At the Wolf's Table Read online

  The first time we had gone out together he’d asked me to meet him at a café near the cathedral, and he arrived late. We sat at a table outside, the air chilly despite the sunshine. Enchanted, I heard a musical motif in the chorus of birds, saw in their flight a dance performed just for me, for this moment with him had finally arrived and resembled love as I’d imagined it ever since I was a little girl. A bird broke away from the flock. Proud and solitary, it plunged down almost as if to dive into the Spree, brushed the water with outstretched wings, and instantly soared up again. It had followed a sudden urge to escape, a reckless act, an impulse driven by euphoria. That same feeling tingled in my calves. Facing my boss, the young engineer sitting before me at the café, I found I was euphoric. Happiness had just begun.

  I had ordered a slice of apple pie but hadn’t tasted it yet. Gregor pointed this out. Don’t you like it? he asked. I don’t know, I said, laughing. I pushed the plate forward, offering it to him, and when I saw him put the first piece into his mouth and chew quickly, with his customary enthusiasm, I wanted to as well. And so I took a bite, and then another, and we found ourselves eating from the same plate, chattering about nothing in particular without looking at each other, as though that were already too intimate, until our forks suddenly touched. When they did we fell silent, looking up. We stared at each other for a long while, as the birds continued to circle overhead or came to rest on branches, on balustrades, lampposts, who knew, perhaps they were diving down to plunge beak-first into the river, never again to emerge. Then Gregor pinned my fork down with his, and it was as if he were touching me.

  * * *

  HERTA CAME OUTSIDE to collect the eggs later than usual. Perhaps she too had spent a sleepless night and was having a hard time waking up that morning. She found me there, sitting on the rusty metal chair, Zart curled up on top of my feet. She sat down beside me, forgetting about breakfast. The door creaked.

  “What, are they here already?” Herta asked.

  Leaning against the doorframe, Joseph shook his head. “Eggs,” he replied, gesturing at the henhouse. Zart scampered after him, and I missed his warmth.

  The soft glow of sunrise had withdrawn like the tide, laying the morning sky bare, pale, drained. The hens began to squawk, the birds to twitter, the bees to buzz against that circle of light overhead, but the squeal of a vehicle coming to a halt silenced them.

  “Get up, Rosa Sauer!” we heard them shout.

  Herta and I leapt to our feet and Joseph returned carrying the eggs. He didn’t notice he’d clutched one of them too tightly and had broken its shell, the yolk oozing through his fingers in viscous rivulets of bright orange. I stared at them. They were about to drip from his skin and would hit the ground without making a sound.

  “Hurry up, Rosa Sauer!” the SS officers insisted.

  Herta touched my back and I moved.

  I chose to await Gregor’s return. To believe the war would end. I chose to eat.

  * * *

  IN THE BUS, I glanced around and sat in the first empty spot, far from the other women. There were four of them, two sitting next to each other, the others sitting on their own. I couldn’t remember their names. I only knew Leni’s, and she hadn’t been picked up yet.

  No one replied when I said good morning. I looked at Herta and Joseph through the window, which was streaked with dried rain. Standing by the doorway, she raised her arm despite her arthritis, he still held a broken egg in his hand. I watched the house as it fell behind—its moss-darkened shingles, the pink paint, the valerian blossoms that grew in clusters from the bare earth—until it disappeared behind the bend. I would watch it every morning as though I were never to see it again. Until one day I no longer felt that longing.

  * * *

  THE HEADQUARTERS WERE three kilometers from Gross-Partsch, hidden in the forest, invisible from the air. When the workers began to build it, Joseph told me, the locals wondered why there was all that coming and going of vans and trucks. The Soviet military airplanes had never detected it. But we knew Hitler was there, that he slept not far away, and perhaps in summer he would toss and turn in his bed, slapping at the mosquitoes that disturbed his slumber. Perhaps he too would rub the red bites, overcome by the conflicting desires caused by the itch: though you couldn’t stand the archipelago of bumps on your skin, part of you didn’t want them to heal because the relief of scratching them was so intense.

  They called it the Wolfsschanze, the Wolf’s Lair. “Wolf” was his nickname. As hapless as Little Red Riding Hood, I had ended up in his belly. A legion of hunters was out looking for him, and to get him in their grips they would gladly slay me as well.

  3

  Once we arrived in Krausendorf, they lined us up and walked us single file to a red-brick schoolhouse that had been set up as military barracks. We crossed the threshold as docile as cows. The SS guards stopped us in the hallway, searched us. It was terrible to feel their hands linger on my sides, under my arms, and not be able to do anything but hold my breath.

  We answered the roll call and they marked down attendance in a register. I discovered that the brunette who had wrenched Leni’s shoulder was named Elfriede Kuhn.

  Two by two, we were made to enter a room that smelled of alcohol while the others waited their turn outside. I rested my elbow on the school desk in front of me. A man in a white coat tied a tourniquet tightly around my arm and tapped on my vein with his pointer and middle fingers. With the drawing of blood samples, we were officially test animals. While the day before might have been seen as an inauguration, a rehearsal, as of this moment our work as food tasters had officially begun.

  When the needle pierced my vein I looked away. Elfriede was beside me, staring at the syringe that drew her blood, filling up with a red color that grew darker and darker. I had never been able to stand the sight of my own blood—recognizing the dark liquid as something that came from inside of me made me dizzy—so I looked at her instead, at her posture straight as two Cartesian axes, her indifference. I sensed Elfriede was a woman of beauty, though I still couldn’t see it. Her beauty was a mathematical theory I had yet to prove.

  Before I knew it, her profile became a face glaring at me sharply. Her nostrils flared, as if lacking air. I opened my mouth to catch my breath and said nothing.

  “Keep pressure on this,” the man in the white coat told me, pressing a cotton ball against my skin.

  I heard Elfriede’s tourniquet come off with a snap and her chair scrape the floor. I too stood up.

  * * *

  IN THE LUNCHROOM I waited for the others to sit down before me. Most of the women chose the same place they had sat in the day before. The chair across from Leni was free, and from then on it was mine.

  After breakfast—milk and fruit—they served us lunch. On my plate, asparagus pie. With time I would come to learn that giving different food combinations to different groups of us was one of their control procedures.

  I studied the lunchroom as one studies a foreign environment—the windows with iron grilles, the French door leading to the courtyard guarded at all times, the pictureless walls. On my first day of school, when my mother had left me in the classroom and walked out, the thought that something bad might happen to me without her knowing about it filled me with sorrow. What affected me wasn’t the danger of the world around me but my mother’s powerlessness. It seemed intolerable that my life could go on happening with her oblivious to it. Whatever remained concealed, even if not on purpose, was already a betrayal. I had searched the classroom for a crack in the wall, a spiderweb, anything that might be mine, like a secret. My eyes wandered the room, which seemed enormous, and finally noticed a missing fragment of baseboard, which calmed me.

  In the lunchroom in Krausendorf the baseboards were all intact. Gregor wasn’t there, I was alone. The SS guards’ boots dictated the pace of the meal, clicking away the countdown to our potential death. This asparagus is delicious, but isn’t poison bitter? I swallowed and my heart stopped.

&n
bsp; Elfriede was also eating asparagus, staring at me as she did, and I drank one glass of water after another to dilute my anxiety. It might have been my dress that made her so curious. Maybe Herta was right, maybe I was out of place wearing that checkered pattern, it wasn’t like I was going to the office, I didn’t work in Berlin anymore. Get rid of those city airs of yours, my mother-in-law had told me, otherwise everyone’s going to look down on you. Elfriede wasn’t looking down on me, or maybe she was, but I had put on my most comfortable dress, the one most worn—the uniform, Gregor used to call it. It was the one I never had to question, neither if it flattered my figure, nor if it would bring me luck. It offered me shelter, even from Elfriede, who was scrutinizing me with a serious look on her face and didn’t even bother to hide it, her eyes scouring the checks on my dress with enough vehemence to make them fly off the fabric, with enough vehemence to unravel the hem, unlace my heeled shoes, make the wave of hair that framed my temple fall flat as I continued to drink water.

  Lunch wasn’t over yet and I didn’t know if we were permitted to leave the table. My bladder ached, like it had in the cellar in Budengasse where Mother and I would seek refuge at night with the building’s other tenants when the air-raid sirens went off. But there was no bucket in the corner here, and I couldn’t hold it any longer. Without even consciously deciding to, I stood up and asked permission to go to the washroom. The SS guards nodded. As one of them, a very tall man with big feet, escorted me into the hallway, I heard Elfriede’s voice. “I need to go too.”

  The tiles were worn, the grout blackened. Two sinks and four stalls. The SS man stood guard in the hallway, we went in, and I hurried into one of the stalls. I didn’t hear another stall door close or a faucet run. Elfriede had disappeared, or was standing there listening. The sound of my stream breaking the silence was humiliating. When I opened the door she blocked it with the tip of her shoe, grabbed me by the shoulder, and shoved me back against the wall. The tiles smelled of disinfectant. She moved her face close to mine, almost sweetly.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Me?”

  “Why were you staring at me during the blood sample?”

  I tried to break free. She blocked my way.

  “A word of advice: mind your own business. In this place, everybody’s better off minding their own business.”

  “I can’t stand the sight of my own blood, that’s all.”

  “Oh, but the sight of someone else’s blood is okay, is it?”

  The scrape of metal against wood made us start. Elfriede pulled away.

  “What are you up to in here?” the guard asked, stepping inside. The tiles were cold and damp, or maybe it was the sweat on my back. “Having a little tête-à-tête, are we?” He wore enormous shoes, perfect for crushing the heads of snakes.

  “I had a dizzy spell. It must be because of the blood sample,” I stammered, touching the red mark over the bulging vein on the inside of my elbow. “She was helping me. I feel better now.”

  The guard warned that if he caught us like that again, so intimate, he would teach us a lesson. Or better yet, he would take advantage of it. Then he burst out laughing.

  We went back to the lunchroom, the Beanpole watching our every step. He was wrong: it hadn’t been intimacy between Elfriede and me, it had been fear. We were sizing up each other and our surroundings with the blind terror of someone who’s just been born into the world.

  That night, in the bathroom of the Sauer home, the scent of asparagus that emanated from my urine made me think of Elfriede. She too, sitting on the commode, probably smelled the same odor. Even Hitler, in his bunker at the Wolfsschanze. That night, Hitler’s urine would stink like mine.

  4

  I was born on December 27, 1917, eleven months before the Great War ended, a Christmas gift to wrap up the holiday celebrations. My mother said Santa Claus had heard me wailing, bundled up beneath so many blankets in the back of his sleigh that he’d completely overlooked me. And so he flew back to Berlin, unwillingly though, because his vacation had just begun and the unscheduled delivery was an inconvenience. It’s a good thing he noticed you, Father used to say, because you were our only gift that year.

  My father was a railroad worker, my mother a seamstress. Our living room floor was always covered with spools of thread and balls of yarn in all different colors. My mother would lick the end of a strand to thread the needle more easily, and I would mimic her. Once, without letting her see, I sucked a strand of thread and played with it on my tongue. When it had been reduced to a soggy clump, I couldn’t resist the urge to swallow it and discover whether, once inside me, it would kill me. I spent the following minutes wondering what the signs of my imminent death would be, but, given that I didn’t die, I soon forgot about it. Then at night I remembered it, certain my time had come. The game of death began at a very early age. I never spoke a word of it to anyone.

  At night my father would listen to the radio while my mother would sweep up the threads strewn on the floor and climb into bed to open a copy of Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, eager to read the latest episode of her favorite serial novel. That was my childhood, the steamed-up windows looking out onto Budengasse, multiplication tables memorized well in advance, the walk to school wearing shoes that were first too big and then too tight, ants decapitated with fingernails, Sundays on which Mother and Father would read from the pulpit—she the psalms, he the Epistles to the Corinthians—and I would listen to them from the pew, either proud or bored, a pfennig coin tucked in my mouth. The metal was salty, it tingled. I would close my eyes in delight, my tongue pushing it to the edge of my throat until it teetered there, ready to slide down, then all at once I would spit it out. My childhood was books beneath my pillow, nursery rhymes sung with my father, blind man’s bluff in the square, stollen at Christmas, trips to the Tiergarten, the day I went to Franz’s crib, stuck his tiny hand between my teeth, and bit down hard. My brother howled like all newborns howl when they wake up, and no one found out what I had done.

  It was a childhood full of sins and secrets, and I was too focused on their safekeeping to notice anyone else. I never wondered where my parents found the milk, which cost hundreds and later thousands of marks, if they held up a grocery store and eluded the police. Not even years later did I wonder if they felt humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles like everyone else, if they too hated the United States, if they felt unjustly treated for being held responsible for a war in which my father had fought. He had spent an entire night in a foxhole with a dead Frenchman and had eventually dozed off beside the corpse.

  During that time, when Germany was a gridlock of wounds, my mother would pull back her lips as she slicked down the end of the thread, on her face a turtle expression that made me laugh, my father listening to the radio after work, smoking Juno cigarettes, and Franz napping in his crib, his arm bent and his hand by his ear, his tiny fingers curled over his palm of tender flesh.

  In my room I would do an inventory of my sins and my secrets, and would feel no remorse.

  5

  “I can’t make heads or tails of this,” Leni moaned. We were sitting at the cleared table after dinner with open books and pencils provided by the guards. “There are too many hard words.”

  “For example?”

  “Salivary alym—no, amyl—wait.” Leni checked the page. “Salivary amylase, or that other one: peps—err … pep-sino-gen.”

  A week after our first day, the chef had come into the lunchroom and handed out a series of textbooks on nutrition, asking us to read them. Ours was a serious mission, he said, and we should be knowledgeable as we carried it out. He introduced himself as Otto Günther but we all knew the guards called him Krümel, or Crumbs, maybe because he was short and skinny. When we arrived at the barracks in the mornings he and his staff would already be working on breakfast, which we ate immediately, while Hitler ate at around ten, after being briefed on news from the front. Then, at around eleven, we had what he would have for lunch. Wh
en the hour-long wait was over they took us home, but at five in the evening they returned to pick us up to taste his dinner.

  The morning Krümel gave us the books, one of the women flipped through a few pages and then pushed her book away with a shrug. She had broad, square shoulders disproportionate to her slender ankles, which were left bare under her black skirt. Her name was Augustine. Leni, on the other hand, went ashen, as though they had announced a big exam and she was certain she would fail. As for me, the task was a consolation—not that I thought it was useful to memorize the phases in the digestive process, nor felt the need to make a good impression. In those diagrams, those tables, I recognized my age-old thirst for knowledge so strongly that I could almost make believe I wasn’t losing myself.

  “I’ll never manage to learn this,” Leni said. “Do you think they’ll quiz us?”

  “The guards sitting at the teacher’s desk and giving us grades? Don’t be silly,” I said, smiling at her.

  Leni didn’t smile back. “Maybe the doctor will ask us something at our next blood exam, surprise us with a question!”

  “That would be funny.”

  “What’s so funny about it?”

  “It’s like we’re peeking into Hitler’s innards,” I said with incomprehensible cheerfulness. “If we make a rough estimate, we can calculate when his sphincter will dilate.”

  “That’s disgusting!”

  It wasn’t disgusting, it was human. Adolf Hitler was a human being who digested.

  “Has the professor finished her lesson? When the lecture’s over we can applaud you.” It was Augustine, the woman with square shoulders dressed in black. The guards didn’t order us to be quiet. At the chef’s request, the lunchroom was to be a schoolroom, and his request was to be respected.