City of Women (32 page)

He shakes his head for a moment. “They’re imbeciles,” he tells her. He’s chewing but doesn’t appear to be tasting. His face is devoid of expression. “Only imbeciles survive, it seems.” And then he asks, “What about you?”

“Me?”

“What is on the agenda for Frau Schröder’s day?”

“Errands.” She pours coffee into his cup, then turns away from his eyes, and starts scraping the skillet with the metal spatula. “Shopping and whatnot.”

“Are you seeing him?”

Sigrid stops, the spatula frozen in her hand. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know where he is right now. I’m sorry, Kaspar. I can’t have this conversation. I simply can’t.” She abandons the skillet in the sink. He says nothing as she pulls on her coat and ties on her scarf. But before she leaves, she is compelled to kiss him quickly on the forehead.

He stops her, taking her arm. “Are you in trouble?” he asks.

She gazes at him. “Yes.”

“How deeply?”

“Deeply enough.”

“So tell me,” he suggests, but she can only shake her head.

“
What
can I tell you, Kaspar?” she asks sadly. “What good could it possibly do?”

To that he has no answer.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I will do my best to keep you out of it.”

But as she turns to go, he still holds on to her arm. “Is he a soldier?” He asks. “There’s no shame, Sigrid. There are plenty of men who’ve simply had enough of this war. If you’re hiding him—”

“Kaspar,” she says, and nearly spills it. Nearly lets the truth burst out of her. But instead she simply shakes her head and removes his hand from her arm. He does not resist.

•   •   •

A
TRAFFIC JAM
on the stairwell. As Sigrid descends, she finds that this is
not only
the morning Frau Granzinger is leaving for the country with her brood and new duty-year girl in formation, but that it is also the morning the Frau Obersturmführer returns from Breslau, now hugely swollen. She watches them collide in the building’s foyer. Frau Granzinger, looming largely in her monstrous traveling cloak and flat-brimmed hat, is herding the children with her usual impatience, hurling orders at the skinny duty-year girl, in a hurry to make it to the trains before the bombers come. The Frau Obersturmführer is accompanied by a teenaged Hitler Jungvolk toting her luggage, who tries in vain to maintain his military posture in front of the skinny girl, as he is shoved aside by the hefty taxi driver handling Granzinger’s steamer trunk.

“
Ah
, Frau
Schröder
,” the Frau Obersturmführer calls to her. Her voice is stiffly cheery. Her face bloated, strained, and pale as lard.

“You’ve
returned,
Frau Obersturmführer,” Sigrid observes, hesitantly.

“Yes.” The woman nods, trying not to mind the jostling from Granzinger’s spawn.

“
Friedrich!
Mind your manners, you little monster,” Granzinger barks, and slaps the boy’s head. “My apologies, Frau Obersturmführer. We’re trying to catch a train.”

“You’re leaving Berlin?”

“For Eberswalde, yes,” Granzinger answers. “Where there are no bombers and no bombs. My sister runs a hotel with her husband. She’s always looking for reliable help with the cleaning and cooking.
Helga! Leave your brother
alone
,
do you
hear?
I’m so sorry, Frau Obersturmführer, but we must be going. I’d say welcome home, only you can
keep
this town, as far as I’m concerned. I grew up here, but I’m done with the place now.” With that, she bustles out the door, shouting at the taxi driver to mind the steamer.

“Up the stairs to the fourth floor,” the young Frau instructs the Jungvolk boy, who only briefly hesitates at the daunting task of hauling the Frau Obersturmführer’s heavy cases up the stairs.

Sigrid falls in step beside the young woman, taking her traveling bag and offering her arm as a crutch.

“I must be heavy as a cow by now,” the Frau Obersturmführer announces with a painful smile.

“What happened?” Sigrid hears herself asks.

“What?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound so inquisitive. But I thought you were going to be
staying
in Breslau. For the birth.”

“I was. But things,” the Frau Obersturmführer tells her, “things didn’t quite work out. My mother, you see, she is not the easiest person to live with. We quarreled. It was silly, really. But there it is. And here
I
am.”

“Yes,” Sigrid agrees. “Here you are.”

•   •   •

I
T TAKES
S
IGRID LONGER
to get to the Kantstrasse than she anticipated. The trains are stalled because of a water main rupture. Or a suicide on the tracks. Or because the Feldgendarmerie are combing the cars for deserters. All of these are theories advanced as absolute fact by Berliners trapped in the underground cans with her. But when the train budges forward, further discussion ceases. The train had stopped, and now it’s moving again. What more does anyone need to say?

When she finds Herr Kozig near the bronze of Wagner across from Fräulein von Hohenhoff’s studio, a frown stamped on his face below the postage-stamp mustache, he has lost the sullen snugness that he cultivated as a U-boat resident of Auntie’s Pension Unsagbar, and is overtly anxious over Sigrid’s tardiness. He is out of his postal uniform, with a rucksack over his shoulder and a bandage wrapped around his head that covers one eye. His clothes are still shabby, but whose aren’t? And now at least his shoes are in decent order. She greets him formally, in a loud enough voice for others waiting at the stop to hear. “So sorry to keep you waiting,” she says, and smiles. “Shall we walk?” Only a few eyes edge briefly in their directions.

“I was worried. I thought you’d been picked up,” he whispers urgently to her as they walk briskly past the sculpture-laden façade of the Theater des Westens.

“No, just delayed. Couldn’t be helped. You have the photographs?”

“Yes,” he says, and covertly hands over an envelope. “You haven’t mentioned my disguise,” he points out, referring to the bandage. “It was the Fräulein’s idea. She thought it would make me look like a bombing casualty.”

Sigrid quickly inserts the envelope into her bag. “Very genuine.” Across the street she spies Ericha’s stocky taxi driver with the scar, leaning against the door of a green-back cab. He gives her a quick look, lifting his eyes from a folded newspaper.

“She’s really a very remarkable woman, Fräulein von Hohenhoff,” Kozig tells her enthusiastically. “Don’t you agree? And not unattractive for her age.”

But Sigrid does not answer. She has spotted Franz waiting for them, shed for once of his signature coat and trilby, and dressed in a heavy oilcloth jacket and worker’s cap. Parked at the curb is a rickety Ford lorry with a gas generator attached
.
But when she turns her eyes to Herr Kozig, something is wrong. He has stopped in his tracks, his face suddenly drained.

“What is it?”

“That man up ahead by the lorry. He’s Gestapo.”

“What?”

“He’s
Gestapo
, I said.”

“Don’t be absurd. That’s impossible.”

“I
know
what I
know
. And what I
know
is that
that
man works for the
Gestapo
. We’ve got to get out of here.” And before Sigrid can attempt another word, he breaks away in a panic. Sigrid swivels back to look at Franz. He has taken a step forward with uncertainty, but then freezes up. She follows his eyes, and feels her color drain as well.

Two men in leather trench coats are jumping out of a black Benz sedan. She hears a popping noise, and one of the headlamps on Franz’s lorry bursts. Everything is racing around her, but at the same time moving very slowly. She can see the gun now in Kozig’s hand, the tiny nickel-plated revolver producing its little puff of smoke. “Halt! Halt!” the trench coats are bellowing. The pistols in their hands are much bigger. When they discharge, Kozig shudders and drops to one knee. And that’s when Franz moves. He seizes one of the trench coats from behind with his bearlike arms. All it takes is a twist of the neck and the man dangles in his grip. One of the big guns is now in Franz’s fist. He fires twice. The second trench coat crumples, but not before discharging a final round. The cap flies from Franz’s head with a splatter of red, and the big man drops like a felled tree. Sigrid’s mind is swirling. Noise everywhere. Screaming. Shouting. A whistle blowing. Car horns honking. Someone shouting. She turns to see the scar-faced taxi driver, shoving Kozig into the rear of his cab.
“Get in!”
he is shouting to her.
“Get in!”

•   •   •

K
OZIG IS BLEEDING
in the rear of the taxi, and gulping breath.
“Find the wound and put pressure on it,”
the driver orders as he barges the vehicle through the streets.
“Put pressure on it or he’ll bleed to death
.
”

Sigrid is rummaging through Kozig’s clothing. “Where are you shot?” she keeps repeating. “Herr Kozig,
where are you shot
?” But Kozig only groans. There is so much blood, but finally she discovers the bullet hole drilled into the man’s thigh.

“I found it! It’s in the thigh!”

“
Press down on it!
Hard! Both hands!” she hears, but when she does, Kozig screams.

“It’s hurting him!”

“Of course it’s hurting him. He’s got a goddamned bullet in his leg. It must have chipped an artery. You’ve got stop the bleeding or he’s dead.”

She forces herself to ignore Kozig’s pain, and does as commanded, but blood is oozing through her fingers. “It’s not
helping
. He’s still
bleeding
.”

“You’ll have to make a tourniquet. Use your scarf!” the taxi driver yells over his shoulder to her. “Tie it tightly around his leg above the wound.
Tightly
! So it cuts off the flow.”

Kozig gnashes his teeth against the agony as Sigrid follows the taxi driver’s direction, but instead of her scarf, she has removed the silly bandage wrapped around the man’s head. The back of the cab is pungent with the odor of blood. Everything is drenched red. But she manages to knot the bandage, tight, around the man’s thigh.
“Done!”
she shouts.

“Now
pressure
again.”

Sigrid clamps her hands back down over the wound, but this time Herr Kozig’s reaction is less sharp. More internalized. “Where are you driving?” she calls to the cabbie.

“There’s a doctor. Not far from here. We’ve used him before.”

“He said,” Sigrid begins. “He said that
Franz
was working for the Gestapo. That’s why he broke.”

“Well, he was right. Franz
was
working for the Gestapo.”

“What?”

“His trucking business. He cleaned out the flats of Jews who’d been taken for transport to the Grosse Hamburger Strasse. He was always looking for strong backs, so I’d help him when I wasn’t in the cab.” He hits the horn, cursing at another driver. “I know it may sound ghoulish,” he admits, “but we made money. Money for food, for ration cards, for bribes. Clothes for our U-boats.”

“Well, if that’s so, then tell me why was the Gestapo waiting for us with guns?”

This question the driver cannot answer. “I don’t know,” he admits. “Franz was having troubles. Money troubles. His wife is very sick. In a sanatorium that costs plenty. Maybe,” he starts to say, but doesn’t finish the sentence. “I don’t know.”

Herr Kozig gurgles. Attempting to speak. “Don’t talk,” Sigrid tells him, but he keeps trying to reach into his coat. Finally she bends her ear to his mouth. “In my pocket,” he whispers. “Coat pocket
.
Please.”

“Herr Kozig, I
can’t
. I can’t let the pressure off your wound.”

His face is bleaching white. His mouth works. His eyes trail away for a moment and then focus on something only he can see. He starts to whisper. Something foreign to Sigrid’s ear. Something ancient.
“Shema . . . Yisrael . . .”

“Not much farther!” the taxi man shouts as he wings around a turn and bumps into an alleyway. The bump jolts Sigrid enough that she loses her perch, and by the time she regains herself and presses back down on the wound, something has changed. Herr Kozig’s stare has gone still as stone.

The cab jerks to a halt.
“We’re here
,
”
yells the driver. He leaps from behind the wheel, and hammers on a rear door of one of the buildings. A stout matron answers, and he argues with her. But Sigrid is looking at Herr Kozig’s face. His mouth is hanging open. His teeth are stained brown. An eyelid has drooped so that only the white shows. The other eye no longer absorbs light. She reaches into the inside of his coat with her bloodstained fingers and removes a small folded photograph with scalloped edges. The crease down the center divides him from the two children. Herr Kozig, well fed in a tailored suit and spats, trimly barbered, posing by a garden wall. The children plump and smiling, a bow in the girl’s hair, the little boy in lederhosen. She gazes at the image, then returns it to the dead man’s pocket, just as the cabdriver yanks open the rear door.

“No point,” Sigrid informs him bleakly. “There’s no point.”

•   •   •

T
HERE IS A SINK
outside of the doctor’s surgery, with a deep basin and a goose-necked spout. Sigrid has stripped down to her slip. The rest of her clothing is stained crimson. The water from the spout is hot, the lye soap burning and abrasive. It feels good. As she scrubs away the blood it feels as if she is scrubbing off her old skin. She can hear the taxi driver arguing again, this time with the doctor. But she can’t make out the words until the door pops opens and the matron enters.

“I cannot help you. I am not an undertaker.”

“So what am I to do with him? Dump him in the Landwehr when nobody’s looking?”

“If that’s what you decide. It’s really none of my affair. I treat only the living.”

The door shuts. The nurse is an obese, unsmiling woman, with an expression as stiff as her starched apron. “I am to bring you these,” she announces, and plops a bundle of clothing with a paper sack on a laminated tabletop. “They won’t fit,” she informs Sigrid with stern satisfaction, “but it’s better than walking the streets half naked. The contents of your pockets you will find in the sack. You should change behind the screen.”