At the Wolf's Table

by Rosella Postorino

  31

  Listening to it with my eyes closed, the sound of the lunchroom would have been a nice sound. The clink of forks against plates, the splosh of water being poured, the thunk of glass on wood, the clack of footsteps against the floor, mouths chewing, voices overlapping, birds singing and dogs barking, the distant rumble of a tractor drifting through the open windows. It would have been nothing other than a moment of conviviality. It’s endearing, the human need to eat so as not to die.

  But if I opened my eyes I saw them—the uniformed guards, the loaded weapons, the confines of our cage—and the dishes would once again clink, the compressed sound of something on the verge of exploding. I thought of the night before, of the terror that they had discovered me, of the dead mouse. I could no longer bear the lie, it was as if I carried it on my back, and was amazed no one else could see it. Still, I wasn’t relieved. Sooner or later they would see it. I lived in a state of high alert.

  That morning, as I was leaving the house to wait for the bus, the cat rubbed against my ankles and I brusquely sidestepped him. I know your secret, you’re not safe, he threatened. Why are you angry at the cat? Herta asked, and I felt like I could die.

  * * *

  THE OTHER WOMEN went outside. I stayed in my seat. The sound of the lunchroom had been interrupted, but Zart’s claws scratching the barn door continued to torment me.

  “Berliner?” Elfriede came to sit down beside me, her elbow upright on the table, her hand cupping her chin. “Can’t digest?”

  I tried to smile. “Well, you know, poison gives me a touch of heartburn.”

  “Milk can help with that. But please, don’t go stealing it this time.”

  We laughed. Elfriede turned her chair to the side to have a view of the courtyard.

  Heike was on the swings and Beate was pushing her—two schoolgirls at recess. Maybe when they were little they had played like that.

  “They’re really close friends,” I said, noticing that Elfriede was watching them too.

  “And yet,” she replied, “Beate wasn’t there when Heike had that problem.”

  It was the first time she had mentioned the abortion, though she avoided calling it by its name.

  “But it was Heike who didn’t involve her,” I objected. “Who knows why?”

  “Because she didn’t want to tell her about the seventeen-year-old.”

  So Elfriede knew about him too. During their walk through the woods Heike must have confided in her.

  “They’re still together,” she added. “People use love to justify all kinds of things.”

  The comment stabbed my heart. In my mind once again I saw the barn door, Albert growing nervous, then the dead mouse in Zart’s jaws. I had to summon my courage to say, “And you think it’s wrong?”

  “The point, Berliner, is that anyone can justify anything. They always find an excuse.” She turned to look at me. “If she really thought she was doing nothing wrong, Heike would talk openly about it with her closest friend. You know why she isn’t ashamed around us? Because we aren’t so dear to her heart.”

  She looked up and to the left, as though still reflecting on it. “Or,” she said, “Heike imagines Beate isn’t ready to know. That she doesn’t want to know. Sometimes knowing is a burden. And she’d rather not give her that burden. In any case she’s lucky she didn’t have to keep it all to herself.”

  She had caught me—it was me she was talking about, she was asking me to confess. I didn’t need to keep everything to myself, I could share that burden with her. She wasn’t Beate, she would understand.

  Or would she tell me I was behaving worse than Heike?

  It didn’t matter to me anymore. At least with Elfriede I wanted to be honest, delude myself that I was better than I had become. She would tell me the dead mouse wasn’t a bad omen, and I would believe her.

  She stood up, went over to one of the guards, asked to be escorted to the washroom. It was a signal, she wanted me to follow her, it had happened before. Or had she been trying to suggest just the opposite? Never confess it to me, don’t make me your accomplice.

  Her fitted skirt went halfway down her calves, her muscles flexed and relaxed as she walked toe to heel. Her poised, lofty gait enchanted me. From the start Elfriede had had that effect on me—if my eyes caught sight of her they remained transfixed. That must have been why I found myself quickly following in the wake of her footsteps, reaching the guard and saying, “I need to go too.”

  * * *

  IN THE WASHROOM, Elfriede was closing a stall door when I stopped her.

  “Don’t you have to go?” she asked.

  “No, I can wait. I need to talk to you.”

  “But I can’t wait.”

  “Elfriede—”

  “Listen, Berliner, we don’t have much time. Can you keep a secret?”

  My organs banged together.

  Elfriede slid a hand into her pocket, very gingerly, and pulled out a cigarette and a box of matches. “I come here to sneak a smoke. Secret revealed.”

  She crouched in one corner of the stall, lit the cigarette, inhaled. Smiling, she blew the smoke into my face. I was leaning against the doorframe, and that breeziness which Elfriede occasionally displayed, rather than dissuading me made me even more anxious to speak to her. She would understand me, she would calm me.

  From outside came a woman’s voice. Elfriede pulled me against her, quickly shut the door. She took one last puff, put the cigarette out against the tiles, and, holding a finger to her lips, said, “Shhh,” as a woman entered and went into one of the free stalls.

  We were as close together as the first time, but now Elfriede wasn’t trying to intimidate me. She stared at me with two sly eyes I had never seen on her before, the cigarette between her fingers and her left hand fanning the air to dispel the smell of smoke. This rule-breaking spirit amused her, a grunt escaped her nose, and she pinched it shut, tucking her head into her shoulders. We were so close, face-to-face, and all at once I felt like laughing too. For a moment I forgot where I had met her, what had led me to her. For a moment the fullness I felt from inhabiting the same space as her made me as giggly as a schoolgirl. We were two high schoolers, Elfriede and I, hidden away in the washroom, sharing a harmless secret, one that wouldn’t have been worth adding to my inventory.

  As soon as the woman left the washroom, Elfriede pulled her face close to mine, her forehead touching my forehead. “Should I relight it,” she said softly, “or do you think it’s dangerous?”

  “The guard is probably wondering what happened to us,” I replied. “Pretty soon he’ll come get us.…”

  “Right.” Her sly eyes sparkled.

  She pulled out the matchbox.

  “But if you want to light it, I’ll wait here with you until you finish it.”

  “Really?”

  “At least two puffs.”

  The match sputtered, the tiny flame burned the paper.

  “Then you take one of them,” she said, slipping the cigarette into my mouth.

  I drew in the smoke awkwardly. More than inhaling it, I swallowed it. It made me feel slightly nauseous.

  “Not even coughing. Well done.” Elfriede smiled, taking back the cigarette. She took a deep drag, closing her eyes slightly. She was calm, or at least seemed to be. “And if they happen to catch us, Berliner? What will you do then?”

  “I’ll stay by your side,” I said, resting my hand on my chest theatrically.

  “Anyway, if they catch us,” she said, “they’ll punish me. What do you have to do with it?”

  Just then the guard decided to knock. “Coming out?”

  Elfriede tossed the cigarette into the toilet, flushed it, opened the door to the stall we were hiding in, then the washroom door, and walked out.

  We went back in silence, Elfriede suddenly focused on something I couldn’t even imagine. Her eyes weren’t sparkling anymore, she wasn’t laughing, the intimacy of a moment before had vanished. I felt something like shame.

>   We weren’t two high school girls playing around, and I didn’t understand her.

  In the lunchroom she remembered. “Oh, Berliner, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  If I didn’t understand her, why would she have understood me?

  “Nothing important.”

  “Oh, no, please. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I’m sorry.”

  It was too dangerous to tell her, to tell anyone, about Ziegler. How ridiculous, believing I could do it.

  “It was nothing, really.”

  “As you wish.”

  She seemed disappointed. She headed toward the courtyard and, almost to delay her, to keep her with me a moment longer, I said, “When I was little, while my brother was sleeping I leaned into his crib and bit his hand, hard.”

  Elfriede didn’t reply, waited for me to finish.

  “Sometimes I think that’s why he doesn’t write to me anymore.”

  32

  Though I knew Albert had a wife and children, when he told me he was going home to Bavaria the second week in July it was as if I had never known. During the months when we had been seeing each other, he had never gone away on leave. His family was an abstract concept, wasn’t any more real than a husband who was missing or dead or simply resolved never to return to me.

  I curled up on my side, isolating myself in the darkness. Albert touched my back, I tried to shake him off, he didn’t give up. What did I expect, that he would cancel his leave so I wouldn’t be left alone to picture him tucking in his children and climbing into bed with her?

  At first it had been easy to think of distancing myself from him—in fact, it had been a need. I imagined him with other women. I saw Ulla riding him, Albert clutching her hips until his nails left marks down her skin as he craned his neck to suck her pointy breasts. I saw Leni shocked at the touch of his fingers between her legs, capillaries bursting on her face as he deflowered her. I fantasized it was Albert who had impregnated Heike. It didn’t cause me pain, but relief, a sort of exuberance: I could lose that man.

  Nevertheless, the night he told me about his leave it was like having a door slammed in my face. Albert slammed it right before my nose and shut himself up in his bedroom with his wife, with his life separated from mine, and didn’t care that I was out there waiting for him.

  “What should I do?” he asked, his palm still resting on my back.

  “Whatever you want,” I replied without turning around. “I’m returning to Berlin after the war, so if you prefer you can forget about me right now.”

  “But I can’t.”

  It made me laugh. It was no longer the foolish laughter of lovers. The decline had begun and I laughed with spite.

  “Why are you being like this?”

  “Because you’re ridiculous. We’re trapped down here and can’t wait to get out. On top of that you’re an SS officer and you bed a woman who has no choice.”

  He pulled his palm away from my back. The loss of that contact made me feel in danger. He didn’t reply or even get dressed, didn’t fall asleep. He lay there, exhausted. I hoped he would touch me again, that he would embrace me. I wanted neither to sleep nor to see the dawn.

  I went back to thinking we didn’t have any right to speak of love. We were living in a severed era, one that upset all certainty and broke up families, crippled every survival instinct.

  * * *

  AFTER WHAT I told him, he might have been convinced I let him into the barn out of fear and not because of the intimacy between us, which felt age-old.

  Between our bodies there was a sort of kinship, as though we had played together as children. As though at eight years old we had bitten each other’s wrists to leave behind a “watch,” the mark of our dental arches that glistened with saliva. As though we had slept in the same crib long enough to believe each other’s warm breath was the very smell of the world.

  And yet that intimacy never became habit. I would run a finger down the furrow in the middle of his chest and my personal history would be razed to the ground, time would be suspended, an endless loop. I would rest my hand on his belly and Albert would open his eyes wide, curve his spine.

  * * *

  NEVER HAD I believed I could trust what he told me, because he told me so little. When he spoke, there was a hint of exclusion in his words. He hadn’t ended up at the front—a heart murmur had exempted him—but the rigor and devotion with which he had served Germany had made him scale many ranks of the Waffen-SS. Then one day he asked to be assigned to different functions. Different from what? I asked him once. He didn’t reply.

  That night, though, after I rejected him, while I had my back turned to him, in the silence he said, “They committed suicide. We were in Crimea.”

  I turned toward him. “Who committed suicide?”

  “The SS officers, the Wehrmacht officers, all of them. Some became depressed, others alcoholics, others impotent.” A grimace turned his face unrecognizable. “And some killed themselves.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Some of the women were beautiful. They would stand there, all naked. They had to undress. Their clothes were washed and packed in suitcases to be reused. They would photograph them.”

  “Who would? What women?”

  He lay still, facing the beams overhead almost as though he weren’t talking to me.

  “People would come out of curiosity, even bring children along, and they would take photographs. Some of them were beautiful—it was impossible to take your eyes off them. One of my men couldn’t handle it. One morning I saw him fall to the ground, on his rifle. He’d fainted. Another confessed to me that he couldn’t sleep.… One must carry out one’s duty with joy,” he said, raising his voice.

  I covered his mouth.

  “That’s what is expected of us,” he went on, his mouth against my hand. He didn’t remove it—it was I who pulled away. “What else could I tell him? I knew it, knew the men were fucking them. They fucked them all, even if it was forbidden, but in any case those women would never be able to tell anyone. Double rations of food: getting rid of fifty people a day is hard work even for us.” Albert’s face furrowed.

  Fifty people a day. I was frightened.

  “Then, one morning, one of them snapped. Instead of aiming at them, he turned his rifle on us and fired. We returned fire.”

  I could have known then about the mass graves, about the Jews who lay prone, huddled together, waiting for the shot to the back of the head, could have known about the earth shoveled onto their backs, and the wood ash and calcium hypochlorite so they wouldn’t stink, about the new layer of Jews who would lie down on the corpses and offer the backs of their heads in turn. I could have known about the children picked up by the hair and shot, about the kilometer-long lines of Jews or Russians—They’re Asian, they’re not like us—ready to fall into the graves or climb onto trucks to be gassed with carbon monoxide. I could have learned about it before the end of the war. I could have asked. But I was afraid and couldn’t speak and didn’t want to know.

  * * *

  WHAT DID WE know back then?

  In March of ’33 the newspaper announced the opening of the camp in Dachau, with its capacity for five thousand. A labor camp, people said. Not that they talked about it willingly. A man who had been there, the doorwoman mumbled, said the detainees had to sing “Horst Wessel Lied” as they were being whipped. Ah, so that’s why they call it a “concert camp,” joked the street cleaner, continuing to sweep. The street cleaner could have played the enemy propaganda card—everyone played that, to drop the subject—but he hadn’t thought fast enough. And those who returned from down there said only, Please, don’t ask me, I can’t tell you, and at that point people certainly did start to worry. A place for criminals, the grocer said with assurance, especially if there were clients listening. A place for dissidents, for Communists, for those who can’t keep their mouth shut. “Dear Lord, make me say nothing they would not allow, I don’t want to be sent away t
o Dachau”: it had become a prayer. They make them put on new boots destined for the Wehrmacht, people said, and they walk around in them for a while, to soften them. That way the soldiers who wear them later on don’t run the risk of getting blisters on their feet. At least that risk they avoided. A reform institute, the locksmith explained, you go there and they brainwash you, when you get out you’re completely over your desire to grumble. How did the song go? “Ten Little Grumblers.” Even little children knew it. If you misbehave, I’ll send you to Dachau, parents threatened. Dachau in place of the boogeyman; Dachau, the place of the boogeyman.

  I had lived in terror at the thought that they might take away my father, who just couldn’t keep quiet. The Gestapo’s keeping an eye on you, one of his coworkers had warned, and my mother had shouted, Do the words “defamation against the National Socialist State” mean anything to you? My father didn’t answer, slammed the door. What was he aware of, the rail worker? Had he seen them, the trains packed with people? Men, women, and children crammed into cattle cars. Did he too believe the project was only to resettle the Jews out East, like they claimed? And Ziegler, did he know everything? About the extermination camps. About the Final Solution.

  * * *

  NAKED AND FEELING threatened, I felt around for my nightgown. I was afraid he would notice and get angry. He turned toward me.

  “They said it wasn’t a problem, that we could be reassigned to other functions. And I was one of those who left. There was an abundance of volunteers—that’s how I got the transfer. Nothing changed, there were others to fill my place.”

  I slid away stealthily, slowly, almost as if I weren’t authorized to move. “It’s dawn,” I said, getting up.

  He nodded with his chin, his customary gesture. “All right,” he said. “Go to bed.”

  “Have a nice trip.”