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A man can only live by absolutely forgetting he’s a man like other folk.
—BERTOLT BRECHT, THE THREEPENNY OPERA
Part
ONE
1
We entered one at a time. We had waited for hours outside, lined up in the hallway. The room was large, its walls white. In the center of it, a long wooden table already laid out. They gestured for us to sit.
I sat with my hands clasped on my belly. In front of me, a white ceramic plate. I was hungry.
The other women had taken their places without a sound. There were ten of us. Some sat up straight and poised, their hair pulled into buns. Others glanced around. The girl across from me nibbled at her hangnails, mincing them between her front teeth. She had doughy, blotchy cheeks. She was hungry.
By eleven in the morning we were already hungry. It wasn’t because of the country air or the journey by bus—the feeling in our stomachs was fear. For years we had lived with this hunger, this fear, and when the smell of the cooked food was under our noses, our heartbeats throbbed in our temples, our mouths watered. I looked over at the girl with blotchy skin. We shared the same longing.
* * *
THE STRING BEANS were served with melted butter. I hadn’t had butter since my wedding day. The aroma of the roasted peppers tickled my nostrils. My plate was piled high. I couldn’t stop staring at it. The plate of the girl across from me was filled with rice and peas.
“Eat,” they told us from the corner of the room, more an invitation than an order. They could see it, the longing in our eyes.
Mouths sagged open, breathing quickened. We hesitated. No one had wished us bon appétit, so maybe there was still time to stand up, say thank you, the hens were generous this morning, an egg will be enough for me today.
Again I counted the women around the table. There were ten of us. It wasn’t the Last Supper.
“Eat!” they repeated from the corner, but I was already sucking on a string bean and felt the blood surging up to the roots of my hair and down to the tips of my toes, felt my heartbeat slowing. What a feast you’ve prepared for me—these peppers are so sweet—what a feast for me, on a wooden table, not even a cloth covering it, ceramic dishes from Aachen, and ten women. If we were wearing veils we would look like nuns, a refectory of nuns who’ve taken vows of silence.
At first our bites are modest, as though we’re not being forced to eat it all, as though we could refuse this food, this meal that isn’t intended for us, that is ours only by chance, of which only by chance we’re worthy of partaking. But then it glides down our throats, reaching that pit in our stomachs, and the more it fills that pit, the bigger the pit grows, and the more tightly we clutch our forks. The apple strudel is so good that tears spring to my eyes, so good that I scoop bigger and bigger helpings into my mouth, wolfing them down until I throw back my head and gasp for air, all in the presence of my enemies.
* * *
MY MOTHER USED to say eating was a way of battling death. She said it even before Hitler, back when I went to elementary school at Braunsteinstraβe 10 in Berlin. She would tie a bow on my pinafore and hand me my schoolbag and remind me to be careful not to choke during lunch. At home I had the bad habit of talking nonstop, even with my mouth full. You talk too much, she would tell me, and then I actually would choke on my food because it made me laugh, her tragic tone, her attempts to raise me with a fear of dying, as if every act of living exposed us to mortal danger—life was perilous, the whole world lay in ambush.
* * *
WHEN THE MEAL was over, two SS guards stepped forward. The woman on my left rose from her chair.
“Sit down! In your place!”
The woman fell back into her seat as though they had shoved her into it. One of the two braids coiled at the sides of her head loosened from its hairpin, dangling slightly.
“None of you have permission to stand up. You will remain here, seated at the table, until further orders. If the food was contaminated, the poison will quickly enter your circulation.” The SS guard scrutinized us one by one, examining our reactions. We didn’t breathe. Then he turned back to the woman who had stood up. She wore a dirndl, so perhaps she had risen out of deference. “Don’t worry, an hour will be enough,” he told her. “In an hour’s time you’ll all be free to go.”
“Or dead,” remarked his comrade.
I felt my rib cage constrict. The girl with blotchy skin buried her face in her hands, muffling her sobs.
“Stop it,” hissed the brunette sitting beside her, but by then the other women were also crying, in tears like sated crocodiles—perhaps an effect of their digestion.
In a low voice I said, “May I ask your name?” The blotchy-faced girl didn’t realize I was talking to her. I reached out, touched her wrist. She flinched, looked at me dumbly. All her capillaries had burst. “What’s your name?” I whispered again.
Unsure whether she had permission to speak, the girl looked over at the guards in the corner, but they were distracted. It was almost noon and they may have been getting hungry themselves, because they didn’t seem to be paying attention to us, so she whispered, “Leni, Leni Winter?” She said it as though it were a question, but that was her name.
“Leni, I’m Rosa,” I told her. “We’ll be going home soon, you’ll see.”
Leni was little more than a child—you could tell by her pudgy knuckles. She had the looks of a girl who’d never been touched in a barn, not even during the weary languor after a harvest.
* * *
IN ’38, AFTER my brother Franz moved away, Gregor brought me here to Gross-Partsch to meet his parents. They’re going to love you, he told me, proud of the Berliner secretary whose heart he had won and who was now engaged to the boss, like in the movies.
I enjoyed it, that trip east in the sidecar. “Let us ride into the eastern lands,” went the song. They would play it over the loudspeakers, and not only on April 20. Every day was Hitler’s birthday.
For the first time, I took the ferry and left town with a man. Herta put me up in her son’s room and sent him upstairs to sleep in the attic. When his parents had gone to bed, Gregor opened the door and slipped under my covers. No, I whispered, not here. Then come to the barn, he said. My eyes misted over. I can’t. What if your mother were to discover us?
We had never made love. I had never made love to anyone.
Gregor slowly stroked my lips, tracing their edges. Then he pressed his fingertip more firmly and more firmly still until he’d bared my teeth, coaxed them open, slipped in two fingers. They felt dry against my tongue. I could have snapped my jaw shut, bitten him. That hadn’t even occurred to Gregor. He had always trusted me.
Later that night I couldn’t resist. I went up to the attic and this time it was me who opened the door. Gregor was sleeping. I brought my parted lips close to his, let our breaths mingle, and he woke up. Wanted to find out what I smell like in my sleep, did yo
u? he asked with a smile. I slid one, then two, then three fingers into his mouth, felt it water up, his saliva wetting my skin. This was love: a mouth that doesn’t bite, or the opportunity to unexpectedly attack the other like a dog that turns against its master.
I was wearing a red beaded necklace when, during the ferry ride home, he clasped my neck. It had finally happened not in his parents’ barn, but in a windowless ship cabin.
* * *
“I NEED TO get out of here,” Leni murmured.
“Shh.…” I stroked Leni’s wrist. This time she didn’t flinch. “Only twenty minutes left. It’s almost over.”
“I need to get out of here,” she insisted.
The brunette beside her had angular cheekbones, glossy hair, a harshness in her eye. “You just can’t keep quiet, can you?” she said, wrenching Leni’s shoulder.
“Leave her alone!” I said, almost shouting.
The SS guards turned toward me. “What’s going on?”
All the women turned toward me.
“Please…,” Leni said.
One of the guards walked over to her. He clamped his hand on Leni’s arm and hissed something into her ear. I couldn’t hear what it was but it made her face twist grotesquely.
“Is she ill?” another guard asked.
The woman in the dirndl jumped up from her chair again. “The poison!”
The other women also shot to their feet when Leni began to retch. The SS guard stepped aside just in time as Leni vomited on the floor.
The guards rushed out, screamed for the kitchen staff, interrogated the chef—the Führer was right, the British were trying to poison him!—some of the women clung to one another, others sobbed against the wall, the brunette paced back and forth with her hands on her hips, making a strange sound with her nose. I went over to Leni and held her head.
All the women were clutching their bellies, but not from spasms—they had sated their hunger and weren’t used to it.
* * *
THEY KEPT US there far longer than an hour. After the floor had been wiped clean with newspapers and a damp cloth, an acrid stench hung in the air. Leni didn’t die, she simply stopped trembling. Then she dozed off at the table, her hand in mine and her cheek resting on her arm, a little girl. My stomach tensed and churned, but I was too exhausted to fret about it.
When it was clear there was no longer cause for alarm, the guards woke Leni and led us single-file to the bus that would take us home. My stomach no longer protested; it had allowed itself to be occupied. My body had absorbed the Führer’s food, the Führer’s food was circulating in my bloodstream.
Hitler was safe.
I was hungry again.
2
We had never been Nazis. As a little girl I hadn’t wanted to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel, hadn’t liked the black neckerchief that hung down the front of their white shirts. I had never been a good German.
But that day, surrounded by the white walls of the lunchroom, I became one of Hitler’s food tasters. It was autumn 1943. I was twenty-five and had fifty hours and seven hundred kilometers of travel weighing on me. To escape the war, a week earlier I had moved from Berlin to East Prussia. I had come to Gross-Partsch, the town where Gregor had been born, though Gregor wasn’t here.
They had shown up unexpectedly at the home of my parents-in-law the day before that first meal. We’re looking for Rosa Sauer, they said. I didn’t hear them because I was in the backyard. I hadn’t even heard the sound of the jeep coming to a halt out front but had seen the hens scurrying toward the henhouse all at once.
“They’re asking for you,” Herta said.
“Who is?”
She turned away without replying. I called out for Zart, but he didn’t come. In the morning he would go off to wander around town. He was a worldly cat. I followed Herta, thinking, Who could be looking for me, no one knows me here, I’ve only just arrived, oh, god, has Gregor come home?
“Has my husband returned?” I asked breathlessly, but Herta was already in the kitchen, her back turned to the door, blocking the light. Joseph was also on his feet, stooping with one hand resting on the table.
“Heil Hitler!” Two dark silhouettes thrust their right arms in my direction.
I raised my arm in reply as I stepped inside. In the kitchen were two men in gray-green uniforms, pale shadows shrouding their faces. One of them said, “Rosa Sauer.”
I nodded.
“The Führer needs you.”
He had never seen my face, the Führer. Yet he needed me.
Herta wiped her hands on her apron as the SS officer continued to speak, addressing me, looking only at me, scrutinizing me as if to make an appraisal: a sturdy piece of craftsmanship. Of course, hunger had somewhat debilitated me, the air-raid sirens at night had deprived me of sleep, and the loss of everything, of everyone, had left me weary-eyed, but my face was round, my hair full and blond.… Yes, one look says it all: a young Aryan female tamed by war, a one hundred percent genuine national product, a fine acquisition.
The officer walked to the front door.
“May we offer you something?” Herta asked, too late. Country folk didn’t know how to receive important guests. Joseph stood up straight.
“We’ll return tomorrow morning at eight. Be ready to leave,” said the other SS officer, who until then had remained silent. Then he too walked to the front door.
The Schutzstaffel were declining out of politeness, either that or they weren’t fond of roasted acorn coffee, though perhaps there was some wine, a bottle saved in the cellar for when Gregor returned. Or they were practicing self-restraint, hardening themselves through abstention, force of will. Whatever the case, they didn’t even consider Herta’s offer, admittedly tardy.
They shouted, Heil Hitler! raising their arms—toward me.
Once they had driven off, I went to the window. The tire tracks in the gravel marked the path to my death sentence. I shot to another window in another room, ricocheting from one side of the house to the other in search of air, in search of a way out. Herta and Joseph followed me. Please, let me think. Let me breathe.
* * *
IT WAS THE mayor who had given them my name, according to the SS. The mayor of a small country town knew everyone, even newcomers.
“We’ll find a way out.” Joseph tugged his beard in his fist as though a solution might slip out. Working for Hitler, sacrificing one’s life for him—wasn’t that what all Germans were doing? But that I might ingest poisoned food and die, not from a rifle shot, not from an explosion, Joseph couldn’t accept it. A life ending with a whimper, perishing out of view. Not a hero’s death but a mouse’s. Women didn’t die as heroes.
“I have to leave.” I rested my cheek against the window. Each time I tried to take a deep breath, a stabbing pain by my collarbone cut it short. I changed windows. A stabbing pain by my ribs. My breath couldn’t break free. “I came here to live a better life.…” I laughed bitterly, a reproach to my parents-in-law, as though they had been the ones to offer my name to the SS.
“You must hide,” Joseph said, “seek refuge somewhere.”
“In the woods,” Herta suggested.
“In the woods where? To die from cold and hunger?”
“We’ll bring you food.”
“Naturally,” Joseph confirmed. “We would never abandon you.”
“What if they come searching for me?”
Herta looked at her husband. “Do you think they would?”
“They won’t be pleased, that’s certain.” Joseph wasn’t getting his hopes up.
I was a deserter without an army, ridiculous.
“You could go back to Berlin,” he said.
“Yes, you could go back home,” Herta echoed. “They won’t follow you all the way there.”
“I don’t have a home in Berlin anymore, remember? If I hadn’t been forced to, I never would’ve come here in the first place!”
Herta’s features tensed. I had shattered the politeness that had s
tood between us because of our roles, because of our scarce familiarity with each other.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“Never mind,” she said stiffly.
I had been disrespectful to her, but at the same time I had thrown open the door to intimacy between us. She felt so close that I longed to cling to her. Keep me with you, take care of me.
“What about you two?” I asked. “If they come and don’t find me here, they might take it out on you.”
“We’ll manage,” said Herta. With this, she turned and left.
Joseph let go of his beard. There was no solution to be found there. “What do you want to do?”
I would rather die in a foreign town than in my own city, where I no longer had anyone.
* * *
ON MY SECOND day as a food taster I rose at dawn. The cock was crowing and the frogs had suddenly stopped croaking, as though falling into an exhausted sleep all at once. It was then that I felt alone, after an entire night awake. In my reflection in the window I saw the circles around my eyes and recognized myself. They hadn’t been caused by insomnia or the war. Those dark furrows had always been there on my face. Shut those books, look at that face of yours, my mother would say, and my father would ask, Do you think she has an iron deficiency, Doctor? and my brother would rub his forehead against mine because the silky caress would help him fall asleep. In my reflection in the window I saw the same circled eyes that I’d had as a girl and realized they had been an omen.
I went out to look for Zart and found him curled up, snoozing beside the henhouse as though looking after the hens. It wasn’t wise to leave the ladies unattended—Zart was an old-fashioned male, so he knew that. Gregor, on the other hand, had gone away. He had wanted to be a good German, not a good husband.
At the Wolf's Table Page 1
