City of Women

EIGHT

ACROSS THE HALL SIGRID TWISTS the bell and thinks, When was the last time I rang this bell? When she returned a glove Frau Remki had dropped on the stairs? She pictures Remki’s colorless expression and waxy gaze. Like a corpse long before her suicide. But now the door opens and it is the Frau Obersturmführer smiling, showing all her teeth, aggressively alive.

“Ah, Frau Schröder. How wonderful,” she announces. No Heil this time. Only, How wonderful. She wears another sensible, well-cut maternity dress, but somehow looks bigger in it than she had on Friday. Could that be? Her skin is well scrubbed and without a single blemish. Her eyes as bright as lightning strikes. Sigrid stands in the threshold, stiff like a shop mannequin, holding the plate of gooey rye-flour sugar rolls. “Good afternoon, Frau Obersturmführer. I’m late, I should apologize.”

“Ah, Quatsch,” says the girl, forgiving her immediately, still beaming. “A few minutes only. And we are all so busy these days. Please, come in. There’s someone here I’d very much like you to meet.”

Someone to meet? Sigrid does a poor impression of the Frau Obersturmführer’s glowing smile and steps inside. Any trace of the flat’s former occupant has been eradicated. Instead of Frau Remki’s stolid Kaiserreich mahogany, the furnishings are blond oak with padded silk upholstery. No more tidy Viennese lithographs. Sigrid surveys photographs of men in uniforms, clustered about the bronze relief of the Führer mounted above the hearth.

“How kind,” the Frau Obersturmführer remarks. “You baked us a treat?”

Sigrid blinks. Then glances down at the plate in her hand. “Oh. No, not me. Some sugar rolls my mother-in-law made for her Sunday kaffeeklatsch.”

“Well. We’ll hope she doesn’t miss them, then.”

Sigrid smiles again blankly. She is looking with polite hesitation at the woman filling one of the silk upholstered armchairs. Hair flat and straw blond with ringlets of ash gray. Body thin as a steel rod. Face, angular, and her eyes are banked with a lifetime of slow-burning anger. Ruined, Sigrid thinks. A ruined woman.

“Frau Schröder, may I present Fräulein Kessler,” the Frau Obersturmführer announces formally. “My sister.”

The woman offers her hand like a bony insect queen. “Half sister,” she corrects, with a baring of teeth that passes for her smile. “So very pleased.”

Sigrid shakes the outstretched hand, and then to fill in the strained silence that follows, the Frau Obersturmführer busies herself by relieving Sigrid of her plateful of rolls and waddling off to the kitchen. “Please. Sit,” she chirps. “I’ll go see to the coffee.” Compared to the steely wreck of her half sister, she appears childlike.

“Oh. Can I offer you help?” Sigrid inquires a bit too hopefully, but the Frau Obersturmführer won’t hear of it.

“No, no. Sit. Talk,” she commands affably. “I shan’t be a moment.”

Sigrid sits.

“So,” the woman announces briskly, “I understand you are a typist.”

A brief look informed by the not-so-hidden disdain in Fräulein Kessler’s voice. “I’m a stenographer for the Reichspatentamt,” Sigrid answers.

A shrug. “Isn’t that what I said?”

Sigrid absorbs this. “And you? Do you work?”

“I’m a nurse.”

“Really.”

“In the women’s ward of Sankt-Gertrauden Hospital.”

“You must find that rewarding.”

“Must I?’

“To heal the sick.”

“It’s mostly dumping bedpans.” Fräulein Kessler lights a cigarette from a tarnished sterling case. “Do you mind?” she asks, exhaling blue-white smoke. More of a challenge than a question.

“No.”

“Would you like one?”

“No, thank you. I don’t smoke.”

“A good German woman.”

“So you are staying with Frau Junger?”

“A bomb fell on my flat. An air mine, they told me. That’s why I am here,” Fräulein Kessler explains wanly. “Do you want to know why you’re here?”

Sigrid pauses. “I beg your pardon?”

The woman languidly taps her cigarette over a small red glass ashtray. “You’re here as bait,” she informs Sigrid in a mock whisper.

Sigrid’s eyes level.

“To entice me out from under my rock,” the woman explains.

“And what does that mean, Fräulein Kessler?”

“It means, Frau Schröder, that since my dear half sister has been saddled with me, she needs to find me a keeper.”

“A keeper,” Sigrid repeats.

“Yes. Like in the zoo. I’m a dangerous animal, you see.”

Sigrid stares. “But… I’m sorry, I’m a bit confused. You’re living here?”

“If you can define it as living, yes.”

“But… Excuse me again. I thought I had met Frau Junger’s brother…”

“Ah, so you met Wolfram, did you?” Fräulein Kessler nods with relish. “Oh, yes, and I’m sure he met you. You’re just his type.”

Sigrid swallows some tiny pulse of heat, and blinks.

“Wolfram travels a great deal since he returned from the front, but he stays here from time to time,” the woman says. “And he’s my brother. Not hers,” she corrects with an unpleasantly bent smile. “I’m not sure if he’s found a woman in the area yet,” she says in a tone of assessment. “But he will. Even with half a leg, he’s still ten times the man of the average specimen of his gender.”

Sigrid finds herself wanting to ask, What happened to him? But with a rattling of porcelain cups on saucers, the Frau Obersturmführer reappears from the kitchen, still smiling as she bears a large tray over the swell of her belly. Sigrid jumps up to assist her. Strudel and lemon tarts surround Mother Schröder’s rye flour rolls on a rose-pattern china platter, causing the rolls to look quite proletarian. And when the Frau Obersturmführer pours the coffee, Sigrid nearly swoons at the aroma. “I’ve been saving some real coffee,” the Frau Obersturmführer admits coyly, “for a special occasion. No cream, I’m afraid. But I can offer you a little skim milk?”

“No, thank you. Just black.”

“Very good. My father always said you can trust a person who drinks coffee black.”

“I’ll have milk,” Fräulein Kessler injects.

But the Frau Obersturmführer’s smile does not crack. “Of course you will, Carin,” she says, and then turns the smile to Sigrid, passing her a delicate porcelain cup and saucer. “My sister, Frau Schröder,” she explains, “has made a hobby of contrariness.”

“Not a hobby, Brigitte,” the woman inserts bitterly. “A career.”

Sigrid takes the saucer in her hands. “And is there much of a living in that?” she asks.

Silence. Fräulein Kessler glares at her thickly for a moment, tipping her cigarette with a thumb, then, “Ha!” she snorts. “For once, Brigitte, you are correct,” she announces. “I don’t hate this woman.”

The windows have been broken out of the tobacco shop. “Vandals,” says Auntie with a shrug. “Children like to break things.” Propaganda from the Litfass column has migrated to the boarded-up window spaces. A sloppy line of posters featuring the same stalwart army front-liner, over and over, advancing a swastika banner: We will be victorious!

The woman and her girls are still absent from the attic, but a youth with a narrow, hawkish face has appeared. Over one eyebrow he has a gash that has partially scabbed. Auntie makes an attempt to tend to the gash with some sulfur powder to help it mend, but he shoves her hand away. He is not interested in mending, he tells her. Issuing Sigrid a stiff stare, as if he might spit, he says, “You look like an authentic Aryan,” his youthful voice cracked by anger. “It must amuse you to dirty your hands with Jews.”

“He’s angry,” Ericha explains later, as they walk down the steps to the door at street level.

“That much I noticed.”

“First he lost his father to an SS aktion. Then his sisters to a catcher.”

Sigrid shakes the word around in her head. “And what does that mean? A catcher?”

The shattered crystal of Ericha’s eyes sharpens. “Jews working for the Gestapo,” she explains simply. “Jews who hunt Jews.”

A blink. Sigrid stops on a step to stare.

“It happens, Frau Schröder. Don’t look so shocked. There are some who’ve made a profession of it.”

Absorbing this, Sigrid draws a breath and then continues. “You seem to be rather well informed about this boy,” she observes, “for a person who asks no questions.”

“I didn’t ask. He spilled it all out after showing up on Auntie’s step, bleeding. He’s been traveling alone for weeks, on nothing but a stolen factory worker’s pass, dodging the SS, dodging the Feldpolizei patrolling for deserters. No money and no food beyond what he could grab. I don’t think he meant to insult you. He’s grieving,” she says, “frightened.”

Sigrid gives a small shrug. “What he looks to me is dangerous.”

Ericha does not disagree. She throws opens the dead bolt on the door. “I’ll try to get rid of him soon,” she says.

Back at the Uhlandstrasse, they part company at Frau Granzinger’s door, and Sigrid listens to the racket of the Granzinger brood echo through the stairwell as she climbs the steps to the next floor. At the door to 11G, she is searching her bag for her house key when the door to 11H swings opens across the landing.

“Oh. It’s you.”

Sigrid turns and is met by the sight of the half sister, the bony Fräulein Kessler, standing staunchly in the threshold, wearing a well-starched housecoat, her hair parted severely.

“It is me, Fräulein Kessler,” she confirms.

“I thought it was Brigitte,” the woman says. “She went to the shops hours ago.”

Sigrid stares politely, ready to turn away, until the woman takes a short step forward.

“You know, I almost find you interesting, Frau Schröder,” the woman declares.

“Yes. You don’t hate me.”

“Ha!” Fräulein Kessler ejects a laugh. She shakes her head, still wearing her version of a smile. “You don’t understand how uncommon an experience that is for a woman like me.” Then her smile loosens slightly. “Or perhaps you do. You’re an outsider, Frau Schröder,” the woman announces, as if stating an essential fact.

“You think I am?”

“Oh, I know it. You wear it like a sign. You and your little feline friend. The duty-year girl slaving for the Fatherland’s gift to motherhood.”

Sigrid’s gaze thickens. “She’s just a lonely child,” she assures the woman. “Not really a friend.”

“No? Is that right? Well, I’m a bit surprised. Because I thought she was a friend. Perhaps a very close friend.”

A silent beat.

“Come now, Frau Schröder. Surely you’re aware of stairwell gossip, aren’t you? You and your little black alley kitten are quite an item. All these old biddies just eat it up like hash.”

Sigrid takes a breath. “Fräulein Kessler.”

“Carin,” Fräulein Kessler informs her in a deadpan tone.

Another pause. “Fräulein Kessler. I’m aware that you have some difficulties with your current situation. And I’m aware that you apparently enjoy attempting to shock. But if you’re going to ask me if I am, or if I am not a lesbian, I would greatly appreciate a direct question.”

The woman’s facial expression remains unchanged, but something is breaking up behind it. The cynical shallows of her eyes have deepened. “Very well, then. Are you a lesbian, Frau Schröder?”

“No, Fräulein Kessler. I am not.”

The woman gazes, then draws a breath through her nostrils. “I see,” she says with scratch of regret.

“I’m sorry if that disappoints you,” Sigrid tells her.

“Disappoints me?” Fräulein Kessler shrugs. “No. Honestly, it’s relief. I thought for a moment that I might be required to actually work up some unfortunate feelings, Frau Schröder,” she says, placing her hand on the door to her flat to close it. “And I’m quite sure that I don’t recall how to do so.”

THAT NIGHT, Sigrid finds that the boy with the hawkish face is gone. She does not hide her relief.

“I won’t ask where you sent him,” she tells Ericha.

But Ericha only inhales, and then exhales. “I didn’t send him anywhere. He simply vanished.”

“What?”

“Auntie found the latch open on the bookcase yesterday morning, and money missing from her purse, along with a jackknife and a dozen food coupons she had stashed in a kitchen drawer.”

Sigrid stares. “Well. Maybe it’s for the best.”

“For the best,” Ericha replies, “until the Gestapo get their hands on him.”

“Then we can only hope he does the right thing. Isn’t that what you called it?” she asks thickly. “He struck me as the type who wouldn’t be taken alive.”

“So, Frau Schröder. You’ve become an expert in such matters?”

Sigrid lets an eyebrow rise. “What choice have I had?”

Renate glows with delight. “My, my. Imagine that. No wonder the little SS madonna was so interested in you. She was playing at matchmaking. She was hoping you’d ignite the lady’s pilot light.”

They are strolling down the banks of the canal. “It was really very sad,” Sigrid tells her, and accepts a drag from a cigarette. The creamy foreign tobacco is too high quality for her to take. It makes her queasy. She hands the cigarette back, shaking her head. “She must be very isolated. And very frightened, I think.”

“Considering what the law says on the subject, she had better be,” Renate observes. “I heard about a woman on my block, the wife of a Party man, no less, who was sent to Plotzensee with a ten-year sentence for—you know.”

Sigrid expels a breath. “Have you ever?”

“Have I ever?”

A shrug to the left. “Been with a woman?”

“Oh, God, no.” Renate laughs brightly. “I require a throttle in order to put my engine into gear.” And then a look with raised eyebrows. “Why? Have you?”

“What, me? Of course not. When would I ever find the time?”

A blink. And then again Renate laughs aloud. “You are so very entertaining,” she declares.

“I’m so very pleased you find me amusing,” Sigrid says, frowning. “So now would it be permissible to change the subject?”

“Oh, very well, then,” Renate agrees. “Enough about you, let’s talk about me. I’m afraid that my liaison with Gerhardt is running thin.”

“Oh? The wife catch on?”

“Nothing so dramatic. What was once inventive and energetic has become stale and repetitive.”

“Ah. Repetitive. The poor foolish man. So what now?”

Renate releases a sigh that floats along with her for several steps. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I could use a rest.”

“Hmm. Renate Hochwilde without a man to bed,” Sigrid murmurs. “Hard to imagine.”

This is said lightly, thoughtlessly, but Renate looks at her closely.

“You know, Frau Schröder,” she says after a moment. “There are times that I suspect you don’t really like me very much.”

Sigrid opens her mouth to protest, but, “Never mind,” Renate tells her quickly. “I’m sure I’m being stupid. Let’s just walk.” But as they walk, a train passes above them on the elevated track, weighting the air with its iron thunder. Sigrid feels herself close off. Fortress Schröder. It’s her secrets, she realizes. The secrets of the Pension Unsagbar walk between them. The secrets of Auntie’s guests in a narrow, windowless room, huddling under blankets, peeing into a bucket. Every day separating Sigrid, not only from Renate, but from all who do not share that knowledge. Separating her by one more unspoken word, one more degree of silence.