My Enemy's Cradle (16 page)

"And do they? Are the rooms searched?"

"I don't know. I suppose so. I've only been here two months. I've never noticed anything disturbed."

I hid the bundle beneath my coat at the bottom of the wardrobe.

"...and what we eat, for God's sake," Leona was saying. "He was a chicken breeder, you know that? He acts as if we're a bunch of brood hens and he's experimenting with the feed to see how big he can get the eggs. Well, you'll see. It's almost time—let's go down and get in line for the first sitting. Here, help me up."

I gave Leona my hand and she grunted as I pulled her up. I glanced back at the wardrobe—I would find a better hiding place later, when I was alone.

Dozens of girls chattered softly by the closed glass doors leading to the dining room, their hands fluttering up from their round bellies like rising doves, then settling back down protectively. "This is Anneke," Leona told the girls we joined. "She's going to be here for a while, so let's be nice and not scare her too much her first night."

I could see right away what Leona had warned me about. The French and Belgian girls were clustered with the girls from Holland, and the German girls were pointedly ignoring us. In the dining room, we sat together, but we filled only one end of the table; there were German girls at the other end, separated from us by several empty seats, and the air from them was icy.

"Where are the older ones, the ones who are married?" I asked Leona.

"Oh, the
Frauen
... never at first sitting ... that's why we come early. They're over in the crèche. They bring their other children here for the food. They'll put them to bed and then they'll come over and talk about their husbands, like old cows chewing their cuds. Would you pass the bread basket?"

I handed it to her and she pointed into it. "See? Just last week ... that Himmler. Oh, those lovely white dinner rolls we used to get. Now it's only wholemeal bread."

Servers were at our table now, setting down platters of food. A groan went up at the bowls of shredded cabbage.

"This is the worst," Leona explained. "Two-thirds of our vegetables have to be eaten raw—that's the new rule—and that includes sauerkraut. Can you imagine? Nobody eats it, of course."

I hadn't seen so much food in a year. Bowls brimming with vegetables, roasted potatoes, onion pies. Pitchers of milk, the heavy cream stirred down, waiting to be poured into tall glasses. There was real butter for the bread. The kitchen girls served everyone a single portion of the roast pork, but you could help yourself to seconds of everything else. I ate until I was ready to burst, and then when an
Obsttorte
was offered, I ate that, too, and still I wanted to eat and to fill my arms with the food, stuff my pockets. All that food made me careless.

Another girl from the Netherlands, Resi, the one who was overdue, was asking me questions about Schiedam. She had gone to university with a girl from there—Juul Kuyper—did I know her? I didn't.

"Maybe she was ahead of you in school. How old are you?"

"Nineteen," I answered, then realized my mistake.

"Oh, well, she would be twenty-one by now, like me," Resi said. Then she went on to describe her friend, but I couldn't really listen.

When an announcement was made that there would be a film shown in the dayroom after the second dinner sitting, I was still shaken. Leona told me she was too tired to stay up and I told her I was, too, after my long day of travel.

Up in our room, Leona pulled her clothes off. I had never seen a pregnant woman's body before and I couldn't help staring at her swollen belly, shot through with purple stretch marks, her heavy breasts resting on it. I tried to picture my own body swelling up, ready to burst. With Isaak's child. Isaak's.

"Awful, isn't it?" she laughed, patting her huge roundness. "I'm a victim of my own lust!"

"Did you love him?"

Leona struggled to pull her nightgown over her middle and fell into bed with a huge sigh, like an old woman. "That night I did. He was a wonderful kisser, I'll give him that much. God, I miss kissing, don't you? He took his time with it. He had chocolate and cinema passes. I had too much beer. And I loved him that night." She sighed, then shook herself. "Well. Just look where it's got me."

"You're almost through it."

"I am. And I'll go home as soon as I can. As soon as they cut that cord." Leona read my glance. "If I let myself hold him or feed him, it'll be worse."

"You're afraid he'll feel like he's yours, then? How do you think of him now?"

"Like a medical condition. Something to get over. Don't look at me that way—you don't know yet."

"You're right. I'm sorry."

"I know how it sounds. But my first roommate gave me that advice—you can't think of it as a baby. Otherwise you could go mad from the pain. Some of them do."

"Go mad?"

"You can hear them. Screaming when they take the babies away. You never hear a sound from the labor ward, and you know that's got to be as loud. But you hear their screams afterward—the one's who've made the mistake of holding them. You'd think someone's tearing off parts of their bodies." Leona eased herself up on her elbows. "Well, tell me about your soldier."

The word brought him back to me for a split second: that one, the
Oberschütze,
with his pale bristly hair and his ham-red face and his rage. My heart kicked. "My soldier." I pictured Anneke's boyfriend instead, turning his blue eyes away from me in the bakery, with that strange look of worry, it had seemed. Or despair. "His name was Karl. He's gone. Transferred."

"Is he going to take the baby?"

"What? It'll be adopted."

"Well, of course it will be adopted; they certainly won't let you keep it. But the Germans will pressure him to take the baby home to his wife—can you imagine those wives, taking their husband's little souvenirs into their families and raising them?—that's the first option. If he's married, that is. Is he?"

"No." I felt the sweat begin to form on my back—all these details.

"Then they'll give your baby to a good Nazi family." She laughed bitterly. "A good Nazi family. I hate thinking about that part. Well. What did you think of your first night?"

"It was all right," I said. "I liked the girls we sat with, anyway."

"Be careful," Leona said. "You'd be surprised how fast things can go bad around here. A hundred women locked up together, none of us virgins and no men—that's bad enough. Then add a bunch of patriotic German girls—Hitler's whores. Just be careful."

She turned off the lamp and instantly the dark brought me back to that alley, to those knuckles in my mouth.

"I like the
rolladen
up," Leona said. "It's not allowed, but if the lights are out they don't know. I like to see the stars. But you can leave them closed, if you'd rather."

"No, open. Open." I rolled the wooden slats into their casing and looked out. The sky was familiar, at least—these same stars glittered over Holland tonight. These were my stars, and I really wasn't that far from home. I lay back and closed my eyes. Immediately I saw the other stars, the yellow ones. They were mine, too. And I was very far from home.

I awoke screaming. Leona was beside me, squeezing my hands. "A bad dream," she said. "Are you all right now?"

I shivered; my nightgown was wet, clinging to me. Leona pulled my coverlet up to my neck. "Can you go back to sleep?"

I couldn't. When I closed my eyes, I couldn't breathe—the stench of motor oil covered my face like a blanket. When I opened them, I saw the mountains outside my window—immense, the tops white and jagged as broken teeth, glowing in the moonlight.

I wanted Isaak, wanted his body next to me. I saw his face, so pained: "I can't love anyone." A sob built like a wave in my chest and I got up quietly and found his drawing pencil on my bureau. Clutching it, I got back into bed and tried to think about him coming for me. It wouldn't be for at least a week or two; until then, I would have to get through these nights. The days would be easier—I would only have to stay out of the staff's way, try to talk to as few of the girls as possible, and take advantage of the resources here.

For one thing, the babies. I lay in bed, calmer, imagining it: There were babies in this building, dozens of them, a richness of pleasure. As soon as I could, I would find out if I could visit the nursery to see them. Perhaps even to hold one.

I watched the sunrise—so normal, as though the sun wasn't shocked to find itself in Germany. A bell rang. Leona stirred and opened her eyes. She looked as though it was a surprise to see me in the next bed but then she smiled, as though it was a nice surprise. She reached over to her night table and found her watch. "We'd better go down."

We dressed; Leona in her vast shift and me in the skirt I'd worn yesterday. This morning the waistband seemed tighter—was that possible already? Or was it just that enormous meal?

Downstairs, a line of girls stretched along the hall, more than had been there the evening before.

"What time do they open the dining room?" I asked.

"Oh, it's open," Leona said. She was still buttoning her sweater. "It's just weigh-in day."

"Weigh-in day?"

"Every Saturday morning. They set up the scales at the dining-room doors ... ruins your appetite, I can tell you that."

The girls chatted and the line moved forward steadily. My mouth tasted of metal, and a bloom of perspiration shivered down my spine.

"Frau Klaus. Try not to make eye contact," Leona advised me in a low voice as we got near. "Don't even smile at her. Once I ... if she singles you out for anything..."

Leona got on the scale and groaned at her weight.

And then it was my turn.

"Name?"

I told her.

"Step out of your shoes. Hurry up, there are girls waiting."

"Fifty-nine kilos," Frau Klaus announced and then noted it. I stepped off the scale and moved next to Leona.

"My belly alone weighs fifty-nine kilos!" she sighed.

Please call the next girl, I willed.

"Wait."

I turned slowly, pretending not to know who she was calling.

She frowned and lifted a paper accusingly. "Fifty-three and a half kilos on your last weighing." She looked back down at the form. "Eleven days ago."

I tried to look amazed. "I've been eating everything in sight," I said, as agreeably as I could. The chatter of the other girls had disappeared entirely.

"Five and a half kilos. That's impossible, of course."

And then I thought of something. "Wait," I said. "Are you sure it says fifty-three? Because the nurse who weighed me said fifty-eight and a half last week. I remember, because it was more than I'd thought."

Frau Klaus stood, my chart in her hand.

"Couldn't that three really be an eight?"

Frau Klaus shook her head, pinched her mouth down into a thin white line. "Where were you weighed?"

I realized that I didn't know. Where had Anneke gone that day? "In the Netherlands," I said.

She looked at me hard for another moment.

"They seemed to be very careless there," I confided. "Not organized, like here."

She nodded, satisfied. "Incompetent." She sat back down and changed the three into an eight with her pen. "Next girl. Name?"

In the dining room, Leona handed me a plate and I took it with both hands so it wouldn't shake. Once again, I was struck by the sheer abundance of food—in a year and a half, I had forgotten that food could be offered as choices. Platters of fresh fruit, real eggs, muesli, cheeses. Three kinds of jam. Again I had the urge to take everything, to fill myself. At either end of the buffet table sat a large tureen of porridge.

"Porridge at every breakfast," Leona muttered. "And if you don't eat it, you'll hear about it."

"They keep track of what you eat here?"

"Just the damned porridge ... Himmler's got an obsession. The rumor is he has to eat it because he suffers from terrible stomachaches, which I hope is true. So I guess he feels everyone else should eat it, too."

"I don't mind it," said Aimée, behind us in line. She was Belgian, and seemed as sweet as her name. "Back home in my village, people would be grateful for it."

Next to her was the other girl from Belgium. "Me, too," she agreed. "I don't mind anything here. It was much worse at the home in Liège."

We took seats at the table—I was between Leona and Aimée. "What was wrong there?" I asked her, low enough that the serving girls pouring tea at the end of the table couldn't overhear.

"For one thing, the doctor there was only a dentist!" Aimée pointed at her belly. "Does this look like a tooth to you?"

"None of the staff was professional," the other girl agreed. "And it was filthy. They found bits of wire in the babies' broth once, and I heard they'd let the chamber pots in the nursery overflow before they'd empty them."

"And you couldn't keep anything valuable," Aimée added. "Everything was stolen. The nurses just took whatever they wanted—we were always running out of soap and linens—and they'd steal half the food. No, say what you want about the Germans—at least they run the homes right over here."

"Oh, there's plenty of stealing here, too," Leona said. "My last roommate came here with a fur coat—God knows why in the summer—and it disappeared right out of our room. She didn't even trust
me
after that ... slept with her things under her pillow."

I thought of my father's letter and the photograph at the bottom of the wardrobe. Maybe I could bury them outside.

Suddenly Greetje, sitting across from us, threw down her spoon and stood. "I've had it!" she cried. She dumped her bowl of porridge onto the tablecloth. "I can't look at another bowl of this shit again. I say we boycott it and send a message to Himmler."

There was a second of shocked silence, as if the other girls were thinking what I was thinking. But Greetje's face said,
Well, what are they going to do about it?
She was right: We were geese about to lay golden eggs, safe at least until we gave birth. Then the other girls laughed, and a few others dumped their porridge onto the table, the gray clumps spattering over the white linen and the silver sugar bowls.