City of Women (29 page)

“No,” she answers.

“Why not?”

A shrug. “Ask God.”

The man suppresses a cough of smoke. “Is your husband aware that you have implicated yourself in this ugly business?”

“
No
, he is not, for I
have
not, Herr Kommissar, done any such thing.”

For a moment, he seems to be making an appraisal of her, until suddenly he drops his face close to hers. “Have you been informed of the clan penalties for crimes committed against the state, Frau Schröder? If you are guilty, then, by law, so is he. Do you wish his fate to be on your conscience?”

“My husband is a
soldier
.”

“Yes, and his mother is a Party member, and all of that will mean exactly nothing. The law is the law. It is very clear on this point. A criminal’s
family
is considered equally as culpable as the criminal,
regardless
of circumstances.”

“I have done nothing wrong, Herr Kommissar,” she says stiffly. “You are not frightening me.”

The man stares deeply at her for a moment, an unmoving stare as if he is trying to turn her inside out with his eyes. And then he says suddenly, in a quite level tone, “I’ve been married three times, Frau Schröder. So, I am aware of how the female mind works. It’s not your fault,” he says. “You have certain frailties built in, it’s part of nature. And if you fall victim to certain misplaced maternal sentiments for a troubled girl, that would only be natural as well. There is no crime in it. Your
crime
is the enshrinement of those sentiments above the laws of the Reich,” he says, and his gaze closes in on her. “Now, I’m going to ask you a question. A very important question, and I want you to think
very
hard before you answer,” he tells her, smoke ribboning upward from his cigarette. “Are you in contact with Ericha Kohl?”

“No,” she answers immediately.

“Let me rephrase the question, and, again, I urge you to weigh your answer very carefully. Are you in contact with the
criminal
Ericha Kohl?”

Sigrid’s eyes are level. “Call her what you like, Herr Kommissar. I am not in contact with her.”

The Kommissar stares at her vacantly, and then lets out a long, slow exhale of smoke. “Very well. You’re free to go, Frau Schröder,” he announces. When she does not budge, he repeats himself. “I said you are free to go.” He tells her this, grinding out his cigarette in Herr Esterwegen’s overflowing ashtray, as if he has lost all interest in her presence. Sitting down behind the desk, he picks up the telephone receiver. “Yes, this is Kriminal-Kommissar Lang, I need to place a call. One moment,” he says, and covers the mouthpiece with his hand. “Is there something else you wish to say?” The question is blank, edged only with impatience.

Sigrid blinks sternly. Shakes her head. “No.” Her voice is hollow. “No, Herr Kommissar. Nothing else.”

•   •   •

“I
WOULD HAVE FAINTED
were I you,” Renate tells her. They are in the cellar of the building, by a window that opens onto the sidewalk. Shelves and shelves, laden with filing boxes, surround them, as well as warning placards:
SMOKING FORBIDDEN IN THIS AREA
. But it is still a favorite place to steal a quick cigarette. Traffic noises drift in from the window.

“What? Why fainted?”

“Because men cannot abide women fainting. Tears they can withstand, but faint and they’ll be on their knees beside you, patting your hand and calling for a glass of water.”

Sigrid shakes her head. “I don’t think fainting would have changed a thing. There wasn’t room to faint.”

“And all this was because of your husband?”

“My husband?”

“You said he was asking questions about Kaspar.”

“He was. Yes.”

“Is it the black market? What has he
done
?”

“Nothing. He’s done nothing except serve his country.”

Renate frowns. “Then I don’t understand.”

She asks Renate for a drag from her cigarette. Inhales deeply. Shakes off the sharp touch of light-headedness.

“They’re very strong. Ukrainian or something. Heinz smokes them.”

Sigrid can tell that Renate’s also observing her closely now.

“Thanks,” Sigrid says, and returns the smoldering cigarette. “I have something I have to say. Something I have to ask you.”

Renate stares. Her expression shrinks slightly. “What?”

“I need to find a doctor.”

“A doctor?” Confused. “
Why?
Are you
sick
?”

“No. Not that sort of doctor,” she answers.

A small twist of a smile, as if perhaps this is some kind of humorless joke. “What are you talking about? What other kind of doctors
are
there?” she asks, but even as the question leaves her mouth, Sigrid can see that she has the answer. “Oh, good God.” She covers her mouth with her hands, to prevent the words from leaving. “Good God, no.”

Sigrid keeps her face straight.

“I gave you
condoms,”
Renate scolds in a crushed whisper. “Dammit, I gave you
condoms
. Why didn’t you
use
them?”

“Do I really need to explain?”

“Could it be Kaspar’s? I mean, is that a possibility? You’ve been with him, too.”

Sigrid knows that she must remove Kaspar from the question in Renate’s mind. Aborting an illicit lover’s child is different from aborting a husband’s. “I was with him, but not in that way,” she says. “He wasn’t inside of me.”

“You’re sure?”

“Renate, if I wasn’t sure whose it was, would I even be considering?”

“All right. All right. You understand why I must ask these things. I’m sorry, but I must.”

“So you’ve asked. Will you help?”

“I don’t know. I have to think.”

“This has never happened to you?” she inquires with a tad too much incredulity that Renate seizes upon.

“You mean
even though I’ve screwed every man in sight
? Is that what you’re implying?”

Sigrid shrugs. “I apologize. You don’t have to tell me.”

“I’ll tell you it
hasn’t
happened to me, because I’m not
stupid
. I don’t
make
stupid mistakes. You
do
, by the way, realize that it is
illegal
. Abortion is a crime. You could end up with two years in Barnim Strasse. And if
I
help you, I could end up joining you there.”

“Please forget it,” Sigrid tells her. “Please forget I ever mentioned it. I shouldn’t have. This is
my
problem.”

Renate smokes solemnly. “That’s right.
Your
problem
,” she says, dropping her cigarette onto the floor and crushing it vigorously with the toe of her shoe. Then shakes her head. “I have to get back to work,” she says, and frowns. “And you should, too.” Saying this, she retrieves the crushed cigarette butt. “After all, there’s still a war going on.”

Back in the stenographers’ pool, Sigrid reinserts herself behind her desk. A glance to Renate yields nothing. The room fills with the chatter of typewriters.

But then the next time she passes by Sigrid’s desk, Renate drops a cigarette card beside her typewriter. On the face is a photo of the Reichsminister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. A simian little man in a brown uniform, posed with his wife at the center of a large brood of golden-haired children. On the back, an address of a clinic in Berlin-Kreuzberg, inked in Renate’s neat script.
Identify yourself
, she has written,
as an old friend of Frau Breuer.

•   •   •

T
HAT EVENING
, she hurries up the stairs of her building. At the fourth-floor landing she can hear the drone of Mother Schröder’s wireless through the door. So she knocks on the opposite door instead. This time it is Carin Kessler who answers. “Come in,” she says with a weight to her voice.

Inside, Sigrid glances about. Something in Carin’s tone has started the acid in her stomach bubbling.

“If you’re waiting for him to appear, he won’t. He’s gone.”

She feels the blood drain from her face. “Gone?”

“When I came home from the shops, the place was empty.” She takes a small fold of paper off the mantel. “He left this.”

Sigrid can only stare, unable to touch it. “Have you read it?” she whispers.

“It was lying open on the kitchen table.”

Finally Sigrid manages to reach out and accepts the paper from Carin’s fingers. Her heart is thumping in her chest. But all he has written is,
Thank you. Please tell your neighbor that I will be in touch.

“That’s
all
?”

“Do you expect more of men?” Carin inquires.

“Where’s Wolfram?” she asks.

“Ah, yes. I heard about the summit over the chessboard. Did he frighten you?” She pours out two measures of brandy from a sleek decanter. “He can be rather terrible when he’s been drinking.”

“He said he can produce identity documents.”

“Well, then I’m sure he can.”

“He said I should grow eyes in the back of my head.”

Carin gives her a sideways look. “Then perhaps you should,” she tells Sigrid. “Here, drink this down,” she commands.

Sigrid follows orders without squeamishness. The brandy burns straight through her. “Thank you,” she whispers.

A shrug. “I don’t accept thanks. Too costly,” Carin explains with a veneer of contrariness, avoiding eye contact. “Excuse me, but I think I need a cigarette,” she says. But when she picks up the sterling lighter from the coffee table, she frowns. “What’s
this
?” she says, and then turns. “Ah, now, here’s something rude. Your friend appears to have consumed my entire bowl of rock sugar before he left. Now,
that’s
a real crime.”

Sigrid can only stare blankly at the empty bowl. “I’m sorry, I must get you some more,” she says with a small, vacant voice.

“Never mind,” Carin tells her. “I’m just trying to”—she shakes her head—“I don’t know what, find reasons to dislike him. Actually, it’s rather a hard thing to do. Dislike him, that is. Against my better judgment, I must admit, I found him charming. And if
I
found him so . . .
well
, I can only imagine,” she says, with small note of shyness.

Sigrid gazes at her for a moment. “May I ask you a question?” she says.

Carin’s face hardens again, though there is something of the same rueful bemusement in her eyes that Sigrid recalls from Wolfram. “Of course,” she answers, and takes a sip of coffee without removing her gaze from Sigrid’s face. “You want to know
why
,
correct? Why I am as I am?”

Sigrid looks back at her but lets her silence be her answer.

“I’ve been expecting the question, actually. Sooner or later.”

“Is it because of the war?”

Something like a smile forms on Carin’s face. “The war?”

“All the men in the army. All the women alone.”

But Carin only chuckles in a mildly disdainful manner. “You mean: what’s left that’s not rationed besides sex?” she says. “There are certainly women like that, lonely hausfrauen, bored with their lives and looking for some excitement. But I am not one of them. You wonder, perhaps if I haven’t learned my tastes for
the female gender simply because there are no men about? The answer is no. I have always been as I am, Sigrid Schröder. Always. It’s not a hobby or something I’ve picked up, like a lingering head cold.”

“I’m sorry,” Sigrid tells her. “I think I’ve offended you.”

Carin shrugs lightly, and shakes her head. “You haven’t. You were curious. You asked a question. Nothing wrong with that.” An interior pause separates them awkwardly for a moment, until Carin takes a breath. “But enough of that. I should tell you. I’ve received a telegram from my half sister this morning. She’s coming back to Berlin.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Any time now.”

“I thought she was staying with her mother until the birth.”

“Her mother’s a drunk,” Carin says, exhaling smoke. “Her mother’s a drunk who despises her as a half-breed, and her husband’s a monster, who fornicates with other women, because it’s his
duty
as an SS man to propagate the breed. And if she looks at him wrong, he becomes violent. Fractured her arm once.” Then, shaking her head, she says, “It almost makes me feel sorry for the silly little heifer.”

—

There’s a stretch of the Nachodstrasse in Schöneberg where German is a learned language. A street peddler offers incense for sale, and hand-painted icons of the saints and the patriarchs in their onion-shaped miters. Sigrid finds many shop windows have signs in Cyrillic lettering, but just to make sure there is no misunderstanding, they also display prominent portraits of the Führer, their brown tsar, decked with swastika flags.

The building she enters smells as much of boiled cabbage as does the rest of Berlin these days. An old woman, scarved in black, brushes past her with an unintelligible mutter. Down a poorly lit hallway, she looks for the residence plate, finds a handwritten name, and knocks on the door.

“You are Herr Melnikov?” she asks the large, thickly jowled man who answers.

“And who is asking?” the man inquires with a throaty accent.

“A friend of Grizmek,” she replies.

The man clears the hallway in both directions with a look, then peers at her with deeply shadowed eyes. “Please to come in,” he tells her.

The flat is neglected and full of clutter, the way the flats of unmarried men of a certain age become. The furnishings are old department-store inventory of the type Sigrid’s mother bought at Karstadt twenty years before. There are knickknacks: a small clock with the gilding thinning, a tarnished horse on a bronze base, a souvenir tray from Luna Park, but nothing particularly Russian, beyond the line of gilded icons on the mantel above the coke stove, and two sepia photographs in oval frames hung on the wall.

“My parents,” Melnikov explains. Gazing out from the frame is a man with a large, spongy body in a white uniform and peaked cap. His face is disguised by a thick brush of a beard as he poses besides a petite, almost doll-sized woman with frail eyes peeking out from a large bonnet. “My father was a customs official in St. Petersburg, where I was born. My mother, a poetess of sorts, though never very well known.” He has opened a bottle of amber and pours out two small cordial glasses. “You’ll have one,” he says, and puts one of the glasses in Sigrid’s hand. “
Na zdorovie
,” he toasts, then drains his glass. “Drink. You must,” he prods her. Sigrid only takes a sip of the thick, sugary stuff, but it seems to satisfy him. “And
that
,” Melnikov sighs, “
that
poor puny
malchik
is me,” he says, with a light melancholy, and gestures to the second photo of a scrawny little boy in an academy uniform posed beside a sleek wolfhound as tall as he. “Hard to believe I was ever such a minuscule pip.” He sets the glass down and turns on a lamp, rolling open a length of black velvet cloth atop a desk blotter. “So. You will show me what you have brought,” he says, then grins at Sigrid’s hesitation. “Not to worry. I am too old and too fat to be a thief. Who could run from the police at my age?”