City of Women (24 page)

“
What
do you know?”

And now a smug face. “You think that the Gestapo comes into my building, and I don’t know the reason why? She’s a black marketeer, and probably a thief to boot. God knows
what
she’s looted from the Granzingers’ place. And
you
, Frau Schröder. I can’t explain it yet. But I know that
you
are her accomplice.”

“That’s a lie.”

“I doubt it.”

“Is that what you told the Gestapo?”

“
Nervous
? You should be. But no. I don’t need those dunderheads to do my work for me. Men are still men, even in the Geheime Staatspolizei, and I can do quite well without their interference in my business.”

“Your business.”

“My
building
, Frau Schröder.
Mine.
You think you’re protected because your husband’s serving, or because my lout of a man wants to squeeze those fine titties of yours? You are
not
protected. My husband is all mouth. When he wants his dirty work, he has his whores in the Augsburger Strasse to sate him. And as far as the Party is concerned, a man’s military record does not protect his wife. If the wife deserves punishment, it
will
be meted out. I can promise you that.”

“And is that the same promise you made to Frau Remki, before you denounced her?”

“Remki?”

“Yes, I’m sure you recall the lady whom you drove to suicide.”

“Ah, so
that’s
what you think, is it? Well, you might be interested to know that you have it wrong. I did no such thing.”

“You
did
. She may have died by her own hand, but it was only to avoid the
punishment
you called down on her head.”

“No. I
mean
, Frau Schröder, it was not
I
who denounced her. Oh, I rang up the Party office, of course, but only to find that someone else had beaten me to the punch.”

“What? You’re lying.”

“You think so, do you? Well, why don’t you ask your mother-in-law if she agrees with you?” Mundt says with venomous satisfaction. “Why don’t you ask your dear Mother Schröder if I’m lying?”

Sigrid stares dumbly into the hatred flattening Mundt’s face.

Then comes the Hausobman’s bark from inside the concierge flat.

“Women! Quit your gabbin’, will you? You’ll wear out your jaw. A man wants his eats while they’re hot!”

Mundt maintains her stare. “Keep your tongue in your mouth, old man,” she calls back over her shoulder. Then she forms her mouth into a smirk. “Good day, Frau Schröder. And Heil Hitler.”

•   •   •

S
IGRID FINDS A SEAT
on the Elektrische, and watches the rain-dampened street pass by in gray shadows of concrete and granite, asphalt and slate. The tram’s noise permeates her bones, and she sits, feeling drained, thinking of her mother-in-law lugging Frau Remki’s wireless into the room. The spoils of betrayal.

At the next stop, there are no more seats, so she stands to let a young pregnant woman sit. The woman smiles her thanks. Her face is pasty white. Her hair sticking out from a wool cap, dry and brittle. Her lips colorless. The child inside consuming her, the little cannibal. Sigrid looks away, staring at the nothingness through the window. For a moment she sees Ericha in her mind’s eye, and feels suddenly quite lonely, as the tram sparks along on its track.

•   •   •

T
HERE IS NO
midday break today, by order of Herr Esterwegen. His contribution to Total War. It makes it more difficult for Sigrid. She meets Renate at the filing cabinets.

“So I have fulfilled your supply requisition, Frau Schröder,” Renate says, suppressing a grin.

Sigrid forces up a small smile in return. “Thank you. Where are they now?”

“In my purse. Shall I create a diversion? Shout
fire
, perhaps?”

“Leave them in the WC.”

“I feel like a master criminal. Dropping the loot.”

“Yes. It’s quite the conspiracy, isn’t it?”

“You know, this is really the
man’s
job. You should educate him.”

“It’s hard for him,” Sigrid explains.

“Whatever you say, Liebling. I suppose it makes no difference, as long as it stays hard for
you
.” Renate smirks.

They look like wrapped candies. Condoms stamped into white cellophane with the brand name Odilei in a red oval. A long snake of them, curled into an old tin of tea leaves, now in Sigrid’s bag.

When she walks up the steps to her building, Mundt shoves up her window.

“
Frau Schröder
,” she calls.

“Not now, Frau Mundt, please, I have nothing more to say to you.”

“Well, we’ll see, Frau Schröder. I simply wished to alert you to the surprise waiting for you.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The
surprise
, Frau Schröder,” Mundt repeats, with a hint of mockery. “I’m talking about the
surprise
waiting for you in your flat.”

But before Sigrid can muster a response to this, the front door opens, and out steps Carin Kessler in a long coat and brimmed felt hat, toting her handbag.

“
Ah
, Frau Schröder. So glad to see you,” she says, grinning stiffly. “I just met your husband.”

Sigrid feels the blood drain from her face. “My husband?”

“I knocked on your flat to invite you to join my walk, but when the door opened it was
he
.”

Sigrid’s mouth opens, but all her words have dissolved.

“I’m going out, so is there anything you need?” Carin asks her. “Any errand I can run?”

“Errand?” Sigrid repeats blankly. “No. No, thank you, Fräulein Kessler. Not as of now.”

“Very well. I shan’t keep you, then. I’m sure,” she says, with a hint of command in her voice, “you must be very happy.”

•   •   •

S
HE CLIMBS THE FOUR FLIGHTS
as if climbing the steps of a gallows. At the door to her flat she stops. She can hear voices on the inside. Mother Schröder gabbling, her normal curmudgeonly tone stripped away. And then the voice of a man. The man to whom she is married.

She looks away to the door across the landing. Only a few steps away. Nothing but that pine door separates her from Egon. Slowly she takes a step toward him. She almost grasps the door handle, but then stops. Her hand will not allow her to do it.

When she enters her flat, it is as if she has walked into someone else’s life. Talk ceases. Her mother-in-law is ladling out soup, but the grin she is wearing dies. The man seated at the table turns his head. He is so much thinner now. His jaw angular, honed like the blade of a knife. All the boyishness from his face has been rubbed off. The uniform he wears looks baggy on him. He stands slowly with a scrape of his chair on the floor, and faces her. And in his eyes, she can see the gun sight aimed at the world. He forms his mouth into a smile as he takes a slightly halting step toward her.

“Hello, wife,” he says. “Your husband is home.”

FIFTEEN

S
HE CAN BARELY STAND
the happy faces at the patent office. All those smiling wives in the stenographers’ pool, so gleeful for her. Her husband has
returned
. She has a
man
again. What’s it feel like? It must feel
good
. Sly looks, sly laughs. You must bring him by this Sunday. Yes, you simply
must
. She has a
man
in a world of women, and they want to parse him up. They want to claim a helping of him, as if he were a one-pot Sunday stew. Sigrid grits her teeth.

At the filing cabinet Renate sneaks a moment. She bites her lip and whispers anxiously, “So how is it?”

Sigrid shakes her head tightly. “Very strange. I don’t know. He’s been away so long. At least it seems so.”

“Has he recovered?”

“What?”

“From his wound?”

“He has a bit of a limp. I . . . I don’t know how long it will last. If it’s permanent.”

“He hasn’t said?”

“He hasn’t
said
much of anything.” She shoves a folder into the cabinet and picks through the tabs for another. “In fact, what he
doesn’t
say is enormous. He carries what he
doesn’t
say like a full field pack on his back.”

“And . . . uh”—Renate glances around—“did you
welcome
him home?” she asks, her voice uncharacteristically sheepish over the subject.

Sigrid answers like a good soldier: “I was on bedroom duty, if that’s what you mean.”

“Was it good?”

A small frown. “It’s been a long time. Things were,” she says, and then shakes her head. “Things were
awkward
. Honestly? It was as if we were strangers.”

“And what about your
friend
?” Renate whispers.

Sigrid plucks a file from the drawer and rolls it shut. “What about him?”

“What are you going to do?”

She pauses, and then answers truthfully. “I don’t know.”

•   •   •

T
HAT NIGHT AT SUPPER
, Mother Schröder is buoyant. She is yammering on, an old bottle of plum brandy uncorked on the table. Full of stories of her son’s childhood, all of which, of course, reflect her own sterling maternal abilities. If she notices that Kaspar is growing bored, she pretends not to, though perhaps it is implicit in the way she continues to try to bribe him with “real coffee,” with another “man’s share” of the sausage, specially purchased in his honor, with the remains of the packet of “real cigarettes.” But he resists as she tries to insert the packet into the breast pocket of his tunic. “
Stop it
, Mother. I have my own goddamned cigarettes,” he announces. Mother Schröder looks as if she has been struck with a fire iron. Kaspar tempers his tone. “Those are yours. You keep them,” he instructs.

In the silence that follows, he stands. “Thank you for dinner,” he says, and solemnly limps over to the coat hooks.

“Where are you
going
?” his mother demands, stricken.

“Out for a while,” he answers simply, shuffling on his soldier’s greatcoat.

“And when will you be back?”

He buttons his coat closed. “Later” is all he says. Slipping on his field cap, he limps out the door. The thump, as he closes it behind him, occupies the room. Till suddenly, Mother Schröder’s voice is like a saber that she wings at Sigrid’s head.

“
You
did this!”

“What?”

“This is
your
doing. You’ve been trying to turn my son against me for years, and now you’ve finally managed it.” Clattering her dishes together with Kaspar’s, the old lady marches toward the sink, leaving behind a bloated silence. Slowly, Sigrid piles her flatware atop her single dish and stands.

•   •   •

L
YING IN BED
, she replays in her mind the sight of the SS herding Jews into the rear of their lorry, and she feels a greasy shame fill her belly. Not just shame over how good Germans could be doing this. Not just shame over her simpleminded denial of “politics” for so long. But also because of the little story that is flickering through her head.
A telephone call would do it.
If the SS were suddenly to sweep Frau Weiss and her children from Sigrid’s life, then they would be swept from Egon’s life as well. She would be free of them.
He
would be free of them. A telephone call to the local Party office would do it, quite easily.
I know where there are Jews hiding.

For an instant she stares at the possibility, as if it has taken form outside her head, like an ugly spider dangling above her from a silvered thread. Could she do it? And if she could, how does a person go about her life after such a crime?

When the door to the flat opens, she feels her body tense. She waits. Listens to the aimless shuffling of boots over the drone of the old woman’s snoring. A hinge creaks. The toilet flushes. And then the door to the bedroom squeaks open in the darkness. She hears the clump of his boots and then Kaspar’s body flops down on the bed beside her. The smell of the schnapps is strong. A moment stretches out before either of them moves. They lie like corpses beside each other.

“I am not what you expected,” he says finally.

“It seems so long,” she breathes. “It seems like many years have passed.”

“Yes, time is strange. A five-minute wait before the order to attack can be an eternity. While five hours of combat will pass in a blink,” he says. And then: “I won’t ask you if you’ve been faithful. At the front, there are men who can’t stop talking about how they’re going to murder their wives for infidelity, but honestly I don’t care. We’ve all done what we have done, and there’s nothing for it.” He fumbles with a packet of field-issue cigarettes and lights one up, the sharp smoke mixing with the stink of the schnapps. “You know, the army runs field brothels for the front-liners,” he says. “Whores shipped in from the Warthegau. They set them up in tents, with blankets draped between the cots. Once we’re queued up, the company sergeant hands out small cans of disinfectant spray, and we’re required to spray the disinfectant onto the whore’s genitals before intercourse. If we don’t, and we come out with a full can, we get punishment duty.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I just want you to know the truth, Sigrid. I don’t want any lies between us.”

•   •   •

I
N THE MORNING
, she cannot help but knock on Carin Kessler’s door. But she gets no answer. So she scribbles a note on a slip of stationery from her purse,
I must see you
, and slips it under the door.

But as she starts down the steps, she hears the lock turn behind her, and the door to the flat floats open. She feels her breath constrict. When she enters the flat, she finds Egon heaped in a chair.

“I understand your man has returned,” he says thickly, “from the front.”

She has closed the door behind her, but the wall of Egon’s gaze stops her from approaching him. “Yes” is all she answers.

“You must be very proud.”

“Egon.”

“Have you asked him,” he inquires, “have you asked him how many Jews he’s murdered?”

“Please don’t.”

“
Don’t
?”

“Please don’t do this.”

“I’m just curious. Did he have a guess? A hundred Jews? Two hundred? Or were there just too many to keep count?”

“He is not a killer, Egon. Only a soldier.”

“Well, what do you think a soldier
is
, Frau Schröder, but a killer in a uniform?”

“He was wounded. In battle. He
did not
murder Jews.”

“And how in hell do
you
know? Have you asked him? Have you said,
Excuse me, husband dear, but do you recall slaughtering any kikes while in Russia?
”

She stares back at him. He drains the last drops of whatever’s in the glass he’s holding. “The truth is, Frau Schröder, that you don’t know
what
your husband has done. Whom he has killed or not killed. And the still
greater
truth is, you don’t
want
to know.”

“This is not my fault,” she breathes. “You are blaming me, but this is not my fault.”

“It’s not my fault that I have a circumcised putz,” he tells her. “But the Greater German Reich still blames me for it. Life is not about what is fair.” He raises the glass again but, finding it empty, tosses it onto the carpet and watches it roll away. “Don’t believe me?” he says, and gestures toward the bronze Hitler relief over the mantel. “Ask
him
,” he instructs
. “
The Führer and I, we understand this. You must live with a stranglehold on the world.”

“I have to go to work,” she says. “I’ll be back. Tonight.”

Egon only shrugs. “I’ll be here. A rat in its trap.”

•   •   •

T
HERE’S A CROWD
at her tram stop, waiting not so very patiently for passengers to climb off so they can clamber aboard. Those with manners wait, those without manners try to push through. When a stout Berliner in a gray coat and black trilby hat bumps into her, she doesn’t immediately recognize him. “My apologies, gnädige Frau,” the man mumbles, then picks up an envelope from the sidewalk. “I think you dropped this,” he says, forcing the envelope into her hand before shoving past her.

She doesn’t open it until she arrives at the office. Until she closes the door of the second-floor WC and tugs the bolt into place. Inside the envelope is a single sheet of paper.
Bahnhof Zoo
,
it reads.
Under the clock. 6:00 this evening.
After she reads it, she crumbles it into a ball and flushes it down the commode.

At six o’clock, as the city is streaked by a bright violet twilight, she approaches the blind man. “A coin in memory of our sacred dead?” he rasps. Sigrid drops groschen into his cup. “Bless you,” he says, then his voice drops a notch. “She’s in the station’s café.”

•   •   •

I
NSIDE
, the loudspeakers are booming out “The March of the Paratroops.”
The trumpets sound tinny, the voices of the military chorus brassy and warped bouncing off the tiled ceiling. She sees the stout Berliner in his gray coat and black trilby smoking a cigar while getting his shoes shined by a young bootblack. He does not afford her a look, but a short, muscular taxi driver, with tough eyes, silvering hair, and a deep scar cut across his cheek, lowers his copy of the
12-Uhr-Blatt
long enough to give her a nod. She follows his nod, and sees Ericha sitting at a table by the sandwich kiosk. She is surprised when the girl jumps to her feet and hugs her. Surprised at how good it feels to hug her back. “How I’ve missed you,” she hears herself say.

Ericha breaks away. Hurried Berliners march past them to catch their trains. “We must sit down. There isn’t much time.”

•   •   •

“I
WAS FRIGHTENED
,” Sigrid says with only a small splinter of rebuke in her voice. “You simply vanished.”

“I had to.”

“Without a word to me.”

“There was no time. I was forced to move quickly. The Gestapo came to your door?”

“My door. Everyone’s door.”

“Then it was better for you that you didn’t know what was happening.”

“So tell me now.”

A lift of her eyebrows. “I was warned that they were coming for me. Nothing more than that.”

“Someone turned you in? One of your contacts?”

“Or I made a mistake. Or both,” she says. “Only the Gestapo knows.”

A whistle, just a few notes, from the taxi driver. Sigrid glances discreetly. “Is that a signal? What does it mean?”

“It’s nothing, don’t worry.”

“Who
are
they?” Sigrid asks. “These men of yours. The fellow in the black trilby, the taxi driver, and the blind man who can see?”

“Comrades, that’s all. From no common background. The taxi driver was once a thief. He spent ten months in Oranienburg before the war, and the Brownshirts gave him his scar as a souvenir the day he was to be released. The blind man? He used to be an actor for the State Theater, until he refused to divorce his Jewish wife.”

“Is she in hiding, too?”

“Hiding in the grave,” Ericha answers plainly. “When she received her evacuation letter from the jüdische Gemeinde, she hanged herself. So you can imagine he has his reasons for what he does.”

“And what about the man in the trilby getting his shoes shined? Does he have reasons?”

“Do you?” Ericha asks.

“All right. I get the message. No more questions.”

But Ericha answers her questions anyway. “He’s just an ordinary man, really. I know him as Franz. He runs a heavy goods delivery business in the Barn Quarter. But he believes in right and wrong, that’s all. Those are his reasons.”

“He’s very protective of you.”

“He’s appointed himself as my guardian,” she says with a bit of irony. But then the irony leaves her voice. “I really couldn’t do without him.” She recedes slightly and takes a sip of coffee, holding the cup with both hands. Then leans forward by a centimeter. “There’s something I must ask you. Something I must be sure of. You’ve never told Auntie your name, have you?”

“My
name
? No.”

“You’re sure? Never in passing?”

“No,” Sigrid repeats, her eyebrows arching. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Because,” Ericha answers, “Auntie’s been arrested.”

“Arrested.”
Sigrid feels her breath shorten.

“They came for her at her brother’s flat.”

“But her brother’s in the Party. Couldn’t he
do
something? Try to protect her?”

“We suspect it was her brother who denounced her. They took her first to the Gray Misery in the Alex for interrogation, and then transferred her to the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.”

“Ahh, my
God
.” Sigrid breathes out, her palm to her forehead. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. A well-known address in Berlin. Once it was an industrial arts-and-crafts school, but since ’33 it’s been the headquarters of the Gestapo.

“And what about”—an instinctive German glance interrupts her—“what about her
guests
?”

“They’re safe, if that’s what you’re asking. We were lucky. Auntie was doing the bookkeeping for her husband’s old partner, who apparently was running a swift trade in black-market cigarettes.
That’s
why the Sipo picked her up. They ransacked the place, of course, but they were looking for ledger books, not for Jews hiding in the attic.”