At the Wolf's Table Read online

  “We” who? I didn’t know what to say. Solidarity among us food tasters was a foreign concept. We were tectonic plates that shifted and collided, floating beside one another or drifting apart.

  “You can’t be selfish. He likes you. Make him give you more.”

  “Take what’s here.” I held my satchel out to her.

  “It’s not enough. We want milk, at least a couple bottles. We’ve got children and we have to have milk.”

  They earned even more than the average laborer, so it wasn’t a question of need. It’s a question of fairness, Augustine would have said if I had pointed that out. Why on earth should you be given more than us? To this I could have shot back, Ask Theodora to do it. She knew Theodora would refuse. Why did she expect me to agree, though? I wasn’t her friend. But she sensed how desperate I was for approval, had sensed it right from the start, even if I couldn’t admit it.

  How do people become friends? Now that I could recognize their expressions, could even anticipate them, my companions’ faces seemed different from the ones I had seen on the first day. That happens at school, or at work, in places where you’re forced to spend many hours of your existence. People are forced to become friends.

  “All right, Augustine. Tomorrow I’ll try asking him.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, Krümel told the two of us that his helpers had returned, so we were no longer needed. I explained this to Augustine and the other women who had chosen her as their spokesperson, but Heike and Beate were relentless. It’s not fair that you were treated to something extra and we weren’t. We have children. Who do you have?

  I didn’t have children. Whenever I had spoken to my husband about it he would tell me it wasn’t the right time, that he was away at war and I was alone. He had left in ’40, a year after our wedding. There I was without Gregor, in our apartment furnished with things from the secondhand shop where we liked to go on Saturday mornings, stopping for breakfast at the nearby bakery, cinnamon Schnecke or poppyseed strudel, which we ate directly out of the bag, one bite each, as we strolled along. There I was, without him and without a child, in an apartment full of junk.

  Germans loved children. During parades the Führer always stroked their cheeks and urged women to have lots of them. Gregor wanted to be a good German but wouldn’t let himself be influenced. He said putting a person into the world meant condemning them to death. But the war will end, I objected. It’s not the war, he replied, it’s life. Everyone dies all the same. When I accused him—You’re not well, ever since you left for the front you’ve been depressed—he became angry.

  Maybe at Christmas, with Herta and Joseph’s help, I would manage to persuade him.

  If I became pregnant I would be nourishing the child in my womb with food from the lunchroom. A pregnant woman isn’t a good guinea pig, since she might muddle the results of the experiment, but the SS wouldn’t find out—at least not until the quarterly lab results or my belly gave me away.

  I would risk poisoning the baby. We would both die, or we would survive. His mealy bones and tender muscles nurtured by Hitler’s food. He would be a child of the Reich even before being my own. But then again, no one is born without sin.

  “Steal it,” Augustine told me. “Go into the kitchen, chat with the chef to distract him—talk to him about Berlin, about when you used to go to the opera, come up with something—then, the minute he turns the other way, take some milk.”

  “Are you insane? I can’t do that.”

  “It’s not his to begin with. You’re not taking it away from him.”

  “But it’s not fair. He doesn’t deserve this.”

  “What, Rosa—do we deserve this?”

  * * *

  LIGHT GLIMMERED OFF the marble countertops, which the kitchen helpers had degreased.

  “Sooner or later the Soviets will surrender, you’ll see,” Krümel said.

  We were alone. He had sent his staff to unload the provisions that had arrived by train at the Wolfsschanze station, saying he would catch up with them later, since I had asked him to explain a chapter in the book I was reading, a book he had given me. I hadn’t thought of a better excuse to keep him there. After he had explained—Krümel delighted in playing the teacher—I was going to ask him for two bottles of milk, even if he would never give them to me, even if he replied rudely, harshly. It’s one thing to be given something as a gift but another thing to demand it. Besides, who was it for? I didn’t have children, had never nursed anyone.

  Krümel had sat down to talk to me and within minutes was chatting away excitedly, as always. The disaster in Stalingrad that February had demoralized everyone.

  “They died so Germany could live on,” Krümel said.

  “That’s what the Führer says.”

  “Well, I believe him. Don’t you?”

  I nodded hesitantly.

  “We’re going to win,” he said, “because it’s only right.”

  He told me that in the evenings Hitler ate facing a wall decorated with a Soviet flag that had been seized at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. In that room he explained to his guests the danger of Bolshevism. The other European nations underestimated it. Didn’t they realize the USSR was as dark, eerie, and unfathomable as the ghost ship in Wagner’s opera? Only a man as stubborn as himself could sink it, even if it meant chasing after it until Judgment Day.

  “Only he can,” Krümel said, checking his watch. “Oh, I need to go. Was there anything else you needed?”

  I need fresh milk. Milk for children who aren’t mine. “No, thank you. In fact, is there something I can do to repay you? You’ve been so kind.”

  “Actually, I could use a favor. We have several kilos of beans to shell. Would you mind starting on them, at least until it’s time for you to go back home? I’ll tell the guards you need to stay here.”

  He left me alone in his kitchen. I could have poisoned the supplies, but that didn’t even cross Krümel’s mind. I was one of Hitler’s food tasters, was part of his team, was also from Berlin. He trusted me.

  * * *

  ONCE IN LINE for the bus, my satchel against my belly, I thought I heard the glass bottles rattle together and tried to hold them still with both hands, walking slowly. Not so slow as to make the SS guards suspicious. Elfriede was behind me. She often stood in line behind me. We were always the last ones to move. It wasn’t laziness—it was our inability to conform. No matter how willing we may have been to follow the rules, the rules had a hard time fitting us. We were like two pieces of the wrong size, or made of some incompatible material, but that was all you had to build your fortress, so you found a way to adapt.

  Her breath tickled my neck. “Berliner, did you let them get you into trouble?”

  “Silence,” one of the guards said listlessly.

  I gripped the bottles through the leather, walked slowly to prevent the least contact between them.

  “I thought you’d learned it’s best for everyone to mind their own business around here.” Elfriede’s breath on my neck was torture.

  Then the Beanpole came toward us calmly. When he was beside me, he looked me up and down. I continued to follow the other women until he grabbed my arm, pulling it away from the leather. I braced myself to hear the clink of glass against glass, but the bottles didn’t wobble. I had done a good job, nestled them snugly into the dark depths of my bag.

  “Having another tête-à-tête, you two?”

  Elfriede stopped behind me and the guard grabbed her as well. “I warned you that if I caught you again I would take advantage of it.”

  The cold glass against my hip. All the guard had to do was accidentally touch my satchel and he would catch me. He let go of my arm, clasped my chin between his thumb and forefinger, and leaned down toward me. My chin was trembling. With my eyes I sought Elfriede.

  “You stink a bit like broccoli today. It’ll have to wait for another time.” The Beanpole cackled. “Why that look on your face? I was joking. We even joke with
you here. What more could you ask for?”

  * * *

  THE HANDOFF TOOK place back on the bus, hidden from view by the bench seats. Augustine had brought a small cloth sack. My chin was still trembling. Below my cheek, a nervous tic.

  “You were great, and generous.” Her smile of thanks looked sincere.

  How do people become friends?

  Us and them. That was what Augustine was proposing. Us, the victims, the young women with no choice. Them, the enemies, the abusers of power. Krümel wasn’t one of us—that was what Augustine meant. Krümel was a Nazi. And we had never been Nazis.

  The only one who wasn’t smiling at me was Elfriede. She was focusing on the expanse of fields and silos that passed by one after the other outside the window. Every day the bus carried me down eight kilometers of road until reaching the bend at Gross-Partsch, my place of banishment.

  10

  From Gregor’s bed I studied the edges of a photograph of him that was stuck into the frame of the mirror above the bedside table. He must have been four, five years old—I couldn’t say. He wore snow boots and was squinting in the sunlight.

  I couldn’t fall asleep. Since I had come to Gross-Partsch I hadn’t been able to. Nor had I been able to in Berlin, where we had been barricaded in the cellar with the rats. Herr Holler used to say we would eventually resort to eating those as well, once the cats and sparrows were gone, they too having been massacred, and without the glory of a memorial. Of all people, it had been Holler who said it—Holler, whose anxiety left him with intestinal distress and who, if he withdrew into the corner where we kept the bucket, would leave behind an unbearable stench.

  Our suitcases were packed, to make a quick escape if need be.

  After the bomb on Budengasse I went up to our apartment. It was flooded. The pipes had been damaged. Up to my knees in water, I opened my suitcase on the mattress and searched through my things for the photo album. It hadn’t gotten wet. Then I opened my mother’s suitcase and breathed in the scent of her clothes. They had a smell too similar to my own. Now that she was dead and I wasn’t, that smell—of which I remained the only heir—seemed even more profane. In her suitcase I found a photo of Franz, sent from America in ’38, just months after he’d set sail. We hadn’t seen my brother since. Of me, there were no pictures. If she and I had been forced to flee, we would have done so together—that was what my mother believed. Instead she died.

  After the bomb, I buried her and went through the abandoned homes on our block. I searched the cupboards and gobbled down what I could, stole tea sets to sell on the black market at Alexanderplatz along with the porcelain dishware Mother kept in the display cabinet.

  Anne Langhans let me stay at her place, where we shared a bed, little Pauline between us. Sometimes I pretended she was the daughter I had never had. Her breath consoled me, grew more familiar than my mother’s.

  I convinced myself that one day Gregor would return from the war. We would fix the pipes in my family home and have a child—or, better, two. In their sleep they would breathe slowly, with their mouths open, like Pauline.

  * * *

  GREGOR WAS SO tall when he walked beside me down Unter den Linden, all the trees gone. The people had to have a clear view of the Führer passing by in the parade—that was why the lindens had been chopped down. I only went up to his shoulders, and along the way he took my hand.

  I said, Isn’t it a bit old, this cliché about the secretary and her boss? He said, If I fire you will I have the right to kiss you?

  It made me laugh. He stopped, leaned against a shop window, and slowly pulled me against him. I stifled my laughter in his wool sweater, then raised my face and glimpsed the portrait in the window: the halo painted around the Führer’s head was yellow and his gaze cross, as though he had just driven the merchants from the temple. We kissed before his eyes. Adolf Hitler blessed our love.

  * * *

  I OPENED THE bedside table drawer, took out all of Gregor’s letters, reread them one by one. It was like hearing his voice, pretending he was near. The X’s marked in ink on the calendar reminded me that soon he really would be.

  * * *

  THE MORNING HE departed, he found me slumped in the bedroom doorway, my forehead pressed against the frame. What’s wrong? he asked. I didn’t reply.

  It felt like I had known happiness only since meeting him. Before then I had never thought I was entitled to it. Those circles around my eyes, like fate. Instead, my happiness was so dazzling and so complete and so mine, the happiness Gregor had given to me as though it were the simplest thing in the world, as though it were his personal vocation.

  But then he relinquished that vocation, found a more important one. I’ll be back soon, he said, stroking my temple, my cheek, my lips, trying to slip his fingers into my mouth in our customary gesture, our silent pact—Trust me, I do trust you, love me, I do love you, make love to me—but I clenched my teeth and he withdrew his hand.

  * * *

  I IMAGINED HIM moving swiftly through the trenches, his breath misting in the freezing-cold air. Only two men have failed to realize Russia is cold, he wrote to me. One of them is Napoleon. Out of caution, he didn’t mention the other one. When I asked him about the war, he said he had to respect military secrecy, though it might have been an excuse to avoid frightening me. Maybe just then he was eating by the fire with the other soldiers, mess tins of canned meat on their laps, their uniforms growing baggy because they were losing weight. I knew Gregor would eat without complaining so none of the others would think of him as a burden. He had always needed others to lean on him in order to feel strong.

  At first he had written that he was uncomfortable sleeping with strangers around, each with a weapon at his disposal. He could have been shot by anyone at any time, be it because of a squabble over a card game, an overly vivid nightmare, a misunderstanding during their march. He didn’t trust them. Gregor trusted only me. Now that he had grown so close to his fellow soldiers he felt ashamed for having thought that way.

  There was the painter, who had lost two sections of his fingers in battle and didn’t know if he would ever paint again. He hated Nazis and Jews in equal measure. As for the former lawyer, a zealous Nazi, he cared little about the Jews and was convinced that not even Hitler lost any sleep over them. He said Berlin would never be bombed because the Führer wouldn’t allow it. When my parents’ home had been struck, I wondered if that chipped away at his certainty. Hitler had calculated everything, Gregor’s comrade-in-arms said. My husband had let him talk because they were in the same unit and in wartime, he said, they became a single body. They were the body he felt he belonged to, a mirror that infinitely reflected his own. They, not I, were flesh of his flesh.

  Then there was Reinhard, who was afraid of everything, even lice, and clung to Gregor like a little boy clings to his father, though he was barely three years younger. “Shitbritches,” I called him. In the last letter that had made it through to Berlin, Gregor had written that excrement was proof of God’s inexistence. Sometimes he liked to provoke people—everyone at his office knew that—but he had never said anything of the sort before. We all have diarrhea here, he wrote, because of the food, the cold, the fear. Reinhard had soiled his pants during a mission, a common occurrence among the soldiers, but for him it had been humiliating.

  If mankind really was created by God, my husband wrote, do you think God would invent something as vulgar as shit? Wouldn’t He have found some other way, one that didn’t involve the repulsive product of one’s digestion? Shit is such a perverse invention that either God is perverse or He doesn’t exist.

  * * *

  EVEN THE FÜHRER, for his part, struggled with the product of his digestion. It was a torment for Krümel. Though the diet he had developed was perfectly healthy, his boss was dependent on the anti-flatulence pills his personal physician prescribed. The patient swallowed as many as sixteen of them a day. Hitler had designed a complex system to avoid being poisoned by the enemy, yet i
n the meantime he was poisoning himself.

  “You mustn’t go around telling all these stories. I’m a gossip,” Krümel said, chuckling, “but you’ll keep them to yourself, won’t you?”

  After lunch I was back in the kitchen, almost done shelling the multitude of beans he had assigned to me. Theodora had offered to help—the kitchen was her territory and she hated the idea of my being there without her. I told her there was no need, and Krümel had had too much on his mind to listen to her. He went to the station with his men, leaving me alone again.

  I got up from the chair, very slowly so it wouldn’t scrape against the floor, tiptoed over—even the least bit of noise might have drawn the attention of the guard posted outside the door—and took two bottles of milk from the refrigerator. My skin tingled as I took them. However, I was so pleased with my courage that I didn’t even consider that Krümel might notice that two—no, four—bottles were missing, even believed he wouldn’t notice. Every item in the kitchen was bound to be counted, he must keep a list of everything that came in and went out. But why should he suspect me? He had assistant chefs, it might have been them.

  * * *

  LATER, AS I stood in line for the bus, the Beanpole walked over to me and opened my purse. It wasn’t a spectacular gesture. The latch simply snapped open and the necks of the bottles peeked out. The Beanpole turned toward Theodora, who said, “There you go.”

  “I don’t want to hear a word out of you!” he snapped, silencing her. My companions had shocked, alarmed looks on their faces.

  Someone went to summon Krümel from the Wolfsschanze. They made us stand there in the hallway until he arrived. When he was in front of me he looked even leaner, almost brittle.

  “I gave them to her,” he said.