City of Women

FIFTEEN

SHE CAN BARELY STAND the happy faces at the patent office. All those smiling wives in the stenographers’ pool, so gleeful for her. Her husband has returned. She has a man again. What’s it feel like? It must feel good. Sly looks, sly laughs. You must bring him by this Sunday. Yes, you simply must. She has a man in a world of women, and they want to parse him up. They want to claim a helping of him, as if he were a one-pot Sunday stew. Sigrid grits her teeth.

At the filing cabinet Renate sneaks a moment. She bites her lip and whispers anxiously, “So how is it?”

Sigrid shakes her head tightly. “Very strange. I don’t know. He’s been away so long. At least it seems so.”

“Has he recovered?”

“What?”

“From his wound?”

“He has a bit of a limp. I… I don’t know how long it will last. If it’s permanent.”

“He hasn’t said?”

“He hasn’t said much of anything.” She shoves a folder into the cabinet and picks through the tabs for another. “In fact, what he doesn’t say is enormous. He carries what he doesn’t say like a full field pack on his back.”

“And… uh”—Renate glances around—“did you welcome him home?” she asks, her voice uncharacteristically sheepish over the subject.

Sigrid answers like a good soldier: “I was on bedroom duty, if that’s what you mean.”

“Was it good?”

A small frown. “It’s been a long time. Things were,” she says, and then shakes her head. “Things were awkward. Honestly? It was as if we were strangers.”

“And what about your friend?” Renate whispers.

Sigrid plucks a file from the drawer and rolls it shut. “What about him?”

“What are you going to do?”

She pauses, and then answers truthfully. “I don’t know.”

THAT NIGHT AT SUPPER, Mother Schröder is buoyant. She is yammering on, an old bottle of plum brandy uncorked on the table. Full of stories of her son’s childhood, all of which, of course, reflect her own sterling maternal abilities. If she notices that Kaspar is growing bored, she pretends not to, though perhaps it is implicit in the way she continues to try to bribe him with “real coffee,” with another “man’s share” of the sausage, specially purchased in his honor, with the remains of the packet of “real cigarettes.” But he resists as she tries to insert the packet into the breast pocket of his tunic. “Stop it, Mother. I have my own goddamned cigarettes,” he announces. Mother Schröder looks as if she has been struck with a fire iron. Kaspar tempers his tone. “Those are yours. You keep them,” he instructs.

In the silence that follows, he stands. “Thank you for dinner,” he says, and solemnly limps over to the coat hooks.

“Where are you going?” his mother demands, stricken.

“Out for a while,” he answers simply, shuffling on his soldier’s greatcoat.

“And when will you be back?”

He buttons his coat closed. “Later” is all he says. Slipping on his field cap, he limps out the door. The thump, as he closes it behind him, occupies the room. Till suddenly, Mother Schröder’s voice is like a saber that she wings at Sigrid’s head.

“You did this!”

“What?”

“This is your doing. You’ve been trying to turn my son against me for years, and now you’ve finally managed it.” Clattering her dishes together with Kaspar’s, the old lady marches toward the sink, leaving behind a bloated silence. Slowly, Sigrid piles her flatware atop her single dish and stands.

LYING IN BED, she replays in her mind the sight of the SS herding Jews into the rear of their lorry, and she feels a greasy shame fill her belly. Not just shame over how good Germans could be doing this. Not just shame over her simpleminded denial of “politics” for so long. But also because of the little story that is flickering through her head. A telephone call would do it. If the SS were suddenly to sweep Frau Weiss and her children from Sigrid’s life, then they would be swept from Egon’s life as well. She would be free of them. He would be free of them. A telephone call to the local Party office would do it, quite easily. I know where there are Jews hiding.

For an instant she stares at the possibility, as if it has taken form outside her head, like an ugly spider dangling above her from a silvered thread. Could she do it? And if she could, how does a person go about her life after such a crime?

When the door to the flat opens, she feels her body tense. She waits. Listens to the aimless shuffling of boots over the drone of the old woman’s snoring. A hinge creaks. The toilet flushes. And then the door to the bedroom squeaks open in the darkness. She hears the clump of his boots and then Kaspar’s body flops down on the bed beside her. The smell of the schnapps is strong. A moment stretches out before either of them moves. They lie like corpses beside each other.

“I am not what you expected,” he says finally.

“It seems so long,” she breathes. “It seems like many years have passed.”

“Yes, time is strange. A five-minute wait before the order to attack can be an eternity. While five hours of combat will pass in a blink,” he says. And then: “I won’t ask you if you’ve been faithful. At the front, there are men who can’t stop talking about how they’re going to murder their wives for infidelity, but honestly I don’t care. We’ve all done what we have done, and there’s nothing for it.” He fumbles with a packet of field-issue cigarettes and lights one up, the sharp smoke mixing with the stink of the schnapps. “You know, the army runs field brothels for the front-liners,” he says. “Whores shipped in from the Warthegau. They set them up in tents, with blankets draped between the cots. Once we’re queued up, the company sergeant hands out small cans of disinfectant spray, and we’re required to spray the disinfectant onto the whore’s genitals before intercourse. If we don’t, and we come out with a full can, we get punishment duty.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I just want you to know the truth, Sigrid. I don’t want any lies between us.”

IN THE MORNING, she cannot help but knock on Carin Kessler’s door. But she gets no answer. So she scribbles a note on a slip of stationery from her purse, I must see you, and slips it under the door.

But as she starts down the steps, she hears the lock turn behind her, and the door to the flat floats open. She feels her breath constrict. When she enters the flat, she finds Egon heaped in a chair.

“I understand your man has returned,” he says thickly, “from the front.”

She has closed the door behind her, but the wall of Egon’s gaze stops her from approaching him. “Yes” is all she answers.

“You must be very proud.”

“Egon.”

“Have you asked him,” he inquires, “have you asked him how many Jews he’s murdered?”

“Please don’t.”

“Don’t?”

“Please don’t do this.”

“I’m just curious. Did he have a guess? A hundred Jews? Two hundred? Or were there just too many to keep count?”

“He is not a killer, Egon. Only a soldier.”

“Well, what do you think a soldier is, Frau Schröder, but a killer in a uniform?”

“He was wounded. In battle. He did not murder Jews.”

“And how in hell do you know? Have you asked him? Have you said, Excuse me, husband dear, but do you recall slaughtering any kikes while in Russia?”

She stares back at him. He drains the last drops of whatever’s in the glass he’s holding. “The truth is, Frau Schröder, that you don’t know what your husband has done. Whom he has killed or not killed. And the still greater truth is, you don’t want to know.”

“This is not my fault,” she breathes. “You are blaming me, but this is not my fault.”

“It’s not my fault that I have a circumcised putz,” he tells her. “But the Greater German Reich still blames me for it. Life is not about what is fair.” He raises the glass again but, finding it empty, tosses it onto the carpet and watches it roll away. “Don’t believe me?” he says, and gestures toward the bronze Hitler relief over the mantel. “Ask him,” he instructs. “The Führer and I, we understand this. You must live with a stranglehold on the world.”

“I have to go to work,” she says. “I’ll be back. Tonight.”

Egon only shrugs. “I’ll be here. A rat in its trap.”

THERE’S A CROWD at her tram stop, waiting not so very patiently for passengers to climb off so they can clamber aboard. Those with manners wait, those without manners try to push through. When a stout Berliner in a gray coat and black trilby hat bumps into her, she doesn’t immediately recognize him. “My apologies, gnädige Frau,” the man mumbles, then picks up an envelope from the sidewalk. “I think you dropped this,” he says, forcing the envelope into her hand before shoving past her.

She doesn’t open it until she arrives at the office. Until she closes the door of the second-floor WC and tugs the bolt into place. Inside the envelope is a single sheet of paper. Bahnhof Zoo, it reads. Under the clock. 6:00 this evening. After she reads it, she crumbles it into a ball and flushes it down the commode.

At six o’clock, as the city is streaked by a bright violet twilight, she approaches the blind man. “A coin in memory of our sacred dead?” he rasps. Sigrid drops groschen into his cup. “Bless you,” he says, then his voice drops a notch. “She’s in the station’s café.”

INSIDE, the loudspeakers are booming out “The March of the Paratroops.” The trumpets sound tinny, the voices of the military chorus brassy and warped bouncing off the tiled ceiling. She sees the stout Berliner in his gray coat and black trilby smoking a cigar while getting his shoes shined by a young bootblack. He does not afford her a look, but a short, muscular taxi driver, with tough eyes, silvering hair, and a deep scar cut across his cheek, lowers his copy of the 12-Uhr-Blatt long enough to give her a nod. She follows his nod, and sees Ericha sitting at a table by the sandwich kiosk. She is surprised when the girl jumps to her feet and hugs her. Surprised at how good it feels to hug her back. “How I’ve missed you,” she hears herself say.

Ericha breaks away. Hurried Berliners march past them to catch their trains. “We must sit down. There isn’t much time.”

“I WAS FRIGHTENED,” Sigrid says with only a small splinter of rebuke in her voice. “You simply vanished.”

“I had to.”

“Without a word to me.”

“There was no time. I was forced to move quickly. The Gestapo came to your door?”

“My door. Everyone’s door.”

“Then it was better for you that you didn’t know what was happening.”

“So tell me now.”

A lift of her eyebrows. “I was warned that they were coming for me. Nothing more than that.”

“Someone turned you in? One of your contacts?”

“Or I made a mistake. Or both,” she says. “Only the Gestapo knows.”

A whistle, just a few notes, from the taxi driver. Sigrid glances discreetly. “Is that a signal? What does it mean?”

“It’s nothing, don’t worry.”

“Who are they?” Sigrid asks. “These men of yours. The fellow in the black trilby, the taxi driver, and the blind man who can see?”

“Comrades, that’s all. From no common background. The taxi driver was once a thief. He spent ten months in Oranienburg before the war, and the Brownshirts gave him his scar as a souvenir the day he was to be released. The blind man? He used to be an actor for the State Theater, until he refused to divorce his Jewish wife.”

“Is she in hiding, too?”

“Hiding in the grave,” Ericha answers plainly. “When she received her evacuation letter from the jüdische Gemeinde, she hanged herself. So you can imagine he has his reasons for what he does.”

“And what about the man in the trilby getting his shoes shined? Does he have reasons?”

“Do you?” Ericha asks.

“All right. I get the message. No more questions.”

But Ericha answers her questions anyway. “He’s just an ordinary man, really. I know him as Franz. He runs a heavy goods delivery business in the Barn Quarter. But he believes in right and wrong, that’s all. Those are his reasons.”

“He’s very protective of you.”

“He’s appointed himself as my guardian,” she says with a bit of irony. But then the irony leaves her voice. “I really couldn’t do without him.” She recedes slightly and takes a sip of coffee, holding the cup with both hands. Then leans forward by a centimeter. “There’s something I must ask you. Something I must be sure of. You’ve never told Auntie your name, have you?”

“My name? No.”

“You’re sure? Never in passing?”

“No,” Sigrid repeats, her eyebrows arching. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Because,” Ericha answers, “Auntie’s been arrested.”

“Arrested.” Sigrid feels her breath shorten.

“They came for her at her brother’s flat.”

“But her brother’s in the Party. Couldn’t he do something? Try to protect her?”

“We suspect it was her brother who denounced her. They took her first to the Gray Misery in the Alex for interrogation, and then transferred her to the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.”

“Ahh, my God.” Sigrid breathes out, her palm to her forehead. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. A well-known address in Berlin. Once it was an industrial arts-and-crafts school, but since ’33 it’s been the headquarters of the Gestapo.

“And what about”—an instinctive German glance interrupts her—“what about her guests?”

“They’re safe, if that’s what you’re asking. We were lucky. Auntie was doing the bookkeeping for her husband’s old partner, who apparently was running a swift trade in black-market cigarettes. That’s why the Sipo picked her up. They ransacked the place, of course, but they were looking for ledger books, not for Jews hiding in the attic.”

Sigrid feels the knot in her belly ease. “So, you moved them?”

“Temporarily. But we had to divide them up. And we lost the old man,” she says.

“Lost him?”

“There was a place in Charlottenburg, a woman whose father had died in an air raid, who agreed to take him for a few nights. I had him on the S-Bahn with me, when, just past the Knie, he made a kind of muffled noise and simply slumped against my shoulder. I knew of course that he was dead,” she says. “His heart gave out, I suppose.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I got off at the next stop.”

“And left him there?”

“Old men drop dead in this town every day. Someone took care of him. Gave him a good German burial. Besides, I had other problems. The man Kozig, for instance,” she says, pressing two fingertips to her upper lip in a mock Führer mustache. “Full of demands as usual. He must have this, and we must do that. But he’s stuck in a rabbit hole for now.”

“And Frau Weiss?”

“Frau Weiss?”

“The woman and her children.”

“They’re safe,” Ericha tells her succinctly. “You call her Frau Weiss?”

“I know. Against regulations, but one night I asked. She’s Viennese.” She sees the face of Frau Weiss and her little daughters inside her head, as if they were sharing the table with them. Egon’s wife and Egon’s children. Her secret duty and secret leverage. “How safe?”

“After the last raid, six hundred people were bombed out of their homes. Something you won’t read in any of the newspapers. So I found a shop in the Berliner Strasse where typewriters are repaired, and while the clerk was in the back room, I filled out the bombing victim’s pass.”

Paying the bootblack, the man in the trilby clears his throat with gusto and dusts ash from his cigar. Ericha glances at him. “We’re running out of time.”

“Why? What’s going to happen?”

“It’s unwise to stay in one place too long. Auntie may be a warhorse, but the Gestapo torturers are experts. We must assume that her endurance and our luck will have limits. Who knows what she might tell them? What she might have already told them.”

“Isn’t there something we can do for her? Someone we can bribe?” Sigrid asks, but Ericha only shakes her head.

“Not at the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. We cannot afford that level of corruption. No. The Gestapo have her and there’s nothing for it. Maybe there’ll be time for mourning when the war’s over, if any of us are left. But for now we can only keep moving.”

“And that means?”

“There’s a Reichsbahn superintendent at Anhalter Bahnhof named Zimmermann,” Ericha says. “If I pay him enough, he can provide tickets from Berlin to Lübeck.”

“Lübeck? You think they’re not arresting Jews in Lübeck, too?”

“There is a freighter under Swedish registration that will take them to Malmö. But that costs money, too. A lot of money. So we’re scratching for it. Everything we have is invested in the ship’s passage, and we’re still coming up short. That’s one of the things I’d hope you might be able to help with.”

“Money?”

“Is there anything you can sell? Some jewelry, perhaps. Clothing? There’s a market for good clothing. Especially men’s clothing.”

“Men’s?”

“Your husband. Are there any of his shoes in your closet?”

“Ericha, you should know,” Sigrid suddenly says, “my husband’s come home.”

An uncertain stare. “Your husband.”

“Yes. He was wounded.”

“And what does this mean?”

“Mean?”

“You have a tone in your voice that makes me very anxious. Does it means that we can no longer count on you?”

“No, that is not what it means.”

“Is that what you came here tonight to tell me?”

“No. I just thought you should know.”

“You haven’t said anything, have you? Told him anything?”

“My God, of course not.”

“One wrong word, Sigrid, and we’ll all be joining Auntie in the cellar of the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.”

“I am aware of that, Ericha. You needn’t lecture me.”

“What else?”

“What?”

“What else? There’s something else that you’re not saying.”

Sigrid pulls her scarf down from the back of her head and takes a breath. “There’s a man,” she starts.

“I knew it. I knew it the moment I saw you together at the door to the building.”

“No. Not him. You must button your mouth and listen to me for a change.”

Ericha’s gaze contracts, but she goes silent.

“A man who once…” Sigrid says, but cannot seem to untangle the rest of the sentence in her head. “We were lovers.”

Ericha gazes at her. “Were?”

“Were. Are.” She shrugs. “He’s a Jew. I’ve been helping him. Hiding him.”

A silence from Ericha that causes Sigrid to turn her head. She finds the girl gazing at her with a shade of gray uncertainty.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” the girl asks, perhaps a little wounded.

“Because I thought you’d react exactly as you did.”

Ericha looks away. Shakes her head. “I don’t believe that. I could have helped,” she says. “I think you wanted him all to yourself.”

“Yes,” Sigrid admits. “That’s right.”

“So. Your husband’s return must have been quite an inconvenience,” she observes blankly. “What are you planning on doing with him?”

“I don’t know. He says he needs better papers. He has a Labor Front membership book, but needs something to travel on.”

“And are you going to be traveling with him?”

Brow knitting. “Am I what?”

“You said he’s your lover. I make the assumption. Are you leaving with him? Is that your plan?”

“No. No, Ericha,” Sigrid whispers. “I’m not going anywhere, and I’m not going to abandon you. You must believe me.” But before the girl responds, a tin cup rattles its coins beside them.

“Remember the veterans’ sacrifice?” the man requests. Then, “Ordnungspolizei coming in,” he warns in an undertone.

Ericha quickly drops a coin in the cup.

“Bless you for your kindness,” the man tells her, then shoves off, tapping his cane. Behind him, two uniformed Orpo men enter the station. Franz immediately drops his head and jostles past them like any good Berliner in a hurry. It’s enough to make them stop and demand his papers.

“We must go. Right now.” Ericha stands and heads toward the doors. Sigrid must hurry to follow. She fires a cautious glance at the two Orpo patrolmen, frowning over the stout man’s identification as he impatiently chews the butt of a cigar. An ordinary man, who knows the difference between right and wrong. They make it out through the station’s bank of doors and into the night air without having to negotiate any hazards more dangerous than pushy Berliners late for their trains.

“Keep walking,” Ericha says. “No looking back.”

Sigrid fumbles to find her blackout torch and switches it on. Staring at the red beam, she asks, “Aren’t you afraid?”

“Afraid?”

“I am. I’m frightened all the time.”

“I have such terrible dreams,” Ericha says, nodding. “Huge machines tearing me to bits. I wake up from them, sweated to the skin, and then lie awake the rest of the night.”

Sigrid looks at the girl as they walk. “You look exhausted,” she says, but Ericha only shakes her head.

“It makes no difference.”

“I’ve missed you,” Sigrid tells her. “I’ve missed you quite a lot.”

Ericha gives her a glance. “Even with all those men about you? Lovers, husbands by the bushel?”

“Yes. Even so, Fräulein Kohl.”

“This is as far as we go together,” Ericha announces, dropping into her voice reserved for dispensing instructions. “When we reach the corner, I will turn left and you will keep going.”

“Where are you staying? Just tell me, please. I don’t want to lose track of you again.”

“You won’t,” Ericha assures her crisply. “Day after tomorrow at noon. I’ll meet you in the Tiergarten. There’s a bench by the Lutherbrücke. Good night, Frau Schröder,” she says. Reaching up, she pelts Sigrid with a kiss on the cheek, before veering away into the twilight of the street.

THAT NIGHT, the Deutschlandsender broadcasts the news from the East. In memory of their fallen comrades of the Sixth Army on the Don, the heroic fighting men of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler and Das Reich divisions advanced into the city of Kharkov with tanks and motorized grenadiers, and have now completely driven Bolshevik forces from their positions. The German soldiers fought indefatigably as house-to-house combat ensued. Tens of thousands of the Red Army foe have been killed. Tens of thousands more taken prisoner. When the German anthem follows the broadcast, Kaspar stares, then takes a moment to light a cigarette.

“What will happen now?” his mother asks him.

“What will happen?”

“You are the military man, my boy. Can’t you tell me?”

“Why, complete and unequivocal victory on all fronts, Mother,” he says, without bothering to smile. “Weren’t you listening?” Then standing, he leaves the room and heads into the WC, leaving Mother Schröder frowning.

KASPAR SLEEPS HEAVIEST in the morning. Sigrid has noticed this. For hours at night, he will toss about under the blankets, but around dawn, he drops off into a thick, corpselike slumber. While he snores, Sigrid climbs from bed and stares into his oaken wardrobe cabinet. He had been a fastidious dresser once, before the army. He wasn’t afraid of spending money on high-quality clothing, though he always pretended that clothes and styles were of little interest to him, and that it was only his position at the bank as an authorized signatory that demanded a certain way of dressing. But she can recall the way he would survey himself in the dressing mirror, adjusting his cuffs, inspecting the lines of his jacket, the seams of his trousers. The vanity reflected in his mirrored face.

The jackets and trousers draped neatly over their hangers are gabardine, English tweed, loden wool, pressed linen. Only a few neckties, but all are silk. His shoes are carefully polished. She brushes the dust from the toe of a pair and reveals a deep burnish that only regularly scheduled buffing can obtain. His current wardrobe, however, consists of a field gray Waffenfrock with a silvered tress on one sleeve that he calls piston rings, two pairs of army-issue breeches, three army-issue blouses, and one pair of hobnailed boots, with a finish of bootblack. A certain way of dressing dictated by the demands of his new posting as a staff clerk in a motor transport company. “A cripple’s job,” he calls it.

At breakfast, she pours him coffee, and listens to the gurgle as it goes into the china cup. “I’m sorry, it’s ersatz,” she tells him, but he only shrugs.

“As long as it’s hot,” he tells her. Then, while his mother is busy whipping batter by the sink, she says, “I’m thinking of donating some of your clothes. To the Winter Relief. Just some of the older things.”

“Fine. Take them all,” Kaspar answers without interest, glaring at the pages of a copy of Signal magazine. On the cover the Führer greets a Romanian officer who lost an arm fighting at Stalingrad. “None of them fit any longer,” he says.

That afternoon she feigns an illness. A stomach nausea that she describes to Fräulein Kretchmar as a thunderbolt in her bowels, a common complaint in a city fed on browning vegetables and chemical substitutes. And though Kretchmar views her skeptically, she permits her to leave work thirty minutes early. That allows her just enough time to make it back to the flat and pillage Kaspar’s wardrobe before his mother comes back from her weekly kaffeeklatsch at Oswald’s, and deposit them in Frau Kessler’s flat.

Carin Kessler has started leaving a spare key to the flat under the rubberized doormat. Sigrid inserts the key into the lock and twists it carefully, delicately. She must often battle the feeling that Frau Mundt’s predatory ears will be able to detect the tumble of the lock from the ground floor. But as the door slides open, she applies pressure on the handle, and the Portierfrau does not erupt from below in a National Socialist whirlwind. Instead, Sigrid pokes her head inside and finds Egon in a padded chair, staring at the wall.

Closing the door quietly behind herself. “I have clothes for you,” she says. “Pick out what you wish. They may be a little long, but they should do.”

Still staring at the wall. “They are your husband’s?”

“Yes,” she says.

“So now you’re dressing me up like a doll?”

Sigrid blinks angrily. “Why don’t you just shut up?” she asks him, which finally prompts him to look at her. “Such a typical Berliner, soaking in self-pity. Think, for a second, of all those without somewhere to hide. All those without someone to hand them clothes and bring them food.”

“All those poor kikes,” he says, “without a good Aryan to care for them. You’re right, Frau Schröder,” he concedes, his voice lacquered with acid, “I am an ingrate.”

She glares at him, hotly, but suddenly she cannot hold back the flood from her eyes. The tears overwhelm her as her legs go weak, and she drops to the carpet, unable to stand, unable to speak, unable to stop this sobbing. Then he is beside her. As his arms encircle her, she thinks for an instant that she wants to resist, but then she thinks she doesn’t, and folds herself into him. “I am an ingrate,” he whispers, but now it sounds like a confession.

SHE HAS ALREADY PUT on the water for the potatoes when Kaspar’s mother comes home, wearing her good hat and good wool dress under her coat.

Sigrid wipes the back of her hand across her cheek, as if the streak of a tear might still be visible, but her cheeks are dry now. “How was Oswald’s?” she inquires.

“Do you care?”

“No,” Sigrid answers honestly.

“Then why ask?”

“I understand that Frau Granzinger has been assigned a new duty-year girl.”

Hanging up her coat. “She has.” Tugging off her gloves and unpinning her hat. “A scrawny beanpole from the Rhineland. Why? Do you plan on ruining her as well?”

“Oh, so is that the verdict? I am the source of ruination?”

But her mother-in-law is through talking. She ends the conversation with a brusque wave as if swatting away a bothersome insect, and turns on the wireless in the living room. According to the Reichsfunk announcer, the Afrika Korps has made a strategic withdrawal from the Mareth Line in Tunisia to positions sixty meters to the north of the Tebaga Gap at Akarit. Also, for similar strategic reasons, the Ninth Army has completed its withdrawal from the city of Vyazma, west of Moscow.

“An interesting way of winning a war, advancing by retreating,” Sigrid hears herself remark. She hadn’t really meant this as a serious comment; it was just that the absurd euphemisms of the Propaganda Ministry had struck her as so ridiculous. And she certainly hadn’t meant to speak it aloud. But recently she has found herself simply too exhausted to keep her thoughts silent.

The comment, however, is enough to bring her mother-in-law blowing back in the kitchen like a fireball. “I will not have that!” she barks at Sigrid. “I will not permit defeatist talk in my house. My house, especially now that my son is home from honorably serving his Fatherland in battle! I rue the day that he married you. I knew it was a mistake then, and I can see now how right I was. So, I warn you, my good girl, one more remark like that, one more insult to the honor of our gallant Wehrmacht, and, daughter-in-law or no, I will have you up in front of the police!”

“Just as you did Frau Remki?” Sigrid shouts back.

Her mother-in-law’s back suddenly goes straight.

“Oh, yes.” Sigrid nods vigorously. “Mundt told me all about it.”

“So you’re listening to Mundt now?”

“We all made the assumption.”

“Assumptions are for fools,” her mother-in-law declares, retreating toward the kitchen.

“You knew that Mundt would happily take the credit, and keep silent about the truth.”

“Well, it doesn’t appear that she kept silent enough.”

“So you admit it?”

“Admit what? I’ve committed no crime.”

“It wasn’t Mundt who denounced Frau Remki, it was you. You!”

“And what of it?!” the old woman suddenly rails. “She was a traitor. She slurred the Führer’s name. Whatever she got, she deserved!”

“And what did you get? Her radio for a few marks. Was that worth her life?”

“She took her own life, if you recall. A coward to the last.”

At that moment, the door opens and in steps Kaspar. His entrance breaks the argument in half with a wedge of silence. He glances at both of them, then shrugs out of his greatcoat and limps over toward the sink, where he washes his hands, using the nub of a bar of lard soap beside the faucet. “How long till supper?” he asks.

Sigrid lights the burner under the pot of water. “I’m sorry, it’s late,” she says, sharply swallowing her fury. “Another forty minutes.”

He only nods and limps over to the kitchen table, where he sits and takes out his pipe. “Mother, do we have any matches?” he asks, digging the pipe’s bowl into a packet of army tobacco. “I’m out.”

“Matches,” the old woman repeats. Then, “Yes. I’ll get you some,” she answers solemnly. At the stove, she shoots Sigrid a stiff glare, but her anger does not completely hide a splinter of fear. Her son has come home from the war, alive, but she no longer recognizes him.