City of Women

NINETEEN

SHE SPIES THE MAN with the monkey ears and the snap-brim brown fedora on the train. After the Nollendorfplatz, she sees him, standing a few meters away, a newspaper tucked under an arm, as he clings to the handrail, intentionally paying her not a whit of attention. When she leaves the train at the Hallesches Tor, she catches him briefly behind her, but then he disappears.

Inside the patent office, she hurries past the old guard, who must call her back to look at her identity card. She is late. Impatiently waiting. When she enters the stenographic room, there is a brief cessation of typewriter chatter. When Fräulein Kretchmar calls her into the office in the corner, all eyes remain locked in their proper places, and the rattle of keys on the paper sounds like a kind of thunder. Only Renate lifts a glance from her desk, but her eyes are expressionless.

In the office, Fräulein Kretchmar closes the door and seats herself behind a steel desk. “Sit, Frau Schröder,” she instructs.

“No, I don’t think I will, thank you,” Sigrid answers.

The woman gazes morosely at her through the lenses of the pince-nez adorning her nose. “Very well, as you wish. I’m afraid I must inform you, Frau Schröder, that I have been directed by Herr Esterwegen to dismiss you from your position. This to take effect immediately. If you have any personal effects, you may retrieve them from your desk.”

“And may I inquire, Fräulein Kretchmar,” Sigrid asks thickly, “as to the reason for my dismissal?”

“It has been determined by those in superior positions that your continued employment by the Reichspatentamt would be a detriment to productivity, and a risk to the good name of the office.”

“I see,” Sigrid says dully. “And is that your opinion as well?”

But Kretchmar only shakes her head, her mouth clamped in a tight line. Choosing a rubber stamp from a rack, she thumps the file on her blotter. “Take this to the second floor,” she says, handing it over. “Your final wages will be issued to you.”

Sigrid pauses only an instant before accepting the file.

Kretchmar’s attention turns to the papers stacked on her desktop. A vein pulses in her neck as she says, “Best of luck to you, Frau Schröder. Heil Hitler.” But then, as Sigrid turns her back on the woman and slips her hand onto the door handle, Fräulein Kretchmar finds the words she could not speak a moment before. “You understand,” she says, “you understand that I had no say in this matter. The decision was made by higher authorities. I can only do as I’ve been instructed.”

“I understand, Fräulein Kretchmar, that someday,” Sigrid replies, “someday you will open up your eyes and wonder what has become of your life. And the only answer will be that you have squandered it, trying to prove something to these men. These higher authorities of yours. Trying to elicit from them some minuscule measure of respect or equality, which you will never receive. Not ever.”

Kretchmar gazes back. Behind her, the message canisters whoosh through the pneumatic tubes.

ON THE TRAIN, Sigrid burrows into the silence beneath the rattle of the cars. She doesn’t think of the patent office. She doesn’t think of the singular blankness of Renate’s glance. She doesn’t even think of Herr Kozig’s bloodless death mask. She thinks that, if she closes her eyes, she can still imagine Egon’s hands touching her body. The pleasing roughness of his fingers on the skin of her shoulder. His palm lightly dancing across her nipple.

Suddenly there is an intrusion. A body squeezing into the space beside her, too close. For an instant she thinks Egon has returned, but the body is the wrong size. Too stringy. No meat on it. She gazes into the angry, hawkish face of the U-boat youth from Auntie’s pension.

“Where is he?” he demands in a scrubby whisper.

She gazes back without words.

“I have a knife,” he hisses, “so you’d better tell me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. The catcher named Grizmek. I’ve seen you with him. Where is he?”

A blank glare. She thinks for an instant of Herr Kozig’s little pistol she has wrapped in a handkerchief at the bottom of her bag. “I have no idea,” she says.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

“Tell me. Tell me or maybe I’ll slit your throat right here.”

“No,” Sigrid says, not removing her eyes from the boy’s. “No, I don’t think you will.”

The boy’s face clenches like an angry fist, but his eyes are suddenly enraged with grief. “He murdered my sisters. They’re dead, because he turned them in to the Gestapo. He might as well have killed them with his own hands.”

“Frau Schröder?” a voice inquires with a sharp concern.

Sigrid’s eyes twitch toward a stubby soldier who is leaning forward from the opposite side of the carriage. It’s one of Kaspar’s drinking comrades from the kitchen table, though it takes her a moment to summon the name. “Unteroffizier Kamphauser,” she says.

“I thought it was you,” he says. “Are you all right?” he inquires more closely, his voice gaining weight as his eyes roll toward the youth, training the gun sight gaze on him. “Is this Schurke giving you trouble?”

But before she can answer, the train bursts into the station, and the boy is up, shoving into the crowd exiting to the platform. The soldier stands abruptly, as if to give chase, but Sigrid waves her hand. “No. No, please. It’s fine. Just an overly excited boy.” The doors are rolled closed, and the train ambles forward. She gains a glimpse of the boy’s face on the platform for a moment, staring with anguished rage.

“Thank you, Herr Kamphauser,” she says, her hand pressed to her breast, slowly breathing in, slowly breathing out. Recovering.

The soldier sits down, then nods his head. “No need for thanks. Though, actually, I’m Messner. Kamphauser is the tall one.”

A blink of confusion, then, “Oh. I’m so sorry.”

“No need.”

“My head, you understand, is so full of cobwebs these days.”

“It’s nothing. I answer to anything,” he grins. A joke. In the gloom of the U-Bahn, his complexion has lost its fermented ruddiness and gone muddy. “Frau Schröder, please excuse me. I don’t mean to talk too much. Or to bother you. It’s just that there’s something I feel I should say. It’s something I’ve been thinking about, and since we’ve met like this…”

She looks at him carefully. “Yes?”

“You know,” he begins with a slightly uncertain note in his voice, “I just want to say that your husband…”

“My husband,” she repeats blankly.

“Your husband,” he says, “is really the sort that keeps a mutt like me going.”

Another blink. “He is?” she replies, surprised by a sudden urge to listen.

“Oh, yes. I mean, I know what I am, Frau Schröder.” He chuckles bleakly. “I’m dirt. I’m nobody. But a man like your husband, who worked as a bank officer. Who has a nice flat and a good wife. For him to invite me to his home, it means something,” he says. “It truly does. I don’t mind admitting that I’m going to miss him greatly.”

Something in her stops dead. “Say that again.”

“I said, I’m going to miss him,” Messner repeats. “When he returns to active duty.”

She hears this, then watches the impact of her expression on his.

“You knew this, didn’t you?” He is sounding suddenly anxious. “I mean, you must have known this already.”

“Are you saying,” Sigrid breathes in. “Are you saying that he’s been recalled to the front?”

“No. No, not recalled,” Messner frowns. There’s a helpless insistence to his voice. “But surely you know this, Frau Schröder.”

“Know what, Herr Messner?”

“He volunteered.” A crooked pain shapes the man’s face. “When he heard that his regiment was being redeployed to the Ukraine, he volunteered to rejoin them.”

“But. But he can’t. You must be wrong about this. He’s been wounded. He’s still going to the hospital for therapy, for God’s sake.”

“One of the doctors at the hospital certified him as fit.”

“Fit? And is this doctor insane?”

“I’m… I’m certain they won’t put him on the line,” he tries to reassure her. “There are plenty of jobs in the rear. He could be clerking for a transport company, just as he’s doing now,” he says with hope.

“No.” She shakes her head at the floor of the carriage. “No, this is too much.”

“I apologize, Frau Schröder. I opened my trap when I shouldn’t have, obviously, and I’m sorry. Please don’t tell him it was me who spilled the beans, will you?” he pleads. “I wouldn’t want him to think ill of me.”

Sigrid looks back at Messner, but really she has stopped seeing the man. Stopped hearing what he is saying.

KASPAR OPENS THE DOOR, and stops long enough to survey her at the kitchen table. Then shuts the door and hangs up his greatcoat. “What are you doing?” he inquires.

“Having a drink. Would you like one? I have a glass ready for you.”

For a moment he does not respond. Then he sits down and faces the glass as Sigrid dumps out three fingers of schnapps. “Prosit,” she offers, and empties her glass in a swallow.

“I’ve never seen a woman do that before,” he remarks, then downs his own.

“Never?” She takes the bottle and pours two more measures. “Not even your whores from the Warthegau?” When he doesn’t answer, she says, “You know, I happened to see one of your comrades from the hospital on the U-Bahn.”

“And he was sober?”

“He told me that you are the sort that keeps him going.”

“Me? I am the sort?”

“You, yes. Because you worked as a bank officer. Because you have a nice flat and a good wife.”

He stares at her and she stares back.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Kaspar? I thought you said you wanted only the truth between us.”

His mouth turns downward at the edges. “I didn’t think it would matter to you,” he answers.

“My husband has volunteered to return to the front, and he didn’t think it would matter to me?”

“Why would it? You have your man tucked away to keep you satisfied. Why would you care what I do?”

“So that’s it? It’s male jealousy? The mortar wounded your body, but I’ve wounded your pride, so you’re marching back to Russia to make yourself a target for all those machine gunners who missed you the first time?”

“How much of this kerosene have you swallowed already?” he asks, examining the bottle.

“Never mind. That’s beside the point. The point is that you lied to me.”

“No, I simply omitted the truth.”

“A fine distinction.”

“One with which you’re familiar.”

“I’ve tried to be truthful with you, Kaspar.”

“No. Perhaps you haven’t lied outright, but you’ve tried not to be truthful with me, unless absolutely necessary. Another fine distinction, I know, but an important one.”

“All right, then, since you’re asking for the full truth? The truth with no holes in it? You’ll get it. More than you’ll have wished for,” she assures him. Killing her shot, she exhales a flat breath. “I’m hiding Jews from the Gestapo.”

Kaspar’s face is unmoved for a moment. Then he almost smiles, as if his hearing must be playing tricks. He looks at her again with incomprehension. For an instant she can recall the puzzled expression of the young man she had married. It’s the expression he would wear when faced with a dilemma outside the prescribed lines of his experience. An expression she had always found at once irksome and endearing. “Is that a joke, Sigrid?” he finally asks. “Are you trying to shock me?”

“Not a joke, Kaspar. Just the truth you were asking for. I’m part of a group.”

Incredulous. “A group hiding Jews.”

“Not restricted to Jews. Anyone who needs help.”

“Help?” A wire of anger is weaving itself into his voice. “Well, this is rather insane,” he says, with his teeth clenching into a humorless grin, as if he might decide to chomp on the air. “This is really rather insane.”

“Yes. I’ll agree.”

“Will you? Well, very nice. How very nice it is that my wife agrees with me,” he steams, “on the subject of her insanity.”

“Not my insanity, Kaspar.”

“And by help, when you say the word help, what does that mean? You help them evade the police?”

“Yes.”

“Criminals.”

“That depends on your definition of the word.”

“Criminals. People who have committed crimes. People have broken the law.”

“Unjust laws.”

“But the law, just the same.” His eyes are darkening.

“Yes.”

“Deserters, too?”

“You mean men who have ‘simply had enough of this war’? Weren’t those your words?”

His voice gains volume. “I mean men who have abandoned their posts.”

“Probably. I often don’t know their reasons for having gone underground. Only that they have them.”

“And is that where you’ve found your lover? Among these men?”

“It’s not just men, Kaspar. Also women. Also children.”

“Women, children, yes.” He nods starkly. “But that doesn’t answer my question, does it? Please, Sigrid,” he says, with a hollow, almost manic note entering his voice. “Please tell me that my wife is screwing a criminal or a deserter. Please tell me that at least she’s screwing a German and not a—”

But he doesn’t finish the sentence. The look on her face has stopped him, so the unspoken word of the unfinished sentence weights the air between them. Kaspar drops his head and shakes it at the table.

Sigrid says nothing. She is watching him around the edges, where the hidden heat of his temper has always been signaled by a twitch of muscle, a flex of his fist. But there is an eerie animal stillness to him now that she does not recognize. She can hear him breathing. Thin, measured breaths. As if he has gone in to a kind of hibernation inside himself.

Finally, she touches his knuckles with the tips of her fingers. It’s a gesture that, after years of marriage to him, has become unconscious. “Kaspar,” she says. But the touch of her fingers is a trigger, and he detonates, ripping the tablecloth from the table, and sending everything flying. The schnapps bottle smashes on the hardwood floor. On his feet, Kaspar glares furiously at the bare table, and then overturns it with a wounded groan.

Sigrid has shoved herself back from the violence, and sits, clenching the chair as if desperate to keep it in place, as if Kaspar might next rip up the floorboard. An echo of the noise of his outburst is stuck in Sigrid’s head. The sound of the crashing bottle. The crashing table. He is breathing roughly now, but he doesn’t appear to see her any longer. Instead, he is gazing wildly into some dark hole. There are tears streaming down his cheeks.

They are motionless like this, both staked to their positions, unmoving.

Until slowly, carefully, Sigrid lets go of the chair, and rises. Her heart thumping. The tears draw her to him. “Kaspar,” she whispers.

That night, she removes her clothes, with the dim bedside lamp still burning, and climbs beneath the blankets as Kaspar watches her. His uniform is already laid out for the morning, draped over the chair. They lie together naked. Not touching, but still sharing the bed while Mother Schröder snores on the other side of the flat.

“So what are you going to do?” she asks in their careful voice. Over the years, they had developed a way of talking in bed, so that Mother Schröder could not hear, even if she was trying to. Not really a whisper, but more like an undertone.

He takes a breath slowly and exhales it. “You mean, am I planning on telling the police? Telling them that my wife has made a hobby of smuggling deserters and Jews? No,” he tells her. “I think I’ll forgo that pleasure.”

She fixes his eyes. “No. That’s not what I meant. You know, Kaspar, if you’re intent on committing suicide, you don’t have to travel all the way back to the Eastern Front. You can simply step in front of a double-decker.”

“I’m not going back to commit suicide.”

“You are. Why else would you be doing it, if not to die?”

“Because I can’t live. Not here. I have no purpose here.”

“Because you won’t permit yourself to have a purpose here. Because you can no longer make sense of your world, you have decided that the world no longer makes sense.”

“No. Honestly, the world has never made sense to me.” His voice picks up a beat of distance. “I have always felt that I was playing a game of catch-up.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.”

He looks at her with a strained weariness. “Yes, of course. My wife has the answer to everything,” he says with muted bitterness.

“When are you leaving?”

“I’m to report to the mustering officer tomorrow morning. We ship out from Anhalter Bahnhof the next day.”

“Goddamn it, Kaspar,” she whispers. “What were you planning to do? Drop me a note in the Feldpost from the Ukraine?”

“I’ve written you a letter. I planned on leaving it.”

“For me to read after you were gone. Dearest Wife: Sorry to say, but I’m off to die for the Führer and Fatherland. Please send Pervatin.” When had she started to cry? She jams her palm into her eyes to wipe them clean. Even with their door closed, she can hear her mother-in-law’s snoring. She swallows. “I’m assuming that you have not yet told the other Frau Schröder in the household?”

“I’ve written her a letter as well. I must ask you, Sigrid, not to say anything to her.”

“Are you joking? You think this is the sort of news I would break to your mother? She’d only blame me. Of course, she’ll blame me in any case. But that makes no difference. Blame is what keeps your mother alive.” She takes a breath free of tears. “I won’t be waiting for you again, Kaspar,” she tells him.

“Were you waiting for me the first time?” he asks.

The truth of this silences her for a moment. “No, I suppose I wasn’t.”

A shrug. “Then what’s the fuss?”

“You have another choice,” she says.

A blank look dangles from his face. “And what does that mean?”

“I could get you out.”

“Out?”

“I could get you to Sweden.”

“Sweden.” He almost smiles at this absurdity. Kaspar Schröder of Berlin-Wilmersdorf among the Swedes. “No.”

“No one will know you. No one will expect you to be anyone other than who you tell them you are.”

“No one will know what I’ve done. No one will know about my crime. Isn’t that what you are really saying?”

“I’m not saying that. Because it’s not true. You will still know. And if suicide’s your answer, then you can kill yourself in Sweden as well as in the East. But if it’s not, if what you’re telling me is true, then perhaps you can begin to expunge your crime by living a different life.”

He stares. Shakes his head lightly. “Sounds like a fairy tale.”

“It doesn’t have to be. But you have to be willing to try. To try to forgive yourself.”

“So. Is that what you have done? Learned to forgive yourself? Hiding Jews illegally, helping soldiers desert their companies? What crime are you trying to expunge, dear wife?”

“The crime of complicity, dear husband,” she answers.

“And you think what you are doing will cleanse you of that? It won’t. We are all dirty, no matter what we do. Life is dirty.”

“So that is why you are choosing death?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever understood you, Sigrid,” he says. “There was a time when I thought I did. I always knew you were different from other women I had met. And I appreciated the fact that you had your own mind. In some ways it made our life together easier. I didn’t have to try to figure out what you wanted from me. But I always thought, I always assumed that there would be boundaries. Now, I see that there are none at all. That boundaries do not exist.” He says this, and then looks at her. His face close. “These children you are hiding,” he asks. “They are how old?”

Silence. She does not respond. She can read his mind.

“Do you ever think,” he asks. “Do you ever think about how old our child would be? Would have been?” he corrects.

Had she not miscarried. Had she not failed to carry their baby to term. She does not answer, but Kaspar does not seem to be waiting for her to. “I never used to. But,” he tells her, “I see the pictures other men carry. How they show them off. And it makes me think about these things.” He is silent. And then, “I know you believe I blame you.”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes. Somewhat. But I also blame myself,” he tells her. “Honestly, Sigrid, the idea of a baby terrified me. I had no idea how to be a father, and assumed I would become a very poor one. Also, it made me jealous.”

“Jealous,” Sigrid repeats.

“We had built a very balanced life, you and I. I knew a baby would turn that upside down. So I let my mother take over your care, when I should have listened to you. I knew you didn’t like her doctor. Perhaps if I had interceded,” he says but doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he gazes up at the ceiling. “I was relieved when you miscarried, Sigrid,” he tells her. “Angry, ashamed. But relieved. I blamed you because it was the simplest option. And because I was frightened that, otherwise, you’d see through me, and realize the sort of man you had married. I blamed you and allowed you to blame yourself. And for that, I am sorry. I should have done better. I should have been a better husband to you.”

“Kaspar,” she whispers. Her body is stationary, but her voice moves closer to him. “If I asked you,” she says.

He turns his face to her. “If you asked me what?”

“What would you do if I asked for your help?”

“My help? I don’t believe you’ve ever made such a request.”

“Well, I’m making it now.”

“What’s his name?” he suddenly asks.

“What?”

“Your Jew. I’m assuming he has a name. What is it?” She can hear the boyish hurt hidden by the flatness of his voice.

“Why do you ask me such a thing?”

“Because I want to know. You ask for my help. Perhaps, that is the price I require you to pay.”

“His name is Egon,” she finally answers him.

A breath of silence, as she can feel him stamping a name to a face he has created in his head.

“And is it your plan,” he inquires, “to run away with him?”

A swallow. “Oh, no,” she answers quietly, and feels her eyes go wet. “No. That’s not in anyone’s plan.”

IN THE MORNING, when she wakes, she finds the imprint Kaspar has left on the sheets. The chair is empty. His wardrobe is empty of his uniforms and gear. In the bathroom, she dresses quickly. When she enters the kitchen, Mother Schröder is still snoring in the other room. Only one envelope has been left on the table and it is marked for her mother-in-law. She picks it up for a moment, but then drops it and walks over to the sink. By the time the old lady emerges from sleep, she is already boiling the water for coffee.

“What is it? Why are you up so early?” she hears the woman ask suspiciously.

She lifts the top of the coffeepot and spoons in three measures from the tin. “He’s gone.”

A thick glower. “What does that mean?”

“It means he’s gone. Your son. My husband. Feldwebel Kaspar Albrecht Schröder is gone.” She swallows. “He left you a letter.”

Mother Schröder’s eyes drop with acid suspicion to the table. She glares at the envelope, then sits. Splits open the flap with her finger and unfolds the single sheet. She reads it, then sets it down. She claims a cigarette from the pocket of her dressing gown and lights it up with a wax-tipped match and inhales smoke deeply. When she turns her eyes to Sigrid, they are damp and loaded. “You are responsible for this,” she announces with murderous brevity.

“Of course you would like to think so.” Sigrid pours the hot water into the pot. “If only I had made him a decent wife.”

“If only you had.”

“Well, I didn’t. I couldn’t. Blame me for it. Despise me for it. There’s still nothing I could have changed.”

“Your husband goes back to war just to get away from you, and all you can offer is this glibness?”

“Is that what he told you in his letter? That the front is preferable to life with his wife?”

“He didn’t have to tell me. It’s obvious. He left to escape you.”

“To escape me, to escape you, to escape all of us. But mostly to escape himself.”

“More fancy talk that’s simply rubbish. The truth is,” she starts to say, but Sigrid cuts her off.

“The truth is, Petronela, that the Kaspar we knew never made it back. That the man the army sent back to you—to us—was a stranger. An Ostkampfer.”

“He was still my boy.”

“He was a casualty,” Sigrid snaps. And then, with a softer edge, “That’s all… another casualty.”

She watches the old woman across the table swallow hard, her eyes wet with fury and grief. “So that’s it? He’s gone? My only son. We erect a tombstone and move on? Is that what you’re advising, daughter-in-law?”

Yes. She thinks it before she says it. “Yes.”

Sigrid watches her mother-in-law age before her eyes. The woman’s face clouds, and she stands with a brittle quality, lifting herself from the chair by leveraging her weight with the palm of her hand clamped on the table. She picks up her son’s letter and turns her back, but her step has taken on a shamble. “There’s a tin of powdered milk in the pantry,” she tells Sigrid as she shuffles in her bed slippers. “I’d like some in my coffee, please.”

THAT DAY SIGRID GOES to the films. She tells her mother-in-law this, but her mother-in-law is silent, planted in her chair by the wireless. Some popular tune babbles, but she seems not to hear it.

On the way to the Elektrischetram, she spies her shadow. Brown, snap-brim fedora. Beer belly. Ears like a monkey’s. She sees him on the tram, and again when she exits. It feels strange being followed. To know you are being followed. So she decides to give the fellow a test, and lead him on a bit of a chase. Down one block and up another. At some point he vanishes. Either he’s doing better at camouflaging himself, or has nipped into a lokal for a quick glass or two.

At the cinema there’s no sign of him. Hans Moser’s petulant expression on the poster fills the display case by the ticket booth. Love Is Duty Free: A Comedy of Vienna. The interior of the lobby smells of cold wool and singed wiring from the portable heater. The patrons file into the auditorium with funereal silence. Sigrid passes a girl in an usher’s uniform and follows the carpeted runner up to the mezzanine balcony. There’s a hefty Berliner in a fur-collared coat seated in the front row by the rail. Squinting, he turns his head to inspect Sigrid, but then frowns, disappointed. In the back row, she takes a seat at the end of the aisle. When the lights go down, she tries to claim comfort in the darkness, but this time there is none to be claimed. She feels simply alone. Then light shudders from the projector and the screen silvers. She opens her eyes to a roar of newsreel Heils and Wagnerian thunder. It’s another petulant Austrian. The Führer speaks in honor of Heroes’ Remembrance Day in the courtyard of the Zeughaus, flanked by captured Red Army flags. His peaked uniform cap is jammed down onto his head, and he resembles a curmudgeonly family uncle, slumped into his greatcoat and favoring his right arm as he grumbles into the microphone.

When another patron finds a seat in a row by the balcony, his silhouette blocks her view. Sigrid feels her breath shorten. The man is wearing no hat, and she can recognize the shape of the back of Egon’s head. Recognize his shadow. He sits beside the only other occupant of the row, the fellow in the fur-collared coat. There’s an exchange of some sort, and Sigrid watches the other man suddenly stand and make his way out. But when she watches Egon stand a moment later, he stops. She can feel his gaze penetrate her. She is at once terrified and overjoyed when she watches him close in on the spot where she is seated. His silhouette cuts its contours out of the Führer’s face on screen. When he dumps himself into the seat beside her, she can smell the aroma of his cigarette tobacco.

“So, this is a surprise,” he states. “Since you haven’t shot me on sight, am I to assume that you have discarded your shiny pistol?”

“I have it still,” she answers.

“Then I should assume you simply prefer point-blank range.”

“That depends. Do you still intend to throttle me?”

“No. I’m here on business, as you witnessed.”

“The tubby gentleman.”

“A small cog in the great machinery.”

“More diamonds stolen from Jewish coat hems?”

“No, contraband stock certificates, actually. Not really my market, you understand. I deal in stones, not paper. I’m just earning a cut of the proceeds as a go-between.”

“A bagman. How demeaning for you.”

“You didn’t leave me much choice. I couldn’t blow my nose on the money you left me. Two hundred marks. Perhaps I will throttle you, after all.”

“And who will remove the bullet from your belly after you try?”

He actually laughs at this. A thick familiar chuckle. In spite of herself, she feels her skin tingle at the sound of it. She turns her eyes to the screen, but can feel his gaze attaching itself to her, as a squadron of Stuka bombers dive murderously through the air, sirens shrieking. “There’s a boy who is stalking you,” she says.

“A what?”

“I don’t know his name. But he was one of the U-boats I was hiding. He’s been trailing me, apparently, hoping to find you. And he does not have kind intentions.”

“And who am I to him, this boy?”

“He’s under the impression that you are the responsible party in the deaths of his sisters at the hands of the Gestapo.” Her voice is detached. Almost mild. “Can that be true?”

A panzer column speeding through a burning townscape fills the cinema’s screen. Egon’s silence at the end of her question is crushing.

“I can’t forgive you, Egon,” she hears herself say.

“I haven’t asked you to. Forgiveness means nothing to me in any case. Just more words.”

“Can you tell me why?” she asks. The ground explodes on the screen, spewing whorls of dark earth.

“Why?”

“Why you did it?”

“You mean, why did I betray my fellow Jews to those pigs in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse? You think maybe it wasn’t just my love for the Führer and Fatherland?”

“Were you afraid? Did they threaten you? Did they threaten your family?”

“So.” He laughs again, but this time there is nothing appealing about the sound. “All that bravado, Sigrid. ‘I can’t forgive you, Egon.’ Yet you’re still trying to. Still trying to give me a way out. A moral escape route. ‘Did they threaten your family?’ the lady asks.” He shakes his head at the joke. But then a silence follows. She can feel something inside of him ebb. “I’m going to tell you the truth this time,” he says finally, with distance. “So that no one is operating under any delusions.”

Sigrid is a stone, waiting. She watches him swallow, staring into the truth before he can consider speaking it.

“Just before the war started, my wife,” he says. “My wife had begged to go to Palestine. Begged. She’d had a cousin, you see, who liked to style himself as a Zionist. He’d paid a fortune for a berth on a Portuguese freighter, and had been smuggled into the Mandate right under the noses of the British. But I thought, a kibbutz? Not for me. Thank you, no. I was not interested in eating sand for breakfast with the zealots. And, anyway, I was already working on visas, and not to some salt bed on the Dead Sea. My brother had made a contact in the American embassy. He claimed he was bouncing the wife of a legation secretary, but I never got the truth out of him. The Gestapo picked him up before I had the chance, the stupid schmuck. Maybe they got the truth out of him. I don’t know about that, either, because three weeks later they sent an urn full of ashes to my sister-in-law, along with an itemized bill to cover the cost of his execution.” He says this as the gray-white flashes from the screen mottle his face. “I tried to pick up where he’d left off with the visas, but it was too late. The Americans were through talking to Jews. And then the Wehrmacht stormed over the border into Poland, and the lid clamped shut on emigration.” He draws a breath and then expels it. “That was when Anna came up pregnant. She was so angry with me,” he says, as if seeing her face. “She said it was my doing that her baby would be born in a concentration camp. I told her she was being hysterical. I told her the Nazis were swine, but they understood the value of money. I could deal with them. And for a while I could. One year passed, and then another, and I managed. In fact, I was rather impressed with myself. We’d lost the flat in Schöneberg, but I’d found a spot down by the docks. Noisy, though not so bad, I thought. It wasn’t a dump. There was food, and coal for the stove.”

I saw your face, and I knew that I simply had to hear the sound of your voice.

“And that’s where you were living,” she asks, “when you fucked me here in the back row?”

“It was that seat over there, wasn’t it?” he says.

“You have no idea which seat it was, so please don’t try to pretend.”

He shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not. But I’m willing to bet that you know which seat it was.”

“Your arrogance does not promote your case,” she says, then brings him back on track. “So your wife received a letter from the jüdische Gemeinde, ordering her to report to the SS with the children? Isn’t that the next line in the story?”

“Yes.”

“And you made the arrangements to go underground. A few rooms above a warehouse in Rixdorf.”

“Yes. A few rooms above a warehouse in Rixdorf,” he repeats. “I paid plenty for it, too, but apparently the good German I was dealing with was running a side business with the Sicherheitspolizei. First the Jews paid him, and then the Sipo paid him. Anyway. They came while we were sleeping. I kicked out a window, and made it out over the rooftops, but I was the only one to escape. It probably would have been better if I had simply flung myself off one of those rooftops,” he considers. “That would have been the noble thing, wouldn’t it?”

“So there was no arrest in a café. No desperate escape from a work detail. No return to empty rooms above a warehouse. All that was a lie.”

“A man runs away, while his wife and children are ensnared? Not exactly anyone’s idea of a heroic action. But then I thought, I could get them out. I could work the system. What could the Stapos really want with a woman and her two children? I could buy them back. I took up a name I had used once years before, and started working. I found where they were being held, and set up a transaction with a bull named Dirkweiler from the Gross Hamburger Strasse Sammellager. It really wasn’t difficult. The Stapos are greedy old whores when it comes to what fills up their pockets. But Dirkweiler was greedier than most. He made promises, always boasting about how he could free a hundred Jews with the stroke of his pen but then always asking for more.

“And then,” he says, “came the end of February. The Sicherheitspolizei arrested more than ten thousand Jews over the course of a single morning, mostly out of the factories. It was a massive operation. Gestapo, Kriminalpolizei, even squads of Waffen-SS men, stuffing Jewish factory workers into the lorries. All the collection areas began to overflow, the Gross Hamburger Strasse included, so the decision was made to clear out some room. Three days later, Dirkweiler informed me that he had ordered my wife and children transferred to Theresienstadt in Bohemia. The ‘paradise camp,’ he called it. And there they would remain, alive and well fed, as long as I cooperated with his operations.” He stares dimly into the light from the screen. “That was the day I became a catcher.” A shrug. “I was good at it. In the diamond business you learn to read people’s faces, as well as the stones. I would pick out a man in a café and stare at him, until he caught my eyes, and then I would know. I became an expert at betrayal. Finally, one morning Dirkweiler calls me into his office. He was happy. I was making him look good with his bosses in the Burgstrasse office, and he wanted to show his appreciation. He’d laid his hands on a bottle of Napoleon brandy from some old Jew’s cellar, most likely. It was second rate, but he thought it was a prize, and wanted to share it with me. A great honor, at least in his eyes. An SS officer inviting a Jew to share a bottle of cognac. Unheard of.”

Sigrid grits her teeth. “And what did you do?”

Egon gazes at her for a moment. “I told him that I wasn’t interested in his brandy. Or his cigarettes, or wristwatches, or any of his trinkets any longer. I told him that if he wanted me to continue to make him look good with his bosses, then he’d have to do something for me.”

“For you,” Sigrid repeats.

Egon slowly breathes in, then exhales. “At first he didn’t react. Maybe he was curious about what I might want. About what a man like me might consider to be valuable, beyond the daily contraband. So I told him. I told him he’d have to bring my wife and daughters back to Berlin.”

Sigrid feels herself go still. Perfectly still. Egon’s eyes are fixed as if he’s still staring into the SS man’s face. “Suddenly, the Herr Untersturmführer didn’t look too happy any longer,” he says. “A minute later he was on his feet banging his fist and shouting about how he didn’t take orders from a fucking Yid. But it was all a front. I had already read the truth in his face.” He says this and swallows. “Maybe I had always known it.”

There’s a pause. Egon takes a long and distant breath to finish the story. “The next day I was on the train with one of the Stapo bulls. His name was Purzel. Not so bad a sort, really. I’ve certainly known worse men. In his way he was a thoughtful butcher. He liked to perform card tricks. Maybe he actually thought he was doing me a favor by telling me. Anna and the girls had never been sent to any sort of a ‘paradise camp.’ They’d been put on transport to a camp in Poland on the twenty-sixth of February. A place called Auschwitz. Apparently, Anna had grown hysterical when one of the girls was separated from her in the crowd at the station platform. The SS don’t like panic during a transport, of course, and have no patience for shrieking women. So a guard struck her in the head with his rifle butt, hard enough to kill her, and then tossed her body onto the train.”

He says this with an even, toneless voice, but then stares blankly for a moment. “This was the story Purzel told me. As I said, maybe he thought he was doing me a service. Maybe he thought he was being humane. I don’t know. He looked rather surprised when I shoved the knife blade into him. Even disappointed. In any case, that was the moment I ended my career with the Geheime Staatspolizei.”

Tears are rolling freely down Sigrid’s cheeks. She would like to touch him. She would like to feel the texture of the grief on his face. But she is afraid that if she touched his skin, she would burn her fingers. There is something of the furnace about his expression, so all she can do is wipe her eyes and say, “What about your daughters?”

“How will I ever know?” he asks the darkness into which he is staring. Then he turns his head and regards Sigrid for an instant as if regarding one of his gems. “Come with me,” he breathes.

She feels, for an instant, as if she has been hollowed out. “That’s not possible.”

“It is. Anything is possible. I would have thought you’d have learned that by now. Come with me.”

She shakes her head. “How?”

“How? We get on a train. Madrid is how many hours away by rail? Less than a day.”

“No. I have work here. There are people who depend on me.”

“Depend on you? For how long? How long until the Gestapo come banging on your door one night? I’ve seen what they do in the cellars at Grosse Hamburger Strasse. There are cellars like that all over the city. Torture is not a strong enough word for it.”

“You can’t frighten me, Egon.”

“I’m not trying to, Frau Schröder. I’m trying to save your life.”

She gazes at the light beading in his eyes.

“Meet me here. Tomorrow. There’s a matinee,” he tells her.

“I can’t.”

“I have a plan I’ve been working on. It’s a bit risky, but if I can pull it off, it’ll put some money in our pockets. Enough to buy you a dozen passports. All I need is that little spitter you’ve been carrying.”

“What?”

“The revolver, Sigrid.”

“What are you doing to do with it?”

“Nothing. Just hand it over.”

She hesitates. Her stomach crawling. “What if I need to shoot you later?” she asks.

“Then you can always ask for it back,” he tells her, and holds out his hand.

She shifts, finally, and passes over the shiny piece of nickel plating and watches him stuff it into his pocket. “Don’t wait for me,” she tells him. “Tomorrow. I won’t be coming.”

“We’ll see,” he replies. “A lot could happen between now and then. The world could shift on its axis, Sigrid. Mountains could spring from the seas. Pigs could fly. A woman could change her mind,” he says, and exits the seat beside her.

Outside in the street, she searches for the monkey-eared Kommissar, and spots him at the news kiosk buying a paper from an old veteran. Only this time he’s exactly the man she wants to see. It actually takes some effort to make sure she doesn’t lose him in the crowd on the U-Bahn platform. Inside the carriage, he takes a seat on the opposite side of the aisle and glowers at his newspaper. Not a good Nazi rag like the Völkischer Beobachter, but a spicy illustrated known for its salacious stories and its “beauty” adverts featuring undressed women. The front page features a pile of muddy skulls with the headline RUSSIA’S GUILT!

She stays on past her stop. Far past her stop, in fact. Past the stop for the Deutsche Opernhaus-Bismarckstrasse, past the stop for Sophie-Charlottenburg-Platz, past the stop for Kaiserdammbrücke and the circumference of the Ringbahn. At one point, as the train is pulling away from the platform at the Adolf-Hitler-Platz, the monkey-eared Kommissar stretches his neck and frowns out the window with a perplexed expression. He must wonder what sort of a ride this woman is taking him on. Finally, two stops later, it’s getting a little embarrassing. They are quite nearly the only ones left in the carriage when it heaves through the tunnel for the Reichssportfeld platform. Sigrid stands and he buries his nose in his newspaper, but when she suddenly crowds into the seat beside him, he jumps as if she’s shocked him with a bolt of electricity.

“I’d like you to look inside my bag, Herr Kommissar,” she tells him with polite force. Her handbag is open, and inside, her hand is gripping the handle of her fish knife. She watches his expression freeze. “Please believe that I don’t wish to hurt you,” she assures him. “Just the opposite, in fact. I want you to remain very healthy. And least for another day.”

He says nothing, only stares at her with blank stupefaction.

“I see you wear a wedding ring,” she observes. “That’s very good. What is the date of your anniversary?”

His eyes narrow. “My what?”

“Your wedding anniversary,” Sigrid repeats.

Eyes still narrow, a glance down at the knife, but now perhaps he’s a bit curious. “April twenty-seventh,” he answers.

“Not very far away,” she notes as she brings out something enclosed in her fist from her coat pocket. “Show me your palm, Herr Kommissar,” she tells him.

He hesitates.

“Go on.”

His frown deepens, but covertly, he opens his palm. “And has your wife ever received a diamond from her husband?” Sigrid inquires. The small stone she releases from her fist gleams for an instant, before the Kommissar’s hand closes over it. Quickly it disappears into his pocket, and he turns a page of his newspaper.

“You have a leak in your bucket,” he tells her.

“A leak,” she repeats.

“A Judas, gnädige Frau,” says the kommissar. “In your little group. You’ve been betrayed.”

She stares blankly at him, but he only frowns at his paper. “Who?” she whispers darkly. “Did you have a name?”

“Yes,” the kommissar answers, and rattles the paper as he turns another page. “I have a name.”

“And?”

A sniff. “My wife’s birthday is May fifteenth.”