At the Wolf's Table Read online

  “I’m sorry,” I said, lowering my head, “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “We all know you studied in the city, okay?”

  “What do you care what kind of studies she did?” another woman, Ulla, broke in. “In any case, she’s here now, eating just like the rest of us. Delicious food, no doubt, dressed with a drizzle of poison.” She laughed, but no one joined her.

  Narrow of waist, firm of bosom, Ulla was quite a dish—that’s what the SS guards said about her. She liked to clip out photographs of actresses from magazines and glue them into a scrapbook. At times she would leaf through them and point them out to us one by one: the porcelain cheeks of Anny Ondra, who had married Max Schmeling, the boxer; Ilse Werner’s lips, soft and plump as she pursed them to whistle the refrain of “Sing ein Lied, wenn Du mal traurig bist” on the radio, because all it took to keep from feeling sad and lonely was to sing a song. Especially, Ulla admitted, to German soldiers. But her favorite was Zarah Leander, with her high-arched eyebrows and the little curls framing her face in the movie La Habanera.

  “Coming here to the barracks wearing elegant clothes is a good idea,” she said to me. I wore a wine-colored dress with a French-cut collar and puffed sleeves. My mother had made it for me. “This way, if you die, at least you’ll already be in your good dress. They won’t even need to prepare your corpse.”

  “Why do you all keep talking about such horrible things?” Leni protested.

  Herta was right: the others noticed my appearance. Not only Elfriede, who had scoured the checks on my dress on our second day there and was now leaning against the wall as she read her book, a pencil between her lips like a burned-out cigarette. It seemed to weigh on her, having to stay seated. She always looked like she was on the verge of leaving.

  “So you like this dress, then?”

  Ulla hesitated, then answered me. “It’s a bit chaste, but the style is almost Parisian. And it’s definitely much nicer than the dirndls Frau Goebbels wants to make us wear.” She lowered her voice. “And that she wears,” she added, pointing with her eyes to the woman next to me, the one who had stood up after lunch on the first day. Gertrude didn’t hear her.

  “Oh, what nonsense.” Augustine slammed her palms on the table for emphasis and turned away. Unsure how to conclude her dramatic finale to the conversation, she decided to move closer to Elfriede, though Elfriede didn’t take her eyes off her textbook.

  “So do you like it or don’t you?” I asked again.

  Ulla reluctantly admitted: “Yes.”

  “Fine. You can have it, then.”

  A thump made me look up. Elfriede had snapped her book shut and folded her arms over her chest, the pencil still in her mouth.

  “So what are you going to do, strip down like Saint Francis right here in front of everyone and give it to her?” Augustine snickered, expecting Elfriede to back her up, but she just stood there staring at me, expressionless.

  I turned back to Ulla. “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow, if you like. No, wait, give me time to wash it.”

  A murmur spread through the room as Elfriede pulled away from the wall and moved over to sit across from me. She let her textbook thud to the table, rested her hand on it, and began to drum her fingers on the cover, scrutinizing me. Augustine watched her, certain she was about to pass judgment, but Elfriede said nothing. Her fingers fell still.

  “She comes here from Berlin to give us handouts,” Augustine said, piling it on. “Wants to give us lessons in biology and Christian charity, to prove she’s better than us.”

  “I do want it,” Ulla said.

  “It’s yours,” I replied.

  Augustine tsked. I would learn she always did that to express her displeasure. “Oh, please.…”

  “Line up!” the guards ordered. “The hour is over.”

  We quickly rose to our feet. Augustine’s little scene had captivated the other women, but their desire to leave the lunchroom was even stronger. Once again, we were going back home safe and sound.

  As I joined the line, Ulla touched my elbow. “Thank you,” she whispered, and ran off ahead.

  Elfriede was behind me. “This isn’t a boarding school for women, Berliner, it’s a barracks.”

  “Mind your own business,” I was surprised to hear myself say. The back of my neck instantly flushed. “You’re the one who taught me that, remember?” It sounded more like an excuse than a provocation. I wanted to get along with Elfriede rather than clash with her, though I didn’t know why.

  “In any case,” she said, “the kid’s right: there’s nothing funny about those books, unless you get a kick out of learning the symptoms caused by various forms of poisoning. Do you enjoy preparing for death?”

  I kept walking, without replying.

  That night I washed the wine-colored dress for Ulla. Giving it to her wasn’t an act of generosity or even a ploy to make her like me. Seeing it on her would be like scattering my life in the capital into Gross-Partsch, dispersing it. It was resignation. Three days later, I gave it to her, dried, ironed, and wrapped in newspaper. I would never see her wear it to the lunchroom.

  Herta took my measurements and altered some of her own dresses for me, narrowing the waistline and shortening the back hems slightly, at my insistence. That’s the fashion, I explained. Berliner fashion, she retorted, pins between her lips like my mother and not even one scrap of thread on the floor of her country house.

  I kept the checkered dress in the wardrobe that had belonged to Gregor, along with all my work clothes. My shoes were the same—Where are you going in those heels? Herta said reproachfully—but only with them on could I recognize my own footsteps, no matter how uncertain they had become. On foggy mornings I would sometimes pull out the checkered dress, gripping the hanger angrily. There was no need for me to blend in with the other tasters, we had nothing in common, why did I care about being accepted by them? But then I would glimpse the dark circles under my eyes and the anger would wither to despondency. Putting the dress back in the darkness of the wardrobe, I would close the door.

  They had been a warning, those circles under my eyes, and I hadn’t grasped it, hadn’t foreseen my fate, blocked its path. Now that death was finally upon me, there was no longer room for the little girl who sang in the school choir, who went roller-skating with friends in the afternoon, who let them copy her geometry homework. Gone was the secretary who had made the boss fall head over heels for her. Instead there was a woman whom the war had suddenly aged. That was the fate written in her blood.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT OF March ’43, the night my fate had taken a sharp turn for the worse, the air-raid siren had gone off with its usual whine, the smallest run-up and then a leap, just long enough for my mother to roll out of bed. “Rosa, get up,” she urged me. “They’re bombing.”

  The day my father died, a year and a half after we entered the war, I had begun to sleep in his place beside her. We were two adult women who had both experienced everyday familiarity with the marriage bed, had both lost it, and there was something profane in the similar smell of our two bodies beneath the covers. Still, I wanted to keep her company when she woke during the night, even if the siren wasn’t going off. Or maybe I was afraid to sleep all alone. That’s why, six months after Gregor had gone off to war, I had rented out our apartment in Altemesseweg and moved back in with my parents. I was still learning the ropes of being a wife and already I had to stop that and become a daughter again.

  “Hurry,” she said, seeing me search for a dress, any dress, to change into. She threw her coat on over her nightgown and headed down in slippers.

  The siren was no different from the previous ones, a long wail that built up as though to last forever, but after eleven seconds it diminished in tone, abated. Then it started up again.

  All the ones before it had been false alarms. Each time we had run downstairs with our flashlights on, despite the blackout orders. In the dark we would have tripped over the other tenants, bumped int
o them as they too headed for the cellar, carrying blankets and children and canteens filled with water, or descended terrified and empty-handed. Each time we had found a tiny patch for ourselves on the floor and sat down beneath a dim, bare lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling. The floor was cold, the people cramped, the dampness sinking into our bones.

  Huddled against one another, we who lived at Budengasse 78 wept and prayed and cried for salvation. We urinated in a bucket too close to the eyes of the others, or held our bladders though they were ready to burst. A young boy bit into an apple and another boy stole it out of his hand, taking as many bites as he could before the first boy snatched it back and slapped him. We were hungry and sat there in silence or dozed, and would reach the dawn with haggard faces.

  Soon afterward, the promise of a new day would drift down onto the light blue façade of our stately building in the outskirts of Berlin, making it glow. Hidden away in the depths of the building, we couldn’t see that light, much less believe it possible.

  As I raced down the cellar stairs with my arm around my mother on that March night, I wondered what note it was, the sound of the air-raid siren. As a girl I had sung in the school choir, the teacher had complimented my pitch, the timbre of my voice, but I hadn’t studied music, so I couldn’t tell the notes apart. And yet, as I nestled down in my spot beside Frau Reinach with her brown kerchief on her head, as I stared at Frau Preiß’s black shoes deformed by her bunioned big toe, at the hairs sticking out of Herr Holler’s ears, at the Schmidts’ son Anton’s two tiny front teeth, and as my mother’s breath—Are you cold? she whispered to me. Bundle up—became the only profane yet familiar smell I had to cling to, all that while the only thing that mattered to me was finding out what note corresponded to that long blare of the siren.

  The rumble of planes overhead instantly banished the thought. My mother squeezed my hand, her nails piercing my skin. Pauline, who was barely three, stood up. Her mother, Anne Langhans, tried to pull her down, but with all the obstinacy of her scant ninety centimeters the little girl broke free. She tilted back her head and looked straight up, turning around as if to seek the origin of the sound or follow the plane’s trajectory.

  The ceiling shuddered. Pauline toppled over as the floor lurched, a deafening hiss drowning out every other sound, including our screams, her cries. The lightbulb flickered out. A massive explosion burst into the cellar, caving in the walls, hurling us every which way. The blast sent our bodies flying through the air, slamming into one another, tangling together as the walls spewed plaster.

  After the bombing ceased, sobs and shouts reached our injured eardrums, muffled. Someone pushed on the cellar door. It was blocked. The women shrieked, the few men present kicked it again and again until finally it burst open.

  We were deaf, blind, the dust had masked our features, made us strangers even to our own parents. We searched for them, calling out, Mother, Father, unable to utter any other words. My eyes saw only smoke. And then Pauline: she was bleeding from the temple. I tore the hem off my skirt with my teeth and stanched the wound, tied the strip of fabric around her head, looked for her mother, looked for mine, recognized no one.

  The sun arrived by the time everyone had been pulled out. Our building hadn’t been leveled but the roof had a gaping hole in it. The roof of the building across from ours was entirely gone. Lined up on the street were the wounded and dead. Survivors leaned back against the wall, gasping for breath, but the fine debris had left throats stinging, noses clogged. Frau Reinach had lost her headkerchief, her hair clumps of smoldering dust that sprouted from her scalp like tumors. Herr Holler was limping. Pauline had stopped bleeding. I was intact, no aches, no pains. My mother was dead.

  6

  “I would give my very life for the Führer,” Gertrude said, her eyes half closed to show her solemnity. Her sister Sabine nodded in approval. Because of her receding chin I couldn’t tell whether she was younger or older. The table in the lunchroom was bare. Only half an hour to go before we could leave. Standing out against the metal-gray sky framed by the window was another food taster, Theodora.

  “I would give my life for him too,” Sabine said. “He’s like an older brother to me. He’s like the brother we lost, Gerti.”

  “I, on the other hand,” Theodora said with a grin, “would have him as a husband.”

  Sabine frowned, almost as if Theodora had disrespected the Führer.

  The window fixtures rattled. Augustine had leaned against them. “Go ahead and keep him, your Great Consoler,” she said. “He’s the one who sends your brothers, fathers, and husbands out for slaughter in the first place. But then again, if they die, who cares? You can always pretend he’s your brother, right? Or you can dream he’ll marry you.” Augustine ran her finger and thumb down the corners of her mouth, wiping away frothy white spittle. “You’re ridiculous, all of you.”

  “You’d better pray you’re not overheard!” Gertrude snapped. “Or do you want me to call in the SS?”

  “The Führer would have kept us out of war if it had been possible,” Theodora said, “but he didn’t have a choice.”

  “I take that back: you’re more than ridiculous—you’re fanatics.”

  Though I didn’t know it then, from that point on “the Fanatics” would be our name for Gertrude and her little group. Augustine coined it while frothing at the mouth. Her husband had fallen at the front, that was why she always dressed in black. Leni told me that.

  The women had grown up in the same town, and those of the same age had gone to school together. They all knew one another, at least by sight. All of them except Elfriede. She wasn’t from Gross-Partsch or the surrounding area, and Leni told me she’d never met her before we’d become food tasters. Elfriede too was from out of town, then, but no one was giving her any trouble over it. Augustine didn’t bother her. Augustine was nasty to me not so much because I came from the capital but because she saw my need to fit in, and that left me vulnerable. Neither I nor the others had ever asked Elfriede what city she came from, and she had never mentioned it. Her coldness left us apprehensive.

  I wondered whether Elfriede had also fled to the countryside in search of peace and had immediately been recruited, just like me. On what basis had they chosen us? The first time I boarded the bus I had expected to find a den of zealous Nazis singing songs and waving flags. Soon I would realize that loyalty to the party hadn’t been a criterion in their selection, except perhaps in the case of the Fanatics. Had they enlisted the poorest ones, the neediest? The ones with the most children to feed? The women talked about their children nonstop, except for Leni and Ulla, who were the youngest ones, and Elfriede. They were childless, as was I. But they didn’t wear wedding bands, while I had been married for four years.

  * * *

  THE MINUTE I got home that afternoon, Herta asked me to help her fold the sheets. She barely even said hello to me. She seemed impatient, as though she’d been waiting for hours to be able to take care of the laundry and now that I had arrived she wasn’t about to wait one second more. “Bring in the basket, please.” She would normally ask me about work and then say, Go rest, lie down for a while, or she would make me some tea. Her brusque behavior today was making me uncomfortable.

  I carried the basket into the kitchen and put it on the table.

  “Come on,” Herta said, “hurry up.”

  I pulled on the end of a sheet and tried to untangle it from the others without overturning the basket. Her rushing me made my movements clumsy. When I gave it one last tug to free it completely, a white rectangle fluttered into the air. It looked like a handkerchief. It was going to fall on the floor and my mother-in-law would be displeased. Only when it hit the floor did I realize it wasn’t a handkerchief but a sealed envelope. I looked at Herta.

  “Finally!” she said, laughing. “I thought you’d never find it!”

  I laughed too, with amazement, with gratitude.

  “Well? Aren’t you going to pick it up?”

 
; As I leaned down she whispered: “Go read it in the other room, if you like. But then come right back here and tell me how my son is.”

  My dearest Rosa,

  At last I can reply to you. We’ve been traveling a lot, sleeping in the trucks. We haven’t even changed our uniforms for a week. The more I travel through the streets and villages of this country, the more I discover there’s only poverty here. Its people have withered, the homes are hovels—far from a Bolshevik paradise, the workers’ paradise.… We’ve stopped for the time being. Below, you’ll find the new address where you can send me letters. Thank you for writing so often, and forgive me if I write less frequently than you, but at the end of the day I’m exhausted. Yesterday I spent all morning shoveling snow out of a trench and then last night I stood guard for four hours (wearing two sweaters under my uniform) while the trench filled up with snow again.

  Afterwards, when I collapsed onto my straw mattress, I dreamed of you. You were sleeping in our old apartment in Altemesseweg. That is, I knew it was our apartment though the room was somewhat different. The strange thing was that lying on the rug was a dog, like a sheepdog. It too was asleep. I didn’t even wonder what a dog was doing in our home, whether it was yours. All I knew was that I had to be careful not to wake it because it was dangerous. I wanted to lay down beside you, so I tiptoed over to avoid disturbing the dog, but it awoke and began to growl. You didn’t hear a thing, you kept on sleeping, and I called out to you, afraid the dog would bite you. Suddenly it barked fiercely and lunged—and just then I woke up. It left me in a foul mood for a long time. Maybe I was only worried about your journey. Now that you’re in Gross-Partsch I’m calmer. My parents will take care of you.

  After everything you had been through, the thought of you all alone in Berlin was a torment to me. I recalled when we argued three years ago, when I decided to enlist. I told you we mustn’t be selfish or cowardly, that defending ourselves was a matter of life and death. I remember the period after the Great War—you don’t, you were too young, but I remember it well. Such misery. Our people were foolish, they let themselves be humiliated. The time had come to strengthen our resolve. I had to do my part, even though that meant leaving you. And yet today I no longer know what to think.