City of Women

THREE

BUILDINGS ALONG THE BROAD AVENUE of Unter den Linden are veiled by acres of camouflage netting festooned with artificial branches to fool Tommy into thinking he’s flying over the Spreewald instead of the middle of the city. But the area around the Hallesches Tor is much like it has always been. It’s a glum working-class slice of Kreuzberg known for its rowdy beer halls. Not a place she’d ever walk at night, but during the day it’s not so bad. Off-duty soldiers loiter about the U-Bahn station, smoking and calling to the girls. Berliners troop off to work across the Belle Alliance Brücke, which bridges the Landwehrkanal’s slow, murky green current. The U1 exits its underground tunnel and rumbles up a long stretch of elevated track toward Rummelsburg, throwing off sparks from its wheels. Only the tangy smell of smoke betrays the recent visit by the RAF bombers. A smell that will linger for days.

She enters the patent office building through the Alexandrinenstrasse door. On the wall there is a dark bronze memorial plaque listing the names of all those patent officials killed in the last war. Across the hall, one of the building porters is tacking up a poster. A leering green face with a hooked beak and drooping, malevolent eyes wears the six-pointed star on his lapel like a boutonniere. This is the enemy of our blood! the caption decries. Show him no mercy! She gazes at the poster blankly, then joins the queue to have her identity card checked by the aging policeman at the desk.

THE STENOGRAPHIC DEPARTMENT is a drab and cavernous affair of flat gray paint and hardwood floors worn smooth. Footsteps can boom into the high ceilings like cannon fire. A photograph of the Führer is hung without irony beside the official air raid alarm instructions. Stay calm. Obey the warden. Keep gas masks ready.

Fräulein Kretchmar arrives, clapping her hands together like the village schoolmistress. “Come, come! No time for frivolous chitchat. To work!” she scolds the roomful of women. “Think of our troops fighting the Bolsheviks. They have no time to waste with such twaddle, and neither do we!”

Sigrid adjusts her chair and removes the hood from her typewriter, easing herself into her standard position in front of the keys. Then, from across the room, she gets a seductively conspiratorial wink from a dusky-eyed brunette. This is Renate Hochwilde, the closest thing she has to a friend here, or anywhere else, for that matter. During their midday break, she recounts the tale of Frau Remki’s outburst. Renate shakes her head and sighs. “She’s a goner.” They are sitting outside in the grass above the Waterloo Ufer on the lower bank of the canal.

“Her husband was in the last war. He was decorated,” Sigrid tells her. “An Iron Cross, First Class.”

But Renate only shakes her head. “Makes no difference. The last war? That’s ancient history. It’s this war that counts. And you don’t lose your mind like that without consequences.” She says this and stretches her back languidly. Dark, luxurious curls. Feline eyes. A well-built body. Men go insane for her. “You can be sure that somebody has already rung up the gentlemen of the Gestapo.”

Sigrid shrugs. “Certainly,” she must agree, “that’s the likelihood.”

“So keep your distance, is my advice. That’s what I’d do.”

“It’s what we all do.”

“And is that so bad? To look out for yourself? Besides, what exactly should you be doing that you’re not?”

Shaking her head, Sigrid digs into her rucksack. “I don’t know. Nothing. There’s nothing I can do, I suppose.”

“And what should you feel obliged to do, anyway? Did you know this woman so well?”

“I helped her with shopping a few times. That sort of thing.” The morning has produced a flaccid sunshine, but it’s revitalizing after the hours under the fluorescent lamps of the patent office. Sigrid is happy to feel even this weak sunlight on her face. She closes her eyes to it. “It’s my mother-in-law who’s known her for ages.”

“Ah. Dear Mother Schröder,” Renate pronounces archly. “And is she rushing off to plead this crazy woman’s case?”

“Not as of this morning.”

“No, I would think not. For once the old gorgon can give you a lesson worth learning. Are you still fighting with her?”

“Always.”

Renate produces a cucumber from her bag and bites into it. “I don’t know how you stand it,” she says, chewing. “I think if I had to live with my mother-in-law under the same roof, there’d be blood on the floor within a week. Hers or mine, I’m not sure. The funny thing is that Oskar feels precisely the same way about her.” Oskar is Renate’s husband, a driver for a staff officer posted in France. Supposedly, he is aware of his wife’s myriad trysts, but makes no objections. “He doesn’t care,” she insists. “He has a wife whose picture he can show about. He adores the children, and I’m sure he gets plenty of what he needs from those pretty mademoiselles.”

Stretching like a cat, Renate purrs over the thought of her latest bedmate. “Oh, he’s very appealing. Very fierce eyes,” she says. “Older, you know. Younger is hard to find these days. But still with the body of an athlete. And, of course, fabulous under the sheets.”

“Um-hmm.” Sigrid nods. “Well. Aren’t all your conquests?”

“I suppose,” Renate replies airily. “But I like this one. He’s polite.”

“You mean he holds the door for you?”

“I mean, he’s not simply interested in his pleasure.”

“How virtuous. What’s he do?” she asks. “For a living, that is.”

Renate takes another bite from her cucumber and chews dutifully. “I’m not sure, really. He has a firm of some sort in the Potsdamer Platz. But we don’t talk much about it, as you might imagine. In fact, we hardly talk at all.”

“Married?’

Renate shrugs. Who cares? “Shipped off to the country with the kinder, where it’s safe. The family abode is in Zehlendorf, but he keeps a cozy little flat off the Potsdamer Platz. For business,” she says.

Sigrid smiles, but as she watches the wands of the willow tree float on the canal’s marble green surface, the smile wanes. She treasures Renate but is frightened by her as well. Frightened by all that desire, the bottomless hunger. “Should I envy you?” she asks.

“Envy?” Her eyebrows rise. “Why?”

“Why? You have no fear of your own appetites.”

To which Renate replies with a laugh. “Well, in truth, it is I who should envy you. Isn’t it? All that self-control.”

Tell me something no one else knows.

On the bus ride home, Sigrid stares through the window. Stares into the past stowed inside her head.

There is nothing to tell, he’d answered. I have no secrets.

She divided her life into two sides of a mirror. On one side of the mirror was her true life with Kaspar and his mother, which felt false. Every morning, she left the flat with Kaspar, as he was off to his work at the bank. They traveled together as far as the Nollendorfplatz, at which point he would give her a pat on the arm and wish her a pleasant day. Her part-time job at the patent office was not as rewarding as she pretended, but it gave her an excuse to be absent from her mother-in-law’s flat in the afternoons when she was asked to work “extra hours” for the war effort. Who wasn’t working extra hours now, anyway? And when that excuse wore thin, there were always the films. A matinee with a friend from the office. Renate Hochwilde is her name. She’s one of the other stenographers. Her husband’s just been called up, Sigrid would explain. I think she’s lonely. Mother Schröder would frown at the idea of such excursions when there was plenty of cleaning to do, but then she frowned at everything. And Sigrid took over washing the supper dishes so that her mother-in-law could sit and listen to the wireless. Rosita Serrano’s cool, clear voice singing “La Paloma.” She would scrub the skillet and think of the sound of Egon’s voice. The heat of his breath on her skin.

On the opposite side of the mirror was the life that felt true. A rendezvous in front of the cinema. Then off to the cramped one-room flat, belonging to a “friend.” The stairs creaked forlornly on their way up, and the hall smelled of failing plumbing and hardship. This had become their routine. But when she asked him her question—A friend? What kind of friend?—the answer was None of Her Business: the name of a land so much more vast than the simple boundaries of a hardscrabble district in eastern Berlin. He still listened to her when she talked, but now she suspected he was simply using her talk to camouflage his silence.

Outside, the air was frigid. Inside, they had generated their own heat. The windowpanes were smeared with condensation. From the knot of blankets she gazed at him as he lit his cigarette, dragged in the smoke, and then exhaled it sloppily. She liked to see him stand naked so casually. Kaspar was different. He never undressed in front of her. And after their business in bed was concluded, he redressed under the covers, before slumping over to his side and collapsing into sleep. Kaspar would never allow her to gape at his ass, standing by a window. He would never turn and show her his member, hanging at rest.

“You look thoughtful,” he told her.

“Just thinking about how far away you are from the bed.”

He gave her an uneven smile that was more interior than exterior, and climbed back onto the mattress. Taking a drag from his cigarette, he blew smoke toward the ceiling.

“I think a circumcised cock is an honest organ. It looks so naked. So unsheathed,” she told him, drowsing her hand over it. “It has nothing to hide. All men should have such an honest cock.” And then she said, “Funny, that word still feels so strange in my mouth.”

“The word or the organ?”

“Ha!” She laughed and slapped her hand against his arm. “If you’re worried, I’ll confess that I’ve come to love the taste of both.”

And now he laughed, too, but she could tell that there was something secret behind his eyes. This was nothing new. She’d seen it many times, and had always been able to ignore it, but wondered now if there would come a moment when that would change. She leaned over and kissed him thickly on the mouth, and he kissed her back, holding his cigarette up in the air. Was it politeness? No ashes or embers dropped on your lover’s delicate flesh? Or perfunctory. Kissing her to the depth required before he could return to his smoking? These were the types of questions with which she battered herself, but only when they were together. Or when they were apart. Just another sample of the minutiae of their connection that would roll around like a marble for days in her brain. Moments before, his mouth had tasted of her. Had tasted of the last place his mouth had been, between her thighs. But this kiss tasted only of tobacco.

AT NIGHT, she came home to 11G. Shelling beans or peeling potatoes for supper, while her mother-in-law fussed over her roast or her chops. The radio masked the silence between them. And when Kaspar came home from the bank, he would kiss them both on the forehead, then go change into a sweater. She was never required to return his kiss, which was a relief, because she feared that she would be incapable of kissing without passion after her hour with Egon. At the table, she was also relieved that she was not required to contribute to the talk. Mother Schröder would yammer on. Kaspar would grunt with polite interest at appropriate moments. So it surprised her one evening when her husband turned his eyes on her and asked, “How was your day?”

She felt caught, as if the thoughts inside her head had just been turned inside out for all to see. As if Egon had suddenly taken a chair at the table.

“My day?”

A mildly wry smile. “Yes. Yours,” he assured her.

“It was fine,” she answered, and then waved away the question. “Uneventful.” For an instant, she was convinced that he knew about everything. That she had been fooling no one. But then he only nodded. “Good,” he said, and went on with supper. At bedtime, he gave her the same chaste kiss as always before settling his head onto the pillow. She turned and faced the wall, staring at her memory of Egon’s face.

There was no part of herself from which she forbade Egon. She was unlocked. Undefended. An open gate. In the aftermath she was shellacked in sweat, though the windowpanes were sticky with frost. She shoved the wet strings of hair from her eyes, and stared up into his face, which hung above her like the sun. She felt herself smile in simple reflex. “I want you to tell me something.”

“Tell you?” His face was arranged into an easy, sated expression, but some fragment of caution had entered his voice. “Tell you what?”

“Tell me something no one else knows.”

“There is nothing to tell,” he answered. “I have no secrets.”

“You have nothing but secrets,” she pointed out. “So tell me something.”

“My name is Weiss.”

This was not exactly what she had in mind. “What?”

“My name is Weiss,” he repeated, and rolled onto his back to pick up his cigarette pack, the paper crinkling as he rummaged about inside. “It’s the name that I was born to.”

“I see. So, your name is Weiss,” she said.

“Don’t sound disappointed, Sigrid. That’s an explosive bit of intelligence. Not many know it.”

A breath. “It’s a very sharp name,” she observed, trying to make the best of it. “It sounds like the swish of a saber blade. Weiss,” she said, demonstrating with a whoosh.

“A Jew’s name,” he pointed out blandly, and lit up.

“No. It is your name.”

“Precisely my point, Frau Schröder.”

She didn’t like it when he addressed her in this way. Didn’t like the scorn it veiled. Perhaps it was her punishment for squeezing a secret from him. So was it her retribution when she suddenly said, “Tell me about your wife.”

He breathed in the question slowly with his cigarette smoke, and then released his response with a frown. “You won’t enjoy this game, Sigrid. I promise you that. You will not.”

“It’s not a game. Only a question.”

No words, only smoke.

“You have nothing to say?” she inquired, drawing the blankets around her. “Or is it that you have no interest in me, beyond what I offer below the waist?”

“Above the waist as well,” he answered in a grimy voice. “You’ve got quite a set.”

It might have aroused her to have heard this a moment before. But now that she was angry, it sounded only crude. She frowned blackly to herself. “Yes. I must have made an irresistible target. Another unfulfilled hausfrau. One among many, no doubt. Stupid in my desires.”

“If you’re intent on torturing yourself like this”—he shrugged—“I can’t stop you.”

“Tell me her name.”

Shaking his head. “Sigrid.”

“It’s a question, Egon. Only a very small one for a mistress. What do you call your wife?”

“I call her by her name.”

“Which is?”

A small breath of concession. “Which is Anna.”

Anna. Sigrid takes the name inside herself, and consigns it to an interior vault. The name of her lover’s wife. “Where is she?” she asked. Nothing. “You have forgotten, perhaps? Now, let’s see… where did I put my wife? Should you search your coat pockets?”

Egon exhaled darkly, then answered. “She’s in Vienna. Her parents are there.”

“How long have you been married to her?”

“Six years.”

“Six years.” It might as well have been a lifetime. It might as well have been a century in comparison to their six frantic months. Six months, one week, and what? How many days? How many hours? How many minutes left? “And does she know?”

“Know?”

“Does she suspect that you so easily slip off your wedding band?”

“I don’t wear a wedding band. I don’t care for symbols of ownership.”

“How convenient for you. And you have children?”

“Sigrid,” he says, glowering.

“Should I assume that the answer is yes?”

“I wouldn’t think you’d be in such a rush to assume anything at this point.”

“But you do, though. Have children, that is.”

“I have daughters,” he admitted. “Two.”

“Ah. You see that wasn’t so difficult. A straight answer.”

“How old?”

He was up, out of the bed. His bare feet padding across the crooked hardwood floor. “How old?” she repeated.

“Five and three.”

“And they have names, like most children?”

Uncorking a bottle of schnapps on the battered sideboard, he poured out a glass. Only one glass. “These questions of yours, Sigrid. They have nothing to do with us.”

“No?” said Sigrid, her voice strident.

He faced her, leaning naked against the sideboard’s edge with the drink in his hand. “What we have,” he told her, “is private. Just between you and me. If you must have the words, fine. You know that I love you.”

“Are you certain of that?”

“But this love is not to be made public. It would be an insult to our feelings to expose them to the hostility of the world.”

“It was public enough in the back of a movie theater.”

“That was fucking.”

“Rather than love. I see.” Sigrid nodded. “And your wife?”

“Not our subject, Sigrid.”

“You love her, too?”

He inhaled smoke. “Differently from you.”

“Hmm. I wonder what that means.”

“I don’t ask you about your husband.”

“Well, you can.”

“But I don’t wish to. Why must he exist for me?”

“Because he exists for me. I go home to him and have you between us every day. The lies I must tell.” She shook her head at the lies stored inside of her brain. “The lies I must remember.”

“Your lies are not my responsibility,” he said. “Your choices are not my responsibility.”

“You have no feelings for me. Not really. If you did, you couldn’t say such things.”

“I love you intensely, Sigrid. Touching you is like sticking my hand into a fire.”

“Sounds very painful for you,” she replied in anger, but also knowing that it was true.

“But my wife. My children. They’re quite simply none of your business. None of our business.”

The words hit her with the weight of stones. For an instant, and not for the first time, she felt herself to be utterly alone. Alone, as if she lay dead in her coffin. The feeling emptied her completely, even of tears. It was also the end of his words for the day, even after he returned to the bed. To her body. As her punishment, his articulation was withdrawn, and afterward there were only grunts and mumbled half words. She was always helpless against this, and raged inwardly at her own stupidity. All his rough terrain had caused her to forget just how vulnerable he was to pain. She cursed her own hubris, her own frantic desire to be everything to him. To blot out wives, children, histories. To render them all without consequence.

Then at the door he had whispered, “Please don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Let your smaller emotions taint what we have.”

She gazed at him for a moment, and shook her head. Quite without a drop of fight remaining, she propped herself up against the pillar of his body, and said, “There are times, Herr Weiss, when I could simply murder you.”

“Well,” he answered calmly, “for that you’ll need to stand in quite a long queue.”

Suddenly she nearly laughed. She glared up into his face. “Longer, you think, than the queue for milk?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Longer than milk, shorter than meat,” he said, and then kissed her.

COMING HOME from the patent office, she thinks, for an instant, that she sees him. Sees him at the bus stop across the street from the zoo. This happens now and again, causing her heart to flood. She conjures him out of the brisk air of the present. Fleshing her memory into a man on the corner, or sitting at a café window. But, of course, it isn’t him. It isn’t him at all. How could it be? He is gone. Escaped into the world beyond the boundaries the Greater German Reich. She sometimes allows herself silly fantasies that, in her old age, she will travel abroad as a widow, and find him sitting at a café table in Barcelona or perhaps Cairo. She will turn the corner and discover a finely silvered version of him wearing a beret. An Egon Weiss she will finally be able to claim.

Entering the flat in the Uhlandstrasse, she hangs her scarf on a peg when her mother-in-law appears wearing a black smirk. “You saw the door?” the old woman inquires.

Sigrid glances at their door. “Saw it?”

“Not ours,” she gruffs. “Frau Remki’s. It’s been sealed. They sealed it up after they took her away.”

“Who took her away?”

“Who? Who do you think, dear child?” Dear child is not a pleasantry in Mother Schröder’s mouth. Sigrid pastes her eyes to her mother-in-law’s expression, then peers into the hall. Frau Remki’s door has been sealed with four white-and-black adhesive-backed stamps bearing the eagle over the hooked cross and encircled by a ring that reads CLOSED BY THE GEHEIME STAATSPOLIZEI. A fifth stamp covers the keyhole.

“Three of them arrived with their pistols out. But, of course, she had beaten them to the punch. A spoiler to the last,” says her mother-in-law. “They had to carry her out feet first.”

Sigrid shakes her head as if to clear it. “What? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying she followed the same path as her exalted husband. A suicide.” The old lady shrugs. “Probably the smartest thing she ever did,” she concludes, then crosses over to the stove and lifts the lid on a large steaming pot. “Soup’s nearly ready,” she announces. “You should put the plates on the table.”

Sigrid stares. “Was it Mundt?”

Sniffing at the soup. “Mundt?”

“Was it Mundt who denounced her?”

“How should I know?” Her mother-in-law picks up the ladle and stirs the pot. “Why don’t you go below stairs and ask her? Knowing Ilse Mundt, she’ll be happy to brag. Now kindly put the plates on the table, will you? I’d like to eat my supper.”