The sound of heels on the tiled floor, the Nazi salute performed to perfection, and Augustine whispering, “Here’s the bastard.”
I turned around for the millionth time.
Ziegler was conferring with a few of his men. Nothing remained of the man who had been socializing with Baron von Mildernhagen the previous night at the soirée, nothing of the man who had appeared at my window.
Maybe it was a form of surveillance. Maybe he spent each night outside a different home, keeping an eye on the food tasters, What an insane idea you’ve got into your head, maybe you dreamed it, an effect of the Abduction, Franz was right—you’re just a sleepwalker.
Ziegler turned toward us. From a distance he inspected the table to check whether we were all eating. I quickly lowered my head, feeling his gaze on the back of my neck. When I began to breathe again I searched for him with my eyes, but he was turned the other way. He wasn’t even looking at me.
* * *
I WENT TO bed early. You were right, Joseph, it’s the springtime, it’s wearing me out. I drifted through a half sleep. The moment I closed my eyes, the skeins of voices in my eardrums came unraveled, my mother pounded her fist on the tablecloth, Are you trying to get yourself fired? my father pushed back his still-full plate and rose from the table, Once and for all will you listen to me, I am not joining the party. Outside, Gross-Partsch went still and inside my head a radio blared. The reception was terrible, it was all one long croak, or maybe it was the frogs again.
Finding myself awake, I sighed, the voices still echoing in my skull.
When I went to the window I saw only darkness, stared out until the moonlight carved the outlines of the trees. What were you expecting, and why?
I tossed and turned in my bed, pulled back the sheets, alert yet feeling numb, got up, returned to the window. Ziegler wasn’t there. Why wasn’t I relieved?
Lying on my back, I studied the wooden beams in the ceiling and with my finger traced the pattern on the sheet, then found myself drawing the oval of Ziegler’s head, his nostrils shaped like the eyes of needles in the cartilage of his tiny nose, the narrow space between his eyes, and at that point I stopped, rolled over on my side, again got out of bed.
I poured myself some water from the carafe, drank a sip, lingered by the bedside table with the glass in my hand. A shadow darkened the pale moonlight—a pang of anguish. I looked over my shoulder and spotted him. He was closer than he had been the night before. I put down the glass, covered the carafe with a folded cloth, walked over to the window. I didn’t hide. With clumsy fingers I turned the oil lamp brighter. Ziegler saw me standing in front of him, a white cotton nightgown beneath my robe, my hair tousled. He nodded. Then all he did was stare at me, as though it were an actual activity, one done simply for its own sake.
19
“I know a doctor,” Elfriede said, her expression indignant, as though we had made her name names through interrogation. The guards patrolled the courtyard, their hands clasped behind their backs, at times touching the circumference of our space like a tangent, at times crossing over it, and when they did, our words stayed trapped in our throats.
I looked at Augustine, who was sitting beside me on the bench, to ask her to confirm there was nothing else to be done. Leni wasn’t far away behind her—I could hear her chatting with Ulla and Beate. Ulla wanted to convince Leni to change her hairstyle. She was eager to play the hairdresser again. Beate told them that two nights earlier she had calculated the Führer’s astrology chart—she hadn’t managed to find a new deck of tarot cards, so she had worked out a horoscope instead—and had discovered that the stars weren’t in his favor. Things would very soon turn against him, perhaps as soon as summer. Leni shook her head in disbelief.
A guard’s jaw dropped. He must have overheard everything, would push us inside and force us to speak. I gripped the bench’s armrest. The guard’s sneeze sounded more like a roar—it made him double over. Then he stood up straight again, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose.
“There’s nothing else to be done,” Heike said.
* * *
ELFRIEDE TOOK HER to a gynecologist and didn’t allow anyone to go with them.
“I don’t get it—why all the secrecy?” Augustine grumbled. “This is a delicate situation, Heike might need our help.”
“Let’s take care of Mathias and Ursula while she’s gone,” I said, to calm her.
We waited for Heike at her house with her children and Leni. We had tried to keep Leni out of it, but she wanted to know, kept asking questions. I was afraid it would shock her, but instead she had taken in the explanation without blinking an eye. Then again, others’ pain doesn’t sting as much as our own.
Beate wasn’t there. Heike hadn’t involved her. Beate was her oldest friend and she felt ashamed before her. Maybe Beate resented it, or, conversely, maybe she was grateful for not having to deal with the problem.
Mathias spent the evening arguing and making up with Pete, Augustine’s son.
“Let’s pretend you’re France and Ursula is England,” he said once he’d grown bored of every other game. “Let’s pretend you two declare war on me.”
“Where’s England?” his little sister asked.
“No,” Pete said, “I want to be Germany.”
He was more or less Mathias’s age—seven or eight. He had sharp shoulder blades and bony arms. If I had had a son, that was how I would have liked him to be, with prominent shoulder blades glistening with sweat like those of my brother when, as a boy, he would run about through the red spruce trees in Grunewald Forest and dive into the Schlachtensee. I would want my child to have blue eyes that squinted in the sunshine like Gregor’s.
“Why Germany?” Augustine asked.
“I want to be strong,” Pete replied, “like our Führer.”
She tsked. “You know nothing about strength. Your father was strong, and he’s gone now.”
The boy blushed, hung his head: What did his father have to do with it, and why did she have to make him feel so sad all of a sudden?
“Augustine…,” I began, but didn’t know what to say next. Her broad, boxy shoulders, and those slender ankles. For the first time I thought they might snap.
Pete ran into the next room. I followed him, Ursula right behind me. He had thrown himself onto the bed, belly-down.
“If you want to, you can be England,” Ursula told him. “I don’t want it anyway.”
Pete didn’t react.
“What do you want, then?” I asked, stroking her cheek.
She was four years old, the same age as Pauline now. Suddenly I missed Pauline, missed her breathing as she slept. I hadn’t thought about her in so long. How was it possible to forget people, to forget children?
“I want my mother. Where is she?”
“She’ll be back soon,” I reassured her. “Listen, should we do something fun? All of us together?”
“Like what?”
“Let’s sing a song.”
She nodded unenthusiastically.
“Go call Mathias.”
She obeyed, and I sat on the bed.
“Are you offended, Pete?”
He didn’t reply.
“Angry?”
His head moved left and right, burrowing into the pillow.
“Not angry.… Are you sad, then?”
He turned to peek at me.
“My father died, too, you know,” I told him. “I understand you.”
He pulled himself up, sat cross-legged. “What about your husband?”
The last surge of light before the sun finally set lit up his face, turning it pale.
“Fuchs, du hast die Gans gestohlen,” I sang in reply, tilting my head from one side to the other as I tapped my finger to the beat. “Gib sie wieder her.” Where had I found that cheerfulness?
Ursula entered with Mathias and Augustine. They sat down on the bed with us and I sang the nursery rhyme all the way to the end. My father had taught it to m
e. Then the little girl begged me to sing it again, and had me repeat it over and over until she had learned it as well.
* * *
IT WAS DARK when we heard footsteps coming up the walk. The children were still awake, and they ran to the front door. Elfriede was supporting Heike, who walked without difficulty, though. Ursula and Mathias threw themselves onto her, clinging to her legs.
“Easy,” she said, “take it easy.”
“Are you tired, Mommy?” Ursula whispered.
“Why aren’t you in bed?” Heike replied. “It’s late.”
“Make her rest.” With this single instruction, Elfriede turned to leave.
“Don’t you even want a cup of tea?”
“It’s late, Rosa, and we’re already past curfew.”
“Why don’t you sleep here, too?”
“No, I’m going.”
She seemed cross, almost as though she had helped Heike against her will. She hadn’t minded her own business, as she had warned me to do.
Heike wouldn’t say where the doctor lived, nor would she call him by name. All she told us was that he’d had her drink a concoction whose ingredients he hadn’t specified and had shown her the door, warning her that soon her contractions would begin. On the way home, they had had to stop in the woods. Sweating and moaning, Heike had expelled a clump of flesh, which Elfriede had buried at the foot of a birch tree while Heike tried to calm her breathing. “I’ll never remember which tree,” she said. “I’ll never be able to go visit him.”
* * *
THE PREGNANCY HAD been a mistake. There was nothing divine in creating life or taking it—it was simply something humans did. Gregor hadn’t wanted to be the origin of any destiny and had reasoned that it was a question of meaning, as though giving life required some kind of meaning. But not even God had posed the same question to Himself.
It had been a mistake, a heartbeat just beneath the navel—Heike had stifled it. I was angry with her, and pitied her too. An emptiness was gouged within my belly, the summation of all the people I missed, including the child Gregor and I had never had.
* * *
WHEN I LIVED in Berlin, whenever I came across a pregnant woman I thought of intimacy. Spine curved back, legs parted slightly, palms resting on that big belly—all made me think of the intimacy between husband and wife. It wasn’t the intimacy of love, of lovers. I thought of nipples growing larger, growing darker, ankles swelling. I wondered whether Gregor would be frightened of my body’s metamorphosis, if he wouldn’t like it anymore, if he would reject it.
An intruder takes up space inside your woman’s body and deforms it, changes it for its own use and consumption, then comes out through the same hole you penetrated, barges through it with an aggressiveness you would never have dared. He has been where you will never be, it is he who will forever own her.
Yet that intruder is yours. Inside your woman, amid stomach, liver, kidneys, something that belongs to you has grown, and in such an intimate, internal part of her.
I wondered if my husband would tolerate my bouts of nausea, my urgent need to pee, my body reduced to its primordial functions; I wondered if nature was what he couldn’t accept.
We hadn’t experienced that intimacy, he and I. We had been parted too early. Maybe I would never put my body at the service of another, at the service of another life. Gregor had stolen that opportunity from me, had betrayed me like a dog that turns against its master. How long had it been since I had last felt his fingers on my tongue?
Heike had had an abortion and I continued to yearn for a child from a man who had gone missing in Russia.
* * *
HE NEVER ARRIVED before midnight, probably to be sure no one was awake except me, knowing I would wait up for him. What drove me to go to the window, what drove him to come, to struggle to make out my silhouette in the shadows? What was it that he couldn’t do without?
The windowpane was a shield. It made the lieutenant less real, that lieutenant who said nothing, who did nothing but remain, persist, impose a presence I couldn’t touch. I stared back at him because there was nothing else to do, since he had come, since it had happened. Even if I had put out the light, I would have known he was there. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. I stared at him, unable to imagine any consequences—the future finally severed from the present. The sweetness of inaction.
How had he known, the night of the soirée, that I would wake up? Did he think I hadn’t yet gone to bed?
A few days after that evening, when I returned home, I found a decorated porcelain vase I had never seen. It was on the kitchen table and was full of dark purple flowers I didn’t recognize. The room had never been filled with so much color.
“They’re German irises,” Joseph said, touching one of the petals with his callused fingers.
“A gift for you,” Herta said. “I put them in water so they wouldn’t wither, but take them to your room now.” Her curt tone exposed my guilt. Had he—no, it couldn’t be—had Ziegler sent me flowers? He certainly couldn’t have included a card, couldn’t have been so shameless. I didn’t dare ask.
“They’re from your friend,” she said.
And Joseph: “I brought them with me from the castle. The baroness insisted.”
“The baroness. She insisted,” Herta said, mimicking him. “I thought you had an admirer,” she added, and my throat went dry. I had to bite my tongue to feel saliva in my mouth again. It was salty, savory, tasted a bit like blood. “But an admirer would never have approached your father-in-law,” she said, laughing.
Was she provoking me?
Joseph also laughed, and I realized it was a joke, nothing more. Herta’s peeved tone had been directed at the baroness, whom Joseph admired and who was interested in me. Herta was the only one who hadn’t gained the woman’s attention and she didn’t like to feel excluded.
“Here,” Joseph said, taking an envelope out of his pocket. I opened it.
Maria—that was how she had signed it—thanked me for attending her soirée and invited me to pay her a call. It would become a habit, spending a few hours at the castle in the early afternoons with the woman who had forced me to sing in front of Ziegler.
Who knew if it was the moment I had closed my eyes that he began to stare at me—he who in the courtyard, stomping on Beate’s cards, had had to force himself to look away from me? Who knew if it was then, as the other guests were applauding while he kept his arms down at his sides, that he decided to come to my window with those same powerless arms? Or maybe he had never decided to, maybe he too had simply moved with the assurance of a sleepwalker.
In Krausendorf, his indifference toward me was absolute. If I happened to hear his voice, it left me paralyzed with terror. The other women noticed it but thought it was the same fear they also felt. Terror of the man who tyrannized guards and food tasters alike, and one morning had even exasperated Krümel—the chef had stormed out, slamming the door and shouting that everyone should know their place, that he knew what he was doing in his kitchen. Terror of the war, as things gradually grew worse and supplies began to arrive with more difficulty. If there were prospects of a food shortage even in the countryside, even at the Wolfsschanze, we were doomed. I would have asked Krümel what he knew, since we had been eating Williams pears and bananas less often, since he was always cooking the same dishes, and with less flair than before, but after our incident with the milk he hadn’t spoken to me again.
* * *
WHEN ZIEGLER WENT away at dawn—at first without a gesture, then raising his hand slightly in farewell, or shrugging his shoulders—I would feel lost. His absence settled in Gregor’s bedroom, expanding until it pushed the furniture back against the walls, pressed me back against the window frame. At breakfast I returned to my real life—that is, to the surrogate of my real life. Only then, as Joseph drank his tea, slurping, and his wife reproached him with a light slap on the arm—jostling his cup and splashing a few drops onto the tablecloth—only then did I think o
f Gregor. I would nail the curtains to the window fixtures, tie myself down to the bed, and sooner or later he would give up. But at night Gregor disappeared because the world itself disappeared, life began and ended in the trajectory of the gaze connecting Ziegler and me.
* * *
IN THE WEEKS following the abortion I was cautious around Elfriede.
Often, sharing a secret doesn’t bring people together—it separates them. Collective guilt is vague, shame an individual personal emotion.
I kept quiet about Ziegler’s visits to my window to avoid sharing the burden of shame with my friends and instead bear it alone. Or perhaps I wanted to spare myself Elfriede’s judgment, Leni’s incomprehension, the chatter of the others. Or, more simply, what I had with Ziegler needed to remain untouched.
I hadn’t even spoken of it to Heike, even though on the night of her abortion, while Augustine was putting the children to bed in the other room and Leni was snoozing in an old armchair, Heike had said to me, “It was a boy.”
“You sensed it would be a boy?”
“No, not what I had inside me.”
I swallowed, not understanding.
“The father,” she said. “He’s a boy, a child. The farmhand who helps us here. When my husband left, he took over for him. He’s a fine boy, you know, very responsible, though he’s barely seventeen years old. How could I have done such a thing…?”
“What did he say about the pregnancy?”
“Nothing. He didn’t know anything, and now there’s nothing left to know—the pregnancy is over.”
I had let her confess and hadn’t confessed to her in turn.
Seventeen years old. Eleven fewer than her.
The birds twittered in the May sky, and the ease with which Heike’s child had slid between her legs, the ease with which it had let itself be eliminated, crushed me.
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