City of Women (38 page)

“I’d like you to look inside my bag, Herr Kommissar,” she tells him with polite force. Her handbag is open, and inside, her hand is gripping the handle of her fish knife. She watches his expression freeze. “Please believe that I don’t wish to hurt you,” she assures him. “Just the opposite, in fact. I want you to remain very healthy. And least for another day.”

He says nothing, only stares at her with blank stupefaction.

“I see you wear a wedding ring,” she observes. “That’s very good. What is the date of your anniversary?”

His eyes narrow. “My
what
?”

“Your wedding anniversary,” Sigrid repeats.

Eyes still narrow, a glance down at the knife, but now perhaps he’s a bit curious. “April twenty-seventh,” he answers.

“Not very far away,” she notes as she brings out something enclosed in her fist from her coat pocket. “Show me your palm, Herr Kommissar,” she tells him.

He hesitates.

“Go on.”

His frown deepens, but covertly, he opens his palm. “And has your wife ever received a diamond from her husband?” Sigrid inquires. The small stone she releases from her fist gleams for an instant, before the Kommissar’s hand closes over it. Quickly it disappears into his pocket, and he turns a page of his newspaper.

“You have a leak in your bucket,” he tells her.

“A
leak
,” she repeats.

“A Judas, gnädige Frau,” says the kommissar. “In your little group. You’ve been betrayed.”

She stares blankly at him, but he only frowns at his paper.
“Who?”
she whispers darkly. “Did you have a
name
?”

“Yes,” the kommissar answers, and rattles the paper as he turns another page. “I have a name.”

“And?”

A sniff. “My wife’s
birthday
is May fifteenth.”

TWENTY

W
HAT ARE YOU DOING
?” her mother-in-law demands to know.

“Packing a suitcase.”

“I can
see
that. Where do you think you’re
going
?”

“On a holiday.”

“A
holiday
?” The old woman nearly swoons at the very idea. “And what about your
job
?”

“What about it?”

“You cannot miss work. It’s illegal.”

“I don’t have a job, Petronela. I was dismissed.”

“
Dismissed?
Oh, my God in Heaven,” her mother-in-law bleats mournfully, “I
knew
it would come to this. Your defeatism and quick mouth finally caught up with you.”

“That’s right.” Sigrid stuffs a pair of shoes into the sides of the case and closes the lid. The snaps don’t work properly, so she finds one of Kaspar’s belts to strap it securely. In the other room, the wireless plays a tune by Charlie and His Orchestra. “You Can’t Stop Me from Dreaming.”

“And what about
me
?”

“You?”

“Off you go, leaving me behind to live on a widow’s pension?”

“I’m sure that the Party won’t let a devoted dues-paying member starve.”

“
You see!
You see, that is
exactly
the sort of remark that lost you your position, I’m quite sure of it.”

“Just think, Petronela, of the freedom you’ll have. You can play your radio whenever you like.”

“You can’t
do
this.”

“Can’t I?”

“You can’t just
leave
.”

“You’ll miss me?” she inquires, throwing on her overcoat.

“I
won’t
be left alone here. I’m warning you.”

“What are you going to do? Ring up the police? Denounce me for packing a suitcase?”

“There’s plenty more I could talk about, I assure you.”

“Maybe that’s true.” She picks up the case by the handle and jiggles it to test the binding job. “But if the police arrest me, then I’ll still be gone, and you’ll still be alone.”

In the next room, Charlie and His Orchestra are suddenly interrupted by a sharp, syncopated beeping.

“I’m going,” Sigrid declares.

“You can’t. There’s an air raid.”

“Churchill sent me a telegram. He said I’d be safe.”

“You can’t go outside, you’re insane. You won’t be
allowed
.”

But Sigrid is not listening. The voice of the Portierfrau Mundt is sharply audible in the stairwell
. “Into the cellar. Everyone into the cellar.”
When she spots Sigrid, her voice gains an edge as the sirens yowl. “Frau Schröder. What do you think you’re
doing
?”

“Getting out, Frau Mundt.”

“That is not permitted. All residents—” she begins, but Sigrid cuts her off.

“Oh, please. Won’t you just shut your hole, you dried-up old bitch?”

“How
dare
you speak so to a member of the Party!”

“Yes. You think you’re the Führer’s favorite, do you? You think he gives the slightest shit whether you live or die? Whether
any
of us do?
He doesn’t
.”

“That’s
treasonous
!”
Mundt actually sounds shocked
. “
Insulting the
Führer
.”

“Get out of my way.”

“Oh! My
God
,” they hear a woman gasp painfully, and turn to see Brigitte, with a belly as big as a drum, waddling down the steps, hugging her air raid blanket. Mother Schröder grips her arm. “It’s coming soon. She could drop at any moment,” the old woman announces. A bolt of guilt strikes Sigrid squarely in the chest. Her promise to Carin had flown out the window.

“Don’t just stand there gawking,” Mother Schröder chides. “
Help
me with her!”

Sigrid drops her suitcase.

The young woman’s face is chalky and coated with sweat as they help her down the stairs. “I’m sorry,” Sigrid whispers. “Your sister asked me to keep an eye on you while she was away. I’m afraid I haven’t done a very good job.”

But Brigitte appears beyond caring about apologies. She bites her lip to suppress a cry as they guide her down the next step. “He’s kicking up quite a ruckus tonight,” she says, rubbing her belly. “Isn’t he? So impatient. Just like his father.”

•   •   •

C
RYING FORBIDDEN
, the sign still reads, but the Tommies are close tonight. Too close for speculation, too close for jokes. There’s only room for fear between the bomb blasts.

In the cellar, the kaffeeklatsch has taken charge of Brigitte, assembling benches into a makeshift bed and covering her in blankets. Sigrid looks at her wristwatch in the swinging lamplight.
“Christ!”
an old uncle from the first floor is calling plaintively at the tremors from the bombs blasts
. “Jesus
Christ!”

Then Mother Schröder seizes her roughly by the arm.
“Her water’s broken.
She’s going into labor!”
she shouts into Sigrid’s face.

•   •   •

T
HE FRAUEN IN THE BUILDING
have abandoned their mending, and separated the girl completely from the men. The members of the kaffeeklatsch prop her up. Frau This and Frau That. In the blinking light, the girl’s face gleams with sweat, even as her breath frosts. Frau Trotzmüller whispers nonsensical encouragements as she mops at the sweat with a handkerchief. Brigitte’s legs are splayed wide open, her dress shoved up past her waist. Sigrid is one of the women holding up a curtain of blankets to guard the Frau Obersturmführer’s modesty. The men peer blankly at the action. Outsiders looking in. But when she turns her head, she can see the crown of the baby’s head emerging from the birth canal.
“Push!”
Mother Schröder commands the girl as she prepares to receive the infant in the folds of her apron. “Now is the time
,
girl! Push!
Push!
”

“It’s coming out!” Frau Trotzmüller shouts with a gleeful panic. “The head is out, little mother!”

“Almost there!” Mother Schröder shouts over the girl’s agonized screams. “Keep pushing! That’s it!
Keep pushing
!”

“It’s coming out! It’s coming out!”

And it is. A tiny pinkish thing covered in maternal goo. Sigrid stares.

“It’s out!”
Frau Trotzmüller crows with ecstatic relief. “Thank God, it’s
out
!”

Lifting it by the legs, Sigrid’s mother-in-law administers the slap that draws air into the baby’s body. Its first exhale emerges in a sharp, high-pitched whine that is so full of life it stings Sigrid’s eyes with tears. And for a single moment in that dingy cellar, there is crying, but there is also cheering.

“Daughter-in-law, get me a shears, I need to cut the cord,” Mother Schröder instructs with some spark of satisfaction.

“My sewing basket is against the bench there,” Marta Trotzmüller declares with excitement. “Use
mine
. You’ll see it!”

She bolts over to sewing basket and returns with the shears. The sound of a snip is heard over the mighty squalling coming from the tiny mouth. “It’s a
girl
,” Mother Schröder announces to all as she swaddles the child in her apron. But something is amiss. The Frau Obersturmführer’s face is still an agonized twist. “No.
No
, you are
wrong
!”

“Child?”

“No, you are
wrong
. It must be a
boy
.
A boy.
It
must
be!”

“Blood!” Frau Trotzmüller suddenly squawks. “Blood!”

“Good God, she’s hemorrhaging. Sigrid, take the baby,” her mother-in-law commands, and before she can refuse, Sigrid has the child in her hands, wrapped in a kitchen apron. This tiny little thing that’s nothing more than a loud noise, but that fills her arms with the weight of promise. The weight of existence.

•   •   •

W
HEN THE RESCUE WORKERS
and the fire police are hauling the bodies from the cellar the next morning, they will find the child’s mother intact. Undamaged by the collapsing beams that crushed the Portierfrau Mundt into something quite unrecognizable. They will find her unbroken by the small mountain of masonry that buried the remains of others. Frau This and Frau That. They will remove the Frau Obersturmführer’s lifeless body from the wreckage of the cellar as if it’s a holy relic. “Her eyes were gazing toward Providence,” one of the local papers will write. “A bloodless Madonna.” It will be the SS who take charge of her corpse, and they will bury it with standards unfurled, and torches crackling. This little Mischling Sleeping Beauty casketed like a Martyr of the Movement. Her husband, the Obersturmführer, just returned from the front minus an arm below the left elbow, will raise his remaining limb in stiff salute above the open coffin as a chorus of BdM Jungmädel sing, “High Night of Clear Stars.” Beside her bier, the tiny white coffin is closed. Closed, though all it contains is the bloodstained kitchen apron which swaddled her daughter at birth. It’s all the rescuers could find of the child.

Two things will be determined from the crater in the street. One, that the bomb was probably a standard British GP, a “general purpose,” set for impact demolition. It will also be determined that the blast was not the result of a direct hit. It was clearly this last fact that allowed for survivors, when the façade of the building was sheared away and collapsed into the cellar. Of the fifteen people jammed into that small, dank underground space, fully half of them managed to escape through the special brickwork passages that lead into the cellar next door. When interviewed days later by a police captain, Herr Mundt, the local Party warden, denied vehemently any possibility that he could have allowed the newborn of a serving SS officer to be stolen. That, regardless of what some of those loopy women in the cellar might have to say, they were simply balmy, and that there was no chance—absolutely no chance—that such a tiny little baby, no bigger than a thumbnail, could possibly have survived.

•   •   •

A
BOVE THEIR HEADS
is a thunder, like a thousand trains, like a thousand pianos dumped from a great height, like a mountain collapsing in on itself. A scream and flash of light, and then nothing but the roar of darkness. For minutes, maybe hours, maybe seconds, Sigrid is unsure if she is alive or dead. Her body is embraced by a thick black numbness. But slowly, slowly, she is aware that her heart is beating. Slowly, she is aware that she is breathing. And then she hears the impatient cry of the baby shielded in her arms. Shielded by her body. Light comes a few breaths later. The beams of electric torches. Shouting. Moaning. Somebody sobbing and somebody giving orders.

“Frau Schröder. You must come!”

It’s a voice she recognizes. A woman’s voice. Beams of light are bouncing off broken beams, shimmering through the dust. She is coughing on the heavy air.

“Frau Schröder
.
You must leave her.”
A voice coming closer. “She is
dead
, Frau Schröder, you must leave her.”

But no
, she wants to say.
No,
You’re wrong
. And maybe she does say that, as she holds the baby tightly.
She’s alive
.
Can’t you hear her? She’s crying? Can’t you hear?
Then a shaft of light catches a face in the rubble. Mother Schröder glowers back at her in blunt astonishment. Unblinking. Her expression frozen, like the face of a watch that has stopped, its last second suspended in time. A dark trickle of blood extends the corner of her final frown.

Another noise. Loud banging, and then a crack. “It’s open!” she suddenly hears Mundt’s husband holler in triumph. “We’re
through
!” the man whoops. And the beams of light shift. She can see Marta Trotzmüller’s face, blood smeared across her forehead. Eyes moony. “Come, now, you cannot argue,” the woman begs. “The men have breached the escape way. We must
go
. If this little doll is to survive, then you must get her
out
.”

•   •   •

T
HE BUILDING ACROSS
the street is burning, throwing off waves of heat. Silhouettes dash across the blinding, orange flicker. Sigrid is still cradling the baby, wrapped in one of the air raid blankets, as she staggers into the street. Clutching the little squalling being to her breast to protect it from the dust and smoke. Someone is calling her name, but it takes a moment for her to realize it. It takes a moment for her to realize that it is Carin, negotiating the chunks of rubble littering the asphalt street.

“I’m sorry,” Sigrid tells her. “I’m sorry. Your sister,” she says.

“Brigitte?” Carin gazes wildly at Sigrid’s face, the dance of the firelight reflecting in her eyes. Then she turns back a flap of the bundle and shifts her gaze to the tiny face screwed up with infant bawling. “My
God . . .
”

“She is unhurt, I think. But I cannot stay. You must take her, Carin,” Sigrid says, and transfers the bundle into Carin’s arms. “Take her to the hospital. Get her treatment, then get her
out
.”

“Out?”

“She will need a mother now, Carin.”

“A mother? Don’t be absurd. I mean, how
can I
?” Her face is stricken. All of its usual cynicism gone. “
How can I?
A woman like
me
, alone?”

“A woman like you is exactly whom she needs. But you are not alone. You have your brother. Go to Wolfram. Find a way, Carin,” Sigrid tells her. “Get her out of this nightmare.”