At the Wolf's Table

by Rosella Postorino

  One afternoon in late April, I was sitting on a bench with Heike and Augustine in the barracks courtyard, which was surrounded by a fence. Since the weather had grown warmer, during the hour-long wait after our meal the SS men would let us go outside under their supervision. One would stand guard by the French door while the other would patrol the yard with his chin held high and his hands behind his back.

  Heike was nauseated, but no one thought about poison anymore.

  “Maybe you’re still hungry,” said Elfriede, who was standing in front of us.

  “Maybe you’re getting your period,” said Leni, who spent the hour counting her footsteps on the faded remains of a hopscotch court drawn on the cement in white paint. You could barely make out the squares, which may have been why Leni wasn’t hopping—not because she found it over the top. Still, she liked being there, almost as if placing herself within that perimeter protected her from all possible attack. “I just got mine, and everyone knows that when women spend lots of time together their menstrual cycles end up synchronizing.”

  “Would you listen to yourself?” Augustine tsked to emphasize how preposterous she found Leni’s remark.

  “It’s true.” Sitting on the ground, Ulla nodded with such emphasis that her chestnut curls bounced like springs. “I’ve heard that too.”

  I was there with them but it was as though I weren’t there at all. I had nothing to say. Occasionally the others would try to rouse me from my lethargy, at times quite awkwardly. For the most part they had grown accustomed to my silence.

  “Such nonsense,” Augustine said. “Women’s menstrual cycles synchronizing? Just another superstition, one of the many they use to subjugate us. What are we going to believe in next, magic?”

  “I believe in it.” Beate stood up from the swing so quickly the seat shot back. Its chains twisted around and instantly untwisted, making the seat twirl.

  Since the first day they let us come outside, I had wondered why the SS hadn’t torn out the playground equipment. Maybe they hadn’t had time, maybe there had been more important things to think about. Maybe they hoped the barracks would one day welcome schoolchildren again, once the East had been defeated, the Communist threat crushed. Maybe the men had kept it there because it reminded them of the children they had left behind somewhere, in some city in the Reich, children who would grow up so much they would be unrecognizable to their fathers returning home on leave.

  “I’m a witch, didn’t you know?” Beate said. “I can chart horoscopes, read palms, and even read cards.”

  “It’s true,” Heike said. “She’s read them for me lots of times.”

  Leni crossed her barrier of faded paint and stopped in front of Beate. “You can predict the future?”

  “Sure she can. She even knows precisely when the war’s going to end,” Augustine said. “Ask her if your husband is still alive, Rosa.”

  My heartbeat lost its rhythm, went off the tracks.

  “Leave her alone,” Elfriede snapped. “Why do you always have to be so tactless?”

  With this, she walked away. I could have followed her, uttered the thank-you trapped in my throat, but instead I remained in my spot beside Augustine, only because it required no effort.

  “You should put a curse on Hitler,” Ulla said, to change the subject. The women laughed to ease the tension. I didn’t.

  “So, Beate,” Leni said excitedly, “tell me if I’ll find a fiancé once the war’s over.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Augustine groaned.

  “Yes, come on!” Ulla said, clapping her hands.

  Beate reached into her pocket, pulled out a black velvet pouch tied with a cord, and opened it to reveal a deck of tarot cards.

  “Do you always bring those around with you?” Leni asked.

  “What kind of a witch would I be if I didn’t?” Beate said. She knelt down and spread out the cards. Then she arranged them slowly, focusing, following a pattern invisible to us. She pulled some out of the stack and laid them down, shuffled the deck, then turned over other cards. Augustine watched her skeptically.

  “Well?” Ulla was impatient. Leni didn’t dare utter a word. The others were leaning over her in a circle. All except Elfriede, who was walking around, smoking; except the Fanatics, who almost never came outside after lunch, preferring to remain diligently seated at their workstations; and except me, still sitting on the bench.

  “Actually, I do see a man.…”

  “Oh, my god!” Leni covered her face with her hands.

  “Good for you, Leni!” The women playfully tugged on her arm and nudged her shoulder. “At least ask her what he’s like. Is he handsome?”

  It was a means of survival, every ounce of energy being dedicated to this sole purpose. That’s what the women were doing. I couldn’t bring myself to do the same anymore.

  “I can’t see whether he’s handsome or not,” Beate said apologetically, “but I see that he’ll arrive soon.”

  “Why the gloomy tone?” Heike asked.

  “He’s ugly and she doesn’t want to tell me so,” Leni whined. Once again, the women burst out laughing.

  Not Beate. “And when—”

  “To your feet!”

  The voice boomed through the courtyard, toward us. It came from a uniformed officer. We had never seen him before. As the women stood up straight and I rose from the bench, Beate gathered her cards and tried to tuck them away, but they caught on the mouth of the velvet pouch and fell to the ground. The man screamed at her, “To your feet, I told you!”

  When he reached us, Leni still had her hands on her cheeks.

  “What is all this?” The man scrutinized Beate. “And you, show me your face,” he said, yanking on Leni’s elbow. She crossed her arms over her chest, clasping her shoulders, a means of comfort, or perhaps self-condemnation.

  The guards hurried over. “Lieutenant Ziegler, what’s going on?”

  “Where were you?”

  The guards snapped to attention and stole angry glances at us—thanks to us they were in trouble. They didn’t reply. It was clear to everyone that it was best to remain silent.

  “They’re just some stupid cards. Nobody ever said it was forbidden, and we weren’t doing anything wrong.”

  I had been the one to speak.

  Looks of astonishment weighed upon me, and not only from the other women. The lieutenant stared at me. He had a small, childish nose. His eyes were somewhat closely set and hazel in color. That was his limitation—his eyes didn’t frighten me.

  Elfriede was standing against the wall, and the guards didn’t call her over. Like us, they waited for the lieutenant to sentence me. At that moment, the courtyard of the former school, the barracks, the rural homes in Krausendorf, the rows of oaks and spruce trees leading to Gross-Partsch, the headquarters hidden in the forest, East Prussia, all of Germany, the Third Reich determined to expand to the farthest reaches of the globe, and the eight meters of Adolf Hitler’s irritated intestine converged in that solitary spot in the world occupied by Lieutenant Ziegler, the man who held the power of life and death over me.

  “I am forbidding it now,” he said to me. “Obersturmführer Ziegler: that is my name. Remember it well, because from now on you will do as I command—everyone will. Meanwhile, salute as you have been taught to.”

  As I mechanically held out my arm, Ziegler turned from me and swiped awkwardly at Beate’s pouch, but it fell to the ground. A gust of wind carried some of the cards a meter or two away. He turned to the guards. “Get the women onto the bus.”

  “Yes, sir, Lieutenant. Move!”

  Beate was the first to leave, Leni followed her, and slowly but surely the others joined them. The Obersturmführer stomped the pouch beneath his boot and turned to his subordinates. “Throw them away.” With this, he walked off.

  By the door he noticed Elfriede. “And what are you doing, hiding?” he said to her as he walked inside. “Get in line.”

  I moved toward her. When I reached her she
touched the arm I had been slow to raise. There was apprehension in her gesture. I had run a risk, and for no reason. But then again, I didn’t need a reason to die—if death had really been at stake—no more than I had a reason to live. That was why I wasn’t afraid of Ziegler.

  He had seen it, my inclination to die, and had had to look away.

  14

  Raising one’s arm for the Nazi salute was no trivial matter. The Obersturmführer had doubtless taken part in many conferences at which they had explained it to him: in order for one’s arm to be raised in a clear, incontrovertible manner, one has to contract every muscle in one’s body, buttocks clenched, tummy in, chest out, legs joined, knees stiff, lungs full so as to exhale a mighty Heil Hitler! Every fiber, tendon, nerve has to perform the solemn task of stretching out one’s arm.

  There are those who hold their arm out weakly and stiffen their shoulder, which should instead remain low, distanced from the ear to avoid the least trace of asymmetry and to triumph in the athletic pose of one who cannot be defeated, or at least hopes not to be. There are those who, instead of holding it out at a forty-five-degree angle, hold it out almost straight up, but you’re not raising your hand to express your opinion. Here, opinions are expressed by but one person, so fall in line and focus on doing your job well. Your fingers, for instance, mustn’t be opened as though to apply nail polish to them. Join them together, hold them out straight! Raise your chin, smooth your brow, channel all your strength, all your intention along the trajectory of your arm, imagine using the palm of your hand to crush the heads of all those who lack the physique of victors. Men aren’t all alike, race is one’s soul seen from the outside, so put your entire soul into that arm and offer it to your Führer, that invincible man with the makings of a messiah. He won’t return it to you, which means you can live relieved of that burden.

  * * *

  OBERSTURMFÜHRER ZIEGLER WAS undoubtedly an expert at the Nazi salute—he had been practicing it for years. Or perhaps he was simply talented. So was I, but I didn’t make enough effort. My salute passed muster, but it was a performance without distinction. And yet as a little girl I had skated, had had a fair command of my body, so when at the beginning of the school year they would assemble us in the auditorium for a lecture on the Nazi salute, I would stand out for my aptitude, too proud to let myself be reproached. Over the course of the school year, though, I would gradually lapse into mediocrity, to the chagrin of my teachers, who would frown at me during the swastika-raising ceremony.

  At the parade celebrating the arrival of the Olympic torch in Berlin—having begun in Greece, then passing through Sofia, Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, and Prague—I saw the Jungvolk standing in line wearing their uniforms. After twenty minutes they couldn’t stand still. They shifted from one foot to the other, supporting their outstretched right arm with their left hand, too weary to avoid the punishment in store for them.

  The radio was broadcasting live recaps of the games. Due to the poor quality of the transmissions, the Führer’s voice was raspy. Nevertheless, it crossed through the airwaves, stentorian and backed by the crowd who cheered and cried out to him as one, and traveled all the way to me. The nation that surrendered itself to him and unhesitatingly proclaimed it by shouting his name—a ritual, a magic formula, a word of limitless power—the nation gripped the heart, offering a sense of belonging that washed away the solitude to which every single person is relegated from birth. It was an illusion I couldn’t believe in—I only wished I felt it inside me, not a rousing sentiment of victory but a comforting sense of connection.

  My father angrily switched off the radio—my father, who believed National Socialism to be only a transitory phenomenon, deviant behavior among disorderly youths, a virus we had caught from Italy; my father, who at work had been passed over by colleagues who joined the Nazi Party. My father, who had always voted Zentrum, like good Catholics did, and had then seen Zentrum backing the law that granted Hitler full powers, backing its own dissolution. My father was oblivious to that sudden, traitorous longing that had blossomed within me as I imagined the stream of people gulping down sausages and drinking lemonade together in the excitement of the holiday, persuaded that individual, irreducible human existences could merge together into a single thought, into a single destiny. I was eighteen at the time.

  How old was Ziegler then? Twenty-three, twenty-five? My father died of a heart attack when Ziegler was certainly already in service, could perform an impeccable Nazi salute, knew the rules, and enforced them, was fully prepared to trample Beate’s tarot cards beneath his boot and my insolence beneath his stony stare. He would have crushed any individual who stood between Germany and the achievement of its glorious designs.

  That was what I was thinking of that afternoon, minutes after seeing him for the first time. He had just been transferred to Krausendorf and had already promised us that nothing there would be the same. What had happened to the officer who had commanded the barracks before him? We had crossed paths a few times in the hallway but he had never deigned to acknowledge our presence. Never would he have come out to the courtyard to scream at us. We were ten digestive tracts, and he certainly wouldn’t have bothered speaking to digestive tracts.

  * * *

  AS I SAT on the bus, I thought of Gregor, thought that maybe he had trampled corpses rather than cards beneath his boots, and I wondered how many people he had killed before going missing. But Ziegler was a German man before a German woman; Gregor, a German before a foreigner. He would need much more self-hatred to give up on his own life. Or indifference. It wasn’t Ziegler who angered me that day—it was my missing husband.

  Actually, it was myself. In those who recognize it, weakness awakens guilt, and I realized that. As a child I had bitten Franz’s hand.

  15

  “She’s going to end up in lots of trouble.” Augustine nodded at Ulla, who was standing off to the side of the lunchroom with the Beanpole and another guard as we waited for lunch to be served. Krümel was late that day, as he had been from time to time recently. I wondered whether there were problems with the supplies, if the impact of the war was reaching even our little corner of heaven on earth.

  Ulla twirled a lock of her hair, fiddled with her necklace, its pendant dangling down to the curve of her bosom. No one could blame her—for too long we had been women without men. It wasn’t the sex we were missing but the sensation of being seen.

  “Women who drool over power are unbearable.”

  I stood corrected—Augustine could blame her. Laughing boisterously, Ulla tilted her head to the side and her dark brown curls slid onto a single shoulder, leaving part of her neck bare. The Beanpole stared at the white skin of that neck without taking any pains to hide it.

  “It’s the war that’s unbearable.”

  Augustine wasn’t surprised to hear me answer back to her, despite my now-customary apathy. After all, I had answered back to Ziegler when even she had said nothing.

  “No, Rosa. You know what Hitler said? He said the masses are like women: they don’t want someone to defend them, but someone to command them. Like women, he said. And that’s because women like Ulla exist.”

  “Ulla is craving a little distraction, that’s all. Sometimes frivolousness can be like medicine.”

  “A poisonous medicine.”

  “Speaking of poison, it’s ready,” Elfriede said, sitting down and spreading her napkin on her lap. “Bon appétit, ladies. As always, let’s hope it’s not our last.”

  “Give it a rest!” Augustine also sat down.

  Ulla took the seat across from her but soon sensed she was being observed. “What?” she asked.

  “Silence,” ordered the Beanpole, who just a moment ago had been admiring her pendant. “Eat.”

  * * *

  “HEIKE, DON’T YOU feel well?” Beate asked in a low voice.

  Heike stared at her oatmeal. It was untouched.

  “It’s true. You’re so pale,” Leni said.

  “You
didn’t put a curse on her, did you, little witchie?”

  “Augustine,” Beate said, “have you got it in for everybody today?”

  “I feel nauseous,” Heike admitted.

  “Still? You don’t have a fever, do you?” Leni reached over the table sideways, trying to feel her forehead, but rather than leaning in to let her, Heike remained sunk in her chair. “It wasn’t your period, then. We don’t have synchronized cycles,” Leni mumbled, disappointed that her theory of sisterhood hadn’t been confirmed. Heike didn’t respond, and Leni nibbled on her fingernail, already closed up in herself, already the little girl who played hopscotch alone and continued to do so as an adult, even without a proper hopscotch court. “I was wrong,” she repeated again after five minutes.

  Augustine intentionally dropped her spoon, which clattered into her Aachen ceramic bowl.

  “Order!” snapped the guard.

  Potato pancakes were served along with a Heil Hitler! that I ignored. The SS guards were constantly coming in and out of the room, and the sight of the pancakes made my mouth water. Unable to control myself, I immediately grabbed one off my plate, burned my fingers, blew on them.

  “You aren’t eating?”

  Recognizing the stern tone, I looked up.

  “I don’t feel well,” Heike replied. “I must have the flu.”

  Leni seemed to return among us. Beneath the table she touched my leg with her foot.

  “Taste the oatmeal. That’s what you’re here for.”

  Heike dipped her spoon into her dish, collected a scant milligram of oatmeal, and with unnerving slowness raised it to her lips, though her lips were sealed tight. She stared at the spoon but couldn’t bring herself to put it into her mouth.

  Ziegler’s fingers squeezed both her cheeks like pliers until her mouth opened. “Eat.”

  Heike’s eyes were watering as she swallowed. My heart raced.

  “There, well done. A taster who doesn’t eat is of no use to us. The doctor will determine if you have the flu. Tomorrow I’ll have him give you a checkup.”