City of Women

TEN

THE ONLY DOLL Sigrid had ever received was as a gift on her eighth birthday. It was such a delicate thing with a china bisque head; hair like spun gold; rose-painted cheeks; and round, pale eyes that rolled open and shut. Too beautiful to touch, really. Sigrid thought it reminded her of her mother. She can recall her mother’s beaming face beside the doll’s as she presented it to Sigrid after breakfast. The same perfect expression. The star-blue brightness of the eyes.

A waste of good money, she heard her grandmother grumble. She’ll have it in pieces in a week. Sigrid, however, had learned to dodge the Grossmutter’s griping, and turned with a hesitant half smile to her father for her cue. Was it a trick? Should she touch it? Or was it one of her mother’s traps? Would it only be swept from her grasp in punishment for some offense in an hour’s time? Her father sat at the kitchen table in his immaculately pressed white linen shirt and scrupulously knotted necktie. In those days, he and she could still operate inside a small, unspoken, and expressionless conspiracy with each other. When he set down his coffee cup, she caught the edge of a nod.

When she took the doll into her hands, she thought that she had never before felt anything so unwieldy and yet so fragile. The doll’s body was large. The china head the size of a head of red cabbage. But the painted eggshell cheeks were so delicate; they looked like a sneeze might crack them. Sigrid spread a smile across her face, half genuine and half rehearsed. She glanced again to her father for approval of this response, but he had already returned to the frown he wore while reading his newspaper, and had abandoned her to the women’s attention. For the rest of the morning before lunch, she was permitted to “skip” her chores in order to “play” with her gift. But she needed coaching. Instead of cradling it, she tried to make it do things. Ride the wooden horse her grandfather had carved for her mother, climb from the floor to the top of the grandmother’s horsehair settee. When she picked up a hammer, to teach her doll how to drive a tack, her mother was compelled to intervene. This is no way to play with a doll, Sigrid, she was assured. You must cradle it, you see. You must cuddle it and give it kisses, thus so, her mother instructed, then demonstrated. But though her mother sounded buoyantly confident in voicing her directives, there was some backbone lacking from her demonstration, as if she could only mimic an action that she herself did not truly understand. Sigrid was attentive, and repeated her mother’s mimicry with some skill, but honestly, she was relieved when the doll went up in the corner cabinet after lunch, and she returned to her chores, cleaning the squeaking glass windowpanes with soapy water and newsprint.

A week later, to the day, Sigrid bumped into the cabinet while sweeping with the broom, and the doll took a fatal tumble, its head smashing into a starburst of chalky shards, fulfilling her grandmother’s prophecy.

IN THE ATTIC she watches Frau Weiss playing with her daughter Ruthi, who is holding her wooden toy. The small tiger, with much of its striping rubbed away. The tiger growls. The tiger prowls up the child’s arm, causing her to giggle. Sigrid watches as if peering into an aquarium. No. Rather as if she is in the aquarium, peering out. Watching such intimacy in play is shocking. Oddly embarrassing and certainly inexplicably painful. Yet addictive. She cannot help but stare, crouched in the corner of the room, clutching the blanket she is supposedly folding. So close and easy, a mother to her child. The most natural thing in the world. But not so for her.

“Frau Schröder?”

Sigrid’s eyes shoot up.

“Are you unwell?” It’s Frau Weiss asking. Her little girl holding the wooden tiger, sharing her inquiring gaze at Sigrid. Two pairs of identical caramel brown eyes.

“Unwell?”

Concern levels the woman’s voice. “You looked a little… ” she says, but does not finish the sentence.

Quickly Sigrid must absorb the guilty sickness coloring her face. “No. No, not at all. Just tired,” she explains, dutifully returning to her folding of the blanket.

“I think. Well, I hope,” says Frau Weiss, “that you know what a heroic act you are performing.”

Heroic? Sigrid smiles grayly. Eyes averted. “I’m folding a blanket.”

“I think you know what I mean. You and the others who risk—” She stops. Glances down at her Ruthi’s head and strokes the little girl’s curly hair. “Who risk so much,” she says in a whisper now. “On our behalf. When so many others have done nothing.”

And for this, Sigrid rewards Frau Weiss’s gratitude by saying, “She must miss her father.”

The woman visibly flinches. A tack inserted into her flesh. “Yes.” Frau Weiss nods, covering the girl’s ears as she pulls her to her breast, as if to protect the child from her words. “Yes, she misses him very much. For many months she was inconsolable. But now… well. Now she no longer cries.”

Sigrid lowers her eyes to the child’s small face. For the first time she can identify with her. They both have reached a point where they no longer cry. Where they are beyond tears. And then what sometimes strikes her as she watches the child’s eyes shine, watches her accept a drink of water from her mother, both of her small hands clutching the glass, what sometimes strikes her, strikes her again. Is this what it would have been like? If this child had been hers with Egon, is this what it would have been like? If he had planted the seeds of such motherhood in her womb? If their love had been a sturdy enough structure to support that kind of weight, would she have been able to expose a hidden maternity, and love a child as much as she loved him? A child. Their child.

She goes to a children’s bookshop nearby to look for something she could bring Frau Weiss to read to her daughters. “Something with a tiger in it,” she suggests to the hefty female shop assistant, and is pleased to find that there is a series following the sweetly illustrated adventures of a tiger in the Indian jungle named Bollo. She buys two, Bollo in the Jungle and Bollo Follows the River. But as the shopgirl is wrapping the purchase, Sigrid notices a book displayed on the desk. It is The Poisonous Mushroom, the title printed in the Sütterlinschrift, favored by grammar school primers. On the cover is a toadstool with an ugly caricatured face. The Judenstern is stamped on the toadstool’s trunk and its cap resembles the round fur hats she remembers on the heads of the immigrant Jews of the Grenadierstrasse. “It’s very popular,” the shop assistant remarks dimly, with, What can one do? embedded in her tone.

Frau Weiss’s girls are enthralled with the Bollo books, and Sigrid is shocked at the sight of the tears in Frau Weiss’s eyes. “I had forgotten the simple pleasure of reading a bedtime story to them,” she whispers. “It seems I’m always thanking you, Frau Schröder.”

“Please,” Sigrid reminds her blankly, “call me Sigrid.”

THE MOON IS OBSCURED by scudding clouds as they walk down the Uhlandstrasse toward their block, and the street is cold and quiet. Sigrid’s torch exudes its blue glow. Her head is a tangle, but she has taken Ericha’s arm in hers again, in the way she recalls her mother taking her arm when she was an adolescent, and again, Ericha has allowed her to do so without comment. It feels good to be attached to the girl in a small way. To be anchored by this small affection in the blacked-out street. For a moment the war recedes into the nightly rustle of cold in the trees. For a moment she can find that small crevice of sanctuary.

Maybe that’s why the sudden pound of footsteps is so amplified. The man charging in between them out of the darkness, head down like a battering ram. He collides with Ericha with rough intention, unlinking her arms from Sigrid’s with force. Sigrid whirls, words in her throat, ready to shout at such an overbearing example of Berlinische manners, when Ericha seizes her arm. “Don’t. Don’t say anything.”

“But that oaf nearly knocked you off your feet.”

“It makes no difference,” Ericha tells her. “I know him.”

“Know him?”

“Let’s keep walking,” she says.

Sigrid opens her mouth, but then doesn’t speak. She silences herself until they turn the corner. “So tell me,” she says. “He’s completely out of sight.”

“Do you recall the day in the park when you saw me with a man?”

“Yes,” Sigrid replies. “He kissed you.”

“To throw off suspicion, he said. To make it look like we’re having a lovers’ rendezvous.”

“That was him?”

“I know him as Johann. He used to supply me with documents.”

“You mean,” Sigrid begins to say, before executing the German glance, even in the dark. “You mean with forgeries?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Forgeries or stolen. They looked very real to me. He was good at pulling them out of his hat.”

“But then?” Sigrid says.

Ericha frowns. “Then what?”

“You tell me.”

An expulsion of breath. “But then he started trying to touch me. On the arm. On the shoulder. Moving his hand about. Finally, one evening on the train, he leaned over and whispered into my ear, I have to fuck you.”

Even after Egon taught her how to use the word. Even after it freely filled her mouth. She is sometimes shocked by its sudden introduction. I have to fuck you. “And what did you do?”

“I let him.” She glances up and then shrugs through the Sigrid’s silence. “You must understand, Frau Schröder, how valuable good documents are.”

“Valuable enough for a woman to prostitute herself for them?” Who is that speaking? Her mother? No. The Grossmutter. That is her grandmother’s voice.

“Yes. Valuable enough,” Ericha responds without emotion. “People have died for less. So I didn’t think spreading my legs for him was such a high price to pay. Only now. Well. You saw. There’s trouble there.”

“Yes. Trouble. Next time does he run you down with a lorry?”

“He was just making a point.”

“A point?”

“That he knows who I am. And what I do.”

“And that unless—how did you put it so delicately? Unless you keep spreading your legs for him, he’ll denounce you to the police?”

“No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Am I to choose between one of those answers?”

“He’s not exactly an innocent in all this. I know where he lives. He took me to his flat in the Heerstrasse. A little man’s dump. So I doubt he’ll be ringing up the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse as a lark. Unless it’s a suicidal lark.”

“Unless,” Sigrid repeats.

“So now I’m a whore.” Ericha shrugs. “You can add it to your list.”

“I have no list.” Sigrid frowns.

“Never mind. Let’s not talk about it, please. Let’s not talk about anything.”

They walk for a bit like this, two ends of the same silence. Again Sigrid loops Ericha’s arm around hers. And Ericha permits it.

The crowd at the cinema is very thin. It’s a bomber’s night. The moon has cleared the night of clouds. Ericha is scheduled to meet a man about rationing coupons. He’s a supervisor at a government printing office and for a price can run off extras. She does not say what that price is or how it is to be paid, and Sigrid does not ask. She has posted herself near the door to the balcony, while Ericha sits down in front by the railing. They have agreed on a signal. Sigrid is holding her handkerchief, and if she thinks there is trouble entering, she will pretend to cough. The man beside Ericha is thin and furtive. Sigrid can see him continually glancing over his shoulder. She follows his glance to the entrance, but no one enters. Film chatters in the projector above. On the screen, a spectacle of costumes in an imperial concert hall: women in hooped shirts, hussars in braid, Gustaf Gründgens in a powdered wig seated at a harpsichord. Sigrid attempts to focus on the screen but cannot. Her mind is turning backward. Turning in on itself.

What are you going to do?

I don’t know.

That’s a lie. I think that’s a lie.

The day he left her was hot and sticky. The air filling the flat in Little Wedding was fetid, and she was sweating beneath her dress. He was grimy, his hand rough and unwashed. They undressed each other without words, because they knew that good-bye was the only word left to be spoken. He dug into her body like a cannibal. And when it ended, finally, and they lay on the mattress like two halves of a sliced apple, siphoning breath into their body from the humid air, she closed her eyes and waited for him to say the words.

But she should have known. She should have known that he would not be one to slash the cord between them. That he would put the knife in her hand to make the cut.

She smelled his cigarette smoke. “Anna has been sent a letter from the jüdische Gemeinde,” he said. He seldom referred to his wife by name, and Sigrid had learned that when he did so, it was for the sake of impact. A trick to insert the invisible wife between them.

“A letter?” she repeated, flatly as a question, though she knew what it meant. After the war in the East had begun, so had the deportations. This was an open secret of which no one cared to speak, but it was difficult to miss. The SS had taken to marching Jewish deportees through the streets on the way to the train stations. Men, woman, and children, stamped with the yellow six-pointed star. Old silver beards and babies in the arms of their mothers.

“She’s been ordered,” he said, “to report to the SS transit camp in the Levetzowstrasse in two days’ time. With both of our children.”

Our children. Suddenly he is claiming his share of them.

Sigrid rolls onto her side and stares blindly at the wall. “What are you going to do?” she asks.

Smoke rises toward the ceiling. “I don’t know.”

“That’s a lie,” she says mildly. “I think that’s a lie.”

She listens to his pause. Then hears him say, “I know a man. For enough money, I can secure a safe place.”

“You mean a hiding place,” she says.

Silence.

“And you would go with them?”

“What other alternative is left?” he asked thickly and spewed smoke.

Sigrid said nothing. There were other alternatives, of course, that she could think of. At least one. But she did not dare speak it aloud. She dared not even form the thought fully in her head. The two of them together as one. Unencumbered by his wife, by his children. She waited, instead, for him to speak it. She allowed herself to balance on the edge of the razor’s blade, waiting to see if he would answer his own question. And when he did not, she let herself tumble from the edge to the safety of irreparable loss. “No other alternative,” she finally whispered. “None.”

Only now did he touch her. Only now, after she had exonerated him from making the unspoken choice, did he lean his body toward hers and lay his hand on her naked skin. Oddly, she felt his touch only as a weight. She had suddenly gone numb.

“It’s not what I want to do,” he told her.

She permitted her eyes to flick across the drab pattern of the wallpaper. “I think,” she breathed, “that is a lie as well.”

A sneeze brings her back. The drab man from the printing office sneezes. Honks into his handkerchief. Sigrid blinks and works to peel away the cling of memory. Suddenly Ericha stands and marches away. Something is wrong. Sigrid readies herself to follow, but as Ericha passes her, the girl rasps out a single word—Stay—and exits so quickly, the old usher doesn’t even make it to his feet before she is gone. Sigrid feels her belly clench as she glances at the printing office supervisor, who has also risen to his feet, and is now standing haplessly, gazing at Ericha’s invisible wake. She watches him clutch the briefcase in his hands as he makes his way through the rank of empty seats. When he passes Sigrid on his way to the balcony doorway, she dares a glance at his face but there’s nothing to his face but an arrangement of features. A nose, a mouth. Nothing in his eyes. Nothing at all.

Sigrid waits until he is gone, then quickly picks up her bag. Outside, she must cross the street to catch up with Ericha. “What happened?”

Ericha shakes her head. “Something was off. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something… off,” she repeats. “He was trouble.”

“You mean an informant?”

“Maybe,” Ericha answers. “I don’t know. Just trouble. He was too fidgety.”

“Well, perhaps it was simply nerves. He was, after all, breaking the law. Believe it or not, some of us mere mortals still get anxious over that.”

“I have to trust my feelings,” Ericha replies.

“So no rationing coupons, then, because a man was fidgety. Who do we go to now? Can you steal enough of Frau Granzinger’s food to feed four mouths?” Why does she feel the need to lash out at the girl?

“I’ll find somebody. Somebody else.” She is struggling to light a cigarette from her packet, but the match does not cooperate.

“Here. Let me help you.” Sigrid frowns, but the girls pulls away.

“I don’t need your help, thank you. I have learned how to strike a match.” And finally she manages. At the steps to their door, Ericha posts herself by the curb.

“What are you doing?” Sigrid inquires.

“I want to smoke for a moment, if that’s permissible.”

Sigrid exhales and goes up the steps alone. Inside the foyer, she stops to unlock the postbox. Nothing but a thin envelope, which falls out of the box and onto the crumbling tile. When she bends to pick it up, someone enters behind her. Ericha, she assumes, until she feels a hand on her body, and turns to see a face.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” the man inquires. “Have you been thinking about me?”

But it’s not the ghost of Egon Weiss. It’s the Frau Obersturmführer’s brother, Wolfram, out of his uniform and in a dark wool chesterfield and roll-brim hat. His body close and full of warmth. Leaning into her on his cane. She catches a sharp scent of schnapps on his breath. “Both the ladies of the house are out till ten at least. No one in the flat. And if you’re squeamish about using another woman’s bed, we can use the sofa. Or the floor.” She gazes back at the hunger in his eyes.

The front door opens again, and this time it is Ericha. For an instant, the girl freezes at the sight of the two of them pressed against the postboxes. Then, “Pardon me,” she offers coldly, before brushing past, head down, shoulders squared as she clomps up the steps.

“You know, if she’s jealous, you can bring her along,” Wolfram proposes. “I find a threesome to be an efficient use of wartime resources.” He has taken her hand in his and guides it firmly inside his coat to the hardness in his trousers.

Sigrid stares. Then removes her hand. He does not attempt to stop her, nor does he follow her, as she begins to climb the stairs, the echo of Ericha’s footsteps above her. All she hears him say is, “An empty flat till ten.”

She thinks that Ericha might be waiting for her halfway up until the sound of the door thumping closed to Frau Granzinger’s flat cancels the thought. Suddenly she feels very angry. Angry at this girl, at the war, at the carpet on the steps, at the wallpaper. At simply everything. She thinks of pounding on Frau Granzinger’s door, but before the thought forms fully she has passed it. On the landing outside of her mother-in-law’s flat she can hear some Viennese schmaltz playing on the wireless. She’s mad at that, too. Mad at the air she is breathing. She starts to claim her key from her bag when she realizes she still has the single piece of mail that fell from the postbox clenched in her hand. A dingy salmon-colored envelope bearing a Feldpost number. She glares at it, then rips it open and refocuses her glare on Kaspar’s handwriting. His penmanship was once very neat. Very beautiful, in fact. Ordered and perfectly fluid. But now the writing on the cheap piece of military stationery is tight as a screw, one turn away from threading.

He writes to his mother, she thinks. Not to her. Not to his wife. There are only instructions for her, to be passed along the chain of command. Tell Sigrid to send more Pervatin.

She finds that she has crumpled the letter in her fist.

From below she listens to Wolfram’s three-point thump ascending the stairs. Growing closer.

HE IS EATING HER ALIVE, out of her clothes. Her blouse half off, her brassiere shoved up: naked from the waist down, save for her Kaufhaus nylons. As he gains his rhythm, his trousers down only far enough for him to unleash himself, her skin is scoured by the thick Persian rug. Egon used to take her on the floor like this. She didn’t like it then. She felt as if he were trying to drag her down, to demonstrate his dominance, to hammer her like a nail into the hard wood. It would often bruise her, and she hated that. Though sometimes she would observe those bruises in the mirror, alone, and feel love for them. But with Wolfram, the floor is the level she craves. No beds. Nothing so lofty. She digs her fingers into his hair as she feels him working her toward climax, feels the scream building in her, to which she knows she cannot give voice. When it comes, she bites his shoulder to silence it, and listens to the sound of his pain.