At the Wolf's Table Page 5

  With time even the SS guards relaxed. During lunch, if they were on their good behavior, they would chat among themselves without taking much notice of us and wouldn’t even tell us to stop talking. If, on the other hand, they were feeling aroused, they would lock their eyes on us and dissect us. They stared at us like we stared at our food, almost as if they were about to take a bite out of us. They would prowl around our chairs with their weapons in their holsters, badly judging the distance, their guns brushing against our backs, making us flinch. At times they would lean over one of us from behind—normally it was Ulla, their “dish.” They would lower their finger to her bosom, murmuring, You’ve got food on your shirt, and all at once Ulla would stop eating. We would all stop.

  Leni was their favorite, though, because her green eyes sparkled against her pale skin, which was too thin to mask any uncertainty, any doubt, and because she was so defenseless. One of the guards pinched her cheek, fussing over her in a falsetto voice—Puppy eyes!—and Leni smiled, not from embarrassment. She thought the tenderness she brought out in others would protect her. She was willing to pay the price for her fragility, and the SS men sensed it.

  In the Krausendorf barracks we risked dying every day, but no more than anyone else alive. Mother was right about that, I thought, as the radicchio crunched between my teeth and the cauliflower filled the room with its homey, comforting smell.

  8

  One morning Krümel announced he was going to pamper us. That’s how he said it—pamper—to us, who no longer believed we had the right to be pampered. He was going to let us taste his zwieback, he said, he had just baked some as a surprise for his boss. “He loves it. He even had it made in the trenches during the Great War.”

  “Sure he did. After all, it’s so easy to find the ingredients at the front,” Augustine whispered. “The butter, honey, and yeast he produced himself, by sweating.” Fortunately the SS guards didn’t hear her, and Krümel had already disappeared into the kitchen with his assistant chefs.

  A noise escaped Elfriede’s nose, a sort of laugh. I had never heard Elfriede laugh before, and it caught me so off guard that it made me feel like laughing too. Though I tried to retain my composure, when I heard another snort I couldn’t hold back a titter. “Berliner, can’t you control yourself?” she said, and at that point a mixture of snickers and grunts fermented in the lunchroom, growing fuller and fuller until we couldn’t hold back any longer. All of us burst out laughing before the SS guards’ astonished eyes.

  “What’s so funny?” Fingers touching a holster. “What’s come over you?” One of the guards pounded his fist on the table. “Do I have to beat it out of you?”

  With effort, we fell silent. “Order!” the Beanpole said, though our sense of amusement had already faded.

  Still, it had happened: for the first time, we had laughed together.

  * * *

  THE ZWIEBACK WAS crispy and fragrant. I savored the merciless sweetness of my privilege. Krümel was pleased, though with time I would discover he always was. It was a question of pride, pride in his profession.

  He too was from Berlin. He had begun his career with Mitropa, the European company that managed railway sleeping and dining cars. In ’37 he had been hired by the Führer to pamper him during journeys on his special train. The train was armored with light antiaircraft cannons to respond to low-altitude attacks and was equipped with elegant suites, Krümel said. They were so elegant, in fact, that Hitler jokingly called it “the Hotel of the Frenetic Reich Chancellor.” Its name was Amerika, or at least it was until America joined the war. Then it was downgraded to Brandenburg, which sounded less grand to me, though I didn’t say so. Now, lodged in the Wolfsschanze, Krümel cooked over two hundred meals a day for Hitler’s staff, also pampering us tasters.

  We weren’t allowed to enter the kitchen, and he would come out only if he had something to tell us or was summoned by the guards—for example, because Heike reported a strange taste in the water, which Beate consequently noticed. The women leapt to their feet—headache, nausea, stomachs churning from distress. But it was Fachingen spring water, the Führer’s favorite! “The water of well-being,” they called it, so how could it harm anyone?

  One Tuesday, two kitchen helpers didn’t show up for work. They had fevers. Krümel came to the lunchroom and asked me to give him a hand. I don’t know why he chose me, maybe because I was the only one who had studied his books on nutrition—the other women had soon grown bored with them. Or maybe it was because I was from Berlin, like him.

  The Fanatics turned up their noses at his choice. If someone was to have access to the kitchen, it should be them, the perfect homemakers.

  One day I had heard Gertrude ask her sister, “Did you read about the young woman who went into a Jew’s shop and was kidnapped?”

  “No, where did it happen?” Sabine asked, but Gertrude went on: “Just imagine—the back of the shop led to an underground tunnel. Passing through it, with the help of other Jews the shopkeeper took her to the synagogue and they all raped her, all at once.”

  Sabine covered her eyes as though witnessing the assault. “Really, Gerti?”

  “Of course,” her sister replied. “They always rape them before offering them in sacrifice.”

  “Did you read that in Der Stürmer?” Theodora asked.

  “I just know it happened, and that’s that,” Gertrude replied. “We housewives aren’t safe anymore, not even when we go shopping.”

  “That’s true,” said Theodora. “It’s a good thing all those shops were closed down.”

  Theodora would have defended tooth and nail the German ideal of mother-wife-homemaker, and it was precisely because she was its worthy representative that she asked to speak to Krümel. She told him about the restaurant her family had run before the war. She had experience in the kitchen and wanted to prove it. The chef was persuaded.

  He handed us each an apron and a crate of vegetables. I rinsed them in the large sink while Theodora cubed some, sliced others. With the exception of scolding me for not rinsing away all the grit or because I had left a puddle on the floor, she didn’t speak to me on the first day. Like an apprentice, she spent her time shadowing the assistant chefs, sticking so close behind them that she hindered their movements.

  “Out of the way!” Krümel ordered her, when he nearly tripped over her feet.

  Theodora apologized, then added, “How better to learn than by watching? I can barely believe I’m working side by side with a chef of your caliber.”

  “Side by side? Out of the way, I told you!”

  Over the following days, though, convinced she was now a full-fledged member of the team, out of professional ethics she decided to take me into her confidence. After all, I was her coworker—or rather, my blatant incompetence made me her underling. And so she told me about her parents’ restaurant, a small establishment, not even ten tables. “It was charming, though. You should have seen it.” The war had forced them to close it down. She planned to reopen it, though, when the war was over, and with several more tables. On the outer edges of her eyes, her wrinkles formed tiny flippers, making them look like two little fish. Her restaurateur dreams filling her with enthusiasm, she began to speak excitedly, the flippers on her face moving so quickly I almost expected to see her eyes spring from her face, dive through the air, and plunge into the pot of boiling water in front of her.

  “But if the Bolsheviks arrived it would be impossible,” she said. “We could never reopen the restaurant. It would be the end of everything.” All at once, the flippers went still. Her eyes were no longer swimming. They were age-old fossils. How old was Theodora?

  “I hope it’s not the end of everything,” I dared to say, “because I don’t know if we’re going to win this war.”

  “Don’t even think that way. If the Russians won, we would be doomed to destruction and slavery, the Führer said so himself. Hordes of men being marched off to the Siberian tundra. Didn’t you hear him say so?”

&nbs
p; No, I hadn’t.

  * * *

  I REMEMBERED GREGOR back in our living room in Altemesseweg. He got up from the armchair we had bought from a secondhand shop and went to the window, sighing. “Russian weather.” Soldiers used that expression, he explained to me, because Russians attacked even in the worst conditions. “They can endure anything.”

  He was on leave and spoke to me about the front—he did that sometimes. He told me about the Morgenkonzert, for example, which was what they called the symphony of explosions the Red Army performed at dawn.

  In bed one night, he said, “If the Russians arrive, they’ll show no mercy.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because the Germans treat Soviet prisoners differently from the others. The British and French receive aid from the Red Cross, and in the afternoon they even play football, while the Soviets are forced to dig trenches under the surveillance of soldiers from their own army.”

  “From their own army?”

  “Yes, men who are lured into it by the promise of a piece of bread or an extra ladleful of broth,” he replied, turning off the light. “If they do to us what we’ve done to them, it’s going to be horrible.”

  For a long time I tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep, and all at once Gregor embraced me. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you those things, you shouldn’t know about them. What good does knowing do? And for whom?”

  I lay awake even after he had fallen fast asleep.

  * * *

  “WE’LL DESERVE WHAT they do to us,” I said to Theodora.

  She glared at me with contempt, then went back to ignoring me. Her hostility darkened my spirits. There was no reason for me to feel that way—she wasn’t someone I wanted a connection with. Actually, I had no connection with any of the other women either. Not with Augustine, who needled me—Made a new friend, have you?—or with Leni, who heaped praises on the food as though I’d cooked it myself. I had no connection with those women, apart from a job I never would have imagined for myself. What do you want to be when you grow up? Hitler’s food taster.

  Nevertheless, the Fanatic’s hostility made me uncomfortable. I wandered through the kitchen more clumsily than usual, and out of distraction burned my wrist. A shriek escaped me.

  At the sight of my skin withering around the burn, Theodora suspended her silent treatment, grabbed my arm, and turned on the faucet. “Run cold water over it!” Then she peeled a potato as the chefs continued their work. She patted my wrist dry with a towel and rested a slice of raw potato on the burn. “It’ll soothe the irritation, you’ll see.” Her motherly care touched me.

  Standing in a corner as I held the slice of potato on my wrist, I saw Krümel toss something into the soup and chuckle to himself. Noticing I’d spotted him doing it, he raised his finger to his lips. “It’s not healthy to go entirely without meat,” he said. “You learned that for yourself in those books I gave you, right? That stubborn man can’t get it through his head, so I sneak lard into his soup. You can’t imagine how angry he gets when he notices! But he almost never notices.” Krümel roared with laughter. “And when he’s convinced he’s gained weight, I can’t get him to eat a thing.”

  Theodora, who was pouring flour into a mixing bowl, moved closer.

  “Believe me, not one thing!” the chef said, looking over at her. “Spaghetti with quark? He digests it so well but refuses it. Bavarian apple cake, his favorite—just think, I serve it to him every evening for his nighttime tea, after his last meeting—but I swear, if he’s on a diet he won’t touch a single slice. In two weeks he can lose as much as seven kilos.”

  “His nighttime tea?” the Fanatic asked.

  “A late-night meeting among friends. The chief drinks either tea or hot chocolate. He’s wild about hot chocolate. The others guzzle down as much schnapps as they can. Not that he approves of it. Let’s say he tolerates it. Only once has he lost his temper, with Hoffmann, the photographer—the man’s a drunkard. Usually, though, the chief doesn’t bother noticing. He listens to Tristan und Isolde with his eyes closed. He always says, ‘If I were about to die, I would want this to be the last thing my ears hear.’”

  Theodora was enraptured. I took the potato slice off my wrist. The afflicted area had spread. I wanted to show it to her, expected her to scold me, to come over and put the slice back in its place, Keep it there and stop making a fuss. Suddenly I missed my mother. But the Fanatic wasn’t paying attention to me anymore—she was hanging on Krümel’s every word. From the way the chef spoke about Hitler, the man was obviously dear to his heart, and Krümel took it for granted that Hitler was dear to our hearts too, even mine. But then again, I had declared my willingness to die for the Führer. Every day my plate—our ten aligned plates—conjured his presence as though through transubstantiation. No promise of eternal life; two hundred marks a month, that was our pay.

  When they had handed us our first envelope, we stuck it in our pockets or purses—none of us dared open it on the bus. In my room with the door closed, I thumbed through the bills with astonishment. It was more money than my salary in Berlin.

  I chucked the potato slice into the trash bin.

  “The chief says eating meat and drinking wine makes him sweat, but I tell him he sweats because he’s too agitated.” When Krümel started talking about him, he couldn’t stop. “‘Look at horses,’ he tells me, ‘Look at bulls. Those animals are herbivores, and they’re strong and robust. On the other hand, look at dogs. One brief run and their tongues are already hanging out.’”

  “It’s true,” Theodora said. “I’ve never thought about that. He’s right.”

  “Bah, I don’t know about that. In any case, he says he can’t stand the cruelty of slaughterhouses.” Krümel was talking only to her now.

  I picked up a roll from a large basket, separated the crust from the soft insides.

  “Once at dinner he told his guests he’d been in a slaughterhouse and still remembered the fresh blood lapping against his galoshes. Just imagine: Dietrich had to push his plate away.… Poor fellow is impressionable.”

  The Fanatic let out a hearty laugh. I balled up the insides of the bread, shaping them into tiny circles and petals. Krümel reproached me for the waste.

  “They’re for you,” I said. “They’re like you, Crumbs.”

  Not listening to me, he stirred the broth and asked Theodora to check on the radishes in the oven.

  “Everything here is a waste,” I went on. “We women are a waste. No one could ever manage to poison him, not with all the security measures here. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Oh, so you’re an expert on security now, are you?” the Fanatic said. “And maybe on military strategy too?”

  “Enough,” Krümel warned, a father whose daughters were quarreling.

  “Well, how did he manage before hiring us?” I asked her defiantly. “Before that, wasn’t he afraid they would poison him?”

  Just then a guard walked into the kitchen to have us take our places at the table. The clumps of bread lay there to dry on the marble countertop.

  The next day, as I made my way around the assistant chefs’ perfect coordination and the Fanatic’s zeal, Krümel appeared with an unexpected gift: in secret, he gave Theodora and me fruit and cheese. He personally put it in my satchel—the leather bag I used to take to the office in Berlin.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You two deserve it,” he said.

  I took it home. Herta couldn’t believe her eyes when I unwrapped the bundles Krümel had given me. It was thanks to me that she had such delicacies for dinner. It was thanks to Hitler.

  9

  Augustine marched up the aisle of the bus so briskly that the hem of her dark skirt seemed to froth. She rested her hand on the back of our bench, touching Leni’s hair, and said, “Let’s change spots, okay? Just for today.”

  It was dark out. Leni looked at me, confused, then got up and plopped into an empty seat. Augustine took her place beside me.


  “Your bag’s full,” she said.

  Everyone was staring at us—not just Leni. Even Beate, even Elfriede. The Fanatics weren’t. They were sitting way in the front, right behind the driver.

  We had spontaneously broken into groups. Not that we expected affection within those groups. More simply, fractures and shifts had occurred with the same inexorability with which the earth’s plates move. The need for protection that Leni betrayed with every blink had left me responsible for her. Then there was Elfriede, who had shoved me in the washroom. In that gesture I glimpsed my own fear. It had been an attempt to make contact. Intimate, yes; the Beanpole might have been right about that. Elfriede had been looking for a fight, like little boys who understand who they can trust only after duking it out. The guard had averted the fistfight, which meant we still had a score to settle, she and I, a debt that generated a magnetic field around us.

  “It’s full, isn’t it? Answer me.”

  Theodora looked over her shoulder, an automatic reaction to Augustine’s harsh voice. A few weeks ago Theodora had remarked that the Führer worked on gut reaction, that he was a man of instinct. Yes, yes, he has a brilliant mind, Gertrude had said, two hairpins clasped between her teeth, not realizing she had just contradicted her friend. But do you know how many things they don’t report to him? she went on, after sticking the hairpins firmly into the braid coiled up on the side of her head. It’s not like he knows everything that happens, it’s not always his fault. Augustine had feigned spitting on her.

  Now she sat beside me, cross-legged, one knee pressed against the seat in front of us. “For a few days now the chef’s been giving you extra food to take home.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We want some too.”