City of Women

ONE

THE BLIND MAN TAPS his cane rhythmically. Three taps, three taps, three taps to gain the attention of passing Berliners. He is a cadaverous sentry with a shaved pate under an old soldier’s cap, selling pencils from a canister strung about his neck. A pyramid of dots is stamped onto the armband he wears, and his round black goggles are like two holes poked through the day, letting the night bleed through. Sigrid fishes out the coin purse from her bag as she emerges from the U-Bahn stairwell, and drops a few groschen into his cup. “Bless you,” he rasps in answer to the jangle. “Please choose a pencil.” She thanks him, but when he turns his head in the direction of her voice, something behind the blindness of those goggles seems to mark her. She puts the pencil into her handbag and crosses the street at the signal.

Tickets for the matinee are three and a half marks now. Up fifty pfennigs. But Sigrid pays the increase without complaint. Today’s feature is titled Soldiers of Tomorrow. The poster casement displays eager, towheaded boys in soldierly Hitler-Jugend outfits, charging across a field with wooden rifles, practicing gymnastics, or peering down the barrel of a heavy-caliber machine gun, under the smiling instruction of an army officer. But what’s playing makes no difference. She’s not here to see a film.

Inside, the usual wartime patrons greet her ticket purchase with vacant appraisal. The lobby smells of mildew and unswept rugs, and the once-grand chandelier lighting is dim and spotty with missing filaments. The sweets counter is empty. Nothing to sell, like the rest of the town. The coat-check porter is reading a sporting magazine to ease his boredom, since the heating is poor, and the weather is far too raw for anyone to shed their overcoats. But there’s a crowd waiting for the ushers to open the doors to the auditorium. In a city where the food is bad and getting worse, where rationing has emptied the shop windows, in a city slowly suffocating on the gritty effluence of another year of war, movie houses are still places to spend a few marks without cutting coupons from a ration book, or waiting one’s life away in a queue.

Ashen-faced pensioners are bent over their canes. Factory women between shifts, with their hair tied up in turbans, pass a single cigarette among themselves. Hard-eyed street whores are on the lookout for takers among the off-duty soldiers. Hausfrauen clutch their heavy purses on their laps, and wait patiently, relieved to escape their children and the duties of home for a few hours.

To all the patrons, Sigrid Schröder speaks only silence.

She is a stenographer in the applications department of the Gitschiner Strasse Patent Office near the Belle Alliance Platz. Still with her looks, she likes to think. Her hair is still thick and flaxen, underneath the scarf she ties over her head. Her body still strong and favorably proportioned. She is not displeased when she looks in the mirror, she simply seldom bothers to. The years of war have redefined her in very restricted terms. She is a number on a pay book, on a booklet of rationing coupons, a face on an identity card. She is Frau Schröder, a kriegsfrau. The wife of a frontline soldier. Her name is merely something to which she answers.

Following the pattern of the threadbare runner, she mounts the stairs to the mezzanine, which overlooks the horseshoe shape of the central auditorium. Sometimes the whores escort their customers up there for their transactions. It’s more private, and the ushers never seem to mind. They’re likely hoping for a tip. Sigrid has learned to pay them no heed. She, too, counts on the balcony’s sparse population during matinees.

Discovering that the old uncle in the usher’s uniform has found a spot for a nap in a seat by the door, she ignores the number on her ticket and takes a seat in the last row against the wall. This is the seat of her memory.

The first winter of the war was bitterly cold. The most frigid temperatures in decades gripped the city. In January, thermometers plummeted to minus twenty degrees, and people joked grimly that Berlin had been traded for Siberia in the nonaggression pact with the Soviets. But by the end of the month, humor was running thin, even in Berlin, along with the coal supply. It was the sort of cold that followed you inside, that searched your clothes for gaps and penetrated you slowly, until it crept into your heart and chilled your blood.

In the bedroom, she would huddle for warmth with her husband, but when her hand ventured to explore the territory below his waist, he would shrug away her touch. “Sigrid, please. I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow” was his usual response. Afterward, she would stare through the frigid darkness above their bed until sleep smothered her.

“Is it because of the miscarriage?” she finally asked him one night.

“I must get my sleep, Sigrid,” was his eventual reply. “And so must you. We’ll talk about this later.”

But of course they never did. Since the war had started in Poland, Kaspar’s work hours had been extended at the bank, and he had become moody and silent. Several men of the staff had already been called up, and he was sure that his turn would come soon. Sigrid tried to picture him in uniform, with a rifle in his hands, but the picture seemed too absurd. He was nearly thirty-five. Surely there were plenty of younger men the army would prefer. And though this rarely happened, Kaspar’s mother agreed with her. “You have important duties to fulfill at the bank,” the old woman declared confidently. “The government understands that we must keep some of our best men at home in order to keep things running.” At which point Kaspar would observe them both from an interior distance, and politely request more coffee in his cup.

The teaser curtain rings open, and the lights dissolve. Sigrid removes her scarf. The show begins with footage of a military chorus launching into the “Horst Wessel Lied.” A jumble of voices rises in response from the auditorium. Audience members are encouraged to join in the singing of patriotic songs. That’s what the sign in the lobby reads, but with no one around to report her, Sigrid remains silent. After the numbing shock of the Sixth Army’s defeat at Stalingrad—an army that had smashed through France only a few years before—the Party’s been engineering an upswing of patriotic fervor. More flags, more slogans, more posters smothering the walls. But under the surface, an acidic dread is eating away at the official convictions concerning victory. In the first week of February, regular radio broadcasting had been suddenly preempted by a Wagnerian funeral march. Reichsmarschall Goering made a solemn announcement from the Air Ministry. The men of the Sixth Army were said to have fought to the last bullet. A few weeks later Goebbels broadcast from the Sportspalast, and declared that the only answer to their sacrifice was Total War. I ask you: Do you want total war? If necessary, do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can even yet imagine? The audience in the Sportspalast roared with frenzied ardor. But most Berliners responded with bewildered silence. Stalingrad was supposed to have been the greatest victory for the Wehrmacht since the fall of Paris. The Red Army on the Volga was reported to be in tatters. How then could this have happened? Three hundred thousand German men dead or taken prisoner. How did it happen? A question often posed in a whisper but left unanswered.

A panic of newsreel images shutters across the screen: troops leaping over shell craters, a tank crushing a stone wall. The onslaught toward victory in the East continues, at least in the movie houses. She breathes in solemnly. Kaspar is there now. He was conscripted two months before the Aufmarsch into Russia, and is now stalled somewhere to the south of Moscow with a few hundred thousand other German husbands. She thinks about him nightly as she goes to sleep. Fears that he is suffering in the elements, but cannot quite wish him in the bed beside her. Does that make her as cold as the Russian winter? Maybe just her heart, she thinks.

A flamethrower belches a stream of burning oil. A chorus of rockets squeals into the smoke–encrusted air. A heavy machine gun rattles. But Sigrid closes her eyes to all of it. She craves this square of darkness like an addict. Only sleep offers her such sanctuary from the present world. Alone in the darkness, she reopens the past, and returns to the instant before Egon had spoken his first words to her.

Listen to this, she hears him say from the empty seat beside her, though she knows it is only a whisper of memory.

The mezzanine had been an icebox that day, but the simple sight of this man who was not her husband had drawn her toward him not her husband, as if she had just found an unexpected source of heat. He was sleekly barbered and wearing a cashmere coat with the collar turned up, striking a dandyish note that was incongruous with the rawness he exuded. Something in his expression was unruly, and his posture was defined by a confident animal brawn.

She had come to the cinema to find an empty space in the day. War movies were best, because attendance was usually weak, so she had bought a ticket for the matinee of Battle Group Danzig, in order to find a crevice of solitude. To find a fissure in her concrete routine, where she could escape the racket of office typewriters. Escape the noise of her mother-in-law’s complaints and the wordless criticisms of her husband’s glances.

The house lights were still up. She couldn’t help but steal a look at the man as he brooded over a copy of the Morgenpost. He looked out of place, but intentionally so. A premeditated outsider. Is that what had prompted her to disregard the number on her ticket and choose a spot only two seats away from his? His eyes had captured and then released her. Then nothing. Only the newspaper claimed his interest as she adjusted her scarf and settled herself in the seat, trying to build her walls out of the empty space. A stout Berliner occupied a seat at the front of the balcony, his hat clamped down over his ears as he stared in obedient anticipation at the curtained screen. She inhaled the tang of smoke from the projector operator’s cigarette above her head. Beside her, the man who was not her husband grunted to himself and turned a page in his newspaper. She found that she, too, was sitting in obedient anticipation, her palms clammy. Was she expecting something? There were many reasons why she should not be planting herself so close to a stranger. Any number of reasons, not the least of which was that she had just made some small effort to conceal her wedding band in the way she folded her hands. A thin, unadorned ring of electroplated gold on the third finger of her right hand. As unadorned as the marriage itself.

“Listen to this,” she heard the man say suddenly, without preamble, without introduction, as if they had been in the midst of a conversation. His voice was deep, as if scraped from the rock of a cave. “‘Physician of true German stock, fifty-seven years old and a veteran of the Cameroon campaigns, fervently desires marital union with a modest and frugal Aryan female, who is strong and healthy, blessed with broad hips for childbearing, and who is repulsed by nicotine and cosmetics.’ My God, now, there’s a catch,” he said, and grinned, showing her his smile for the very first time. “Don’t tell me you’re not tempted.”

“No, I think not,” Sigrid replied, even though she knew she shouldn’t be answering. Even though she had no business doing so. “I’m afraid I once owned a tube of lipstick.”

“Well, this one, then. I know this one will set your heart pounding. ‘Aryan widower of property, age sixty-two, wishes male progeny through matrimony with a young, fertile Aryan mate, in order to preserve an old family name from extinction.’ There you have it. An old family name, yours for the taking.” He read on. This old man and that old man searching for pure-blooded Aryan bedmates, but Sigrid was not fully listening. Instead, she was watching the slight twitch in his jawline as he spoke. A thin tremble of muscle that she felt repeated as a shiver beneath her skin.

He smiled again, but this time with scrutiny. He gave her his surname, which she would soon learn was false. “But I insist you call me by my forename. Egon,” said the man who was not her husband, offering his hand. “I know that I am a terribly rude man, interrupting your privacy this way. But I hope you’ll forgive me. I saw your face, and I simply had to hear the sound of your voice.”

She glanced at the outstretched hand, as if she might ignore it, but the smile was too much. Open. Easy. Carnivorous. Even more appealing for its sharp splinter of pain. She took his hand. It was warm, and she felt the strength of his grip. “So now you have heard it,” she said.

That same day he took her to a café that smelled of boiled sugar, balsam oil, and pipe smoke. It was a small place in the Savignyplatz with leaded casement windows where she could hear the clank of the S-Bahn trains as they passed. He bought her coffee and an apple torte, and amused her by eating most of it himself. But mostly what he did was listen to her as she bounced from topic to topic, with anxious release. Small topics, which turned into larger ones. Peeling potatoes for supper turned into the stagnation she felt living under her mother-in-law’s roof. A memory of her father’s love for fancy cakes turned into his desertion and the emptiness she felt at her mother’s deathbed. She would suddenly become aware of how much she was talking and apologize, but the depth of his eyes encouraged her to continue. When she realized how late it was, she became flustered. But again he only smiled, crushed out one of the many cigarettes he had smoked, and paid the bill. That night she could not forget his eyes. Could not forget their easy desire, their brute intelligence. Even as she lay beside Kaspar in their bed with the clunking mattress springs, she felt as if Egon was still watching her.

Two days later, she bought a ticket to Aces of the Sea. He met her in the lobby. She extended her hand, and he took it, but kissed her cheek. Briefly, but with intention. Up in the mezzanine, sitting beside him, she found that she did not dare look into his face. The teaser divided, and the silvered images stormed onto the screen with an edge of static. She stared dutifully at the screen as the Ufa newsreel erupted with a blare of trumpets. Footage of artillery caissons and tanks. Polish army prisoners formed a soup line inside a fenced-in pasture. Gangs of old Warsaw Jews with bristling beards were paraded in front of the camera. They gazed out from the screen, blinking with anxiety. When the movie began, she stared straight ahead at it. But to her the heroics of the submarine fleet in the North Atlantic were nothing but a distraction of noise and flicker. Her eyes shifted furtively to the periphery, her mind now bent on the man who was not her husband, whose hand she felt suddenly touch her face.

The first time he kissed her on the mouth, she shoved him away. The second time he kissed her on the mouth, she kissed him back. The theater was dark. On the screen a U-boat captain sighted a freighter through his periscope as Egon calmly guided her hand to the center of his trousers.

“Do you feel that?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“Then you know what it’s for.”

Her memory, at that instant, is disrupted by an intrusion. Some piece of the present forcing itself into her consciousness. She is aware that someone has filled the seat beside her, though she does not immediately open her eyes. It’s a problem these days. A woman by herself. Soldiers off duty. Usually it’s nothing much to rebuff them. A few pointed words, and if words don’t work, she’s started carrying a fish knife. She makes an attempt to hold on to the heat of the past, but when she hears the girl’s pressured whisper, her eyes snap open.

“Please say that we came here together.”

“What?” Sigrid blinks.

“Please, Frau Schröder. Say we came here together. That we’ve both been here since the beginning of the film.”

It’s Frau Granzinger’s duty-year girl. What is her name? A thin, long-limbed specimen with an oval face and soot black hair under a wool beret. Her eyes are so overtly charged that they give off an electrical shock. Sigrid starts to speak, but something prevents her. Maybe it’s the sight of the two men marching around the horseshoe of the auditorium below, their electric torches slicing up the darkness of the aisle. Several members of the audience complain when the beams hit them in the face, till one of the men shouts, “Sicherheitspolizei! Lights up!”

A grumble broadens across the theater as the house lights are raised and the film shudders to a halt, but it quickly dies when the men start checking papers.

The door to the balcony opens and a figure enters. Inside the borders of the Reich, the security police wear plain clothes. In this case, a long khaki raincoat and a slouch hat. He wakes the sleeping usher unceremoniously, and the old man staggers to his feet, spluttering, “Yes, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar,” and “No, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar.” The Sipo man dismisses him with a wave and examines the papers of a young Fräulein who had been necking with her boyfriend, a callow Luftwaffe Flakhelfer. “What’s this about?” the Flakhelfer demands to know, in order to exhibit his bravery in uniform, but the Sipo man simply ignores him, and the boy’s bravery ends there. A glance down, and then a glance up, and the Herr Kommissar heads straight for the row where Sigrid and the girl are installed. Sigrid feels the girl grasp her hand tightly, but breaks the grip. “Take this,” she whispers, pressing her ticket stub on the girl. “Quickly. Put it into your pocket.”

GEHEIME STAATSPOLIZEI.

That’s what’s stamped on the small aluminum warrant disk hanging from a chain. It’s what all agents of the Gestapo carry. The man allows it to dangle over his fingers just long enough for its meaning to sink in, and then flips it back into his palm. He has a hard jaw, and not unhandsome features, but there is a kind of animal fatigue entrenched in his face. A sleeplessness in his eyes, as if they have been burned open. “Papers,” he says, talking to the girl first. She says nothing but digs out her identification from her shoulder bag and hands it over. The man squints at it. Does not hand it back. “Papers,” he says to Sigrid, extending an open hand.

Sigrid swallows as she opens her bag. Once, on an electric tram going up the Friedrichstrasse, it took her three minutes to find her identification in order to satisfy some glowering police sergeant. It was the longest three minutes of her life. But this time she has no trouble. Her identity booklet has become slightly dog-eared from overuse. When she hands it over, she makes sure that she touches the Herr Kommissar’s finger with her own. Just a graze of contact, but enough to elicit the snap of a glance from the man, before he trains his attention on her photograph stapled to the gray cardboard. “Frau Schröder.”

“Yes,” Sigrid confirms.

“You know this young female?” he asks with a nod toward the girl wedged in beside her.

Does she hesitate? She seems to hear the words before she realizes that she is speaking them. “Yes. She’s serving her duty year with my downstairs neighbor.”

“Her duty year?”

“Surely you’re aware, Herr Kommissar, of the requirements for youth these days? She’s found work as a domestic, caring for the children of a mother of six. A recipient of the Mother’s Cross.”

“Really? How commendable,” the man replies flatly. “And I suppose that the two of you have been sitting here since the beginning of the film?”

“We have,” Sigrid replies simply.

“And the ticket window will recall selling you your tickets together?”

“We purchased our tickets separately, Herr Kommissar. She paid for hers, I for mine. I can’t tell you what the ticket window will or will not recall about it.”

A frown shadows the Sipo man’s face. Then he looks down at the girl. “May I see your ticket stub, please? Fräulein?” His voice is not polite.

But the girl does not blink. She removes Sigrid’s ticket stub from her pocket and hands it over. He examines it without altering the shape of his frown, and checks it against the number of the next empty seat. “Frau Schröder,” he says to Sigrid without expression, “this young lady is in the wrong seat.”

“Is she?” Sigrid responds innocently. “Well, to be truthful, Herr Kommissar, we preferred these seats in the rear rather than those down front, so we could chat and not disturb anyone. I know it’s against the rules, but we women do like to chat, so we moved.” She gives a lightly pleasant shrug. “Is that the crime you’re investigating, Herr Kommissar?” she inquires. “Shall we move back down to our original seats?”

His eyes lock onto hers, and she knows she must hold his gaze without hesitation.

“Tell me, Frau Schröder,” the Sipo man begins, with only the barest edge to his voice. “What is this young woman’s name?”

Sigrid does not budge. “Her name?”

“Yes.” He nods. “She works for your neighbor. You’ve come to see a film together. Surely you know her name.”

Sigrid’s mind speeds back to Frau Granzinger’s introduction of the girl on the stairs of their apartment block. There must be a name stuck somewhere in her head.

“Frau Schröder?” the Sipo man prompts.

“Fräulein Kohl,” she announces. The name pops out of her mouth.

The Herr Kommissar’s eyes flick up from the girl’s identity card, still in his hand. A muscle in his jawline grows taut as calculations are made behind his eyes. “And her given name?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Sigrid answers. “Child, what is your given name?”

“Ericha,” the girl replies tersely.

“Ericha, Herr Kommissar,” Sigrid informs the man. “To answer your question.”

A pause. Again the calculations are made behind the shield of his gaze. Another plainclothes man swings open the balcony door. When the Herr Kommissar looks at him, the fellow shrugs loosely. No luck. The Sipo man’s frown gains definition for a moment. But then he swallows a breath. Sigrid feels the painful force of his eyes for only an instant before he hands back their papers. “Enjoy the show, ladies,” he tells them, and then marches from the balcony with his man trailing.

Sigrid exhales deeply. She realizes that even in the drafty theater, she is clammy with sweat. This time it’s she who clenches the girl’s hand, and it is the girl who breaks away.

“Thank you,” the Fräulein says, as if the words might choke her if she does not dislodge them quickly.

“Don’t thank me,” Sigrid informs her.

“No, I must.”

“Actually, what you must do is tell me what this is about.”

“I’m sorry, but that is what I cannot do.”

“No? I stick out my neck, and then I can’t ask why?”

“I won’t impose any further, Frau Schröder. Once the film starts up, I’ll leave you to your solitude.”

“Oh, you will? You’ll leave me to my solitude? That’s a very thick word from someone who doesn’t know me from a lamppost.”

The girl adjusts the strap of her shoulder bag, as if preparing for sudden departure. “I can tell about people.”

“Tell?”

“What they’re like. On the inside.” She shrugs. “I’ve seen how you are. Around the apartment block. You hold yourself in. You hold yourself apart.”

Sigrid absorbs a mild wave of dismay. “Ah. So you’re a Gypsy, I suppose? You have the Menschenkenntnis.” This is meant as sarcasm, but the girl gives her a close look before facing the screen.

“I have certain instincts. Call them what you wish, but I’m usually right,” she says. “At least, I was right about you.”

“Don’t be too sure. I might decide to call the Herr Kommissar back at any second and recant.”

But now the girl only smiles. “I thought I was going to pee myself when he asked you my name.”

Sigrid lifts her eyebrows at this remark. “Yes, well. It’s a good thing for you that I have my father’s memory for such things.” At that moment the house lights darken and the projector rattles back to life. The images on the screen return after a bright flicker. “I’ll be going now,” the girl whispers, but before she can rise, Sigrid clamps a hand over her arm. “You’ll do nothing of the kind. Do you actually think that the Herr Kommissar and his comrades are done? They’ll be standing outside the theater right now, just to see who comes bolting out of the door. No. Whatever this is about—and I’m not asking, mind you—but whatever this is about, you will sit here with me for the duration of this film. You will be properly inspired by the heroic effort of the Hitler Youth Battalion No. 47 to work a field radio. And then you and I will take our leave and catch the next Elektrische down the Uhlandstrasse to our building, where, if you have any sense, you will do your chores, have your supper, and go straight to bed. Is that understood?”

The girl looks like she might argue, but then doesn’t. Both of them turn their faces to the screen, and stare at it in silence. Hitler Youth boys crawling on their bellies with wooden rifles. Sigrid shakes her head at herself. Her grandmother had always clucked at her for being too impulsive. Too rash. “Unbesonnen” was the word she used. A person easily seduced by the thrill of reckless behavior. “Just like your mother,” the old lady would declare with resignation. Her Grossmutter did not dispense compliments, and Sigrid had always taken it as an unfair scold. But, sitting in the mezzanine of this disheveled cinema, having just rescued this sooty-haired girl from the Gestapo’s attention, she cannot deny the pulse of exhilaration she feels at her unbesonnen behavior.

The film ends with the predictable salvo of martial music. The lights go up halfway. Everyone stumbles listlessly out of the exits, emerging into the thickening afternoon light. Sigrid looks across the street at the Gestapo Kommissar and his men standing around a large black sedan. He lights a cigarette, and the light colors his face as he cups the match. One of his men says something to a pair of uniformed Ordnungspolizei officers who have joined them. It must be a joke, because the Orpo men laugh. Ericha takes Sigrid’s arm as if to prompt her forward. “We should go,” she says firmly, “or we’ll miss the tram.”

By the time they have traveled down the Uhlandstrasse, the light is failing, the sky has gained an edge of slate blue, and the streets have darkened. On the No. 14 Elektrische tram the ghost light glows green. They don’t speak as the tram rumbles down its track, but sit, sharing silence with the rest of the passengers. The greenish air raid lamps have turned the windows into sickly mirrors, but Sigrid avoids her reflection. Only after they disembark and the tram makes the circle toward Schöneberg does she finally ask, “How did you know to find me in the cinema?”

The girl wraps her coat tightly around her body. Sigrid notes that it’s missing buttons. “I was waiting across the street,” she replies. “I happened to see you go in. It was luck, really. Just luck.”

“And who were you waiting for?”

“Someone.”

“A man, I suppose.”

Ericha hesitates for no more than a breath. “Yes.”

“But he didn’t show.”

“He did not.”

Sigrid suddenly stops. “Is this how it’s going to continue? Me dragging out every word from you?”

Ericha turns and looks at her but does not answer.

“Don’t you think that I am owed some sort of explanation?’

“Owed?” Ericha repeats, as if the word is foreign.

“Owed. I put myself in danger on your behalf this evening, without knowing a single reason why I should.”

The girl nods. “Because that is your nature.”

Sigrid sighs, exasperated. “So you know me so well from nodding to me in the stairwell. How is that again? Ah, yes. Because of your second sight,” Sigrid says caustically. “You can read people’s minds. Fine. I can’t. You must give me an explanation. Tell me what you were doing.”

But the girl only smiles with regret. “My business is not your business, Frau Schröder. Besides, even if I told you, it would only be a lie. You must trust me in this matter,” she assures Sigrid. “The truth is not something that you want to hear.”