At the Wolf's Table

by Rosella Postorino

  “Shhh, get some sleep now. Sleep, because by tomorrow I want you all better.”

  Perhaps it was from an intestinal infection, or only because his digestive system had been compromised by months of hardship, but he couldn’t keep anything down. I would make him meat broth, when I managed to get my hands on any meat, and those four spoonfuls he was able to swallow would be expelled immediately. His excrement was liquid, greenish, and let off an odor I never would have believed could be produced by a human body.

  We set him up in Pauline’s room and at night I would stay there in a chair beside his bed. At times the little girl would wake up and come looking for me. “Are you coming to sleep with me?”

  “Sweetheart, I need to stay with Gregor.”

  “If you don’t, will he die?”

  “As long as I’m here with him, I swear to you that he won’t die.”

  Some mornings I would wake up because the sunlight was hitting my eyelids and I would find her curled up on top of him. She wasn’t our daughter, but I might still count her breaths as she slept.

  Gregor’s debilitated body had nothing in common with my husband. His skin had another smell—but Pauline couldn’t know that. Keeping that man alive was my only purpose in life. I would tuck him in, wash his face, his arms, his chest, his penis and testicles, his legs, his feet, dipping a cloth into the footbath basin, which Anne only prepared for herself in the evenings, now that I had stopped collecting rubble to avoid leaving him alone. I would trim his nails, shave his beard, cut his hair, accompany him to the bathroom, wipe him. At times he unexpectedly regurgitated, coughed, spat into my hand. I never felt disgust—I loved him, and that was that. Gregor had become my child.

  The minute he woke up Pauline would wake up too. In a low voice, so he wouldn’t hear her, the little girl would say, “As long as we’re here, Rosa, I swear to you that he won’t die.”

  Gregor didn’t die. He got better.

  * * *

  “YOU KNOW, WHEN Agnes told me she’d called you and that you were coming, it reminded me of something that happened during the war. Maybe I already told you about it in a letter.”

  “I don’t think so, Gregor,” I say with fake reproach. “You wrote practically nothing to me about the war.”

  He grasps the fake reproach and laughs. “Still rubbing it in my face. Unbelievable!” And since he laughs, he coughs. The lines on his forehead grow thicker. The dark splotches on his face quiver.

  “Do you want some water?” On the nightstand is the glass, still half full.

  “We didn’t know what we could write. It was dangerous to show you were discouraged, and I was so discouraged.…”

  “Yes, I know, don’t worry. I was joking. What is it you remembered?”

  “There were two women. They came looking for their husbands. They’d come I don’t know how many kilometers on foot, hundreds of kilometers, in the snow, sleeping out in the cold, just to see them. But once they arrived they discovered their husbands weren’t there. You should have seen the looks on their faces.”

  “So where were they?”

  “I have no idea. At another camp, probably. Or they’d been taken to Germany, or maybe they were dead. Who knows? They weren’t among our prisoners. The wives walked all the way back, in the same snow and the same cold, without learning anything about them. Can you believe it?”

  When he speaks more, he gets breathless. Maybe I should make him not talk, stay here with him in silence, take his hand—if only I dared touch him.

  “But why did that come to your mind? It’s not like I came here on foot through the snow.”

  “True.”

  “Besides, you’re not my husband anymore.”

  What an unhappy thing I’ve said. I didn’t mean to be rude.

  I stand up, walk around the room. There’s a locker in which Agnes has probably stored towels, a change of pajamas, everything he needs. Why isn’t Agnes back yet?

  “Where are you going?” Gregor asks.

  “Nowhere, I’m right here.”

  I trip over his slippers at the foot of the bed before sitting back down.

  “Even if you didn’t walk through the snow, you took at least a three-and-a-half-hour trip to come say goodbye to me.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Why do you think people need to say goodbye?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You came all the way to Hannover to do it. You must know the reason why.”

  “Well … maybe people need nothing to be left hanging. I think.”

  “So you came here to tie up the loose ends?”

  The question catches me off guard.

  “Rosa. We’ve been left hanging since ’40, you and I.”

  * * *

  WE LEFT EACH other by mutual consent, and it was very painful. People normally say, “We decided by mutual consent,” to mean they didn’t suffer from it, or that they suffered less, but it’s not true. Sure, it’s possible to suffer more, if one of the two can’t come to terms with it, if they hurt the other intentionally, but separation is inevitably a painful experience. Especially in cases where the people have been given a second chance, against all odds. The two of us had lost each other, and after the war we had found each other again.

  It lasted three years, then we split up. I don’t understand those who say, It had been over for a long time. It’s impossible to establish the precise moment when a marriage ends, because a marriage ends when the spouses decide it’s over, or at least one of the two decides it is. Marriage is a fluctuating system—it moves in waves, it can always end and always begin again, it has no linear progression, nor does it follow logical paths. The lowest point in a marriage doesn’t necessarily mean it’s over; one day you’re in the pits and the next day you’re soaring again without knowing how it happened, and you can’t remember a reason, not a single one, why you should separate. It’s not even a question of pros and cons, of pluses and minuses. Everything considered, all marriages are destined to end and each marriage has the right—the duty—to survive.

  Ours held together for a while out of gratitude. We had received a miracle, we couldn’t squander it. We were the chosen ones, were destined to be. With time, even the enthusiasm of a miracle dampens. We had thrown ourselves headfirst into rebuilding our marriage because that was the word on everyone’s lips back then: rebuilding. Leaving the past behind, forgetting. But I never forgot, and neither did Gregor. If only we had shared our memories, I told myself at times. We couldn’t. To us it would have seemed like squandering our miracle. Instead we tried to protect it, to protect each other. For the rest of those years we were trying so hard to protect each other that we ended up with nothing but that: barricades.

  * * *

  “HI, DAD.”

  In walks a young woman with long, straight hair parted down the middle, a light-colored linen dress with shoulder straps, sandals on her feet.

  “Hello,” she says, seeing me.

  I stand up.

  “Margot,” Gregor says.

  The young woman comes over to me and I’m just about to introduce myself when Agnes comes back. “Oh, honey, you’re here? And the boy?”

  “I left him at my mother-in-law’s.” She looks out of breath, Gregor’s daughter, a veneer of perspiration on her forehead.

  “This is Rosa,” Agnes says.

  “Welcome.” Margot offers me her hand. I shake it. She has Gregor’s eyes.

  “Thank you. I’m happy to meet you,” I say, smiling. “I saw you in a photograph. You’d just been born.”

  “So you sent around pictures of me without my permission, huh?” she said to her father, grinning and giving him a kiss.

  * * *

  GREGOR SENT ME pictures of his baby girl and hadn’t thought it might hurt my feelings—he just wanted to make me still feel part of his life. It was an affectionate gesture—not protective, but affectionate. He wasn’t protecting me any longer, had forgotten how it was done. He had married Agnes, I had
gone to their wedding, had wished them all the best and done so sincerely. Never mind that I felt sad on the train back to Berlin. The fact that he wasn’t alone anymore didn’t make me feel any less lonely.

  Wolfsburg, they announced over the loudspeaker on the way back, Wolfsburg station. I started. How had I not noticed it on the way there? Maybe I’d been sleeping. I had passed through the town of the wolf to separate myself once and for all from my husband.

  * * *

  “I BROUGHT YOU a present, Dad.”

  Margot takes a folded sheet of grid-ruled paper out of her purse and hands it to Gregor.

  “Wait,” Agnes says, “I’ll open it for you.”

  It’s a crayon drawing. There’s a bald man lying in a bed beneath a sky of pink clouds. Growing between the legs of the bed are flowers with petals in a rainbow of colors.

  “It’s from your grandson,” Margot says.

  I’m there beside them. I can’t help but read what’s written on it. It says: GRANDPA, I MISS YOU. GET WELL SOON.

  “Do you like it?” Margot asks.

  Gregor doesn’t reply.

  “Think we can hang it up, Mom? Should we hang it up?”

  “Hmm.… We’d need a pushpin, or some tape…”

  “Dad, aren’t you going to say anything?”

  He’s too touched to reply, it’s clear to see, and I feel out of place right now, with this family that isn’t mine. I move away, go to the window, look out at the courtyard between the slats of the rolling shutters. There are patients in wheelchairs, nurses pushing them along. There are people sitting on benches; it’s hard to say whether they’re sick or healthy.

  * * *

  THE FIRST TIME Gregor tried to make love to me again, after all that time, I withdrew. I didn’t say no, didn’t make an excuse, I simply tensed. Gregor stroked me sweetly, believing it was shyness—we hadn’t touched each other for too long a time. Contact with his body was a habit, I handled it with experience, with practicality. The war had given back to me the body of a veteran, and I had enough youth and energy to take care of him. But we hadn’t touched each other with desire—desire was a feeling I had forgotten. We had to learn it all over again, slowly but surely, with gradual practice—that was what Gregor believed. I thought it was desire that brought about intimacy, and immediately, like a sudden jerk, but maybe the opposite was also possible—starting with intimacy, reappropriating it until grasping desire, like when you wake up and try to grasp a dream you’ve just had, but it’s already vanished; you remember the atmosphere but not a single image. Sure, it might be possible, certainly other wives had succeeded. How they managed to, I have no idea. Maybe ours hadn’t been the right approach.

  46

  The doctor doesn’t wear glasses. When he comes in I check my watch. It’s already late afternoon. Agnes and Margot chat with him, talking about the World Cup, then about Margot’s son, whom the doctor must have met at some point in this room. He’s very friendly, has an athletic build and a baritone voice. I’m not introduced and he doesn’t take notice of me. He asks us to step outside, he needs to check on Gregor.

  In the hallway, Agnes asks me, “Are you staying over at our place, then?”

  “Thanks, I’ve booked a hotel.”

  “I don’t see why, Rosa, there’s plenty of room. Besides, you’d be keeping me company.”

  Yes, we could keep each other company, but I’m accustomed to living alone, I don’t want to share anyone else’s space.

  “I’d rather not be a bother, really. Anyway, I’ve already booked, it’s a little hotel here in the area. It’s convenient.”

  “Well, remember: if you change your mind at any time, just call me and I’ll come pick you up.”

  “If you don’t want to be alone, Mom, you can sleep at our place.”

  Why is Margot saying that? To make me feel at fault?

  The doctor joins us. He’s finished. Agnes asks for an update on Gregor’s condition. Margot listens carefully and then asks her own question. I’m not part of the family so I go back into the room.

  * * *

  GREGOR IS TRYING to roll down his left sleeve. His right arm is bare, its sleeve raised to allow the IV needles to penetrate his vein. The other, instead, is covered with blue cotton. Blue must be Agnes’s favorite color. Maybe Gregor rolled it up to scratch himself. He has dry skin streaked with white lines left behind by his fingernails.

  “We weren’t left hanging,” I tell him without sitting down. “We moved on.”

  Gregor keeps trying but can’t roll the sleeve down. I don’t help him, don’t dare touch him.

  “You came back, I took care of you, you got better, we reopened the office, we rebuilt the house, we moved on.”

  “Is that what you came here to tell me?” He gives up, lets go of his pajama sleeve. “Is this your goodbye?” His voice is raw, hoarse.

  “Don’t you agree?”

  He sighs. “We weren’t the same as before.”

  “But who was the same as before, Gregor? Who managed that?”

  “Some people did.”

  “Are you trying to tell me other people were better than us, than me? I already knew that.”

  “I never made it an issue of better or worse.”

  “And you were wrong to.”

  “Did you come here to tell me I was wrong, Rosa?”

  “I didn’t come here to tell you anything, Gregor.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “If you didn’t want me here you could have said so! You could’ve had your wife tell me over the phone!” I mustn’t get angry. It’s pathetic, an old woman getting angry.

  Here she comes, his wife. She rushes in, looking alarmed.

  “Rosa,” she says, as though my name contained all the questions.

  She goes over to Gregor, rolls down his pajama sleeve. “Everything okay?” she asks him.

  Then she turns to me. “I heard you two shouting.”

  I’m the only one who shouted. Gregor wouldn’t be able to, not with those lungs. It’s me Agnes heard.

  “I don’t want you to get tired,” she tells her husband. She’s talking to me—I’m the one tiring him.

  “Excuse me,” I say, and walk out.

  I pass by the doctor and Margot, don’t say anything to them, walk down the hall, don’t know where I’m going. The neon lights are giving me a headache. On the stairs I feel like I’m falling, but instead of clinging to the handrail I grab the chain tucked beneath my shirt collar, pull it out, clutch it in my fist. The metal is cold and hard. Only when I reach the end of the stairs do I open my hand. On my palm, the wedding band attached to the chain has left behind two circles.

  * * *

  I HAD NEVER been to her house before. All I had to do was push on the door to enter a dark room—there was a single, narrow window—with a table and a small sofa. The chairs had been knocked over amid broken dishes and glasses, the credenza drawers yanked out and dumped onto the floor. In the half-light, the gaps in which they had once been inserted looked like burial recesses waiting to be occupied.

  The SS had turned everything upside down. So that was how it happened, how someone was uprooted. I was left with objects, the need to touch what had belonged to Elfriede now that she was gone.

  Taking a deep breath, I stepped forward until I reached a curtain. Hesitantly I pushed it aside, a feeling of trespassing. In the bedroom, linens and clothes were piled on the wooden flooring. Torn off the mattress, the sheets were a heap of rags, perched atop it a pillow ripped apart at the seams.

  The world had broken down once Elfriede was gone, and I had been left in that world without even a body to grieve over, yet again.

  I knelt on top of the clothes, stroked them. I had never touched her stony face, her cheekbones, or even those bruises on her legs that I had been the cause of. I’ll stay by your side, I had sworn to her in the barracks washroom. And at that moment we had ceased to be as giggly as schoolgirls.

  Stretching out on the floor
, I scooped up the clothing around me, gathered it beneath my neck, my face pressed against the floor. They didn’t have a scent, not hers, or I had already forgotten it.

  When you lose someone, the pain you feel is for yourself, the pain that you’ll never see them again, never hear their voice again, that without them, you think, you’ll never make it. Pain is selfish. That was what made me angry.

  But as I lay there amid her clothes, the vastness of that tragic end revealed itself in its entirety. It was such a huge, unbearable event that it drowned out the pain, engulfed it, expanded until it occupied every centimeter of the universe, became proof of what mankind was capable of.

  I had learned the dark color of Elfriede’s blood just to avoid seeing my own. The sight of someone else’s blood is okay, is it? she had asked me.

  All at once I was hungry for air. I rose to my feet and, almost to calm myself, began to pick up the articles of clothing one by one, shaking them out to smooth the wrinkles, hanging them in their place. How absurd, tidying up, as though there were any need to, as though she might return. I folded the linens, stored them in the wardrobe drawers, pulled the sheets back onto the mattress and tucked them in, to then take care of the torn pillow.

  It was when I slid my arm into the pillowcase to smooth down the stuffing that I found it—something cold and hard. I pulled it free from the rough wool and saw it. A gold ring: a wedding band.

  At the sight of it, I flinched. Was Elfriede married too? Who was the man she loved? Why hadn’t she ever told me?

  So many things we had hidden from each other. Is it possible to love each other amid deceit?

  I stared at the ring for a long time, then dropped it into an empty jewelry box on the bedside table. Sticking out of an open drawer was a metal case. A cigarette case. I opened it. There was one left, the last cigarette she hadn’t smoked. I took it out.

  Looking at it between my fingers—the ring finger clad in the wedding band Gregor had given me one day five years earlier—I remembered Elfriede’s hand drawing a cigarette to her lips, her pointer and middle fingers letting go for a second, spreading like scissors, to then collect it again during the hour-long waits in the courtyard, or the day I hid in the washroom with her. I remembered her hand with ringless fingers.