David Gillham: City of Women

To her left, her mother-in-law is darning the toe of a stocking while griping to a trio of her kaffeeklatsch women about a recent injustice. A rude grocery clerk or a shop girl’s poor grammar. Some damned thing. Even as they are squeezed into this dank basement, awaiting the onslaught of the British bombers, the old lady can’t manage to shut off her spout. Her cronies nod in frowning agreement with baggy chins as they tend to the mending in their laps. They cluck their tongues in sympathy and bite off loose threads.

Sigrid turns inward. Certainly she no longer thinks of the future, because every day the future proves itself to be a duplicate of the present. So instead she roots through the past. She spots him for a moment in the corner of her mind. Not on their last day together, in a sweaty flat in Little Wedding. But on their first day. His voice preserved in her head.

Do you feel that? he said.

Yes.

Then you know what it’s for.

The dangling light in the cellar flickers, then dims, a signal that the main event is coming closer, but no one comments. It’s said that air raid shelters develop their own personalities. Some timorous, some fatalistic, some raucous, some prone to panic. It’s a tough crowd in the bottom of 11 Uhlandstrasse. No raid hysterics here. Someone has tacked up a sign: CRYING FORBIDDEN. Across the room, Frau Mundt’s husband offers Sigrid a lascivious wink as he chews the stem of his pipe. The Herr Hausleiter Mundt. He is the porter and the Party’s Hausobman for the building. An Old Fighter who once a month dresses up in his dun brown Sturmabteilung getup and cycles off to get soused with his chums at the local SA beer hall. He’s set up a game of Skat on a card table with a pair of his drinking cohorts. In the event that a bomb comes through the roof, their job is to sledgehammer the layer of bricks that opens up an escape route into the next building. They grunt and spit tobacco and chortle, and scratch their rumps, but they’re relatively harmless. The real danger is the Hausleiter’s wife . The Portierfrau Mundt. It’s her connections to the Party that count, not the old man’s. She has caught her husband’s wink in Sigrid’s direction, and now scrutinizes Sigrid with flinty, unforgiving eyes.

Sigrid turns her head away. To her right, the eternally harried Frau Granzinger struggles with the youngest members of her brood. One who fidgets and one who fusses. The infant in her arms is only a peanut, and the rest are squirming in this dank cellar, mad for attention with only one mummy to share. The woman scolds and coos at them in succession.

Sigrid thinks of the touch of his hand on her skin under her clothes. The mad connection of their bodies. Wait, not yet, not yet , his words burning in her ear. His pulse invading her. Not until I tell you .

She tasted blood as she bit his lip, her skirt hiked up, his mouth burrowing into her neck, his hands searching, traveling under her blouse. She had no resistance to offer, only her own need, only her own rage, like that of an animal out of its cage. The film projector muttering mechanically above them, beaming sterile, blue-white light. The old man at the mezzanine rail had turned his head to stare at them. A piece of silk ripped, and her back arched. He entered her, one nylon-clad leg hooked around his thigh, his trousers sagging to his knees as he thumped into her, pounding her against the velour cinema seat. She gazed blindly at the silvered dance of images on the screen. She begged him, commanded him, her mouth raw with demands. But then her words broke up and there was nothing but the shrieking inside her, which she bit her own knuckle to contain.

Near the door to the cellar, Frau Remki coughs coarsely, and the Portierfrau Mundt makes a performance of shielding herself from contamination by germs, or perhaps from the contamination by Frau Remki herself. The old lady is Sigrid’s fourth-floor neighbor. Once Hildegard Remki was the queen of the block. Her husband was a dentist, and she could afford mink fur collars and luncheons once a month at the Hotel Adlon, along with new shoes and a private tutor for her son, Anno, to learn the piano. When it was her turn to act as hostess for the kaffeeklatsch, it was always with the English sterling coffee service, and the Meissen porcelain. Even Mother Schröder deferred to her taste in chanson singers on the radio. Don’t you really find, Petronela, that Marika Rökk has the superior vocal cords? I know you’re fond of that Swedish woman, but don’t you really agree? But all that changed when her husband was thrown out of his practice because he was a Social Democrat. When he died, suicide was rumored. And then Anno was conscripted into the army and killed in the Balkans. Now Frau Remki is the block’s pariah. Thin and threadbare as a ghost, she wears only mourning black. Looking into her eyes is like staring through the windows of a bombed-out building.

More screaming from Frau Granzinger’s hobgoblins. In a jealous effort to displace the smaller creature from the coveted position on its mother’s lap, the larger one, with the piglet’s nose, has started to bawl with a forcible vengeance and pinch its mother’s arm repeatedly. The harried Frau Granzinger attempts to combat the attack by increasing the volume of her scolding, but it’s a losing battle. She quite suddenly capitulates, and shovels the crying infant over to Sigrid with a beleaguered appeal. “Please, Frau Schröder. Take the baby, won’t you?” And before she can refuse, Sigrid is holding the child as if it were a time-fused bomb that has dropped through the ceiling. She feels the unaccustomed weight of the squirming baby, feels the sticky pressure of the gazes of the cellar’s denizens as the infant begins to wail in earnest. She coos ineffectively and tries to readjust her hold, but to no avail. The child’s crying is like an air raid siren. Only her mother-in-law’s intervention ends the ordeal. “Tsst,” the old woman clucks caustically as she drops her sewing into her basket in exasperation. “For pity’s sake, hand her to me ,” she commands, and plucks the child from her daughter-in-law’s grasp. “Honestly, there are times when I think it’s a blessing you never had a child of your own. It’s obvious that you don’t have a whit of maternal instinct,” she announces.

And there it is. The dirty truth out in the open for all to know, like soiled linen hung from the windows. Sigrid clutches the strap of her air raid sack, feeling her face heat even in the cold. “Yes. Quite a blessing,” she agrees, glaring at the whiteness of her knuckles.

Her mother-in-law, however, carries on, oblivious. The baby has calmed immediately in her no-nonsense grip. “I see your new duty-year girl has gone missing again. What is she up to this time?” she demands curiously of Frau Granzinger. Sigrid shifts her eyes to see Granzinger grimace, then wave off the thought. “Don’t ask,” she groans. “It’s too ridiculous.”

“Don’t tell me,” the multiple-chinned Marta Trotzmüller chimes in mischievously. “Don’t tell me that she’s got a bun in the oven already ?” Granzinger’s previous girl turned up pregnant by an SS man from a Death’s Head Company, and was whisked off to a Fount of Life home in the Harz Mountains.

“Who knows what she does.” Granzinger sighs. “You know, in the beginning she wasn’t so bad. A little moody, perhaps. A little mürrisch, but at least competent in her work. She could change the baby’s diaper without fuss, and wash a dish without leaving bits of schmutz along the edges like the last one did. And she could manage bedtime without argument or tears. So I thought maybe finally I’ve had some luck. But then suddenly she starts to evaporate. I send her out with the shopping bags, and she disappears for hours, and comes back with no explanation. The queues were long, is all she says. The trains were slow. That’s all. And when I raise the roof about it, she just stares. It’s really too incredible. I hardly see the creature,” Granzinger complains, perfecting her frown. “Except at supper, of course. She always manages to find her way to the supper table.”