City of Women (8 page)

“But Frau Schultz is
mean
,” Sigrid complained. “And she has that nasty dog who always nips my ankles.”

“You’ll learn to live with it. I’ve learned to live with plenty worse, believe me. She’s expecting you to start tomorrow.”

“I don’t think Fabian ever loved you,” Sigrid announced. “And neither did Poppa.” Her eyes were suddenly burning with tears. It was the cruelest thing she could think of to say. Her mother only gazed back at her with a kind of wretched disdain, but all she said was, “Don’t make any problems for old lady Schultz. Or it’ll be
my
bite you have to worry about.”

Good. For once you are staying out of trouble
, Sigrid hears herself observe. Returning home from the patent office, she has met Fräulein Kohl outside the building, shepherding Granzinger’s two middle girls up the steps. She finds that she is inexplicably happy to see the young woman, though she does not dare show it.

“Go on. Go on up,” the Fräulein directs the children without sympathy. “You know the way, I think, by now.”

“Mutti will be cross if you leave us alone again,” the piggy-faced child points out.

“And I’ll be cross if you don’t do as you’re told, and we don’t want
that
, do we? Now go. I want a word with Frau Schröder.”

The little piglet frowns. She looks like she might want to challenge her orders, but decides not to, and the two children bounce up the steps.

“A word?” Sigrid asks.

“Will you do something for me? Frau Schröder?”

“You mean something
else
?”

The girl removes a parcel from her pocket, tightly wrapped in brown butcher’s paper and tied with twine. “Would you hold this for me? Just for a few days.”

“Hold it?” Sigrid feels a small pinch in her belly. “What does that mean, ‘hold it’? Hold it for what? What is it?”

“Something that I would prefer not to have just anyone open. I have very little privacy, you see. Frau Granzinger is regularly searching through my things.”

“And how do you know I won’t open it as well? Because of your intuition again?”

“No. I think you might open it. But better you than her. Anyway, it won’t be long,” she says. “I’ll take it back in a few days.”

“No. No, this doesn’t feel correct.”

“It’s
not
correct, Frau Schröder. In fact, it’s very
in
correct. But never mind,” the girl tells her, and replaces the parcel into her pocket. “Never mind. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She turns her back to Sigrid and heads up the steps.

“Wait. Child. You needn’t simply walk away,” Sigrid points out.

But the girl only shrugs as she opens the doors to the foyer. “No? Why not? Either you do something or you don’t. That’s what I’ve learned,” she says, and disappears into the building.

Climbing the steps alone toward 11G, Sigrid fills her head with a memory. The first time Egon asked her to deliver an envelope for him, they had just made love. Afterward, she lay collapsed on her back, her head on the mattress. Where had the pillow gone? He reached over to retrieve his cigarettes from the end table, and then lit up, leaning beside her on one elbow.

“Don’t tell me your husband has ever done
that
for you,” he said, exhaling smoke in a stream. “That takes some true craftsmanship.” She didn’t answer, and he didn’t seem to expect her to. “So, Frau Schröder. There’s something you can do for
me
,” he told her.

She let her head roll over so that she was looking into his face. “In payment for your fine craftsmanship?” she asked.

“Tomorrow at noon, there will be a man waiting on the main platform of Schlesischer Bahnhof. I’d like you to exchange packages with him.”

“Packages,” Sigrid repeated.

“Yes. I’ll give you the package for him. You bring back his package for me.”

A stare.

“Very simple, actually,” Egon told her. “It won’t take you thirty minutes. You can do it on your midday break.”

She took the cigarette from his fingers. “Am I permitted to ask questions?”

“It’s a small business transaction. That’s all.”

“But illegal,” she said, and inhaled smoke.

“Will you do it?”

Exhaled. The smoke plumed upward. “Of course I’ll do it. I think you know that I’ll do anything you ask of me.”

“Good,” he said, and reclaimed his cigarette.

•   •   •

T
HE PACKAGE ITSELF
was a sack of Karneval brand rock sugar candy. When she looked at Egon for an explanation, he simply said, “Don’t eat any. You could break a tooth.” When she opened the drawstring and shook a sample of the contents into her palm, a shard of glimmer appeared among bits of the amber rock sugar. She had never owned a diamond, but assumed that this is what one looked like.

When she gave Egon the box of Weike Garde cigars, which she had received in return for the sack of rock sugar candy, he dropped the box on the end table and sat on the bed, pulling off his shoes.

“No trouble?”

“No,” she answered, draping her coat over the flimsy cane-back chair. “The gentleman was just where you’d said he would be.”

One shoe hit the floor. “Good. What did he look like?” The other shoe hit the floor.

“Skinny. Head shaved. A black Homburg and a gray mustache that was waxed.”

Egon nodded to himself. “Good,” he said again, yanking out the tail of his shirt, then peeling it, still buttoned, over his head.

“So. What’s in the cigar box? Cigars?”

“You didn’t look?” he asked. Then shrugged. “Only money. A few marks to get by on.” And then he asked, “Did you enjoy it?”

“You mean my secret mission?” she asked, unbuttoning her dress.

“If we were mobsters in Chicago, you’d be called my ‘bagman.’”

“‘Bagman’?” Sigrid repeats. Incomprehensible. “So we’re mobsters now?

“Tell me the truth. It didn’t give you a thrill, Frau Schröder, to be disobeying the rules?”

In fact, it had. Her heart had pumped excitedly as she had made the exchange. It had happened so fast, she had barely realized that it was over when the skinny Berliner disappeared into the crowd on the platform. But all she tells Egon is, “I’m already disobeying the rules. With you, you great monster.”

Egon grinned, and stood long enough to unbuckle his belt and drop his trousers. “So you’ll do it again?” he asked.

But Sigrid didn’t answer him. They both knew the answer to his question. So instead she turned her back to him and showed him the clasp of her brassiere. “Undo me,” she whispered lightly.

•   •   •

O
PENING THE DOOR
to her mother-in-law’s flat, Sigrid smells camphor balls. “Frau Mundt has posted a notice from the Party,” Mother Schröder announces as Sigrid removes her coat and scarf.

“A notice?” she asks, still distracted by her own memory.

“A collection for the war effort,” the old lady says, “of winter clothing.”

Sigrid glances at the striped dress box from Tempelhof’s that her mother-in-law is filling. “And do we have any winter clothing left worthy of collecting?”

“As usual, your attempts at humor are ill placed.”

There were always collections being made. SA men rattling tins for Winter Relief in the rail stations. Hitler Youth collecting pots and pans door to door for scrap metal drives. Sigrid digs through the pile on the table. Last year it was the same. Scarves, old gloves, some rabbit-fur collars. But this year it’s also the gray-blue houndstooth coat the old lady had worn before the war, and a long black wool cape that Sigrid had bought for herself before she’d quit her job at the telephone company to get married. None of Kaspar’s clothes. Kaspar’s bedroom wardrobe has become something of a shrine to her mother-in-law since he was called up. “And I am contributing my sable hat?” Sigrid asks. It is the only expensive gift that Kaspar ever bought for her. Russian sable. It was their fifth wedding anniversary, after he had been promoted to the position of authorized signatory at the bank. She had picked it out from a shop window in the Unter den Linden.

Mother Schröder grabs the hat like it’s an old cleaning rag. “You mean
this
?” The old woman shrugs, tossing the hat aside. “Fine. You want to keep it, go ahead. Let our soldiers turn to ice. Forget about the fact that your
husband
is at the front right now, doing his patriotic duty. You must have your important hat.”

Sigrid takes a breath. “No,” she replies, returning the hat to the heap. “It makes no difference,” she says, and realizes that this is true. Let it return to Russia.

That evening, per Frau Mundt’s notice-board instructions, Sigrid places the striped dress box and the pair of coats on the landing for official collection by the Portierfrau’s slovenly husband. She notes that across the hall, at the door of the Frau Obersturmführer’s flat, are a pile of coats and a wicker basket full of furs and wools. Also, two pairs of skis complete with poles, which are added to the inventory by a lean, dark-headed man supported heavily by a cane, who steps out of the flat just as Sigrid is taking her mental inventory. Her surprise must register clearly on her face, because he lifts his eyebrows and asks, “Did I startle you?”

He looks to be in his early thirties, not so much older than she, wearing a dark wool cardigan, with a patch at one of the elbows, over a white linen shirt buttoned at the collar. His face is evenly proportioned, with patrician features. What used to be called an “officer’s face.” But his gaze is like a gun sight, as if he is looking at her down the bore of a rifle. When she does not respond, he stacks the skis neatly against the wall. “Well. Shan’t be getting much use out of these anytime soon. Skiing, as I recall it, requires
two
legs,” he tells her, and turns his weight on his cane to reenter the flat.

“Wait. I’m sorry,” Sigrid hears herself suddenly say.

Again he takes her into his sights. “You’re sorry? For what?” he says mildly. “That you were impolite, or that I am a one-legged cripple?”

“Both,” she answers. She can feel a sudden thickening in her blood. A certain dryness at the back of her mouth. It’s not that she feels stripped by his gaze, more like annihilated. “Are you in pain?” Sigrid asks, feeling her face heat.

“Yes,” he answers. “Are you?”

“Me?”

“You look it,” he tells her. “In pain, that is.”

“Yes,” she hears herself answer suddenly.

“Then you should do something about it. I could help you.”

“Help me?”

“Relieve the pain.”

She swallows. Absorbs the force of his stare. “No. Thank you.”

The man fixes her with the gun sight a moment longer, then shrugs. “Well, you should do
something
, gnädige Frau,” he tells her, opening the door to the flat. “I have my pain, and what can be done about it? Stitch a leg back on after it’s been blown off? Not very practical. But you? What’s your excuse?”

•   •   •

T
HAT NIGHT
, Sigrid lies awake, staring up at the darkness of the ceiling. She’s still awake with a wire of tension in her body. Her palms are clammy. It’s been so long that she’s even
thought
about doing this that she’s hesitant. Will she remember how? Shoving off her covers, she gingerly tugs up her nightdress and lets her fingers go seeking. They come up dry at first, but then she feels the dampness. Her body slowing, arching. Tightening. She must bite her wrist to silence her cry. Her cry for the man who has turned her past into a treasury, and her future into an ash pit of hope.

—

It’s Saturday. Her day for the dairy shop and greengrocer. So she swallows some belladonna with a cup of sour chicory coffee, eats a slice of tasteless rye bread, and hurries out the door, only to be intercepted at the top of the stairs. Frau Mundt, the porter’s wife, is decked out in her best Nazi fashion. The blue-black Frauenschaft uniform, complete with the felt fedora and swastika pin on the lapel of her overcoat. An ensemble she is known to wear any time she visits the Party’s district office in the Jägerstrasse.

“’Morning,” Sigrid offers quickly.

“
Heil Hitler
,” Mundt reminds her.

“Yes of course. Heil Hitler
.
I’m sorry, but I’m on my way to Brodheker’s, before they run out of milk.”

But Frau Mundt makes no move to clear the stairwell. “Perhaps you did not see the notice,” she announces, in a tone a bit too sharp for a Saturday morning.

“Notice,” Sigrid repeats. “I’m sorry,
notice
? I don’t know what you mean.”

“
Donations
, Frau Schröder,” Mundt replies with a thin frown. “Of warm clothing for our men in the east, struggling against the Bolshevik enemy. Your husband among them, I believe. They were to be placed on the landing for collection.”

“Yes. Oh, yes, of course. I put out our donation last night. Right here at the door. A box and two coats.”

“Is that so?”
Mundt replies dubiously with pursed lips. “Well, then. I suppose we have a
mystery
on our hands, Frau Schröder. Because my husband, the Herr Hausleiter, picked up no such donation. The only clothing left on the landing was that at the Frau Obersturmführer Junger’s door.”

Sigrid gives the door a glance. “Well, then there must have been some mistake. Perhaps it was all mixed together in error.”

“No. No error was made. I spoke personally to the Frau Obersturmführer on this subject first thing. All of her items were accounted for.”

Sigrid heaves a breath. “Then you’re correct, Frau Mundt. It is a mystery. Since you’re so
positive
that your husband couldn’t possibly have mixed one set of coats with another, then I recommend you speak to my mother-in-law. Perhaps she can explain it.” Mundt shoots her eyes in the direction of Sigrid’s door. Maybe she’s not quite so anxious to tangle with the
elder
Frau Schröder. “
Go ahead
. She’s in the kitchen boiling diapers for Frau Granzinger. You know, in the spirit of the people’s community. But I’m sure she’ll be quite happy to discuss the matter with you. Now, you’ll excuse me, please, I don’t wish to miss my bus,” she says as she squeezes past and dashes down the steps.

“Very well, Frau Schröder,” the woman calls after her with an arch tone. “I shouldn’t want to
delay
you. But be aware. This isn’t just about a few old coats. The Party pays very close attention to the proper expression of the National Socialist spirit. Do you hear me, Frau Schröder?
Very
close attention
.”