David Gillham - City of Women

A panic of newsreel images shutters across the screen: troops leaping over shell craters, a tank crushing a stone wall. The onslaught toward victory in the East continues, at least in the movie houses. She breathes in solemnly. Kaspar is there now. He was conscripted two months before the Aufmarsch into Russia, and is now stalled somewhere to the south of Moscow with a few hundred thousand other German husbands. She thinks about him nightly as she goes to sleep. Fears that he is suffering in the elements, but cannot quite wish him in the bed beside her. Does that make her as cold as the Russian winter? Maybe just her heart, she thinks.

A flamethrower belches a stream of burning oil. A chorus of rockets squeals into the smoke–encrusted air. A heavy machine gun rattles. But Sigrid closes her eyes to all of it. She craves this square of darkness like an addict. Only sleep offers her such sanctuary from the present world. Alone in the darkness, she reopens the past, and returns to the instant before Egon had spoken his first words to her.

Listen to this , she hears him say from the empty seat beside her, though she knows it is only a whisper of memory.

The mezzanine had been an icebox that day, but the simple sight of this man who was not her husband had drawn her toward him not her husband, as if she had just found an unexpected source of heat. He was sleekly barbered and wearing a cashmere coat with the collar turned up, striking a dandyish note that was incongruous with the rawness he exuded. Something in his expression was unruly, and his posture was defined by a confident animal brawn.

She had come to the cinema to find an empty space in the day. War movies were best, because attendance was usually weak, so she had bought a ticket for the matinee of Battle Group Danzig , in order to find a crevice of solitude. To find a fissure in her concrete routine, where she could escape the racket of office typewriters. Escape the noise of her mother-in-law’s complaints and the wordless criticisms of her husband’s glances.

The house lights were still up. She couldn’t help but steal a look at the man as he brooded over a copy of the Morgenpost . He looked out of place, but intentionally so. A premeditated outsider. Is that what had prompted her to disregard the number on her ticket and choose a spot only two seats away from his? His eyes had captured and then released her. Then nothing. Only the newspaper claimed his interest as she adjusted her scarf and settled herself in the seat, trying to build her walls out of the empty space. A stout Berliner occupied a seat at the front of the balcony, his hat clamped down over his ears as he stared in obedient anticipation at the curtained screen. She inhaled the tang of smoke from the projector operator’s cigarette above her head. Beside her, the man who was not her husband grunted to himself and turned a page in his newspaper. She found that she, too, was sitting in obedient anticipation, her palms clammy. Was she expecting something? There were many reasons why she should not be planting herself so close to a stranger. Any number of reasons, not the least of which was that she had just made some small effort to conceal her wedding band in the way she folded her hands. A thin, unadorned ring of electroplated gold on the third finger of her right hand. As unadorned as the marriage itself.

“Listen to this,” she heard the man say suddenly, without preamble, without introduction, as if they had been in the midst of a conversation. His voice was deep, as if scraped from the rock of a cave. “‘Physician of true German stock, fifty-seven years old and a veteran of the Cameroon campaigns, fervently desires marital union with a modest and frugal Aryan female, who is strong and healthy, blessed with broad hips for childbearing, and who is repulsed by nicotine and cosmetics.’ My God, now, there’s a catch,” he said, and grinned, showing her his smile for the very first time. “Don’t tell me you’re not tempted.”

“No, I think not,” Sigrid replied, even though she knew she shouldn’t be answering. Even though she had no business doing so. “I’m afraid I once owned a tube of lipstick.”

“Well, this one , then. I know this one will set your heart pounding. ‘Aryan widower of property, age sixty-two, wishes male progeny through matrimony with a young, fertile Aryan mate, in order to preserve an old family name from extinction.’ There you have it. An old family name, yours for the taking.” He read on. This old man and that old man searching for pure-blooded Aryan bedmates, but Sigrid was not fully listening. Instead, she was watching the slight twitch in his jawline as he spoke. A thin tremble of muscle that she felt repeated as a shiver beneath her skin.

He smiled again, but this time with scrutiny. He gave her his surname, which she would soon learn was false. “But I insist you call me by my forename. Egon,” said the man who was not her husband, offering his hand. “I know that I am a terribly rude man, interrupting your privacy this way. But I hope you’ll forgive me. I saw your face, and I simply had to hear the sound of your voice.”

She glanced at the outstretched hand, as if she might ignore it, but the smile was too much. Open. Easy. Carnivorous. Even more appealing for its sharp splinter of pain. She took his hand. It was warm, and she felt the strength of his grip. “So now you have heard it,” she said.

That same day he took her to a café that smelled of boiled sugar, balsam oil, and pipe smoke. It was a small place in the Savignyplatz with leaded casement windows where she could hear the clank of the S-Bahn trains as they passed. He bought her coffee and an apple torte, and amused her by eating most of it himself. But mostly what he did was listen to her as she bounced from topic to topic, with anxious release. Small topics, which turned into larger ones. Peeling potatoes for supper turned into the stagnation she felt living under her mother-in-law’s roof. A memory of her father’s love for fancy cakes turned into his desertion and the emptiness she felt at her mother’s deathbed. She would suddenly become aware of how much she was talking and apologize, but the depth of his eyes encouraged her to continue. When she realized how late it was, she became flustered. But again he only smiled, crushed out one of the many cigarettes he had smoked, and paid the bill. That night she could not forget his eyes. Could not forget their easy desire, their brute intelligence. Even as she lay beside Kaspar in their bed with the clunking mattress springs, she felt as if Egon was still watching her.

Two days later, she bought a ticket to Aces of the Sea . He met her in the lobby. She extended her hand, and he took it, but kissed her cheek. Briefly, but with intention. Up in the mezzanine, sitting beside him, she found that she did not dare look into his face. The teaser divided, and the silvered images stormed onto the screen with an edge of static. She stared dutifully at the screen as the Ufa newsreel erupted with a blare of trumpets. Footage of artillery caissons and tanks. Polish army prisoners formed a soup line inside a fenced-in pasture. Gangs of old Warsaw Jews with bristling beards were paraded in front of the camera. They gazed out from the screen, blinking with anxiety. When the movie began, she stared straight ahead at it. But to her the heroics of the submarine fleet in the North Atlantic were nothing but a distraction of noise and flicker. Her eyes shifted furtively to the periphery, her mind now bent on the man who was not her husband, whose hand she felt suddenly touch her face.

The first time he kissed her on the mouth, she shoved him away. The second time he kissed her on the mouth, she kissed him back. The theater was dark. On the screen a U-boat captain sighted a freighter through his periscope as Egon calmly guided her hand to the center of his trousers.