David Gillham - City of Women

She feels the blood drain from her face. “Gone?”

“When I came home from the shops, the place was empty.” She takes a small fold of paper off the mantel. “He left this.”

Sigrid can only stare, unable to touch it. “Have you read it?” she whispers.

“It was lying open on the kitchen table.”

Finally Sigrid manages to reach out and accepts the paper from Carin’s fingers. Her heart is thumping in her chest. But all he has written is, Thank you. Please tell your neighbor that I will be in touch.

“That’s all ?”

“Do you expect more of men?” Carin inquires.

“Where’s Wolfram?” she asks.

“Ah, yes. I heard about the summit over the chessboard. Did he frighten you?” She pours out two measures of brandy from a sleek decanter. “He can be rather terrible when he’s been drinking.”

“He said he can produce identity documents.”

“Well, then I’m sure he can.”

“He said I should grow eyes in the back of my head.”

Carin gives her a sideways look. “Then perhaps you should,” she tells Sigrid. “Here, drink this down,” she commands.

Sigrid follows orders without squeamishness. The brandy burns straight through her. “Thank you,” she whispers.

A shrug. “I don’t accept thanks. Too costly,” Carin explains with a veneer of contrariness, avoiding eye contact. “Excuse me, but I think I need a cigarette,” she says. But when she picks up the sterling lighter from the coffee table, she frowns. “What’s this ?” she says, and then turns. “Ah, now, here’s something rude. Your friend appears to have consumed my entire bowl of rock sugar before he left. Now, that’s a real crime.”

Sigrid can only stare blankly at the empty bowl. “I’m sorry, I must get you some more,” she says with a small, vacant voice.

“Never mind,” Carin tells her. “I’m just trying to”—she shakes her head—“I don’t know what, find reasons to dislike him. Actually, it’s rather a hard thing to do. Dislike him, that is. Against my better judgment, I must admit, I found him charming. And if I found him so… well , I can only imagine,” she says, with small note of shyness.

Sigrid gazes at her for a moment. “May I ask you a question?” she says.

Carin’s face hardens again, though there is something of the same rueful bemusement in her eyes that Sigrid recalls from Wolfram. “Of course,” she answers, and takes a sip of coffee without removing her gaze from Sigrid’s face. “You want to know why , correct? Why I am as I am?”

Sigrid looks back at her but lets her silence be her answer.

“I’ve been expecting the question, actually. Sooner or later.”

“Is it because of the war?”

Something like a smile forms on Carin’s face. “The war?”

“All the men in the army. All the women alone.”

But Carin only chuckles in a mildly disdainful manner. “You mean: what’s left that’s not rationed besides sex?” she says. “There are certainly women like that, lonely hausfrauen, bored with their lives and looking for some excitement. But I am not one of them. You wonder, perhaps if I haven’t learned my tastes for the female gender simply because there are no men about? The answer is no. I have always been as I am, Sigrid Schröder. Always. It’s not a hobby or something I’ve picked up, like a lingering head cold.”

“I’m sorry,” Sigrid tells her. “I think I’ve offended you.”

Carin shrugs lightly, and shakes her head. “You haven’t. You were curious. You asked a question. Nothing wrong with that.” An interior pause separates them awkwardly for a moment, until Carin takes a breath. “But enough of that. I should tell you. I’ve received a telegram from my half sister this morning. She’s coming back to Berlin.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Any time now.”

“I thought she was staying with her mother until the birth.”

“Her mother’s a drunk,” Carin says, exhaling smoke. “Her mother’s a drunk who despises her as a half-breed, and her husband’s a monster, who fornicates with other women, because it’s his duty as an SS man to propagate the breed. And if she looks at him wrong, he becomes violent. Fractured her arm once.” Then, shaking her head, she says, “It almost makes me feel sorry for the silly little heifer.”

There’s a stretch of the Nachodstrasse in Schöneberg where German is a learned language. A street peddler offers incense for sale, and hand-painted icons of the saints and the patriarchs in their onion-shaped miters. Sigrid finds many shop windows have signs in Cyrillic lettering, but just to make sure there is no misunderstanding, they also display prominent portraits of the Führer, their brown tsar, decked with swastika flags.

The building she enters smells as much of boiled cabbage as does the rest of Berlin these days. An old woman, scarved in black, brushes past her with an unintelligible mutter. Down a poorly lit hallway, she looks for the residence plate, finds a handwritten name, and knocks on the door.

“You are Herr Melnikov?” she asks the large, thickly jowled man who answers.

“And who is asking?” the man inquires with a throaty accent.

“A friend of Grizmek,” she replies.

The man clears the hallway in both directions with a look, then peers at her with deeply shadowed eyes. “Please to come in,” he tells her.

The flat is neglected and full of clutter, the way the flats of unmarried men of a certain age become. The furnishings are old department-store inventory of the type Sigrid’s mother bought at Karstadt twenty years before. There are knickknacks: a small clock with the gilding thinning, a tarnished horse on a bronze base, a souvenir tray from Luna Park, but nothing particularly Russian, beyond the line of gilded icons on the mantel above the coke stove, and two sepia photographs in oval frames hung on the wall.

“My parents,” Melnikov explains. Gazing out from the frame is a man with a large, spongy body in a white uniform and peaked cap. His face is disguised by a thick brush of a beard as he poses besides a petite, almost doll-sized woman with frail eyes peeking out from a large bonnet. “My father was a customs official in St. Petersburg, where I was born. My mother, a poetess of sorts, though never very well known.” He has opened a bottle of amber and pours out two small cordial glasses. “You’ll have one,” he says, and puts one of the glasses in Sigrid’s hand. “ Na zdorovie ,” he toasts, then drains his glass. “Drink. You must,” he prods her. Sigrid only takes a sip of the thick, sugary stuff, but it seems to satisfy him. “And that ,” Melnikov sighs, “ that poor puny malchik is me,” he says, with a light melancholy, and gestures to the second photo of a scrawny little boy in an academy uniform posed beside a sleek wolfhound as tall as he. “Hard to believe I was ever such a minuscule pip.” He sets the glass down and turns on a lamp, rolling open a length of black velvet cloth atop a desk blotter. “So. You will show me what you have brought,” he says, then grins at Sigrid’s hesitation. “Not to worry. I am too old and too fat to be a thief. Who could run from the police at my age?”

Laid out on the length of velvet, the diamonds become stars in the lamplight. She watches Melnikov handle them with deftness and concentration.

“You are an expert,” she observes.

The Russian agrees. “I’ve been doing this for a very long time,” he muses, examining one of the stones with an eye ring. “After the Bolsheviks, there were droves of Russians in Berlin, all trying to unload their ancestral trinkets. Grand dukes waiting tables at the Romanisches Café, pawning the jewels they had smuggled in, sewn into their wives’ undergarments. It was quite a time to make money,” he reminisces fondly, then nods appreciatively at the diamond he is inspecting. “Excellent. Excellent color, excellent clarity. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen so many top-quality stones. These days, most of what I’m brought is trash. But our friend still has his eye. These will do very nicely. Did he say how much?”