At the Wolf's Table

by Rosella Postorino

  Augustine, on the other hand, had wielded her usual skepticism toward all that gibberish about Beate being a witch and had stayed home, using her children as an excuse.

  We’re going to punish Ziegler, Beate had said. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, at least we’ll have some fun.

  She opened the box. It contained pins.

  “What do you mean to do?” Leni asked, slightly worried. Inflicting pain on Ziegler didn’t bother her—it was that the bad things you wish on others might come back to you one day. She was worried about herself.

  “I take something the lieutenant touched,” Beate explained, “and I stick pins into it. If we all focus on imagining that the apple core is him, pretty soon the lieutenant won’t be feeling so good.”

  “What nonsense,” Elfriede said. “I came all the way here for a bunch of nonsense.”

  “Oh, don’t be a killjoy like Augustine!” Beate told her. “Can’t you just play along? Look at it as a way to pass the time. Did you have anything better to do tonight?”

  “After that, do you burn the apple core over the candle?” Leni was the most interested among us.

  “No, that’s just to create atmosphere.” The little witch was really having fun.

  “Sticking pins into a chewed-up apple? Never heard of anything like it,” Elfriede said.

  “We don’t have anything else that’s been in contact with Ziegler,” Beate pointed out. “We need to make do.”

  “Hurry up,” Elfriede said, “before it gets dark out. I have no idea why I listen to you.”

  Beate took a pin from the box. She pointed it at the upper part of the apple core and pierced the deteriorated pulp. “A pin in his mouth,” she said. I had kissed it, that mouth. “That way we won’t hear him screaming at us anymore.”

  “Right,” Leni said, giggling.

  “No, girls, let’s stay serious, otherwise it won’t work.”

  “Beate, hurry up,” Elfriede insisted.

  By the light of the candle, her fingers cast a long, flickering shadow. When it neared the apple core it darkened it, made it an eerie object, more or less the shape of a human body, Ziegler’s body, which I had known.

  Beate stuck more pins into it, saying aloud anatomical parts. Shoulders, which I had clung to. Belly, which I had rubbed against. Legs, which I had encircled with my own.

  I had been in contact with Ziegler. They might as well have stuck pins into my flesh—it would have been more effective.

  Beate focused on what was left of the red peel attached to the stem. “Head.”

  My neck stung.

  “Is he dead now?” Leni asked in a low voice.

  “No, we’re missing his heart.”

  Her fingers moved closer with deliberate slowness. My breath began to grow short. The pin was just about to pierce the seed when I thrust my hand in the way.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Ow!” A drop of blood pooled on my finger, glimmered in the candlelight.

  “Are you hurt?” Beate asked.

  Elfriede blew out the candle, getting up.

  “Hey, why’d you do that?” our hostess asked.

  “Come on, that’s enough,” she replied.

  I was hypnotized by the blood on my fingertip.

  “Rosa, what’s gotten into you?” Leni was already anxious.

  Elfriede came over to me, and the others watched in silence as she pushed me into the bedroom.

  “Still scared of your own blood, Berliner? Can’t you see it’s just a tiny speck?”

  The twins were sleeping on their sides, cheeks squashed against arms, mouths open as if in a compressed, deformed O.

  “It’s not because of that,” I mumbled.

  “Look.” She grabbed my wrist, slid my fingertip between her lips, sucked. Then she checked to see if it was still bleeding, sucked on it again.

  A mouth that doesn’t bite, or the chance to unexpectedly attack the other.

  “There,” she said, letting go of my finger. “Now you know you won’t bleed to death.”

  “I wasn’t afraid I would die. Don’t make fun of me.”

  “Then what was it? Did you get spooked? You’re a city girl—you disappoint me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Are you apologizing for disappointing me?”

  “I’m worse than you think.”

  “How should you know what I think?” She raised her chin in a comical air of defiance. “How presumptuous.”

  It made me want to laugh.

  Then, to justify myself, I said, “The other night, in the barracks. It was terrible.”

  “It was terrible, yes, and it might happen again. There’s no avoiding it,” she said. “We can hide as long as we want, but sooner or later death will track us down all the same.” Her expression turned sharp. It was just like the one she wore during the blood draw on our second day. But then her features gave in to resignation and her eyes comforted me. “I’m afraid too. More than you are.”

  I looked at the minuscule prick on my fingertip, which had dried, and my words slipped out: “I love you.”

  Her surprise left her speechless. One of the twins let out a rodent-like sound, wrinkled his nose as though from a sudden itch, turned beneath the sheets, and rolled over, belly-up, arms raised, spread out. He looked like Baby Jesus already surrendering for crucifixion.

  “You’re right,” I said. “It’s nonsense.”

  “What, that you love me?”

  “No, this charade with the pins.”

  “Oh. Thank goodness.” She took my hand, squeezed it. “Let’s go back to the others.”

  Only right before stepping into the kitchen, only then, did I let go.

  * * *

  I DIDN’T GO to the window that night, nor any of the following nights. I thought I had finished it, that it was over. He didn’t come back—or, if he did come back he didn’t scratch his nails against the windowpane. Perhaps he had never come and the screech had been the sound of my bones.

  I missed him. It wasn’t like missing Gregor, fate taking a sharp turn, the annulment of all promises. It wasn’t that serious. It was restlessness. I clutched the pillow, the cotton rough, combustible. It wasn’t Albert Ziegler—it was me. The inertia he had disturbed. I bit the pillowcase. The roughness between my teeth made me shudder. Instead of Ziegler it could have been anyone, that’s what I thought. I had made love to him because I hadn’t made love for too long a time. I tore off a strip of cloth, chewed it, a thread got caught between my canines. I sucked on it, wrapped it around my tongue, swallowed it, like I had when I was a little girl. It didn’t kill me this time either. What I’m missing isn’t Albert Ziegler, I told myself, it’s my body.

  * * *

  WHO KNEW HOW many days later, the Beanpole appeared in the lunchroom and ordered me to my feet. “You’ve been stealing again.”

  What was he talking about? “I haven’t stolen anything.”

  Krümel had claimed responsibility for the bottles of milk in my bag. I had never been found guilty.

  “Move.”

  I looked over at Theodora, Gertrude, Sabine. They were as stunned as I was. It hadn’t been the Fanatics who accused me.

  “What is it I supposedly stole?” I asked breathlessly.

  “You know perfectly well,” the Beanpole said.

  “Berliner.” Elfriede shook her head, a mother who’d run out of patience.

  “I swear it!” I shouted as I stood up. I hadn’t gotten myself into trouble again, she had to believe me.

  “Come along.” The Beanpole pulled me by the arm.

  Leni pinched her nose shut, squeezed her eyes closed.

  “Go on, out in front of me.” He guided me out of the lunchroom, escorted by another guard.

  In the hallway I turned around, tried once again to ask what theft I had been accused of. “Did Krümel tell you something? He’s just mad at me.”

  “He’s mad at you because you steal from the kitchen, Sauer. But now you’re going to re
gret it.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Be quiet and walk.”

  I pressed my palms against his chest. “I beg you, you’ve known me for months. You know I would never—”

  “Get your hands off me! How dare you?” He shoved me away by the shoulder.

  I made my way forward, my breathing ragged, until we were outside Ziegler’s office.

  The Beanpole knocked, was told to enter, made me go in, was dismissed, though it was plain to see he was consumed with curiosity. I wondered whether he would stay outside and eavesdrop.

  Ziegler clearly didn’t. He came over to me, gripped my arm so hard it hurt, my joints coming apart, my bones clattering to the floor. Then he pressed me against him and I was intact, I hadn’t shattered to pieces.

  “Did Krümel tell you something?”

  “If you don’t come outside tonight I’ll break the window.”

  “Did he tell you about the milk? Was it him who made you think of the excuse of theft?”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “How do we explain it away, this story you’ve come up with? What am I going to tell the other women?”

  “Unless you want to confess to stealing, despite having already been pardoned once, you’ll tell the others it was all a misunderstanding, that everything is fine now.”

  “They’ll never believe it.”

  He scrutinized me. I had to close my eyes for a moment. I breathed in the scent of his uniform—it lingered on him even when he was naked.

  “You meant to kill us,” I said.

  He didn’t reply.

  “You would have killed me.”

  He continued to scrutinize me, seriously, as always.

  “Say something, for heaven’s sake!”

  “I’ve already told you: if you don’t come outside I’ll break the window.”

  A pain shot through my forehead. I raised a hand to my temple.

  “What is it, Rosa?”

  It was the first time he had called me by my first name.

  “You’re threatening me,” I said, and the pain vanished all at once. Through my body spread sweet relief.

  24

  Within hours we were lying one beside the other like two people in a field staring up at the sky, even though there was no sky above us. The heat with which Ziegler had embraced me that afternoon in his office had disappeared—knowing I was still available was enough to calm him. As soon as we entered the barn he had lain down and hadn’t touched me. His uniform still on, he was silent. Maybe he was sleeping—I didn’t know what his breathing sounded like in his sleep—maybe he was thinking, but not of me. I lay there beside him in my nightgown. Our shoulders were touching, and the fact that this contact left him unresponsive demoralized me. I was already addicted to his desire. He had needed to do so little—decide to come to my window one night—for it to happen. I had responded to that desire as though to a summons. And now his indifference was humiliating. Why had he brought me here, if he wouldn’t even say a word to me?

  His shoulder pulled away from mine. As though pushed by a gust of wind, Ziegler moved, sitting up. I thought he was about to leave, and without explanation—after all, it was without explanation that he appeared outside the first time. After all, I had never asked him anything, never asked for a reason.

  “It was the honey,” he said.

  I didn’t understand.

  “It was a shipment of bad honey. That’s what poisoned you.”

  The delicious cake Elfriede had liked so much. “They sold you tainted honey?” I sat up as well.

  “Not deliberately.”

  I touched his arm. “Explain.”

  Ziegler turned, and his voice reverberated against my face. “It happens. Bees feed off a noxious plant somewhere around the hive and taint the honey, that’s all.”

  “What plant? And who said so? And what did you do to the producer?”

  “People don’t die from honey. Or at least, very rarely.” The sudden warmth on my cheek was his hand.

  “But you didn’t know it wasn’t lethal. While I was vomiting and shivering and fainting, you didn’t know that. You would’ve let me die.” I put my palm on his hand to push it away. He squeezed it.

  Ziegler shoved me back and my head fell to the ground with a soft, buttery thump. He covered my face with all five fingers, his palm sealing my mouth shut, his fingertips squeezing my forehead. He pressed down on my nose, my eyelids, as though wanting to crush them, reduce them to a pulp. “You aren’t dead.”

  Releasing his grip on my face, he stretched out on top of me, slipped his fingers under my rib cage, clasped the twelfth rib almost as if to detach it, to reclaim it at long last on behalf of the entire male gender.

  “I thought I was going to die,” I said. “You thought so too, and you didn’t do anything.”

  He raised my nightgown and bit the rib he hadn’t managed to pull free. I thought it would break between his teeth, or that his teeth would break. But the rib seemed to roll beneath his incisors, soft, chewy.

  “You aren’t dead,” Ziegler said against my chest. He kissed me on the mouth, said, “You’re alive,” and his voice caught in his throat, a sort of cough. I caressed him as one might caress a child, as one might say, Everything’s fine, nothing’s happened. Then I began to undress him.

  25

  I went out every night to make love to him, walking briskly toward the barn with the determination of someone going to face the inevitable. It was a soldier’s march. Questions crowded my mind. I silenced them. The next day they would return to torment me, but when I went into the barn they were rags snarled in wire fencing, unable to get through the barrier of my will.

  There was, in that act of going outside, a rebellion. In the solitude of my secret I felt complete freedom; relieved of all control over my own life, I succumbed to the arbitrariness of events.

  We were lovers. It would be naïve to look for a reason for which two people become lovers. Ziegler had looked at me—no, actually, he had seen me. In that place, at that time, it had been enough.

  Maybe one night Joseph would open the door and find us there, lying together, a Nazi uniform draped over us. Why hadn’t it happened yet? In the mornings I thought it would be just—I wanted to be dragged onto the scaffold to face the collective scorn. So that explains the whole story about the theft, a misunderstanding my foot, now it’s all clear, the other women would say. A Berliner secretary, Herta would say, I knew she couldn’t be trusted.

  In the darkness I clung to my lover’s body so I wouldn’t fall, and suddenly I felt life accelerating, consuming my body, my hair falling out, my nails breaking.

  * * *

  “WHERE DID YOU learn to sing? I’ve been meaning to ask you that since the night of the party.”

  Albert had never asked me a personal question before. Was he really curious about me?

  “In Berlin, at school. We had a chorus, met two afternoons a week. At the end of the year we would perform for our parents. What torture, for them.”

  “But you’re an excellent singer.”

  He said it with such a familiar tone, as though we had been chatting for years. Instead, it was the first time.

  “I had a very good teacher who knew how to motivate us. I liked singing and she would give me solos. I always had fun at school.”

  “I didn’t, not at all. Just think: my elementary school teacher used to take us to the cemetery.”

  “The cemetery?”

  “To teach us to read. From gravestones. The writing was large and all uppercase, there were letters and numbers … she found it a convenient method.”

  “A practical woman!”

  Was laughing with him possible?

  “In the morning she would line us up in pairs and walk us down to the graveyard. We had to keep quiet out of respect for the ‘poor souls’ and read one gravestone each. Sometimes I was so shaken by the idea that there was a dead person under the ground that I couldn’t utter a word
.”

  “A likely excuse,” I said, laughing.

  It was possible; he laughed too.

  He said, “At night all those dead people would come to mind and I would imagine my mother or father under the ground, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

  What was happening to us? We were two strangers sharing our life stories. Did physical intimacy spawn compassion? I felt an incomprehensible protectiveness toward his body.

  I needed his thumbs squeezing my nipples, pinning me to the wall. Once acted upon, though, our impetuosity dissolved. It became tenderness, the untrustworthy tenderness of lovers. I was thinking of Ziegler as a little boy—that was what was happening to me.

  “The teacher would make us count our heartbeats too. ‘There is no such thing as boredom,’ she would tell us. ‘If you become bored, you can take your pulse’”—Ziegler grasped his wrist with his other hand—“‘and count. One. Two. Three. Each heartbeat is one second, sixty seconds are one minute. You can know how much time has passed even without a watch.’”

  “She thought that was a good way to kill boredom?”

  “I would do it at night when I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about the dead. It seemed disrespectful to go there and trespass on their space. I thought sooner or later they would seek revenge.”

  In an evil monster’s voice, I said, “And they would take you to the netherworld?” I grabbed his wrist. “Come on, let’s count your heartbeats like your teacher taught you.” He let me do it. “You’re quite alive, Lieutenant Ziegler.”

  It takes a great deal of curiosity to imagine people when they were little. Ziegler as a child was the same person as now, but most of all he was another—he was the starting point of a destiny that would include me. With that child I was forming an alliance. He wouldn’t hurt me. That was why I could play with Albert, that was why I was laughing—my hand over my mouth to avoid making noise—in the banal way lovers laugh, laugh over nothing.

  “The dead seek revenge,” he said.

  I wanted to hold him in my arms, that child afraid of death, make him fall asleep with a world of caresses.