City of Women (36 page)

Finally, she touches his knuckles with the tips of her fingers. It’s a gesture that, after years of marriage to him, has become unconscious. “Kaspar,” she says. But the touch of her fingers is a trigger, and he detonates, ripping the tablecloth from the table, and sending everything flying. The schnapps bottle smashes on the hardwood floor. On his feet, Kaspar glares furiously at the bare table, and then overturns it with a wounded groan.

Sigrid has shoved herself back from the violence, and sits, clenching the chair as if desperate to keep it in place, as if Kaspar might next rip up the floorboard. An echo of the noise of his outburst is stuck in Sigrid’s head. The sound of the crashing bottle. The crashing table. He is breathing roughly now, but he doesn’t appear to see her any longer. Instead, he is gazing wildly into some dark hole. There are tears streaming down his cheeks.

They are motionless like this, both staked to their positions, unmoving.

Until slowly, carefully, Sigrid lets go of the chair, and rises. Her heart thumping. The tears draw her to him. “Kaspar,” she whispers.

That night, she removes her clothes, with the dim bedside lamp still burning, and climbs beneath the blankets as Kaspar watches her. His uniform is already laid out for the morning, draped over the chair. They lie together naked. Not touching, but still sharing the bed while Mother Schröder snores on the other side of the flat.

“So what are you going to do?” she asks in their careful voice. Over the years, they had developed a way of talking in bed, so that Mother Schröder could not hear, even if she was trying to. Not really a whisper, but more like an undertone.

He takes a breath slowly and exhales it. “You mean, am I planning on telling the police? Telling them that my wife has made a hobby of smuggling deserters and Jews? No,” he tells her. “I think I’ll forgo that pleasure.”

She fixes his eyes. “No. That’s not what I meant. You know, Kaspar, if you’re intent on committing suicide, you don’t have to travel all the way back to the Eastern Front. You can simply step in front of a double-decker.”

“I’m not going back to commit suicide.”

“You are. Why else would you be doing it
,
if not to die?”

“Because I can’t
live
. Not here. I have no purpose here.”

“Because you won’t permit yourself to have a purpose here. Because you can no longer make sense of your world, you have decided that the
world
no longer makes sense.”

“No. Honestly, the world has never made sense to me.” His voice picks up a beat of distance. “I have always felt that I was playing a game of catch-up.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.”

He looks at her with a strained weariness. “Yes, of course. My wife has the answer to everything,” he says with muted bitterness.

“When are you leaving?”

“I’m to report to the mustering officer tomorrow morning. We ship out from Anhalter Bahnhof the next day.”

“Goddamn it, Kaspar,” she whispers. “What were you planning to do? Drop me a note in the Feldpost from the Ukraine?”

“I’ve written you a letter. I planned on leaving it.”

“For me to read after you were gone.
Dearest Wife: Sorry to say, but I’m off to die for the Führer and Fatherland. Please send Pervatin
.” When had she started to cry? She jams her palm into her eyes to wipe them clean. Even with their door closed, she can hear her mother-in-law’s snoring. She swallows. “I’m assuming that you have not yet told the
other
Frau Schröder in the household?”

“I’ve written her a letter as well. I must ask you, Sigrid, not to say anything to her.”

“Are you joking? You think
this
is the sort of news I would break to your mother? She’d only blame me. Of course, she’ll blame me in any case. But that makes no difference. Blame is what keeps your mother alive.” She takes a breath free of tears. “I won’t be waiting for you again, Kaspar,” she tells him.

“Were you waiting for me the first time?” he asks.

The truth of this silences her for a moment. “No, I suppose I wasn’t.”

A shrug. “Then what’s the fuss?”

“You have another choice,” she says.

A blank look dangles from his face. “And what does that mean?”

“I could get you out.”

“Out?”

“I could get you to Sweden.”

“Sweden.” He almost smiles at this absurdity. Kaspar Schröder of Berlin-Wilmersdorf among the Swedes. “No.”

“No one will know you. No one will expect you to be anyone other than who you tell them you are.”

“No one will know what I’ve
done
. No one will know about my
crime
. Isn’t that what you are really saying?”

“I’m not saying that. Because it’s not true.
You
will still know. And if suicide’s your answer, then you can kill yourself in Sweden as well as in the East. But if it’s not, if what you’re telling me is true, then perhaps you can begin to expunge your crime by living a different life.”

He stares. Shakes his head lightly. “Sounds like a fairy tale.”

“It doesn’t have to be. But you have to be willing to try. To try to forgive yourself.”

“So. Is that what you have done? Learned to
forgive
yourself? Hiding Jews illegally, helping soldiers desert their companies? What crime are
you
trying to expunge, dear wife?”

“The crime of complicity, dear husband,” she answers.

“And you think what you are doing will cleanse you of that? It won’t. We are all dirty, no matter what we do. Life is dirty.”

“So that is why you are choosing death?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever understood you, Sigrid,” he says. “There was a time when I thought I did. I always knew you were different from other women I had met. And I appreciated the fact that you had your own mind. In some ways it made our life together easier. I didn’t have to try to figure out what you wanted from me. But I always thought, I always
assumed
that there would be boundaries. Now, I see that there are none at all. That boundaries do not exist.” He says this, and then looks at her. His face close. “These children you are hiding,” he asks. “They are how old?”

Silence. She does not respond. She can read his mind.

“Do you ever think,” he asks. “Do you ever think about how old our child would be?
Would have been?
” he corrects.

Had she not miscarried. Had she not failed to carry their baby to term. She does not answer, but Kaspar does not seem to be waiting for her to. “I never used to. But,” he tells her, “I see the pictures other men carry. How they show them off. And it makes me think about these things.” He is silent. And then, “I know you believe I blame you.”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes. Somewhat. But I also blame myself,” he tells her. “Honestly, Sigrid, the idea of a baby terrified me. I had no idea how to be a father, and assumed I would become a very poor one. Also, it made me jealous.”

“Jealous,” Sigrid repeats.

“We had built a very balanced life, you and I. I knew a baby would turn that upside down. So I let my mother take over your care, when I should have listened to you. I knew you didn’t like her doctor. Perhaps if I had interceded,” he says but doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he gazes up at the ceiling. “I was relieved when you miscarried, Sigrid,” he tells her. “Angry, ashamed. But relieved. I blamed you because it was the simplest option. And because I was frightened that, otherwise, you’d see through me, and realize the sort of man you had married. I blamed you and allowed you to blame yourself. And for that, I am sorry. I should have done better. I should have been a better husband to you.”

“Kaspar,” she whispers. Her body is stationary, but her voice moves closer to him. “If I asked you,” she says.

He turns his face to her. “If you asked me what?”

“What would you do if I asked for your help?”

“My help? I don’t believe you’ve ever made such a request.”

“Well, I’m making it now.”

“What’s his name?” he suddenly asks.

“What?”

“Your Jew. I’m assuming he has a name. What is it?” She can hear the boyish hurt hidden by the flatness of his voice.

“Why do you ask me such a thing?”

“Because I want to know. You ask for my help. Perhaps, that is the price I require you to pay.”

“His name is Egon,” she finally answers him.

A breath of silence, as she can feel him stamping a name to a face he has created in his head.

“And is it your plan,” he inquires, “to run away with him?”

A swallow. “Oh, no,” she answers quietly, and feels her eyes go wet. “No. That’s not in anyone’s plan.”

•   •   •

I
N THE MORNING
, when she wakes, she finds the imprint Kaspar has left on the sheets. The chair is empty. His wardrobe is empty of his uniforms and gear. In the bathroom, she dresses quickly. When she enters the kitchen, Mother Schröder is still snoring in the other room. Only one envelope has been left on the table and it is marked for her mother-in-law. She picks it up for a moment, but then drops it and walks over to the sink. By the time the old lady emerges from sleep, she is already boiling the water for coffee.

“What is it? Why are you up so early?” she hears the woman ask suspiciously.

She lifts the top of the coffeepot and spoons in three measures from the tin. “He’s gone.”

A thick glower. “What does
that
mean?”

“It means he’s gone. Your son. My husband. Feldwebel Kaspar Albrecht Schröder is gone.” She swallows. “He left you a letter.”

Mother Schröder’s eyes drop with acid suspicion to the table. She glares at the envelope, then sits. Splits open the flap with her finger and unfolds the single sheet. She reads it, then sets it down. She claims a cigarette from the pocket of her dressing gown and lights it up with a wax-tipped match and inhales smoke deeply. When she turns her eyes to Sigrid, they are damp and loaded. “You are responsible for this,” she announces with murderous brevity.

“Of course you would like to think so.” Sigrid pours the hot water into the pot. “If only I had made him a decent wife.”

“If only you had
.
”

“Well, I didn’t. I couldn’t. Blame me for it. Despise me for it. There’s still nothing I could have changed.”

“Your husband goes back to war
just to get away from you
, and all you can offer is this glibness?”

“Is that what he told you in his letter? That the front is preferable to life with his wife?”

“He didn’t
have
to tell me. It’s
obvious
. He left to escape you.”

“To escape me, to escape you, to escape all of us. But mostly to escape himself.”

“More fancy talk that’s simply
rubbish
. The
truth is
,” she starts to say, but Sigrid cuts her off.

“The
truth is
, Petronela, that the Kaspar we knew never made it back. That the man the army sent back to you—to
us
—was a stranger. An Ostkampfer.”

“He was still my boy.”

“He was a
casualty
,” Sigrid snaps. And then, with a softer edge, “That’s all . . . another casualty.”

She watches the old woman across the table swallow hard, her eyes wet with fury and grief. “So that’s
it
? He’s
gone
? My only son. We erect a tombstone and move on? Is that what you’re advising, daughter-in-law?”

Yes
. She thinks it before she says it. “Yes.”

Sigrid watches her mother-in-law age before her eyes. The woman’s face clouds, and she stands with a brittle quality, lifting herself from the chair by leveraging her weight with the palm of her hand clamped on the table. She picks up her son’s letter and turns her back, but her step has taken on a shamble. “There’s a tin of powdered milk in the pantry,” she tells Sigrid as she shuffles in her bed slippers. “I’d like some in my coffee, please.”

•   •   •

T
HAT DAY
S
IGRID GOES
to the films. She tells her mother-in-law this, but her mother-in-law is silent, planted in her chair by the wireless. Some popular tune babbles, but she seems not to hear it.

On the way to the Elektrischetram, she spies her shadow. Brown, snap-brim fedora. Beer belly. Ears like a monkey’s. She sees him on the tram, and again when she exits. It feels strange being followed. To know you are being followed. So she decides to give the fellow a test, and lead him on a bit of a chase. Down one block and up another. At some point he vanishes. Either he’s doing better at camouflaging himself, or has nipped into a lokal for a quick glass or two.

At the cinema there’s no sign of him. Hans Moser’s petulant expression on the poster fills the display case by the ticket booth.
Love Is Duty Free: A Comedy of Vienna
. The interior of the lobby smells of cold wool and singed wiring from the portable heater. The patrons file into the auditorium with funereal silence. Sigrid passes a girl in an usher’s uniform and follows the carpeted runner up to the mezzanine balcony. There’s a hefty Berliner in a fur-collared coat seated in the front row by the rail. Squinting, he turns his head to inspect Sigrid, but then frowns, disappointed. In the back row, she takes a seat at the end of the aisle. When the lights go down, she tries to claim comfort in the darkness, but this time there is none to be claimed. She feels simply alone. Then light shudders from the projector and the screen silvers. She opens her eyes to a roar of newsreel
Heils
and Wagnerian thunder. It’s
another
petulant Austrian. The Führer speaks in honor of Heroes’ Remembrance Day in the courtyard of the Zeughaus, flanked by captured Red Army flags. His peaked uniform cap is jammed down onto his head, and he resembles a curmudgeonly family uncle, slumped into his greatcoat and favoring his right arm as he grumbles into the microphone.

When another patron finds a seat in a row by the balcony, his silhouette blocks her view. Sigrid feels her breath shorten. The man is wearing no hat, and she can recognize the shape of the back of Egon’s head. Recognize his shadow. He sits beside the only other occupant of the row, the fellow in the fur-collared coat. There’s an exchange of some sort, and Sigrid watches the other man suddenly stand and make his way out. But when she watches Egon stand a moment later, he stops. She can feel his gaze penetrate her. She is at once terrified and overjoyed when she watches him close in on the spot where she is seated. His silhouette cuts its contours out of the Führer’s face on screen. When he dumps himself into the seat beside her, she can smell the aroma of his cigarette tobacco.