The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  He gazes at the red indentations the garters have left on her thighs. He likes these.

  I'm a busy man, he says petulantly. It's hard enough for me to take time from my schedule to come here. If you should require something in the future, you ask me first, understand? I expect you to be here at all times, whenever I need you.

  Anna nods.

  The Obersturmführer gives her a grin: all is forgiven, for now. He draws her to him; he cups her breasts and lets them fall, cups them and lets them fall.

  Lovely, he says, such delicious bouncy breasts, the very ideal of breasts.

  He pinches a nipple, then rubs his fingertips together, blinking at them.

  What's this? he says.

  Anna flushes. Downstairs, Trudie is crying. Although the child has been weaned for months, Anna's body still responds to her pleas for food.

  It's milk, she mumbles.

  What?

  Milk! snaps Anna, humiliated past caring whether his tone is one of surprise or disgust. Perhaps, if it is the latter, he will take himself away.

  The Obersturmführer laughs.

  Really? he says. And the girl nearly two. Well, Anna, you've just made my evening easier: I can have my dinner here. Kill two birds with one stone, as they say.

  He takes her nipple into his mouth, drawing milk through the aureole in thin threads. Anna closes her eyes, pretending that it is the child, only the child, but the sensation is wrong, he uses his tongue rather than his lips, and his stubble prickles against her skin. Her hands, rising in instinctive quest to his dark head, encounter coarse, close-cropped hair; she knots them together behind her back, swaying for balance on her painful ankle, staring at the wall. She has learned another lesson from the Obersturmführer this evening: she will no longer make deliveries to the quarry. It is too dangerous to even contemplate. She has other mouths to feed.

  25

  COME HERE, ANNA, THE OBERSTURMFÜHRER SAYS.

  Anna complies. She stands before him, as usual, as he sits on the side of Mathilde's bed. This is how the game always begins. What Anna can never guess at are the middles or the endings. He will bring a phonograph player from the camp, place a forbidden jazz record on its turntable, and order her to strip to it. Ach, never mind, he will say, laughing at her artless burlesque. Or he will command her to stand on a chair, naked and blindfolded, while he circles her, touching her here and there with teeth or tongue or baton. He has poured bourbon onto her shirtwaist and suckled her through the whiskey-soaked cloth. Yes, the Obersturmführer is endlessly inventive in this wearisome schoolboy fashion. Has he gleaned these scenarios from the forbidden books in his father's bedside drawer? Anna pictures the Obersturmführer as an adolescent, hunched over such a manual in the WC, the door barred, his shorts around his ankles, eyes bulging, and she feels the same cold revulsion as she would for worms writhing on the sidewalk after a rain. She waits now for some indication as to what he has devised this time.

  Tonight he wants her passive, to remain still so he can mold her in his hands like bread. His breathing thickens as he undoes Anna's blouse, unbuttons her skirt, rolls the silk stockings he has brought her down her legs. Anna moves only to kick them free of her ankles. Perhaps he will bind her with them, as he once did, then removing a straight razor from his pocket and shaving her all over: legs, arms, armpits, pubic bone. The hair grew back rough, in sharp bristles that reminded Anna of those on a pig's hide. It itched for days.

  Raise your arms above your head, the Obersturmführer commands. Then turn around. Like a ballerina. As a girl, did you want to be a ballerina? Of course you did; all little girls do. Yes, like that. So I can see you.

  The Obersturmführer's voice, while engaged in such play, drops to a deeper register; normally crisp, his consonants soften like chocolate melted in the pan. The tone makes Anna think of rich, dark cake, a too-sweet dessert that she would cram into her mouth, helpless to stop, until she vomited it up.

  He pulls her to him by the hips, positioning her between his knees. Anna can't contain a gasp: his hands are, as always, cold. He lightly bites the flesh above her bellybutton, shaking his head like a dog. Anna feels him grin against her stomach. But when he slides a finger into her, clinically, like a doctor, and pushes her away a few inches so he can watch her face, his expression is grave.

  You are the most willing woman I've ever known, he says. It's as though you have some eternal wellspring inside you—here.

  He crooks the finger. Anna strains not to react with a sound, a blink, an arch of the back, a moan. She stiffens her spine against her head's instinctive loll.

  But the Obersturmführer knows. Yes, here, he says, this one spot, rough as a cat's tongue. You like that, don't you?

  He wiggles his finger, as though beckoning to an adjutant, a prisoner, to her: Come.

  How very strange to be a woman, he muses, springing himself free of his regulation briefs and pulling Anna onto the bed; poor women, everything hidden from them, on the inside. You see, he adds as he rolls grinning on top of her, I know you better than you know yourself.

  Anna thinks that this is true. And that perhaps it is at these moments that she hates him the most, for robbing her of her own familiar flesh by making it respond in such a way, as though it is no longer hers to command.

  Every time he leaves, after Trudie is safely in bed, Anna punishes her traitorous body with lye soap and a pumice stone. She fills the bath with water so hot that her skin, that white sheath with its dark freckles that the Obersturmführer finds so appealing, will surely peel off like that of a boiled tomato. Standing nude in the bedroom, she slaps her face, stomach, thighs, but this only reminds her of other activities the Obersturmführer enjoys. She digs her nails into her lower lip, drawing blood. She touches herself between the legs and examines her fingertips: dry when she does it.

  One night Anna fetches the sewing bag from Mathilde's bureau and sits naked on the toilet, a hand mirror placed between her feet. She licks the thread and slides it through the needle, her eyes already watering as she imagines pressing it against that tenderest of flesh: how sharp it will be, how cold. Despite her rehearsal, the reality is more painful than she imagines; tears spurt, and she drops the needle, hearing it land with a tiny clink! on the mirror. She is too cowardly; she can't go through with it. Instead, she contents herself by picturing the Obersturmführer's reaction to finding her sewn shut, the stitches black and clumsy against the dark pink folds.

  But he steals even this poor comfort from her through a story he tells her one December evening, after returning from a trip that has prevented him from visiting the bakery for two weeks. Anna doesn't know where he has been, but he is particularly insatiable, having been deprived of his pleasures for so long. Dispensing with the scarves and razors, the whiskey and the gimmicks, he takes her three times, always from behind. Anna wonders, as she braces her palms against the wall to keep her head from being bashed into it, whether this predilection is peculiar to the Obersturmführer or if all men have a secret fondness for this position, the woman anonymous, merely a back and jiggling buttocks and a hank of hair, the man pumping like a dog.

  When he has finished with her physically, the Obersturmführer again begins speaking, as though resuming a conversation. Anna has become accustomed to this; she should even welcome it, as nothing more is required of her than that she nestle against him with her head pillowed on his chest. But dear God, he is so boring! Complaints about the starchy food; the trivia of his domestic routine—particularly laundry, the Obersturmführer has a fetish about the whiteness of his shirts; indignant analysis of whether his adjutant's smile is insolent; on and on. When Anna envisions hell, she suspects it will look just like this: a gray box of a room in which she is trapped with this man while he talks and talks and talks for all eternity.

  Sometimes, if the Obersturmführer appears sufficiently caught up in what he is saying, Anna dozes. At other times, such as now, she mentally lists the maternal chores that have yet to be fulfilled: Trudie m
ust be fed, bathed, tucked in, and lied to. Every night the child poses the same question, making a sort of game out of it. Where is Tante Mathilde? she asks, and Anna patiently repeats a version of the same story she has told the bakery's patrons: Mathilde has been placed by the Work Bureau in an officers' dining hall in Hamburg. Some men needed her to come and make bread for them by the sea, Anna explains to Trudie, and each time the child gazes at the ceiling, says Oh, rubs her blanket against her cheek, and falls asleep. Just like that.

  But this evening, Anna's list of tasks is interrupted by a word the Obersturmführer utters an inch from her ear. Auschwitz. So he has been in Poland, then. The Obersturmführer has mentioned Auschwitz before, since he has been arranging transports of Jewish prisoners from Buchenwald to this bigger camp. (The time this takes, which could be spent on other, more worthy disciplinary causes! The hours of maintaining the camp records!) Anna also knows about Auschwitz from the rumors contained in the prisoners' condoms. And rumors they must be, of course; it is beyond belief, what the prisoners say. Marching the Jews straight from the trains to gas chambers, the crematoria? Even the SS wouldn't be so insane as to squander such a massive labor force in the middle of a war, particularly given the invasion of Mother Russia. No, this must be the invention of a mind deranged from overwork and starvation. Such tales grow from such conditions, even as mushrooms will sprout from a pile of dung.

  Nonetheless, the repetition of the word makes Anna pay attention, for once, to the Obersturmführer's monologue.

  I'm sorry, I didn't catch what you just said, she murmurs.

  The Obersturmführer blinks at her as if one of the pillows has spoken; then, looking pleased, he rotates his damaged shoulder beneath Anna's head, joggling her a bit closer. The smell of him, meat and smoke and his Kölnischwasser, 4711, drifts from beneath his arm.

  I was just remarking what a help it will be to us in our own experiments, he repeats, the chance to watch Mengele at work. Of course, our chaps mostly prevent outbreaks, preserve the healthy, instead of making great scientific strides. We don't have the equipment for it, for one thing. But we do the best we can; we do our part with what limited resources we have.

  And what is it you do? Anna asks.

  Oh, the usual. We're trying to develop an inoculation against typhus, for instance—though that hasn't been quite successful yet, as most of the specimens die. But we have made some progress in curing the homosexual disease—you know what this is? You do? You are a constant surprise to me, Anna! Well, as I said, the advances are very small but perhaps significant in the long run, involving castration, that kind of thing. Which is why, as I was saying, it was so instructive to observe Mengele, since on the day we were allowed into his laboratory, he was performing surgery on the reproductive organs.

  On a homosexual? Anna whispers.

  The Obersturmführer laughs. No, that's nothing to Mengele; that's for pikers like us. He was working on a Jewess, a former prostitute. He was sewing up her—

  The Obersturmführer glances sideways at Anna and clears his throat.

  —her feminine opening. What happens when she is not permitted her monthly flow? Do the internal organs wither, stop functioning? Fascinating prospect. Impractical for use on the general population, but scientifically...

  Anna feels her stomach muscles convulsing. Cold sweat breaks out beneath her arms, on her neck. She puts a hand to her mouth as if stifling a belch.

  Excuse me, she says.

  Certainly. In any case, that's what Mengele is, first and foremost, a scientist, perhaps the Reich's most valuable. Though what a surgeon he must have been as a civilian! We stood in the balcony with a hundred others, mirrors placed all about the table so we could see. He must have been under enormous pressure. And the Jewess kept moving. But did Mengele's hands falter? Not once! Golden hands, as swift as hummingbirds.

  Anna knows she is going to be sick. She sits up, breathing shallowly and staring into the hallway; she focuses on the lamplight, lying in a skewed rectangle on the floor. Then a shadow moves, eclipsing it.

  Trudie? she calls. Go downstairs.

  The shadow doesn't move.

  Anna squints at it. Behind her, the Obersturmführer has fallen silent, a bad sign. Anna sinks back onto his damaged shoulder, as he has not yet signaled that he wishes her to do otherwise.

  She is coming apart, imagining things, seeing shadows that aren't there.

  Even the way Anna sleeps now is unfamiliar to her: each morning she wakes with a stiff neck, unable to turn her head more than a few degrees to either side. She has slept on her back, her arms flung above her head, in a position of abject surrender.

  Trudy, January 1997

  26

  SLEEP DEPRIVATION, TRUDY HAS COME TO REALIZE, IS A form of torture. The Nazis knew this, of course: one of the Gestapo's favored interrogation methods, quieter and less messy than the extraction of fingernails or breaking bones, was to isolate subjects in a room where the lights were never extinguished, shocking them with a low dosage of electricity whenever they started to doze off. Trudy thinks she can now understand, to some degree, why people were so forthcoming with information after only a few days of this treatment. Since the continuation of her project she sleeps little, and when she does her dreams are frequent and bad. She is lost in a forest, diminished to child-size, the hoary trunks of trees towering on all sides: calling out and searching for something she is doomed never to find. Or she is a Berlin hausfrau, wandering from room to room in an endless, unheated flat, rubbing her arms and stooping to peer through windows for something dreadful that never comes. Trudy is ever hungry and always cold; she thrashes awake to find she has kicked the covers onto the floor. And although he hasn't made another appearance per se, Trudy senses that she has also dreamed of Saint Nikolaus; he is somewhere nearby, the officer, engineering bureaucratic destruction at his desk or eating a leg of chicken, wiping on the sleeve of his tunic a mouth glistening with grease.

  Actively afraid of the dreams, Trudy takes to swallowing sleeping pills to ward them off. But the drugs don't work; they keep her perversely alert, sweating and twitchy, staring owl-eyed at the ceiling until, just before dawn, she succumbs to a soupy doze from which she jerks violently awake with the sensation of falling. As Trudy slumps sour-stomached over the kitchen table with her first coffee of the day, watching the sky turn from black to gray to white, she debates over and over the wisdom of proceeding with this project. She vows each time that this afternoon's interview will be her last. Then she gets up and goes into her study, where she listens to a recording of Thomas Mann reading Lotte in Weimar in German while she memorizes the day's questions. She can't give it up now. Whether because of word-of-mouth—Frau Kluge spreading the news of Trudy's sympathetic ear and access to the university's checkbook—or because they have seen her advertisements, Trudy has more subjects than she can handle.

  At first deciding to continue her interviews simply to overcome her fear of doing so, Trudy has discovered her anxiety unfounded: none of them has been as shocking as Frau Kluge's. The women profess relative ignorance of the Nazi regime and regret over its consequences; they speak of bombs, of hunger, of husbands killed or returning terribly changed, disfigured or missing limbs or wraithlike and prone to strange tempers. Of cold and illness and privation. The garden-variety grim tales. So Trudy, far from having her confidence further eroded, feels it growing with each interview. She has a talent, it seems, for interrogation. And although Trudy despises her trust-invoking methods—widening her blue eyes, touching her blond hair, wearing her high black boots, her Stiefel—she also takes acerbic satisfaction from their success. There is more than that, too: sometimes, when lying awake and waiting with dread for sleep to overtake her, Trudy has to admit to a certain comfort, the relief of accepting her genetic predisposition—to her odd sense, in those neat houses, of coming home. Sitting in tidy kitchens much like hers, Trudy rediscovers things she didn't know she had lost: the tang of Teewurst on the tongue, the delicious sibila
nce of a forgotten German word. And as much as she hates herself for it, Trudy finds she is hungry for her subjects' praise, for their delighted clapping over her fluency, for their compliments on her appearance and their treating her—though they are sometimes not much older than she—like one of their own Kinder, their children.

  Mrs. Rose-Grete Fischer, Trudy's seventh subject, is a case in point. She welcomes Trudy and Thomas—who has mercifully agreed to film more interviews, even sounding a bit startled at Trudy's assumption that he wouldn't—into her bungalow with a flutter of hands. While Thomas sets up his equipment in the living room, mumbling happily to himself about the open space and comfortable armchairs, Trudy sits with Rose-Grete in the kitchen, nibbling a slice of Kaffeekuchen. This, too, Trudy has come to expect; most of her subjects have proven more hospitable than Frau Kluge, and although in her current state Trudy doesn't dare eat much for fear of nodding off under Thomas's hot lights, she always takes a little something so as not to offend her hosts.

  Rose-Grete watches Trudy appreciatively from the corner of her eye.

  You are a good girl, she says, to take the time to visit an old lady. To be interested in what she has to say.

  Trudy smiles at her, a trifle uncomfortably. Rose-Grete is a tiny woman, all delicate bones poking at skin the texture of an old peach, and at sixty-eight is still lovely but for the eye patch she wears, which lends her something of a piratical air. Trudy longs to know why she wears it, but as Rose-Grete hasn't brought the subject up, Trudy is determined to act as if she hasn't noticed it either. It is difficult not to stare at the black triangle of cloth, though, and when Trudy concentrates on Rose-Grete's remaining eye, she feels as though her gaze is unnaturally and insultingly forced.