City of Women (23 page)

“It’s the best way for Jews to travel. Not even the Gestapo bothers with identity checks when the bombs are falling.” Turning his back to her, he shrugs on his shirt. She swivels her feet onto the bare wood floor and picks up her nylon chemise.

“That’s a very nice watch,” she says.

“What?” Egon grunts, sparing only half a glance.

She picks up the wristwatch from the nightstand.
Cartier
is inscribed on the face. “I said, that’s a very nice watch.”

He takes it from her and straps it on his wrist. “It manages to tell time,” is all he says.

“Always the best. Even now. The fine watch. The mohair coat. How do you do it?” she asks with a touch of awe and, perhaps, a touch of something else. Pride? Pride in her man?

“I do what I do,” he replies. She had not expected more of an answer from him. Still, she frowns at the absurdities. Or is it a smile?

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing,” she answers. “Women. It really isn’t fair what men do to us.”

Down in the street, they part, as always, outside the hotel door. She, in her scarf, pushing open an umbrella, he creasing the brim of his hat against the patter of rain. “Good day, Frau Schröder,” she hears him say as he leaves her. A smile crossing his face. “You’ll understand if I don’t wish you a bombless night.”

•   •   •

A
T THE DOOR OF HER FLAT
, she hears the radio. Lotte Lehmann’s trilling soprano voice singing,
Warning.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she calls out as she hangs up her coat, in the most casual voice she can manage. As usual, she finds her mother-in-law planted in the chair beside the wireless, but the look on Mother Schröder’s face indicates that she is not listening. In fact, the look indicates that she is considering boring through a steel plate with nothing more that the sharpness of her eyes. Sigrid opens her mouth, but closes it again as a quick electrical pulse shoots through her heart. She sees the dingy packet of letters wrapped by a black ribbon clutched in her mother-in-law’s claws. “How did you get those?” she hears herself demand. Her voice is throaty, disconnected. Hoarse, suddenly, with crackling emotion.

“That’s what you have to say to me?
How did I get them?
” Mother’s Schröder’s voice is raw with indignity.

“You violated my privacy.”

“I opened a cigarette tin. If you store your
privacy
there, then you should expect it to be violated.”

“Give them to me.” She makes a move as if to snatch them, but Mother Schröder grips them with both hands.

“No.”

“I demand that you
give them to me
!”

“And
I
demand that you give me an explanation of this
filthy trash
!”

“Demand away, it’s none of your business.”

“You’re married to my son. That
makes
it my business. Does he know?”

“Know?”

“That his wife is stashing away this pornography?” she hisses, shaking the letter righteously at Sigrid.

“It was years ago. Before I ever met Kaspar,” she lies.

“Yet you keep them.”

“They’re not pornography.”

“They’re disgusting. And no woman with a grain of moral character—”

“Oh, can you stuff your
moral character
up your ass, please? I’m sick to death of hearing about it. My God, you’re over sixty and what you understand about being a woman would fit in a thimble.”

Mother Schröder’s face has gone bloodless. “You think that fornication makes you more of a woman?”

“I think that
passion
makes me more of a woman.”

Mother Schröder’s expression hardens with contempt. “
Passion
. A word used by an idiot. You think you know
me
, yet you have no knowledge of yourself. Passion is the excuse of a whore. And a simple-minded whore at that.” She shakes the packet of letters at her. “Is
this
who you are thinking of?”

“
What?
”

“I know what you do. At night. When you’re in bed. I’m not a fool.”

“You’re
spying
on me in my own bed?”

“It’s your
husband’s
bed, not yours. And I asked you a question.”

“You’re mad.”

“I’m well aware of your history. I know that your father was a philanderer, and left your mother in the lurch. And I warned Kaspar when he married you that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Leave my family out of this,” Sigrid hears herself say coldly.

“Maybe if you had had a decent upbringing, you might have turned out to have a bit of moral backbone.”

“Shut your mouth!” Sigrid hears herself shouting. The words rip out of her. “Shut your fucking
mouth
!” she bellows.

Mother Schröder stumbles back a step, as if she has been shoved, her face contorted. “How dare you. How
dare
you use such language toward me,” she hisses in rebuke, but clearly, by the expression stamped on her face, Sigrid has frightened her. In that instant, Sigrid sees just how old the woman has become. How hollowed out. She works to force the fire back into her belly, to regain control of herself. “Give me. Those letters,” she demands.

The old woman squeezes the packet. Her face reassessing. Reforming itself. “Do you swear to me,” she says, “that this man means nothing to you now?”

Sigrid breathes in. Breathes out.

“Can you?
Swear
?”

“I can do better than that, Petronela,” Sigrid replies. “I can swear that I meant nothing to him.”

A stare, then her mother-in-law frowns. Regains the imperious edge to her voice. “And still you keep his letters? God, but you
are
an idiot.” She tosses the letters onto the rug. “My advice? Burn this trash.”

•   •   •

R
AIN CLOUDS SHEETING BERLIN
keep the Royal Air Force away that night, and the next. But on the third night, the sky is a dark, cloudless shell.

She is standing in front of the sink in her apron, washing dishes in brownish tepid water and covertly watching the clock on the wall tick away the minutes till seven o’clock. Seven o’clock is recognized throughout town as the RAF’s favorite arrival time. Restaurants have started to time their service by this schedule, and cinemas have started adjusting their showtimes.

As the minute hand closes in on the hour, she realizes that she is holding her breath. Holding it, and then she exhales as she feels the surge of the sirens vibrate through her bones and settle in the pit of her belly.

From behind her comes the scrape of her mother-in-law’s chair. The old lady has been sitting over her coffee with a sour-smelling cigarette, still enforcing the silence that has regulated their mealtime. They have not spoken beyond the most basic mechanics of communication since the incident with the letters, but now she hears the old woman say, “What are you
doing
?”

“Doing? I’m doing the dishes.”

“Don’t be stupid. There’s a
raid
on. Dishes will wait. Go see to the fuse box.”

“No. I don’t think so. I’m tired of hiding in a hole.”

“Oh, yes. Always the selfish one. What
she’s
tired of doing. Might it occur to you that if a bomb falls on your head, that there would be consequences for
others
?”

“I’m sure you’d manage somehow.”

“Perhaps. But what about my son? Wounded. Confined to a hospital bed in some godforsaken corner. Don’t you think he has the
right
to come back home to the woman he took for his
wife,
however misguided that decision might have been?”

“If a bomb falls on my head, Kaspar can come home to you,” Sigrid hears herself say. “Which is how you’ve always wanted it anyway.”

The old woman scowls. “It’s
illegal
. You can’t simply
choose
to stay out of the shelter.”

Still scrubbing at the dishes in the dirty water. “Yet that is what I’m doing.”

“I could have the Hausobman up here to haul you down.”

“I’ll bolt the door shut.”

“Then he’ll break it in.”

“I doubt it. The door is private property. The landlord would be unhappy at having to replace it. Besides, can you imagine the grist that scene would give to the gossip mills? At your expense, I might add.”

Mother Schröder reverts to silence long enough to digest that possibility. Then, “Fine,” she blurts. “Let the Tommies blow you to pieces. I won’t shed a single tear for stupidity.” The old woman marches to the door and begins bustling with her coat and hat.

“Don’t forget your sewing bag,” Sigrid tells her at the door. Noise drifting up as Frau Granzinger evacuates her brood. Her mother-in-law snatches the bag out of her hand, and exits without giving her a look. But she
does
receive a look from Fräulein Kessler, who is just leaving her flat. It is against regulations to lock your flat during an air raid, in the event that the Hausobman must get in to fight a fire. But just to reassure Sigrid perhaps, the Fräulein leaves the door standing ever so slightly ajar.

•   •   •

T
HINGS MOVE QUICKLY
. Sigrid can hear the muffled drone of bomber engines in the sky and the thudding under-beat of pom-pom guns as she slings open the building’s front door, and Egon bursts into the foyer and dashes up the stairs. She hurries to catch up, the sound of their footsteps out of sync, filling up the stairwells as they climb.

“Number 11H,” she tells him.

But Egon hangs back. “You go in first. If there’s still someone inside, you can make excuses. I could only look like a looter.”

She budges the door open. No one is inside. Only the furnishings of the Frau Obersturmführer’s model National Socialist flat. She nods to him to enter. When she clamps the door shut behind them, he is standing with his back to her in front of the bronze portrait of the Führer.

“She’s a Nazi?” he asks, with an oddly distant curiosity.

“No. It’s a complicated story.”

He shrugs. Turns away from the plaque and faces her. “Everyone’s story is complicated,” he says, and shrugs off his overcoat. Then looks up at the ceiling. Above them, the rumble of the bombers is getting louder as she allows him to unbutton the front of her blouse. Then pulls her down. On the floor, her skirt is up, and he has her naked below. He has exposed her to the ghosts of the flat. Frau Remki laying her grief down on her deathbed before seizing up with the convulsions. Her boy, a child again, giggling gleefully as he chases a ball around the room, long before he would grow to be a soldier and be blown to smithereens. The ghosts in the flat, the ghosts in her mind. Ericha, watching, staring as Sigrid’s back arches, her
own
body falling victim to convulsions, but in Sigrid’s case, the convulsions of rapture. Ericha staring from the shadows of Sigrid’s mind. And Frau Weiss. Frau Anna Weiss, gently shielding her children’s eyes from the scene on the floor. Gazing at their coupling in silence from the dim recesses of Auntie’s secret room, while above them, the thunder of war shakes the window glass.

—

Total War follows her everywhere. Military marches play continually from the loudspeakers strung up in public squares. Sigrid is deaf to them. She is desperate.
Desperate
to touch him. He has been in hiding in the flat for three nights. Three nights of lying in her bed alone, with Egon across the hall, as unreachable as if he were across an ocean. But tonight, Carin Kessler has promised to take a walk before supper and give her a precious thirty minutes alone with him.

First, however, she must obtain a certain item that they have run short of.

She thinks about this item as she’s coming down the steps, on her way to work. Condoms are difficult to come by, at least if you’re a female civilian. The Party frowns on contraception. It wants more babies, more good German babies, armies of babies.

The Wehrmacht, however, issues them to the troops by the meter. Every soldier carries them. Wolfram had a pocketful, considered “standard equipment.” But not so for U-boats. Not so for Jews in hiding. Egon had organized a small supply from somewhere. Who knows where? She never asked. But it was only a handful, which they have exhausted.

“You know it’s illegal,” she hears. It’s Portierfrau Mundt dressed in her apron, clutching a broom in her hand at the doorway to the concierge flat.

Sigrid turns, hand on the handle of the foyer door. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s
illegal
to stay out of the shelter when there’s a raid. So where were you, Frau Schröder? Where exactly were you when Tommy paid us a call?”

She lifts her eyebrows. “My mother-in-law didn’t say?”

“What she said was,
Don’t ask me
. I believe her exact words were ‘As far as I’m concerned, I
have
no daughter-in-law.’”

“We had a row,” Sigrid replies. “I left the house.”

“And where did you go?”

“Walking. I was angry.”

“Walking where?”

“What?”

“Walking
where
, Frau Schröder? The moon? You must have been walking
somewhere
.”

“Not the moon.”

“Don’t be arrogant, this is a serious matter.”

“No, Frau Mundt. I think it’s
not
a serious matter. I had an argument with my mother-in-law. Surely
that
is not illegal. I was upset and went for a walk. Surely
that
is not illegal. When the bombers came I went into the Uhlandstrasse U-Bahn tunnel. And certainly
that
is not
illegal
.”

“I see. So you have an explanation up your sleeve, as usual. Such a smart woman you are. But tell me, then, Frau Schröder, if you were out gallivanting, as you say,
why
don’t I recall seeing you return before I bolted the door for the night?”

“I can’t explain the world for you, Frau Mundt,” Sigrid tells her, on edge. “Now, if you don’t mind, I cannot be late for work.
That
, I believe,
is
illegal.” She turns away, but then a pinch stops her as Mundt literally seizes her arm. The woman’s eyes are violent. “I haven’t finished with you, Frau Schröder. You’ve got my back up. I know that you have been cooking up something with that little rag from the Labor Service.
Oh, yes
, I know all about what
she’s
been up to.”