David Gillham - City of Women

“I’m sorry, but that is what I cannot do.”

“No? I stick out my neck, and then I can’t ask why?”

“I won’t impose any further, Frau Schröder. Once the film starts up, I’ll leave you to your solitude.”

“Oh, you will ? You’ll leave me to my solitude ? That’s a very thick word from someone who doesn’t know me from a lamppost.”

The girl adjusts the strap of her shoulder bag, as if preparing for sudden departure. “I can tell about people.”

“Tell?”

“What they’re like. On the inside.” She shrugs. “I’ve seen how you are. Around the apartment block. You hold yourself in. You hold yourself apart.”

Sigrid absorbs a mild wave of dismay. “Ah. So you’re a Gypsy, I suppose? You have the Menschenkenntnis.” This is meant as sarcasm, but the girl gives her a close look before facing the screen.

“I have certain instincts. Call them what you wish, but I’m usually right,” she says. “At least, I was right about you.”

“Don’t be too sure. I might decide to call the Herr Kommissar back at any second and recant.”

But now the girl only smiles. “I thought I was going to pee myself when he asked you my name.”

Sigrid lifts her eyebrows at this remark. “Yes, well. It’s a good thing for you that I have my father’s memory for such things.” At that moment the house lights darken and the projector rattles back to life. The images on the screen return after a bright flicker. “I’ll be going now,” the girl whispers, but before she can rise, Sigrid clamps a hand over her arm. “You’ll do nothing of the kind. Do you actually think that the Herr Kommissar and his comrades are done? They’ll be standing outside the theater right now, just to see who comes bolting out of the door. No. Whatever this is about—and I’m not asking , mind you—but whatever this is about, you will sit here with me for the duration of this film. You will be properly inspired by the heroic effort of the Hitler Youth Battalion No. 47 to work a field radio. And then you and I will take our leave and catch the next Elektrische down the Uhlandstrasse to our building, where, if you have any sense, you will do your chores, have your supper, and go straight to bed. Is that understood?”

The girl looks like she might argue, but then doesn’t. Both of them turn their faces to the screen, and stare at it in silence. Hitler Youth boys crawling on their bellies with wooden rifles. Sigrid shakes her head at herself. Her grandmother had always clucked at her for being too impulsive. Too rash. “Unbesonnen” was the word she used. A person easily seduced by the thrill of reckless behavior. “Just like your mother,” the old lady would declare with resignation. Her Grossmutter did not dispense compliments, and Sigrid had always taken it as an unfair scold. But, sitting in the mezzanine of this disheveled cinema, having just rescued this sooty-haired girl from the Gestapo’s attention, she cannot deny the pulse of exhilaration she feels at her unbesonnen behavior.

The film ends with the predictable salvo of martial music. The lights go up halfway. Everyone stumbles listlessly out of the exits, emerging into the thickening afternoon light. Sigrid looks across the street at the Gestapo Kommissar and his men standing around a large black sedan. He lights a cigarette, and the light colors his face as he cups the match. One of his men says something to a pair of uniformed Ordnungspolizei officers who have joined them. It must be a joke, because the Orpo men laugh. Ericha takes Sigrid’s arm as if to prompt her forward. “We should go,” she says firmly, “or we’ll miss the tram.”

By the time they have traveled down the Uhlandstrasse, the light is failing, the sky has gained an edge of slate blue, and the streets have darkened. On the No. 14 Elektrische tram the ghost light glows green. They don’t speak as the tram rumbles down its track, but sit, sharing silence with the rest of the passengers. The greenish air raid lamps have turned the windows into sickly mirrors, but Sigrid avoids her reflection. Only after they disembark and the tram makes the circle toward Schöneberg does she finally ask, “How did you know to find me in the cinema?”

The girl wraps her coat tightly around her body. Sigrid notes that it’s missing buttons. “I was waiting across the street,” she replies. “I happened to see you go in. It was luck, really. Just luck.”

“And who were you waiting for?”

“Someone.”

“A man, I suppose.”

Ericha hesitates for no more than a breath. “Yes.”

“But he didn’t show.”

“He did not.”

Sigrid suddenly stops. “Is this how it’s going to continue? Me dragging out every word from you?”

Ericha turns and looks at her but does not answer.

“Don’t you think that I am owed some sort of explanation?’

“Owed?” Ericha repeats, as if the word is foreign.

“ Owed . I put myself in danger on your behalf this evening, without knowing a single reason why I should.”

The girl nods. “Because that is your nature.”

Sigrid sighs, exasperated. “So you know me so well from nodding to me in the stairwell. How is that again? Ah, yes. Because of your second sight,” Sigrid says caustically. “You can read people’s minds. Fine. I can’t. You must give me an explanation. Tell me what you were doing .”

But the girl only smiles with regret. “My business is not your business, Frau Schröder. Besides, even if I told you, it would only be a lie. You must trust me in this matter,” she assures Sigrid. “The truth is not something that you want to hear.”

THE NO. 8 T-LINE BUS lumbers south, stuffy with people on their way home from work. A middle-aged Bürger reluctantly surrenders his seat to Sigrid, and she sits with a cursory nod of gratitude, quickly walling herself off from the busload of her fellow Berliners. At the patent office they make a joke about her. She is an unassailable bastion they say, calling her Fortress Schröder just loudly enough so that she must pretend not to hear them.

Staring at nothing as the gray day sinks into a purple evening, her eyes look past her reflection in the window glass to the curious patchwork of bombing damage along the bus’s route. Windows boarded over and bricks blackened in spots, but the buildings still occupied. A vacant lot where the remains of a block of flats had been pulled down. The British Royal Air Force had made a target of Berlin the year before. The newsreels had shown rescue crews digging survivors from the rubble, but not the bodies they had also dug out. Sigrid remembers the sight of the dead laid out like bales of rags on the sidewalk. She closes her eyes to the street. Sometimes she envies the blind man with his black goggles. There’s so much he does not have to see.

By the time she climbs down from the bus, the twilight is drowning the streets, darkening the granite façade of Uhlandstrasse 11. It’s a narrow, middle-class apartment block of the sort that’s common to the district. Her husband had grown up on the fourth floor, 11G. Even now the flat remains in her mother-in-law’s name. Living here had started out as a temporary arrangement to “economize” after Kaspar married her, but that was eight years ago. The smell of boiled cabbage ambushes Sigrid as she steps into the tiled, hexagonal foyer. The first time she had entered the building was on her wedding day. Kaspar and she had been married at the registry office in Berlin-Mitte, then took the U-Bahn to the Uhlandstrasse, with Kaspar toting the entirety of her life’s possessions contained in two rather worn suitcases. Ahead of her on the steps, he set the cases down on the well-scrubbed granite landing and opened the door to the foyer with a comic élan, then turned and, without warning, lifted her off her feet, causing her to squawk with surprise. “Kaspar, what are you doing ?”