City of Women (5 page)

He breathed in the question slowly with his cigarette smoke, and then released his response with a frown. “You won’t enjoy this game, Sigrid. I promise you that. You will not.”

“It’s not a game. Only a question.”

No words, only smoke.

“You have nothing to say?” she inquired, drawing the blankets around her. “Or is it that you have no interest in me, beyond what I offer below the waist?”

“Above the waist as well,” he answered in a grimy voice. “You’ve got quite a set.”

It might have aroused her to have heard this a moment before. But now that she was angry, it sounded only crude. She frowned blackly to herself. “Yes. I must have made an irresistible target. Another unfulfilled hausfrau. One among many, no doubt. Stupid in my desires.”

“If you’re intent on torturing yourself like this”—he shrugged—“I can’t stop you.”

“Tell me her name.”

Shaking his head. “Sigrid.”

“It’s a question, Egon. Only a very small one for a mistress. What do you call your wife?”

“I call her by her name.”

“Which is?”

A small breath of concession. “Which is Anna.”

Anna. Sigrid takes the name inside herself, and consigns it to an interior vault. The name of her lover’s wife. “Where is she?” she asked. Nothing. “You have forgotten, perhaps?
Now, let’s see . . . where did I put my wife?
Should you search your coat pockets?”

Egon exhaled darkly, then answered. “She’s in Vienna. Her parents are there.”

“How long have you been married to her?”

“Six years.”

“Six years.” It might as well have been a lifetime. It might as well have been a century in comparison to their six frantic months. Six months, one week, and what? How many days? How many hours? How many minutes left? “And does she know?”

“Know?”

“Does she suspect that you so easily slip off your wedding band?”

“I don’t wear a wedding band. I don’t care for symbols of ownership.”

“How convenient for you. And you have children?”

“
Sigrid,
” he says, glowering.

“Should I assume that the answer is yes?”

“I wouldn’t think you’d be in such a rush to assume
anything
at this point.”

“But you
do,
though.
Have children
, that is.”

“I have daughters,” he admitted. “Two.”

“Ah. You see that wasn’t so difficult. A straight answer.”

“How old?”

He was up, out of the bed. His bare feet padding across the crooked hardwood floor. “How old?” she repeated.

“Five and three.”

“And they have names, like most children?”

Uncorking a bottle of schnapps on the battered sideboard, he poured out a glass. Only one glass. “These questions of yours, Sigrid. They have nothing to do with us.”

“No?” said Sigrid, her voice strident.

He faced her, leaning naked against the sideboard’s edge with the drink in his hand. “What we have,” he told her, “is private. Just between you and me. If you must have the words, fine. You know that I love you.”

“Are you certain of that?”

“But this love is not to be made public. It would be an insult to our feelings to expose them to the hostility of the world.”

“It was public enough in the back of a movie theater.”

“That was fucking.”

“Rather than love. I see.” Sigrid nodded. “And your wife?”

“Not our subject, Sigrid.”

“You love her, too?”

He inhaled smoke. “Differently from you.”

“Hmm. I wonder what that means.”

“I don’t ask you about your husband.”

“Well, you
can
.”

“But I don’t wish to. Why must he exist for me?”

“Because he exists for
me
. I go home to him and have you between us every day. The lies I must tell.” She shook her head at the lies stored inside of her brain. “The lies I must remember.”

“Your lies are not my responsibility,” he said. “Your
choices
are not my responsibility.”

“You have no feelings for me. Not really. If you did, you couldn’t say such things.”

“I love you intensely, Sigrid. Touching you is like sticking my hand into a fire.”

“Sounds very painful for you,” she replied in anger, but also knowing that it was true.

“But my wife. My children. They’re quite simply none of your business. None of
our
business.”

The words hit her with the weight of stones. For an instant, and not for the first time, she felt herself to be utterly alone. Alone, as if she lay dead in her coffin. The feeling emptied her completely, even of tears. It was also the end of his words for the day, even after he returned to the bed. To her body. As her punishment, his articulation was withdrawn, and afterward there were only grunts and mumbled half words. She was always helpless against this, and raged inwardly at her own stupidity. All his rough terrain had caused her to forget just how vulnerable he was to pain. She cursed her own hubris, her own frantic desire to be everything to him. To blot out wives, children, histories. To render them all without consequence.

Then at the door he had whispered, “Please don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Let your smaller emotions taint what we have.”

She gazed at him for a moment, and shook her head. Quite without a drop of fight remaining, she propped herself up against the pillar of his body, and said, “There are times, Herr Weiss, when I could simply murder you.”

“Well,” he answered calmly, “for that you’ll need to stand in quite a long queue.”

Suddenly she nearly laughed. She glared up into his face. “Longer, you think, than the queue for milk?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Longer than milk, shorter than meat,” he said, and then kissed her.

•   •   •

C
OMING HOME
from the patent office, she thinks, for an instant, that she
sees
him. Sees him at the bus stop across the street from the zoo. This happens now and again, causing her heart to flood. She conjures him out of the brisk air of the present. Fleshing her memory into a man on the corner, or sitting at a café window. But, of course, it isn’t him. It isn’t him at all. How could it be? He is gone. Escaped into the world beyond the boundaries the Greater German Reich. She sometimes allows herself silly fantasies that, in her old age, she will travel abroad as a widow, and find him sitting at a café table in Barcelona or perhaps Cairo. She will turn the corner and discover a finely silvered version of him wearing a beret. An Egon Weiss she will finally be able to claim.

Entering the flat in the Uhlandstrasse, she hangs her scarf on a peg when her mother-in-law appears wearing a black smirk. “You saw the door?” the old woman inquires.

Sigrid glances at their door. “Saw it?”

“Not
ours
,” she gruffs. “Frau Remki’s. It’s been sealed. They sealed it up after they took her away.”

“
Who
took her away?”

“
Who?
Who do you
think
, dear child?”
Dear child
is not a pleasantry in Mother Schröder’s mouth. Sigrid pastes her eyes to her mother-in-law’s expression, then peers into the hall. Frau Remki’s door has been sealed with four white-and-black adhesive-backed stamps bearing the eagle over the hooked cross and encircled by a ring that reads
CLOSED BY THE GEHEIME STAATSPOLIZEI.
A fifth stamp covers the keyhole.

“Three of them arrived with their pistols out. But, of course, she had beaten them to the punch. A spoiler to the last,” says her mother-in-law. “They had to carry her out feet first.”

Sigrid shakes her head as if to clear it. “
What?
What are you saying?”

“I’m saying she followed the same path as her exalted husband. A suicide.” The old lady shrugs. “Probably the smartest thing she ever did,” she concludes, then crosses over to the stove and lifts the lid on a large steaming pot. “Soup’s nearly ready,” she announces. “You should put the plates on the table.”

Sigrid stares. “Was it Mundt?”

Sniffing at the soup. “Mundt?”

“Was it Mundt who
denounced
her?”

“How should I know?” Her mother-in-law picks up the ladle and stirs the pot. “Why don’t you go below stairs and ask her? Knowing Ilse Mundt, she’ll be happy to brag. Now kindly put the plates on the table, will you? I’d like to eat my supper.”

FOUR

A
T A TRAM STOP
, the conductor must clear the aisle to make space for a soldier propped on crutches who is boarding without the benefit of a right foot. Several passengers compete to give up their seats for him, but he politely refuses all offers, face flushing. There was an invasion of Berlin after the Aufmarsch into Russia. An invasion by an army of mutilated and crippled young men. A year ago they said the war was all but won. The Party press secretary announced that the Wehrmacht’s victory in Russia was now irreversible.
THE GREAT HOUR HAS STRUCK! CAMPAIGN IN THE EAST DECIDED!
roared the headlines in the
B.Z
.
EASTERN BREAKTHROUGH DEEPENS. THE SPIRES OF MOSCOW ARE IN SIGHT!
Reports over the wireless were triumphant. Soviet Army Groups Timoshenko and Voroshilov were encircled! Army Group Budyonny was in chaos! German boys would be coming home by Christmas, and everyone was going to be rich. In the cafés, Berliners leapt to their feet, saluting the radio announcements, and booming out the
“Deutschland” and “Horst Wessel” lieder.
Russian-language phrase books crowded the bookshop display windows for those pioneers soon to resettle in the East, and for practical minds expecting a flood of Russian-speaking servants. But then came winter, with rumors of unbearable cold. Cold that froze engine blocks and turned motor oil to sludge. The phrase books vanished from the shops, along with such items as soap, tooth powder, sewing needles, eggs, and wool socks. And though many boys did return home, they did so missing limbs.

The soldier must hop to one side at the next stop to allow for more passengers, and finally accepts a seat simply to get out of the way. Once he is settled, Sigrid notices that everyone carefully avoids looking at him. But the young man does not appear to notice. He sits, lost in his own stare, as if he is still facing down a frigid wind sluicing off the steppes. She thinks of Kaspar. The letters she receives in the Feldpost from him are flat, oddly factual, and really rather dull.
We had hot soup today. Beans, potatoes, and a bit of ham. It really wasn’t too bad.
Or,
The cough persists. Perhaps I shall ask the Sanitäter for a gargle
. But when she pictures his winter-chapped face, a vast distance fills his eyes, until she allows the routine rustle of an ur-Berliner’s newspaper to sweep the image away. Final victory continues to fill the front page, but the back page is crowded with black-bordered hero’s death notices.
Fallen for Führer and Fatherland
under an iron cross. Black borders to match the number of black armbands worn on Berliner coat sleeves.

She only felt guilt for her infidelity after it had ended. In the heat of Egon’s grip, she was so boiling over that she sometimes transferred her passion to Kaspar’s body in sudden spasms of desire in the bed they shared at 11G. Kaspar’s reaction was always one of surprised participation. He was not a bad lover, her husband. He possessed his own kind of well-rehearsed power, and certainly had always been attentive to her body. She has never had any complaints. And when her brimming desire for Egon would secretly slop over her rim, Kaspar always entertained her instructions. But he never took root inside her. She could always separate herself from him when their coupling was through, and listen to the mild saw of his snore without interest. Without guilt. Only after Egon was gone and Kaspar remained did her betrayal cause her pain. So she tried to camouflage her guilt with the overeagerness of her wifely laugh and her solicitude at the supper table. Or subsume it in the binding vacancy that settled between them as they sat listening to the radio. But it was really only after he was conscripted and the army stuffed him onto a train rolling toward the Eastern Front that her guilt eased. If he was a soldier, then she was a soldier’s wife, and could play that role without torment.

At the following stop, she squeezes past the wounded boy’s crutches, and hurries off the tram. It is not a short trip to her mother’s grave. It’s a train ride to Schmargendorf, and then a tram, and then a long hike. Head down, she walks beneath the bare poplars following the course of an old limestone wall. Like most of Berlin’s cemeteries, this one is an antique, a crowded garden of tombstones and looming marble funerary tableaux from a previous century. Many graves are overwhelmed by weeds, the flotsam growth of ungoverned flora, ancient flat-faced headstones caked with moss, choked by vines. Obelisks and mute stone angels blackened by wreaths of the city’s soot. But to the north of the Misdroyerstrasse gate they are still burying people. The graves are fresh. Mounds and mounds of newly interred German boys shipped back from the East in pine. Officers only. Lower ranks are buried where they fall, and all that comes back to the families is a letter from the Army Information Authority, and if they’re lucky, some personal items. A watch. A pipe. A photograph. Half of an identity disk. Paper flags decorate the ground beside the granite markers. Small flapping swastikas. Sigrid skirts a funeral that is in progress. A clot of family members in black, raising their arms in weak salute as a crew of laborers lowers a plain pine coffin into the earth on ropes. The clergyman in his stiff white vestment is booming out a raw-throated version of the “Horst Wessel Lied.” A dozen yards farther down, workers with spades are busy cutting out more graves from the clay.

One day a month, she makes the trip here to discharge her responsibilities. Her mother’s grave, she finds, has fingers of dying vines clinging to the marble, and a spiky thicket of pigweed popping up at its base. She pulls out the gloves and old gardening shears from her bag and starts trimming it away, kneeling on a sheet of newspaper so as not to soil her nylons. So much overgrowth. Had she missed a month?

There are times she thinks of her mother, lying silent in death below her, staring up through empty sockets at the darkness of her coffin. Can she see through that darkness? Can she feel the weight of the daughter above her, on her knees trimming weeds?

All arms and legs
, she hears her mother saying.

They were still living in the airy, garden flat in the Südgelände. Her father’s engineering practice was doing well. A turbine contract from AEG had provided for regular trips to the shops and daily stops at the neighborhood butcher.

“Eat,” her grandmother commanded, rough as ever on the surface, but there was an urgency underneath. Her voice resilient with an underpinning of duty and . . .
what
? Concern, perhaps? Not really affection, but something of the same species. Sigrid was fourteen and skinny as a pole the three women of the house, as Poppa referred to them, were sharing the kitchen table. “All arms and legs,” her mother announced. “Remember? I was the same way before I developed,” she said, as if speaking in code. But Sigrid knew what she meant. Breasts and hips. A woman’s body like her mother’s, all curves. “Eat,” her grandmother said, repeating her command. “The both of you.” She had placed steaming bowls of her famous pea soup with salted pork in front of them, and large cuts of white bread. Sigrid eagerly picked up her spoon. Her grandmother’s pea soup was her very favorite. “Put some meat on your bones,” the old woman advised, “before people start thinking we’re starving you to death here.”

Sigrid glanced to her mother for permission, and received a quick wink.
Let’s humor the old lady
, the wink said. The Grossmutter. A loud and cranky engine normally, a solid piece of diesel machinery that would till the fields, or plow you over. Either one with efficiency. But that day, as her mother joined Sigrid in devouring those bowls of soup with salt pork, the trio of women formed a comfortably faultless triangle.

Suddenly, her mother leaned over and nuzzled Sigrid with a kiss. A smile ignited her face, and Sigrid felt herself blush with surprise and happiness. It was not the sort of thing her mother was likely to do. Only when she was in a perfect mood.

A year later, the stock market crashed, trips to the shops ceased, and Grossmutter was dead. A stroke took her in the kitchen, like the drop of an ax blade. Her body was shipped off to a plot beside her husband in Hanover. They said good-bye to the old woman’s coffin on platform B of Lehrter Bahnhof, just the two of them, because Poppa had deadlines, and simply could
not
leave the office unsupervised. Her mother was a slop bucket of tears spilling over, while Sigrid hid hers.

After that, it was her mother’s job to cook, but that didn’t work out well, so it became Sigrid’s job instead. Meanwhile, business for her father’s firm died, too, when AEG canceled its contracts. Sigrid somehow linked the two events in her head. Her father started spending evenings at the office, then some nights stopped coming home altogether. Then one morning in late March, the day after a terrible rainstorm, he left his key to the flat on the kitchen table and never came back.

There were certain formalities to observe after a certain period of time. Telephone calls placed to his embarrassed secretary at the firm. A visit to the local police precinct, where the Wachtmeister at the desk treated her mother like a foolish woman who had just lost her husband. A solemn discussion with her father’s partner in the firm. A solemn discussion with the manager of their bank. A solemn discussion with their landlord. Sigrid blamed her mother’s cooking.
“Why couldn’t you have cooked better for him!”
she’d bellowed. It was the first time she had ever raised her voice to her mother in her life. But her mother only gazed back at her flatly. “Why couldn’t have you been a better daughter?” she asked. The same day, her mother cleaned out her father’s wardrobe, and gave everything to Winter Relief. Soon after, she started selling things off. Every day, when Sigrid came home from school, there would be another empty space somewhere in the flat. The furniture went first. The fancy dresses went next, and then the pots and pans, dishware, flatware, knickknacks, Meissen, books, everything her mother could lay her hands on. Though, only as a last resort did she empty the contents of her jewelry case, her eyes filling.
That,
thought Sigrid with a mix of bitterness and satisfaction, seemed to pain her mother more than parting with her husband. And, of course, the garden flat in Südgelände was now far out of their reach, so her mother found a dustbin in the Salzbrunner Strasse where the WC was down at the end of the hallway and was often clogged. There they lived alone. And that’s how it felt. Both of them together. But both of them alone.

Making her way along a graveled path toward the gate, with her sack of garden tools, Sigrid notices a couple occupying a granite bench near an untended landscape of forgotten graves. They are seated close to each other, yet something seems to separate them. She looks away and keeps walking. But then behind her are voices. Raised voices. She can’t help but turn back to look.

The girl is standing now, and the fellow bent forward from the bench, holding her hand as if he might have to prevent her fleeing. He looks innocuous in the drab, shapeless coat and hat that is the civilian uniform of all Berliner males these days. The girl is in a dark, too-large coat with a wool beret pulled over soot black hair. Sigrid does not immediately recognize the creature until she spots the girl’s awkwardly stiffened posture as the man jumps to his feet and kisses her full on the mouth. It’s the duty-year girl, Fräulein Kohl. Sigrid finds herself staring, oddly transfixed. The Fräulein does not exactly resist, but neither does she exactly respond. Then she turns her head toward Sigrid, and even from the distance that separates them, Sigrid can feel the grip of the girl’s glare. It chases her away. She turns quickly and starts hiking toward the street, as if it were
she
who’d just been caught in a moment of intimacy. The footsteps she hears crunching on the gravel behind her are hurried and growing closer.

Frau Schröder
.

For several steps Sigrid does not slow, but then she hears the Fräulein appeal again, calling her name, and she stops. Turns about. The girl swallows a breath. Close up, Sigrid is reminded again how young this girl is. No lines on her brow. A touch of baby fat in the oval of her face. Eighteen, perhaps. Nineteen. Certainly no older. “Fräulein Kohl,” she says blankly.

“Frau Schröder, I must ask you, please, not to mention to anyone what you just saw.”

“And what
did
I just see, Fräulein Kohl?”

“That man and me.”

“You mean the man who kissed you?”

“I know that you have no reason to do me any more favors, but I ask you to
please
keep this under your hat. It could mean trouble for me.” Sigrid looks into the girl’s electric eyes. It’s obvious that asking for favors is a painful exercise. Sigrid blinks. Takes a breath. Why is
she
the one feeling cornered? Looking toward the bench, she sees that the man is still there, watching them.

“He’s married, I take it?”

“Married? I really have no idea.” Ericha pauses as if she must make a quick calculation, and then she says: “But that has nothing to do with it.”

Sigrid looks down at her in confusion. “I see. Well. In any case, Fräulein Kohl,
your
business is not
my
business. I am not a gossip, if that’s what you are worried about. So, if you’ll excuse me, I must catch a bus.” She turns and starts walking.

“Ah. Frau Schröder,” the girl begins as she catches up. “Do you mind if I walk with you?”

Sigrid keeps moving, but gives a glance to the rear. The fellow on the bench is staring after them with obvious frustration. “Won’t your friend object?”

Ericha glances back as well, but for only an instant. “He’ll survive,” she replies. And then, “You have someone buried here?”

Sigrid looks the girl over quickly. “Yes,” is all she says. And then, “My mother.”

Ericha nods. “I never knew my mother,” she volunteers flatly.

“No? I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. She didn’t die. She just gave me up. I was raised in an orphanage in Moabit.” Outside the gate, Sigrid turns and starts to follow the soot-stained wall down the Misdroyerstrasse.

“I’ll be leaving you here,” the girl tells her.