David Gillham - City of Women

A detail of foreign workers are hauling rubble and tossing it into the rear of a cart drawn by a sagging dray. Their boss is a tubby work leader in the Labor Service, but they are not so well fed as he. Their clothes are ragged and stained. She hears them gabbling among themselves. Something slushy and Slavic. Their jackets bear a large white letter. P for “Polnisch.” They grunt with the heavy work. Their faces are hard and their expressions raw. They struggle with the chunks of bomb-scorched masonry as the boss puffs on his cigars and complains to an equally well-fed police meister about the results of a local football match. Both offer Sigrid a perfunctory nod as she passes, but the workers look at her sightlessly, all of them sharing the same covenant. They do not see her, she does not see them. A conspiracy of blindness.

WHEN SHE ENTERS the apartment block, she finds a crowd filling the steps of the top-floor landing. “What is this?” she asks Marta Trotzmüller.

“They’ve come from the SS Economics Office,” the woman replies with puckish excitement, “for the auction .”

“Auction?”

“Didn’t you see the sign?”

There’s a spattering of applause, as the paper stamps are broken by Frau Mundt’s husband under the supervision of a tubby bureaucrat in a steel gray uniform with a death’s head on his cap. She spots her mother-in-law in the front rank.

In the kitchen of the flat, she tries to remain deaf to the burble of voices next door, and instead concentrates on the potatoes she is peeling. Blackish brown and rubbery with age. She watches their skin curl and then drop away into the scrap bucket in the sink. By law, scraps must be saved. The Party collects them for pig slop. How funny Egon would find that. Before she knows it, she is thinking of his face, his touch, and feels a finger of warmth in her belly. But then she hears the front door creak, and she shoves all thought away as her mother-in-law enters, struggling with the weight of Frau Remki’s Telefunken wireless set. Sigrid glares at her in shock. Mother Schröder glares back in defiance, and kicks the door shut behind her with the heel of her shoe. “Don’t you start, daughter-in-law,” she warns. “Don’t you dare start. I don’t want to hear any of your sermonizing.”

“But how could you do that?” Sigrid begins anyway.

Mother Schröder frowns. “Do what ? What’s my horrible crime? It’s a radio.”

“A radio that belonged to one of your oldest friends until she committed suicide.”

The old woman plunks the heavy wireless onto the kitchen table, and huffs, her face flush. “Why must you always side with anyone but me?” she demands. “You heard what she said in the cellar. The woman was a traitor.”

“Maybe that’s what Frau Mundt calls her.”

“It’s what everyone calls her, because it’s what she was .”

“I can’t believe you can speak like this. You knew her for over twenty years.”

“And for over twenty years she was a toffee-nosed bitch who thought her turds didn’t stink. I can remember when her husband, the gallant war hero , bought her this radio. She played it just loudly enough to let everyone know what she had. That was always her way. Flaunting her possessions. Always the higher grade. Always the new coat every winter, while the rest of us patched ours. Only the balcony flat was good enough for her. But when your husband’s father died, it took her three days to manage the walk across the hall to offer me her ‘condolences,’ and of course with a fancy cake she’d bought from Oswald’s. So don’t you lecture me on Hildegard Remki, my good girl. Everyone in that cellar had troubles of their own, and plenty of them. I’ve lost a child, too, you know. Kaspar’s little brother. He was just a tiny little baby, and he was beautiful. God took him from me when the influenza came, and it was like a knife in my heart. But I did my mourning in private ; I didn’t go vomiting it out in public. But of course, as usual , the eminent Hildegard Remki had to flaunt. Her grief was so much deeper , you see. So much more profound. So much more important . She had to open her trap, only this time she had to pay the piper. And if I have her precious radio, what’s the difference? She won’t be listening to it any longer.”

Sigrid stands frozen, a damp, half-peeled potato in one hand and the paring knife in the other, stunned by the sheer vehemence of the mother-in-law’s outburst. She watches the old woman brush a frazzled white hair out of her face, clutch the heavy mahogany wireless to her breast, and hulk it out of the kitchen. Sigrid stares after her, breathing in and breathing out. Only a shaft of milky light draws her back to the sink, where she returns to the peeling of the potatoes.

A few minutes later, she pauses when a hash of radio static is followed by music. Lale Andersen singing, Everything Passes, Everything Goes . Then she lowers her eyes toward the sink’s drain, and continues peeling.

The next day, when she returns from work, the door to the Remki flat is standing open. She cannot resist the impulse to peek inside. The emptiness draws her in. She stands in the front room, where Frau Remki once set her sterling service on the mahogany coffee table. Nothing is left now but the hardwood of the floors mottled by holes from carpet tacks. Kaiserreich lithographs of the Rhineland? No trace beyond the shadows on the wall, where the frames had hung, and a twist of picture wire knotted around a nail. The noise of Sigrid’s heels on the floorboards echo largely in the barren space.

IN A WEEK’S TIME, however, the place has been repainted, a sign that someone important is moving in. And Sigrid must squeeze past the furniture being hauled up the stairs by Frau Mundt’s husband and a gang of his cronies from the beer hall. They huff and puff and sweat as they lug the lengthy leather couch, the silk-upholstered armchairs, the heavy oak dinner table, and rolled tapestry carpets. The bronze relief portrait of the Reich’s First Soldier and Führer of the German Volk, Adolf Hitler.

Of course, there’s a portrait of the same fellow hanging in Sigrid’s flat, too. It’s a stationer’s print in a cheap tackboard frame. Her mother-in-law had it hung over her chair. “Don’t drop it, for God’s sake,” one of Mundt’s pals jokes as they negotiate the stairwell railing with the heavy bronze plaque. “We don’t want the Gestapo crawling up our arseholes.” He guffaws and then swears sharply as he nearly loses his grip. This, just as the new mistress of the flat appears. The fellow’s face darkens as Mundt’s husband berates him roughly. “Bauer, you dunderhead. Watch your mouth .”

“Beg pardon, gnädige Frau.” The old beer-swiller begs demurely. But the flat’s new mistress appears not to hear him. “Haven’t you brought the china up yet?” she demands of Mundt’s husband with a frown that pinches her face. “I told you I wanted the china. I’m sure I said that.”

Mundt’s husband clears his throat. “It’ll be up next, gnädige Frau.” he assures her. “The very next thing.” Then he takes it out on his chum. “Come on, meathead! Keep moving! Do you think the lady has time to waste?”

She is young. Couldn’t be more than a couple of years into her twenties, with glossy, honey brown hair plaited into a crown of braids. Her eyes are blue and as large as lakes. A cherub face and a milkmaid’s body. Pretty and quite pregnant. Several months along, to judge by the large bulge covered by a simple print maternity dress cut from top-quality linen.

“Frau Schröder, isn’t it?”