City of Women (17 page)

At that point Sigrid suddenly finds her voice. “Oh, I’m so sorry.
Please
, come in. Are you hungry? We have some soup.”

But the soldier is already waving the offer away. “No. No, thank you. You’re kind, but I came here straight from the train and still have to report in.”

“Well.
Thank you
,” Sigrid tells him, touching the door. “Thank you for . . .” For what? The words don’t want to form. The Landser glances at her hand on the door, and she jerks it away, embarrassed at her desire to shut him out. “For your friendship to Kaspar,” she says.

The Landser breathes out, and chucks his duffel bag onto one shoulder. “I’m not sure ‘friendship’ is the word, Frau Schröder. I’m not sure there is a word for what one front-liner owes to another. In any case,” he says with a nod, “I’ll say good night.”

•   •   •

P
REPARING FOR BED
that night, Sigrid pauses as she sits on the mattress and gazes at the photo of Kaspar in his dress uniform, but the photographer shot the picture in profile, so he is turning his face away from her. The night before he had reported for induction they had made love. She had wanted to. She had wanted to touch his body. To memorize it with her hands, so that she would remember. At least, she felt, she owed him that much. At least it was her duty to remember. But when he climaxed it was so unlike him; his howl had been so raw, as if he was in agony, and she couldn’t help but think:
This is how he will cry out when his flesh is torn in battle.
Bullets, shrapnel, foreign metal ripping through the body she has just committed to memory, that’s how he will sound. Afterward, as he slept, she could only see his silent face as a death mask.

•   •   •

I
N THE MORNING
, leaving for the patent office, she glances briefly at the door to the flat across the landing. Should she feel guilt? Why doesn’t she? What is missing from her that she does not feel guilt over adultery? And now Kaspar, a victim of the war. She should be speared by guilt. But mostly she feels confused, as if trying to find her way through some kind of maze.

She stands there for some time until she realizes that she has been holding her breath. Then she exhales and continues down the stairs.

It takes another four days before a letter arrives from the army, informing her that that her husband, Kaspar Albrecht Schröder, Feldwebel, 34. Infanterie-Division, 34. Füsilier-Regiment, Battalion 2, has been wounded while in service to the Führer, Volk, and Fatherland.

TWELVE

L
ONG BEFORE THE WAR
, the National Socialist bureaucracy had codified its hatred of Jews into legal strictures. The Nuremburg Laws had stripped Jews of German citizenship; barred them from the professions; maligned, ridiculed, and penalized them in statutory language; and segregated them from daily German life.

Distasteful, perhaps, but law were laws. How could a person change them?

And while there were stories of Jews subjected to beatings in the streets, or being torn from their beds and tortured in Brownshirt bunkers, such individual brutality seemed anecdotal. A story of this Jew, a story of that Jew. Terrible, perhaps, but easy to close one’s eyes and ears to during the daily routine. What, after all, could be done?

But then, on a November day in 1938, a Foreign Ministry clerk in the German legation in Paris was shot in the stomach. His assailant was a Jewish youth named Grynszpan, who offered no resistance to the French police at his arrest, and declared that he had done what he had done to protest the German persecution of Polish Jews. The legation clerk died two days later, on November 9, which happened to be the fifteenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s failed Munich putsch, and the holiest day in the National Socialist calendar.

Sigrid had become pregnant. When she was three months along, her mother-in-law complained that she hadn’t gained enough weight. That she was starving the baby. Food, however, sickened Sigrid on most days. It was often all she could do to keep a thin gruel down in the mornings. Mother Schröder would sit opposite her at the kitchen table and glare while Sigrid spooned the watery porridge into her mouth, just to make sure that not a single drop was left behind.

“Can you put out your cigarette, please?” Sigrid asked her. “It’s making me ill.”

“
Everything
makes you ill,” her mother-in-law grumbled in response, but then screwed out the cigarette in the small tin ashtray. “Eat,” she commanded. “You’ll not be shortchanging my grandson on his breakfast.”

Sigrid exhaled. “And how do you know it’s a boy?”

A shrug. “What else?”

It was a chilly autumn. Sigrid had started working part-time at the patent office earlier that year, and now was under pressure from Kaspar’s mother to quit.

“It’s absurd that you insist on taking a job.”

“I want to work.”

“You think my son is not providing for you?”

“I want to do something. I can’t devote myself to housework.”

“And why not? It’s what I’ve done since I was twelve years old. It’s what every honorable woman does.”

“Mother,” Kaspar interceded glumly from behind the newspaper. “Please. Let it go.”

“Let what go?”

“Sigrid is not like you. She needs intellectual stimulation.”

“Ah, and what does that make me? A block of wood?” the old woman demanded indignantly, but her son only shifted his expression into a lighter gear.

“No. It makes you a mother.”

“Well, what do you think
she
is going to be in another six months? Shall I explain the process to you, my son?”

“Just let it go.”

“Is she going to be
intellectually stimulated
right up until the time she drops the baby on the floor of some dusty office?”

“Excuse me,” Sigrid muttered suddenly. She knew she wouldn’t make it to the toilet, so instead she threw up in the kitchen sink.

Her mother-in-law regarded the scene distantly. “So now I’m supposed to wash dishes in that sink?”

At the patent office she was in pain. A slow discomfort as she sat, preceding sudden cramps that caused her to lose her fingering on the typewriter keys. She had complained to the doctor of these spasms the week before, with Mother Schröder sitting with her in the examination room, but the Herr Doktor had simply dismissed her complaint, as he enjoyed dismissing all of her concerns.
Nervous little mothers
, he would chuckle in a grumpy manner.
I assure you, Frau Schröder, I have been practicing medicine for thirty-seven years, and I have heard it all by now. This is nothing to worry about. Simply the process of childbearing, to which as I’m sure your gracious mother-in-law here can attest, is not all hearts and romance.

Mother Schröder had raised her eyebrow at the remark, but said nothing.

On the train ride back, Sigrid had said, “I don’t much care for him.”

“Who?”

“The Herr Doktor. I don’t much like his manner.”

“You don’t have to like his manner. He’s the authority. Like or dislike has nothing to do with it.”

“He didn’t give me anything.”

“Such as
what
, daughter-in-law?”

“Such as something for the pain.”

“As he said,” Mother Schröder said, frowning drably, “it’s not all hearts and romance. Life is filled with pain. You can’t simply eliminate it. And as far as the good doctor is concerned, he delivered my son, your husband and the father of your child, without a moment’s worry. Be grateful for his experience.”

Sigrid went silent. She felt suddenly ashamed of herself. Asking for the pain to be eliminated. How weak. Her grandmother would have been appalled. On her deathbed, her mother had begged, pleaded, demanded, and sobbed for something to relieve the agony in her bowels, while Sigrid, in the next room, had clamped her hands over her ears to blot out the sound.

Making her way home from work, she saw a woman on the train. A typical Berlinische hausfrau, with a level, unflappable gaze, and a handbag big enough to fit a manhole cover. Suddenly, peering closely at Sigrid, she boomed, “Say, you don’t look so good.”

Several nearby faces rose with a trace of squinting alarm. Sigrid opened her mouth and managed to say, “I just entered my third month.”

“Well,
of course
you have.” The Frau nodded with sudden understanding. “And since when is
that
business anything but misery? You’re in your third month? Believe me, it only gets harder from here on out. Five times I’ve suffered through it. And the worst of them was my first. My Hansel. The little monster made me sick every morning for months, and then took his own sweet time popping out
. Eighteen hours
I was in labor. It felt like I was giving birth to a two-ton lorry,” the Frau announced with a cackle. “That was twelve years ago, and he still hasn’t gotten any easier. A little devil from birth.”

At the Ku’damm, Sigrid left the train, but as she climbed the steps of the U-Bahn, the cramps returned and closed in like a vise. She had to stop and grip the rail to keep from collapsing. At the top of the stairs, she stopped to breathe, just to breathe until the worst of it passed. There was shouting and an acrid tang in the air that tasted like cinders in her mouth. She raised her head and wiped the clamminess from her brow. Several people were pointing. She spotted the thick smear of black smoke ballooning toward the clouds from over the rooftops.

A woman stopped her bicycle in the street and stared with widened eyes. “My God, what is it?” she squawked. “What’s burning?”

A plump Berliner volunteered the answer grimly. “The Fasanenstrasse Synagogue.”

By the time she boarded the T-Line bus, there were a half dozen smoke columns pluming skyward. A fire engine passed with its klaxon horn blaring. Through the bus’s windows she saw an old woman tending to a man, who was sitting on a curbstone, holding a flimsy handkerchief to his bloodied mouth. A handful of boys were gleefully pitching chunks of pavement through the windows of a shop front. On the door was slopped a six-pointed star, yellow paint dripped down over the words
Jews Perish!

“The Yids are really in for it now!” a fellow at the front of the bus crowed loudly. The silence that followed seemed to agree with him.

Sigrid clamped her eyes shut at another spasm.

Later, she would see it all in the cinema newsreels. The burning synagogues collapsing in a whorl of flame. The black-clad SS men shearing the beard from a shrunken old rabbi, while spectators either sheltered their children from the sight, or held their toddlers aloft for a better look. Jewish storekeepers glumly sweeping up the carpets of glass, glinting like shattered crystal.

But what she would remember most were the ruins of a grand piano that she passed in the street. It had been shoved from a second-floor balcony and smashed to smithereens. The harp split, pointing toward the sky, its strings popped. Keys scattered like broken teeth. The image stayed with her. An image of a crime, somehow more intimate, than the flat, black-and-white violence caught on film. The beauty of the piano, now ruined. She felt the pain of it in a contraction, and turned away.

As she opened the door to the apartment house and stepped into the foyer, the pain struck her like a thunderbolt. Her knees buckled, and she had to grip the door frame to stop from falling. Staring up at the multiple flights of steps before her, she remembered how Kaspar had swept her up in his arms on their wedding day. But Kaspar was still at the bank, no doubt, working late as had become his habit.

On Sigrid’s way up the stairs, the cramps seemed to be playing a game with her. Allowing her to shuffle upward, without interference, only to stab her on the next step. By the time she reached the landing of 11G, she was smearing the tears away from her face. Trying to control herself as she fumbled the key into the lock.

“Mother Schröder
,
”
she heard herself croak hoarsely as she entered the flat. But then she blinked at the look of horror stamped on her mother-in-law’s face.

Marta Trotzmüller shoved back from the table and jumped to her feet, leaving her coffee cup behind.
“Frau Schröder
,
”
she cried out with a look of pale shock. “You’re
bleeding
!”

Only now did Sigrid look down. She watched with an odd curiosity as a dribble of red spotted the well-scrubbed floorboards between her legs.

•   •   •

A
FTER THE DOCTOR HAD LEFT
, after the pronouncements had been made, when Kaspar entered the bedroom in the evening he was gentle with her. But his face was clouded and distant, like a storm settled over a mountaintop.

She cried, and he sat beside her and held her hand.

She stopped crying, and he continued to hold her hand, but only until he had calculated the earliest moment he could release it. She could see the internal timing in his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Kaspar,” she whispered through the fog of the sedative the doctor had finally prescribed her. “I’m so sorry. . . .”

“It’s not your fault,” he answered. “I don’t blame you. Nobody blames you.” But it was clear from his gaze that this was a lie.

He stood to leave because she needed her rest, needed her sleep, but she caught him at the door. “Is it over?” she asked with sudden urgency.

He stopped but said nothing.

“The fires. What I saw in the street. It was so terrible.”

Kaspar gazed back at her. “You should rest,” he said to her. “Don’t bother yourself with what you cannot change.”

•   •   •

S
IGRID FINDS HERSELF
thinking about that moment as she sits at her desk in the patent office, staring blankly over her typewriter. How far away from Kaspar she had felt, even though he was so close. Then she hears a voice beside her, and she tries not to look startled. It’s Renate, an anxious expression forming her face.

“I heard you got a letter,” she says. A letter. Everybody knows what that means. It’s standard method used by the army to inform wives and mothers that their husbands and sons are casualties.

Sigrid does not ask her
how
she heard about the letter. This is a type of news that travels. Last November, when Thea Burgel lost her husband at Stalingrad, the entire building knew before lunch. But Sigrid looks up into Renate’s gorgeous face without sympathy for Kaspar or for herself.

“Yes,” says Sigrid, cranking paper into the hard rubber roller of her typewriter. “But it’s not threatening his life. His wound, I mean. A comrade of his appeared at the door last night. He said that Kaspar had been struck by shrapnel from a mortar, but that the wound wasn’t critical.”

“Well, thank God for
that
,” Renate replies with a relief that surprises Sigrid. She has never known Renate to care much for Kaspar. No overt dislike, just blankness between the mention of Kaspar’s name and her next word. But now, with a dark frolic of hair hanging over her brow, Renate looks genuinely relieved. Perhaps only relieved that she will not have to suffer through Sigrid’s grief.

“Yes,” Sigrid replies. “Thank God.”

Noise up front as Fräulein Kretchmar claps her hands together. “Ladies! Your attention, please, before the day begins. As some of you may know, Frau Schröder has just this morning received notification that her husband has been wounded in combat on the Eastern Front.”

Audible gasps. “Not critically,” Sigrid repeats dimly to the room.

Fräulein Kretchmar crimps her lower lip. “Very good to know. But though we all, I’m sure, deeply sympathize with Frau Schröder at this moment in time, we may
not
allow such feelings to interrupt or impede our work. As I have often said: our soldiers have
their
battlefields and we have
ours
.” Standard Kretchmar propaganda. When Inge Voss’s husband was shot down in a bomber over the English Channel, Kretchmar’s only suggestion was that donations be made to the War Victim Care Fund in his name.

That night Sigrid is stopped by Ericha on the stairwell. She appears to have been lying in wait for her. Her young face is closed, her eyes bottomless. She is starting to look squeezed.

“I heard,” the girl says.

“
Wounded.
That’s all,” Sigrid tells her. She is having difficulty meeting Ericha’s gaze.

Ericha stares. “If you need to stop. For a while.”

“Stop?” Sigrid looks back at her with a sudden precision. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what it
feels
like to be in your position.”

“You’ve
never
known what it feels like to be in my position, Ericha. Why should that mean something now?”