At the Wolf's Table

by Rosella Postorino

  Joseph chomped down on his pipe, his jaw creaking. He had risked losing me too, not only a son he had never buried, and the rigid posture with which he sat, his fist clenched on the tablecloth, kept away even Zart, who was crouching beneath the table.

  The whistling in my head continued to torture me. Then Hitler uttered Stauffenberg’s name: it was like being stabbed in the ear, which I covered with my hand. The contrast between the hot cartilage and my cool palm momentarily soothed me.

  Stauffenberg was responsible, the Führer said, and I thought of Maria. I had no way of knowing that the colonel had already been shot, nor what fate was in store for my friend.

  The window was open on that July night. No one was on the road, the barn was closed. The frogs croaked unperturbed, oblivious to the risk that their master had run just hours ago, oblivious to the fact that they even had a master.

  “We will settle accounts in the way we National Socialists are accustomed,” Hitler shouted, and Joseph’s pipe snapped between his teeth.

  35

  Maria was arrested the next day along with her husband, taken to Berlin, and locked up in prison. The news spread around town immediately, spreading down the milk line and around the well, through the fields at dawn, and even at Moy Lake, where children were playing in the water, including Heike’s, who had learned to swim. Everyone imagined the big castle empty now that the baron and baroness were gone and the servants had had to bar the shutters. I imagined the townspeople breaking down a door, the servants’ entrance perhaps, and being surrounded by a luxury, a magnificence that they had never witnessed before, then leaving through the front door as though after a soirée, perhaps hiding booty under their shirts or in their trousers. But the castle was guarded day and night, and no one could go inside.

  Joseph was out of a job too. “It’s better off this way,” Herta said. “You’re old. Haven’t you noticed?” She seemed angry at him for having had anything to do with the baroness, but actually she was only worried that they would come to interrogate him, to capture him.

  She was concerned about me too, and grilled me: What had I spoken about with that woman, did I know who she really was, had I met any strange people at her home? Suddenly Maria had become dangerous, someone it would be better to keep a distance from. My kind, spoiled friend. They had locked her in a cell without sheet music, had taken from her the gown with the bias cut she had had made, the one almost identical to mine.

  Hitler had decided to act swiftly, the people’s court instead of a military court, summary trials and immediate executions by hanging, a noose around the neck, one made of a piano string hung from a butcher’s hook. Not only those suspected of having had even the slightest part in the assassination attempt, but even their relatives and friends were all rounded up and deported, and anyone who offered refuge to those being sought was executed. Clemens von Mildernhagen and his wife Maria had been Colonel Stauffenberg’s longtime friends, they had had him over to the castle on many occasions. According to the prosecution, Stauffenberg had plotted with other conspirators there; the baron and baroness of Gross-Partsch were devious.

  But what did the prosecution know about Maria’s universal enthusiasm, about her smoothly polished thoughts? She knew about flowers, songs, and little else, only what she needed. Maybe the colonel had schemed behind their backs, secretly using the castle as a base for his meetings, maybe the baron had been in on it and had kept his wife in the dark. I had no idea. After all, I didn’t have a relationship with him. I knew, though, that Maria had loved both Stauffenberg and Hitler, and they had both betrayed her.

  On my bedside table, next to the oil lamp, was the last book she had given me, which I hadn’t returned to her: poems by Stefan George. Her dear Claus had given it to her, according to the dedication written on the frontispiece. It must have been very precious to her, and yet she had lent it to me. Suddenly I realized that Maria cared about me, more than I cared about her, that more than anything else I was amused by the levity with which she interacted with the world.

  I tore the pages out of the book one by one, crumpled them up, and lit a small fire in the backyard. Seeing the flickering flames rise and twist, Zart scurried into the house. I was burning a book all on my own, with neither a band nor oxcarts, nor even the clucking of the hens to celebrate. I was terrified by the possibility that if the Nazis came looking for me they might find Stauffenberg’s dedication on the book of George poems and arrest me. I was burning a book to renounce Maria. But the fire, which destroyed all I had left of her, was also the clumsy rite by which I was saying goodbye.

  Joseph was interrogated. They soon released him, and no one came for me. I don’t know what became of Maria’s sons. They were only children and, as everyone knows, Germans love children.

  * * *

  THE NEW DIRECTIVES to defend the Führer also involved us food tasters. Forced to pack suitcases, we were taken from our homes. Herta watched me disappear around the Gross-Partsch bend, my nose glued to the bus window, and anxiety stung her like it had on my first day.

  In the courtyard, in addition to searching us, the guards checked our suitcases. Only after that could we go inside. Krausendorf became lunch, dinner, and dormitory. It became our prison. We were allowed to sleep at home only on Fridays and Saturdays. The rest of our time was dedicated to the Führer, who had bought our whole lives, and for the same price—no negotiations allowed. Segregated in the barracks, we were soldiers without weapons, high-ranking slaves.

  * * *

  ZIEGLER RETURNED THE day after the assassination attempt, entered the lunchroom, and announced that as of that moment we would be under constant surveillance. Recent events had demonstrated that no one could be trusted, much less us, lowly country women accustomed to lying with beasts, what did we know about honor, or loyalty, we had probably heard it over the microphones of the German radio—Always practice loyalty and honesty—but that went in one ear and came out the other with us potential traitors, who would sell our children for a piece of bread and spread our legs for anyone, given the opportunity. He, however, would isolate us like caged animals. Things would be different now that he was back.

  The SS guards hung their heads. To me they looked embarrassed by his rambling tirade that had nothing to do with the bombing. It seemed more like a personal outburst. Maybe the Obersturmführer had caught his wife in bed with another man, they thought. Maybe he had been browbeaten at home—some women bossed their men around—so now he had to make up for it by pounding his chest and raising his voice: ten females kept in check were what he needed to feel like a man, control over an unusual barracks made him feel that he had power, that he was authorized to abuse it.

  I was the one who thought that.

  Air whistled through Elfriede’s nostrils and Augustine cursed beneath her breath, with the risk that Ziegler might hear. I stared at him, waiting for his eyes to meet mine, but he avoided them. That was what had me convinced he was talking to me. Or he had simply drawn from a list of clichés to piece together an effective speech, one with just the right dose of insults, like any monologue to which no reply is expected. Maybe he had something to hide, he, who had been chatting with Stauffenberg and the baron that May night at the castle. I wondered if his colleagues had grilled him, if someone had suspected him. Or if he had become so unimportant that no one had noticed him together with the man behind the conspiracy and his presumed accomplices. Ziegler was frustrated, furious: just when something tremendous happened, he hadn’t been there.

  Then I told myself it was plausible that he had gone back to Bavaria at that very moment on purpose, that I had understood nothing, neither about him nor about Maria, they had all lied to me. I never learned the truth, never asked.

  * * *

  COTS WERE LAID out for us in the classrooms on the second floor, an area of the barracks we had never been to before. Three tasters per room, except for the larger one, in which they put four cots. They let us choose our beds and our roommates. I took the one
against the wall beside Elfriede, and then there was Leni. Looking out the window, I saw two guards. They paced the school perimeter, the patrol lasting all night. One of them noticed me and ordered me to get to bed. The Wolf was on guard, keeping close watch, wounded and burned, a trapped and vicious creature. And Ziegler slept in the outermost ring of the Wolfsschanze; the heart of the headquarters was off-limits to him.

  * * *

  “I MISS YOU,” he said a few mornings later, crossing paths with me in the hallway. I had fallen behind. My ankle had buckled and I had lost a shoe. The SS guard watched me from a distance as he walked the line of women to the lunchroom. “I miss you.” I looked up, my foot still bare, my ankle throbbing. The guard came over in a show of concern and I slipped my shoe on, sliding a finger into the heel as I teetered on only one leg. My instinct was to lean on Albert, and his instinct was to support me. He held out a hand. I had known his body and couldn’t touch it. I couldn’t believe it had been his, now that I wasn’t touching it anymore.

  A love like that, which has no past, no promises, no obligations, dies out from indolence. The body grows lazy, it prefers inertia to the effort of desire. Just being able to touch him again—his chest, his belly, simply my hand on the fabric of his uniform—would have been enough to feel time fall to dust, enough to open wide the depth of our intimacy. But Albert froze and I composed myself. Standing up straight, I began walking again without replying. The guard who had just reached me clicked his heels and saluted him by extending his arm just as Obersturmführer Ziegler let his own arm fall.

  36

  On Saturdays and Sundays, during my hours off work, I spent my time with Herta and Joseph. We picked vegetables in the garden, wandered the forest, sat out back chatting or saying nothing, grateful all three of us could be there in the same place, I having lost my parents, they their child. It was on that shared loss, on the very experience of loss, that we based our bond.

  I still wondered whether they suspected my nights with Ziegler. Having deceived them made me feel unworthy of their affection, though it didn’t make mine any less sincere. That it was possible to omit parts of one’s existence, that it was so easy, had always shocked me; but it’s only by being oblivious to others’ lives as they pass by, it’s thanks only to this physiological lack of information, that we avoid going insane.

  My sense of guilt had extended to Herta and Joseph because Herta and Joseph were right there in flesh and blood, while Gregor was a name, a thought upon waking, a picture in the mirror frame or the photo album, a handful of memories, a sudden outburst of tears at night, a feeling of anger and defeat and shame. He was an idea, Gregor. He was no longer my husband.

  * * *

  IF I WASN’T with my in-laws, I dedicated my free time to Leni, who wanted to meet up with Ernst when he went off duty but was afraid to go alone. And so she would bring along me and Ulla, or Beate and Heike with their respective children. Some days even Elfriede would come, despite the fact she couldn’t stand the two Wehrmacht soldiers and did nothing to hide it.

  “So am I a great soothsayer or aren’t I?” Beate said early one Sunday afternoon, sitting at a little table in a café on Moy Lake.

  “You mean about Hitler?” Elfriede said, provoking her. “You predicted things would go badly for him, and as you can see you got it wrong.”

  “What did you predict?” Ernst asked.

  “She’s a witch,” Ulla said. “She did his horoscope.”

  “Well, actually he did risk dying,” Heiner said. “You weren’t far off, Beate. No one can bring down our Führer, though.”

  Elfriede stared at him hard. Heiner didn’t notice. He drank deep from his beer stein and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “We risked dying ourselves,” she pointed out. “They almost managed to poison us, and we don’t even know what with.”

  “It wasn’t poison,” I said. “It was honey, tainted honey.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked me.

  All at once my legs went rubbery.

  “I don’t know,” I stammered. “I … I deduced it. The ones who got sick had eaten honey.”

  “Where was the honey?”

  “In the dessert, Elfriede.”

  “Actually, it’s true,” Heike said. “Beate and I didn’t throw up … you two were the only ones who ate dessert that day.”

  “Sure, but there was yogurt on the cake too. Besides, Theodora and Gertrude were sick, and it’s not like they ate dessert. They were eating dairy.” Elfriede was irritated. “How can you say it was the honey, Rosa?”

  “I’ve already told you, I don’t know. I just guessed.”

  “No, you stated it as a fact. Did you find it out from Krümel?”

  “Krümel doesn’t even talk to her anymore!” Ulla said. Then she turned to the two soldiers and, to include them in the conversation, explained, “She got in lots of trouble, our Rosa.” The two said nothing, not understanding.

  “I can blame that on Augustine. On Augustine and the rest of you,” I said, turning to Heike and Beate.

  “Don’t change the subject,” Elfriede said stubbornly. “How do you know it’s true? Tell me.”

  “She’s a soothsayer too!” Beate joked.

  “What’s a soothsayer?” little Ursula asked.

  My legs without a drop of strength. “Why are you getting so worked up, Elfriede? I told you I don’t know. I was talking about it with my father-in-law. We must’ve figured it out together.”

  “If you think about it, they didn’t serve us honey again for a while after that,” Ulla said, thinking aloud. “What a shame. The cake you let me sneak a taste of was delicious, Rosa.”

  “Exactly, you see?” I said, seizing the opportunity. “Maybe I figured it out from the fact that they stopped giving us honey. In any case, what difference does it make now?”

  “What’s a soothsayer?” Ursula repeated.

  “It’s a witch who can tell what’s going to happen,” Beate told her.

  “Mother knows how,” one of her twins bragged.

  “It still makes a difference, Rosa.” Elfriede wouldn’t stop staring at me. I couldn’t hold her gaze.

  “If you’ll let me continue!” Beate said, raising her voice. “I wasn’t talking about the Führer. I’m not as good with horoscopes as I am with cards, and Ziegler stole those from me.” The tremor I always felt whenever he was mentioned. “I was talking about Leni.”

  Leni shook herself from the enchantment she fell into whenever Ernst was near.

  He pulled her closer and kissed her forehead. “You predicted Leni’s future?”

  “She saw a man.” I spoke in a low voice as though not to be heard by Elfriede, so she would forget I was there.

  “And some people think he showed up,” she said. Only I heard the sarcasm in her voice, or maybe the guilt I felt over lying to her distorted my perception.

  Ernst drew his mouth to Leni’s already ruby-red ear. “Is it me?” He laughed. Heiner did too, as did Leni. I followed suit, forcing a laugh.

  We were all laughing. We hadn’t learned anything. We thought it was still all right to laugh, thought we could trust—trust life, trust the future.

  Elfriede didn’t. She stared at the bottom of her cup, the idea of reading the coffee grounds not even occurring to her. She had waged a battle to the death with the future, and none of us had noticed.

  * * *

  THE SAME NIGHT that Leni’s enchantment was shattered, the Abduction returned. As Leni silently pushed back her sheets and left the room barefoot, Elfriede was breathing hard—not snoring, it was a sort of squeak. I was covered with sweat, but no one was holding me close.

  I was sleeping deeply, dreaming, and at first I wasn’t there in the dream. There was a pilot, and he was hot. He drank a sip of water, slid his finger under his collar, then prepared to fly the plane in a perfect curve. In the bull’s-eye he saw a red patch in the darkness, a fiery moon, or the star of Bethlehem—this time, however, the Magi wou
ldn’t follow it, there was no newborn king to pay tribute to. And yet in Berlin a young woman with a creamy complexion and red hair, a woman exactly like Maria, had just gone into labor, and in the dark of a cellar that resembled the one in Budengasse a mother whose son was at the front said, Push, I’ll help you, and an instant later the blast of a bomb sent her hurtling backward. The children who were sleeping woke up wailing, the ones awake began to scream, the cellar became a mass grave in which their bodies would be piled up once the lack of oxygen had snuffed them out. Pauline wasn’t there.

  When Maria’s heartbeat stopped, her unborn child lost its only chance to come into the world. It remained floating in the placenta, oblivious that its destiny had been to come out—how strange, one death that contains another.

  Outside, instead, there was oxygen. It fed the flames, which rose dozens of meters and illuminated the now-roofless buildings. In the explosion the rooftops had flown off like Dorothy’s house in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, trees and billboards whirled through the air, and the gaping holes in the houses would have revealed—if someone had peeked inside them—the vices and virtues of their inhabitants: an ashtray still dirty with cigarette butts or a vase full of flowers that remained standing though the walls around it collapsed. Neither men nor animals, however, were in any condition to peek—they were curled up on the floor or had already been burned to cinders, black statues captured in the act of drinking, of praying, of caressing their wife to make up after a foolish argument. Night-shift workers had melted in the boiling water of the burst furnaces, prison inmates had been buried alive under the rubble before having finished serving their time, and at the zoo the lions and tigers lay still, looking like they had been stuffed.

  Ten thousand feet overhead, the bombardier could still see that incandescent light in the bull’s-eye and drink another sip of water and undo a button, could tell himself that the light was nothing but a cluster of stars—that was why, although dead, they continued to shine.