City of Women

FOUR

AT A TRAM STOP, the conductor must clear the aisle to make space for a soldier propped on crutches who is boarding without the benefit of a right foot. Several passengers compete to give up their seats for him, but he politely refuses all offers, face flushing. There was an invasion of Berlin after the Aufmarsch into Russia. An invasion by an army of mutilated and crippled young men. A year ago they said the war was all but won. The Party press secretary announced that the Wehrmacht’s victory in Russia was now irreversible. THE GREAT HOUR HAS STRUCK! CAMPAIGN IN THE EAST DECIDED! roared the headlines in the B.Z. EASTERN BREAKTHROUGH DEEPENS. THE SPIRES OF MOSCOW ARE IN SIGHT! Reports over the wireless were triumphant. Soviet Army Groups Timoshenko and Voroshilov were encircled! Army Group Budyonny was in chaos! German boys would be coming home by Christmas, and everyone was going to be rich. In the cafés, Berliners leapt to their feet, saluting the radio announcements, and booming out the “Deutschland” and “Horst Wessel” lieder. Russian-language phrase books crowded the bookshop display windows for those pioneers soon to resettle in the East, and for practical minds expecting a flood of Russian-speaking servants. But then came winter, with rumors of unbearable cold. Cold that froze engine blocks and turned motor oil to sludge. The phrase books vanished from the shops, along with such items as soap, tooth powder, sewing needles, eggs, and wool socks. And though many boys did return home, they did so missing limbs.

The soldier must hop to one side at the next stop to allow for more passengers, and finally accepts a seat simply to get out of the way. Once he is settled, Sigrid notices that everyone carefully avoids looking at him. But the young man does not appear to notice. He sits, lost in his own stare, as if he is still facing down a frigid wind sluicing off the steppes. She thinks of Kaspar. The letters she receives in the Feldpost from him are flat, oddly factual, and really rather dull. We had hot soup today. Beans, potatoes, and a bit of ham. It really wasn’t too bad. Or, The cough persists. Perhaps I shall ask the Sanitäter for a gargle. But when she pictures his winter-chapped face, a vast distance fills his eyes, until she allows the routine rustle of an ur-Berliner’s newspaper to sweep the image away. Final victory continues to fill the front page, but the back page is crowded with black-bordered hero’s death notices. Fallen for Führer and Fatherland under an iron cross. Black borders to match the number of black armbands worn on Berliner coat sleeves.

She only felt guilt for her infidelity after it had ended. In the heat of Egon’s grip, she was so boiling over that she sometimes transferred her passion to Kaspar’s body in sudden spasms of desire in the bed they shared at 11G. Kaspar’s reaction was always one of surprised participation. He was not a bad lover, her husband. He possessed his own kind of well-rehearsed power, and certainly had always been attentive to her body. She has never had any complaints. And when her brimming desire for Egon would secretly slop over her rim, Kaspar always entertained her instructions. But he never took root inside her. She could always separate herself from him when their coupling was through, and listen to the mild saw of his snore without interest. Without guilt. Only after Egon was gone and Kaspar remained did her betrayal cause her pain. So she tried to camouflage her guilt with the overeagerness of her wifely laugh and her solicitude at the supper table. Or subsume it in the binding vacancy that settled between them as they sat listening to the radio. But it was really only after he was conscripted and the army stuffed him onto a train rolling toward the Eastern Front that her guilt eased. If he was a soldier, then she was a soldier’s wife, and could play that role without torment.

At the following stop, she squeezes past the wounded boy’s crutches, and hurries off the tram. It is not a short trip to her mother’s grave. It’s a train ride to Schmargendorf, and then a tram, and then a long hike. Head down, she walks beneath the bare poplars following the course of an old limestone wall. Like most of Berlin’s cemeteries, this one is an antique, a crowded garden of tombstones and looming marble funerary tableaux from a previous century. Many graves are overwhelmed by weeds, the flotsam growth of ungoverned flora, ancient flat-faced headstones caked with moss, choked by vines. Obelisks and mute stone angels blackened by wreaths of the city’s soot. But to the north of the Misdroyerstrasse gate they are still burying people. The graves are fresh. Mounds and mounds of newly interred German boys shipped back from the East in pine. Officers only. Lower ranks are buried where they fall, and all that comes back to the families is a letter from the Army Information Authority, and if they’re lucky, some personal items. A watch. A pipe. A photograph. Half of an identity disk. Paper flags decorate the ground beside the granite markers. Small flapping swastikas. Sigrid skirts a funeral that is in progress. A clot of family members in black, raising their arms in weak salute as a crew of laborers lowers a plain pine coffin into the earth on ropes. The clergyman in his stiff white vestment is booming out a raw-throated version of the “Horst Wessel Lied.” A dozen yards farther down, workers with spades are busy cutting out more graves from the clay.

One day a month, she makes the trip here to discharge her responsibilities. Her mother’s grave, she finds, has fingers of dying vines clinging to the marble, and a spiky thicket of pigweed popping up at its base. She pulls out the gloves and old gardening shears from her bag and starts trimming it away, kneeling on a sheet of newspaper so as not to soil her nylons. So much overgrowth. Had she missed a month?

There are times she thinks of her mother, lying silent in death below her, staring up through empty sockets at the darkness of her coffin. Can she see through that darkness? Can she feel the weight of the daughter above her, on her knees trimming weeds?

All arms and legs, she hears her mother saying.

They were still living in the airy, garden flat in the Südgelände. Her father’s engineering practice was doing well. A turbine contract from AEG had provided for regular trips to the shops and daily stops at the neighborhood butcher.

“Eat,” her grandmother commanded, rough as ever on the surface, but there was an urgency underneath. Her voice resilient with an underpinning of duty and… what? Concern, perhaps? Not really affection, but something of the same species. Sigrid was fourteen and skinny as a pole the three women of the house, as Poppa referred to them, were sharing the kitchen table. “All arms and legs,” her mother announced. “Remember? I was the same way before I developed,” she said, as if speaking in code. But Sigrid knew what she meant. Breasts and hips. A woman’s body like her mother’s, all curves. “Eat,” her grandmother said, repeating her command. “The both of you.” She had placed steaming bowls of her famous pea soup with salted pork in front of them, and large cuts of white bread. Sigrid eagerly picked up her spoon. Her grandmother’s pea soup was her very favorite. “Put some meat on your bones,” the old woman advised, “before people start thinking we’re starving you to death here.”

Sigrid glanced to her mother for permission, and received a quick wink. Let’s humor the old lady, the wink said. The Grossmutter. A loud and cranky engine normally, a solid piece of diesel machinery that would till the fields, or plow you over. Either one with efficiency. But that day, as her mother joined Sigrid in devouring those bowls of soup with salt pork, the trio of women formed a comfortably faultless triangle.

Suddenly, her mother leaned over and nuzzled Sigrid with a kiss. A smile ignited her face, and Sigrid felt herself blush with surprise and happiness. It was not the sort of thing her mother was likely to do. Only when she was in a perfect mood.

A year later, the stock market crashed, trips to the shops ceased, and Grossmutter was dead. A stroke took her in the kitchen, like the drop of an ax blade. Her body was shipped off to a plot beside her husband in Hanover. They said good-bye to the old woman’s coffin on platform B of Lehrter Bahnhof, just the two of them, because Poppa had deadlines, and simply could not leave the office unsupervised. Her mother was a slop bucket of tears spilling over, while Sigrid hid hers.

After that, it was her mother’s job to cook, but that didn’t work out well, so it became Sigrid’s job instead. Meanwhile, business for her father’s firm died, too, when AEG canceled its contracts. Sigrid somehow linked the two events in her head. Her father started spending evenings at the office, then some nights stopped coming home altogether. Then one morning in late March, the day after a terrible rainstorm, he left his key to the flat on the kitchen table and never came back.

There were certain formalities to observe after a certain period of time. Telephone calls placed to his embarrassed secretary at the firm. A visit to the local police precinct, where the Wachtmeister at the desk treated her mother like a foolish woman who had just lost her husband. A solemn discussion with her father’s partner in the firm. A solemn discussion with the manager of their bank. A solemn discussion with their landlord. Sigrid blamed her mother’s cooking. “Why couldn’t you have cooked better for him!” she’d bellowed. It was the first time she had ever raised her voice to her mother in her life. But her mother only gazed back at her flatly. “Why couldn’t have you been a better daughter?” she asked. The same day, her mother cleaned out her father’s wardrobe, and gave everything to Winter Relief. Soon after, she started selling things off. Every day, when Sigrid came home from school, there would be another empty space somewhere in the flat. The furniture went first. The fancy dresses went next, and then the pots and pans, dishware, flatware, knickknacks, Meissen, books, everything her mother could lay her hands on. Though, only as a last resort did she empty the contents of her jewelry case, her eyes filling. That, thought Sigrid with a mix of bitterness and satisfaction, seemed to pain her mother more than parting with her husband. And, of course, the garden flat in Südgelände was now far out of their reach, so her mother found a dustbin in the Salzbrunner Strasse where the WC was down at the end of the hallway and was often clogged. There they lived alone. And that’s how it felt. Both of them together. But both of them alone.

Making her way along a graveled path toward the gate, with her sack of garden tools, Sigrid notices a couple occupying a granite bench near an untended landscape of forgotten graves. They are seated close to each other, yet something seems to separate them. She looks away and keeps walking. But then behind her are voices. Raised voices. She can’t help but turn back to look.

The girl is standing now, and the fellow bent forward from the bench, holding her hand as if he might have to prevent her fleeing. He looks innocuous in the drab, shapeless coat and hat that is the civilian uniform of all Berliner males these days. The girl is in a dark, too-large coat with a wool beret pulled over soot black hair. Sigrid does not immediately recognize the creature until she spots the girl’s awkwardly stiffened posture as the man jumps to his feet and kisses her full on the mouth. It’s the duty-year girl, Fräulein Kohl. Sigrid finds herself staring, oddly transfixed. The Fräulein does not exactly resist, but neither does she exactly respond. Then she turns her head toward Sigrid, and even from the distance that separates them, Sigrid can feel the grip of the girl’s glare. It chases her away. She turns quickly and starts hiking toward the street, as if it were she who’d just been caught in a moment of intimacy. The footsteps she hears crunching on the gravel behind her are hurried and growing closer.

Frau Schröder.

For several steps Sigrid does not slow, but then she hears the Fräulein appeal again, calling her name, and she stops. Turns about. The girl swallows a breath. Close up, Sigrid is reminded again how young this girl is. No lines on her brow. A touch of baby fat in the oval of her face. Eighteen, perhaps. Nineteen. Certainly no older. “Fräulein Kohl,” she says blankly.

“Frau Schröder, I must ask you, please, not to mention to anyone what you just saw.”

“And what did I just see, Fräulein Kohl?”

“That man and me.”

“You mean the man who kissed you?”

“I know that you have no reason to do me any more favors, but I ask you to please keep this under your hat. It could mean trouble for me.” Sigrid looks into the girl’s electric eyes. It’s obvious that asking for favors is a painful exercise. Sigrid blinks. Takes a breath. Why is she the one feeling cornered? Looking toward the bench, she sees that the man is still there, watching them.

“He’s married, I take it?”

“Married? I really have no idea.” Ericha pauses as if she must make a quick calculation, and then she says: “But that has nothing to do with it.”

Sigrid looks down at her in confusion. “I see. Well. In any case, Fräulein Kohl, your business is not my business. I am not a gossip, if that’s what you are worried about. So, if you’ll excuse me, I must catch a bus.” She turns and starts walking.

“Ah. Frau Schröder,” the girl begins as she catches up. “Do you mind if I walk with you?”

Sigrid keeps moving, but gives a glance to the rear. The fellow on the bench is staring after them with obvious frustration. “Won’t your friend object?”

Ericha glances back as well, but for only an instant. “He’ll survive,” she replies. And then, “You have someone buried here?”

Sigrid looks the girl over quickly. “Yes,” is all she says. And then, “My mother.”

Ericha nods. “I never knew my mother,” she volunteers flatly.

“No? I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. She didn’t die. She just gave me up. I was raised in an orphanage in Moabit.” Outside the gate, Sigrid turns and starts to follow the soot-stained wall down the Misdroyerstrasse.

“I’ll be leaving you here,” the girl tells her.

“I beg your pardon? So I continue to be your convenient shield, without a breath of explanation.”

“Don’t be offended. I’m only trying to protect you.”

“Protect me from what? It seems you have things backward. I am the one who’s been protecting you.”

“I must go.”

“And what about your duty, Fräulein?”

Blankness. “My duty?”

“Yes! Your duty. Have you forgotten about that word?”

“You don’t understand.”

“Well, at least you’re quite correct in that. I don’t understand. But what I do understand quite well, Fräulein Kohl, is that you have responsibilities to discharge. And if I recall, Frau Granzinger has not yet given up her children.” Why is she suddenly angry?

The girl absorbs this with a barely noticeable flinch. Her expression remains unchanged.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that,” Sigrid tells her.

The girl shrugs. “It makes no difference. People often behave in hurtful ways. Why try to explain it? Thank you for the morality lesson, Frau Schröder. It was most helpful. Good-bye,” she says, and turns and walks away.

“Wait,” Sigrid calls after her, but the girl only quickens her step.

SHE IS LATE returning to the patent office and is summoned by Fräulein Kretchmar into the hallway. Kretchmar scowls, her eyes hard as bullets behind the rimless pince-nez. Her graying hair tightly pinned. Her Party membership badge fastened to the lapel of her charcoal suit. “You were late, Frau Schröder, returning from your midday break.”

“Yes, Fräulein Kretchmar.”

“By fourteen minutes, Frau Schröder.”

“Yes, Fräulein Kretchmar. My apologies. Of course, I will make the time up.”

“That is not the point, Frau Schröder. We are at war here in the Reichspatentamt, just as surely as the soldiers at the front are at war, only we have our battlefields here at our desks. Now, what do you suppose would happen if our soldiers were late in responding to a call to arms, hmm?”

“Chaos, Fräulein Kretchmar.”

“Chaos, Frau Schröder,” Fräulein Kretchmar confirms with fervor. A favorite theme of hers. “Your work has always been exemplary. We both know that. We both know that you are a cut above most of these young women, who are only marking time till they reach the wedding altar. But that does not excuse you from the rules. If it happens again, I’ll have no choice but to report you to Herr Esterwegen. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Fräulein Kretchmar.”

Silence. Fräulein Kretchmar’s scowl remains unaltered. But then she says, “Very well, you may return to your desk.”

“Yes, Fräulein Kretchmar. Thank you.”

But no sooner does Sigrid turn than Fräulein Kretchmar calls her again. “I am aware of the general opinion of me, Frau Schröder.”

Sigrid looks back at her.

“Among the women. That I’m a shriveled-up spinster.” Fräulein Kretchmar’s expression is still hard as granite, but the muscles in her jaw twitch slightly. “No, you needn’t deny it. Its something I’ve come to terms with long ago. But from you, Frau Schröder, from you I expect better. It’s not easy being a female in my position. My work must be perfect. Better than perfect. I am the sole female in authority in this office, and if one of my stenographers comes back fourteen minutes late from her midday break, it not only reflects poorly upon her, it reflects poorly upon me, and upon every woman here. Upon every woman in the Reich. We are all responsible to each other for our actions, Frau Schröder. As one woman is judged, so all women are judged. “

Sigrid holds her gaze for a moment, then nods once. “Yes, Fräulein Kretchmar,” she says. “I understand.”

RAIN COMES IN the afternoon, but dwindles by the time she leaves her bus. Marching down the Uhlandstrasse toward her block, Sigrid can see that the soggy band of clouds is breaking up, revealing a sheet of blue steel sky. Good weather for Tommy. Bad weather for any Berliner trying to get a decent night’s sleep. Untying her scarf, she passes the bombed-out apartment house. The collection of salvaged belongings has long since been hauled away from the curbside, but the family pictures still hang askew on the exposed walls. Grandma and grandpa in their frame, staring out at a world they never imagined possible.

A detail of foreign workers are hauling rubble and tossing it into the rear of a cart drawn by a sagging dray. Their boss is a tubby work leader in the Labor Service, but they are not so well fed as he. Their clothes are ragged and stained. She hears them gabbling among themselves. Something slushy and Slavic. Their jackets bear a large white letter. P for “Polnisch.” They grunt with the heavy work. Their faces are hard and their expressions raw. They struggle with the chunks of bomb-scorched masonry as the boss puffs on his cigars and complains to an equally well-fed police meister about the results of a local football match. Both offer Sigrid a perfunctory nod as she passes, but the workers look at her sightlessly, all of them sharing the same covenant. They do not see her, she does not see them. A conspiracy of blindness.

WHEN SHE ENTERS the apartment block, she finds a crowd filling the steps of the top-floor landing. “What is this?” she asks Marta Trotzmüller.

“They’ve come from the SS Economics Office,” the woman replies with puckish excitement, “for the auction.”

“Auction?”

“Didn’t you see the sign?”

There’s a spattering of applause, as the paper stamps are broken by Frau Mundt’s husband under the supervision of a tubby bureaucrat in a steel gray uniform with a death’s head on his cap. She spots her mother-in-law in the front rank.

In the kitchen of the flat, she tries to remain deaf to the burble of voices next door, and instead concentrates on the potatoes she is peeling. Blackish brown and rubbery with age. She watches their skin curl and then drop away into the scrap bucket in the sink. By law, scraps must be saved. The Party collects them for pig slop. How funny Egon would find that. Before she knows it, she is thinking of his face, his touch, and feels a finger of warmth in her belly. But then she hears the front door creak, and she shoves all thought away as her mother-in-law enters, struggling with the weight of Frau Remki’s Telefunken wireless set. Sigrid glares at her in shock. Mother Schröder glares back in defiance, and kicks the door shut behind her with the heel of her shoe. “Don’t you start, daughter-in-law,” she warns. “Don’t you dare start. I don’t want to hear any of your sermonizing.”

“But how could you do that?” Sigrid begins anyway.

Mother Schröder frowns. “Do what? What’s my horrible crime? It’s a radio.”

“A radio that belonged to one of your oldest friends until she committed suicide.”

The old woman plunks the heavy wireless onto the kitchen table, and huffs, her face flush. “Why must you always side with anyone but me?” she demands. “You heard what she said in the cellar. The woman was a traitor.”

“Maybe that’s what Frau Mundt calls her.”

“It’s what everyone calls her, because it’s what she was.”

“I can’t believe you can speak like this. You knew her for over twenty years.”

“And for over twenty years she was a toffee-nosed bitch who thought her turds didn’t stink. I can remember when her husband, the gallant war hero, bought her this radio. She played it just loudly enough to let everyone know what she had. That was always her way. Flaunting her possessions. Always the higher grade. Always the new coat every winter, while the rest of us patched ours. Only the balcony flat was good enough for her. But when your husband’s father died, it took her three days to manage the walk across the hall to offer me her ‘condolences,’ and of course with a fancy cake she’d bought from Oswald’s. So don’t you lecture me on Hildegard Remki, my good girl. Everyone in that cellar had troubles of their own, and plenty of them. I’ve lost a child, too, you know. Kaspar’s little brother. He was just a tiny little baby, and he was beautiful. God took him from me when the influenza came, and it was like a knife in my heart. But I did my mourning in private; I didn’t go vomiting it out in public. But of course, as usual, the eminent Hildegard Remki had to flaunt. Her grief was so much deeper, you see. So much more profound. So much more important. She had to open her trap, only this time she had to pay the piper. And if I have her precious radio, what’s the difference? She won’t be listening to it any longer.”

Sigrid stands frozen, a damp, half-peeled potato in one hand and the paring knife in the other, stunned by the sheer vehemence of the mother-in-law’s outburst. She watches the old woman brush a frazzled white hair out of her face, clutch the heavy mahogany wireless to her breast, and hulk it out of the kitchen. Sigrid stares after her, breathing in and breathing out. Only a shaft of milky light draws her back to the sink, where she returns to the peeling of the potatoes.

A few minutes later, she pauses when a hash of radio static is followed by music. Lale Andersen singing, Everything Passes, Everything Goes. Then she lowers her eyes toward the sink’s drain, and continues peeling.

The next day, when she returns from work, the door to the Remki flat is standing open. She cannot resist the impulse to peek inside. The emptiness draws her in. She stands in the front room, where Frau Remki once set her sterling service on the mahogany coffee table. Nothing is left now but the hardwood of the floors mottled by holes from carpet tacks. Kaiserreich lithographs of the Rhineland? No trace beyond the shadows on the wall, where the frames had hung, and a twist of picture wire knotted around a nail. The noise of Sigrid’s heels on the floorboards echo largely in the barren space.

IN A WEEK’S TIME, however, the place has been repainted, a sign that someone important is moving in. And Sigrid must squeeze past the furniture being hauled up the stairs by Frau Mundt’s husband and a gang of his cronies from the beer hall. They huff and puff and sweat as they lug the lengthy leather couch, the silk-upholstered armchairs, the heavy oak dinner table, and rolled tapestry carpets. The bronze relief portrait of the Reich’s First Soldier and Führer of the German Volk, Adolf Hitler.

Of course, there’s a portrait of the same fellow hanging in Sigrid’s flat, too. It’s a stationer’s print in a cheap tackboard frame. Her mother-in-law had it hung over her chair. “Don’t drop it, for God’s sake,” one of Mundt’s pals jokes as they negotiate the stairwell railing with the heavy bronze plaque. “We don’t want the Gestapo crawling up our arseholes.” He guffaws and then swears sharply as he nearly loses his grip. This, just as the new mistress of the flat appears. The fellow’s face darkens as Mundt’s husband berates him roughly. “Bauer, you dunderhead. Watch your mouth.”

“Beg pardon, gnädige Frau.” The old beer-swiller begs demurely. But the flat’s new mistress appears not to hear him. “Haven’t you brought the china up yet?” she demands of Mundt’s husband with a frown that pinches her face. “I told you I wanted the china. I’m sure I said that.”

Mundt’s husband clears his throat. “It’ll be up next, gnädige Frau.” he assures her. “The very next thing.” Then he takes it out on his chum. “Come on, meathead! Keep moving! Do you think the lady has time to waste?”

She is young. Couldn’t be more than a couple of years into her twenties, with glossy, honey brown hair plaited into a crown of braids. Her eyes are blue and as large as lakes. A cherub face and a milkmaid’s body. Pretty and quite pregnant. Several months along, to judge by the large bulge covered by a simple print maternity dress cut from top-quality linen.

“Frau Schröder, isn’t it?”

Sigrid looks up. “Yes,” she answers with a politely blank expression.

“I am the Frau Obersturmführer Junger,” the girl announces, and glides forward with an outstretched hand.

“Very pleased,” Sigrid tells her, and moves forward as well, but not a hair farther than is required to take the Frau Junger’s plump white hand. It takes a certain type of female to introduce herself to a new neighbor by her husband’s rank in the SS. The Frau Obersturmführer. “Welcome to the building.”

The Frau Obersturmführer gives her a single military shake. “Thank you,” she responds without inflection. “Your husband is serving, isn’t he?”

Sigrid stares, her eyebrows arched. “I beg your pardon?”

“I asked if your husband is serving.”

“Well, yes. He is.”

“On the front line?”

Her teeth clench lightly. She feels her face heat. “In the East,” she answers, “with the Ninth Army.”

The Frau Obersturmführer nods. “Ah. Very good.” And her lips pucker into a tight little smile. Very good. As it should be. “My husband is also in central Russia. Eighth SS-Kavallerie-Division,” she announces, as if this obviously trumps Sigrid. “He commands an anti-banditry company, and is a holder of the German Cross in gold.”

“I see,” says Sigrid, stretching her face into a pleasant mask.

“I’m really so proud of him,” the Frau Obersturmführer declares, her round face glowing. “Really so very proud.”

Escaping into the flat, Sigrid thumps the door behind her, only to discover her mother-in-law crouched down on the floor in the living room with her ear pressed against the speaker of Frau Remki’s wireless. This is the standard position for listening to the forbidden broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Company. Sigrid clears her throat loudly and takes no small pleasure in watching the old crone jump out of her skin. “That’s a crime, you know,” she says.

“What’s a crime?” The old woman quickly snaps the radio off and lights up one of her cheap Aristons. The air goes bitter as she expels smoke. “Going deaf or growing old?”

Sigrid drops her bags on the sideboard. “Hörsig’s had our number on the board, so I got some carp. Doesn’t look too bad.”

“Still no codfish?”

“No, you’ll have to wait for Army Day for that.”

“Fine,” Mother Schröder responds flatly, distancing herself from the radio as she stands. “I’ll put water on for the potatoes. We should get them prepared,” she announces, crossing into the kitchen, cigarette still poking out from between her lips.

Sigrid slips off her coat and shivers. The flat is chilled. She crosses to the coke stove and dumps a few briquettes into the firebox from the scuttle, taking advantage of the temporary weakness of Mother Schröder’s position. “I met our new neighbor,” she says, picking up the day’s mail. Nothing unusual. An invitation from the German Association of Music Lovers. Something from the Dairy Society of Mark Brandenburg. “Just now,” she says, “on the landing. She’s very young.”

Mother Schröder glares at the coke stove, but makes no protest. Resting her cigarette on the edge of the counter, she frowns as she dumps a few shrunken potatoes into the metal colander. “Yes, and I understand she is with child.” This fact is tossed at Sigrid like a hand grenade tossed by a soldier. “Unless I’ve heard incorrectly,” the old woman adds.

Sigrid swallows and walks over to the sink, opening the hot water tap, though the water still runs cold. “Don’t worry. Your hearing is still good enough for gossip. She’s really quite the ripe little plum.” She plops the fish on the cutting board. Brownish blood has soaked through the newspaper in which it’s been wrapped, and colors Sigrid’s fingers.

“When is she due?” her mother-in-law asks with mock innocence. “Did she mention?”

“She did not, nor did I inquire. All she wanted to know was if Kaspar is at the front.”

Mother Schröder’s face suddenly tenses. “She asked about Kaspar?”

“She asked if my husband is serving on the front line.”

“And what did you tell her?”

Sigrid squints at the intensity of her mother-in-law’s question. “I told her the truth. Why? What should I have told her?”

But Mother Schröder only shakes her head and turns back to the potatoes. “Just watch your words, daughter-in-law,” the old woman warns, scrubbing the potatoes roughly. “The wife of an active-duty officer in the SS. She may look ripe, but that’s the kind of plum that bites back.”

For a moment they are quiet as Mother Schröder dumps the last potato into a bowl. Sigrid removes a knife from the drawer and slices a grayish fillet in half. “So,” she ventures, “what did they have to say?”

Her mother-in-law scowls. “What did who have to say?”

“You know who. The radio.”

The old woman looks hunted. She shakes her head. “Nonsense,” she says. “Pure nonsense.”

Sigrid takes a step closer. “Pure nonsense of what sort?”

“The same sort of ridiculous rumors one can hear in the queue at the fishmonger’s,” the old woman says, facing the sink. Then her eyes dart to either side, a reflex so involuntary and commonplace that Berliners have given it a name: the German glance. “They say that the Bolsheviks have launched an offensive against our forces outside of Moscow,” she admits in a low voice, meeting Sigrid’s eyes for only an instant. “But surely it will be repulsed. His generals may have failed him at Stalingrad, but the Führer will not permit such a thing to happen again. We can, I think, be most certain of that.”

THAT NIGHT THEY’RE down in the cellar again, but the Brits have targets in the northern districts in mind. The true purpose of the raid seems to be to establish the young Frau Obersturmführer Junger as the new queen of the block. The rain of bombs is only background music. She beams beatifically at one and all. Shares her bratwurst. Coos at Frau Granzinger’s child and cradles the infant like a Madonna. Even goes so far as to read aloud a portion of a letter from her SS-Obersturmführer husband at the front. “‘My treasured wife,’” she begins. “‘You must remember that regardless of how painful our separation may be, at this most sacred time in a woman’s life, that we are fighting to create nothing less than a new world. And that the sacrifices we make at home, as well as here on the field of battle, shrink to triviality when compared with the Führer’s Great Purpose. We fight not for mundane conquest but for the very survival of all that is good and true and pure.’”

By this point Sigrid is praying for a bomb to hit. Fortunately the all-clear sounds before her prayer is answered. The residents gather themselves together and shamble toward the steps with the usual post-raid prattle. “Looks like the Tommies will have to try harder next time; we’re still among the living.” “Who knows? Maybe they ran out of bombs.” Sigrid notes that Fräulein Kohl has appeared in the cellar tonight, holding the restless little Granzinger infant as if it were a lit bomb while squeezed into the benches. She glares at Sigrid as if this is somehow her fault .

I HAVE SOMETHING for you.

Her mother-in-law has uncorked a bottle of peach brandy to share with Marta Trotzmüller, but does not bother to invite Sigrid to join them. Just as well. Unlike the harried Frau Granzinger, Marta is of the same generation as her mother-in-law. The Kaiser’s generation. And after a few snorts of brandy, they begin to unravel the spiderweb of their past. Back in days when the Pariser Platz was filled with smartly appointed carriages, and Berlin was the stomping ground for the mustachioed officers of the imperial guard regiment.

Sigrid is sitting in the bedroom in the chair, where Kaspar always draped his trousers at night, putting some greasy cream on her hands and shoulders.

There are letters that she has kept. Recklessly. Foolishly out of some girlish sentiment. They are tied with a silk burgundy-colored ribbon and stashed in a cigarette tin. He would never post them, of course. But he would leave them in her coat pocket, in her bag, to find on the train ride home. Or the next day when she opened her purse before work. Raw, animal scribbling, often dedicated to the torture to which she was subjecting him. His need for her, flowing through the ink across the pages. Her culpability in the matter of his brutal sexual despair when they are parted. He calls her a siren. A Lilith. A succubus. But also an Aphrodite. The Angel of his Flesh. Foolish little names that always left her disproportionately senseless. Now and again she removes the letters from the tin and holds them. When she’s alone in the flat or the old woman is passed out, she holds them just to feel their weight, but never reads a word again. She doesn’t need to. They are all printed in fire on the walls of her memory. And all she need do to see his face, to hear is voice, is close her eyes.

I have something for you, he told her.

“Something?” She tried not to sound hopeful. He had never given her a gift of any kind.

“Yes. Sometimes I write to you when you’re not with me. Sometimes at night,” he said, and reached over to the side table, where he plucked a small envelope from beneath a monstrous volume of Goethe’s Theory of Colors.

“You mean,” she asked, “a love letter?”

A shrug. Call it what you like. She crinkled open the envelope, trying to restrain her excitement. No one had ever written her a love letter. When she opened the page and read it, she could hear his voice as if from a distance, even though he was right next to her. The words both murdered her and made her whole. She touched his face as she read, just to feel him. And felt the kiss of his lips on her fingers. When she finished, when she reached the last word, she was no longer trying to hold back the tears from cooling her cheek. She gazed openly up into his face. Then raised her mouth to him and whispered her love into his ear. It was the first time she had used the word with him in a direct sentence.

He reacted by kissing her briefly. Brushing hair from her forehead. “It’s just a letter, Sigrid. Just what I’ve been thinking.”

She felt suddenly confused. Suddenly at risk. Something had gone off course in his voice. He dumped himself onto his back and blew smoke at the ceiling.

“Why did you marry your husband?” he inquired.

A blink. “Why?”

“You’re surprised at the question?”

“I am,” she admitted, “a little.”

“You said that I should ask about him.”

“I said that you could ask about him.”

“So you married for love? Is that correct? You loved him?”

She rearranged her face to accommodate her answer to this question. Perhaps she couldn’t quite imagine that he was so quickly turning the word against her. “Well. In some ways, yes, of course.”

But he cut her off. “Of course? Why, of course? You think it’s required?” Another puff from his cigarette. “You think it’s something ordained by God?”

“I don’t think I like this conversation.”

“You know what I believe? I believe God is a confidence man. And that love is his favorite swindle.”

A moment later, he was back on the bed, pushing into her. Pumping himself into her as if she were the holy repository for all his perfect sacrilege.

When Sigrid was fifteen, during a time when the Nazi Party was still merely a political curiosity in Berlin, there was a chubby old lady named Steinberg, who lived above the dingy flat, which Sigrid shared with her mother in the Salzbrunner Strasse. The old lady was losing her sight, so Sigrid would help her with cleaning and laundry and shopping after school dismissal, and for this Sigrid earned a few marks. It wasn’t so bad. Since her mother had taken a secretarial position at a Kreuzberg Blaupunkt factory to pay the rent, their flat always felt like an empty grave when Sigrid came home, so she didn’t mind having another place to be. Sitting in Frau Steinberg’s small living room, she often read the books that lined the shelves, sometimes aloud for the old lady’s benefit. She knew, of course, that Frau Steinberg was Jewish, but had never given this fact any great thought. On the mantel was a picture of Herr Steinberg in uniform with a medal pinned to his tunic from the Kaiser’s war. At Christmastime, Frau Steinberg distributed sweets to the children in the building. And if there was a tiny copy of Jewish scripture inserted into a small brass knickknack tacked to the front door frame, it didn’t seem to bother the neighbors much.

Then one afternoon, Frau Steinberg’s son arrived. His name was Fabian. He was not very tall, but physically very strongly built, with dark, lustrously palmated hair. There was a brawniness under the suit he wore, and when he smiled, Sigrid felt her stomach flip. When her mother met him, she saw a look on her mother’s face that made her highly suspect. It was the look usually reserved for the jewelry counter at KaDeWe. And Fabian’s look in return was not much different. It caused Sigrid a twinge of jealousy, the way they smiled at each other. And she certainly didn’t like the way her mother questioned her at supper. So you say he’s a salesman?

Of some sort.

And he’s come back to Berlin?

Only temporarily, Sigrid had answered, though she had made that up.

Did you see the shirt he was wearing? That was real silk.

Sigrid frowned. She had paid no attention to his shirt.

He must do well, don’t you think? But at this point, Sigrid could tell that her mother was now talking to herself, not to her daughter.

Dinners and outings followed, with Sigrid present. Then dinners and outings followed without her present. It made Sigrid angry, and to get back at her mother, she started copying her father’s mannerisms: fortifying herself behind printed words at the supper table, answering questions with a dull, ironic huff of breath followed by a flat grunt of disapproval, all in attempt to conjure her father’s ghost and sting her mother with the memory of her absent husband. But her mother simply ignored her and talked about the French automobile that Fabian had bought.

A Renault the color of ripe cherries.

A huff of breath. Not even a German car. Followed by a flat grunt of disapproval.

Then there was a morning when Sigrid woke up at first light only to find Fabian leaving their flat. She stood there, clutching her dressing gown closed over her flannel nightclothes, staring at him in shock. He only smiled his smile in return, and chirped, “Be smart at school today, blondie.” He had started calling her that. “Study hard.”

A few moments later, her mother came bustling into the room, in a pale blue satin nightgown, with a flimsy lace top that left her bosom largely exposed. Sigrid had never seen her in such a thing before. Her mother stopped dead at Sigrid’s stare, but only for the length of a breath to recalculate. Then she hurried toward the kitchen. “You’re up early,” was all she said. Sigrid said nothing.

In fact, Sigrid said nothing for the rest of the day. It was only after dinner when her mother was boiling coffee that she blurted out the words. “Are you going to marry him?”

Her mother offered her the thinnest of glances as she lit up a cigarette.

“Marry whom, Liebchen?”

Sigrid frowned. “Herr Steinberg, of course,” she blurted. “Fabian.”

Her mother formed an odd smile shaped around something sharp and painful. “Liebchen,” she began, drowsily, then spewed out smoke. “That would never happen.”

“Why?” Sigrid had demanded. “Because he doesn’t love you?”

And now a flash of pain colored her mother’s eyes. “Oh, no. I’m sure he loves me.”

“Then why?” Sigrid was a little afraid now. Afraid of what was coming.

“Because of you, of course.”

“Me?”

“He’s a Jew, child.” And then her voice became blandly incredulous. “I could never permit a Jew to become your father.”

Sigrid saw Fabian perhaps a week later, standing out in the street in front of their flat. But her mother only closed the shades. “I’ve spoken to Frau Schultz across the street. She needs help with her housework, and will pay two marks a day.”

“Frau Schultz?”

“The money will come in handy. Look at you, you’re growing out of your clothes,” her mother observed with a dim reproach informing her voice. “Soon you’ll be popping out of our blouse.”

“But Frau Schultz is mean,” Sigrid complained. “And she has that nasty dog who always nips my ankles.”

“You’ll learn to live with it. I’ve learned to live with plenty worse, believe me. She’s expecting you to start tomorrow.”

“I don’t think Fabian ever loved you,” Sigrid announced. “And neither did Poppa.” Her eyes were suddenly burning with tears. It was the cruelest thing she could think of to say. Her mother only gazed back at her with a kind of wretched disdain, but all she said was, “Don’t make any problems for old lady Schultz. Or it’ll be my bite you have to worry about.”

Good. For once you are staying out of trouble, Sigrid hears herself observe. Returning home from the patent office, she has met Fräulein Kohl outside the building, shepherding Granzinger’s two middle girls up the steps. She finds that she is inexplicably happy to see the young woman, though she does not dare show it.

“Go on. Go on up,” the Fräulein directs the children without sympathy. “You know the way, I think, by now.”

“Mutti will be cross if you leave us alone again,” the piggy-faced child points out.

“And I’ll be cross if you don’t do as you’re told, and we don’t want that, do we? Now go. I want a word with Frau Schröder.”

The little piglet frowns. She looks like she might want to challenge her orders, but decides not to, and the two children bounce up the steps.

“A word?” Sigrid asks.

“Will you do something for me? Frau Schröder?”

“You mean something else?”

The girl removes a parcel from her pocket, tightly wrapped in brown butcher’s paper and tied with twine. “Would you hold this for me? Just for a few days.”

“Hold it?” Sigrid feels a small pinch in her belly. “What does that mean, ‘hold it’? Hold it for what? What is it?”

“Something that I would prefer not to have just anyone open. I have very little privacy, you see. Frau Granzinger is regularly searching through my things.”

“And how do you know I won’t open it as well? Because of your intuition again?”

“No. I think you might open it. But better you than her. Anyway, it won’t be long,” she says. “I’ll take it back in a few days.”

“No. No, this doesn’t feel correct.”

“It’s not correct, Frau Schröder. In fact, it’s very incorrect. But never mind,” the girl tells her, and replaces the parcel into her pocket. “Never mind. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She turns her back to Sigrid and heads up the steps.

“Wait. Child. You needn’t simply walk away,” Sigrid points out.

But the girl only shrugs as she opens the doors to the foyer. “No? Why not? Either you do something or you don’t. That’s what I’ve learned,” she says, and disappears into the building.

Climbing the steps alone toward 11G, Sigrid fills her head with a memory. The first time Egon asked her to deliver an envelope for him, they had just made love. Afterward, she lay collapsed on her back, her head on the mattress. Where had the pillow gone? He reached over to retrieve his cigarettes from the end table, and then lit up, leaning beside her on one elbow.

“Don’t tell me your husband has ever done that for you,” he said, exhaling smoke in a stream. “That takes some true craftsmanship.” She didn’t answer, and he didn’t seem to expect her to. “So, Frau Schröder. There’s something you can do for me,” he told her.

She let her head roll over so that she was looking into his face. “In payment for your fine craftsmanship?” she asked.

“Tomorrow at noon, there will be a man waiting on the main platform of Schlesischer Bahnhof. I’d like you to exchange packages with him.”

“Packages,” Sigrid repeated.

“Yes. I’ll give you the package for him. You bring back his package for me.”

A stare.

“Very simple, actually,” Egon told her. “It won’t take you thirty minutes. You can do it on your midday break.”

She took the cigarette from his fingers. “Am I permitted to ask questions?”

“It’s a small business transaction. That’s all.”

“But illegal,” she said, and inhaled smoke.

“Will you do it?”

Exhaled. The smoke plumed upward. “Of course I’ll do it. I think you know that I’ll do anything you ask of me.”

“Good,” he said, and reclaimed his cigarette.

THE PACKAGE ITSELF was a sack of Karneval brand rock sugar candy. When she looked at Egon for an explanation, he simply said, “Don’t eat any. You could break a tooth.” When she opened the drawstring and shook a sample of the contents into her palm, a shard of glimmer appeared among bits of the amber rock sugar. She had never owned a diamond, but assumed that this is what one looked like.

When she gave Egon the box of Weike Garde cigars, which she had received in return for the sack of rock sugar candy, he dropped the box on the end table and sat on the bed, pulling off his shoes.

“No trouble?”

“No,” she answered, draping her coat over the flimsy cane-back chair. “The gentleman was just where you’d said he would be.”

One shoe hit the floor. “Good. What did he look like?” The other shoe hit the floor.

“Skinny. Head shaved. A black Homburg and a gray mustache that was waxed.”

Egon nodded to himself. “Good,” he said again, yanking out the tail of his shirt, then peeling it, still buttoned, over his head.

“So. What’s in the cigar box? Cigars?”

“You didn’t look?” he asked. Then shrugged. “Only money. A few marks to get by on.” And then he asked, “Did you enjoy it?”

“You mean my secret mission?” she asked, unbuttoning her dress.

“If we were mobsters in Chicago, you’d be called my ‘bagman.’”

“‘Bagman’?” Sigrid repeats. Incomprehensible. “So we’re mobsters now?

“Tell me the truth. It didn’t give you a thrill, Frau Schröder, to be disobeying the rules?”

In fact, it had. Her heart had pumped excitedly as she had made the exchange. It had happened so fast, she had barely realized that it was over when the skinny Berliner disappeared into the crowd on the platform. But all she tells Egon is, “I’m already disobeying the rules. With you, you great monster.”

Egon grinned, and stood long enough to unbuckle his belt and drop his trousers. “So you’ll do it again?” he asked.

But Sigrid didn’t answer him. They both knew the answer to his question. So instead she turned her back to him and showed him the clasp of her brassiere. “Undo me,” she whispered lightly.

OPENING THE DOOR to her mother-in-law’s flat, Sigrid smells camphor balls. “Frau Mundt has posted a notice from the Party,” Mother Schröder announces as Sigrid removes her coat and scarf.

“A notice?” she asks, still distracted by her own memory.

“A collection for the war effort,” the old lady says, “of winter clothing.”

Sigrid glances at the striped dress box from Tempelhof’s that her mother-in-law is filling. “And do we have any winter clothing left worthy of collecting?”

“As usual, your attempts at humor are ill placed.”

There were always collections being made. SA men rattling tins for Winter Relief in the rail stations. Hitler Youth collecting pots and pans door to door for scrap metal drives. Sigrid digs through the pile on the table. Last year it was the same. Scarves, old gloves, some rabbit-fur collars. But this year it’s also the gray-blue houndstooth coat the old lady had worn before the war, and a long black wool cape that Sigrid had bought for herself before she’d quit her job at the telephone company to get married. None of Kaspar’s clothes. Kaspar’s bedroom wardrobe has become something of a shrine to her mother-in-law since he was called up. “And I am contributing my sable hat?” Sigrid asks. It is the only expensive gift that Kaspar ever bought for her. Russian sable. It was their fifth wedding anniversary, after he had been promoted to the position of authorized signatory at the bank. She had picked it out from a shop window in the Unter den Linden.

Mother Schröder grabs the hat like it’s an old cleaning rag. “You mean this?” The old woman shrugs, tossing the hat aside. “Fine. You want to keep it, go ahead. Let our soldiers turn to ice. Forget about the fact that your husband is at the front right now, doing his patriotic duty. You must have your important hat.”

Sigrid takes a breath. “No,” she replies, returning the hat to the heap. “It makes no difference,” she says, and realizes that this is true. Let it return to Russia.

That evening, per Frau Mundt’s notice-board instructions, Sigrid places the striped dress box and the pair of coats on the landing for official collection by the Portierfrau’s slovenly husband. She notes that across the hall, at the door of the Frau Obersturmführer’s flat, are a pile of coats and a wicker basket full of furs and wools. Also, two pairs of skis complete with poles, which are added to the inventory by a lean, dark-headed man supported heavily by a cane, who steps out of the flat just as Sigrid is taking her mental inventory. Her surprise must register clearly on her face, because he lifts his eyebrows and asks, “Did I startle you?”

He looks to be in his early thirties, not so much older than she, wearing a dark wool cardigan, with a patch at one of the elbows, over a white linen shirt buttoned at the collar. His face is evenly proportioned, with patrician features. What used to be called an “officer’s face.” But his gaze is like a gun sight, as if he is looking at her down the bore of a rifle. When she does not respond, he stacks the skis neatly against the wall. “Well. Shan’t be getting much use out of these anytime soon. Skiing, as I recall it, requires two legs,” he tells her, and turns his weight on his cane to reenter the flat.

“Wait. I’m sorry,” Sigrid hears herself suddenly say.

Again he takes her into his sights. “You’re sorry? For what?” he says mildly. “That you were impolite, or that I am a one-legged cripple?”

“Both,” she answers. She can feel a sudden thickening in her blood. A certain dryness at the back of her mouth. It’s not that she feels stripped by his gaze, more like annihilated. “Are you in pain?” Sigrid asks, feeling her face heat.

“Yes,” he answers. “Are you?”

“Me?”

“You look it,” he tells her. “In pain, that is.”

“Yes,” she hears herself answer suddenly.

“Then you should do something about it. I could help you.”

“Help me?”

“Relieve the pain.”

She swallows. Absorbs the force of his stare. “No. Thank you.”

The man fixes her with the gun sight a moment longer, then shrugs. “Well, you should do something, gnädige Frau,” he tells her, opening the door to the flat. “I have my pain, and what can be done about it? Stitch a leg back on after it’s been blown off? Not very practical. But you? What’s your excuse?”

THAT NIGHT, Sigrid lies awake, staring up at the darkness of the ceiling. She’s still awake with a wire of tension in her body. Her palms are clammy. It’s been so long that she’s even thought about doing this that she’s hesitant. Will she remember how? Shoving off her covers, she gingerly tugs up her nightdress and lets her fingers go seeking. They come up dry at first, but then she feels the dampness. Her body slowing, arching. Tightening. She must bite her wrist to silence her cry. Her cry for the man who has turned her past into a treasury, and her future into an ash pit of hope.

It’s Saturday. Her day for the dairy shop and greengrocer. So she swallows some belladonna with a cup of sour chicory coffee, eats a slice of tasteless rye bread, and hurries out the door, only to be intercepted at the top of the stairs. Frau Mundt, the porter’s wife, is decked out in her best Nazi fashion. The blue-black Frauenschaft uniform, complete with the felt fedora and swastika pin on the lapel of her overcoat. An ensemble she is known to wear any time she visits the Party’s district office in the Jägerstrasse.

“’Morning,” Sigrid offers quickly.

“Heil Hitler,” Mundt reminds her.

“Yes of course. Heil Hitler. I’m sorry, but I’m on my way to Brodheker’s, before they run out of milk.”

But Frau Mundt makes no move to clear the stairwell. “Perhaps you did not see the notice,” she announces, in a tone a bit too sharp for a Saturday morning.

“Notice,” Sigrid repeats. “I’m sorry, notice? I don’t know what you mean.”

“Donations, Frau Schröder,” Mundt replies with a thin frown. “Of warm clothing for our men in the east, struggling against the Bolshevik enemy. Your husband among them, I believe. They were to be placed on the landing for collection.”

“Yes. Oh, yes, of course. I put out our donation last night. Right here at the door. A box and two coats.”

“Is that so?” Mundt replies dubiously with pursed lips. “Well, then. I suppose we have a mystery on our hands, Frau Schröder. Because my husband, the Herr Hausleiter, picked up no such donation. The only clothing left on the landing was that at the Frau Obersturmführer Junger’s door.”

Sigrid gives the door a glance. “Well, then there must have been some mistake. Perhaps it was all mixed together in error.”

“No. No error was made. I spoke personally to the Frau Obersturmführer on this subject first thing. All of her items were accounted for.”

Sigrid heaves a breath. “Then you’re correct, Frau Mundt. It is a mystery. Since you’re so positive that your husband couldn’t possibly have mixed one set of coats with another, then I recommend you speak to my mother-in-law. Perhaps she can explain it.” Mundt shoots her eyes in the direction of Sigrid’s door. Maybe she’s not quite so anxious to tangle with the elder Frau Schröder. “Go ahead. She’s in the kitchen boiling diapers for Frau Granzinger. You know, in the spirit of the people’s community. But I’m sure she’ll be quite happy to discuss the matter with you. Now, you’ll excuse me, please, I don’t wish to miss my bus,” she says as she squeezes past and dashes down the steps.

“Very well, Frau Schröder,” the woman calls after her with an arch tone. “I shouldn’t want to delay you. But be aware. This isn’t just about a few old coats. The Party pays very close attention to the proper expression of the National Socialist spirit. Do you hear me, Frau Schröder? Very close attention.”

Outside, Sigrid must pass Mundt’s husband, sporting his dung brown SA kepi and greatcoat, which bulges at the belly as he piles another stack of coats onto the bed of a three-wheeled lorry. He gives her a gusty whistle. “So, she reamed you good, did she?” he says, and grins. Sigrid frowns and does not answer, causing the paunchy old hog to snort. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll make sure she simmers down. No trouble. Just remember that your old Uncle Mundt always takes care of his pretty ones.” He winks and then cackles, showing a mouthful of brown teeth.

MOST BERLIN DISPLAY WINDOWS are filled with empty boxes now. The signs above them read DECORATION ONLY. “Nur Antrappen” is how it is worded. Berlin has nothing left to sell. It has been reduced by the years of war to grinding coffee from acorns, to drinking wood alcohol mixed with chemical syrup, and to filling up shop windows with nothing but “Nur Antrappen.” The dairy shop’s window is lined with milk bottles, filled with salt. Inside, maybe a few liters of actual milk will be available for those who queue up early enough. Not whole milk, of course, but skim, a thin, bluish white fluid. By the time Sigrid gets there, the sign has already been put out. NO MORE TODAY. So much for that. Now she must hurry over to the greengrocer’s, hoping to pick up a few green onions plus a questionable cabbage head and three and a half kilos of graying potatoes. That will be dinner for the week, plus the few kilos of war bread that her red paper ration cards will allow. But before she steps into the grocer’s she sees someone stepping out. The young Fräulein Kohl, still with her wool beret stuffed over her soot-colored hair. On one side she carries a shopping sack sagging with the weight of produce, and on the other, tucked under her arm, a striped dress box from Tempelhof’s secured with twine, and two coats. A gray-blue houndstooth and a long black wool cape. Sigrid stops dead. Fräulein Kohl, she starts to call out, but then swallows it. Some instinct is at work she cannot quite name. The girl continues her striding progress. Sigrid hesitates for an instant longer. Glances from side to side. Then falls in a discreet distance behind, and follows the girl’s eastwardly march.

The march ends two blocks farther, a short stretch of unremarkable pavement, at a spot where the street curves around the tall Litfass column smothered with tattered advertisements for products no longer available: Miele vacuums, Miele-Ideal, RM 58, and Miele L, RM 90. Dralle’s Birch Hair Water. The pretty blond Fräulein leans, smiling, against a birch tree trunk. Afri-Cola, with a palm tree on the bottle. Good and German!

The building is an old double-story gray brick monstrosity from the previous century. The street-level windows off the tobacconist’s are grimed with dust. Their display cases empty. The light-bleached sign on the glass reads CLOSED FOR INVENTORY. The top-floor windows are boarded up, and the bricks blackened by smoke.

Sigrid watches the girl set down her burdens long enough to unlock a door tucked beside the shop. Then she gathers it all back up and vanishes inside.

So what is it? A black market in used clothes? Maybe so. Certainly there’s a market for everything in Berlin these days. Sigrid looks around and goes into a small Konditorei at the corner, where she orders a cup of coffee too tasteless to finish, and watches from the window. Maybe half an hour passes before the girl reappears on the street, without the dress box or coats, and with the contents of her shopping sack substantially reduced.

Sigrid stands, digs a few groschen from her coin purse, and drops them on the tabletop.