At the Wolf's Table

by Rosella Postorino

  A pang in my belly. Not a baby’s kick, but God’s perversion.

  “They’re a little compensation for the work she’s done in the kitchen. Rosa Sauer isn’t paid to do it, she’s paid to taste the food, so I felt it was only right to reward her, also because she kept on working even after the assistant chefs had all left. I hope it isn’t a problem.”

  Another pang. No one ever got what they deserved, not even me.

  “No problem, if you felt it was appropriate. Just warn us next time.” The Beanpole looked at Theodora again, and she looked at me. She wasn’t asking for forgiveness, she was expressing her contempt.

  “That’s enough,” said another guard. What did he mean? Enough with the lavishing food on Rosa Sauer? Enough with the snitching on Rosa Sauer? Or, For god’s sake, Rosa Sauer, enough with the trembling? “Come on, everyone. Walk.”

  My ears burned and my vision blurred with tears that sprang to the surface like water from drilled earth. If I could avoid blinking they would pool in the basin of my eyes, evaporate. Not even on the bus would I let them fall.

  Augustine didn’t hand me the cloth sack. The bottles traveled with me all the way to the curve by our house. The moment the bus set off again I poured the milk onto the ground.

  It had been intended for their children—no, it had been intended for Hitler. How could I waste such a concentration of calcium, iron, vitamins, protein, sugars, and amino acids? From one of the books Krümel had given me, I had learned that the fat in milk was different from all other fats. It was easier to absorb, and the body used it immediately and efficiently. I could have stored the bottles in the cool cellar, invited Augustine, Heike, and Beate, Here’s the milk for your children—Pete, Ursula, Mathias, and even the twins—they’re the last two liters, I’m sorry it didn’t last, but it was worth it. I could have served them tea in Herta’s kitchen. How did people become friends? They had asked me to steal for them.

  I could have given the bottles to Herta and Joseph, lied about how I had gotten them. Krümel is so generous, he dotes on me. Here, drink this, it’s fresh, nutritious milk, and it’s all thanks to me.

  Instead there I was, leaning over, motionless, as I watched the milk splash onto the gravel. I wanted to waste it. No one was to drink it. I wanted to deny it to Heike’s and Beate’s and Augustine’s children, deny it to any child who wasn’t my own, without feeling guilty.

  Only when the bottles were empty did I look up. Herta was at the window. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY I mustered the courage to open the kitchen door. “I’m here for the beans,” I said. I had prepared the greeting, especially the tone, in advance: cheerful but not too much, with an imploring undertone if one listened carefully. My voice, however, came out fake.

  Krümel didn’t turn around. “Thank you. I don’t need your help anymore.”

  In the corner, the wooden crates were stacked one atop the other, empty. The refrigerator was on the opposite side. I didn’t dare look at it. I studied my fingernails. They had yellowed, but now that my work was over they would go back to how they had been before: a secretary’s nails.

  I stepped over to Krümel. “No, thank you. Forgive me.” This time my voice wasn’t fake. It was broken.

  “Don’t show your face in my kitchen again,” he replied, finally turning to look at me.

  I couldn’t hold his eyes.

  Hanging my head and bobbing it several times to let him know I would do as he said, I walked out, forgetting to salute.

  11

  It was well into December. Ever since the war had started, especially after Gregor had left, Christmas had lost its festive spirit for me. But this year I awaited it with the same eagerness I had as a child, because it would bring me the gift of my husband.

  In the mornings I would put on one of Herta’s knitted woolen caps before I got onto the bus, which would cross the snowy expanse, amid birches and beech trees, and take me to Krausendorf, where I would participate in the liturgy of the lunchroom together with other young German women—an army of worshippers prepared to receive on our tongues a Communion that wouldn’t redeem us.

  Who could ever have preferred eternal life to their life here on earth? I certainly couldn’t. I swallowed each bite that might kill me as though it were an offering—three offerings a day for each day of the Christmas novena. Offer up to the Lord the effort of your studies, your sadness over your broken skate, or your head cold, my father would tell me when he would pray with me at bedtime. Look at this offering, then, look at it: I offer up my fear of dying, my appointment with death which has been put off for months and which I cannot cancel, I offer them up in exchange for his coming, Father, for Gregor’s coming. Fear comes to me three times a day, always without knocking. It sits beside me and if I stand up it follows me, by now it’s practically a constant companion.

  People can grow accustomed to anything—to digging coal out of the cramped tunnels in mines, rationing the need for oxygen; to walking swiftly across the beams of a construction site suspended high in the sky, facing the dizzying void. People can grow accustomed to the blare of sirens, to sleeping in their clothes so they can evacuate quickly in the event of an air raid. People can grow accustomed to hunger, to thirst. Of course, I had grown accustomed to being paid to eat. It might have seemed like a privilege, but it was a job like any other.

  * * *

  ON THE DAY of Christmas Eve, Joseph took a rooster by the legs, turned it upside down, and with a flick of his wrist broke its neck. A brief, crisp snap. Herta put a pot over the fire and when the water was boiling dunked it in three or four times, holding it first by its head and then by its legs. Finally she plucked it, pulling out the feathers with her hands. All that savagery just for Gregor, who was about to arrive. Fortunately Hitler had left town, so I would be free to eat with my husband and his parents.

  The last time Gregor had been back on leave, in Berlin, while he was sitting in the living room in Budengasse and listening to the radio, I had gone to his side and caressed him. He’d accepted my caresses without reacting. His distraction felt like a challenge, but I said nothing, not wanting to ruin the few hours we had left to spend together. He took me as I slept, without saying a word. I awoke to find his body, his fury, on top of me. Only half awake, I neither resisted nor indulged him. Afterward I told myself he needed the darkness, that for him to make love to me he needed for me not to be there. It frightened me.

  * * *

  LATER THAT DAY, the letter arrived. It was brief. Gregor said he had been admitted to a field hospital. He didn’t say what had happened to him or what his injuries were. All he said was that we shouldn’t worry. We replied at once, begging him for more information.

  “If he managed to write to us,” Joseph said, “it means it’s nothing serious.” But Herta sank her face into her arthritic hands and refused to eat the chicken she had prepared.

  The night of the twenty-fifth, suffering from my usual insomnia, I couldn’t even stay in Gregor’s room. The photo of him as a little boy tore me apart. I slipped out of bed and wandered the darkness of the house.

  I bumped into someone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, recognizing Herta. “I can’t fall asleep.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” she replied. “Tonight you and I are bound to be sleepwalkers.”

  * * *

  I FOLLOW MY course with the precision and confidence of a sleepwalker, Hitler had said as he occupied the Rhineland.

  She’s a silly old sleepwalker, my brother would say when I talked in my sleep as a girl.

  My mother said, She’s always talking, she never pipes down, not even when she’s sleeping. Franz stood up from the table, his arms extended in front of him and his tongue lolling as he moved like a marionette, grunting. Cut it out and eat your dinner, Father said.

  I would dream I was flying. A force swept me off the ground and pulled me higher and higher, empty space beneath my feet, a wind that howled and
hurled me toward the trees, toward the walls of buildings. I avoided them by a hair’s breadth, the noise deafening. I knew it was a dream, knew that if I spoke the spell would be broken and I would be returned to my bed, but I had no voice, just a bubble of breath trapped in my throat—it burst a second before impact, exploding into a shriek: Franz! Help!

  At first my brother would mutter groggily, What is it, what’d I do? Then he would wake up only to snap, What’s the matter with you, anyway?

  I called it the Abduction. Not with Franz or with my parents—I just called it that in my mind, and only once with Gregor, who put his arms around me in bed and found me covered in sweat. Gdańsk had just been occupied. I murmured, It’s the Abduction, it hasn’t happened for years. Instead of asking me to explain, he murmured, You were only dreaming.

  Three years later, after the bomb that killed my mother, I thought the Abduction had always been a prophetic dream. But at the end of the day every life is a form of compulsion, with a constant risk of crashing.

  * * *

  DECEMBER 27 WAS MY birthday. It had stopped snowing and I yearned for the Abduction to carry me away. It would have been a liberation, a rush of anguish expelled all at once without the responsibility of holding it in to avoid upsetting Herta, who was already in pieces, to avoid worrying Joseph.

  The Abduction didn’t return. My husband wasn’t there and would never write to us again.

  Another letter was sent to us two and a half months later from the main offices of the military family notification services. It said that Gregor Sauer—age 34, height 1.82 meters, weight 75 kilograms, chest 101 centimeters, blond hair, average nose and chin, blue eyes, fair complexion, healthy teeth, profession engineer—had been declared missing.

  Missing. On the page it wasn’t written that Gregor Sauer had lean calves, that his big toe was separated from his pointer toe as though by a gulf, that the insides of his soles always got worn down first, that he loved music but never sang it under his breath—in fact he would plead, Be quiet, I beg you, because I sang under my breath nonstop, at least before the war—and he shaved every day, at least in times of peace, and the white of the shaving cream he would spread on with the brush contrasted with his lips, making them redder, and plump, even though they weren’t, and he would run his finger across those thin lips when he drove his old NSU, and it bothered me because it looked like a gesture of uncertainty—I didn’t love him if he was vulnerable, if he saw the world as a threat, if he didn’t want to give me a child—to me it looked like a shield, that finger on his mouth, a distance taken from me. It wasn’t written on the page that in the morning he preferred to wake up early and have breakfast alone, take a break from my talking, even though we had been married for barely a year and he had to set off for the front, but if I pretended to be sleeping, right after finishing his tea he would sit on the edge of the bed and kiss my hands with the devotion with which one kisses children.

  They thought they were identifying him through that string of numbers, but if they hadn’t said it was my husband they might as well have been talking about anyone.

  * * *

  HERTA COLLAPSED INTO a chair. “Herta,” I called out. She didn’t reply. “Herta!” I shook her. She was stiff and yielding at the same time. I held out some water; she didn’t drink it. “Herta, please.” She dropped her head back and I pulled the glass away. Her face to the ceiling, she said, “I’ll never see him again.”

  “He isn’t dead,” I shrieked, and her body slumped back into the chair. Finally, she looked at me. “He isn’t dead,” I insisted. “He’s missing. Right here it says missing, understand?”

  Slowly her features reemerged, and an instant later they contracted. “Where’s Joseph?”

  “I’ll go get him, okay? But drink something.” I held the glass to her lips.

  “Where’s Joseph?” she repeated.

  I ran through town, heading for the von Mildernhagens’ castle, where he was working. Scrawny, spindly tree trunks, emaciated branches, roof tiles splotched with mold, geese rambling inside their pens, women at the windows, and a man on a bicycle removing his hat to me in greeting, still pedaling as I ran and ignored him. Atop a utility pole, a nest. The stork raised its bill toward the sky as though in prayer—it wasn’t praying for me.

  Covered with sweat, I clung to the bars of the gate and called out for Joseph. Had the storks arrived so soon? Not long from now it would be spring, and Gregor wouldn’t have returned. He was my husband. He was my happiness. Never again would I play with his earlobes, never again would he press his forehead against my bosom, curling up around me to have me stroke his back. He would never hold his cheek to my swollen belly, I would never have a child from him, he would never hold him in his arms, would never tell him about his hijinks as a young country boy, entire days spent among the trees, cannonball dives into the lake, ice-cold water and purple lips. I yearned to slip my fingers into his mouth again and feel safe.

  My nose between the bars, I screamed. A man came, asked me who I was, I mumbled that I needed the gardener, I’m his daughter-in-law, and before he had even opened the gate entirely I was inside and was running who knew where, then heard Joseph’s voice and ran over to him. I handed him the letter. He unfolded it and read it.

  “Come home, please. Mutti needs you.”

  The clatter of footsteps on the stairs made us turn around.

  “Joseph.” It was a woman with red hair, a round face, and a creamy complexion, holding the hem of her gown as though she had run over to join us. Her coat, draped over her shoulders, had slid down to the side, revealing a burgundy sleeve.

  “Baroness.” My father-in-law apologized for the disturbance, explained what had happened, and asked permission to leave. She came over and took his hands in hers, supported them as if afraid they might collapse, or at least it seemed that way to me. “I’m so sorry,” she told him, her eyes glistening. It was then that Joseph burst into tears.

  I had never seen a man, an old man, weep. It was a soundless cry, one that made the joints creak, something more to do with lameness, the loss of muscle control. A senile desperation.

  The baroness did her best to console him, then desisted, waited for him to calm down. “You’re Rosa, aren’t you?” I nodded. What did she know about me? “It’s a pity that we should meet on such a sad occasion. And to think I was so eager for us to get to know one another. Joseph has told me all about you.” Before I could even wonder why she might want to know me, why he might talk about me, why she—a baroness—would converse with a gardener, my father-in-law detached his gnarled hands from the woman’s, dried his sparse eyelashes, and told me we should leave. I don’t know how many times he apologized to the baroness, how many times he apologized to me on the way home.

  * * *

  I WAS A widow. No, no, I wasn’t. Gregor wasn’t dead. We just didn’t know where he was or if he would ever return. How many missing soldiers had returned from Russia? I didn’t even have a cross to leave fresh flowers on every week. I had the photo of him when he was a child, squinting in the sunshine, not smiling.

  I imagined him lying on his side in the middle of the snow, his arm outstretched and my wrist far away, absent. His hand clutched air. I imagined him sleeping. He hadn’t been able to overcome the exhaustion, his fellow soldiers hadn’t wanted to wait for him, not even Shitbritches—such ingratitude—and Gregor had frozen. When the weather turned warm, the slab of ice that had once been my husband would melt, and perhaps a young woman with cheeks as red as a matryoshka’s would awaken him with a kiss. With her he would begin a new life and have children named Yury or Irina, would grow old in a dacha, and from time to time before the fire would have a feeling he couldn’t put his finger on. What are you thinking about? the matryoshka would ask him. It’s as though I’m forgetting something—no, someone, he would reply, but I don’t know who.

  Or perhaps years later a letter would arrive from Russia. The body of Gregor Sauer discovered in a mass grave. How do they kno
w it’s him? How do we know they aren’t making a mistake? We would believe it. We would have no choice.

  12

  When the brakes of the SS bus squealed, I pulled the sheet over my face.

  “Get up, Rosa Sauer!” they shouted from outside.

  The afternoon before, in Krausendorf, I hadn’t said a word about what had happened. I was so stunned by the news that my body had rejected it instead of metabolizing it. Only Elfriede had said something. Berliner, what is it? she had asked. Nothing, I replied. She grew serious, touched my shoulder. Rosa, is everything all right? I moved away. The contact with her hand had brought the dam crashing down.

  “Rosa Sauer!” they repeated. I listened to the hum of the engine until it was switched off. I lay there, not moving. The hens weren’t squawking, hadn’t done so for months. Zart had imposed silence; his presence was enough to calm them. By now they were used to hearing the tires screeching to a halt on the gravel, we were all used to it.

  A brief rapping on my bedroom door, Herta’s voice calling to me. I didn’t answer.

  “Joseph, come,” she said. Then I heard her walk toward me, push the sheet back, shake me gently. She was making sure I was alive, that it was me. “What are you doing, Rosa?” My body was there, it wasn’t missing, but it didn’t react.

  Joseph went to her side. “What is it?”

  Just then, they knocked.

  My father-in-law went to the door.

  “Don’t let them in,” I begged.

  “What are you talking about?” Herta protested.

  “Let them do what they want to me. I don’t care. I’m tired.”

  A crease formed between Herta’s eyebrows, a short vertical slit I had never noticed before. It wasn’t fear. It was resentment. I was playing dead while her son might actually be dead. I was putting myself in danger, along with the two of them.