City of Women (26 page)

“Oh, so is that the verdict?
I
am the source of ruination?”

But her mother-in-law is through talking. She ends the conversation with a brusque wave as if swatting away a bothersome insect, and turns on the wireless in the living room. According to the Reichsfunk announcer, the Afrika Korps has made a strategic withdrawal from the Mareth Line in Tunisia to positions sixty meters to the north of the Tebaga Gap at Akarit. Also, for similar strategic reasons, the Ninth Army has completed its withdrawal from the city of Vyazma, west of Moscow.

“An interesting way of winning a war, advancing by retreating,” Sigrid hears herself remark. She hadn’t really meant this as a serious comment; it was just that the absurd euphemisms of the Propaganda Ministry had struck her as so ridiculous. And she certainly hadn’t meant to speak it aloud. But recently she has found herself simply too exhausted to keep her thoughts silent.

The comment, however, is enough to bring her mother-in-law blowing back in the kitchen like a fireball.
“I will not have that!”
she barks at Sigrid. “I will not permit defeatist talk in my house.
My
house, especially now that my son is home from honorably serving his Fatherland in battle! I rue the day that he married you. I knew it was a mistake then, and I can see now how right I was. So, I
warn
you, my good girl, one more remark like that, one more
insult
to the honor of our gallant Wehrmacht, and, daughter-in-law or no, I will have you up in front of the police!”

“Just as you did Frau Remki?” Sigrid shouts back.

Her mother-in-law’s back suddenly goes straight.

“Oh, yes.” Sigrid nods vigorously. “Mundt told me all about it.”

“So you’re listening to Mundt now?”

“We all made the assumption.”

“Assumptions are for fools,” her mother-in-law declares, retreating toward the kitchen.

“You knew that Mundt would happily take the credit, and keep silent about the truth.”

“Well, it doesn’t appear that she kept silent enough.”

“So you admit it?”

“Admit what? I’ve committed no crime.”

“It wasn’t Mundt who denounced Frau Remki, it was
you
.
You!
”

“And
what of it
?!” the old woman suddenly rails. “She was a
traitor
. She slurred the Führer’s name. Whatever she got,
she
deserved
!”

“And what did
you
get? Her radio for a few marks. Was that worth her life?”

“She took
her own
life, if you recall. A coward to the last.”

At that moment, the door opens and in steps Kaspar. His entrance breaks the argument in half with a wedge of silence. He glances at both of them, then shrugs out of his greatcoat and limps over toward the sink, where he washes his hands, using the nub of a bar of lard soap beside the faucet. “How long till supper?” he asks.

Sigrid lights the burner under the pot of water. “I’m sorry, it’s late,” she says, sharply swallowing her fury. “Another forty minutes.”

He only nods and limps over to the kitchen table, where he sits and takes out his pipe. “Mother, do we have any matches?” he asks, digging the pipe’s bowl into a packet of army tobacco. “I’m out.”

“Matches,” the old woman repeats. Then, “Yes. I’ll get you some,” she answers solemnly. At the stove, she shoots Sigrid a stiff glare, but her anger does not completely hide a splinter of fear. Her son has come home from the war, alive, but she no longer recognizes him.

SIXTEEN

A
SPRINKLING OF RAIN COMES
and goes restlessly in the morning, and by the afternoon is replaced by a damp, stolid breeze. Sigrid has made her journey to the bench in the Tiergarten at the foot of the Lutherbrücke, as instructed. As she sits, the breeze is riffling recklessly through the line of poplars as she observes the Berliner’s clip of Ericha’s slim, dark-clad figure crossing the bridge.

The child looks done in. Her face has been sharpened, depleted of its rounded girlishness. He eyes are shadowed and ringed with blue moons. The crystalline blue of her gaze is now flat and cloudy.

“You look terrible,” Sigrid tells her.

“I could say the same of you, Frau Schröder. You should look in the mirror,” Ericha replies, then shakes her head. “Sorry, that sounded much more harsh than I intended.”

“You’re not sleeping?”

“I’ve been on the move a lot.”

“On the move?”

“I catch a few hours here and there.”

Suddenly, Sigrid perceives an absence. She looks up and searches the area, but all she sees is an elderly couple propped against each other as they travel slowly down the path. “Ericha? Where’s your friend Franz?”

No answer.

“Ericha?”

“I told him to stay away from me for a while.”

“Stay away?
Why?
”

Again no answer.

“Ericha, what is going
on
?”

“I’m pregnant,” she answers suddenly.

Sigrid stares. Opens her mouth, then closes it again. “How . . . how can that
be
?” she finally manages.

“How can it be? You’re a grown woman. You must be familiar with the process. Do I really need to explain?”

“
Ericha
. You know what I’m saying.
How did this happen?
”

“As I said. You must be familiar with the process.”

“Who?”
she demands.

“Does it matter?”

“Doesn’t it
?
”

“Not to me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Listen to yourself. You sound like a typical hausfrau. What is there to understand? There was a man. He had what I needed. So I bounced him for it. That was it. That was the
process
.”

“Only now you end up with a baby in your belly.”

“You sound angry with me.”

“Angry?”
Sigrid suddenly catches the pitch of her grandmother’s voice. “No. No, of course not. Of course, I’m not
angry
. I’m only, I’m only
shocked
. That’s all. Only shocked.” She swallows. “I’m sorry if,” she starts to say, but Ericha shakes her head.

“It means nothing. Honestly, I wouldn’t blame you if you
were
angry.
I’m
angry
,” she says, pulling out a cigarette and poking one into her mouth. “I’m
furious
.”

The breeze blows past as Ericha cups her match to light up a cigarette. The smoke she exhales is whisked away. Finally, she says, “You remember the man named Johann?”

“Your forger? The man who nearly bowled you over in the middle of the sidewalk?
He’s
the father?”

“He was the man I fucked,” she corrects.

“And have you told him?”

Now Ericha releases something like a laugh. “
Told him?
No. No, I haven’t
told
him, Frau Schröder. Don’t be absurd. This has nothing to do with him.”

“Ericha, I know you have no feelings for him, but if you are carrying his
child . . .
”

“I’m carrying a tiny kernel in my womb, that’s all. A little speck. If it belongs to
anyone
, it belongs to
me
.” She expels smoke and watches it vanish. With her head turned she asks, “Have you ever had one done?” When Sigrid doesn’t answer her, she turns her head back. “Have you?”

Sigrid’s jaw has stiffened. “You mean . . . an abortion?” she asks. Then shakes her head once. “No.”

Ericha looks away. Takes another drag from her cigarette. For a moment she shivers. “Auntie used to do them long ago. She told me once. She was a midwife working in the factory slums. Delivering babies, yes. Also,
other
procedures for women. Sometimes after they’d been raped, but mostly after their husbands had knocked them up for the seventh or eighth time, and they
just couldn’t do it again
. But I can’t get to Auntie now, can I?”

“Is that what you want?” Sigrid asks her.

Ericha swallows. Shrugs. “What else
can
I want? Can you actually credit me as a mother? I mean, can you imagine it?” she asks. “Me pushing the pram? Me washing nappies? It’s laughable,” she says harshly, expelling wintry smoke. “Absolutely
laughable
.” Her cigarette is cheap and the tobacco goes out. “
Shit
,” she swears. But as she scratches another match to life, it trembles in her hand. And when the match is extinguished by an errant breath of wind, her façade crumbles to pieces, and long and terrible sobs seize her utterly. Sigrid clutches her without thought or hesitation. And as she keeps the girl enfolded in her arms, as if trying to keep her from flying into pieces, she thinks for a moment of herself: a motherless child standing at a graveside. Lost.

•   •   •

I
T’S GROWING LATE.
Dusk gathering above the treetops, darkening the branches. The cemetery warden is hesitant to let her in, but finally concedes to her obvious anguish. “Only a few minutes,” he warns, and opens the gate.

Kneeling atop her mother’s grave, Sigrid places her hand on the headstone. It is cold. Cold as the ground. Grossmutter had once announced that her mother had been unwanted. Sigrid was still young at the time, seated at the kitchen table with a bowl of black cherries. Still long-limbed and gangly, a scrawny scarecrow with a tousled mess of flaxen hair. Her mother, standing a few feet away, was washing a delicate porcelain bowl in the sink. Grossmutter had been across the table picking at Sigrid’s cherries like a poacher. Her face sharp and predatory, as always. One moment she was talking about how she couldn’t understand why young women these days were so intent on “keeping their figure,” and the next she was announcing that she has never intended to give birth to any more children after her third. “But then along comes your mother.” She’d frowned. “Completely unwanted, but there I was. Stuck with another mouth to feed. And back then,” she added significantly, “we didn’t have a
choice
, if you know what I’m saying. Back then if you had a baby coming, it
came
. And that was that.”

Suddenly there was a crash in the sink. The sound of fine porcelain shattering.

“
Now
, what have you broken?” Grossmutter demanded to know loudly.

“I’m sorry,” her mother answered, not turning around. “It slipped.”

As a girl, she had been angry with her mother at that moment. That she should be so clumsy. That she should break such an important bowl. That she was so weak in the face of Grossmutter’s bullying. By that age she had stopped defending her mother, and then after Grossmutter’s death, picked up the attack where the old lady had left off.

And when the cancer came, she remembers her mother lying on the horsehair settee, weak as an unstrung puppet, a frail collection of bones wrapped in a thin yellowing skin, pleading for some kind of mercy. And then she was gone. Bundled into the grave. Sigrid’s aunt Trudi had come to act as the chief nursemaid, boiling towels and administering old-fashioned remedies, though mostly she just clucked her tongue and shook her head at heaven. At the grave site, she told Sigrid, “At least your poor mother is finally at rest.” Sigrid nodded. What a relief death must have been for her.

•   •   •

W
HEN
S
IGRID RETURNS
to the flat she finds Kaspar laughing. There are two other soldiers with him at the kitchen table, hunched around a half-empty bottle of corn schnapps, and they are all laughing. It is the first time she has seen her husband laugh since his return.

He stands and steps toward her, grinning, and for an instant she tries to see the man she married, the smiling husband with whom she sometimes passed an easy Sunday afternoon at the lake. But the grin he wears looks more like a distortion of his face. “Ah, my devoted wife. Home from the Battle of the Stenographers’ Pool.” He doesn’t kiss her, but captures her in the crook of his arm and marches her beside the table. She resists the desire to turn away from the stink of schnapps on his breath. “Fall in, comrades,” he commands largely. “Salute the Victor of the Reichspatentamt!”

The men leap comically to attention, clicking their boot heels. One is short but built like a tree stump. His head is shaven, and a livid scar draws a crescent across his skull and chops off the tip of his left ear. The other is more like a tree trunk. Long-bodied with willowy limbs. He has no scars on his face, but his left hand, she notes, is shy three fingers. Both of them, like Kaspar, wear the onyx wound badge pinned to their ill-fitting uniforms beside the Ostmedaille, the Frozen Meat Medallion. “Frau Schröder,” Kaspar says, continuing his mock drill ground formality, “may I present Unteroffizier Kamphauser and Unteroffizier Messner, two of the best-preserved corpses in the army. Notice there’s very little decay. How lifelike they look.”

“Only because we’re pumped so full of formaldehyde,” the stubby one injects, triggering a generous round of guffaws.

“So very pleased to meet you, gentlemen,” Sigrid manages, slipping the strap of her bag from her shoulder, and freeing herself from her husband’s grip in the process. “Where is your mother, Kaspar?”

“Out somewhere,” Kaspar answers without interest. “At ease, comrades!” he commands, returning to the military bluff, refilling the trio of glasses on the table. “Time to regroup.” Sigrid prepares herself to decline an offer of a glass, but then no offer is made. She hangs up her coat, thinking of Egon’s hands on her skin. “Did your mother start the supper?”

“I really haven’t the slightest,” Kaspar answers.

“I see. Gentlemen, I assume that you are staying to eat?” she says dutifully, walking toward the kitchen stove, and picking up her apron. But Kaspar waves her off.

“No, no. Nothing special. Just some
pickled beets
,” he tells her, triggering another round of guffaws at some private Ostfront joke. Their drunken chumminess makes her feel suddenly claustrophobic. And all she can think of is
Egon
. In the kitchen, there are no pickled beets, but she does find cold fried potatoes and a bit of smoked herring. She quickly puts it on a plate, and drops it off on the table with three forks. “Good appetite, gentlemen,” she says. “Kaspar, I have an errand to run.” But Kaspar barely acknowledges her. By the time she has slipped back into her coat, they are singing a booming, hideously off-key version of “Lili Marlene.”

She steps into the foyer and closes the door behind her, muffling the noise of their chorus. From below stairs, she can hear one of Frau Granzinger’s kids screaming. But she is staring at the door of Carin Kessler’s flat. A quick German glance, before she tiptoes across, knocking carefully. “It’s
me
,” she whispers to the door, and the door swings open as if she has just uttered a password.

“Well, Hello, Frau Me,” the man in the threshold answers. But it is not Egon. It is Wolfram, in full uniform, silver wound badge, close-combat clasp, Ostmedaille, Iron Cross pinned under the breast pocket of his Waffenfrock, tricolor ribbon in his buttonhole. Garrison strap connected to his pistol belt. False leg with the glossy high boot attached. She steps back, fearfully, from the force of his eyes. “Come in,” he tells her. “We were just having a game.”

Without comprehension. “A game?”

“Yes. Your friend and I. Come in,” he says again, but this time it is more of a command. And when she does, she finds Egon seated on the sofa, dressed in his black mohair overcoat over a tweed jacket of Kaspar’s, and bent over a chessboard on the coffee table. He looks up at her with the blank concentration of a man defusing a bomb.

“I managed to avoid his Nimzo-Indian defense by conceding my bishops,” Wolfram explains, “but it’s left me limping into the middle game, if you’ll pardon the expression. He’s tricky,” he concludes, as he shuts the door behind them. “Very tricky. Can I get you a glass of bull’s blood?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Egri Bikavér. It’s Hungarian red from the Eger region.”

Staring into Egon’s face. “No. No, thank you.”

“It’s really not so bad,” Wolfram tells her. Marching with his cane over to the coffee table, he refills a pair of goblets by the game board. Fallen pieces litter its margin, knights, pawns, bishops. “Quite full-bodied. Don’t you agree?” he asks Egon.

“It’s your move,” is all Egon says in return.

Wolfram frowns lightly at the board. “Hmm. I see you are indeed a true disciple of the hypermoderns. Have you heard the story of how Nimzowitsch conceded the Immortal Zugzwang Game to Sämisch? He stood up and slapped himself in the forehead, shouting, ‘
That I should lose to such an idiot!
’”

“Wolfram,” Sigrid says thickly, but he raises his hand to halt her.

“Really, Frau Schröder, you cannot break my concentration if I am expected to have any chance to save my queen from a terrible fate,” he orders, with a touch of rawness, and knocks back a deep swallow of bull’s blood from his goblet.

“What do you want me to
do
?” Sigrid asks him desolately.

“Well, you could start by taking off your coat and sitting down like a human being.” He gives her only the shortest of glances, but she catches the gun sight. She thinks, for only a heartbeat, of the fish knife she keeps in her bag. She looks to Egon, but he is staring distantly at the pieces on the board. So she removes her coat and, like a human being, she sits, balancing herself on the edge of one of the Frau Obersturmführer’s padded club chairs.

“So I understand that my dear sister Carin has developed a big mouth,” Wolfram says, glaring at the pieces. “Has she not, Frau Schröder?” he asks, when Sigrid does not respond.

“She told me,” Sigrid answers tonelessly, “about your family.”