City of Women

TWO

THE NO. 8 T-LINE BUS lumbers south, stuffy with people on their way home from work. A middle-aged Bürger reluctantly surrenders his seat to Sigrid, and she sits with a cursory nod of gratitude, quickly walling herself off from the busload of her fellow Berliners. At the patent office they make a joke about her. She is an unassailable bastion they say, calling her Fortress Schröder just loudly enough so that she must pretend not to hear them.

Staring at nothing as the gray day sinks into a purple evening, her eyes look past her reflection in the window glass to the curious patchwork of bombing damage along the bus’s route. Windows boarded over and bricks blackened in spots, but the buildings still occupied. A vacant lot where the remains of a block of flats had been pulled down. The British Royal Air Force had made a target of Berlin the year before. The newsreels had shown rescue crews digging survivors from the rubble, but not the bodies they had also dug out. Sigrid remembers the sight of the dead laid out like bales of rags on the sidewalk. She closes her eyes to the street. Sometimes she envies the blind man with his black goggles. There’s so much he does not have to see.

By the time she climbs down from the bus, the twilight is drowning the streets, darkening the granite façade of Uhlandstrasse 11. It’s a narrow, middle-class apartment block of the sort that’s common to the district. Her husband had grown up on the fourth floor, 11G. Even now the flat remains in her mother-in-law’s name. Living here had started out as a temporary arrangement to “economize” after Kaspar married her, but that was eight years ago. The smell of boiled cabbage ambushes Sigrid as she steps into the tiled, hexagonal foyer. The first time she had entered the building was on her wedding day. Kaspar and she had been married at the registry office in Berlin-Mitte, then took the U-Bahn to the Uhlandstrasse, with Kaspar toting the entirety of her life’s possessions contained in two rather worn suitcases. Ahead of her on the steps, he set the cases down on the well-scrubbed granite landing and opened the door to the foyer with a comic élan, then turned and, without warning, lifted her off her feet, causing her to squawk with surprise. “Kaspar, what are you doing?”

“It is the husband’s job to carry his bride over the threshold of their new home,” he answered, smiling. “Don’t you know?”

But when he crossed the foyer with Sigrid in his arms, and was suddenly faced with the multiple flights of stairs ascending farther and farther upward, he paused gravely. Sigrid laughed. “Well, go on,” she prompted. “What’s keeping you, husband? It’s only a few stairs.”

“I thought this building had a lift.”

“Did you? How? You grew up here.”

“Yes, and I always imagined a lift.”

She laughed again contently. “Then put me down, put me down,” she said, smiling. “Carrying one’s bride across the threshold of the foyer will quite suffice for German common law, I’m sure.” When her feet touched the floor again, her arms were still hung around his neck, and she kissed him. He smiled back at her. Though she could tell that the kiss in a public area had made him uncomfortable. “Go,” she commanded lightly. “Go, husband. If you want to carry something, then carry your bride’s luggage over the threshold.”

She remembers watching him take up her bags with gallant obedience and climb the stairs with them. It was a feeling she so seldom experienced in her life. A feeling of home. Of coming home after a long journey. And here was her husband, taking up her bags. In that instant, she decided that she had, in fact, made the correct decision by marrying Kaspar Schröder. And that she was so relieved, so very relieved, that she would no longer have to live on her passion alone, as her mother had done. She would, instead, have all the things her mother disdained. A clean floor swept by her own hand, good bone china, a good German kitchen, a meaningful but uncomplicated routine, and a man in her bed to share the simple intimacies at the end of the day, without heartache, without the squalid Sturm und Drang.

What a relief it was.

Eight years later, as Sigrid steps in and shakes raindrops from her scarf, the stingy foyer is dank as a pit, its tile hexagon disintegrating at the edges. On the wall, the official notice board, maintained by Portierfrau Mundt, is festooned with bulletins from the Reich Rationing Office, the Reich Medical Office, the Security and Aid Service, the Air Defense League, the Winter Relief Fund, and the Social Insurance Bureau. Sigrid ignores them as always, and starts up the grueling helix of stairs to the top floor, passing the buckets of sand and water at each landing, just in case a British phosphorus stick someday finds a home on the roof.

At the door to 11G, she heaves a sigh and turns her key in the lock. Entering the flat, she is met by the smell of coal smoke. Her mother-in-law must have just lit the coke stove. Just enough briquettes fed into its belly to make it through the evening with a draft of heat. Sigrid removes her coat and scarf. The short entrance hall leads into an incommodious box kitchen. Then come three rooms and one bath barely large enough to fit the cast-iron tub. Newsprint is stuffed between the double-hung windows to deaden the buffeting winds gusting in from the lake districts, and the window glass is taped up against bombings.

“Mother Schröder?” she calls out, smelling the old woman’s bitter cigarettes. Her mother-in-law appears from the kitchen, toting an iron tureen with pot holders. “You’re late,” the old lady declares. Even after all these years, she still uses the formal address with her. “Next time, I’ll start without you, and you can scrape out what’s left.”

Stuck into a chair at the table, she listens to her mother-in-law grouse about a downstairs neighbor. It’s hard to separate the incessant noise of her complaints from the incessant burble of the cheap Volksempfänger wireless in the next room. “You’d think the Luftwaffe has won the war for us single-handedly to hear her tell it,” the old lady grumbles. “And all because that boy of hers, who barely has the brains to blow his nose, somehow learned to work an airplane.” Mother Schröder’s face is gaunt, well chiseled. Her hair once blond, now wintry white in its helmet of hairpins, her eyes hot as stoves. “You know, I tried to convince Kaspar to sign up for the Luftwaffe before he was conscripted. He could have had a position with the Air Ministry right here in town, I’m sure of it. A man of his abilities. But, of course, men do not listen to women,” she declares with remorse, the lines around her mouth deepening. “He could have been making a true contribution to the war effort with his intellect. But instead what do they have him doing? Marching with a rifle. As if there aren’t a hundred other men, less gifted, who couldn’t be doing that in his place.” She clucks over the foolishness of it all, and then gives Sigrid a look. “You’re not eating.”

“I don’t have much of an appetite.”

Another look. “We don’t waste food. It’s immoral. Not to mention illegal.”

“I’m not wasting it. I’ll put it in my thermos. It’ll keep until tomorrow,” Sigrid says as she stands and lifts her bowl from the table. “But if you think I’ve transgressed, feel free to ring up the authorities. I’m sure you can get a job at a ball-bearing plant after they haul me away for soup crimes.”

“Of course. Disrespect. That’s all you ever have to offer.” Her mother-in-law shakes her head in resignation. She removes one of her acrid cigarettes from a packet beside her soup bowl. But as she lights it up with a spirit lighter, the wireless snags her attention. “Ah. This is a new song,” she announces. And for a moment, the old woman’s expression lightens its starch. She fingers the notes in the air, and hums tunelessly along with the radio songstress. Sing, nightingale, sing—a song from the old days—touch my weary heart. Until the broadcast cuts out with a spurt of static and is replaced by a sharp, syncopated beep. Quickly Sigrid is up and tuning the dial on the wireless, until she catches the strident warning voice of the Flaksender announcer. A large force of enemy bombers has entered the territory of the Reich, on course for grid square G/H. To repeat: Enemy bombers currently on course for grid square G/H, Gustav/Heinrich.

It’s the signal that the British bombers have crossed the line into the Mark Brandenburg, and are coming for Berlin.

Sigrid gazes bleakly at the wireless, but Mother Schröder is already bustling about, firing off orders. “Turn off the gas line, and see to the fuse box, daughter-in-law. And the blankets. Don’t forget the blankets. I’m sure those dreadful benches haven’t gotten any softer on the backside.”

THE TENANTS PACK themselves into the cellar with grumbles and rubber-stamped frowns, but without any embarrassing panic. They have learned to soldier through the routine. They are armed with their air raid bags, their Volksgasmasken, their water jugs, and heavy blankets. They pick up the same vinegary prattle, as if they had left it behind during the last raid, but it’s easy to tell from their faces that the return of the bombers in strength after so many months has soured their stomachs. This is not supposed to be happening. They have been assured by the proper authorities that Berlin’s air defense rings have now been so well armored that they are simply impenetrable. So how is it, then, that the British Air Gangsters have regained such traction in the skies? It’s an unanswered question that hangs in the cellar air like the stink of mildewed sandbags and mice droppings.

Sigrid is impatient for the bombers to come. To finish their business and allow her to be on her way. Around her, the tenants hem her in with their stale bodies, their stale complaints. If she hates the Tommies at all, it is because they have forced her down into this goddamned hole again. A wail from Frau Granzinger’s infant closes in on her. Trapped. How did she ever become so trapped?

To her left, her mother-in-law is darning the toe of a stocking while griping to a trio of her kaffeeklatsch women about a recent injustice. A rude grocery clerk or a shop girl’s poor grammar. Some damned thing. Even as they are squeezed into this dank basement, awaiting the onslaught of the British bombers, the old lady can’t manage to shut off her spout. Her cronies nod in frowning agreement with baggy chins as they tend to the mending in their laps. They cluck their tongues in sympathy and bite off loose threads.

Sigrid turns inward. Certainly she no longer thinks of the future, because every day the future proves itself to be a duplicate of the present. So instead she roots through the past. She spots him for a moment in the corner of her mind. Not on their last day together, in a sweaty flat in Little Wedding. But on their first day. His voice preserved in her head.

Do you feel that? he said.

Yes.

Then you know what it’s for.

The dangling light in the cellar flickers, then dims, a signal that the main event is coming closer, but no one comments. It’s said that air raid shelters develop their own personalities. Some timorous, some fatalistic, some raucous, some prone to panic. It’s a tough crowd in the bottom of 11 Uhlandstrasse. No raid hysterics here. Someone has tacked up a sign: CRYING FORBIDDEN. Across the room, Frau Mundt’s husband offers Sigrid a lascivious wink as he chews the stem of his pipe. The Herr Hausleiter Mundt. He is the porter and the Party’s Hausobman for the building. An Old Fighter who once a month dresses up in his dun brown Sturmabteilung getup and cycles off to get soused with his chums at the local SA beer hall. He’s set up a game of Skat on a card table with a pair of his drinking cohorts. In the event that a bomb comes through the roof, their job is to sledgehammer the layer of bricks that opens up an escape route into the next building. They grunt and spit tobacco and chortle, and scratch their rumps, but they’re relatively harmless. The real danger is the Hausleiter’s wife. The Portierfrau Mundt. It’s her connections to the Party that count, not the old man’s. She has caught her husband’s wink in Sigrid’s direction, and now scrutinizes Sigrid with flinty, unforgiving eyes.

Sigrid turns her head away. To her right, the eternally harried Frau Granzinger struggles with the youngest members of her brood. One who fidgets and one who fusses. The infant in her arms is only a peanut, and the rest are squirming in this dank cellar, mad for attention with only one mummy to share. The woman scolds and coos at them in succession.

Sigrid thinks of the touch of his hand on her skin under her clothes. The mad connection of their bodies. Wait, not yet, not yet, his words burning in her ear. His pulse invading her. Not until I tell you.

She tasted blood as she bit his lip, her skirt hiked up, his mouth burrowing into her neck, his hands searching, traveling under her blouse. She had no resistance to offer, only her own need, only her own rage, like that of an animal out of its cage. The film projector muttering mechanically above them, beaming sterile, blue-white light. The old man at the mezzanine rail had turned his head to stare at them. A piece of silk ripped, and her back arched. He entered her, one nylon-clad leg hooked around his thigh, his trousers sagging to his knees as he thumped into her, pounding her against the velour cinema seat. She gazed blindly at the silvered dance of images on the screen. She begged him, commanded him, her mouth raw with demands. But then her words broke up and there was nothing but the shrieking inside her, which she bit her own knuckle to contain.

Near the door to the cellar, Frau Remki coughs coarsely, and the Portierfrau Mundt makes a performance of shielding herself from contamination by germs, or perhaps from the contamination by Frau Remki herself. The old lady is Sigrid’s fourth-floor neighbor. Once Hildegard Remki was the queen of the block. Her husband was a dentist, and she could afford mink fur collars and luncheons once a month at the Hotel Adlon, along with new shoes and a private tutor for her son, Anno, to learn the piano. When it was her turn to act as hostess for the kaffeeklatsch, it was always with the English sterling coffee service, and the Meissen porcelain. Even Mother Schröder deferred to her taste in chanson singers on the radio. Don’t you really find, Petronela, that Marika Rökk has the superior vocal cords? I know you’re fond of that Swedish woman, but don’t you really agree? But all that changed when her husband was thrown out of his practice because he was a Social Democrat. When he died, suicide was rumored. And then Anno was conscripted into the army and killed in the Balkans. Now Frau Remki is the block’s pariah. Thin and threadbare as a ghost, she wears only mourning black. Looking into her eyes is like staring through the windows of a bombed-out building.

More screaming from Frau Granzinger’s hobgoblins. In a jealous effort to displace the smaller creature from the coveted position on its mother’s lap, the larger one, with the piglet’s nose, has started to bawl with a forcible vengeance and pinch its mother’s arm repeatedly. The harried Frau Granzinger attempts to combat the attack by increasing the volume of her scolding, but it’s a losing battle. She quite suddenly capitulates, and shovels the crying infant over to Sigrid with a beleaguered appeal. “Please, Frau Schröder. Take the baby, won’t you?” And before she can refuse, Sigrid is holding the child as if it were a time-fused bomb that has dropped through the ceiling. She feels the unaccustomed weight of the squirming baby, feels the sticky pressure of the gazes of the cellar’s denizens as the infant begins to wail in earnest. She coos ineffectively and tries to readjust her hold, but to no avail. The child’s crying is like an air raid siren. Only her mother-in-law’s intervention ends the ordeal. “Tsst,” the old woman clucks caustically as she drops her sewing into her basket in exasperation. “For pity’s sake, hand her to me,” she commands, and plucks the child from her daughter-in-law’s grasp. “Honestly, there are times when I think it’s a blessing you never had a child of your own. It’s obvious that you don’t have a whit of maternal instinct,” she announces.

And there it is. The dirty truth out in the open for all to know, like soiled linen hung from the windows. Sigrid clutches the strap of her air raid sack, feeling her face heat even in the cold. “Yes. Quite a blessing,” she agrees, glaring at the whiteness of her knuckles.

Her mother-in-law, however, carries on, oblivious. The baby has calmed immediately in her no-nonsense grip. “I see your new duty-year girl has gone missing again. What is she up to this time?” she demands curiously of Frau Granzinger. Sigrid shifts her eyes to see Granzinger grimace, then wave off the thought. “Don’t ask,” she groans. “It’s too ridiculous.”

“Don’t tell me,” the multiple-chinned Marta Trotzmüller chimes in mischievously. “Don’t tell me that she’s got a bun in the oven already?” Granzinger’s previous girl turned up pregnant by an SS man from a Death’s Head Company, and was whisked off to a Fount of Life home in the Harz Mountains.

“Who knows what she does.” Granzinger sighs. “You know, in the beginning she wasn’t so bad. A little moody, perhaps. A little mürrisch, but at least competent in her work. She could change the baby’s diaper without fuss, and wash a dish without leaving bits of schmutz along the edges like the last one did. And she could manage bedtime without argument or tears. So I thought maybe finally I’ve had some luck. But then suddenly she starts to evaporate. I send her out with the shopping bags, and she disappears for hours, and comes back with no explanation. The queues were long, is all she says. The trains were slow. That’s all. And when I raise the roof about it, she just stares. It’s really too incredible. I hardly see the creature,” Granzinger complains, perfecting her frown. “Except at supper, of course. She always manages to find her way to the supper table.”

“Maybe she has better things to do than change diapers,” Marta Trotzmüller suggests with ladled nuance, but the joke is wearing thin.

Frau Granzinger only shrugs. “I suppose she thinks so. But I swear, when I was her age, I would never have thought of disobeying my elders. It simply would not have crossed my mind.”

“You should get rid of her. Complain,” Mother Schröder insists. “For God’s sake, Lotti, they awarded you the Mother’s Cross. You shouldn’t have to put up with such insults.”

“Yes,” Marta Trotzmüller agrees fervently. “That’s right! An insult. That’s what it is, all right. You should complain to the Labor Service officer.”

“Exactly so,” Mother Schröder agrees, as if it is all too obvious. “If looking after your children doesn’t interest her, perhaps she’d prefer a year in the Land Army. Have them stick a pitchfork in her hands and let her muck out a stable before she sits down to the supper table,” she insists. “That’ll cool her engines considerably, I’ll wager.”

Sigrid thinks of the girl occupying the seat beside her in the cinema. Please, Frau Schröder. Say we came here together. Oddly, she has some inclination to defend the girl from this onslaught from the kaffeeklatsch. The same inclination, perhaps, that has caused her to tell a lie to a security policeman. A stranger’s impulse to step in and protect a child from a bully? Perhaps, in the end, she thinks, that’s all it was.

Talk in the cellar abruptly dies at the eruption of the Luftwaffe’s air defense guns. Even at this distance, the arsenal of cannons and pom-poms mounted atop the gargantuan Zoo Flak Tower causes a tremble in her heart when unleashed. It is the signal that the RAF bombers have arrived. The dangling cellar light quakes. Faces turn upward to the rafters as the carpet of thunder unrolls.

“Wellingtons,” one of the old farts announces with a scowl. As if he can tell the difference between the engine of a Wellington bomber and a beer belch, or between a sack of sand and his great fat ass. But whatever they are, Wellingtons or no, they are close. Beside Sigrid, Mother Schröder clicks her tongue mechanically at the fretting baby as the whistling begins.

It’s said that if you can hear a bomb whistle, then you’re safe. It’s the bomb you don’t hear that rips the roof from your building, pulverizes the walls, and buries you alive in a heap of smoldering slag. Still, the whistling builds up inside you like a scream. You can’t help but hold your breath.

Sigrid winces as the first explosion shudders through the cellar and the children’s wailing builds in pitch. Fingers of dust filter down from the rafters. People cough and snort. The overhead lamp sways. More bombs fall. More whistling and more bombs and more dust. This is how time passes. Who knows how long? Minutes? Hours? Then, with a deafening thunderclap, the lights black out, and even this tough crowd bellows, because, for a heartbeat, the darkness is solid. Death, Sigrid thinks. This is death. This is how death comes. But then the lamp flickers back to life. Its weak, swaying bulb illuminates the baldly stunned faces. They glare at one another, blinking through the cascades of dust, bewildered, perhaps, by the fact that they are still in one piece. “Well, that was a close shave,” someone observes with a laugh. “Such jokers they are, those Tommies and their bombs.” But the banter stops when the Portierfrau Mundt gives an angry squawk. “Curse that devil Churchill!” she declares. “May he rot in his grave before this war is over!” Typical Mundt performance. And everyone replies with the silence of a well-trained audience. Until a boney black rage rears up from the bench beside the door.

“Churchill? Churchill?” the voice echoes incredulously. “Never mind Churchill. Curse that devil Hitler! He’s the one responsible!” All eyes snap to the rising black-clad figure of Frau Remki. She shakes her skinny fist, her narrow face pinched with rage and ruinous grief. “He’s the one who’s murdered my boy with his war lust! My son! Gone!” she cries. Eyes as wild as spiders. “He should never have been a soldier, but that devil decreed it! That devil,” she repeats, her breathing growing coarse, but then her face sags. “Anno was such a beautiful baby. Don’t you know?” she asks, though the women around her recoil from the question. “So very beautiful,” she explains. “And he slept like an angel, too. Never a night of colic. No trouble at all. But now he’s been torn to pieces, and I have nothing. Not even his body to bury. Not even that. Only a broken metal tag with a number on it. That was all our beloved Führer saw fit to return of my only child!”

Another blast shakes the cellar, and the lamps blink frantically. But by this time the rest of the shelter’s inhabitants must welcome a bomb blast or two, if only to silence Frau Remki’s suicidal indictment. And indeed when the light sputters back to a low-wattage glow, the woman has sunk back down to her place like a pile of rags. The thudding explosions grow more distant, but the cellar remains a densely silent place, like a room full of drunkards with painful hangovers. Only the children cry. Finally, as the drone of the attack fades to nothing, the wail of the children is overwhelmed by the wail of a siren. One long, aching howl, signaling that the RAF has crossed over the line into Hannover-Brunswick airspace, and that Berlin, that vast, rambling city, is all-clear.

The explosions had seemed so close in the cellar, so intimately connected, that Sigrid half expects to be greeted the next morning by a streetscape of destruction. But as she walks to the bus, the damage appears modest in their block of the Uhlandstrasse. A few buildings with blown-out windowpanes. A roof, pockmarked by splinters of flak shrapnel from the Zoo Tower guns, is being patched by a gang of workers up on ladders. A crack here, a hole there. Some smoke hovering farther up. Then she turns the corner and is faced with a scene that no roof and window gang could hope to mend. The façade of the white brick apartment house with the pretty garden terraces has been sheared off completely, exposing the interiors within. There was a time when she imagined Kaspar leasing them a place in this building, with its fanciful scrollwork and clean, whitewashed face. She had often speculated about what the flats might look like on the inside, and now, thanks to the Royal Air Force bombardiers, she can see them clearly. The wallpaper from floor to floor is pinstriped, floral print, woodland. The family pictures are hanging askew. Furniture is coated with plaster dust. Two women and an old grandpa struggle in the morning drizzle to carry a horsehair settee over the rubble to the curbside, where they have piled a few lonely, surviving possessions. A coffee table. A toilet seat. A dining-room chair. A chipped soapstone bust of Beethoven. The maestro scowls at the rain as Sigrid passes. The air smells burned and bitter. She tastes ash and keeps on walking. It’s a chilly morning under brackish green skies. Her scarf is tied over her head. Her breath frosts lightly as she spots her bus lumbering down the street toward her stop. She enters the end of the queue and concentrates on nothing as she stares at the back of people’s heads.

There aren’t many buses running in Berlin these days. Petrol is a military priority, and the Wehrmacht has commandeered hordes of city vehicles. But the No. 8 T-Line bus, with its dingy coat of BVG yellow, still rolls onward, three times a day, from the Badensche Strasse to the Alex and back, as part of the clockwork of the city. More Berliners pack the aisles as the bus trumbles onward. An odor of human dank deepens. A familiar bouquet by now. It is the smell of all that is unwashed, stale, and solidified. It is the smell that has replaced the brisk scent of the city’s famous air. The ersatz perfume of Berlin, distilled from all that is chemically treated and synthetically processed. Of cigarettes manufactured from crushed acorns, of fifty-gram cakes of grit-filled soap that clean nothing. Of rust and clotted plumbing. Damp wool, sour milk, and decay. The odor of the home front.

Passengers on the bus are lumped together like potato sacks. A few aging men with their newspapers, though mostly the city has been left to its women. Under the new conscription decrees, regiments of husbands, uncles, and brothers have been mobilized and Berlin has become a city of women. They fill the bus, as always, concentrating on their knitting or clutching their heavy handbags in their laps, while the advertising placards extol the virtues of the Ski-Nelly brassiere with extra wide straps, and Erdal shoe polish. But last night’s return of the bombers has had its effect. There is an undercoating of tension hidden by the masks of business as usual slapped on people’s faces. The newspaper headlines are high-strung and victimized. AIR ATTACK ON BERLIN WORKING-CLASS DISTRICT and AIMLESS BOMBING OVER BERLIN RESIDENTIAL AREAS the morning editions cry. The Morgenpost claims to know WHAT CHURCHILL INTENDS TO BOMB IN BERLIN.

She writes a few words to Kaspar on the special stationery issued by the Feldpost, using her purse as a desktop and her father’s Montblanc fountain pen. She has grown rather proficient at this, learning how to anticipate the agitation of the bus ride and lift the nib of the pen to keep from creating a blot. She does not mention the bombing, because she knows the censors would scratch it out in any case. So all she writes is that she and his mother remain healthy and well, and that she is quite busy at the office. All is in order. What else can she say? Recapping her pen, she folds the letter away, and leans back her head, closing her eyes.

Do you feel that?

Yes.

Then you know what it’s for.

At the Ku’damm she transfers from the bus to the underground. The U1 on the B line. The U-Bahn train that traverses the city’s belly from the Uhlandstrasse, past the Schlesisches Tor and across the River Spree to the station at the Warschauer Brücke. It’s usually a quick enough ride for her, five stops to Hallesches Tor. But then, at Anhalter Bahnhof, something happens. The usual crowd pushes on from the commuter trains, and the doors have been closed to the platform, but the train does not move. Nobody talks. Why bother? Delays happen. It’s all part of the war. Then the door to the carriage is rolled open, and two men shove their way in. Snap-brim hats and long overcoats. They come to a halt in front of a woman in a threadbare outfit and a kerchief over her tousled brown hair. Her face is colorless and gaunt, she stands hanging from a handrail. “Papers,” one of the men demands. The timber of his voice cuts through dreary silence. It is an official voice. A voice of authority. “Papers. Show me your papers.”

The woman’s posture goes rigid. She glares for a heartbeat and then spits solidly into the man’s face. “Shit!” he swears, smearing the spittle from his eye. “You ugly bitch!” The crack of his hand, as he slaps her face, galvanizes the attention of the carriage. A middle-aged hausfrau across the car leaps to her feet, but then she freezes.

“Geheime Staatspolizei,” the man in the leather trench coat assures everyone, displaying his aluminum warrant disc for all to peruse. He is fat. Fatter than any Berliner living on a lawful share of war rations should be. “This creature is a Jewish parasite, and is of no concern to any good German,” the fat man declares. “She has boarded public transportation in violation of the law, and has appeared in public without the Judenstern that she is legally required to wear.” The Judenstern. A cloth badge in the shape of a yellow star with six points, and the word “Jude” machine-stitched at the center in mock Hebraic lettering.

The carriage remains silent. The standing hausfrau suddenly looks hunted and slouches back down into her seat. Most eyes turn to the carriage floor. The fat man appears satisfied with this. He nods to his partner, who shoves the woman in the kerchief out of the car, and then rolls the door closed behind them.

No one speaks until the train begins to lumber out of the station, when the hausfrau, now clutching her handbag, tries to redeem herself as a good German by blustering, “Dirty Jewess, delaying the train. Now we’ll all be late.”

Eyes dart back and forth, but the only replies are a few loud coughs and the rattle of newspapers.

Two days after the coupling in the back row of the cinema, he took her to a room at the top of a dingy flight of steps. Inside, he dropped his trousers in front of her, while she was still only half out of her coat. She froze up at the sight, one arm out of her sleeve, her eyes dropping to his exposure.

“Take a good look,” he instructed her, “before we go any further. You know what this means.”

Still staring. Somehow it answered the questions that had been building. His covertness. All the hidden thought she detected behind his eyes. But all she said was, “It means you’re missing a small flap of skin.”

“It means more than that, and you know it. This is exactly what all the race laws have been written to prevent. “

She did not budge a muscle as she lifted her eyes to his face “I don’t care.”

“No? You are so eager to become a blood traitor to your race?”

“I already have become.”

“That was in the dark. This is in the light. You know what happens if we are found out. An Aryan female fornicating with a Jew, much less a criminal Jew who doesn’t wear the Judenstern? It could mean prison for you, if you’re lucky. If you’re not, they’ll drop you into a camp, where you’ll be breaking up rusted batteries with a wooden mallet.”

A small breath inhaled and then exhaled. She had seen the newsreels of labor camps, for the work-shy, for politicals and habitual criminals. They weren’t exactly a secret. For an instant she tried to imagine such a fate. Tried to imagine herself in a rough barracks, smashing those batteries. A prisoner in a striped smock. A race criminal. But the heat she felt rise up in her simply scorched the image from her mind. “Then we must not be found out,” she answered, and dropped her coat onto the floor.