City of Women

SIX

“IS THIS STILL A FLAT?” Sigrid asks when they reach the top. There’s a residence plaque by the door, with a number, but no name, only an impression in the paint where a nameplate had once been tacked. But Ericha hushes her and knocks. Twice. Then three times. The hallway is thick with shadow and stinks of fire rot. The old woman who opens the door is a hefty old Berliner mare, with deep-pocketed eyes and a voice like a shovel full of cinders. “You scared the shit out of me,” she declares crossly, then clamps her eyes on Sigrid. “Who’s this?”

“A friend,” Ericha tells her. “She’s here to help.”

“Help? Help how?” The old woman squints with animal suspicion. “By gossiping to her friends about what’s none of her business?”

“My name is—” Sigrid begins, but the woman chops her off sharply.

“I don’t need to know your name, gnädige Frau, and you don’t need to know mine.”

“Auntie, please,” Ericha pleads aggressively. “You can trust her.”

“No, you can trust her,” the woman snorts. Her face drops into a deeply furrowed scowl. “But I suppose I’ve got no other choice in the matter. You’re both here, so you may as well come in.”

The door opens to a squat room crowded with furniture. The air smells of cat piss and lye soap. Sigrid starts to cover her nose, then quickly stops herself. Cats scurry away to their hiding places, except for a giant tom, enthroned on the shelf of a bookcase with a few dirty ledger volumes. The old woman shuts the door behind them and shoves the dead bolt closed.

“This is the lady I told you about. Who gave me the clothes,” Ericha says.

“The clothes…” The old eyes squint. “Oh, you mean the one with the fancy fur hat. Quite a thing,” she tells Sigrid as she shambles across the room.

“Do you…” Sigrid starts, still trying to knit this together. “Do you wear it?” To which the old woman cackles.

“Wear it? Oh, yes.” She nods mockingly and poses, as if modeling the sable on her grizzled gray mop. “I wore it just yesterday to the opera, don’t you know. Die Fledermaus,” she declares with a faux grin, which quickly drops from her face.

Giving the tomcat a gentle shove from the bookcase shelf, she snorts at the absurdity. “It’s all right, Hektor,” she informs the tom, “you’ve done your job.” The cat hops down, and the old woman reaches around and pulls what must be a latch, because the bookcase squeaks and swings out on a hinge, revealing a door in the wall.

“Handy little construction, isn’t it?” the old woman points out with wry pride. “My husband, may he rest, could be handy at times.”

“Where does it lead?”

“You saw the tobacconist on the street? That used to be our business, till the old fool fell asleep at his desk one night with a lit cigar. He was always afraid that his employees were stealing from him, so he blocked off the entrance to the attic stockroom from below and built this door in our flat.” The old woman shrugs as if tossing away the thought. “Now I use it to board my special guests. I call it the Pension Unsagbar,” she says. The Pension Unspeakable. “Not exactly the Hotel Adlon, but better than the alternatives.” The first face Sigrid sees, as the door is opened, is thin and peering. An old man staring back with watery, suspect eyes. Then an old woman whose face is as white as powder, her skin mapped with lines, her mouth set in a distant scowl. She gazes out at Sigrid’s entry into the cold, dank space in the way ghosts must watch the living. Ericha steps up and announces, “This lady has come to help. She can be trusted.” But she addresses the inhabitants of the space as if she might be speaking a language they do not understand.

Her body is tight. Her muscles clenching up. A ball of iron is forming in her belly. Sigrid opens her mouth, because there must be some words she can find to speak, but then she fails to find a single one. She can only attempt to blink away a sodden shock that has trapped her as if it were a net dropped from the ceiling.

Swiveling her gaze, slowly, she takes in three children, pale and hungry in the eyes. A little girl with a liquid gaze from under the sable ring of Sigrid’s hat. Twin boys in clothes far too large for them. They couldn’t be much past the age for kindergarten, huddling with blankets in the unheated attic room. A middle-aged Frau slowly rubbing her hands for warmth, her eyeglasses held together by a twist of wire. The Judenstern has been ripped out from her ragged coat by the stitching, but a shadow remains.

Tricked.

Sigrid feels suddenly tricked. Fooled into passing through a door and being confronted by this illegal world.

“Just as I warned you, Frau Schröder,” Ericha breathes. “Was I wrong?”

“SO! YOU HAVE gone mad,” is all Sigrid says to the girl, as they reenter the street. A quick march down the sidewalk, following the sickly blue beam of her pocket torch. Trying to walk off her anger and fear. The cold in her belly and the heat under the skin. She allows Ericha to fall in step with her, but does not permit her to breach the barrier of silence she erects.

Sigrid carries her silence with an edge, in the same way she carries the fish knife. The sidewalk pavement glows blue from her pocket torch. “Frau Schröder, you must slow down,” Ericha complains. “You’ll fall off the curb in this darkness, and break your ankle.”

“Shut up,” Sigrid hisses back. “Just shut up. I’m unimpressed by your concern for my welfare, considering the vat of shit you’ve just dropped me into.”

“I dropped you? Oh, no. I was only following orders, Frau Schröder. You were the one who insisted on knowing who I was hiding. If it’s a vat of shit, it’s one you climbed into on your own.”

Sigrid frowns with anger at the sidewalk. “Are they all Jews?”

“Mostly, but not always,” Ericha tells her. “Sometimes they’re politicals. Or homosexuals. Or religious. Or all three. It makes no difference. The idea is to stop them from falling into the hands of the Gestapo.”

“By sticking them up in the attic of a burned-out building?”

“Auntie’s is only one link in the chain. We keep them moving.”

“And the police are not bright enough to catch on?”

“Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the channels break down. Sometimes a mistake is made, or there’s just bad luck. Or sometimes there’s a betrayal.” She says this in an offhanded tone. “That’s why we don’t trade in names. Names are not safe. They come as strangers and they leave as strangers.”

“Strangers,” Sigrid repeats. “And how do you feed these strangers without ration coupons?”

“It’s difficult. Perhaps the most difficult thing. It helps now that I’m shopping for Frau Granzinger.”

“You mean you’re stealing from your employer’s food coupons?” Sigrid says. But if this is meant as an accusation, Ericha doesn’t appear to notice.

“A few less potatoes. A loaf or two of bread. Some sardines in a tin, maybe? It’s nothing. She gets plenty of coupons, believe me. The NSV is very generous with recipients of the Mother’s Cross. Her children do not go to sleep hungry.”

“So you mean to say that you’ve become an accomplished thief.”

“I mean to say that stealing is sometimes a moral imperative.”

“Ah, such large words. I wonder if the Gestapo will be intimidated by them.”

“If you’re trying to scare me, Frau Schröder, I can assure you that I’m already properly terrified.”

“No, I don’t believe you are. This is a ‘crusade’ of some sort for you, little one. But have you really thought about the consequences?”

“I know all about consequences, Frau Schröder.”

“I doubt it. But I wasn’t just talking about you. What about the consequences to others? The old woman, for instance, whose flat we were in. You called her Auntie.”

“It’s what she is called.”

“What about her?”

“What about her? She’s made her choice. Just as I have.”

Sigrid issues her a hard look, then turns away. “Lunacy,” she whispers.

“Yes,” Ericha agrees. “Absolute lunacy.”

“How long have you had them?”

“This group? Only a few days.”

“And you don’t know where they come from?”

“No, I’m not meant to know. That’s the way it works. None of us know more than we absolutely must.”

“And who are ‘none of us’?”

Ericha pauses, but then answers. “Others, Frau Schröder. Others with more courage than you or me. But I do my best. And when I have to, I lie. And when I have to, I steal.”

A light sprinkle begins to fall. Sigrid pulls out her scarf and ties it around her head. “That doesn’t make it right,” she says.

“Maybe,” Ericha replies. “But I think what’s right and what’s wrong is a much larger question now. Larger than a few rationing Marken.”

“And you keep them there, in that awful attic, without respite. Like prisoners?”

Ericha shrugs. What else is she supposed to do?

Sigrid shakes her head. “They have no sunlight.”

“During the day there is light that filters through the holes in the roof. Along with the cold, and sometimes the rain. At night they hang up blankets so they can light their candles.”

“And where do they go to the toilet?”

“Twice a day, Auntie opens the door for them to use the WC, one at a time. It’s the most dangerous times for everyone. She has a brother, a Party man, who likes to drop by unannounced, and would not be amused to find a Jew in the WC. At night, if they must, they pee in a bucket. We’ve hung a blanket for privacy.”

Sigrid swallows a breath, shaking her head as she runs her hand over her forehead. But the silence between them is a sponge that soaks up the weak spattering of rain.

“So?” Ericha finally asks. “What are you going to do?”

“Do?”

“Is this the point where you ring up the police?”

“No,” Sigrid admits grudgingly. “If it gives you pleasure, you were right about me to that extent. I’m not going to ring up the police.”

“Then what?”

“Then what? Then nothing, Fräulein Kohl.”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry, Frau Schröder, but you don’t get off the hook that easily. You wanted to know all. I warned you, but you insisted. The moment you walked into that room, you committed yourself.”

“Oh? Is that how it works?” Sigrid asks caustically. But Ericha only nods.

“Yes. Morally. That is how it works.”

“I see. Your moral imperative.”

“You told me earlier tonight that you’re a good German,” says Ericha. “Now is your opportunity to prove it. That’s all.”

“I don’t require a lecture on moral principles from a nineteen-year-old.”

“No. No, you who are older and so much wiser, you actually imagine that you can simply close your eyes again and everything you’ve seen will vanish. Go back to your flat, Frau Schröder. Go back to your job, go back to your routine. Convince yourself that there is nothing you can do, as the police drag their victims from their beds.”

“There are criminals in this world, child, not just victims,” Sigrid says. “There are people who commit crimes and deserve arrest.”

Suddenly Ericha’s eyes cool. “Last spring, there were three girls from a Jewish school for the blind, none of them more than ten. A colleague was trying to move them into a safe house we had at the time in Friedrichshain, but something happened. Maybe they were spotted by someone who denounced them. Maybe they simply stood out too much. But when the Sipo grabbed them off the street, it made no difference how it happened. Only that it had. Three little girls never coming back. So tell me, please, Frau Schröder, what crime do you imagine they had committed?” she asks. “Other than the crime of Jewish blood?”

“You have no right to address me in this way,” Sigrid says, suddenly angry. “You are so incredibly naïve.”

“Really?” the girl says, steaming. “Because I value morality?”

“Because you think that choices are all yes or no, and that there’s no room in between.”

“Untrue,” Ericha says. “I have learned that fact quite well. Compromise is the lesson of the day. It’s easy to do. A pregnant woman with a yellow star must walk in the freezing rain because Jews are barred from public transport. Just don’t look. A man is beaten by the police in front of his children. Don’t look. The SS march a column of skeletons, in filthy striped rags, down the middle of the goddamned street. But don’t look,” she whispers roughly. “You avert your eyes enough times, and finally you go blind. You don’t actually see anything any longer.”

“Enough. I’ve had enough of this.” Sigrid starts to turn away, but the girl grips her by the arm. “Let go of me, please,” she commands tightly.

“Do you listen to the BBC, Frau Schröder? If you do, then you must know what’s in store for the people in Auntie’s attic, if the Gestapo lay their mitts on them.”

Sigrid feels her breath constrict. “The British have always been full of atrocity stories,” she replies. “In the last war, too. It’s part of their propaganda.”

Ericha fixes her closely with overcharged eyes, as if to examine Sigrid from the inside out. “Now who’s being naïve?” the girl asks.

Sigrid gazes back at her, blinking raindrops from her eyes.

“Make your choice, Frau Schröder. Unlike those in the attic, you still have that privilege. Yes,” she says, “or no.”

THAT NIGHT, SIGRID gazes into the darkness above the bed, and the darkness stares back.

Egon had continued to use her for his black market exchanges. Different places each time. Different faces, too. A tubby Berliner mensch in a greasy hat waiting on the Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn station. A gaunt fellow with very thick eyeglasses and a cloth cap at the Kottbusser Tor stop, squinting at a copy of the Deutsche Illustrierte with a wounded infantry Landser on the cover. A whiskered old man who smelled of sour cabbage, waiting on the Prinzenstrasse platform. Always men and always stops on the U1 B line.

“I try to make it convenient for you,” he told her. She had delivered another sack of rock sugar, but this time had been handed a simple kraft paper envelope, filled with twenty-mark notes.

“You must be rich by now,” she’d said, crouched behind him on the bed, unbuttoning his shirt.

“All Jews are rich. Don’t you know that by now?”

She frowned. “Don’t take it that way. It was only a joke.”

“Would you like me to be rich?” he asked, allowing her to remove his shirt.

“I don’t care,” she answered, brushing her lips across his skin from his neck to his shoulder. “I don’t care about money.” She could feel him breathe in and then out.

“That’s quite a luxury. It’s all I can think about.”

She stopped. Did not pull away, but felt something clench inside. It hurt that she wasn’t all he could think about. But more than that, it reminded her of the family he must be feeding and clothing with the money she collected for him in these U-Bahn transactions. The family that was None of Her Business, yet laid a deep and secret claim to him.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she answered. But when he shifted toward her and stroked the hair from her face, she did not let him catch her eyes, for fear that he could too easily read the thoughts that were written in them.

“Do you love me?” she whispered with heat into his ear, when he was inside her.

“I love you,” he huffed.

“And you choose me? You choose me over her?”

“I choose you,” he told her, a growl in his throat as he increased the rhythm of his advance. “You.”

But even as she gripped him. Even as she tried to draw him so deeply inside of her that he would never escape her embrace. She knew that his choice was only a breath of air.

“FRAU SCHRÖDER. Heil Hitler and good morning.”

Sigrid turns at the awkward sound of that particular combination, and is faced with the Frau Obersturmführer’s dimpled smile and pregnant belly. “Yes. Good morning,” she replies, issuing a smile in return. “And Heil Hitler,” she adds for good measure.

“You’re going out?” the young woman inquires smilingly. She is wearing a simple but well-cut dressing gown. Blond locks drape her shoulders. Just looking at her makes Sigrid feel like an old rag.

“Yes. To work,” Sigrid says, and locks the door with the key.

“So I understand that you met my brother, Wolfram.”

Sigrid feels something staple her into place. She thinks of the lean man with the gun-sight gaze. “Yes,” she says. “I did.”

“Well”—and this is said delicately—“I hope he didn’t impinge upon you.”

“Impinge upon me?”

“Yes. I hope he didn’t impose upon your good nature.”

“My good nature.” Sigrid raises her eyebrows. “No, no, he neither impinged nor imposed.”

“It’s just that Wolfram, the poor man, it’s just that he’s been through quite a lot,” the Frau Obersturmführer informs her.

“Yes. His leg.” Sigrid nods. But the woman squints back at her.

“Oh, yes. His leg. That, too. In any case, if you ever feel that he’s been presumptuous in some way, please don’t hesitate to inform me. Will you promise?”

“I promise,” Sigrid says, maintaining an even tone.

The woman’s blazing smile returns. “Wonderful. I feel so much better now that we’ve had our little talk. This Sunday, you should stop by in the afternoon for coffee. That is, if you’re not otherwise engaged. I’m sure I would find your company most enjoyable.”

“Really?” She hears herself ask the question.

“I shall expect you at one,” the Frau Obersturmführer informs her.

AT THEIR MIDDAY BREAK, she tells Renate, “I’ll have to miss our lunch today.”

“Really?” Renate arches an eyebrow. “Should I be jealous?”

“Only of the war effort,” Sigrid replies. “I promised my mother-in-law I would volunteer at the Party office to help sort out clothes from the collections.”

“Ah, yes. She’s a member of the club, isn’t she?”

“The lady pays her dues. That’s all I know.”

“Doesn’t that entitle you to a few more ration coupons?’

“Oh, yes. One shoe more per year. Color of my choice, as long as it’s brown.”

“Well. At least sorting through coats might help some poor front-liner keep warm.”

“That’s the idea,” Sigrid says, sighing, and shifts the weight of her armload of files. Warm under a blanket. She can feel his body next to her, still. Smell the scent of sex mixed with the musty wool. The deception of peace in her heart. She had fallen in love with Egon while he slept.

Renate pauses. Files a folder and then gives her a look. “Do you miss him?”

Sigrid flinches. Caught. The flash of Egon’s face across the back of her eyes. “Miss him?”

“Kaspar,” says Renate.

Kaspar. Sigrid opens her mouth but nothing sensible seems to come out of it, and Renate waves her off. “Never mind, never mind. A stupid question to ask. I’m sorry,” she says. But for a moment, her expression has let slip its usual bravado. “It’s only that I surprise myself. I mean, I know that my darling husband is likely screwing everything in and out of a skirt. But sometimes I’m still just frantic for him.” She frowns, then shrugs it off. “Never mind. Makes no sense,” she announces, and then frowns again. “Women are such goddamned idiots,” she whispers bitterly.

The No. 8 is packed, but a young Landser from a reserve regiment politely surrenders his seat to her. When the bus heaves to a halt unexpectedly, the passengers lean as a body to peer through the windows. Shouting and cries. Whistles screeching. SS Death’s Head troops, armed with machine pistols, are herding a band of civilians out into the street in front of an apartment block. The women are clutching their children. The men are clutching their suitcases. All of their faces are paper white. An old man wears a long white beard and a skullcap. When he falls, an SS man kicks him with his boot, over and over. A curly-headed girl screams at the violence, and suddenly the SS are kicking them all, cursing at them as they are driven into the rear of a transport lorry. Then it is over. The rear of the lorry is clamped shut, and the Death’s Head kommando piles into a massive Opel Blitz troop carrier.The vehicles veer into a horseshoe turn and speed away.

A hefty female police auxiliary in feldgrau coveralls steps up and waves the bus forward with stout authority.

Passengers settle back into their seats. Back into the grayness of their routine bus ride. But Sigrid realizes that she has bitten into her knuckle until it has started to bleed.

AS HER MOTHER-IN-LAW salts the potatoes boiling in the pan, she makes an excuse to go up to the Granzingers’. She returns a borrowed baking dish, with a slab of her mother-in-law’s bundt cake on it, with real sugar icing. The children are so excited by the prospect of a sweet morsel that Frau Granzinger must hold the baking dish above her head to make it to the kitchen. That’s when she takes Ericha by the arm.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says to the girl.

Ericha’s eyes lock onto hers. “Yes?” Sigrid flicks her eyes to Frau Granzinger, surrounded by her gaggle as she removes a large cake knife from a drawer. “Tell me,” Ericha whispers.

“Friedrich, wait your turn!” Frau Granzinger snaps.

Sigrid hesitates.

“Tell me, Frau Schröder. Did you come here to bring cake?”

“Ilse! Watch your brother, he’s made a mess. Frau Schröder. You must stay for a slice,” Granzinger insists.

“Yes. Yes, of course. Thank you,” she calls back. And then returns to the question in Ericha’s eyes. “I came up here,” Sigrid says, “because you said I must make a choice. And against my better judgment, I have made one.”