And how do you know that he’s not a Gestapo spy?”

A look. “How do I know
any
of them aren’t? How do I know
you’re
not?”

“There’s something about him that’s different.”

“You mean he looks more Jewish.”

“I mean maybe he looks more hunted.”

“They’re all hunted. Are you forgetting that?”

“You have your instincts about people,” Sigrid says, “perhaps I have mine.”

Ericha glances at the man playing a card, then turns back to the pantry shelf. “He escaped,” she says, “from the SS quarantine in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse.” A flash of her eyes in Sigrid’s direction. “But he left his wife behind.”

“You’ve got to get them out of here.” This is Auntie talking. She has cornered Sigrid. “That raid last night was the final straw. Their nerves are stretched. The children especially. Up there, they feel like sitting ducks for the bombers.” Sigrid dares a glance at Anna Weiss, bleakly rocking her girls in her lap, covered by a blanket. Both children are staring into some unseen spot.

“You should talk to the young one,” is all Sigrid says, nodding once in Ericha’s direction.

“I
have
talked to her. Talked until I was blue, and I get nowhere
.
So now I am talking to the adult,” the old woman says. Then swallows her voice. “My brother, maybe you’ve heard, he’s a Party member and he likes to feel important.”

Sigrid says nothing.

“He has comrades in the SS,” Auntie tells her. “Old Fighters, who brag. So I learn things. And what I’ve learned is that the noose has
tightened
,” she says. “They say that, after Stalingrad, Goebbels was so incensed over Jews still working in the armament factories that he’s sworn to make Berlin Jew-free by the end of this month. That means twenty or thirty thousand Jews to be deported.”

Sigrid blinks starkly at this. “Thirty thousand?”

“Maybe they thought they were safe working a lathe or a handpress for the war industries,” Auntie says, frowning, “but they’re finding out differently now. Over a thousand a day are being shipped east in cattle cars. And the Gestapo are
everywhere
. I’ve seen the same Stapo bull
twice now
, loitering about the grocer’s down the street.”

Sigrid tastes a drop of dread. “You’re sure he’s Gestapo?”

“You think I can’t recognize one by now? Trilby hat, big leather overcoat. He might as well be wearing a sign,” she says, and scowls. “But for every one I
do
see there can be another half dozen I
don’t
.
You
’
ve
got to get them
out of here
,” Auntie declares. “You’ve got to talk to that girl of yours and make her
understand
.”

Sigrid draws a thick breath and shakes her head. The trouble is that Ericha is barely speaking to her since the night before. “I’ll see what I can do,” she promises dimly.

The room smells of wood rot and leaky plaster and nightly buckets of urine. And underneath, something else. An odor of desolation and chronic fear.

Sigrid kneels down beside Frau Weiss. The woman props up a frail smile in greeting, but it’s obvious that her beautiful confidence is starting to fray. “The girls were very frightened last night,” she whispers, still slowly rocking the children in her arms. “The guns. They were so loud.”

“The Zoo Tower. The gun emplacements have had bigger flak cannons installed,” Sigrid tells her. “It was in the newspapers.”

“Well.” A small shrug. “They are quite deafening.”

“I have something for the children,” Sigrid says. “Do they like chocolate?” She produces two pieces of bittersweet wrapped in foil from her bag—some of Renate’s contraband.

“Chocolate? Oh, yes.” Frau Weiss smiles, brushing the hair from Ruthi’s eyes. “These little ones
love
their chocolate. Don’t they?”

The children raise their eyes to Sigrid blankly, then gaze at the foil-wrapped chocolate. They accept the gift, but without expression.

“Now, what do you say to the kind lady?” their mother prompts.

“Thank you,” they chant together.

“Thank you,
Frau Schröder
. Be polite.”

“Thank you, Frau Schröder.”

Sigrid feels herself smile and, without realizing it, has begun stroking the little one’s curly mass of hair. “You’re most welcome,” she tells them.

“Mama,” good soldier Liesl says with innocence, “I want to save mine for Poppa.”

“What?” Frau Weiss sounds perplexed.

“I want to save mine for Poppa. Is that all right?”

“I want to save mine for Poppa, too,” Ruthi follows. Sigrid removes her hand.

Anna’s smile has dipped. “No, no. You needn’t do that.”

“But Poppa loves chocolate,
too
.” Liesl insists, her small face suddenly burdened. “I want him to have it.”

Her sister, at this point, has started to cry. “I want to give Poppa my chocolate.
I want to save it for him.
”

“Shhh, shhh.”
Rocking her girls more tightly. “It’s all right. Poppa doesn’t need your chocolate. I’m sure there is plenty of chocolate where he is, and he would want you to have yours. Now, this kind lady has brought you a delicious gift. You should enjoy it.” But by now, Sigrid has receded. She has removed her hand from the child’s head, and can only watch as the woman tries to rebuild the invisible shelter around her children. She catches Frau Weiss’s eyes for only an instant before she must look away. She cannot bear to see a mother’s terror in the eyes of her lover’s wife.

•   •   •

T
HEY ARE WALKING
to the U-Bahn station past the spires of a tall brick church pointing toward the empty evening sky. Heads down, the cold breath of winter in the air.

“Auntie says you won’t listen to her.” Sigrid frowns.

“Most people say that.”

“Well, she also says that her current pension guests must be moved.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Are you?”

“Don’t you think I
know
how desperate things are? Don’t you think I
know
? That pig from the printing office wanted five hundred marks for a single month’s worth of ration cards.
Five hundred.
Next month it could be twice that. I know we’re running out of resources and I
know
Auntie’s getting nervous, but what am I supposed to
do
that I’m not already
doing
? They need
papers
, Sigrid. I can’t move them without documents.” So seldom does Ericha address her by her given name that the sound has a bite to it.

“But I thought. I mean, don’t you
have
a source for that?”

“I did, but now I don’t,” she says.

“And does that surprise you, considering your method of payment?”

“That’s
really
not very helpful,” the girl declares sharply. “Really not very helpful
at all
.”

A tram sparks past, its blackout lights glowing like fireflies in the dusk. “So what happened to
you
?” she asks.

Sigrid blinks. “To me?”

“You know what I mean. Your new soldier friend. The Herr Leutnant.”

“That’s none of your business.”

“No? I wonder.”

“Nothing happened. Besides, I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

“Does he have a big cock?”

Sigrid stops so suddenly that several Berliners nearly collide with her. “Can’t you watch where you’re going?” a hausfrau scolds her brashly. “There are people walking, you know.”

“I don’t expect to be insulted by you,” she tells Ericha.

“And I don’t expect to be lied to by
you.
”

“I have not
lied
to you.”

“No, you’ve simply mislaid a bit of truth. Look, I wouldn’t care about whose bed you’re filling, but for the fact that you have made a commitment to the work we do. How do I know that you won’t let something slip when you’re lying under the blankets with this man. He’s an officer. You could compromise everything.”

“I won’t do that.”

“How do I
know
you won’t?”

“
Because
, little one, you must
trust
me,” Sigrid answers. Then removes the edge from her voice. “You must
trust
me.”

Ericha’s eyes burn fearfully for an instant. Then she turns away. They walk wordlessly forward until, “There's a man been hanging about down the street,” Sigrid says. “Auntie thinks he’s Gestapo.”

Ericha gives her only the briefest of glances. “Auntie sees Gestapo men everywhere,” is her only response.

“Are you still in there?”

“What
?” Sigrid looks up sharply at her mother-in-law across the table.

“I said, are you still in there?”

“In there?” Trying to snap back to the present. “Yes. Yes,” she answers curtly. “Still.”

“Good. I thought maybe you’d fallen into a coma.”

“Only tired,” she lies. She rubs at the claw of pain in her head. Stirs the oily cabbage soup in front of her. An official voice yaks at them stridently over the radio, dispensing valuable information about nothing. “Must we?” Sigrid asks.

Blowing on a spoonful from her bowl. “Must we
what
?”

“Have the wireless?”

Mother Schröder looks up from her bowl and dips in her slice of bread. “Why not? Certainly,
you
have nothing to say these days. Why should I be forced to eat in silence?”

Sigrid drops her spoon and shoves herself away from the table. “Never mind. God forbid we should ever have a moment without some squawking jackdaw filling our ears with noise.”

“I
happen
to be waiting for my program, if that’s allowed,” her mother-in-law calls after her reproachfully, but Sigrid is not listening. She tugs open the cabinet above the sink. “I’m taking one of your cigarettes,” she announces.

“Well. Nice of you to ask.”

Striking a kitchen match, she ignites the tip of one of the old lady’s abominations and inhales its poisonous taste.

“Look, there’s no reason for you to be hopping up in the middle of supper. If you must have the radio off,
fine
. Turn it off, and sit back down. Your soup is going cold.”

Somewhere in the old woman’s voice, Sigrid senses an appeal, a thread of need. Is it loneliness? But she is in no mood to accommodate her, in any case, and takes a short, vicious pleasure in squashing the plea. “If you’re so concerned, then
you
eat it,” she replies. “It tastes like horse piss anyway.” Mother Schröder’s back stiffens abruptly, but then her eyes drop to hide the injury. The pleasure of the attack dissipates in a blink, and is replaced by a sting of shame, but before Sigrid can say another word, there’s a knock at the door that dispels all else as the two women share the sharp ends of the same look. The knock repeats itself firmly. Sigrid inhales smoke, then tamps the cigarette in one of her mother-in-law’s tin ashtrays. “I’ll get it,” she says as calmly as possible. Crossing to the door, she opens it with only a heartbeat’s hesitation, then steps back with an audible intake of breath.

It’s a soldier. He looms largely in his Landser’s uniform, filling up the threshold with a kind of burdened authority. One side of his face is brutally scarred, so that the texture of his skin resembles sandpaper. His nose is crooked and plasticized, and a corner of his mouth is stitched into an artificial grimace. He seems to accept her gasp with practiced tolerance. “Frau Schröder?” he inquires.

Trying to recover herself, her hand at her throat. “Yes.”

“My name is Kurtz, Frau Schröder. I’m a comrade of your husband’s.”

“My husband?” A blankness enters her voice.

“What is it?
What’s happened
?” Mother Schröder is demanding anxiously. The Landser’s eyes flick toward the old woman, but then back to Sigrid. “He’s been wounded.”

“Wounded?”
she hears her mother-in-law repeat with a swift bleakness. But Sigrid herself can find no words. The silence she craved a moment before now steals her voice.

“Not critically,” the Landser assures them tonelessly, and then turns his head as Mother Schröder paces forward.

“What happened? Do you know what happened?”

“He told me his company had orders to hold a position outside of Rzhev. They were dug in for the night when Ivan dropped a few mortars onto their position. He took a dose of shrapnel.”

“And where is he?” the old woman must know.

“Recovering. There’s an army hospital north of Smolensk. It’s where we met. Anyway, I’m sure you’ll be getting the notice soon. I’ve been rotated off the line, but I told him that I would look you up on my way through Berlin. Personally.”

Silence. The women stare at the disfigured face dumbly, until the man clears his throat. “Well . . . so I’ve kept my promise.”