City of Women

TWELVE

LONG BEFORE THE WAR, the National Socialist bureaucracy had codified its hatred of Jews into legal strictures. The Nuremburg Laws had stripped Jews of German citizenship; barred them from the professions; maligned, ridiculed, and penalized them in statutory language; and segregated them from daily German life.

Distasteful, perhaps, but law were laws. How could a person change them?

And while there were stories of Jews subjected to beatings in the streets, or being torn from their beds and tortured in Brownshirt bunkers, such individual brutality seemed anecdotal. A story of this Jew, a story of that Jew. Terrible, perhaps, but easy to close one’s eyes and ears to during the daily routine. What, after all, could be done?

But then, on a November day in 1938, a Foreign Ministry clerk in the German legation in Paris was shot in the stomach. His assailant was a Jewish youth named Grynszpan, who offered no resistance to the French police at his arrest, and declared that he had done what he had done to protest the German persecution of Polish Jews. The legation clerk died two days later, on November 9, which happened to be the fifteenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s failed Munich putsch, and the holiest day in the National Socialist calendar.

Sigrid had become pregnant. When she was three months along, her mother-in-law complained that she hadn’t gained enough weight. That she was starving the baby. Food, however, sickened Sigrid on most days. It was often all she could do to keep a thin gruel down in the mornings. Mother Schröder would sit opposite her at the kitchen table and glare while Sigrid spooned the watery porridge into her mouth, just to make sure that not a single drop was left behind.

“Can you put out your cigarette, please?” Sigrid asked her. “It’s making me ill.”

“Everything makes you ill,” her mother-in-law grumbled in response, but then screwed out the cigarette in the small tin ashtray. “Eat,” she commanded. “You’ll not be shortchanging my grandson on his breakfast.”

Sigrid exhaled. “And how do you know it’s a boy?”

A shrug. “What else?”

It was a chilly autumn. Sigrid had started working part-time at the patent office earlier that year, and now was under pressure from Kaspar’s mother to quit.

“It’s absurd that you insist on taking a job.”

“I want to work.”

“You think my son is not providing for you?”

“I want to do something. I can’t devote myself to housework.”

“And why not? It’s what I’ve done since I was twelve years old. It’s what every honorable woman does.”

“Mother,” Kaspar interceded glumly from behind the newspaper. “Please. Let it go.”

“Let what go?”

“Sigrid is not like you. She needs intellectual stimulation.”

“Ah, and what does that make me? A block of wood?” the old woman demanded indignantly, but her son only shifted his expression into a lighter gear.

“No. It makes you a mother.”

“Well, what do you think she is going to be in another six months? Shall I explain the process to you, my son?”

“Just let it go.”

“Is she going to be intellectually stimulated right up until the time she drops the baby on the floor of some dusty office?”

“Excuse me,” Sigrid muttered suddenly. She knew she wouldn’t make it to the toilet, so instead she threw up in the kitchen sink.

Her mother-in-law regarded the scene distantly. “So now I’m supposed to wash dishes in that sink?”

At the patent office she was in pain. A slow discomfort as she sat, preceding sudden cramps that caused her to lose her fingering on the typewriter keys. She had complained to the doctor of these spasms the week before, with Mother Schröder sitting with her in the examination room, but the Herr Doktor had simply dismissed her complaint, as he enjoyed dismissing all of her concerns. Nervous little mothers, he would chuckle in a grumpy manner. I assure you, Frau Schröder, I have been practicing medicine for thirty-seven years, and I have heard it all by now. This is nothing to worry about. Simply the process of childbearing, to which as I’m sure your gracious mother-in-law here can attest, is not all hearts and romance.

Mother Schröder had raised her eyebrow at the remark, but said nothing.

On the train ride back, Sigrid had said, “I don’t much care for him.”

“Who?”

“The Herr Doktor. I don’t much like his manner.”

“You don’t have to like his manner. He’s the authority. Like or dislike has nothing to do with it.”

“He didn’t give me anything.”

“Such as what, daughter-in-law?”

“Such as something for the pain.”

“As he said,” Mother Schröder said, frowning drably, “it’s not all hearts and romance. Life is filled with pain. You can’t simply eliminate it. And as far as the good doctor is concerned, he delivered my son, your husband and the father of your child, without a moment’s worry. Be grateful for his experience.”

Sigrid went silent. She felt suddenly ashamed of herself. Asking for the pain to be eliminated. How weak. Her grandmother would have been appalled. On her deathbed, her mother had begged, pleaded, demanded, and sobbed for something to relieve the agony in her bowels, while Sigrid, in the next room, had clamped her hands over her ears to blot out the sound.

Making her way home from work, she saw a woman on the train. A typical Berlinische hausfrau, with a level, unflappable gaze, and a handbag big enough to fit a manhole cover. Suddenly, peering closely at Sigrid, she boomed, “Say, you don’t look so good.”

Several nearby faces rose with a trace of squinting alarm. Sigrid opened her mouth and managed to say, “I just entered my third month.”

“Well, of course you have.” The Frau nodded with sudden understanding. “And since when is that business anything but misery? You’re in your third month? Believe me, it only gets harder from here on out. Five times I’ve suffered through it. And the worst of them was my first. My Hansel. The little monster made me sick every morning for months, and then took his own sweet time popping out. Eighteen hours I was in labor. It felt like I was giving birth to a two-ton lorry,” the Frau announced with a cackle. “That was twelve years ago, and he still hasn’t gotten any easier. A little devil from birth.”

At the Ku’damm, Sigrid left the train, but as she climbed the steps of the U-Bahn, the cramps returned and closed in like a vise. She had to stop and grip the rail to keep from collapsing. At the top of the stairs, she stopped to breathe, just to breathe until the worst of it passed. There was shouting and an acrid tang in the air that tasted like cinders in her mouth. She raised her head and wiped the clamminess from her brow. Several people were pointing. She spotted the thick smear of black smoke ballooning toward the clouds from over the rooftops.

A woman stopped her bicycle in the street and stared with widened eyes. “My God, what is it?” she squawked. “What’s burning?”

A plump Berliner volunteered the answer grimly. “The Fasanenstrasse Synagogue.”

By the time she boarded the T-Line bus, there were a half dozen smoke columns pluming skyward. A fire engine passed with its klaxon horn blaring. Through the bus’s windows she saw an old woman tending to a man, who was sitting on a curbstone, holding a flimsy handkerchief to his bloodied mouth. A handful of boys were gleefully pitching chunks of pavement through the windows of a shop front. On the door was slopped a six-pointed star, yellow paint dripped down over the words Jews Perish!

“The Yids are really in for it now!” a fellow at the front of the bus crowed loudly. The silence that followed seemed to agree with him.

Sigrid clamped her eyes shut at another spasm.

Later, she would see it all in the cinema newsreels. The burning synagogues collapsing in a whorl of flame. The black-clad SS men shearing the beard from a shrunken old rabbi, while spectators either sheltered their children from the sight, or held their toddlers aloft for a better look. Jewish storekeepers glumly sweeping up the carpets of glass, glinting like shattered crystal.

But what she would remember most were the ruins of a grand piano that she passed in the street. It had been shoved from a second-floor balcony and smashed to smithereens. The harp split, pointing toward the sky, its strings popped. Keys scattered like broken teeth. The image stayed with her. An image of a crime, somehow more intimate, than the flat, black-and-white violence caught on film. The beauty of the piano, now ruined. She felt the pain of it in a contraction, and turned away.

As she opened the door to the apartment house and stepped into the foyer, the pain struck her like a thunderbolt. Her knees buckled, and she had to grip the door frame to stop from falling. Staring up at the multiple flights of steps before her, she remembered how Kaspar had swept her up in his arms on their wedding day. But Kaspar was still at the bank, no doubt, working late as had become his habit.

On Sigrid’s way up the stairs, the cramps seemed to be playing a game with her. Allowing her to shuffle upward, without interference, only to stab her on the next step. By the time she reached the landing of 11G, she was smearing the tears away from her face. Trying to control herself as she fumbled the key into the lock.

“Mother Schröder,” she heard herself croak hoarsely as she entered the flat. But then she blinked at the look of horror stamped on her mother-in-law’s face.

Marta Trotzmüller shoved back from the table and jumped to her feet, leaving her coffee cup behind. “Frau Schröder,” she cried out with a look of pale shock. “You’re bleeding!”

Only now did Sigrid look down. She watched with an odd curiosity as a dribble of red spotted the well-scrubbed floorboards between her legs.

AFTER THE DOCTOR HAD LEFT, after the pronouncements had been made, when Kaspar entered the bedroom in the evening he was gentle with her. But his face was clouded and distant, like a storm settled over a mountaintop.

She cried, and he sat beside her and held her hand.

She stopped crying, and he continued to hold her hand, but only until he had calculated the earliest moment he could release it. She could see the internal timing in his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Kaspar,” she whispered through the fog of the sedative the doctor had finally prescribed her. “I’m so sorry… .”

“It’s not your fault,” he answered. “I don’t blame you. Nobody blames you.” But it was clear from his gaze that this was a lie.

He stood to leave because she needed her rest, needed her sleep, but she caught him at the door. “Is it over?” she asked with sudden urgency.

He stopped but said nothing.

“The fires. What I saw in the street. It was so terrible.”

Kaspar gazed back at her. “You should rest,” he said to her. “Don’t bother yourself with what you cannot change.”

SIGRID FINDS HERSELF thinking about that moment as she sits at her desk in the patent office, staring blankly over her typewriter. How far away from Kaspar she had felt, even though he was so close. Then she hears a voice beside her, and she tries not to look startled. It’s Renate, an anxious expression forming her face.

“I heard you got a letter,” she says. A letter. Everybody knows what that means. It’s standard method used by the army to inform wives and mothers that their husbands and sons are casualties.

Sigrid does not ask her how she heard about the letter. This is a type of news that travels. Last November, when Thea Burgel lost her husband at Stalingrad, the entire building knew before lunch. But Sigrid looks up into Renate’s gorgeous face without sympathy for Kaspar or for herself.

“Yes,” says Sigrid, cranking paper into the hard rubber roller of her typewriter. “But it’s not threatening his life. His wound, I mean. A comrade of his appeared at the door last night. He said that Kaspar had been struck by shrapnel from a mortar, but that the wound wasn’t critical.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Renate replies with a relief that surprises Sigrid. She has never known Renate to care much for Kaspar. No overt dislike, just blankness between the mention of Kaspar’s name and her next word. But now, with a dark frolic of hair hanging over her brow, Renate looks genuinely relieved. Perhaps only relieved that she will not have to suffer through Sigrid’s grief.

“Yes,” Sigrid replies. “Thank God.”

Noise up front as Fräulein Kretchmar claps her hands together. “Ladies! Your attention, please, before the day begins. As some of you may know, Frau Schröder has just this morning received notification that her husband has been wounded in combat on the Eastern Front.”

Audible gasps. “Not critically,” Sigrid repeats dimly to the room.

Fräulein Kretchmar crimps her lower lip. “Very good to know. But though we all, I’m sure, deeply sympathize with Frau Schröder at this moment in time, we may not allow such feelings to interrupt or impede our work. As I have often said: our soldiers have their battlefields and we have ours.” Standard Kretchmar propaganda. When Inge Voss’s husband was shot down in a bomber over the English Channel, Kretchmar’s only suggestion was that donations be made to the War Victim Care Fund in his name.

That night Sigrid is stopped by Ericha on the stairwell. She appears to have been lying in wait for her. Her young face is closed, her eyes bottomless. She is starting to look squeezed.

“I heard,” the girl says.

“Wounded. That’s all,” Sigrid tells her. She is having difficulty meeting Ericha’s gaze.

Ericha stares. “If you need to stop. For a while.”

“Stop?” Sigrid looks back at her with a sudden precision. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what it feels like to be in your position.”

“You’ve never known what it feels like to be in my position, Ericha. Why should that mean something now?”

An almost imperceptible shrug. “Guilt,” the girl suggests.

Sigrid keeps her glare rigidly in place. But all she can manage to say is, “Well, it’s too late for that.”

On a Saturday morning she takes the elevated into the new S-Bahn station at Anhalter Bahnhof. Wolfram has a flat in a house across the Saarlandstrasse in the Askanischer Platz. A squat, nameless collection of walls, with oddly matched furniture, faded curtains, and a floor, well swept, but warped. Even with furnishing, there’s an uninhabited quality to the place. She looks around it, slowly tugging off her scarf. She can see the sprawling architecture of the Anhalter rail station through the window. Reclining atop its grand arches, two classical statues: Night and Day.

She turns back around to the flat. “What is this place?”

“A room,” he answers, “with a bed.” The springs creak painfully as he drops his weight onto the mattress. He has tossed his gabardine coat over a chair, and is dressed in a pullover, leather-chapped jodhpurs, and Rieker riding boots. “I ride once a week in the Tiergarten,” he says, answering the unasked question. “It’s part of my physical-therapy program.”

“I’ve never been on a horse,” Sigrid says mildly. She watches him yank the pullover over his head, followed by his collarless shirt. His upper body is rippled with muscles.

“They’re beautiful animals, horses,” he says, “though not very bright.”

“And isn’t that how you like them?” she asks.

He grins back ruefully, then lifts his eyebrows. “So do you want to see it?” he inquires with a slight note of mischief.

“I think I already have,” she tells him. Still dressed. Still with her coat buttoned.

“No, I don’t mean my putz, Frau Schröder,” he says, dropping back on the bed to unbutton the breeches. “I mean my stump.” Without waiting for an answer, he wrenches down his breeches and skivvies. His body, naked, is sinewy and long. An athlete’s body. But torn also. Clawed by scars. Hauling off one boot with gusto, he must wrestle the other free. On the right, a perfect foot, a perfect calf. But on the left, the leg ends abruptly below the knee. Strapped to the joint is a wooden, calf-length prosthesis, which resolves itself in a hinged wooden foot. “Lovely, isn’t it. Courtesy of the Army Medical Service. I have one with a black leather shoe attached, that I bought from a catalog, but wearing boots is more difficult,” he tells her, unbuckling the straps. The prosthesis is dropped onto the heap of his clothing. He slides his rump onto the center of the bed, mattress springs crunching as he positions himself for display.

Sigrid stares softly at the rounded pinkish stump of bone and skin, pockmarked by scarring and chapped by the leather strap. “How did it happen?” she asks.

“A Schu-mine,” he answers. “One of ours.” He smiles grimly, shaking his head at absurdity of it. “Ridiculous. Seventy days of combat, from Poland to the Baltic, and I step on one of our own goddamned mines.” This is said without rancor, but with sheer irony. His gun-sight gaze, for an instant, is inverted, staring inward.

“And it still causes you pain?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it hurts like all that’s holy. You don’t find it repulsive?”

“I find it sad,” Sigrid tells him.

“Ah. That’s worse,” he says, rolling sideways to shove back the blankets on the bed. “I’d rather be an object of repulsion than pity. Oh, well. You’re still in your coat,” he points out. “Come, come, Frau Schröder. You watched me undress. Now, let me watch you.”

Sigrid unbuttons her coat and drapes it over a wooden chair. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“Then what would you prefer? I must warn you, I have little patience for endearments.”

“My name is Sigrid,” she says, and undoes the front of her blouse. “You should call me that.”

He smells of sweated leather and horsehide. It’s a smell she likes. A smell of exertion and comfortable animal strength. She finds that she can easily lose herself in Wolfram’s body. The riot of her desire blots out the world. When he rolls her onto her back and enters her, mattress springs ringing, she feels only the terrible thrill of the abyss.

But when they are done, collapsed beside one another on the bed, she closes her eyes and sees Egon’s face in the ghost light of her memory.

“My husband’s been wounded,” she says.

Wolfram is silent for a moment, then reaches for a packet of army-issue cigarettes on the bed stand. “Where?” he asks, lighting up.

“A place called Rzhev.”

He nearly laughs. “No. I mean where on his body?”

It suddenly panics her that she doesn’t know the answer to that question. That she hadn’t asked that question when his comrade was at the door. “I have no idea,” she answers starkly.

Wolfram expels smoke. “Just curious if he’ll be shipped home. You know. A Heimatschuss.”

Sigrid stares. Takes in this new term as she steals the cigarette from Wolfram’s fingers for a puff. Heimatschuss. A homeward-bound shot. “What a bad person I have become. My husband is wounded, and I don’t even bother to find out the details. Meanwhile, I am lying in the bed of another man.”

“Not so bad,” Wolfram assures her, retrieving the cigarette. “Believe me, if your husband’s been in the East, he’s done worse. Much worse.”

She stares inwardly, as if she might be able to see all the way to Russia, if only she concentrated. But Kaspar and the East remain blocked by an impenetrable cloud, which her brain will not allow her to penetrate. She arches her neck as if the action will shut off her mind. “Do you have an extra?” she asks. “Cigarette?”

He picks up the packet from the side table, then tosses it back. “Empty. But there’s fresh ammo in the pocket of my coat,” he tells her.

Sigrid climbs from the bed, the room’s cold draft embracing her body. “Which pocket?”

“Left or right. One of them.”

She feels through the left pocket of his overcoat flopped over the chair back, and feels something hard. But it’s not a packet of cigarettes. She pulls it out and looks at a cardboard packet of playing cards with a winking devil on the front.

She sits down on the edge of the bed and dumps the contents on the plain, threadbare quilt. A deck of naked women in four suits stare up at the ceiling. Wolfram looks at her blankly. “Couldn’t find the cigarettes?”

“Is this what you think of women?” she asks.

“It’s a soldier’s diversion,” he says, smoking. “One finds them about in the barracks.”

“But I didn’t find them in a barracks, I found them in your pocket.”

“You’re shivering. Why don’t you come back under the covers?”

“No,” is all she says.

“I see. You are offended. You think maybe you’re just another card in my deck, is that it?”

“Of course I am. I don’t pretend to believe anything else.” She picks up the ten of hearts. “Is this how you’d like to see me? With nothing but a milkmaid’s cap and a yolk across my shoulders? Or perhaps,” she suggests, discarding the card for another, “with a whip and equestrian boots?”

“No. I’m not interested in costumes, Sigrid. If you wish to know about this deck,” he says, picking up a few of the cards, only to toss them back down, “my sergeant left it on display on his desk, the idiot, so I picked it up to prevent trouble. Quite honestly, I had forgotten all about it. And as for the rest, I am not so indiscriminate as you are apparently determined to believe. I have no more use for fantasy maidens in naughty positions than I do for bedmates who have no brains. It’s boring. Why should I waste my time?”

But Sigrid is staring. Not at him, but at one of the cards.

“Frau Schröder?” he prods. She places her hand on his bare chest as an answer. Her eyes still glued to the ace of spades she has lifted from the bedspread.

“What is it? Have you been transfixed?”

“No. No, it’s nothing,” Sigrid answers, and begins to gather the cards together. “I’m sorry. Let’s forget about it, I had no right to sound so accusatory. After all, we’re not here to philosophize. Are we?”

Only after she has left Wolfram asleep in the bed, only after she has left the train, and found a spot on the margin of the U-Bahn rush behind a news kiosk does she open her purse. Only then does she remove the card she took from the deck and stare down at it with… what? Anger? Shame? Somehow grief.

The thin, dark-headed female nude, adorning the queen of spades, is aggressively graphic in her posture: hands clamped on her hips, pelvis thrust forward. Posed in front of a crudely painted background of the Venetian canals, she is staring down the camera, naked save for the striped stockings gartered to her thighs, and the gondolier’s cap raked to one side. Her eyes, so sharp, so challenging, so uncompromising and orphaned from joy.

SIGRID DISPLAYS THE PLAYING CARD, watching Ericha’s eyes latch onto it. “Can you explain this?”

Without a millimeter’s movement. “Explain what?”

“Explain why you posed for this?”

“Can you explain why you’re carrying it in your purse?”

“You’re very clever, yes,” Sigrid says in a dry voice. “But I want an answer from you.” She pokes the card forward again.

Ericha makes no move to touch it, only examines it with a blank pause, and turns away to the street. An army lorry booms past, the soldiers inside hooting and whistling for her attention, but they gain none of it. “A lot of women are doing it. The photographers pay good money.”

Sigrid stares. “And that’s your explanation? The photographers pay good money?”

“Do I require another?”

“Don’t,” Sigrid begins to respond, but the words jam up in her head. She must shake them loose before she can speak. “Don’t you have any shame, child?”

“Shame?” Ericha’s eyes are suddenly hard and shadowed. “No, Frau Schröder. No, gnädige Frau, I have none. Not a drop. And I will not be held accountable by your obsolete notions of ‘propriety.’ Propriety died with the first man murdered by the criminals in power, Frau Schröder. The first time a wife received an urn full of her husband’s ashes from the Gestapo.”

“Yes. Yes, I know you are a fine one with your high talk. But the truth is, talk can just be an excuse. A justification to act as you wish, the rest of the world be damned. But there are rules. Still. Rules about respecting oneself, and one’s body. Rules about displaying oneself naked for payment!”

“You seem intent on casting me as a whore, Frau Schröder,” Ericha observes.

Sigrid blinks, taken aback. “No. No, not at all. I’m simply trying to make you understand,” she says, but the girl ambushes her point.

“After the Aufmarsch,” Ericha interrupts in a contained voice, “the army was followed into the East by special murder battalions of the SS and police, whose mission, whose single mission, was to slaughter Jews. As many Jews as they could find. In Latvia, in the Ukraine, in Russia. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand people massacred at a time. Women, babies, old men. It didn’t matter. They were mowed down and their bodies dumped in mass graves.”

“Child,” Sigrid tries to say, but the girl cuts her off.

“No. Don’t interrupt. If you’re going to do this work, you should be fully educated. In Poland, they’ve set up camps. Not work camps, mind you, or ‘resettlement’ camps, or whatever lie they’re telling about them, but extermination factories, hidden in the marshlands, with the express purpose of manufacturing corpses by the ton. That’s the destination of the trains leaving the goods yard of the Bahnhof Grunewald. And that’s the fate that everyone in Auntie’s pension is dodging. Everyone. So you’ll pardon me,” she says, “you must pardon me, Frau Schröder, if I’m not too impressed by your flights into the realm of proper behavior for a young lady.”

The weather grows sodden with rain. The dark building shapes and the gray species of wartime Berliners are bleakly outlined against the downpours. Traffic grinds and slows. Small armies of ragged men have been put to work clearing rubble from bombed buildings around the Belle Alliance Platz. Once Sigrid had seen a newsreel of downed British airmen clearing a sidewalk of slag in the bomb-bruised Potsdamer Platz as grinning Berliners looked on. But that’s just propaganda. She’s never seen a Brit prisoner of war on the streets. These men are Russian prisoners enduring their punishment in the rain as they are forced to repair a damaged tramline track. Faces like sheared stone. Steel-helmeted SS Totenkopf guards in rubberized cloaks stand by, with carbines slung. One of the Totenkopf men works hard at lighting a cigarette in the rain, stopping only long enough to call out his favorite obscenities to Sigrid as she passes.

The brick apartment block, with its front ripped away, still stands as it did two months before, the interiors of its flats still on display to the street. But somehow the rain makes it seem even not simply abandoned but lonely. Inconsolable.

She shakes the rain from her umbrella in the foyer. Since the notice came from the army, there’s been nothing. Opening the postbox, she stares at the empty slot, then closes it. She has been waiting for a letter from Kaspar, but no such letter comes. Where is he? How is he recovering? She has no idea. She has followed the official instructions for wives writing to wounded husbands. Written one letter after the other, each becoming shorter and more succinctly demanding than the last, till finally she was simply writing, Kaspar, tell me how you are. Tell me how badly you have been hurt. But no response comes, so the unanswered questions fill up a kind of dead space inside of her. She visits an army office off of the Landwehrkanal, which is charged with knowing such things, but they can tell her nothing new. Only that he was wounded between one date and another, and that he was put on a medical train after being transferred from War Hospital 4/531 Smolensk-Nord. But where this train has taken him, it’s simply impossible to say. Records are incomplete. The backlog is gargantuan. The army clerk behind the desk has eyes so deep that she can nearly see the rows of tombstones crowding them.

At the Pension Unsagbar, keeping the guests from freezing has become a problem. Blankets, yes, but there’s no way to heat the space properly when the temperatures drop at night. Auntie has taken to allowing the children to sleep with their mother on her parlor floor, which has stirred the pot. The man called Kozig is grumbling. What claim does she have to warmth that is more legitimate than mine? Because she has children? I have children too. Just not here. Should my children’s father freeze? Are her children more valuable than mine? Do they need a parent more? There have been arguments.

One night Sigrid is leaving as Frau Weiss is listening to her children’s prayers. Their little voices reciting the large words in Hebrew. “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.”

“Do you understand?” Frau Weiss asks her with lightness to her smile.

Sigrid shakes her head. “No.”

“It means, ‘Hear, O Israel. The Lord is our God, the Lord is One.’”

Herr Kozig sneers. “You think God still hears us?” he inquires leadenly, snapping each card as he lays out his game of solitaire. “You really think He’s still listening to the Jews?”

Frau Weiss looks at the new arrival, with the gray stubble of beard and the foolish postage-stamp mustache. “I’m sorry if you don’t think so, Herr Kozig,” Frau Weiss replies, though she doesn’t sound sorry. She sounds defiant. “I’m sorry if you think God could desert His people.”

“Desert us? How absurd.” He snaps a card from the deck. “He hasn’t deserted us. He’s served us up on a platter. While you’re teaching your children to say the Shema, He’s busy with the Nazis sharpening their knives for them, ready to carve up the next Jew for supper.”

“Herr Kozig, please!” The woman reproves him angrily, her hands over her daughter’s ears. “The children!”

“They shouldn’t know?” He shrugs. “Say your prayers, my little kinder,” he mocks. “God is listening. But what your mama won’t tell you is that he is also laughing.”

“I DON’T LIKE HIM.” Auntie frowns, with a sideways glance at Kozig’s never-ending game of solitaire.

“It is not for us to like or dislike him, Auntie,” Ericha reminds her. “We do not choose favorites.”

“And now I get a lecture from the pulpit,” the old woman says, smirking. “First you bring me a thief, who steals from my purse, and now this one, who’s thinking God knows what.”

“So shall I write up a morals questionnaire for all U-boats to complete, Auntie? Would that satisfy you?”

“Did you know he has a gun?”

“Does he?”

“A nickel-plated popgun that he sticks in his trousers to fill the void. I’ve seen him hide it.”

“Well, it makes no difference.” Ericha shakes her head. “He’ll be gone soon. We’ll move them all out soon. I have a possibility for passports. A man who works in the Interior Ministry.”

“And how long have you been saying that? You have this possibility or that possibility. Some bureaucrat who can stand on his head! Meanwhile, the Gestapo are trying to peer in through the keyhole.”

“I’m working on it, Auntie.”

“Have you heard the old man? His cough is getting worse. Sometimes I think he’s choking up the last breath of air in his body. He could be tubercular, for all we know.”

“I said I’m working on it,” Ericha repeats in a rebuffing tone as she buttons her coat. “What more would you have me tell you?”

“That you have a solution. That’s what I would have you tell me.”

Then, tugging on her beret, Ericha turns to Sigrid. “We should go.”

But on the way out Auntie gives Sigrid a look that isn’t hard to read. Do something!

ON THE STREETS, the number of flags have multiplied since Goebbels’s speech demanding Total War. Patriotic marches jam the wireless and daily broadcasts, assure everyone that the men of the eastern armies are emerging from their winter camps in Russia with iron hearts, and that they will soon unleash such an onslaught that Ivan will simply collapse to his knees and pray for mercy. Oh, yes. Pray for mercy. But the BBC broadcasts a slightly different version. According to London, the Russians have retaken vast swaths of territory, and Army Group Center is struggling to re-form its line by withdrawing its forces from the Moscow salients. This, the announcer reminds with cool satisfaction, comes on the heels of the humiliating defeat of all German forces at Stalingrad.

When she reports this to Wolfram, he holds her in his gun sights. “Stalingrad,” he says, “was more than just the end of the Sixth Army. It was the end of any hope we might have had of laying our hands on the oil fields in the Caucasus. So there will be no spring offensive,” he announces almost casually. “Not really. Maybe by the summer. June or July. At which point, I can only imagine, we’ll throw everything we’ve got into a pincer attack to cut off the salient around Kursk. But it won’t be enough. Von Manstein managed to stabilize the southern front and kept it from collapsing because he’s a great goddamned soldier, but to breach Ivan’s line will mean committing every last piece of functioning armor we have, and draining every last drop of petrol from our reserve. And then, even if we do, by some miracle, manage to punch through, we won’t have the power to do much more than sit there and wait for the Reds to punch back. Our line will cave in, but this time there’ll be no way to rebuild it. No panzers. No fuel. No men,” he says flatly. “After that, the eastern armies will begin traveling the glorious road to victory in reverse.”

Sigrid looks at him starkly. They have continued to keep the springs ringing in the bed they share in the Askanischer Platz, unfaltering in their pursuit of oblivion. Though she is still a little afraid of the man. There is something of the land mine about him. And now this blunt assessment has stunned her.

“Are you saying,” she finally asks, and then must start the question again. “Are you saying that the war in the East is lost?”

This prompts a short laugh from Wolfram. “Lost, but far from over. We still have an ocean or two of blood to be spilled before that. Would you believe me if I told you that there are elements of the general staff already planning for the defense of the Reich’s eastern borders?” He pokes a cigarette into his mouth and picks up his silver-plated lighter. “It’s true,” he says, attempting to snap the lighter to life. “What will happen when the Red Army reaches the River Oder?”

Her face is blank, but her eyes are deep. “And what will happen?”

A glance up from the malfunctioning lighter. “We’ll learn the true definition of Total War, gnädige Frau.” No fire. “Dammit,” he breathes mildly. “Out of fuel, too.” And then he asks, “Where are you going?”

“To the WC,” she answers. Drawing a blanket from the bed. Out in the hall, she clears the hall with a glance, wraps herself more tightly, and quickly pads to the toilet a few steps away. Inside she locks the door, and sits. She simply had to get away from Wolfram for a moment. The information he is dispensing is so highly potent that she feels drunk from it. Perhaps everyone had their suspicions about the Eastern Front, but no one has ever spoken them aloud like this, not even Ericha. Yet here is this young man, casually calculating the equation of military debacle. No tanks, no petrol, no men equals the Red Army at the Oder.

When she returns to the room from the WC, she finds Wolfram closing the flap of her bag, as if he has just withdrawn his hand from it. “Looking for a match,” he explains calmly, cigarette dangling from his lips.

“I don’t carry matches,” she says.

“So I discovered. But you do carry a sharp little sister in there,” he notes, stretching over to the nightstand drawer, still in search of a light.

“I might have to gut a fish,” Sigrid answers.

“You’re coming back to bed?” he inquires, finally discovering a matchbox in the drawer, and lighting the cigarette.

“No. I have to get dressed,” she answers.

“Really? I thought you were staying. We could have dinner.”

She shakes her head, gathering her clothes. “I have to go.”

“Another man?”

“No. A mother-in-law. I must report in.”

“I’m going out of town for several days next week,” he tells her.

Efficiently slipping into her chemise. “Another woman?”

“Would that make you jealous?”

“I couldn’t help but notice that the wardrobe here is filled with a rack of women’s clothing. I assume I am not the only one you bring here.”

“And if I were to say that you are?” His eyes are on her as she dresses.

“I would call you a liar. So where are you going, if it’s not another woman?”

“Just reporting in to my own mother-in-law of sorts,” he replies, then turns away. “I’m sure you’ll miss me dreadfully.”

“I will,” she hears herself say.

But Wolfram seems to be done with this conversation. He is propped up against the headboard, studying his cigarette. “Take care going home. Keep an eye peeled for dangerous fish.”

“Wolfram,” she suddenly says. “What is happening to the Jews?”

He gazes at her abruptly, his gun sight returning. “That is quite a loaded question,” he says.

“We are murdering them?”

“You mean, you and I?”

“I mean us. Germany.”

“So you’ve been listening to the BBC,” he suggests.

“Yes, but I’m not a fool. I don’t have to listen to the BBC to see what’s happening in the streets of my own city. So I’m asking you. Is the objective,” she begins, then must swallow before speaking the word, “extermination?”

Only a beat of silence separates them.

“If you’re not an fool, Frau Schröder,” he replies, and expels a whistle of gray smoke, “and I don’t believe you are, then why are you asking a question to which you already know the answer?”

THE NEXT MORNING, when she arrives at the police desk in the foyer of the patent office, she finds that her employee identification card is missing from her bag. The old guard at the desk does not make trouble for her. He simply scratches a note with a frown in a logbook. “You’ll have to go upstairs to the third floor to have it replaced,” he tells her. It’s the only full sentence she has ever heard the old man speak. But as she walks down the corridor, she thinks of Wolfram’s hand in her bag.

That evening, when she returns to her flat, Mother Schröder is talking to her from the kitchen, where she is washing a plate, and says, “So you’re missing your shadow.”

Sigrid wraps an uneaten portion of supper in wax paper. A slice of hard Schwarzbrot smeared with fish paste. That will be lunch tomorrow. “My shadow?”

“Your protégée. Fräulein Klink-a-doodle.”

The tone tells her that the old lady must have sneaked in a schnapps or two before eating. “Her name is Kohl, and she’s not my protégée in any sense of the word. It happens that we both enjoy the cinema. That’s all.”

“Well, you aren’t aware, then? She’s… what’s the expression? She’s jumped ship?” The china clinks as the old woman places the dish into the wooden drainer. Sigrid glares dumbly, prompting her mother-in-law to smile with satisfaction. “So. She Who Knows All didn’t know that, did she?”

“Know what? What in God’s name are you getting at?”

“No need to swear, daughter-in-law. I’m simply surprised that you’re in the dark. She didn’t come home to her bed last night.”

“What?” She must try to sound only mildly alarmed.

“Just what I said. Have you lost your hearing, too, or just your judgment?” The old woman wipes her chapped hands dry with a towel, glaring at Sigrid’s stupidity. “I told you that the creature was not to be trusted. But why would you ever listen to me?”

“What do you mean ‘not to be trusted’?”

“There were certain items missing.”

“Missing?”

“From Lotti Granzinger’s flat.”

“What items?”

“Certain items. None of your business what.”

Sigrid blinks. Shakes her head to try to free herself from this tangle of nonsense. “Has anyone gone searching for her?”

“Searching for her?” Mother Schröder snorts at the idea. “She has found somewhere else to sleep. Must I spell it out for you further? She left Lotti no other choice than to report her to the Labor Service.” The old woman hangs the hand towel on its hook with finality. “We’ll see if a daily dose of close-order drill doesn’t check the little strumpet’s urges.” Then her voice gains an edgy squawk. “And where are you going at this hour?” Mother Schröder demands.

But Sigrid does not answer. She is snatching her coat and vanishing from the flat.

Forty minutes later she is rapping on Auntie’s door. But when the door opens, the look filling the old woman’s face kills Sigrid’s words before she can utter a single syllable.

“Ah. Good evening, Frau Hoff,” says Auntie in a politely formal tone. “I know you said you’d be dropping by, but I didn’t realize you’d be coming tonight.”

Sigrid stares at her dumbly. Frau Hoff? And then she hears it. “Who is it, Helene?” a male voice inquires pointedly from within.

“It’s Frau Hoff from Herr Schmidt’s office. I wasn’t expecting her till later this week.”

“Well, she’s here now,” the voice grumbles. “Have her come in.”

Sigrid blinks. It takes her an instant to reassemble herself into Frau Hoff. “No, no. I’m so sorry. I must have gotten my dates mixed up. And you have company. I’ll come back another night.”

“Helene,” the voice calls firmly. “Have her come in,” it instructs.

Auntie gives her a shrug. “Please. Come in.”

Inside, the flat is unusually warm. Or perhaps it’s only Sigrid sweating. Planted on the worn-out settee is a worn-out old man. Bald. A face like a prune. An entrenched frown. He appears shrunken inside of the serge suit he wears, and he holds a cane in his hand as if he might use it suddenly to launch himself from the sofa cushion. Pinned to his lapel is a “scary badge” above an Iron Cross from the Kaiser’s days. He glares up at Sigrid through smudged spectacles with lenses as thick as ice cubes. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t rise, Frau Hoff.” Not a polite request, more like a direct order. “But I suffered an injury in defense of our Fatherland.”

Sigrid stares back for a moment as if the old prune has spoken to her in tongues.

“My brother, Frau Hoff,” Auntie interprets. “Herr Brückner. He was wounded during the last war,”

“Frog bayonet,” the geezer explains sternly. “Second Verdun.”

“Then, please, Herr Brückner, please remain seated. I’m really so sorry to have disrupted your evening.”

“Not to worry,” Auntie informs her. “I have what you need right at hand.” But whatever Frau Hoff needs that is right at hand, it seems to take Auntie an eternity to find it in a cardboard box of papers she has pulled out from under the curtain of the kitchen sink.

“So, Frau Hoff. I’ve heard your name mentioned before. You work for Schmidt, do you?” the old man suddenly demands.

Sigrid flinches in response. “Yes. For Herr Schmidt.”

“How long?”

Sigrid concentrates on breathing. “How long? A while. It often seems longer than it’s actually been.”

“I can believe that. I’ll be blunt, Frau Hoff, I never trusted your employer. I think he cheated my brother-in-law, Otto, for years, and now is making a career of cheating his widow. It’s a crime. And someday I’ll prove it.”

“Reinhold, please. Not again,” Auntie begs as she returns from the sink, a dog-eared file folder closed with elastic in her hands. “You must excuse my brother, Frau Hoff. He has made a mistrust of humanity his career.”

Herr Brückner snorts. “And my sister, Frau Hoff, has never learned to keep her mouth shut in front of strangers.”

“An old family tradition.” Auntie grins dimly. “So. Here you are,” she says, handing over the file folder. I hope this will satisfy Herr Schmidt’s needs.”

“Yes.” Sigrid steps toward her. “Thank you.” Removing her gloves, she places them on Auntie’s kitchenette table, managing to signal Auntie with her eyes as she pretends to inspect the file folder’s contents. “Yes, I’m sure this will be more than adequate. Good night. And good night, Herr Brückner. So very pleased to meet you.”

The old man shrugs. Her opinion, not his.

Halfway down the corridor, Auntie appears behind her, flapping the pair of gloves in the air. “Frau Hoff. You left your gloves behind.”

Up close, Auntie looks as if she has just been through the wringer. “What are you doing here?” she hisses. “I told the young one that no one was to come tonight.”

“Well, I didn’t know that, because the ‘young one’ has gone missing,” Sigrid informs her, and watches the old woman’s expression fall flat. “She didn’t come home last night. That’s why I’m here. I thought perhaps—”

“I haven’t seen her,” Auntie declares curtly.

Sigrid looks at her for a blank moment.

“And I’m not in the business of dispensing sympathy if that’s what you’re here for. What happens, happens. Nothing to be done.”

“I know what business you’re in,” Sigrid replies archly, “and I didn’t come for sympathy. I came for help.”

“Well, help is the last thing I can give you. If the young Fräulein is missing, then it means she may have been compromised. Which means that I have been compromised, which means that our guests have been compromised, and which, by the way, means that you have been compromised, too. So you came to the wrong place for help. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to my brother for further interrogation. Take your gloves and go. And don’t come back unless you’ve decided that you can be of some help to me.”

“Helene!” the old fart calls from the flat. “What’s taking you? My coffee’s gone tepid.”

Auntie frowns. Hands over the gloves. “Good night.”

THE NEXT EVENING a raw eastern wind skids off the lakes. It rends the snapping banners clinging to their flagstaffs, gusts the thin dry snow in whirling patterns across the asphalt of the Uhlandstrasse, and carries the Gestapo into their apartment building.

“So you have no idea concerning her whereabouts?”

The man’s voice is dull. Bored. It matches his expression.

“That’s correct,” Sigrid replies.

“Yet according to”—he consults his notebook with a frown for the name—“according to Frau Granzinger, the two of you were friendly.”

His face is pale and doughy. Thick eyebrows. Dark eyes with only a pilot light burning. “‘Friendly’?” Sigrid repeats, as if only vaguely familiar with the concept. “Did she use that word? If she did, then I’m afraid she overstated the matter considerably. I found Fräulein Kohl to be a confused young girl. Perhaps I took some pity on her and tried to give her a steer in the proper direction.”

“And what direction would that be?”

“As I said, she was confused. Girls at that age often fall victim to emotional turmoil. Certainly you must be aware of that.”

The man looks back at her blankly.

“My advice to her, and how closely it was heeded, I cannot say, but my advice to her was to work and work hard. Redouble her efforts. Forget about her personal pains and dedicate herself to the task at hand.”

“Which was?”

“Which was the care of Frau Granzinger’s children, of course. Keeping them fed. Keeping them clean.”

The man’s stare is unaltered.

“I told her, you see, that changing soiled diapers might not be very glamorous, but that in doing so she was serving the nation as surely as does the frontline soldier. But then a man in your position must understand that all too well, Herr Kommissar.”

The man’s eyes flicker ever so slightly. Must I?

“Serving as a policeman, that is. Of course, I have no doubt that as a German man you would much prefer to be waging war with a rifle on the battlefield. But you know that there are other battlefields, too, battlefields that are just as important. Fighting the enemies within as well as the enemies without.” Sigrid says all this wearing a face of humorless sincerity, her eyes bluntly serene in her convictions.

For a long moment, the man observes her, his gaze illuminated by an infinitesimal glint of scrutiny. Then the door across the hall opens and a man in a snap-brim hat and leather trench coat emerges from the Frau Obersturmführer Junger’s flat. But it is not the Frau Obersturmführer showing him out, but the half sister, dressed in her well-pressed nurse’s uniform. The woman gives Sigrid a momentary glance, and then offers a, “Heil Hitler, Frau Schröder,” in quite a perfunctory manner. A tone that Sigrid mimics perfectly in her reply. “Heil Hitler, Fräulein Kessler,” she responds, and then both turn to view the doughy-faced men standing on the landing with the impunity that is the property of the unvarnished heart. Fräulein Kessler shuts her door. The man looks at his partner, who only shrugs; then he stuffs his notebook back into the pocket of his overcoat.

“Thank you, Frau Schröder,” he says without gratitude, “for your time. Heil Hitler.”

“Heil Hitler,” Sigrid responds earnestly. She closes the door with a careful thud, then presses her head against the wood, listening to the echo of the men’s footsteps as they descend floor by floor. When she tugs off her cardigan, she realizes that she has sweated through her dress. Mother Schröder surveys her darkly, puffing on one of her stinking cigarettes. Only a puddle of schnapps remains in her glass. “I told you,” she declares sharply. “I told you, didn’t I? That girl was trouble from the start. Now, look what we’ve got. The Gestapo at our door.”

“The Gestapo,” says Sigrid, hanging her cardigan on the hook and wiping her cheek. “was at everyone’s door. Not just ours.”

“And did everyone break out into sweat because of it?” the old lady inquires with a sour smirk.

Sigrid removes her hand from her cheek. “They did if they have any brains.”

Mother Schröder snorts. Tends to her cigarette. “You’re lucky I’m a Party member.”

“Yes,” Sigrid tells her, crossing to the sink and unscrewing the tap. “Every day I thank God for that.”

“You know, you might, for once, think of someone else’s welfare,” the old woman calls out caustically after her. “If they arrest you, it’s your whole family that follows. Forget about me, I’m an old woman. But think about your husband, if you can still remember his face. Think about what might happen to him.”

Sigrid fills her cupped hands and presses her face into the water from the kitchen sink’s open tap. She feels it tingle on her skin, then rises up and summons breath. “Kaspar is a soldier. A wounded soldier. The army won’t let anyone touch him. Besides, I haven’t done anything wrong. I work in a patent office. I come home, I go to sleep. I wake up for the bombers when they come, and go back to sleep after they leave. The next morning I start the process over again, just like everyone else. Why should the Gestapo have the slightest interest in arresting me?” Is she reassuring herself with this dialogue? By now she is back into the front room, wiping her hands on the dish towel.

“Because you have no sense,” her mother-in-law explains curtly. “That’s always your problem. You think because you’re so smart that you can get away with anything. That you’re above it all. But you’re not, my good girl. And if you’re not careful, you’re going to find that out, just like that sow Hildegard Remki did.”

For an instant the old lady’s eyes are searing, then she looks rapidly away. Inhales smoke. A second later she reaches over and snaps on Frau Remki’s Telefunken, leaving Sigrid standing there, glaring at her as the Ninth Symphony invades the room. Sigrid feels a chill through her sweated blouse.

In the bedroom, she removes the sweaty garment and picks a dry one from the bureau. Sitting on the bed, she examines the postcard she has secreted from the pocket of her coat. Ericha’s eyes are as naked as her body. She regards Sigrid with equally naked appraisal. Eyes steaming wet, Sigrid turns the card over in her hand, and reads the address printed on the back: WILHELMINA VON HOHENHOFF. BEAUTY IMAGES, 146C KANTSTRASSE, BERLIN.