City of Women

FOURTEEN

IN THE MORNING, leaving for the patent office, she steps out of the door to the landing and finds Mundt’s husband and one of his cronies muscling the weight of a steamer trunk out of the door and down the stairs. “Mornin’, dolly.” He winks at Sigrid. “Man’s work comin’ through.” Sigrid steps back to allow them to pass with their burden, then looks up at the sound of her name.

“Frau Schröder. What a happy coincidence,” the Frau Obersturmführer announces. She is wearing her Volk’s community smile, but her face is bleached and exhausted, and her belly has swollen to the size of a medicine ball.

“It appears you are traveling, Frau Junger.”

“To my mother’s in Breslau. Just until my little soldier arrives.”

“Little soldier” confuses Sigrid for a instant. And then, “Ah, yes. Of course.” She quickly snatches the satchel from the girl’s hand. “Here, I’m so thoughtless, please let me help you with your bag.”

“Oh. Thank you, that’s kind. Would you like to go first? I’m afraid I’m rather slow on steps these days. Going down as well as coming up.”

After Sigrid had miscarried, the women of the house had gotten on their hands and knees and scrubbed the spots of blood from every step.

“Please. You first, I’ll follow.”

The Frau Obersturmführer refreshes her smile, and begins her sluggish procession down the stairs. “Getting on the streetcar can take me a lifetime,” she says. “But everyone is so understanding and helpful.”

“So you think it will be a boy, do you?” Sigrid inquires.

A step, a pause. A step, a pause. “Oh, yes. I’m quite sure of it, Frau Schröder. From the strength of his kick, you see.” She grins, and Sigrid feels the simple force of her certainty. It pinches Sigrid with some unidentifiable emotion. Somewhere between dread and joy.

That night she leaves her mother-in-law with the wireless and a glass of potato brandy, and knocks on the door across the landing. Fräulein Kessler greets her wearing her nursing shift and her standard sardonic face. “He’s not here, Frau Schröder.”

“He?”

“My brother, of course. He’s in Belgium or Luxembourg, or some such place for a week. I don’t know. He tells me these things, but I never know if I should believe him. In any case, he’s gone.”

“I’m not here to see your brother.”

“No?”

“I don’t mean to trouble you. Were you on your way to work?”

“Not for a few hours yet. I have the night ward tonight,” she says with curious caution.

“Did you mean what you said?” Sigrid asks her. “That you could be my friend?”

A pause. Sigrid watches an internal reorganization of the woman’s expression.

“If a friend is what you need,” she answers.

“It is.”

And now a double-sided glance. The German glance. “I think you’d better come in,” says Fräulein Kessler.

“YOU KNOW THEY OFFERED her a place in one of the Font of Life homes,” the woman announces from the kitchen.

Removing her scarf, Sigrid glances away from the bronze Führer portrait on the wall. “Font of Life.”

“Brigitte. The local Standarte was putting through the paperwork. But I think giving birth in an SS brood mare barn was too much, even for her.” She brings the coffee service in from the kitchen. Not the gentrified sterling service that her sister had used, but a sensible, stainless steel press and plain china. “So instead it’s off to Breslau and her Mutti. God help her.”

“She is difficult, her mother?”

“I’ve met the woman only twice, but wished to murder her on both occasions.” She sets down the tray and pours. “I hope you like it strong. I make it strong, because that’s how my father drank it. Cigarette?” she offers, but Sigrid shakes her head tightly. “You seem very anxious. You should relax. You should take off your coat.”

“Thank you, I’m fine,” she says, and takes a perfunctory sip of the coffee. It scalds her tongue.

“Too hot? No cream to be had, I’m afraid. But you don’t take it anyway, do you?”

“No.”

“And no white sugar, either. Though, if you’d like, there’s rock sugar,” she says, offering a small crystal bowl filled with amber-colored rock sugar candy from the table. “You might try it, even if you usually drink it black. Its sweetness kills the bitterness.”

“I need to hide someone,” Sigrid suddenly blurts out.

Fräulein Kessler pauses, then sets down the bowl and picks up her cigarette case. “Yes. I thought it might be something like that.” She ignites her cigarette with a silver-plated table lighter and draws in smoke. “I’ve heard about your young friend’s sudden disappearance. I’m sorry, I can’t recall her name. The police are looking for her, correct?”

“Ericha Kohl is her name. But I’m not here about her. Ericha is gone, and I have no idea where she is. The friend I need you to help is a man.”

A stare, then a quick recalibration of her gaze. “Ah. A man,” she repeats, and spews smoke. “In trouble with the authorities? Black market or maybe tired of army life?”

“He’s a Jew,” Sigrid says plainly.

And suddenly Fräulein Kessler’s tidy cynicism freezes to her face. She gazes at Sigrid as if trying to see inside of her head.

“I’ve shocked you,” Sigrid points out.

“Well,” the woman says, and releases a sigh of smoke, “you do continue to surprise me.”

“Can I assume that is said in a friendly way?”

“You’re taking an awful chance here, aren’t you, Frau Schröder? You think that because I have my… ” she says, and frowns, “because I have my proclivities that I’m not a good German?”

“I said something similar once, Fräulein Kessler,” Sigrid tells her. “And what I think is that it is up to us to define what makes a good German good. But you’re correct. I am taking an awful chance.” She gazes back at the woman. “Have I made a mistake?”

Fräulein Kessler takes another draw from her cigarette and covers a cough. “I’m not sure,” she says finally, “what you think I can do.”

“Let him sleep on your floor.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just for a few days. Maybe a week. Until I can,” she begins, but then falters. Until she can do what, exactly? She makes do with, “Until I can figure something out.” As she is speaking, Sigrid is vaguely aware of a wave of tension building in her. Of her throat constricting. Her voice tightening. “I know it’s a great deal to ask. A man, whom you haven’t met. Of whom you know nothing. But I have no place else. No other ideas. And then I think, since your sister is in Breslau. Since your brother is gone. Maybe a few days. A few days or a week on your floor, till I can find some way—”

“Frau Schröder,” the woman interrupts. “You needn’t have an apoplexy. I’m saying yes.”

“What?”

“I’m saying yes,” she repeats.

Sigrid looks back at the woman’s face. Then suddenly the tears spring from nowhere. A gush that takes her completely unawares. She does her best to stop it up, trawling her bag for a handkerchief. “I’m sorry,” she says, choking. “I’m sorry. Thank you.”

“Drink some coffee. It’ll stiffen you up.”

Sigrid nods and takes a sip, wiping her eyes. “Thank you,” she says again.

Fräulein Kessler has gathered her elbows together and is leaning forward on them, running the back of her thumb over her forehead absently. “This man. If I may ask, he is your lover?”

Sigrid, mopping herself up, nods. “He is.”

“In the same way that my brother is?”

A pause.

“Different.”

“Yes, I can see it in your expression.”

“I’m sorry,” Sigrid tells her. But she shakes her head. “No apologies. Things are as they are. Does anyone else know?”

“No. No one,” Sigrid says. Retrieving her breath. Returning the handkerchief to her bag.

“I think,” the woman tells her, “if you and I truly are to be friends, and that’s the idea, is it not?”

Almost a smile. “It is, Fräulein Kessler.”

“Then I think there is something you should know. I’m a Mischling.”

The word makes no sense to Sigrid for an instant. And then it does. Mischling. A half Jew. “Ah, me… ” she whispers.

“Officially, a Mischling, first degree. My father was born Jewish, though he was converted. My grandparents both died in a house fire when he was very small, and he went to the Kessler family in Charlottenburg, who had him christened. When he was grown, he married a Christian woman, who bore first me and then Wolfram, before she died in the influenza epidemic. Wolfram claims he remembers her, but I don’t see how. I barely do, and I’m four years older.”

“And what about,” Sigrid asks, “what about your sister?”

“Yes, the dear child. She is the product of wife number two.”

“Does she know?”

At this, Fräulein Kessler smiles ruefully. “That she is a Mischling, too? Oh, she knows, all right. She knows very well. Which is why she goes to so much trouble to portray the perfect Aryan wife. She’s really grown quite creative about it. Those letters she reads aloud in the cellar, for instance? Her husband, the great Herr Obersturmführer, never bothers himself to write. He’s a thoughtless brute. So she writes them herself.”

“But how did…?” Sigrid starts to say, then stops.

“Oh, please feel free to ask the question, Frau Schröder. How did a Mischling end up married to a serving officer in the Waffen-SS in the first place? It’s a very good question, and the answer is Wolfram. He’s a very resourceful man, my brother. Did he ever mention the nature of his work to you?”

“The nature? He’s a soldier,” says Sigrid.

“Yes, a soldier, but more than that.”

“He’s said nothing more.”

“No, I suppose not. You had better things to do than talk. Fair enough. Since I’m confessing, I might as well spill it all. Wolfram is a member of the Abwehr. You’ve heard of this?”

A dull look. “I know nothing about the army other than they have guns and heavy boots.”

“Then allow me to educate you. The Abwehr is the clandestine service for the whole of the Wehrmacht,” she adds. “I don’t know how he did it, but somehow he expunged our family secret from the official registries. On the record, we are one hundred percent Aryan stock, confirmed all the way back to 1750. That’s the SS standard for bloodlines, you see. So our little secret of ancestry remains between us and God. As I said,” Fräulein Kessler repeats more pointedly, “he’s very resourceful. Foolish, perhaps, the way he sticks his neck out. But very resourceful.”

“Do you have any idea what he might want with my employee identification card from the patent office?”

“What he might want with it?”

“I think he may have taken it from my bag.”

“Well, I haven’t the faintest what makes Wolfram’s mind work. Other than to assure you that he does nothing on impulse. Every move on my brother’s part is a step in a plan.”

“A plan? But what sort of plan could involve a piece of yellow cardboard with my photograph attached?”

“Perhaps he wanted a photograph for his wall. Or, if he took your identity card, then perhaps he thinks you need a new identity,” the woman suggests. “Now, drink your coffee, please, I can’t abide letting hot good coffee go cold,” she says, and heats up Sigrid’s cup. “By the way, I do believe you should start calling me Carin now. Considering the topics of our conversation, you and I are far past formalities. Wouldn’t you agree?”

In the narrow hotel room, Sigrid lies on her back, gazing up at a large brown water stain on the ceiling plaster. Bits of the plaster have decayed and flaked at the corner, where beads of water condense. But the stain spreads out like a great muddy dry bed above her, scalloped at the edges by the outwash of many leaky afternoons. Rain splatters the windowpane outside. She listens to the damp noise of traffic and smells Egon’s acrid cigarette smoke.

Is it true? His ghost has been made flesh once more?

“Do you need money?” she hears him ask.

“Money?”

“For this woman. Does she expect to be paid to put me up?”

A disapproving glance. “No.”

But Egon only shrugs. Rolls onto his side. Drifts his finger down between her breasts to her belly. “Don’t sound so insulted. Most people want to be paid,” he says. “You know I do love your body, Sigrid. How strong it is. How subtle.”

“Yes. My body,” she answers.

“You don’t think I love you, too?”

“I’m sure I don’t know anything about what or whom you love.”

“Still angry,” he says with almost a smile, his touch feathering the swell of her breasts. “After all this time?”

“No.” She frowns, glaring upward at the stain. “No. You did what you thought you must do.”

“No.” He frowns. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t mean you’re still angry about us. It means you’re still angry. Under all your middle-class civility, you’re still angry. It’s one of the things that made me fall in love with you to begin with.”

“Egon,” she says, suddenly seizing him by the scruff of his neck and pushing her face into his. “Egon, I want you to stop using that word,” she commands. “Do you understand? I want you to stop.” She watches his eyes. “I want you to stop,” she whispers.

A wash of thunder floats above them. Then a knock at the door grabs her in the belly.

“Porter. Ten minutes.”

Immediately she sits up and starts dressing.

“So. When will you be ready to make the move?” she asks.

Egon is standing now. Pulling on his skivvies. “Well, that depends on the Royal Air Force.”

Fastening the hook of her brassiere. “What?”

“The next time the bombers come. That’s when you should expect me. You have a shelter in your building, yes?”

“The cellar.”

“Then find some way to stay out of it after the alarms sound, and be ready to meet me by the door.” He steps into his trousers.

“You’re going to travel through an air raid?’

“It’s the best way for Jews to travel. Not even the Gestapo bothers with identity checks when the bombs are falling.” Turning his back to her, he shrugs on his shirt. She swivels her feet onto the bare wood floor and picks up her nylon chemise.

“That’s a very nice watch,” she says.

“What?” Egon grunts, sparing only half a glance.

She picks up the wristwatch from the nightstand. Cartier is inscribed on the face. “I said, that’s a very nice watch.”

He takes it from her and straps it on his wrist. “It manages to tell time,” is all he says.

“Always the best. Even now. The fine watch. The mohair coat. How do you do it?” she asks with a touch of awe and, perhaps, a touch of something else. Pride? Pride in her man?

“I do what I do,” he replies. She had not expected more of an answer from him. Still, she frowns at the absurdities. Or is it a smile?

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing,” she answers. “Women. It really isn’t fair what men do to us.”

Down in the street, they part, as always, outside the hotel door. She, in her scarf, pushing open an umbrella, he creasing the brim of his hat against the patter of rain. “Good day, Frau Schröder,” she hears him say as he leaves her. A smile crossing his face. “You’ll understand if I don’t wish you a bombless night.”

AT THE DOOR OF HER FLAT, she hears the radio. Lotte Lehmann’s trilling soprano voice singing, Warning. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she calls out as she hangs up her coat, in the most casual voice she can manage. As usual, she finds her mother-in-law planted in the chair beside the wireless, but the look on Mother Schröder’s face indicates that she is not listening. In fact, the look indicates that she is considering boring through a steel plate with nothing more that the sharpness of her eyes. Sigrid opens her mouth, but closes it again as a quick electrical pulse shoots through her heart. She sees the dingy packet of letters wrapped by a black ribbon clutched in her mother-in-law’s claws. “How did you get those?” she hears herself demand. Her voice is throaty, disconnected. Hoarse, suddenly, with crackling emotion.

“That’s what you have to say to me? How did I get them?” Mother’s Schröder’s voice is raw with indignity.

“You violated my privacy.”

“I opened a cigarette tin. If you store your privacy there, then you should expect it to be violated.”

“Give them to me.” She makes a move as if to snatch them, but Mother Schröder grips them with both hands.

“No.”

“I demand that you give them to me!”

“And I demand that you give me an explanation of this filthy trash!”

“Demand away, it’s none of your business.”

“You’re married to my son. That makes it my business. Does he know?”

“Know?”

“That his wife is stashing away this pornography?” she hisses, shaking the letter righteously at Sigrid.

“It was years ago. Before I ever met Kaspar,” she lies.

“Yet you keep them.”

“They’re not pornography.”

“They’re disgusting. And no woman with a grain of moral character—”

“Oh, can you stuff your moral character up your ass, please? I’m sick to death of hearing about it. My God, you’re over sixty and what you understand about being a woman would fit in a thimble.”

Mother Schröder’s face has gone bloodless. “You think that fornication makes you more of a woman?”

“I think that passion makes me more of a woman.”

Mother Schröder’s expression hardens with contempt. “Passion. A word used by an idiot. You think you know me, yet you have no knowledge of yourself. Passion is the excuse of a whore. And a simple-minded whore at that.” She shakes the packet of letters at her. “Is this who you are thinking of?”

“What?”

“I know what you do. At night. When you’re in bed. I’m not a fool.”

“You’re spying on me in my own bed?”

“It’s your husband’s bed, not yours. And I asked you a question.”

“You’re mad.”

“I’m well aware of your history. I know that your father was a philanderer, and left your mother in the lurch. And I warned Kaspar when he married you that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Leave my family out of this,” Sigrid hears herself say coldly.

“Maybe if you had had a decent upbringing, you might have turned out to have a bit of moral backbone.”

“Shut your mouth!” Sigrid hears herself shouting. The words rip out of her. “Shut your fucking mouth!” she bellows.

Mother Schröder stumbles back a step, as if she has been shoved, her face contorted. “How dare you. How dare you use such language toward me,” she hisses in rebuke, but clearly, by the expression stamped on her face, Sigrid has frightened her. In that instant, Sigrid sees just how old the woman has become. How hollowed out. She works to force the fire back into her belly, to regain control of herself. “Give me. Those letters,” she demands.

The old woman squeezes the packet. Her face reassessing. Reforming itself. “Do you swear to me,” she says, “that this man means nothing to you now?”

Sigrid breathes in. Breathes out.

“Can you? Swear?”

“I can do better than that, Petronela,” Sigrid replies. “I can swear that I meant nothing to him.”

A stare, then her mother-in-law frowns. Regains the imperious edge to her voice. “And still you keep his letters? God, but you are an idiot.” She tosses the letters onto the rug. “My advice? Burn this trash.”

RAIN CLOUDS SHEETING BERLIN keep the Royal Air Force away that night, and the next. But on the third night, the sky is a dark, cloudless shell.

She is standing in front of the sink in her apron, washing dishes in brownish tepid water and covertly watching the clock on the wall tick away the minutes till seven o’clock. Seven o’clock is recognized throughout town as the RAF’s favorite arrival time. Restaurants have started to time their service by this schedule, and cinemas have started adjusting their showtimes.

As the minute hand closes in on the hour, she realizes that she is holding her breath. Holding it, and then she exhales as she feels the surge of the sirens vibrate through her bones and settle in the pit of her belly.

From behind her comes the scrape of her mother-in-law’s chair. The old lady has been sitting over her coffee with a sour-smelling cigarette, still enforcing the silence that has regulated their mealtime. They have not spoken beyond the most basic mechanics of communication since the incident with the letters, but now she hears the old woman say, “What are you doing?”

“Doing? I’m doing the dishes.”

“Don’t be stupid. There’s a raid on. Dishes will wait. Go see to the fuse box.”

“No. I don’t think so. I’m tired of hiding in a hole.”

“Oh, yes. Always the selfish one. What she’s tired of doing. Might it occur to you that if a bomb falls on your head, that there would be consequences for others?”

“I’m sure you’d manage somehow.”

“Perhaps. But what about my son? Wounded. Confined to a hospital bed in some godforsaken corner. Don’t you think he has the right to come back home to the woman he took for his wife, however misguided that decision might have been?”

“If a bomb falls on my head, Kaspar can come home to you,” Sigrid hears herself say. “Which is how you’ve always wanted it anyway.”

The old woman scowls. “It’s illegal. You can’t simply choose to stay out of the shelter.”

Still scrubbing at the dishes in the dirty water. “Yet that is what I’m doing.”

“I could have the Hausobman up here to haul you down.”

“I’ll bolt the door shut.”

“Then he’ll break it in.”

“I doubt it. The door is private property. The landlord would be unhappy at having to replace it. Besides, can you imagine the grist that scene would give to the gossip mills? At your expense, I might add.”

Mother Schröder reverts to silence long enough to digest that possibility. Then, “Fine,” she blurts. “Let the Tommies blow you to pieces. I won’t shed a single tear for stupidity.” The old woman marches to the door and begins bustling with her coat and hat.

“Don’t forget your sewing bag,” Sigrid tells her at the door. Noise drifting up as Frau Granzinger evacuates her brood. Her mother-in-law snatches the bag out of her hand, and exits without giving her a look. But she does receive a look from Fräulein Kessler, who is just leaving her flat. It is against regulations to lock your flat during an air raid, in the event that the Hausobman must get in to fight a fire. But just to reassure Sigrid perhaps, the Fräulein leaves the door standing ever so slightly ajar.

THINGS MOVE QUICKLY. Sigrid can hear the muffled drone of bomber engines in the sky and the thudding under-beat of pom-pom guns as she slings open the building’s front door, and Egon bursts into the foyer and dashes up the stairs. She hurries to catch up, the sound of their footsteps out of sync, filling up the stairwells as they climb.

“Number 11H,” she tells him.

But Egon hangs back. “You go in first. If there’s still someone inside, you can make excuses. I could only look like a looter.”

She budges the door open. No one is inside. Only the furnishings of the Frau Obersturmführer’s model National Socialist flat. She nods to him to enter. When she clamps the door shut behind them, he is standing with his back to her in front of the bronze portrait of the Führer.

“She’s a Nazi?” he asks, with an oddly distant curiosity.

“No. It’s a complicated story.”

He shrugs. Turns away from the plaque and faces her. “Everyone’s story is complicated,” he says, and shrugs off his overcoat. Then looks up at the ceiling. Above them, the rumble of the bombers is getting louder as she allows him to unbutton the front of her blouse. Then pulls her down. On the floor, her skirt is up, and he has her naked below. He has exposed her to the ghosts of the flat. Frau Remki laying her grief down on her deathbed before seizing up with the convulsions. Her boy, a child again, giggling gleefully as he chases a ball around the room, long before he would grow to be a soldier and be blown to smithereens. The ghosts in the flat, the ghosts in her mind. Ericha, watching, staring as Sigrid’s back arches, her own body falling victim to convulsions, but in Sigrid’s case, the convulsions of rapture. Ericha staring from the shadows of Sigrid’s mind. And Frau Weiss. Frau Anna Weiss, gently shielding her children’s eyes from the scene on the floor. Gazing at their coupling in silence from the dim recesses of Auntie’s secret room, while above them, the thunder of war shakes the window glass.

Total War follows her everywhere. Military marches play continually from the loudspeakers strung up in public squares. Sigrid is deaf to them. She is desperate. Desperate to touch him. He has been in hiding in the flat for three nights. Three nights of lying in her bed alone, with Egon across the hall, as unreachable as if he were across an ocean. But tonight, Carin Kessler has promised to take a walk before supper and give her a precious thirty minutes alone with him.

First, however, she must obtain a certain item that they have run short of.

She thinks about this item as she’s coming down the steps, on her way to work. Condoms are difficult to come by, at least if you’re a female civilian. The Party frowns on contraception. It wants more babies, more good German babies, armies of babies.

The Wehrmacht, however, issues them to the troops by the meter. Every soldier carries them. Wolfram had a pocketful, considered “standard equipment.” But not so for U-boats. Not so for Jews in hiding. Egon had organized a small supply from somewhere. Who knows where? She never asked. But it was only a handful, which they have exhausted.

“You know it’s illegal,” she hears. It’s Portierfrau Mundt dressed in her apron, clutching a broom in her hand at the doorway to the concierge flat.

Sigrid turns, hand on the handle of the foyer door. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s illegal to stay out of the shelter when there’s a raid. So where were you, Frau Schröder? Where exactly were you when Tommy paid us a call?”

She lifts her eyebrows. “My mother-in-law didn’t say?”

“What she said was, Don’t ask me. I believe her exact words were ‘As far as I’m concerned, I have no daughter-in-law.’”

“We had a row,” Sigrid replies. “I left the house.”

“And where did you go?”

“Walking. I was angry.”

“Walking where?”

“What?”

“Walking where, Frau Schröder? The moon? You must have been walking somewhere.”

“Not the moon.”

“Don’t be arrogant, this is a serious matter.”

“No, Frau Mundt. I think it’s not a serious matter. I had an argument with my mother-in-law. Surely that is not illegal. I was upset and went for a walk. Surely that is not illegal. When the bombers came I went into the Uhlandstrasse U-Bahn tunnel. And certainly that is not illegal.”

“I see. So you have an explanation up your sleeve, as usual. Such a smart woman you are. But tell me, then, Frau Schröder, if you were out gallivanting, as you say, why don’t I recall seeing you return before I bolted the door for the night?”

“I can’t explain the world for you, Frau Mundt,” Sigrid tells her, on edge. “Now, if you don’t mind, I cannot be late for work. That, I believe, is illegal.” She turns away, but then a pinch stops her as Mundt literally seizes her arm. The woman’s eyes are violent. “I haven’t finished with you, Frau Schröder. You’ve got my back up. I know that you have been cooking up something with that little rag from the Labor Service. Oh, yes, I know all about what she’s been up to.”

“What do you know?”

And now a smug face. “You think that the Gestapo comes into my building, and I don’t know the reason why? She’s a black marketeer, and probably a thief to boot. God knows what she’s looted from the Granzingers’ place. And you, Frau Schröder. I can’t explain it yet. But I know that you are her accomplice.”

“That’s a lie.”

“I doubt it.”

“Is that what you told the Gestapo?”

“Nervous? You should be. But no. I don’t need those dunderheads to do my work for me. Men are still men, even in the Geheime Staatspolizei, and I can do quite well without their interference in my business.”

“Your business.”

“My building, Frau Schröder. Mine. You think you’re protected because your husband’s serving, or because my lout of a man wants to squeeze those fine titties of yours? You are not protected. My husband is all mouth. When he wants his dirty work, he has his whores in the Augsburger Strasse to sate him. And as far as the Party is concerned, a man’s military record does not protect his wife. If the wife deserves punishment, it will be meted out. I can promise you that.”

“And is that the same promise you made to Frau Remki, before you denounced her?”

“Remki?”

“Yes, I’m sure you recall the lady whom you drove to suicide.”

“Ah, so that’s what you think, is it? Well, you might be interested to know that you have it wrong. I did no such thing.”

“You did. She may have died by her own hand, but it was only to avoid the punishment you called down on her head.”

“No. I mean, Frau Schröder, it was not I who denounced her. Oh, I rang up the Party office, of course, but only to find that someone else had beaten me to the punch.”

“What? You’re lying.”

“You think so, do you? Well, why don’t you ask your mother-in-law if she agrees with you?” Mundt says with venomous satisfaction. “Why don’t you ask your dear Mother Schröder if I’m lying?”

Sigrid stares dumbly into the hatred flattening Mundt’s face.

Then comes the Hausobman’s bark from inside the concierge flat.

“Women! Quit your gabbin’, will you? You’ll wear out your jaw. A man wants his eats while they’re hot!”

Mundt maintains her stare. “Keep your tongue in your mouth, old man,” she calls back over her shoulder. Then she forms her mouth into a smirk. “Good day, Frau Schröder. And Heil Hitler.”

SIGRID FINDS A SEAT on the Elektrische, and watches the rain-dampened street pass by in gray shadows of concrete and granite, asphalt and slate. The tram’s noise permeates her bones, and she sits, feeling drained, thinking of her mother-in-law lugging Frau Remki’s wireless into the room. The spoils of betrayal.

At the next stop, there are no more seats, so she stands to let a young pregnant woman sit. The woman smiles her thanks. Her face is pasty white. Her hair sticking out from a wool cap, dry and brittle. Her lips colorless. The child inside consuming her, the little cannibal. Sigrid looks away, staring at the nothingness through the window. For a moment she sees Ericha in her mind’s eye, and feels suddenly quite lonely, as the tram sparks along on its track.

THERE IS NO midday break today, by order of Herr Esterwegen. His contribution to Total War. It makes it more difficult for Sigrid. She meets Renate at the filing cabinets.

“So I have fulfilled your supply requisition, Frau Schröder,” Renate says, suppressing a grin.

Sigrid forces up a small smile in return. “Thank you. Where are they now?”

“In my purse. Shall I create a diversion? Shout fire, perhaps?”

“Leave them in the WC.”

“I feel like a master criminal. Dropping the loot.”

“Yes. It’s quite the conspiracy, isn’t it?”

“You know, this is really the man’s job. You should educate him.”

“It’s hard for him,” Sigrid explains.

“Whatever you say, Liebling. I suppose it makes no difference, as long as it stays hard for you.” Renate smirks.

They look like wrapped candies. Condoms stamped into white cellophane with the brand name Odilei in a red oval. A long snake of them, curled into an old tin of tea leaves, now in Sigrid’s bag.

When she walks up the steps to her building, Mundt shoves up her window.

“Frau Schröder,” she calls.

“Not now, Frau Mundt, please, I have nothing more to say to you.”

“Well, we’ll see, Frau Schröder. I simply wished to alert you to the surprise waiting for you.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“The surprise, Frau Schröder,” Mundt repeats, with a hint of mockery. “I’m talking about the surprise waiting for you in your flat.”

But before Sigrid can muster a response to this, the front door opens, and out steps Carin Kessler in a long coat and brimmed felt hat, toting her handbag.

“Ah, Frau Schröder. So glad to see you,” she says, grinning stiffly. “I just met your husband.”

Sigrid feels the blood drain from her face. “My husband?”

“I knocked on your flat to invite you to join my walk, but when the door opened it was he.”

Sigrid’s mouth opens, but all her words have dissolved.

“I’m going out, so is there anything you need?” Carin asks her. “Any errand I can run?”

“Errand?” Sigrid repeats blankly. “No. No, thank you, Fräulein Kessler. Not as of now.”

“Very well. I shan’t keep you, then. I’m sure,” she says, with a hint of command in her voice, “you must be very happy.”

SHE CLIMBS THE FOUR FLIGHTS as if climbing the steps of a gallows. At the door to her flat she stops. She can hear voices on the inside. Mother Schröder gabbling, her normal curmudgeonly tone stripped away. And then the voice of a man. The man to whom she is married.

She looks away to the door across the landing. Only a few steps away. Nothing but that pine door separates her from Egon. Slowly she takes a step toward him. She almost grasps the door handle, but then stops. Her hand will not allow her to do it.

When she enters her flat, it is as if she has walked into someone else’s life. Talk ceases. Her mother-in-law is ladling out soup, but the grin she is wearing dies. The man seated at the table turns his head. He is so much thinner now. His jaw angular, honed like the blade of a knife. All the boyishness from his face has been rubbed off. The uniform he wears looks baggy on him. He stands slowly with a scrape of his chair on the floor, and faces her. And in his eyes, she can see the gun sight aimed at the world. He forms his mouth into a smile as he takes a slightly halting step toward her.

“Hello, wife,” he says. “Your husband is home.”