David Gillham - City of Women

The No. 8 is packed, but a young Landser from a reserve regiment politely surrenders his seat to her. When the bus heaves to a halt unexpectedly, the passengers lean as a body to peer through the windows. Shouting and cries. Whistles screeching. SS Death’s Head troops, armed with machine pistols, are herding a band of civilians out into the street in front of an apartment block. The women are clutching their children. The men are clutching their suitcases. All of their faces are paper white. An old man wears a long white beard and a skullcap. When he falls, an SS man kicks him with his boot, over and over. A curly-headed girl screams at the violence, and suddenly the SS are kicking them all, cursing at them as they are driven into the rear of a transport lorry. Then it is over. The rear of the lorry is clamped shut, and the Death’s Head kommando piles into a massive Opel Blitz troop carrier.The vehicles veer into a horseshoe turn and speed away.

A hefty female police auxiliary in feldgrau coveralls steps up and waves the bus forward with stout authority.

Passengers settle back into their seats. Back into the grayness of their routine bus ride. But Sigrid realizes that she has bitten into her knuckle until it has started to bleed.

AS HER MOTHER-IN-LAW salts the potatoes boiling in the pan, she makes an excuse to go up to the Granzingers’. She returns a borrowed baking dish, with a slab of her mother-in-law’s bundt cake on it, with real sugar icing. The children are so excited by the prospect of a sweet morsel that Frau Granzinger must hold the baking dish above her head to make it to the kitchen. That’s when she takes Ericha by the arm.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says to the girl.

Ericha’s eyes lock onto hers. “Yes?” Sigrid flicks her eyes to Frau Granzinger, surrounded by her gaggle as she removes a large cake knife from a drawer. “Tell me,” Ericha whispers.

“Friedrich, wait your turn!” Frau Granzinger snaps.

Sigrid hesitates.

“ Tell me , Frau Schröder. Did you come here to bring cake?”

“Ilse! Watch your brother, he’s made a mess. Frau Schröder . You must stay for a slice,” Granzinger insists.

“Yes. Yes, of course. Thank you,” she calls back. And then returns to the question in Ericha’s eyes. “I came up here,” Sigrid says, “because you said I must make a choice. And against my better judgment, I have made one.”

“THEY’RE CALLED U-BOATS,” Ericha tells her. Those in hiding. “Submarines,” because they are submerged, and must run silently to avoid detection and destruction.

A teenage girl and her little brother are the latest guests to arrive at the pension. The girl has not removed the Judenstern, sewn, yellow and black, onto her coat. Ericha helps her with a penknife, cutting the threads with concentration. The next day, Sigrid uses her last blue ration coupon to purchase a quart of skim milk for them, which she hides on the outside windowsill of her bedroom, where her mother-in-law is unlikely to find it. But when she brings it to the pension, the brother and sister are gone. She doesn’t ask questions, though the questions are bursting inside her. Where did they go? Who were they? Where were their parents? But Sigrid keeps her mouth closed. The milk goes to a pair of middle-aged women instead, who quote Shakespeare to each other as if quoting from the Bible.

But at night, lying in her bed, Sigrid cannot help but fill in the blank spots. She imagines the teenage girl sneaking a glance at the boys in her school, perhaps, stealing a drag from her father’s cigarette. Imagines the girl’s little brother kicking a ball down a cobbled street beside a canal. Chalking his games on the sidewalk. But these normal lives, which she conjures for the U-boats, are her secret. Her secret war against her own fear. It helps to steady her. Helps to stop her from dropping things. A bowl, a file of papers, her comb as she looks blankly at the reflection in the mirror, and suddenly loses strength in her fingers, as if she has had to divert it elsewhere. To some interior spot of resistance.

That’s the way it is at first. Hiding people is much more draining. Much more terrifying than the games she played with Egon’s black-market exchanges. She sometimes thinks she may blurt something out at the office that will give them all away. Worries that she brings home the smell of their fear to her mother-in-law’s flat. She wakes in a silent panic one night, and is compelled to peer into the wardrobe to see if she has actually stashed a U-boat there, or if it was simply a dream.

But after a month, something begins to ease. She begins to make pathways in her head to accommodate the Pension Unsagbar. Auntie begins to call her Frau Blondi, because it has become necessary for her to have a name. After more than a month, a kind of machinery begins to take over. Her muscles grow used to the routine of breaking the law. She stops dropping her fountain pen, and has quit allowing dishes to slip from her fingers. She finds a small closet in her head, in which she can shut away the fear of hiding an attic full of contraband people from the Gestapo, and begins to mimic her old, bland addiction to routine.

Meanwhile, the machinery works. U-boats in, U-boats out, passed to one anonymous contact after the other. The parcels of black-market goods handed off at cafés or on U-Bahn platforms. Cigarettes, hard sausage, food coupons, powdered eggs, the currency of underground survival. Unnamed faces, fearful glances, anger and disbelief and grateful tears. All part of the procedure of daily life.

Ericha approves. “You’re not such a hausfrau any longer,” she informs Sigrid with satisfaction.

“Is that a compliment?”

No answer to that question. “I need you to do something for me,” she says instead. “But it could be dangerous.”

“You mean more dangerous?”

“Yes,” Ericha agrees. “That’s what I mean.”

“Well, what is it?”

The girl expels smoke from a bitter-smelling cigarette. “A pickup.”

TAKING A STEP back when the bus grinds up to the curb, Sigrid adjusts the copy of the B.Z. midday folded in a rectangle under her arm. When the passengers climb down, she watches their faces anxiously. What should she be looking for? A spark of fear? Defiance? Anticipation? Or simply the blankness of habitual suffering?

She realizes, to her own embarrassment, that she is also observing features. Noses with a hook? An Oriental shadow to the eyes? How he would laugh at her for that, she thinks. Of course, my dear little shiksele. Look for the kosher snout .

The last passengers disembark, and the Berliners crowding the curb pile aboard. She feels a twinge of panic. This is the third bus that has arrived without results. Has she missed them? Is she waiting at the wrong stop? Has something gone wrong?

She looks at her wristwatch. Not much time left before she is due back at the patent office. Can she wait another three minutes? Another two? How long until someone notices that she has not boarded a single bus? How long before she starts to stand out? She glances at the old man at the news kiosk, filling his pipe. Had she caught him watching her? But then she sees a woman approaching the stop with her two little girls in tow. There is nothing overtly distinguishing about them. The woman is probably around Sigrid’s age, wrapped in a heavy, shapeless wool coat with a felt hat. They have no suitcases, no bags, they have simply themselves. And maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why Sigrid is suddenly sure that she has been waiting at the right spot, after all. The children are hurrying to keep pace with their mother. The woman grips their little hands as if they are her luggage to carry. Not as a burden but as the only possessions of value she has left to her.