City of Women

SIXTEEN

A SPRINKLING OF RAIN COMES and goes restlessly in the morning, and by the afternoon is replaced by a damp, stolid breeze. Sigrid has made her journey to the bench in the Tiergarten at the foot of the Lutherbrücke, as instructed. As she sits, the breeze is riffling recklessly through the line of poplars as she observes the Berliner’s clip of Ericha’s slim, dark-clad figure crossing the bridge.

The child looks done in. Her face has been sharpened, depleted of its rounded girlishness. He eyes are shadowed and ringed with blue moons. The crystalline blue of her gaze is now flat and cloudy.

“You look terrible,” Sigrid tells her.

“I could say the same of you, Frau Schröder. You should look in the mirror,” Ericha replies, then shakes her head. “Sorry, that sounded much more harsh than I intended.”

“You’re not sleeping?”

“I’ve been on the move a lot.”

“On the move?”

“I catch a few hours here and there.”

Suddenly, Sigrid perceives an absence. She looks up and searches the area, but all she sees is an elderly couple propped against each other as they travel slowly down the path. “Ericha? Where’s your friend Franz?”

No answer.

“Ericha?”

“I told him to stay away from me for a while.”

“Stay away? Why?”

Again no answer.

“Ericha, what is going on?”

“I’m pregnant,” she answers suddenly.

Sigrid stares. Opens her mouth, then closes it again. “How… how can that be?” she finally manages.

“How can it be? You’re a grown woman. You must be familiar with the process. Do I really need to explain?”

“Ericha. You know what I’m saying. How did this happen?”

“As I said. You must be familiar with the process.”

“Who?” she demands.

“Does it matter?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Not to me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Listen to yourself. You sound like a typical hausfrau. What is there to understand? There was a man. He had what I needed. So I bounced him for it. That was it. That was the process.”

“Only now you end up with a baby in your belly.”

“You sound angry with me.”

“Angry?” Sigrid suddenly catches the pitch of her grandmother’s voice. “No. No, of course not. Of course, I’m not angry. I’m only, I’m only shocked. That’s all. Only shocked.” She swallows. “I’m sorry if,” she starts to say, but Ericha shakes her head.

“It means nothing. Honestly, I wouldn’t blame you if you were angry. I’m angry,” she says, pulling out a cigarette and poking one into her mouth. “I’m furious.”

The breeze blows past as Ericha cups her match to light up a cigarette. The smoke she exhales is whisked away. Finally, she says, “You remember the man named Johann?”

“Your forger? The man who nearly bowled you over in the middle of the sidewalk? He’s the father?”

“He was the man I fucked,” she corrects.

“And have you told him?”

Now Ericha releases something like a laugh. “Told him? No. No, I haven’t told him, Frau Schröder. Don’t be absurd. This has nothing to do with him.”

“Ericha, I know you have no feelings for him, but if you are carrying his child…”

“I’m carrying a tiny kernel in my womb, that’s all. A little speck. If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to me.” She expels smoke and watches it vanish. With her head turned she asks, “Have you ever had one done?” When Sigrid doesn’t answer her, she turns her head back. “Have you?”

Sigrid’s jaw has stiffened. “You mean… an abortion?” she asks. Then shakes her head once. “No.”

Ericha looks away. Takes another drag from her cigarette. For a moment she shivers. “Auntie used to do them long ago. She told me once. She was a midwife working in the factory slums. Delivering babies, yes. Also, other procedures for women. Sometimes after they’d been raped, but mostly after their husbands had knocked them up for the seventh or eighth time, and they just couldn’t do it again. But I can’t get to Auntie now, can I?”

“Is that what you want?” Sigrid asks her.

Ericha swallows. Shrugs. “What else can I want? Can you actually credit me as a mother? I mean, can you imagine it?” she asks. “Me pushing the pram? Me washing nappies? It’s laughable,” she says harshly, expelling wintry smoke. “Absolutely laughable.” Her cigarette is cheap and the tobacco goes out. “Shit,” she swears. But as she scratches another match to life, it trembles in her hand. And when the match is extinguished by an errant breath of wind, her façade crumbles to pieces, and long and terrible sobs seize her utterly. Sigrid clutches her without thought or hesitation. And as she keeps the girl enfolded in her arms, as if trying to keep her from flying into pieces, she thinks for a moment of herself: a motherless child standing at a graveside. Lost.

IT’S GROWING LATE. Dusk gathering above the treetops, darkening the branches. The cemetery warden is hesitant to let her in, but finally concedes to her obvious anguish. “Only a few minutes,” he warns, and opens the gate.

Kneeling atop her mother’s grave, Sigrid places her hand on the headstone. It is cold. Cold as the ground. Grossmutter had once announced that her mother had been unwanted. Sigrid was still young at the time, seated at the kitchen table with a bowl of black cherries. Still long-limbed and gangly, a scrawny scarecrow with a tousled mess of flaxen hair. Her mother, standing a few feet away, was washing a delicate porcelain bowl in the sink. Grossmutter had been across the table picking at Sigrid’s cherries like a poacher. Her face sharp and predatory, as always. One moment she was talking about how she couldn’t understand why young women these days were so intent on “keeping their figure,” and the next she was announcing that she has never intended to give birth to any more children after her third. “But then along comes your mother.” She’d frowned. “Completely unwanted, but there I was. Stuck with another mouth to feed. And back then,” she added significantly, “we didn’t have a choice, if you know what I’m saying. Back then if you had a baby coming, it came. And that was that.”

Suddenly there was a crash in the sink. The sound of fine porcelain shattering.

“Now, what have you broken?” Grossmutter demanded to know loudly.

“I’m sorry,” her mother answered, not turning around. “It slipped.”

As a girl, she had been angry with her mother at that moment. That she should be so clumsy. That she should break such an important bowl. That she was so weak in the face of Grossmutter’s bullying. By that age she had stopped defending her mother, and then after Grossmutter’s death, picked up the attack where the old lady had left off.

And when the cancer came, she remembers her mother lying on the horsehair settee, weak as an unstrung puppet, a frail collection of bones wrapped in a thin yellowing skin, pleading for some kind of mercy. And then she was gone. Bundled into the grave. Sigrid’s aunt Trudi had come to act as the chief nursemaid, boiling towels and administering old-fashioned remedies, though mostly she just clucked her tongue and shook her head at heaven. At the grave site, she told Sigrid, “At least your poor mother is finally at rest.” Sigrid nodded. What a relief death must have been for her.

WHEN SIGRID RETURNS to the flat she finds Kaspar laughing. There are two other soldiers with him at the kitchen table, hunched around a half-empty bottle of corn schnapps, and they are all laughing. It is the first time she has seen her husband laugh since his return.

He stands and steps toward her, grinning, and for an instant she tries to see the man she married, the smiling husband with whom she sometimes passed an easy Sunday afternoon at the lake. But the grin he wears looks more like a distortion of his face. “Ah, my devoted wife. Home from the Battle of the Stenographers’ Pool.” He doesn’t kiss her, but captures her in the crook of his arm and marches her beside the table. She resists the desire to turn away from the stink of schnapps on his breath. “Fall in, comrades,” he commands largely. “Salute the Victor of the Reichspatentamt!”

The men leap comically to attention, clicking their boot heels. One is short but built like a tree stump. His head is shaven, and a livid scar draws a crescent across his skull and chops off the tip of his left ear. The other is more like a tree trunk. Long-bodied with willowy limbs. He has no scars on his face, but his left hand, she notes, is shy three fingers. Both of them, like Kaspar, wear the onyx wound badge pinned to their ill-fitting uniforms beside the Ostmedaille, the Frozen Meat Medallion. “Frau Schröder,” Kaspar says, continuing his mock drill ground formality, “may I present Unteroffizier Kamphauser and Unteroffizier Messner, two of the best-preserved corpses in the army. Notice there’s very little decay. How lifelike they look.”

“Only because we’re pumped so full of formaldehyde,” the stubby one injects, triggering a generous round of guffaws.

“So very pleased to meet you, gentlemen,” Sigrid manages, slipping the strap of her bag from her shoulder, and freeing herself from her husband’s grip in the process. “Where is your mother, Kaspar?”

“Out somewhere,” Kaspar answers without interest. “At ease, comrades!” he commands, returning to the military bluff, refilling the trio of glasses on the table. “Time to regroup.” Sigrid prepares herself to decline an offer of a glass, but then no offer is made. She hangs up her coat, thinking of Egon’s hands on her skin. “Did your mother start the supper?”

“I really haven’t the slightest,” Kaspar answers.

“I see. Gentlemen, I assume that you are staying to eat?” she says dutifully, walking toward the kitchen stove, and picking up her apron. But Kaspar waves her off.

“No, no. Nothing special. Just some pickled beets,” he tells her, triggering another round of guffaws at some private Ostfront joke. Their drunken chumminess makes her feel suddenly claustrophobic. And all she can think of is Egon. In the kitchen, there are no pickled beets, but she does find cold fried potatoes and a bit of smoked herring. She quickly puts it on a plate, and drops it off on the table with three forks. “Good appetite, gentlemen,” she says. “Kaspar, I have an errand to run.” But Kaspar barely acknowledges her. By the time she has slipped back into her coat, they are singing a booming, hideously off-key version of “Lili Marlene.”

She steps into the foyer and closes the door behind her, muffling the noise of their chorus. From below stairs, she can hear one of Frau Granzinger’s kids screaming. But she is staring at the door of Carin Kessler’s flat. A quick German glance, before she tiptoes across, knocking carefully. “It’s me,” she whispers to the door, and the door swings open as if she has just uttered a password.

“Well, Hello, Frau Me,” the man in the threshold answers. But it is not Egon. It is Wolfram, in full uniform, silver wound badge, close-combat clasp, Ostmedaille, Iron Cross pinned under the breast pocket of his Waffenfrock, tricolor ribbon in his buttonhole. Garrison strap connected to his pistol belt. False leg with the glossy high boot attached. She steps back, fearfully, from the force of his eyes. “Come in,” he tells her. “We were just having a game.”

Without comprehension. “A game?”

“Yes. Your friend and I. Come in,” he says again, but this time it is more of a command. And when she does, she finds Egon seated on the sofa, dressed in his black mohair overcoat over a tweed jacket of Kaspar’s, and bent over a chessboard on the coffee table. He looks up at her with the blank concentration of a man defusing a bomb.

“I managed to avoid his Nimzo-Indian defense by conceding my bishops,” Wolfram explains, “but it’s left me limping into the middle game, if you’ll pardon the expression. He’s tricky,” he concludes, as he shuts the door behind them. “Very tricky. Can I get you a glass of bull’s blood?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Egri Bikavér. It’s Hungarian red from the Eger region.”

Staring into Egon’s face. “No. No, thank you.”

“It’s really not so bad,” Wolfram tells her. Marching with his cane over to the coffee table, he refills a pair of goblets by the game board. Fallen pieces litter its margin, knights, pawns, bishops. “Quite full-bodied. Don’t you agree?” he asks Egon.

“It’s your move,” is all Egon says in return.

Wolfram frowns lightly at the board. “Hmm. I see you are indeed a true disciple of the hypermoderns. Have you heard the story of how Nimzowitsch conceded the Immortal Zugzwang Game to Sämisch? He stood up and slapped himself in the forehead, shouting, ‘That I should lose to such an idiot!’”

“Wolfram,” Sigrid says thickly, but he raises his hand to halt her.

“Really, Frau Schröder, you cannot break my concentration if I am expected to have any chance to save my queen from a terrible fate,” he orders, with a touch of rawness, and knocks back a deep swallow of bull’s blood from his goblet.

“What do you want me to do?” Sigrid asks him desolately.

“Well, you could start by taking off your coat and sitting down like a human being.” He gives her only the shortest of glances, but she catches the gun sight. She thinks, for only a heartbeat, of the fish knife she keeps in her bag. She looks to Egon, but he is staring distantly at the pieces on the board. So she removes her coat and, like a human being, she sits, balancing herself on the edge of one of the Frau Obersturmführer’s padded club chairs.

“So I understand that my dear sister Carin has developed a big mouth,” Wolfram says, glaring at the pieces. “Has she not, Frau Schröder?” he asks, when Sigrid does not respond.

“She told me,” Sigrid answers tonelessly, “about your family.”

“Yes, a kike by any other name,” Wolfram says. “I was discussing it earlier, with our mutual chum here. By the way, if you’re feeling awkward, don’t,” he instructs her.

“Awkward?”

“That you’re sitting in a room with two men, both of whom you’ve fucked. We’ve discussed that, too. There are no secrets between the children of Abraham, you see.”

She looks to Egon for help, but he only offers her a blank glare and takes a swig of the wine.

“Are you,” she starts to say, but her throat dries up. “Are you going to call the police?”

“The police?” Wolfram squawks. “Why on earth would I do that? You know, that’s the trouble with you Aryan types. Always running to the police to solve your problems.” Thrusting a knight forward, he sits back. “There. My brilliant defense,” he announces, “Maybe I’ll do better than old Nimzo.” Opening his cigarette case, he picks one out and jams it into his mouth. “You know, my sister is very fond of you. Which is unusual, because Carin normally despises the world.”

“Yes, I’m fond—” she says, but her words are starting to choke her. “I’m fond of her, too.”

“Are you crying, Frau Schröder?”

Sigrid wipes her eyes. “I can’t,” she whispers. “I can’t play this game with you, Wolfram. Please just do what you’re going to do.”

“Well, I did do what I was going to do, Frau Schröder,” he answers. “I defended my queen from a brutal assault by my opponent’s rook.”

She shakes her head. “Please…”

Wolfram inhales smoke, and frowns archly at the board. “You need papers?” he asks Egon. “Correct?”

Egon looks up at him. She sees a lightning recalculation change his expression by the slightest measurement. “Correct,” he says, in a dead level voice.

Wolfram, nodding to himself as he peers at the pieces. “I can supply them.”

Egon’s gaze tightens. “And the cost?”

“I’m sure there’ll be a cost, but it won’t be in Reichsmarks,” Wolfram answers simply. Slouching to one side, he removes a neatly pressed handkerchief from the pocket of his breeches and offers it to Sigrid. “Here. A gift,” he says.

Sigrid accepts the offer. The handkerchief is monogrammed linen. She quickly wipes the remnant of tears from her eyes.

“I really can’t stomach tears,” Wolfram explains, then prods Egon gamely. “So are we playing or are we playing?” But when Egon doesn’t move, Wolfram expels a huff. “Very well, then, if I am to play both sides of this game, so be it.” He reaches over to Egon’s pieces and hooks the queen’s knight to a different square. “There. That is the proper response,” he declares.

Egon flicks his eyes at the board, then back up at Wolfram’s face.

“You think I hate the Nazis because of what they’re doing to the Jews?” Wolfram asks him. “I don’t. I hate them because they’re stupid. That’s their crime in my opinion. Just so you understand.”

“I understand,” Egon tells him.

“Do you?”

“I understand that you’re the man who can get me the papers I need.”

Wolfram’s assailing gaze recedes a millimeter. “Ah. A pragmatist. I should have guessed, by the way you play. Taking control of the center board from a distance, while fools rush in with their pawns. You have photographs of yourself?”

Egon reaches into an inner pocket. “These will do, I think,” he says, and offers a small paper envelope.

“How efficient you are,” Wolfram observes. “Quite an admirable quality. No wonder you can pass for a German.” He says this, but instead of accepting the offering, he swallows the remainder of his wine, forcing Egon to set the envelope beside the board, among the carnage of pieces. It’s more than Sigrid can take.

“Will you stop?” she pleads, her eyes smeared with tears. “Both of you, will you quit this, this warfare? It’s making me sick to my stomach. Just stop it.”

Silence. Egon suddenly stands. “I am going to the toilet. If you like, finish the game without me. I’m sure you’ll hold up my end quite effectively.” He says this and then walks out of the room, without giving Sigrid a glance. She sits in the silence he leaves behind, Wolfram’s handkerchief balled in her hand. Then comes the ring of the telephone. She looks at it. A sleek black Bakelite instrument. She looks at Wolfram, who is lighting another cigarette.

“Are you going to let it ring?” she finally asks.

“Do you think it’s someone important?”

“Shall I answer it for you?”

“Because I am an invalid? Please do.”

She stands, sniffing back the tears, the insistent ring scraping her nerves, and snatches the receiver. “Kessler residence, good day.” Then she places her palm over the receiver. “It is for you. A man asking for you by rank.”

“Which man?”

A blink. “May I ask who is calling?” she inquires into the receiver, then whispers. “Herr Oster.”

He holds out his hand without looking at her, and she hands over the receiver. His conversation is clipped. Suddenly, he sounds quite sober and military. “Kessler here, Colonel. Yes, sir, that’s correct. No, I shouldn’t think that would satisfy the gentlemen in Turkey.” He glares and then nods his head curtly. “Yes, sir, I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” And it’s over, without a single Führer salute, and he is prying himself off the settee with his cane. “I must go.”

Sigrid says nothing. At the door she tries to assist him with his greatcoat, but he resists. “It’s my leg that is missing, Frau Schröder. I still have both arms.”

“Wolfram, there is something I must tell you,” she says, and shoots a glance in the direction of Egon’s departure.

He follows her glance.

“There are more,” she says. “More than simply him.”

“Really? Are you making a business of it, Frau Schröder? Please, I won’t judge you if you are.”

An instant’s confusion, and then she shakes it off. “No. No. I mean more Jews,” she tells him.

Without expression. “Jews?”

“You are familiar with the term ‘U-boats’? I am part of a group who hides them.”

Still no expression. “For how long?”

A single-word answer. “Months.”

“And he knows this?” Wolfram says, nodding toward Egon.

“He doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I haven’t told him. No one knows unless they need to. That’s the way it works.”

“How convenient for you. So I am to assume there is a reason why I now know.”

“There are problems. The Gestapo have arrested one of our people. The woman in charge of our hiding place.”

“Then you’ve been compromised,” he concludes evenly.

“It’s a possibility,” she admits, but Wolfram shakes his head.

“No,” he instructs. “It’s a possibility that it will rain tomorrow, or it’s a possibility that a horse will talk. But if the Gestapo have this woman in custody, then it’s a certainty that they know what she knows. This is not a game for amateurs, Frau Schröder.”

“I’m not aware that it is a game at all, Herr Leutnant,” Sigrid replies with a glare. “Or is that all you’re interested in? Playing games? Is all this just another chess puzzle for you?”

“If it is, then you’d better pray that I am a better player than your friend. I would have trapped him in mate in three moves.”

“This isn’t about him. It isn’t about me.” For a moment, she holds the darkness in his eyes.

And then he says, “What is it you need?”

“Documents. We need documents.”

“Ah. The world needs documents.”

“And travel permits, too. Berlin to Lübeck.”

“And what is in Lübeck?”

“Ships.”

“Sweden?” he asks, and takes her silence as his answer. “A popular destination, though rather chilly this time of year. How many?”

She tells him.

“I’ll need photographs for them as well,” he says. “You can arrange that?”

“Photographs? Yes,” she answers tightly.

“No snapshots with the family Leica,” he warns. “Official standard-sized, full-face shots. No left ears showing, do you know what I’m saying?” By decree, Jewish passport photos always show the left ear. According to the common wisdom of the Interior Ministry, the left ear of a Jew betrays a Semitic shape.

“Yes. Yes, I understand. I know a professional.”

“Four different shots in four different outfits is best. They can’t appear as if they were all taken at once. Is it men or women?”

“Both.”

“All adults?”

“Two small children.”

“Small, as in infants?”

“No. Three and five,” she answers.

“And how many men?’

“Only one,” she says, picturing Herr Kozig, with his stringy hair combed over his bald head and his ridiculous postage-stamp mustache.

“Military age?”

“Late forties.”

“Is he the father?”

“No.” Only a fraction of hesitation. “Unrelated.”

“And how Jewish do they look?”

“How what?”

“How Jewish? I think it’s a simple question.”

“I don’t know. Not very.” Sigrid frowns. But then says, “Except, perhaps, the man.”

“Then try to get him in uniform. Any uniform, it doesn’t matter. The uniform will carry him.”

A flush of the commode rattles the pipes. Wolfram lifts his eyebrows. “As far at that one’s concerned,” he says with a shrug toward the inside of the flat, “I’ll get him some exemption papers. He can pass in a decent suit,” he says. “And am I correct in assuming he’ll need a Reisepass?”

“Yes” is all she says.

“So he’ll be traveling to Lübeck as well?”

She keeps her face under tight control. “Traveling, yes. But he has his own plans” is all she says.

“And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“You have no plans?”

“My plans are to continue day by day,” she answers.

“So you are the noble kriegsfrau, is that it?” he asks. “Sticking with you poor wounded husband back from the front?”

“No. ‘Noble’ is the last word to describe me, I think.”

“Good,” he answers, “because, I can assure you, nobility is nothing more than an invention of the living to eulogize the dead. The dead are not noble. They are simply decaying in their graves. And if you’re not very careful, Sigrid, that is what you will be doing,” he warns. “By the way, I should ask: What does you husband know?”

“What does he know? About my… my many escapades, you mean? He knows nothing.”

“Does that mean he doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to know?”

“It means I have said nothing to him.”

“Well. This may sound perverse, but perhaps you should.”

“And why should I do that?”

“Because, Frau Schröder, if you intend to continue in this line of work, and that seems to be your intent, you’re going to require your husband’s involvement. If not actively, then at least by implication.”

She doesn’t like the sound of that word. “Implication?”

“If he knows you’re hiding Jews,” Wolfram spells it out in a carefully direct tone, “but does nothing about it, he is then, by definition, implicated. He can’t change his mind later and decide to denounce you to the nearest Party member.”

“That would be his mother,” she says.

“Even better. If he opens his mouth, if either of them do and the Gestapo hauls you away, her standing with the Party will be destroyed. No question about that. In fact, it’s very likely that they’ll haul her away as well. And he could end up back at the front, but this time in a penal battalion with a red triangle on his sleeve, clearing minefields by the centimeter with a bayonet.”

The picture of this invades her head. She feels herself blanch.

“Now it’s you who look wounded.”

“It never occurred to me,” she says.

“That actions have consequences?” he asks.

“The danger in which I’ve placed Kaspar.”

Wolfram gazes at her. “We’re fighting a war, Sigrid. What else can you expect?” he asks. For a moment he simply studies her eyes. When he speaks again, his standard tone of irony has returned. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must suspend further conversation, gnädige Frau. Our Fatherland is calling me.” He puts his hand on the doorknob, but she stops him.

“Should I thank you?”

Returning to her face. “Why bother? As you said, it’s not about you.”

“Do you hate me?” she whispers.

“Because of him? No. Hatred is too valuable a quantity to waste. And if I’m disappointed,” he tells her calmly, “it’s only because I find most bedmates dull after the first time or two. But you, Sigrid Schröder, are very inventive in the sack. Quite unburdened by convention. Quite at home in your body.”

She stares at him. Somewhere in her, she knows, is the desire to touch him, but there is too much in the way for her to find it.

“I’ll be in contact,” he says, and slips on his peaked uniform cap. “In the meantime, I suggest you grow a pair of eyes in the back of your head,” he advises, then makes his way toward the stairs. “My sister will be back in an hour,” he announces over his shoulder as he negotiates the first steps downward. “In case you have an interest in her where abouts.”

When she returns to the flat, she finds Egon pouring more bull’s blood into his glass. “What did he say to you?” he asks.

“He said death is waiting for me.”

Egon gazes at her for a moment, unfocused, then lifts the goblet to his lips. “Death is waiting for us all,” he tells her. “It’s only a matter of timing and negotiation. I’ve taught myself to live with that in order to survive. You should, too.”

“How have you done it?” she asks starkly.

“Taught myself?”

“Survived.”

His eyes lift and suddenly they are as deep as mine shafts. Without bottom. “Luck,” he answers.

“No. No, you don’t believe in luck.”

He frowns. “There’s something I need you to do for me,” he announces, setting down the wine goblet.

“I’ve heard that before,” she observes as he removes his mohair overcoat, then unclasps a penknife. Draping his coat lining over his knee, he carefully cuts the stitching loose, and produces a velvet pouch. “There is a man in Schöneberg named Melnikov. He’s a Russian. A former tsarist, but now officially stateless. We did business together before the war. I want you to take something to him.” Opening the pouch’s string, he taps out the contents. Blue-white diamonds. They look like tiny fragments of a star in the palm of his hand. “He’s always in the market for decent stones.”

Sigrid stares at their light. “So I am to be your bagman again.”

He looks at her, waiting.

“How much are they worth?”

“Enough,” is all he says.

“I will do whatever you ask,” she answers him. “But if you expect me to make a deal with this man, I know nothing about such matters.”

“You don’t have to. Tell him that Grizmek has sent you to him. He’ll give you a good price.”

“And who is Grizmek?”

“Me. I’m Grizmek,” Egon answers, killing the last of his wine. “It’s the name I use for this sort of transaction.”

“And does this man Melnikov, does he know who you are, really?”

“Does anybody know who anyone is? Give me that handkerchief,” he tells her.

She obeys, and he opens it into a white square on the sofa next to him. She watches him set about selecting stones from the glimmer in his palm. “You’ve never said,” she breathes.

He affords her a cautious eye. “Said what?”

“Where you’re going.”

“West,” he answers, returning to his selection, holding one small stone up to inspect it in a bit of window light. “I have a contact in the Spanish diplomatic mission. A little man, with a big man’s title. For the right amount of cash, he will give me transit papers under any name I like.”

He knots the chosen stones into Wolfram’s handkerchief and offers her the small bundle, which she accepts. The diamonds feel obscenely light. Star breath.

“To Spain?” she says.

“To Madrid. From there I can make my way to Lisbon.”

She watches him return the unselected diamonds to the velvet pouch, and stick the pouch into the pocket of his trousers. “And from there?”

He lifts his eyebrows. Anywhere.

“What about your family? What about your wife and daughters?”

His eyes grow heavier. “I’m no good to them dead,” is all he says.

“And what about me?”

A breath. He combs his fingers through his hair. “What about you?”

“You haven’t said that you want me with you.”

“You are with me.”

“You know what I’m saying.”

“Do I, Frau Schröder?”

“I’m just curious how I’m fitting into your plan. Once the bedroom calisthenics are finished, that is.”

“My plan is to stay alive,” he answers. “Very simple.”

Sigrid gazes at him. “With or without me.”

“You want me to be your lover, Sigrid? I am your lover. You want me to make you happy? I cannot. You want me to complete you? I cannot. You want me to survive? You must help me. I can only offer you what I have. The rest is your choice.”

“Yes, I think I’ve heard that song before.”

“What do you want? That I proclaim undying love?”

“It would be a start.”

“It would be a lie. There is no such thing. You dress me up in your husband’s clothes,” he burns, yanking off Kaspar’s jacket. “You want me to play your husband. You want devotion and fidelity and all those things that, by the way, you yourself don’t believe in, and you want me to beg you to help me. The poor Jew, whom you finally have in your power.”

“It is not me,” she points out numbly, “who will be leaving.”

“Makes no difference.”

“I think it does.”

“So it’s ‘Come with me, Sigrid.’ That’s what you’re waiting for? If I say, ‘Give up everything and risk your life,’ you would do it?”

“I’ve already given up everything. I’m already risking my life.”

“So then come, if you wish,” he snorts. “Why should it be my decision?”

“You won’t ask me?”

“I am not responsible,” he bursts. “And I won’t be made responsible. Not for you, not for anyone but myself. That is the way God created me, so if you have a problem with that fact, take it up with Him.”

She stares back at him for a moment. So this is the way it will go. He will slip away to Lisbon. And Sigrid will be left to rescue his wife and daughters. Isn’t God humorous. She looks at the bundle of diamonds in her hand. Then looks at her watch and says, “Take off your clothes. We have an hour.”

AFTERWARD, he goes into the WC as she redresses. When he comes out in his skivvies, buttoning his shirt closed, he asks, “What are you doing?”

She has taken out Carin’s darning kit from its basket beside the settee, and is sewing up the hem of his coat lining. “I’m preserving your secret.”

“You’re what?”

“You left your little bag of treasure unprotected in your trouser pocket, so I’m sewing it back into your coat. See how even?” she says, displaying the freshly sewn lining. “No one will ever notice.”

He looks at her with a mix of satisfaction and suspicion. “So you are a seamstress. I never knew.”

“I have a question for you,” she says suddenly, freezing her needle in mid-stitch.

“A question?”

“What are the names of your daughters?”

She waits in the silence that follows, as if balancing herself on the point of the sewing needle.

“Is this a trade, Sigrid? You carry my diamonds, I answer your questions?”

“No. I simply think about such things. Imagine what their names might be.”

“Well,” he says, lighting a bitter-smelling cigarette from Carin’s silver table lighter, “then imagine I’ve given you an answer.”

In the morning, Kaspar is encamped in the toilet. It makes her run late.

“Sorry. It’s the Pervatin,” he explains blankly, walking into the bedroom in his undershirt and drawers. Pervatin, the little yellow stimulant tablets dished out to front-liners by the army to keep them alert. “It plugs you up.” He retrieves his uniform breeches draped over the back of the chair and steps into them. “It’s always challenging in the field. By November, the ground in Russia is too frozen to dig a latrine, so you just have to stick your ass out into the wind and grunt. Frostbite is not uncommon.”

Sitting on the bedside, slipping on her shoes, she pauses at that image. “So why do you still take them?”

Preoccupied. Lugging his arms into his army blouse. “What?”

“You’re not in the field any longer, Kaspar. You’re at home. Why are you still taking pills?”

“You never know, Ivan could be hiding in the pantry closet or in the wardrobe, ready for an ambush. I have to stay vigilant,” he says, and then shrugs off the joke when he sees she’s not laughing. “They keep me going,” he confesses drably. Picking one from a pillbox on the dresser, he swallows it dry. “You know? Otherwise I might just keep sleeping one morning.”

Unlike Wolfram, Kaspar has not been eager to show off his wound. Even in bed, even during intercourse, he keeps his body hidden under the covers, and he never undresses in front of her. She has seen it only once really. A flash of scar tissue below the left hip, as if he had been clawed. He never complains of pain, but she can see it in his face. As he sits at the kitchen table or walks down the stairs. The minuscule hesitation before a pinch in his expression. No cane, but something in him has been no less crippled.

“So. When we married,” she hears him ask, without any particular emotion in his voice, “did you love me?”

The question stabs her. She blinks at his silent face, and then answers. “I thought I did.”

“And now? Do you love me now?”

Meeting his eyes. “I don’t know.”

Turning away, stuffing the tail of his blouse into his breeches. “Oh, come now, Sigrid. That’s not a soldier’s answer. A soldier’s answer is ‘yes, sir’ or ‘no, sir.’”

“I am not a soldier,” she says. Shoving her foot into her other shoe, she tries to escape the room, but Kaspar seizes her elbow. “Remember what I said, Sigrid? No secrets between us. Only honesty.”

She gazes into the face of the stranger inhabiting Kaspar’s body. “I feel sympathy for you. I feel grief for you. But I don’t feel love,” she says.

“Is there someone else?”

Her lips part before she answers, “Yes.”

For an instant, she is unsure what he is going to do. Strike her? Throttle her? He looks as if he is standing on a precipice, gazing downward. But then he simply releases her arm. “Now you see,” he tells her as he flops down onto the chair to yank on his boots. “That wasn’t so difficult.”

She is frozen in place. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

“What else would you have me say?”

“Are you going to divorce me?”

“Is that what you want me to do?”

“You’re not even going to ask his name?”

“You sound disappointed. It’s your business, Sigrid,” he says, and stomps his heel into his boot. “Just don’t lie to me.”

SHE IS RUNNING down the corridor. The train was delayed at the postbahnof, and now she is late. The noise of flat-heeled shoes reverberating off the linoleum, bouncing off the walls, filling her ears. She flings open the door to the stenographic room, and is met by Fräulein Kretchmar, standing like a stone monument.

“I’m sorry, Fräulein Kretchmar,” she quickly pants, but then words stick in her throat. The expression on Fräulein Kretchmar’s face is sculpted by a dismal finality.

“You are to report to Herr Esterwegen’s office, Frau Schröder.”

Sigrid feels eyes in the room stick to her, then peel away. She glances at Renate, who telegraphs her a wet blink of panic before averting her eyes back to the keys of her typewriter.

Eyes continue to follow her in the standard covert fashion as she passes through the lobby of desks that bulwark Herr Esterwegen’s private office. His secretary, an old white-headed biddy, offers her a bleak glare as she buzzes the intercom.

“Frau Schröder, Herr Esterwegen.”

Sigrid braces herself for the angry noise of a man known for his petty tirades, but all she hears over the intercom’s hash is “Send her in.”

“Come,” he calls when she knocks. The door opens and she finds Esterwegen’s pudgy red face scowling at her, chewing on the nail of his little finger, his eye popping behind the steel-rimmed spectacles. “Sit, Frau Schröder. There’s someone here to see you,” he instructs. But it’s not the sight of Esterwegen’s anxiety that shortens her breath.

“Herr Kriminal-Kommissar,” she declares. It’s the Gestapo man from the cinema mezzanine. The same animal fatigue is entrenched in his face. The same sleeplessness fills his eyes. He does not speak to her, however, but turns to Esterwegen instead.

“I’ll need your office, Herr Esterwegen,” he informs the man.

Esterwegen blinks stupidly. “My office?”

“It won’t be for long.”

Another blink, before he gets the message. “Of course,” he says, his scowl deepening. Standing, he thoughtlessly stuffs papers into an already bulging briefcase, then nods to the Kommissar. “Heil Hitler,” he says, showing his palm, but the Herr Kommissar does not respond. He has already blotted out Esterwegen’s existence. Shutting the door, he fishes a packet of cigarettes from his coat pocket.

“You don’t smoke,” he says.

“No,” Sigrid answers.

“I’ve heard that about you. That and a few other things.” Lighting his cigarette, he breathes out a jet of smoke. He doesn’t use Esterwegen’s chair, but rather perches on the corner of his desk, one leg hooked over. “Please, sit.”

“Sit?”

“Yes. In the chair,” the Herr Kommissar instructs.

Drawing in a breath, Sigrid smooths her skirt and inserts herself into the chair facing the desk.

“So. We have a problem, you and I,” he tells her.

She stares.

“It seems your young friend from the cinema has gotten herself into some very serious trouble,” he informs her.

Sigrid says nothing, swallowing back the sickly heat coming up from her belly.

“You know she’s gone missing, correct?”

“Yes,” she answers. “Yes, Herr Kommissar.”

“But do you know why?”

“No, Herr Kommissar.”

“Were you aware that she was trading on the black market?”

“No, Herr Kommissar.”

“So I can also assume you were unaware that she was also illegally sheltering criminals?”

“Criminals, Herr Kommissar? She was sleeping on a cot in a pantry closet. Where would she be hiding criminals?” Inhale, exhale.

A frown. “I understand,” he says, “your desire to protect her, Frau Schröder. It’s only to be expected of a woman such as yourself to have some maternal feelings for a wayward creature. You would not be a woman if you didn’t have such feelings. But as difficult as it may be, as unpleasant as it may be,” the Herr Kommissar says, leaning forward with an intimate lilt, “you must put those feelings aside.”

She stares frankly back at him. “I think you have made a mistake, Herr Kommissar.”

“Oh, no. No mistake,” he assures her, then leans over and lifts open the cover of a file folder lying on the desk blotter. Sigrid’s file from the office personnel records, she realizes. He scrutinizes it from an angle, brow furrowed. “Your husband,” he says, returning to the tone of a civil servant. “He’s been serving on the Eastern Front.”

“He was, but now he’s home. He was wounded.”

The Kommissar nods, expelling smoke. “No children,” he says.

“No,” she answers.

“Why not?”

A shrug. “Ask God.”

The man suppresses a cough of smoke. “Is your husband aware that you have implicated yourself in this ugly business?”

“No, he is not, for I have not, Herr Kommissar, done any such thing.”

For a moment, he seems to be making an appraisal of her, until suddenly he drops his face close to hers. “Have you been informed of the clan penalties for crimes committed against the state, Frau Schröder? If you are guilty, then, by law, so is he. Do you wish his fate to be on your conscience?”

“My husband is a soldier.”

“Yes, and his mother is a Party member, and all of that will mean exactly nothing. The law is the law. It is very clear on this point. A criminal’s family is considered equally as culpable as the criminal, regardless of circumstances.”

“I have done nothing wrong, Herr Kommissar,” she says stiffly. “You are not frightening me.”

The man stares deeply at her for a moment, an unmoving stare as if he is trying to turn her inside out with his eyes. And then he says suddenly, in a quite level tone, “I’ve been married three times, Frau Schröder. So, I am aware of how the female mind works. It’s not your fault,” he says. “You have certain frailties built in, it’s part of nature. And if you fall victim to certain misplaced maternal sentiments for a troubled girl, that would only be natural as well. There is no crime in it. Your crime is the enshrinement of those sentiments above the laws of the Reich,” he says, and his gaze closes in on her. “Now, I’m going to ask you a question. A very important question, and I want you to think very hard before you answer,” he tells her, smoke ribboning upward from his cigarette. “Are you in contact with Ericha Kohl?”

“No,” she answers immediately.

“Let me rephrase the question, and, again, I urge you to weigh your answer very carefully. Are you in contact with the criminal Ericha Kohl?”

Sigrid’s eyes are level. “Call her what you like, Herr Kommissar. I am not in contact with her.”

The Kommissar stares at her vacantly, and then lets out a long, slow exhale of smoke. “Very well. You’re free to go, Frau Schröder,” he announces. When she does not budge, he repeats himself. “I said you are free to go.” He tells her this, grinding out his cigarette in Herr Esterwegen’s overflowing ashtray, as if he has lost all interest in her presence. Sitting down behind the desk, he picks up the telephone receiver. “Yes, this is Kriminal-Kommissar Lang, I need to place a call. One moment,” he says, and covers the mouthpiece with his hand. “Is there something else you wish to say?” The question is blank, edged only with impatience.

Sigrid blinks sternly. Shakes her head. “No.” Her voice is hollow. “No, Herr Kommissar. Nothing else.”

“I WOULD HAVE FAINTED were I you,” Renate tells her. They are in the cellar of the building, by a window that opens onto the sidewalk. Shelves and shelves, laden with filing boxes, surround them, as well as warning placards: SMOKING FORBIDDEN IN THIS AREA. But it is still a favorite place to steal a quick cigarette. Traffic noises drift in from the window.

“What? Why fainted?”

“Because men cannot abide women fainting. Tears they can withstand, but faint and they’ll be on their knees beside you, patting your hand and calling for a glass of water.”

Sigrid shakes her head. “I don’t think fainting would have changed a thing. There wasn’t room to faint.”

“And all this was because of your husband?”

“My husband?”

“You said he was asking questions about Kaspar.”

“He was. Yes.”

“Is it the black market? What has he done?”

“Nothing. He’s done nothing except serve his country.”

Renate frowns. “Then I don’t understand.”

She asks Renate for a drag from her cigarette. Inhales deeply. Shakes off the sharp touch of light-headedness.

“They’re very strong. Ukrainian or something. Heinz smokes them.”

Sigrid can tell that Renate’s also observing her closely now.

“Thanks,” Sigrid says, and returns the smoldering cigarette. “I have something I have to say. Something I have to ask you.”

Renate stares. Her expression shrinks slightly. “What?”

“I need to find a doctor.”

“A doctor?” Confused. “Why? Are you sick?”

“No. Not that sort of doctor,” she answers.

A small twist of a smile, as if perhaps this is some kind of humorless joke. “What are you talking about? What other kind of doctors are there?” she asks, but even as the question leaves her mouth, Sigrid can see that she has the answer. “Oh, good God.” She covers her mouth with her hands, to prevent the words from leaving. “Good God, no.”

Sigrid keeps her face straight.

“I gave you condoms,” Renate scolds in a crushed whisper. “Dammit, I gave you condoms. Why didn’t you use them?”

“Do I really need to explain?”

“Could it be Kaspar’s? I mean, is that a possibility? You’ve been with him, too.”

Sigrid knows that she must remove Kaspar from the question in Renate’s mind. Aborting an illicit lover’s child is different from aborting a husband’s. “I was with him, but not in that way,” she says. “He wasn’t inside of me.”

“You’re sure?”

“Renate, if I wasn’t sure whose it was, would I even be considering?”

“All right. All right. You understand why I must ask these things. I’m sorry, but I must.”

“So you’ve asked. Will you help?”

“I don’t know. I have to think.”

“This has never happened to you?” she inquires with a tad too much incredulity that Renate seizes upon.

“You mean even though I’ve screwed every man in sight? Is that what you’re implying?”

Sigrid shrugs. “I apologize. You don’t have to tell me.”

“I’ll tell you it hasn’t happened to me, because I’m not stupid. I don’t make stupid mistakes. You do, by the way, realize that it is illegal. Abortion is a crime. You could end up with two years in Barnim Strasse. And if I help you, I could end up joining you there.”

“Please forget it,” Sigrid tells her. “Please forget I ever mentioned it. I shouldn’t have. This is my problem.”

Renate smokes solemnly. “That’s right. Your problem,” she says, dropping her cigarette onto the floor and crushing it vigorously with the toe of her shoe. Then shakes her head. “I have to get back to work,” she says, and frowns. “And you should, too.” Saying this, she retrieves the crushed cigarette butt. “After all, there’s still a war going on.”

Back in the stenographers’ pool, Sigrid reinserts herself behind her desk. A glance to Renate yields nothing. The room fills with the chatter of typewriters.

But then the next time she passes by Sigrid’s desk, Renate drops a cigarette card beside her typewriter. On the face is a photo of the Reichsminister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. A simian little man in a brown uniform, posed with his wife at the center of a large brood of golden-haired children. On the back, an address of a clinic in Berlin-Kreuzberg, inked in Renate’s neat script. Identify yourself, she has written, as an old friend of Frau Breuer.

THAT EVENING, she hurries up the stairs of her building. At the fourth-floor landing she can hear the drone of Mother Schröder’s wireless through the door. So she knocks on the opposite door instead. This time it is Carin Kessler who answers. “Come in,” she says with a weight to her voice.

Inside, Sigrid glances about. Something in Carin’s tone has started the acid in her stomach bubbling.

“If you’re waiting for him to appear, he won’t. He’s gone.”

She feels the blood drain from her face. “Gone?”

“When I came home from the shops, the place was empty.” She takes a small fold of paper off the mantel. “He left this.”

Sigrid can only stare, unable to touch it. “Have you read it?” she whispers.

“It was lying open on the kitchen table.”

Finally Sigrid manages to reach out and accepts the paper from Carin’s fingers. Her heart is thumping in her chest. But all he has written is, Thank you. Please tell your neighbor that I will be in touch.

“That’s all?”

“Do you expect more of men?” Carin inquires.

“Where’s Wolfram?” she asks.

“Ah, yes. I heard about the summit over the chessboard. Did he frighten you?” She pours out two measures of brandy from a sleek decanter. “He can be rather terrible when he’s been drinking.”

“He said he can produce identity documents.”

“Well, then I’m sure he can.”

“He said I should grow eyes in the back of my head.”

Carin gives her a sideways look. “Then perhaps you should,” she tells Sigrid. “Here, drink this down,” she commands.

Sigrid follows orders without squeamishness. The brandy burns straight through her. “Thank you,” she whispers.

A shrug. “I don’t accept thanks. Too costly,” Carin explains with a veneer of contrariness, avoiding eye contact. “Excuse me, but I think I need a cigarette,” she says. But when she picks up the sterling lighter from the coffee table, she frowns. “What’s this?” she says, and then turns. “Ah, now, here’s something rude. Your friend appears to have consumed my entire bowl of rock sugar before he left. Now, that’s a real crime.”

Sigrid can only stare blankly at the empty bowl. “I’m sorry, I must get you some more,” she says with a small, vacant voice.

“Never mind,” Carin tells her. “I’m just trying to”—she shakes her head—“I don’t know what, find reasons to dislike him. Actually, it’s rather a hard thing to do. Dislike him, that is. Against my better judgment, I must admit, I found him charming. And if I found him so… well, I can only imagine,” she says, with small note of shyness.

Sigrid gazes at her for a moment. “May I ask you a question?” she says.

Carin’s face hardens again, though there is something of the same rueful bemusement in her eyes that Sigrid recalls from Wolfram. “Of course,” she answers, and takes a sip of coffee without removing her gaze from Sigrid’s face. “You want to know why, correct? Why I am as I am?”

Sigrid looks back at her but lets her silence be her answer.

“I’ve been expecting the question, actually. Sooner or later.”

“Is it because of the war?”

Something like a smile forms on Carin’s face. “The war?”

“All the men in the army. All the women alone.”

But Carin only chuckles in a mildly disdainful manner. “You mean: what’s left that’s not rationed besides sex?” she says. “There are certainly women like that, lonely hausfrauen, bored with their lives and looking for some excitement. But I am not one of them. You wonder, perhaps if I haven’t learned my tastes for the female gender simply because there are no men about? The answer is no. I have always been as I am, Sigrid Schröder. Always. It’s not a hobby or something I’ve picked up, like a lingering head cold.”

“I’m sorry,” Sigrid tells her. “I think I’ve offended you.”

Carin shrugs lightly, and shakes her head. “You haven’t. You were curious. You asked a question. Nothing wrong with that.” An interior pause separates them awkwardly for a moment, until Carin takes a breath. “But enough of that. I should tell you. I’ve received a telegram from my half sister this morning. She’s coming back to Berlin.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Any time now.”

“I thought she was staying with her mother until the birth.”

“Her mother’s a drunk,” Carin says, exhaling smoke. “Her mother’s a drunk who despises her as a half-breed, and her husband’s a monster, who fornicates with other women, because it’s his duty as an SS man to propagate the breed. And if she looks at him wrong, he becomes violent. Fractured her arm once.” Then, shaking her head, she says, “It almost makes me feel sorry for the silly little heifer.”

There’s a stretch of the Nachodstrasse in Schöneberg where German is a learned language. A street peddler offers incense for sale, and hand-painted icons of the saints and the patriarchs in their onion-shaped miters. Sigrid finds many shop windows have signs in Cyrillic lettering, but just to make sure there is no misunderstanding, they also display prominent portraits of the Führer, their brown tsar, decked with swastika flags.

The building she enters smells as much of boiled cabbage as does the rest of Berlin these days. An old woman, scarved in black, brushes past her with an unintelligible mutter. Down a poorly lit hallway, she looks for the residence plate, finds a handwritten name, and knocks on the door.

“You are Herr Melnikov?” she asks the large, thickly jowled man who answers.

“And who is asking?” the man inquires with a throaty accent.

“A friend of Grizmek,” she replies.

The man clears the hallway in both directions with a look, then peers at her with deeply shadowed eyes. “Please to come in,” he tells her.

The flat is neglected and full of clutter, the way the flats of unmarried men of a certain age become. The furnishings are old department-store inventory of the type Sigrid’s mother bought at Karstadt twenty years before. There are knickknacks: a small clock with the gilding thinning, a tarnished horse on a bronze base, a souvenir tray from Luna Park, but nothing particularly Russian, beyond the line of gilded icons on the mantel above the coke stove, and two sepia photographs in oval frames hung on the wall.

“My parents,” Melnikov explains. Gazing out from the frame is a man with a large, spongy body in a white uniform and peaked cap. His face is disguised by a thick brush of a beard as he poses besides a petite, almost doll-sized woman with frail eyes peeking out from a large bonnet. “My father was a customs official in St. Petersburg, where I was born. My mother, a poetess of sorts, though never very well known.” He has opened a bottle of amber and pours out two small cordial glasses. “You’ll have one,” he says, and puts one of the glasses in Sigrid’s hand. “Na zdorovie,” he toasts, then drains his glass. “Drink. You must,” he prods her. Sigrid only takes a sip of the thick, sugary stuff, but it seems to satisfy him. “And that,” Melnikov sighs, “that poor puny malchik is me,” he says, with a light melancholy, and gestures to the second photo of a scrawny little boy in an academy uniform posed beside a sleek wolfhound as tall as he. “Hard to believe I was ever such a minuscule pip.” He sets the glass down and turns on a lamp, rolling open a length of black velvet cloth atop a desk blotter. “So. You will show me what you have brought,” he says, then grins at Sigrid’s hesitation. “Not to worry. I am too old and too fat to be a thief. Who could run from the police at my age?”

Laid out on the length of velvet, the diamonds become stars in the lamplight. She watches Melnikov handle them with deftness and concentration.

“You are an expert,” she observes.

The Russian agrees. “I’ve been doing this for a very long time,” he muses, examining one of the stones with an eye ring. “After the Bolsheviks, there were droves of Russians in Berlin, all trying to unload their ancestral trinkets. Grand dukes waiting tables at the Romanisches Café, pawning the jewels they had smuggled in, sewn into their wives’ undergarments. It was quite a time to make money,” he reminisces fondly, then nods appreciatively at the diamond he is inspecting. “Excellent. Excellent color, excellent clarity. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen so many top-quality stones. These days, most of what I’m brought is trash. But our friend still has his eye. These will do very nicely. Did he say how much?”

“How much?”

“How much is he asking?”

“He said that you would offer a fair price.”

The old Russian snorts. “Then, I suppose I must,” he says. “You know, I knew him, before the war, our friend Grizmek. By a different name back then, though,” he says, and winks. “I did business with his father and older brother. They were both good men. You know, honest. More honest than me,” he concedes. “But the young one?” he says. “Like a razor. If you weren’t careful? Slash, right through to the bone. And then he’d leave you bleeding, but do so with a most disarming smile.”

“Yes,” Sigrid admits. “I’m familiar with the process.”

Melnikov shrugs his understanding. “He has always relied upon his women,” he tells her, but then says nothing more about it. Instead he grunts as he bends over to a heavy black safe, which looks as if it has been through more than one war. “You’ll excuse me,” he says, “if I must ask you to turn your back.”

She does, staring at the icons on the mantel, gilded but dust-laden, and listening to the trip of the tumblers and the heavy thunk of the safe’s iron door.

“This is what I am prepared to offer,” the man tells her, and proffers a kraft paper envelope. She takes it. Inside is a stack of Reichsmarks. She glances at him. What is the protocol? Should she count it? But Melnikov can read her mind, it seems. “Go ahead. Count it. It’s no insult.”

So she does. Then gazes back at the old man’s face with some small anxiety. She has never held this much money in her hands before.

“I am not by nature a generous man,” he explains with a shrug. “But there are times when one does what one can do. Tell him it’s in honor of his father, God preserve his soul.”

“Thank you,” Sigrid whispers. Then buries the envelope in her bag. “Thank you, Herr Melnikov.”

Sigrid turns, but at the door Melnikov adds a parting thought. “And tell him, please. Tell him I offer my condolences.”

“Condolences?”

“Forgive my poor taste for asking you to play as messenger in this case, but please tell him that I was very grieved to hear of his wife.”

The words turn Sigrid into cement. She cannot move from the doorway. “His wife,” she repeats.

“Yes. I knew her when she was a girl in St. Petersburg. I was partners, briefly, with her uncle in export business.”

“St. Petersburg.” Sigrid shakes her head. “But that’s not possible,” she explains.

A blink. “Pardon? What is not possible?”

“His wife is very much alive. And she’s not from St. Petersburg, she’s from Vienna.”

“No,” Melnikov corrects in a patient tone. “Vienna is where they met. Perhaps,” he suggests, “perhaps you’ve misunderstood.”

“No. No, Herr Melnikov. I haven’t misunderstood. And I saw his wife only days ago. You’re offering condolences, but she is very much alive.”

And now Melnikov’s face is starting to darken with caution. He gives the corridor another glance, then clears his throat so that his tone is level and blunt. “Meine Frau,” he begins thickly, formally. “Your relationship with Grizmek is your business. I don’t know what he has said to you, or what you believe. But I can assure you, I am not so old or so senile that I cannot recall the facts of my own life. I can also assure you that what I’m telling you is true. A terrible thing, but true. His wife was killed last month on the day she and her daughters were to be transported to Poland.”

Sigrid searches the sagging face for some fissure in its certainty, just a small enough crack for her to slip through. But his face is a wall. Finally, she forms the question. “How do you know this?”

Melnikov frowns. “I dislike dealing with the SS, but times being what they are, I have more than one business associate at a certain address in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse. I was aware of Grizmek there. I was aware, too, that they valued his services. Also, perhaps, they were a little frightened of him. I know this sounds absurd, the SS frightened of a Jew? But that was my sense of it. They were very concerned that he never discover the truth about his wife. Especially that durák Dirkweiler.”

“Who is Dirkweiler?”

“Untersturmführer Dirkweiler. He’s a handler.”

“A handler? What does that mean?” she asks, then presses him when he shakes his head. “Tell me, please. What does that mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“What about the Grosse Hamburger Strasse? He was a prisoner there. What do you mean, they valued him? The Gestapo gave him beatings.”

“No doubt. In the beginning.”

“The beginning? What are you saying, the beginning?”

The Russian frowns. “You’re telling me you don’t know? Quite seriously?”

“Know what?”

Suddenly he shakes his head. More worried. “I have said enough. A little brandy,” he tells her, “and a pretty woman has loosened my tongue. That’s all.” He’s trying to crowd her out, but she becomes immovable.

“No, Herr Melnikov, I will not allow you to simply shoo me on my way.”

“My dear, you have your money, more than I should have paid. What more do you want from an old man?”

“I will not leave until you answer me.”

“Answer you? But I have answered you.” The door across the hall cracks open. No eye is visible, no listening ear. But it is enough to deepen the frown on the old man’s face.

“Shall I scream? I will,” Sigrid whispers, her voice gone raw. “I’ll scream my head off.”

His eyes loom. “You want the police here?”

“Do you? I’m sure that I am not the first ‘pretty woman’ who’s come to do business at this door. I’m sure they would wonder just what kind of brothel the old Ivan is running.”

The Russian’s scowl goes black. But then he yanks her back inside with surprising strength, and shuts the door. He glares into her face. “Grosse Hamburger Strasse 26. It’s a detention center for Jews in transit. Only there are some Jews, like our ‘Grizmek,’ who have taken up residence there. Some who are engaged in a very specialized line of work as a member of what the Gestapo call their ‘Search Service.’ Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No. You’re not making sense.”

“You Germans have a very good word for it. ‘Umsatteln,’” he tells her. “To resaddle in midride. Seamlessly so. Search Service Jews are given green permits that allow them to travel freely about town. They sit at café tables,” he explains. “They ride the S-Bahn. They don’t wear the Judenstern. They sit on a bench in the park, they go to the cinema. And they watch.”

“Watch?”

“For other Jews.” He shrugs blandly. “And when one is spotted, it only takes a nod. A wave. There’s a Gestapo handler nearby who does the rest.”

She can hear Ericha’s voice in her head. Jews who hunt Jews. “Catchers,” she breathes.

“So, the gnädige Frau knows more than she lets on.”

Sigrid says nothing. There are no words available to her.

“Yes, catchers.” Melnikov nods. “Some are trying to save their own lives. Others, the lives of their family, perhaps. And others? I think such work can be very addictive. As a Jew in Gestapo custody, what are you? Nothing. Vermin to be trod upon. As a catcher you have value. Catchers are privileged. They have independence. They’re given special rewards,” he says, rubbing his fingers together, displaying the lucrative friction of booty.

“The diamonds,” Sigrid whispers.

“Can you imagine? All those Torah-kissing graybeards showing up for evacuation with little fortunes tucked into their clothes and hidden in their satchels? He’s of great worth to that gang of Stapo lunkheads, I’ve no doubt. His eye for stones is very keen. Though, as I understand it, he has quite a talent as a catcher as well. Maybe it’s the same keenness,” Melnikov suggests. “An eye that can spot the thinnest flaw in the embellishment of a gem, perhaps can spot that same flaw in the embellishment of a man. Or of a woman,” he adds. “You know, you’re not the first.”

Her eyes contract. She can suddenly feel the shame, even before she hears the words.

“There was a little tichka. Polish, I think. She used to make his deliveries for him. And then, for a little while, a redhead. Beautiful. Maybe a Jewess. I didn’t pry, you know. I’m an old man skating on very thin ice, so when I don’t want to know answers, I don’t ask questions,” he says. And then shrugs. “So, gnädige Frau,” he inquires with something like compassion, “do you still wish to scream?”

SIGRID IS CLAMBERING down the stairs, her stomach heaving. She makes it out of the building, and into the street, before the sickness overcomes her and she pukes bile into the gutter. A Berliner trots up to aid a distraught woman, but she cannot see his face. All she sees is the swastika on his Party pin. “How can I help you, how can I help you?” he keeps repeating. But she has no answer for him. She is beyond help. She has crossed into a territory far beyond the jurisdiction of curbside kindness from a stranger. Beyond the map of her existence. She has vomited out the last dregs of her old self, and is now forming into a different sort of creature. One beyond desire. Beyond mercy.

SHE CARRIES Melnikov’s revelation up the stairs toward her flat, as if carrying a mason’s tray of bricks on her back. She bleakly surveys the door that only yesterday was a passageway to a doppelgänger’s life with Egon, but is now just a plain wooden door. She tries to summon the face of Frau Weiss. Of Liesl and Ruthi, faces she thought were stamped indelibly across her memory, but now her mind is clogged. Thickened and cloudy. She sees their faces as if they have been obscured by a layer of smoke.

When she enters her flat, she finds Kaspar and his comrades from exercise therapy downing schnapps again at the kitchen table. She is relieved to be ignored by this trio as she unties her scarf and slips out of her coat. She wants to be invisible right now. They are drinking and hooting loudly at some front-liner’s joke.

Her mother-in-law is snoring in her chair by the wireless. A glass of wine has overturned and spilled onto her lap, staining her dress dark red. Sigrid does not bother to remove the glass or wake her. In fact, she takes some satisfaction in letting the old lady sleep in her own spillage. Unteroffizier Kamphauser is standing now, his parade-ground voice engorged with hilarity, imitating a particular officer’s booming commands, and the trio dissolve into fits of boozy laughter.

When there’s a knock on the door that nobody but she seems to hear, she opens it and stiffens. It’s Wolfram, in uniform. “Herr Leutnant,” she says formally, to warn him. Suddenly the chorus ceases behind her, and there’s a noise of chairs. She turns to find that Kaspar and his comrades, in the presence of an officer, have jumped to their feet. Wolfram looks embarrassed. It is the first time she has ever seen such an expression on his face.

“Please, gentlemen. Let’s dispense with such nonsense,” he tells them, and then leans heavily on his cane, making sure he is displaying the combat credentials pinned to his tunic as he offers his hand. “I’m Kessler.”

“Kamphauser, Herr Leutnant,” Unteroffizier Kamphauser declares with a heel click as he shakes.

“Kamphauser.”

“Messner, Herr Leutnant,” Unteroffizier Messner declares with a heel click as he shakes.

“Messner.”

“Schröder,” says Kaspar as he takes Wolfram’s hand. His eyes are wary as if he might be expecting an ambush.

“Ah, Schröder. The master of the house. I can’t tell you how highly my sisters speak of your wife.”

“Yes. Thank you, Herr Leutnant,” Kaspar answers tonelessly.

“In fact, I was just stopping by to deliver a small token of appreciation. We had the good fortune of obtaining a few bottles of French cognac at my office. I thought I should like to share the wealth.” He slips a bottle from under his arm and presents it. “Will you accept?” he asks. “Frau Schröder?”

“You’ll have to ask my husband, Herr Leutnant.”

Wolfram turns his face expectantly. “It is quite smooth,” he prods. “Perhaps the French are second-rate soldiers, but they are quite expert at brandy.”

“We’ll accept, thank you, sir,” Kaspar answers. “But only if the Herr Leutnant will stay for a glass.”

And now a gleam of bemusement lightens Wolfram’s eyes. “What an irresistible invitation,” he says. “I can’t say no.”

Within a half hour one drinks turns into several, as the level of the cognac bottle declines. While Sigrid is drying the dishes for return to the cabinet, Wolfram is amusing his new comrades with an overtly hilarious tale of how his commanding officer had his pisser nipped off by a Red Army sniper while taking a leak. The men howl. And it’s only the return of Mother Schröder to consciousness, angered and embarrassed by the spill on her dress, that finally brings the evening to a close.

In the bedroom, Sigrid lies down, still in her clothes, and stares up at the ceiling. The smooth surface is marred by a spidery web of cracks and flaking paint. When she falls asleep she dreams of climbing stairs. She knows that she must get to the top. That everything depends on this, but the stairs never end. Up ahead she can hear Ericha’s voice begging her to hurry. But all she can see is darkness.

When she wakes, Kaspar is laid out on the bed beside her, still in his boots.

“Kaspar?” she asks, drowsily.

“Have you been with him?”

She feels the tension at the back of throat. “What?”

“The Herr Leutnant. I don’t assume he was actually delivering that bottle of cognac to share with a gang of lowly foot-wrapped Indians.”

“If you’re asking me to read the man’s mind, Kaspar,” Sigrid answers quite truthfully, “I assure you, I cannot.”

Kaspar says nothing more for a moment. He exhales thickly, and then informs her, “What I don’t understand,” she hears him say, “what I don’t understand is why I am alive. I should have been killed a hundred times. But for reasons I cannot imagine, I wasn’t. Men died all around me, but I remained alive. One morning, we were just outside of Rzhev. It was snowing. We were up to our knees in it. Pinned down by a couple of Bolshie MGs. I was watching one of my squad mates bleeding into the snow. Bright, bright red on the white. The color was so beautiful. So very seductive,” he says. “And suddenly I decided I had had enough. So I stood up. Just…”—he hesitates—“stood up. I was going to walk straight into the Maxims and let them riddle me to pieces. I refused to survive again when all around me all my squad mates were dead or dying. But then came an explosion. It was a mortar round. That’s the last thing I remember before waking up on a hospital cot.”

Sigrid is surprised by a sudden feeling of compassion for her husband. A feeling of common mystery. Thousands transported. So many dead. Who decides who lives? Divine calculation? Fate? All evidence aside that neither exists, that life is a random series of numbers. One lives, six die, three live, a thousand die. She cannot help but believe that there is some kind of unknowable clockwork in operation. Some vast pattern, unseen at street level. Perhaps, because otherwise what would be the point? She starts to say something like that. Such things cannot be known, but stops when she realizes that, in fact, Kaspar is no longer beside her. Even though he may be still filling the other half of the bed with his body, he has returned to the East.

“That’s a terrible story, Kaspar,” she offers quietly.

And for an instant, he seems to actually see her again. Long enough for her to see him drowning in the depth of his own gaze. “No. That’s a story of stupidity. But if you’d like to hear a terrible story, I have one of those, too.”

She is not sure she does, but Kaspar does not wait for her permission. “It was August. Very hot. The air was so heavy with dust it was choking. We had been given orders by battalion to secure a little town west of Zubtsov. Just a village, really, I couldn’t tell you its name, but it had cost us. I mean, cost us dearly. Ivan simply didn’t want to give it up. They were NKVD frontier troops, and they fought like mad dogs. We took it, lost it, then took it back again. Three days it went like this, back and forth, three days straight, with no sleep, no food, only fighting. Then, finally, the panzers arrive, and the Ivans evacuated. But what they left behind,” he says, “it was inhuman. They had taken prisoners. Eleven of them, two from my company. We found their bodies, stripped naked, mutilated. Heads crushed in. Entrails exposed. Genitals sliced off and stuffed into their mouths.” He pauses, gazing up at the ceiling, as if he were seeing it all there. “What we felt, when we found them? I can’t explain. It was more than rage. It was more than grief. It was something that has no name.”

He stares.

“That night we found a cache of vodka that the Reds had left, and got very drunk. Very drunk, and decided that such a crime couldn’t go unpunished. So we assembled and went back into the village. Three squads of men. We rousted everyone out of their shacks. Women, children, young and old, and forced them into an empty horse barn. Then we boarded shut the doors,” he says, gazing, “and set the barn on fire.”

Silence.

“It took an hour before the screaming stopped, though it seemed much longer. At one point, there was a woman. A woman who had dug a hole under the barn with her hands, and tried to squeeze her child out. But when we saw them, we opened up and cut them into pieces.”

Sigrid does not move. She cannot move. She can only listen as the tears roll down her cheeks.

“I cannot explain it, Sigrid. I will never be able to explain it. But at that instant, I believed they were guilty. All of them. Even the woman and her child. I believed they were all,” he whispers, “less than human.”

Quietly, Sigrid rises from the bed. Kaspar does not try to stop her. He does not seem to notice. In the bathroom, she manages to turn on the cold water tap to wash her face, but then can only glare at the water swirling down the drain. When she looks up, the mirror above the sink holds an image of a stranger. Hair dangling. Eyes like stones.