City of Women (18 page)

An almost imperceptible shrug. “Guilt,” the girl suggests.

Sigrid keeps her glare rigidly in place. But all she can manage to say is, “Well, it’s too late for that.”

On a Saturday morning she takes the elevated into the new S-Bahn station at Anhalter Bahnhof. Wolfram has a flat in a house across the Saarlandstrasse in the Askanischer Platz. A squat, nameless collection of walls, with oddly matched furniture, faded curtains, and a floor, well swept, but warped. Even with furnishing, there’s an uninhabited quality to the place. She looks around it, slowly tugging off her scarf. She can see the sprawling architecture of the Anhalter rail station through the window. Reclining atop its grand arches, two classical statues: Night and Day.

She turns back around to the flat. “What is this place?”

“A room,” he answers, “with a bed.” The springs creak painfully as he drops his weight onto the mattress. He has tossed his gabardine coat over a chair, and is dressed in a pullover, leather-chapped jodhpurs, and Rieker riding boots. “I ride once a week in the Tiergarten,” he says, answering the unasked question. “It’s part of my physical-therapy program.”

“I’ve never been on a horse,” Sigrid says mildly. She watches him yank the pullover over his head, followed by his collarless shirt. His upper body is rippled with muscles.

“They’re beautiful animals, horses,” he says, “though not very bright.”

“And isn’t that how you like them?” she asks.

He grins back ruefully, then lifts his eyebrows. “So do you want to
see it
?” he inquires with a slight note of mischief.

“I think I already have,” she tells him. Still dressed. Still with her coat buttoned.

“No, I don’t mean my putz, Frau Schröder,” he says, dropping back on the bed to unbutton the breeches. “I mean my stump.” Without waiting for an answer, he wrenches down his breeches and skivvies. His body, naked, is sinewy and long. An athlete’s body. But torn also. Clawed by scars. Hauling off one boot with gusto, he must wrestle the other free. On the right, a perfect foot, a perfect calf. But on the left, the leg ends abruptly below the knee. Strapped to the joint is a wooden, calf-length prosthesis, which resolves itself in a hinged wooden foot. “Lovely, isn’t it. Courtesy of the Army Medical Service. I have one with a black leather shoe attached, that I bought from a catalog, but wearing boots is more difficult,” he tells her, unbuckling the straps. The prosthesis is dropped onto the heap of his clothing. He slides his rump onto the center of the bed, mattress springs crunching as he positions himself for display.

Sigrid stares softly at the rounded pinkish stump of bone and skin, pockmarked by scarring and chapped by the leather strap. “How did it happen?” she asks.

“A Schu-mine,” he answers. “One of ours.” He smiles grimly, shaking his head at absurdity of it. “Ridiculous. Seventy days of combat, from Poland to the Baltic, and I step on one of our own goddamned mines.” This is said without rancor, but with sheer irony. His gun-sight gaze, for an instant, is inverted, staring inward.

“And it still causes you pain?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it hurts like all that’s holy. You don’t find it repulsive?”

“I find it sad,” Sigrid tells him.

“Ah. That’s worse,” he says, rolling sideways to shove back the blankets on the bed. “I’d rather be an object of repulsion than pity. Oh, well. You’re still in your coat,” he points out. “Come, come, Frau Schröder. You watched
me
undress. Now, let me watch
you
.”

Sigrid unbuttons her coat and drapes it over a wooden chair. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“Then what would you prefer? I must warn you, I have little patience for endearments.”

“My name is Sigrid,” she says, and undoes the front of her blouse. “You should call me
that
.”

He smells of sweated leather and horsehide. It’s a smell she likes. A smell of exertion and comfortable animal strength. She finds that she can easily lose herself in Wolfram’s body. The riot of her desire blots out the world. When he rolls her onto her back and enters her, mattress springs ringing, she feels only the terrible thrill of the abyss.

But when they are done, collapsed beside one another on the bed, she closes her eyes and sees Egon’s face in the ghost light of her memory.

“My husband’s been wounded,” she says.

Wolfram is silent for a moment, then reaches for a packet of army-issue cigarettes on the bed stand. “Where?” he asks, lighting up.

“A place called Rzhev.”

He nearly laughs. “No. I mean where on his body?”

It suddenly panics her that she doesn’t know the answer to that question. That she hadn’t asked that question when his comrade was at the door. “I have no idea,” she answers starkly.

Wolfram expels smoke. “Just curious if he’ll be shipped home. You know. A Heimatschuss.”

Sigrid stares. Takes in this new term as she steals the cigarette from Wolfram’s fingers for a puff. Heimatschuss. A homeward-bound shot. “What a bad person I have become. My husband is wounded, and I don’t even bother to find out the details. Meanwhile, I am lying in the bed of another man.”

“Not so bad,” Wolfram assures her, retrieving the cigarette. “Believe me, if your husband’s been in the East, he’s done worse. Much worse.”

She stares inwardly, as if she might be able to see all the way to Russia, if only she concentrated. But Kaspar and the East remain blocked by an impenetrable cloud, which her brain will not allow her to penetrate. She arches her neck as if the action will shut off her mind. “Do you have an extra?” she asks. “Cigarette?”

He picks up the packet from the side table, then tosses it back. “Empty. But there’s fresh ammo in the pocket of my coat,” he tells her.

Sigrid climbs from the bed, the room’s cold draft embracing her body. “Which pocket?”

“Left or right. One of them.”

She feels through the left pocket of his overcoat flopped over the chair back, and feels something hard. But it’s not a packet of cigarettes. She pulls it out and looks at a cardboard packet of playing cards with a winking devil on the front.

She sits down on the edge of the bed and dumps the contents on the plain, threadbare quilt. A deck of naked women in four suits stare up at the ceiling. Wolfram looks at her blankly. “Couldn’t find the cigarettes?”

“Is this what you think of women?” she asks.

“It’s a soldier’s diversion,” he says, smoking. “One finds them about in the barracks.”

“But I didn’t find them in a barracks, I found them in your pocket.”

“You’re shivering. Why don’t you come back under the covers?”

“No,” is all she says.

“I see. You are offended. You think maybe you’re just another card in my deck, is that it?”

“Of course I am. I don’t pretend to believe anything else.” She picks up the ten of hearts. “Is this how you’d like to see me? With nothing but a milkmaid’s cap and a yolk across my shoulders? Or perhaps,” she suggests, discarding the card for another, “with a whip and equestrian boots?”

“No. I’m not interested in costumes, Sigrid. If you wish to know about this deck,” he says, picking up a few of the cards, only to toss them back down, “my sergeant left it on display on his desk, the idiot, so I picked it up to prevent trouble. Quite honestly, I had forgotten all about it. And as for the rest, I am not so indiscriminate as you are apparently determined to believe. I have no more use for fantasy maidens in naughty positions than I do for bedmates who have no brains. It’s boring. Why should I waste my time?”

But Sigrid is staring. Not at him, but at one of the cards.

“Frau Schröder?” he prods. She places her hand on his bare chest as an answer. Her eyes still glued to the ace of spades she has lifted from the bedspread.

“What is it? Have you been transfixed?”

“No. No, it’s nothing,” Sigrid answers, and begins to gather the cards together. “I’m sorry. Let’s forget about it, I had no right to sound so accusatory. After all, we’re not here to philosophize. Are we?”

Only after she has left Wolfram asleep in the bed, only after she has left the train, and found a spot on the margin of the U-Bahn rush behind a news kiosk does she open her purse. Only then does she remove the card she took from the deck and stare down at it with . . .
what
? Anger? Shame? Somehow grief.

The thin, dark-headed female nude, adorning the queen of spades, is aggressively graphic in her posture: hands clamped on her hips, pelvis thrust forward. Posed in front of a crudely painted background of the Venetian canals, she is staring down the camera, naked save for the striped stockings gartered to her thighs, and the gondolier’s cap raked to one side. Her eyes, so sharp, so challenging, so uncompromising and orphaned from joy.

•   •   •

S
IGRID DISPLAYS THE PLAYING CARD
, watching Ericha’s eyes latch onto it. “Can you explain this?”

Without a millimeter’s movement. “Explain what?”

“Explain why you posed for this?”

“Can you explain why you’re carrying it in your purse?”

“You’re very clever, yes,” Sigrid says in a dry voice. “But I want an answer from you.” She pokes the card forward again.

Ericha makes no move to touch it, only examines it with a blank pause, and turns away to the street. An army lorry booms past, the soldiers inside hooting and whistling for her attention, but they gain none of it. “A lot of women are doing it. The photographers pay good money.”

Sigrid stares. “And that’s your explanation? The photographers pay good money?”

“Do I require another?”

“Don’t,” Sigrid begins to respond, but the words jam up in her head. She must shake them loose before she can speak. “Don’t you have any
shame
, child?”

“Shame?” Ericha’s eyes are suddenly hard and shadowed. “No, Frau Schröder. No, gnädige Frau, I
have none
. Not a drop. And I will not be held accountable by your obsolete notions of ‘propriety.’ Propriety died with the first man murdered by the criminals in power, Frau Schröder. The first time a wife received an urn full of her husband’s ashes from the Gestapo.”

“Yes. Yes, I know you are a fine one with your high talk. But the truth is,
talk
can just be an excuse. A justification to act as you wish, the rest of the world be damned. But there
are
rules.
Still.
Rules about respecting oneself, and one’s body. Rules about displaying oneself naked for
payment
!”

“You seem intent on casting me as a whore, Frau Schröder,” Ericha observes.

Sigrid blinks, taken aback. “No. No, not at all. I’m simply trying to make you understand,” she says, but the girl ambushes her point.

“After the Aufmarsch,” Ericha interrupts in a contained voice, “the army was followed into the East by special murder battalions of the SS and police, whose mission, whose
single mission,
was to slaughter Jews. As many Jews as they could find. In Latvia, in the Ukraine, in Russia. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand people massacred at a time. Women, babies, old men. It didn’t matter. They were mowed down and their bodies dumped in mass graves.”

“Child,” Sigrid tries to say, but the girl cuts her off.

“No. Don’t interrupt. If you’re going to do this work, you should be fully educated. In Poland, they’ve set up camps. Not work camps, mind you, or ‘resettlement’ camps, or whatever lie they’re telling about them, but
extermination
factories, hidden in the marshlands, with the express purpose of manufacturing corpses by the ton
. That’s
the destination of the trains leaving the goods yard of the Bahnhof Grunewald. And
that’s
the fate that everyone in Auntie’s pension is dodging.
Everyone
. So you’ll pardon me,” she says, “you must
pardon
me, Frau Schröder, if I’m not too impressed by your flights into the realm of proper behavior for a young lady.”

—

The weather grows sodden with rain. The dark building shapes and the gray species of wartime Berliners are bleakly outlined against the downpours. Traffic grinds and slows. Small armies of ragged men have been put to work clearing rubble from bombed buildings around the Belle Alliance Platz. Once Sigrid had seen a newsreel of downed British airmen clearing a sidewalk of slag in the bomb-bruised Potsdamer Platz as grinning Berliners looked on. But that’s just propaganda. She’s never seen a Brit prisoner of war on the streets. These men are Russian prisoners enduring their punishment in the rain as they are forced to repair a damaged tramline track. Faces like sheared stone. Steel-helmeted SS Totenkopf guards in rubberized cloaks stand by, with carbines slung. One of the Totenkopf men works hard at lighting a cigarette in the rain, stopping only long enough to call out his favorite obscenities to Sigrid as she passes.

The brick apartment block, with its front ripped away, still stands as it did two months before, the interiors of its flats still on display to the street. But somehow the rain makes it seem even not simply abandoned but lonely. Inconsolable.

She shakes the rain from her umbrella in the foyer. Since the notice came from the army, there’s been nothing. Opening the postbox, she stares at the empty slot, then closes it. She has been waiting for a letter from Kaspar, but no such letter comes. Where is he? How is he recovering? She has no idea. She has followed the official instructions for wives writing to wounded husbands. Written one letter after the other, each becoming shorter and more succinctly demanding than the last, till finally she was simply writing
, Kaspar, tell me how you are. Tell me how badly you have been hurt.
But no response comes, so the unanswered questions fill up a kind of dead space inside of her. She visits an army office off of the Landwehrkanal, which is charged with knowing such things, but they can tell her nothing new. Only that he was wounded between one date and another, and that he was put on a medical train after being transferred from War Hospital 4/531 Smolensk-Nord. But where this train has taken him, it’s simply impossible to say. Records are incomplete. The backlog is gargantuan. The army clerk behind the desk has eyes so deep that she can nearly see the rows of tombstones crowding them.