City of Women

THIRTEEN

SHE KNOCKS but there is no answer, though she can hear a woman’s voice. A strong voice, engaged in argument. Quietly she tries the brass door handle, and the door pops open with a smooth click. Peering in, she finds that the loft is full of shadows. Heavy drapes are closed over tall windows, shutting out even a blink of light. Only a table lamp, dressed with a red scarf, burns at the opposite side of the room, where she can see, in the warm, blood-red light, a very tall, athletically trim woman in trousers, pacing back and forth on the telephone, shouting into the receiver with a commanding anger. “I don’t care, Dieter, I don’t care! Those are all your problems, not mine. Now, we have an agreement and you will stick to it, is that understood?!” But before poor Dieter, whoever he is, can possibly make a reply, she rings off with a slam. Sigrid stands in the threshold, the corridor leaking light behind her. “You’re late,” the woman announces imperiously. “That’s your first and last warning. Keep me waiting again, and I’ll sack your ass.” She steps away from the lamp glow, and a second later, Sigrid is blinded by a stinging assault of white light.

“Well, don’t just stand there, for fuck’s sake,” she hears the woman demand.

Tentatively Sigrid steps forward, shielding her eyes. “You are Wilhelmina von Hohenhoff?”

The woman steps into the light with an expression of critical appraisal. Her thick bob of curls is dyed henna red. Her eyes are hooded and deeply set. “You’re a little old for this,” she observes.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Most of my girls aren’t much past twenty. But still, you have the eyes, and an interesting bone structure,” she says.

Sigrid backs off half a step as the woman fluffs her fingers through her hair. “Frau von Hohenhoff.”

“Fräulein von Hohenhoff. Good hair. Maybe a braid. But later for the details. Take off your clothes. I want to see your body.”

“I am not here to strip down for your camera, Fräulein von Hohenhoff.”

“No? Then why are you wasting my time? I’m sure you were told that I only do nudes.”

“I am not here to be photographed. Will you please turn off those lights?”

The woman examines Sigrid with a sudden frown. “Then why are you here?”

“My name is Frau Schröder. I’m here about… about one of your models. Now, if you please, I’m being blinded.”

The woman retains her frown, and walks off, the noise of her heels on the hardwood floor echoing into the loft’s high ceilings. A metallic click kills the brightness, which is replaced by the glow of a line of studio lights. Sigrid blinks and lowers her hand.

“You have a good look,” the woman informs her. “So I won’t boot you out the door just yet. But don’t get comfortable.”

“I’m looking for a girl named Ericha Kohl.”

“Yes? And you think she sat for me, do you?”

“Well,” Sigrid says, and produces Ericha’s playing card, “she wasn’t exactly sitting.”

The woman observes the card and then Sigrid. “Are you a wife?” Fräulein von Hohenhoff inquires blankly.

“Am I a what?”

“Sometimes wives appear hunting for their husband’s bed partner. Sometimes husbands appear hunting for their wife’s bed partner. My girls are not threatened by variety.”

“No. Nothing like that. But you know her, correct?”

“Oh, yes. Who could forget the courageous young Ericha?” The woman crushes out her cigarette in a small enamel ashtray overloaded with butts. “Why do you ask, if it’s not too much trouble to tell me?”

“Because,” Sigrid answers, “she’s gone missing.”

The woman gazes back at her. Then turns suddenly and strides away, over to a sideboard, without a word. Sigrid follows the echo of her heels. “You have nothing to say?” she asks.

“What would you have me say? A girl has gone missing.” The woman shrugs, finding a cigarette to light. “They often do.” The room around them is cluttered with cameras and equipment, light stands, props, and assorted Hetzblätter. The smell of developing fluid mixes with the bitter aroma of strongly brewed coffee. On the wall are a dozen or so framed photographs of schnauzer dogs. “My children,” she explains. “Arco and Duxi. Dead now. I could never bring myself to have another after them,” she explains with wistful efficiency, and then sits and lights another cigarette. But Sigrid is not interested in the dog photos. She is staring at several painted background flats stacked against the wall. Sigrid recognizes the canal scene from Ericha’s pose.

“You disapprove?”

“What?”

Fräulein von Hohenhoff nods toward the flats. “Of what I do. You shouldn’t. I provide a valuable service to the Wehrmacht by boosting the morale of our troops.”

“My approval or disapproval is of no importance,” she says.

“Well, I’m glad we can agree on that.”

“Can you tell me,” she asks, “the last time you saw her?”

Fräulein von Hohenhoff does not have to consider. “Last night. She appeared here in the late evening.” The woman inhales smoke, and expels none of it. “I’d hoped she’d come to pose again, because the camera loves her. Strange. To look at her, you’d never imagine, the scrawny thing. But no”—she knocks off a bit of ash into another loaded ashtray—“that wasn’t why.” “Up close, behind the vigor of her façade, Sigrid sees that the woman is aging. The jawline pulping. The skin of her neck wrinkling, starting to sag. Her teeth and fingers filmed by tobacco stains. “So,” Fräulein von Hohenhoff says with a cool gaze, “who are you to her?”

“We are neighbors.”

“Neighbors. And why should I give a piss about that, Frau Schröder?”

“She works for the woman who lives above me. We’ve been friends,” she says, but suddenly it all becomes a jumble. Too much to explain and not enough. “It’s not a joke. The police are looking for her,” she announces. “They came to our apartment block last night.”

“The police?”

“The Gestapo,” Sigrid clarifies.

Fräulein von Hohenhoff takes a breath. Stares at the ashtray and then raises her eyes heavily. “Do you know?” she asks.

“Know?”

“What she does.”

A minuscule pause. “Yes.”

“Then you must have some idea how useful a photographer might be to…”—the woman pauses, to choose the correct words— “… to her hobby.”

Sigrid says nothing

“I gave her my key,” the woman tells her. “If she ever needed it. Ever needed a place. But Ericha Kohl is a ghost, Frau Schröder. She appears, she disappears.” A shrug. “Like an apparition. If you know her at all, then surely you know that much.”

“So, you have no thoughts… ?”

“On the contrary. I have many thoughts about our Fräulein Kohl. But where she is or might be, I have not an inkling.”

Sigrid stares for a moment at the woman’s face. “Are you lying to me?”

A stony look in reply. Then the Fräulein is up. She steps away, with eyes averted as she rubs a thumb across her forehead. Smoke floats in the air around her. “I was never running a business, you understand. Photos for identity documents? I did them as favors. And only for certain people.”

“But you supplied documents to Ericha.”

“I am a photographer, not a forger. That work went to someone else. A man she knew in the Heerstrasse,” she says, her voice gaining an edge.

“A man, yes. She called him Johann.”

“I had no contact with him,” she announces flatly. “You say his name was Johann?” A frown. “I didn’t inquire.”

“Fräulein von Hohenhoff, please,” Sigrid finally begs. “No more of this piecemeal story. Tell me what you know.”

The woman turns, her face transparent and loaded with pain. “I was angry,” she declares, her eyes gone suddenly red. “She came to me, not out of any feeling, but only to ask for money. Only money. This man. I knew how she was soiling herself with him. I was angry,” she repeats. “I tossed a hundred marks on the floor and told her to go fuck herself.”

Sigrid takes in a painful breath. But the Fräulein turns away.

“Now you may be permitted to judge me, Frau Schröder,” she says in a sickened voice. “And then get out.”

SIGRID TRAVELS THE KANTSTRASSE like a sleepwalker, twice bumping into eternally hurried Berliners rushing in the opposite direction. She is headed, ostensibly, for the Zoo U-Bahn station, but is only dimly aware that she has made a wrong turn. “Get your eyes examined!” Her fellow citizens scold her. “Are you blind?” they demand to know. And then a body slams into her with such force that only a pair of hands seizing her arms prevent her from hitting the pavement. The impact forces her to struggle for focus. Then she sees the face, and his name catches in her throat.

“There’s someone following you,” he whispers. She feels his breath burning her ear. “Black trilby and gray overcoat, a half block back.” And then aloud, “Excuse me, gnädige Frau, for my blunder. My apologies.” In a heartbeat he is gone, merging into the oncoming pedestrians, but Sigrid is stuck solidly in place, staring after him. Her heart, her brain, her body are in full-blown shock, as the echo of Egon’s voice reverberates in her head and heats her flesh. When she lurches forward it is without thought, and this time when she plows into someone she is knocked flat onto her rump. Her head swims. She blinks at the other woman who is bent over her, apologizing, retrieving the contents of Sigrid’s purse, which have been spilled on the sidewalk. “Are you hurt?” the woman keeps repeating. A slim, thoughtful face, her eyebrows pinched together with concern. “Are you hurt? I’m so sorry. I simply wasn’t watching,” she says, gathering up a comb, a compact mirror, a pencil stub and a tube of headache powder, and then stops dead to stare at Ericha’s naked postcard. Sigrid snatches it from the woman’s hand with a curt “Thank you,” and clambers to her feet. “I am unhurt.” Then, pushing past without another syllable, she searches the street with a breath of frantic hope, but no hope is found, only strangers. Strangers in front of her and strangers behind her. Though, purchasing a copy of the B.Z. am Mittag from a uniformed paperboy, is a hefty Berliner bear wearing a slate gray overcoat and a black trilby hat. Sigrid gulps down a metallic taste of fear, puts down her head, and charges down the walk in the opposite direction, weaving through the midday mob. A block farther, she turns quickly into a small café and finds a chair and a table. Her hands are shaking. Her body shivering. The waitress squints at her. “Sorry, are you ill?” she inquires, but Sigrid ignores the question. Orders coffee. Shock, fear, and unadulterated excitement. The thrill of his voice. The sight of his face. The grip of his hands. So suddenly, igniting her heart. Alive. He is not a ghost of her imagination. He is alive and touchable.

The bell over the door jangles, and she glances up with wild hope, but only spots the hefty man entering with a newspaper under his arm. Gray coat, black trilby. He pays her not a whit of attention, but thumps down behind a table, and spreads open his newspaper, ruffling pages, clearing a gummy congestion from his throat. He orders a coffee and a brandy and a Dutch cigar.

Her palms are sweating. She downs a few swallows of the tasteless coffee in her cup and quickly stands. Her coins ring on the tabletop and she bullets for the door. Outside, she sees the E bus, slowing for its stop in the Auguste-Viktoria-Platz, below the zoo. Her pace quickens. She risks a glance behind, only to see the hefty man veering out of the café door with a frown. She picks up her pace again. By the time the bus eases to a halt with a moan of brakes, she is running, and though she dares not turn again, she knows that he is running, too. The last of the passengers are loading themselves aboard, and the bus driver is signaling his return to traffic by the time she makes it to the stop and hammers on the door. This is illegal, and most drivers ignore such desperate actions, but sometimes it works. The bus halts, the doors swing open, and she clambers up. The driver grunts at her, but the young female conductor wearing a striped BdM armlet sets in with an immediate lecture, which Sigrid ignores. She is too busy watching the great bear huffing and puffing as he runs, red-faced, beside the departing bus before tossing up his hands in frustration. The bus grinds into gear and pulls away from the curb, spewing oily exhaust. A car horn sounds in the street. Inside, it is crowded and she must stand. A baby cries over the noise of the motor. An old hausfrau snores. A wordless disgruntlement fills in the empty spaces. She’s not even sure where she is going, but doesn’t care. The thrill has turned upside down inside of her. Standing there aboard the lumbering bus, jostled and bumped, the odor of unwashed clothing filling her nostrils, she feels Egon’s abandonment as keenly as she did the last time they shared a bed. He was there, and then in a blink he was gone. Disappearing into daylight and not throwing a shadow, making his escape, without her. As always. Without her.

AT THE DOOR to the building she is met by Portierfrau Mundt, in her bleached apron over a drab housedress, who holds the foyer door for her as if Sigrid is a truant child. “Awfully late for a married woman to be coming home from work, Frau Schröder,” the woman notes. “More delays on the trains, no doubt?”

Sigrid gives her a dark eye. “You were holding supper for me, Portierfrau? Or just spying from your window?”

“My husband and I are responsible for residents of this building,” she reminds her archly. “Remarks like that do you no good. As you may one day discover.”

Sigrid climbs the stairs, deaf to Mundt. Deaf to herself, beyond the thumping of her heart. At the landing to her flat, she pauses. Digs blindly into her purse for the key. When she doesn’t find it, she digs into her pockets. Where had she put the foolish thing? But when she draws out a piece of grayish wartime paper, folded in half, her heart thumps deeply. For a moment, it’s too much. She closes her hand over the note and presses it against her belly. Then she steals a breath and opens the fold. Quickly scans the contents once, and then again. It’s only a few words. But she reads them over and over, then jumps when the door opens behind her.

“Good evening,” she hears Fräulein Kessler say. The woman is dressed in a stiff beige housecoat and wearing wire-rimmed spectacles. The combination makes her look dowdy, older. “I’m sorry, are you all right?”

“All right?”

“You look,” Fräulein Kessler considers, “somewhat ill.”

Sigrid puts a hand to her forehead as if checking for a fever. “No. No, thank you, I’m not.”

“Would you like to come in? I have some brandy. Perhaps you could use a touch.”

“No. Very kind, but I’m sorry,” Sigrid answers. She sees Fräulein Kessler glance at the note still clenched in her hand. A certain wryness enters the woman’s expression.

“So have you screwed him yet?” she asks.

A flash of heat.

“My brother, that is.”

Sigrid gazes back at her with loaded eyes. All artifice seems to have abandoned her. “Yes,” she answers.

Fräulein Kessler nods to herself as she tugs off her spectacles. “He is irresistible. Even though he’s missing a leg, women cannot stop themselves from falling into his bed. A word of warning, though. Don’t make plans for the future, because you don’t have one. At least not with him.”

“Thank you. I’ll remember that,” Sigrid says thickly.

“You know, Sigrid Schröder, you are missing out on an opportunity. Wolfram may be fickle, but I am not. I can be your friend, even if not your lover.”

Only an instant’s pause before she says, “Can you?”

“Friends are really of much greater value anyway. Lovers?” She shrugs. “Who can trust them?”

At their midday break, Sigrid evades Renate’s company, and travels east along the canal toward the Municipal Gasworks, until she drops onto a bench where the dead wands of the willows etch lines in the water’s thick blue-green current. Only then does she dare examine the note again. Words scratched at an angle: cinema and balcony, followed by a time. When a body suddenly shoves onto the bench next to her, she closes the scrap of paper in her fist. A hefty specimen, dressed in a slate gray coat, lifts his black trilby. “Frau Schröder.”

Instinctively she attempts to rise, but the man’s hand clamps down on her arm. “Please, I’m not who you think,” he says, a weighty gaze beneath the bristles of his eyebrows. “I’m a friend of Fräulein Kohl’s.”

Sigrid stares back, but she settles back onto the bench and the man releases her arm. His hands are calloused, she notes. A workingman’s hands.

“You know where she is?”

“I can’t say.”

“But you know.”

“I cannot say.”

“You know that she’s still alive.”

“Yes.”

“And safe.”

“As safe as any of us can be.”

“I want to see her.”

“Not possible now.”

“Then someone should make it possible, because I want to see her.”

“I can’t stay much longer, but you should know that we think the operation has been compromised.”

“Auntie?”

“Not arrested, but they’re watching her.”

“For how long?”

“You should listen now, not talk. We’re making a plan to get them out. The current guests.”

“Get them out? How, if they’re watching?”

“I cannot say more now. We will need your help, but not now. For now you should stay away. Do you understand? You’ll be contacted again,” he says, and then he’s up, lifts his hat once more, and marches off toward the gasworks.

The lobby of the cinema is dim. A single, aging whore occupies a well-worn velveteen chair, staring at the smoke from her cigarette. The old usher’s cough webs his lungs. He wipes his mouth with a handkerchief and holds open the door to the mezzanine. The rear of the balcony is empty. No patrons. Her heart is drumming in her chest as the film cranks through the projector. Up on the gray-lit screen, a newsreel camera follows a squadron of condor-winged bombers across a churning Russian sky.

Sigrid unfolds the note again, just to make sure that there are still words written there. Somehow she fears that they may have vanished from the paper, leaving it blank. But the shape of his handwriting is still visible. And then a voice.

“Don’t speak.”

As if she could.

“Sigrid, I beg you, don’t say a word.”

As if a word could possibly escape her throat. He is blotted by shadow, only a gray flicker shaping the outline of his face. His grip is desperate as he seizes her arm in his hand, and his body smells of staleness and neglect, and need.

“I have to touch you,” he whispers hoarsely. And she lets him. His touch is hunting at first, searching her for something lost. Inside her coat, under her blouse. His mouth suddenly near. Exploring her neck. Her eyes remain pried open. She is too afraid to close them, for fear that the flutter of her lids will be enough to disturb the fragile reality of the instant, that he will vanish into a memory or dream or the darkness inside her own head.

She hurries to unbutton Egon’s trousers, with a consuming need that resembles desperation more than desire. Desperate to hold some piece of the past, of her past self in her hand, to give it weight and form.

Hiking her skirt, she climbs onto Egon’s lap. He enters her, and she begins to pump herself on him. With slow, hopeful anguish, then with sudden purpose. He has started to gasp. To snort under her assault, so she clamps her hand over his mouth. Presses her head down to his, and takes an ear in her teeth as a hostage. And then it’s over, suddenly, in a spasm. And she lets her weight sag against him. Pinning him down.

At work, Renate tells Sigrid about her new man. He’s a soldier named Heinz, back from the Balkans on furlough. Sigrid listens to the descriptions of their bed sport, thinking of Egon’s body, the feel of him inside, with her thighs astride him. She thinks of this, but all she says to Renate is, “So what became of your man in the Potsdamerplatz?”

Renate sighs with a small frown. “Ah, that. There was a scheduling conflict. I arrived at his place one evening, and found him humping a little blond morsel from the Luftwaffeneinsatz.” She smiles again and shrugs. “I threw a fit, but really it was only for show. Things had been going downhill. We both knew it was over with. Probably it was the best way to finish it. No sentiment, just a clean cut.”

“And now Heinz.”

“You know, he’s not at all what I’m used to. He’s rather rough-hewn. No money to speak of. Just a soldier. We met on the U-Bahn, of all places, when he offered me his seat.”

“He offered you his seat, and you offered him your ass,” Sigrid says, and then looks up at the pinprick of silence.

Renate is still smiling, but she says. “That wasn’t very kind.”

“I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m sorry. I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Well. I can have a guess at what’s wrong. You need a release.”

Sigrid feels a pause in her throat, then swallows it. “I need a place,” she whispers.

It was really too cold for a walk along the canal, but no matter. She has dragged Renate away from the patent office canteen and into the bitter air just to be able to speak this sentence to her. Renate frowns, rubbing her hands together. “A place?”

“A place to go to,” Sigrid says with muted urgency. “With someone.”

And now the light breaks over Renate’s face. “Ahh.” She grins archly. “Well, it’s about time, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Please,” Sigrid protests.

“So who’s the lucky fellow?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

“No one you know. Just a man.”

“Well, they’re all just men, dumpling. But surely he has a name. Or do you just call him ‘Schnuckiputzi’?” she teases.

“Stop it. This is not a matter for jokes,” Sigrid insists, but Renate laughs anyway.

“Of course it is, Liebling. It just seems so serious, because it’s your first time in the game. But never mind. I won’t make light. I’m just so deadly curious,” she says, nudging Sigrid intimately. “It’s not that blockhead Werner, is it? God, I hope not. Believe me, he’s more crow than cock.”

“No. Not Werner. He’s not from the office,” Sigrid frowns. She stares at the slate of the walk and keeps moving. “I told you, it’s no one you know.”

“All right, all right, so it’s no one I know. At least tell me what he looks like.”

“He looks like a man.”

“Pfft,” Renate snorts with abrupt annoyance. “If this is how you’re going to be, you can go tell your problems to the mirror. But if you want my help, you must provide a few details.”

The space expands between them, and is filled by the sputter of a motor launch traveling down the canal. Then Sigrid expels a heavy breath. “He’s tall,” she says.

“Tall,” Renate repeats coolly. “Well, I suppose he would be.”

“With dark hair.”

“And eyes?”

“Brown.”

“Just brown?”

“No. Brown like caramel.”

“Brown like caramel. Now, we’re getting somewhere. A handsome face, I assume.”

“Yes. A handsome face. Broad. A bit rough.”

“And his body?”

“He has one,” Sigrid says, but finds that, against her will, she is experiencing a tingle of pleasure at this. She has never described Egon to anyone before. Never elaborated on his parts in this way. It sends a small thrill through her, which Renate must detect, because her lascivious tone returns. “I’m betting he’s muscular. No brains, perhaps, but hard muscles,” she purrs, leaning into Sigrid as they walk, throwing her off balance. “A laborer, maybe. Hard muscles, and he grunts like an ape. Like those Frenchmen fixing the rail lines.” She laughs, and then the laugh catches in her throat, and her voice drops urgently. “Oh, God. He’s not, is he?”

“Not?”

“A foreigner?” A problem, the authorities have found. A city full of lonely women meets an army of foreign workers conscripted into the Reich from the occupied lands, often the only males of species around who are not in short pants or walking with a cane. There have been incidents. Some of them highly publicized. The woman shipped off to a concervation camp, and the man, too, if he’s from the west, hanged or beheaded if he’s from the east.

Sigrid feels her smile die, though she still props up its corpse. “No. Not a foreigner,” and then she adds, “He was born in Neukölln.”

Renate breathes relief. “Wonderful. A good Berliner proletariat. Is he in the army?”

“Renate,” Sigrid complains. “You ask too much.”

“All right, I ask too much. But tell me this, at least.” And now her lips brush Sigrid’s ear. “Does he fill you up?”

Her mouth dries, and her eyes go blind to everything in front of her. All she can see is his face below her as she rode him. But words in reply to Renate’s question will not come.

“Never mind,” Renate tells her, giving her arm a squeeze. “Maybe you don’t know yet, do you, Liebchen? So don’t worry. Your big sister will fix you up.”

“Should I remind you, big sister, that I am older than you?”

“Older? Younger? It’s experience that counts here. And in that, strudel, you are a babe in arms.”

Sigrid frowns inwardly at this but does not give voice to any objection. “So,” she says instead, “I have answered your questions, and we are running out of time. Do you know of a place?”

“I think I do.” Renate says, taking her arm and hugs it as they walk. Sigrid does not resist. “I think I know of a place that might serve your purposes quite well.”

THE PLACE TURNS out to be a dreary hotel in the Kantstrasse down the street from the Bahnhof am Zoo. Officially, it caters to out-of-town commercial peddlers. Unofficially, it caters to those who need a room with a bed for just long enough to get the sheets sweaty. So nobody pays too much attention to papers or registration beyond the minimum. The fee for the room is six marks an hour plus a ten-mark “concierge fee.” Sigrid has scrounged money from stashes at home, but to her surprise Egon removes a money clip from his pocket, and signs the guest book as Ernst Friedrichsohn and wife, Hannover.

Stupidly, it gives her a small thrill. To be signed in as his wife, even under such ersatz terms. “Identification, please, Herr Friedrichsohn,” the dingy old Berliner behind the desk requests, and Sigrid watches Egon produce a brown cardboard booklet. A Mitgliedsbuch issued by the German Labor Front. Full of contribution stamps, but no photograph necessary.

The porter gives the booklet a perfunctory glance. “Very good.” He frowns, and makes a notation before he plucks a key from a board of hooks. “Room thirty-three.”

Room 33 is cramped. The rooms here are designed to hold a narrow, lumpy bed and little else. No oversize feelings or possibilities. There’s a dry sink and a single chair close to the door, where their clothes are draped. Hers on the chair seat, his dangling over the back. Her shoes in a neat duet on the floor, her nylons balled and stuffed into the toes. His shoes, dull from the streets, the leather cracked, lying where they fell, tossed off pell-mell, still laced.

Peeled like a piece of fruit. That’s how she feels. Lying in her sweat, feeling the sting of the room’s chill on her skin, hearing the windowpanes tremble with the wind. She has so much to say to him, yet she finds she can say nothing at all. So instead she falls into an old habit with Egon. When she cannot bring herself to speak, she asks him what he’s thinking.

But Egon is simply staring at the ceiling, as if he can see through it to the sky. “I have to get better papers,” he says.

She feels a sharp pinch of distress. He is not thinking about her. About how their heartbeats synchronized as their bodies merge. He’s thinking about his damned identification papers.

“What I’ve got now might get me past a dim-witted hotel porter. But a labor pass won’t pass muster with any Sipo man with more than one eye in his head.”

She gets the feeling that Egon is talking more to himself than to her. He reaches for one of the cigarettes she’d brought for him. A few of the Bulgarians purloined from the packet she’d given Mother Schröder. She had found them again, hidden in the rear of the dish cabinet, with half of them smoked. He lights up with a wax tip and she watches the smoke rise with his gaze. He makes no comment on the quality of the tobacco. Another disappointment.

“You haven’t said.”

He barely glances at her. “What?”

“What you think of the accommodations.”

“It’s a room,” he answers blankly.

“Yes,” she agrees with a breath. “A room with a bed. I suppose that’s all that’s required.”

“You require more than that, Sigrid? More than a bed we can share?”

“Where are you spending your nights?” she asks with unveiled purpose. But he tosses the question on its head.

“That’s a very good question. The place I’m in now isn’t working out so well. I need to find something new.”

“New?”

“For a few weeks.”

“Only that?”

“Maybe a month.”

Sigrid feels the air grow thin. “Why only a month?” she asks carefully.

But if Egon hears the interior question that she is asking, he does not respond to it. “Because a month is all I need,” he says.

“So where are you staying now?” she repeats with an edge. “You’re not going to tell me?”

“What difference does it make? I only have a few more nights there. Three. Maybe four.”

Nights, she thinks, and is instantaneously jealous. Is it another woman? she itches to demand, even though she, herself, is another woman. A woman other than his wife.

“I can pay. That’s not the problem,” he says. “The problem is that it’s too dangerous for me on the street. I can be too easily recognized.”

“You don’t look Jewish,” Sigrid hears herself say, and then flinches at the sound of her own words.

But Egon only laughs, hoots grimly at the ceiling. “Yes, I have quite the Aryan puss. No cricked schnobel on this Yid,” he says with a grin.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Thanks to Juli Streicher, all you good Germans think every Jew looks like a Shylock.” That is Julius Streicher, the publisher of a virulent propaganda rag called Der Stürmer, who delights in grotesque caricatures of Semitic faces. “In a way, that old bastard has saved my life more than once.”

“I’m not a Juli Streicher,” Sigrid says, causing Egon to look at her directly. Fully, with assessment.

“No. No, you’re not, Sigrid Schröder. You’re a woman with a very good heart.” He says this and then rolls onto his side, fixing his eyes on hers as the smoke ribbons upward from his cigarette. “So. Will you help me?”

But she is hurt. Wounded by his offhand classification of her, dumping her into the pool of good Germans along with such a notorious Jew baiter. She may answer Egon’s question in her head, but first she must ask him, “Where are your wife and children?”

His expression does not change, but his eyes darken, as if a lamp in the room has been switched off. “I don’t know,” he answers her.

Perhaps she was hoping to hear something else. A reply that would cancel out the scenario she has built in her head. She, lying here in the bed with him in a second-class hotel, while across town she is hiding his wife and daughters from the Gestapo in a frigid attic. Or perhaps she would like to have heard that he had simply split from his wife. Or that his wife had escaped to some neutral destination—Switzerland, Sweden, the North Pole—and had taken any and all children with her, never to return. Perhaps she may have even preferred to hear that they were dead. At least dead, she could pinpoint them. Reduce them to something manageable.

“You don’t know? No idea at all?” she presses. And now she can feel him studying her, calculating some inner equation. She does not rearrange the blankness of her face. Finally he looks away, drawing on his cigarette, and tapping an ash into a ceramic tray on the bed stand from Haus Vaterland. He seems to be settling into himself, settling into some version of himself. When he speaks his voice has lost all texture.

“The place I had found. A few rooms above a warehouse in Rixdorf. It worked for a while. I had my contacts for food. There was a roof over their heads. For a time, it all seemed survivable. But then I was sitting in a café last summer. I had made arrangements to meet a man about some clothing coupons when I saw someone I recognized. Or rather who recognized me. It was another Jew. A man I had known from the diamond trade, years ago. He stood up and waved his hand at me. I could tell something was wrong, immediately, but I moved too slowly. Before I could make it to the door, there were a pair of Gestapo bulls blocking my path with their cannons out.” He stops. Chews a thought for a moment. “They took me to the Grosse Hamburger Strasse and beat hell out me for a night or two. Just for the fun of it.” He shrugs. “And then it was off to the Levetzowstrasse. There I rotted, waiting for my turn to be packed into the cattle cars. Until one morning, after a bombing raid, they picked ten men for a work detail. Hauling rubble.” He flicks his eyebrows. “When I saw my chance, I took it. Bashed the guard on the skull with a piece of masonry and ran.” He stops again to measure a breath of smoke. “I went straight back to the warehouse, of course, but the rooms were empty. Not a sign of Anna or the girls.” He stares, as if surveying the emptied rooms in his head, then jams his cigarette into the ashtray. “Not a thread left behind.”

Sigrid does not move as his gaze drifts over to hers.

“So does that answer your questions, Frau Schröder? Is there anything else you require knowing?”

Her eyes go wet. What are the names of your daughters? she wants to ask. But the question is suddenly so sharp and dangerous that it threatens to cut her throat if she tries to utter it.

“Good,” he concludes at her silence. “Now it’s your turn to answer my question,” he says, sliding his arms around her. “Will you help me?” he asks again.

There is only one answer to this, of course. Yes. For a month, for a day, for an hour. If it costs her everything. If it strips her skin down to the bone. Her answer is, as it has always been, yes.