City of Women

FIVE

“SOMETHING ODD IS GOING ON in my building.”

Renate is smoking a cigarette. She holds it in a confidential manner, like a film star, close to her lips. “Odd? In what way odd?”

Sigrid hesitates. Perhaps she’s making a mistake. She may use the intimate form of address with Renate, but just how far does that go? Renate cocks her head to one side at Sigrid’s silence, puffing languidly. “What is it, strudel?” she inquires.

“There’s a girl, on her duty year, come to work for Frau Granzinger. Helping her with the children.”

“And you’ve fallen in love with her?”

“No. What?” It takes Sigrid a moment to hear that. She shakes the question off with impatience. “Renate, please, for once no jokes.”

“Well, what is a person supposed to think,” Renate replies, slightly bemused as she expels smoke. “You look so painfully serious. What else could it be but love?”

“She’s involved in something. I don’t know what. But something illegal.”

“So? Half of Berlin is involved in something illegal, and the other half wishes it was. It’s how to survive.”

“No, I don’t mean stoop transactions at the greengrocer’s. I mean something…” She does not quite have the nerve to speak the word.

But Renate, it appears, does not flinch. “Political,” she says with a direct gaze.

Sigrid breathes in. Looks back toward the flow of the canal. They are sitting on a bench, wrapped against the cold. “We had put out some clothing. You know. For our men in the East. Old coats, gloves, and things of that sort. But before the Hausobman came to collect, the girl made off with the lot of it.”

“You mean she stole it? How do you know this?”

“I saw her in the street. She took it all to an address in Moabit. Also food from her shopping sack.”

“Well, then, she’s hiding somebody,” Renate announces flatly.

Sigrid gives her a slightly uncomfortable look, as if she is experiencing an unexpected pain in an unexpected place. “Yes. I think probably so.”

“You think? What else could it be? A boyfriend would be my guess, trying to dodge the army. Or maybe he’s deserted.”

“But what would a boyfriend do with a lady’s winter cape?”

“I don’t know. What is the army going to do with my fitch fur jacket? I didn’t ask. They wanted it, so I gave it to them. Who knows? Maybe the boyfriend likes to dress like a girlfriend. It could be his disguise.”

“Very unlikely,” Sigrid says. She is watching the wands of the willow tree float mournfully on the dark surface of the canal.

“Did you have any trouble with your Hausobman over the clothes?”

Sigrid blinks. Glances back at her. “No. A little with his wife. Nothing too serious.”

Renate exhales a breath. “Then forget about it,” she advises. “What’s she to you, anyway?”

Sigrid exhales stiffly. Rewraps her half-eaten sandwich in its crinkled wax paper, and says, “I don’t know. Nothing, I suppose.”

“So mind your own business, dumpling.” Renate says this with a smile, but her eyes mean it. “Anyway, this is all far too serious. Let’s leave such silly Quatsch behind. I have a gift.”

Sigrid blinks. “A gift,” she starts to protest, but Renate raises her palm.

“Not for you. For your dear Mother Schröder. This should make your life easier,” Renate says, and slips a packet of cigarettes into the pocket of Sigrid’s coat, giving it a pat. “Bulgarian. Real tobacco, sugar cured. She’ll love you for it.”

Sigrid releases a small, restless laugh. “No. She’ll hate me for it. But you’re right. She’ll take them,” she says. “It seems I’m always thanking you.”

“Phhtt. Forget about that. Besides, it’s Gerhardt you should thank. Not me. He’s the king of contraband.”

THE GERMAN WOMAN DOES NOT SMOKE.

That’s what the signs read across the city. Restaurant and café owners have been banned from selling cigarettes to their female patrons. But the campaign has come to little effect, at least in Sigrid’s fourth-floor flat in the Uhlandstrasse. The old lady continues to foul the air with her Aristons, at forty pfennigs per packet of five. Above her chair in the front room, there is a permanent brown stain on the ceiling from decades of low-grade tobacco.

Sigrid enters the flat while her mother-in-law scrubs potatoes over the sink.

“Here. A present for you,” she says, and places the packet of Renate’s cigarettes on the kitchen table.

Mother Schröder quits her scrubbing. Gazes hungrily. “Where did those come from?’

“Bulgaria, I believe.”

“You know very well what I mean.”

“They were a gift.”

Eyes shoot up, appraisingly. “A gift?”

Sigrid frowns. “From my friend at the office.”

“Ah.” The old lady dries her hands on the dish towel and nods now with understanding. “Frau Hochwilde,” she pronounces. The whore.

“Look, if you don’t want them, that’s fine.” Sigrid grows impatient. “I’ll put them away. I’m sure they’ll come in handy someday.”

“No, I’ll put them away,” Mother Schröder suddenly insists, and snatches the packet from the table. “Knowing you, daughter-in-law, you won’t remember where they are in a week’s time.” Slipping the packet into the pocket of her apron, she returns to the sink and shows Sigrid her back. “By the way, that girl stopped by for you.”

Sigrid lifts her eyes from the mail. “Girl?”

“I can’t think of her name, if I ever knew it. But you know who I mean,” she insists, as if perhaps her daughter-in-law is being willfully obtuse. “The duty-year creature for Lotti Granzinger. The one who looks like trouble. Mark my words, I can spot the type.”

Sigrid drops the mail on the table and pours a glass of water from a pitcher in the icebox. “And what did she want?” she asks with a neutral voice before she takes a drink.

“How should I know? I’m not a mind reader.”

“No,” Sigrid agrees, thinking, And thank God for that.

THE FRONT ROOM of Frau Granzinger’s flat is cramped with heavy, veneered furnishings. A worn woven carpet. A colored print of the Führer, rendered in pastel, prewar issue, is hung centrally on the wall, where it is surrounded by photographs of the husband and children. The slightly pudgy Herr Granzinger in his army forage cap and service uniform poses with their two oldest boys, also in uniform. A chubby trio in feldgrau. A Volksempfänger radio sits on a lace doily atop a laminated bureau. The only piece of furniture in sight with any value is a glass-fronted cherrywood curio cabinet. On prominent display inside the top shelf is the Mother’s Cross of Honor in gold, awarded by the Party. The framed certificate reads The most beautiful name of the heart is Mother! Honor Card of the German Mothers rich in children. And then, above a swastika, Protecting the German Mother is the honorable duty of every German.

A herd of children stampede about Sigrid, whooping and shrieking. Sigrid stands rigidly in the middle of the room. Through the door to the kitchen she can see a pot steaming on the stove, tended by the two eldest girls, a pair of sullen things in their teens. One stirs while the other cranks the wringer and hangs dripping nappies on the line. Frau Granzinger is stationed by the bassinet jammed into the corner of the room, waging war against soiled diapers with her infant.

“No, Frau Schröder, I’m sorry,” she is saying, “but Fräulein Kohl is not here. In fact, she is often not here. Especially when I could use her most. Fredi, stop that, this instant! Leave your sister alone!” she commands. “Last week I had the laundry room booked. And what happens? She doesn’t show. I had to make do with these two,” she says, nodding toward the daughters. “And neither of them have the brains God gave a flea.”

Sigrid flinches at a childish shriek as two of the wild spawn do battle over possession of a toy. The male child in a Jungvolk’s “Pimpf” uniform is delighting in ripping the head from his sister’s doll. “I tell you truthfully, Frau Schröder,” Frau Granzinger declares gravely, “I had more help with the children when our little dachshund was alive. At least Pooki could keep them entertained. Now it might as well be Red Indians on the loose.” She shakes her head as she extracts the newly diapered infant from the bassinet, who immediately begins to wail. “Unless she mends her ways, I may be forced to speak to someone about that girl.” There’s a crash, as the Jungvolk boy now attacks an enemy trash basket and pretends to bayonet it with a wooden rifle. “Friedrich! What did I say? You leave your roughhousing for outside!”

Sigrid steals a breath. “Perhaps, Frau Granzinger,” she suggests over the din, “perhaps I could have a word with her. I mean, I can certainly understand why you’re having trouble, but she may find it easier to talk to me. As a neutral party,” she says, though she knows how that will be translated: as one childless woman to another.

“Friedrich! Leave your sister alone, you nasty little scrapper!” Frau Granzinger squawks, and then shakes her head with exhaustion. “You’re welcome to try, Frau Schröder. As you can see, I’m at the end of my tether. But let me warn you, she’s stubborn as a goat, that one. And far too much of an independent thinker for my tastes. No wonder they booted her out of the BDM.”

Sigrid nods sympathetically. “Ah. Is that what happened?” The BDM. Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female Hitler Youth.

Frau Granzinger crooks the crying baby over her shoulder and starts pounding the infant for a burp. “They thought that under the right influence she would come around. You know what Hetzblätter fills a girl’s head with at her age. But as you can see”—the woman quits her mechanical pounding long enough to fling her hand out in a gesture of resigned disappointment—“she is nowhere to be found.”

A sharp clang of metal comes from the kitchen, as one of the daughters burns her fingers on the lid from the pot of boiling diapers, and drops it with a cry of pain. “God in heaven,” Granzinger groans. “What now?”

WHEN ERICHA KOHL APPEARS at the door to Sigrid’s flat just after suppertime, her face is tense and even more pale than usual.

“You talked to Frau Granzinger,” she whispers tersely. “What did you say to her?”

Sigrid frowns. “Shut up, will you?” she answers flatly. “I’ll be asking the questions from here on out. Now go get your coat and meet me downstairs by the front door. And if anyone asks, you and I are going to the cinema. Because we love it so.”

THE STREET IS a smear of darkness where only pinpoints of blue and red float and bob. According to the blackout regulations, no light is permissible that can be detected from a ceiling of five hundred meters. Curbstones are striped with whitewash, steps are marked with phosphorous zigzag patterns. People negotiate the sidewalks with pocket torches filtered by colored tissue paper, or, for the stalwart Party comrade who wishes to distinguish himself from a lamppost during blackouts, a lapel pin with a fluorescent swastika. One can buy them from vendors on the street for sixty pfennigs each.

Sigrid switches on her torch to pay for their tickets under an unlit marquee. When Ericha attempts a word, she shushes her curtly. Inside, the latest edition of the Deutsche Wochenschau newsreel casts a sputtering of light and shadow across the screen. A Waffen-SS man in a steel helmet is tramping across a stretch of frozen ground, navigating his way through a dozen corpses lying stiff as plaster, dusted with snow, as if they have been brushed with confectioner’s sugar. More evidence of Bolshevik atrocities, the narrator announces in a bludgeoning tone.

“May I speak now?” Ericha whispers.

“When I say so,” Sigrid snaps back at her, glaring up at the field of bodies. The two women are planted in the rear of the balcony. Empty but for an old Berliner hausfrau who is snoring loudly.

“No one can hear us,” Ericha insists.

“How do you know? How do you know anything?” Sigrid suddenly bursts out. “How old are you, anyway?”

“I’m nineteen.”

“Nineteen. Still a girl.”

“There are boys dying at the front who are no older.”

“That’s different.”

“Why is it different?”

“Because they are boys. Boys become soldiers. It’s the natural way.”

“And girls become what? What is the natural way for them? To become livestock. That’s how the brown swine see us. On our backs with our legs spread, and then the same when we’re giving birth. To them that’s our only purpose. They have made us whores to motherhood.”

“Quiet.” Sigrid burns. “I haven’t brought you here to debate. I may not be a Party member, child, but I’m still a good German,” she warns. “And regardless of what your ‘instincts’ may tell you, I have my limits.”

Ericha glares, then slumps sullenly back into her seat. Stares up at the newsreel. “We’ll see.”

“You came to my flat this afternoon,” Sigrid says.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Treasonable reasons, I’m sure.”

“More humor like that, and I stand up and walk out right now. Is that what you want?”

Ericha still stares at the screen. “You are the one who brought me here.”

“Not for nonsense.”

The girl exhales dully. “I came by because… I don’t know. I just wanted to talk. That’s all. It gets so stifling in Frau Granzinger’s flat. Sometimes I have to get out before I am suffocated to death by the odor of diaper dirt.”

“Well, you should know that Frau Granzinger is keenly aware of your delinquency. She said that her dachshund was more help with the children than you are.”

Only now does Ericha turn her eyes, a trace of anxiety filling them. “She said that?”

“She said that, and plenty more. I understand you were dismissed from the BdM?”

Sharp glance. “So you are tied into the gossip mill. Yes, it’s true. I was tossed out.”

“Why?”

“I realize that you haven’t known me for very long, Frau Schröder, but do you actually need to ask that question? Do I strike you as the ideal of National Socialist maidenhood?”

“Was it because of a boy?”

“You mean because they call it the ‘Mattress League’?”

“Is that what happened to you? You lost your virginity?” Sigrid asks bluntly.

Ericha returns the question with a probing glare. “I didn’t lose it, I gave it away,” she answers. “But, no, that’s not why they booted me. I refused to sing a song.”

“A song?” Sigrid repeats flatly.

“The ‘Horst Wessel Lied.’ Since I was in grammar school they’ve forced me to choke on that bloody thing, until one day I simply refused to sing it.” She shrugs. Casually. “And so that was the end of my glorious career in the Bund Deutscher Mädel.”

Sigrid shakes her head. The “Horst Wessel Lied” is a grandiloquent ballad of blood and thunder, penned by the Party’s most celebrated martyr, and officially sanctified as the sacred anthem of National Socialism. “You’re lucky it wasn’t the end of more than that.”

“So I’ve been told over and over. In any case, I was given a choice. A duty year as a domestic or the Land Army.”

Sigrid stares back.

“First,” the girl tells her, “I went to a woman in Charlottenburg whose husband was a manager at the Borsig plant. She wanted me to take her children to the zoo while she bedded down her boyfriends. That wasn’t so bad. I liked the zoo. There’s a splendid Siberian tiger in the Raubtierhaus. But then one day her husband came home from the factory unexpectedly. End of the story. Then next, a woman in Rummelsburg, who would leave her children to me so she could drink herself into a stupor. I could have dealt with that, she only occasionally became violent, but then she fell down a flight of stairs and snapped her neck. So now it’s Frau Granzinger’s.”

“Well, it won’t be Frau Granzinger’s much longer if you don’t buckle down and get to work.”

“That’s why you brought me here tonight? To give me a lecture?”

“No,” Sigrid says. “It’s not.” She breathes in. “I want to know who you’re hiding.”

Ericha’s head snaps around. She goes stock-still.

“I know that you stole the clothing from in front of my door,” Sigrid tells her. “I saw you coming out of a grocer’s with them, and I followed you. Is it the man you were with that day in the cemetery? Has your sweetheart decided to hide out from the army?”

Ericha still has not budged the smallest muscle. She looks frozen in place. When she speaks, her voice sounds very far away, as if she has fallen down a well. “Did you tell anyone else?” she asks.

Sigrid thinks of Renate. “No,” she lies.

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know. That depends on what you have to say.”

“I have nothing to say,” Ericha replies in a thin voice.

“And that’s not an acceptable answer,” Sigrid flares. “Now, either you tell me what you’re up to, or I’ll—”

“You’ll what? Denounce me? Ring up the police and have me arrested?”

“You think I won’t?” Sigrid is gripping the sides of her seat, as if she might suddenly spring from it. But now Ericha nearly smiles.

“That’s correct. I think you won’t,” she says.

“Then tell me what you’re doing,” Sigrid demands. “If I’m so trustworthy in your eyes. If your instincts are so infallible. What have you got to lose?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because,” Sigrid answers her. And breathes in. “Because I think you are a child. Because I think your tough shell is a child’s façade. And because I think you’re in trouble far above your head, whether you’ve realized it or not.”

“And what if I am? Why should it matter to you?”

Sigrid steadies her stare. “I wish you could tell me,” she says. “Because I’m sure I don’t know.”

The girl goes dead silent, and then starts to rise.

Sigrid’s brow knits. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Leaving,” the girl declares, but Sigrid seizes her by the arm and pulls her back into her seat with a bump.

“You’ll do nothing of the kind, I assure you.”

On the screen Carl Raddatz has just fervently embraced Kristina Söderbaum, but their kiss in resplendent Agfacolor is forestalled by the arching wail of an air-raid siren. First one howl, then another. And another, building to a siren’s song.

“Shit,” Ericha hisses through clenched teeth.

The floor lights in the theater blink on and the projector stutters out. Berliners busy themselves by shoving impolitely toward the exits. Outside, Sigrid takes Ericha’s arm, and feels the girl tense. A policeman is directing people into the nearest public shelter, which is actually the U-Bahn tunnel across the street. The crowd funnels itself down the steps, where the air goes thick with human sweat and track grease. And then when the guns of the Zoo Flak Tower go off, the recoil sounds like iron balls rolling across a concrete floor above their heads. It’s the signal that Tommy will be above them soon. Yet everyone is reasonably calm, or perhaps simply resigning themselves to the routine business of death dropping from the skies again.

The bombers come and make their noise, and even when the lights blink out briefly, no one gets hysterical. Crying forbidden. The Berlin citizenry toughening up. Several men pass around a cigarette. Their wives take out their mending. People look for comfortable places to settle. Remarkably, a train passes by, though it doesn’t stop. Lit faces in the windows telegraph past, like creatures from a ghoulish dream. Tommy is not close tonight.

“No bonbons for us tonight,” one of the men pipes up. “Churchill’s after the Siemens factory,” he declares with confidence.

How is it that these men think they know so much? Sigrid cannot help but wonder. Did Churchill ring them up in advance and say, Relax, gents. I’m heading for Spandau. One of the wives steals the thought from Sigrid’s head, and speaks as much aloud, followed by some harsh laughter on the part of the fellow’s chums. Sigrid smiles with mild satisfaction, but when she looks at Ericha leaned against the wall, the girl is staring into a dark hole.

“Fräulein Kohl?”

Nothing.

“Ericha?”

Still nothing.

Sigrid takes breath. “There is no reason to worry,” she assures. “The old fool’s right. We’re not the target.”

“I’m not worried. The all-clear will sound soon.”

“Ah,” says Sigrid. “More Gypsy soothsaying.” She says this mildly. But the look Ericha fires at her is anything but mild. “What? What’s the matter?”

“The girls in my BdM troop,” Ericha tells her in an emotionless voice. “That’s what they used to call me. The Gypsy.”

“Really? Well. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

A pause. “They did,” she says.

As the all-clear siren bawls its single note above them, Ericha goes mute and remains so, even as the crowd climbs the station steps and emerges into the darkness of the street. She has taken on the quality of a somnambulist. Not so unusual for a Berliner these days, but the transformation is so sudden that Sigrid feels uneasy.

“Look,” she whispers, latching onto Ericha’s arm, “I know I’m often harsh. It’s how I am. But striking yourself dumb won’t remedy the situation.”

Ericha raises her eyes. “Nothing will remedy the situation, Frau Schröder. We are all of us stuck in this mess, until the day when the last standing bricks in this town are turned into rubble. That’s the only remedy we can expect. A clean slate. Counting upward from zero.”

Sigrid stares, half baffled, half mortified. “I think you have gone mad, child,” she whispers.

Ericha does not disagree. “Mad enough to surrender. Come with me, Frau Schröder, and I’ll show you what you’ll soon regret seeing.”

A low bank of cloud cover glows crimson above the burning factory district to the northwest. The stench of chemical-rancid smoke perfumes the air. A fire brigade pumper clangs past them. A few shadows hurry down the opposite side of the street. They hurry, too, until they reach the curve in the nameless street and the Litfass pillar guarding the empty windows of the tobacconist shop.

“Last chance to turn back,” Ericha informs her. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Now, open the door, will you please?”

Ericha inserts the key by touch in the darkness. The door opens with a complaint of rusty hinges. Only when they are both inside, and the door is closed and locked behind them, does she tug the chain on a dangling lamp, dimly revealing a narrow corridor with a decrepit carpet runner smelling of burned wood. “This way to Ravensbrück, Frau Schröder,” she announces.

Sigrid recoils.

Ravensbrück is the concentration camp for women, north of Berlin on the Havel. A favorite spot for the Gestapo to send females arrested for political crimes. “Is that a joke?” Sigrid frowns.

“You’ll find out,” Ericha replies, then turns and starts climbing the steps.