David Gillham - City of Women

“The diamonds,” Sigrid whispers.

“Can you imagine? All those Torah-kissing graybeards showing up for evacuation with little fortunes tucked into their clothes and hidden in their satchels? He’s of great worth to that gang of Stapo lunkheads, I’ve no doubt. His eye for stones is very keen. Though, as I understand it, he has quite a talent as a catcher as well. Maybe it’s the same keenness,” Melnikov suggests. “An eye that can spot the thinnest flaw in the embellishment of a gem, perhaps can spot that same flaw in the embellishment of a man. Or of a woman,” he adds. “You know, you’re not the first.”

Her eyes contract. She can suddenly feel the shame, even before she hears the words.

“There was a little tichka . Polish, I think. She used to make his deliveries for him. And then, for a little while, a redhead. Beautiful. Maybe a Jewess. I didn’t pry, you know. I’m an old man skating on very thin ice, so when I don’t want to know answers, I don’t ask questions,” he says. And then shrugs. “So, gnädige Frau,” he inquires with something like compassion, “do you still wish to scream?”

SIGRID IS CLAMBERING down the stairs, her stomach heaving. She makes it out of the building, and into the street, before the sickness overcomes her and she pukes bile into the gutter. A Berliner trots up to aid a distraught woman, but she cannot see his face. All she sees is the swastika on his Party pin . “How can I help you, how can I help you?” he keeps repeating. But she has no answer for him. She is beyond help. She has crossed into a territory far beyond the jurisdiction of curbside kindness from a stranger. Beyond the map of her existence. She has vomited out the last dregs of her old self, and is now forming into a different sort of creature. One beyond desire. Beyond mercy.

SHE CARRIES Melnikov’s revelation up the stairs toward her flat, as if carrying a mason’s tray of bricks on her back. She bleakly surveys the door that only yesterday was a passageway to a doppelgänger’s life with Egon, but is now just a plain wooden door. She tries to summon the face of Frau Weiss. Of Liesl and Ruthi, faces she thought were stamped indelibly across her memory, but now her mind is clogged. Thickened and cloudy. She sees their faces as if they have been obscured by a layer of smoke.

When she enters her flat, she finds Kaspar and his comrades from exercise therapy downing schnapps again at the kitchen table. She is relieved to be ignored by this trio as she unties her scarf and slips out of her coat. She wants to be invisible right now. They are drinking and hooting loudly at some front-liner’s joke.

Her mother-in-law is snoring in her chair by the wireless. A glass of wine has overturned and spilled onto her lap, staining her dress dark red. Sigrid does not bother to remove the glass or wake her. In fact, she takes some satisfaction in letting the old lady sleep in her own spillage. Unteroffizier Kamphauser is standing now, his parade-ground voice engorged with hilarity, imitating a particular officer’s booming commands, and the trio dissolve into fits of boozy laughter.

When there’s a knock on the door that nobody but she seems to hear, she opens it and stiffens. It’s Wolfram, in uniform. “Herr Leutnant,” she says formally, to warn him. Suddenly the chorus ceases behind her, and there’s a noise of chairs. She turns to find that Kaspar and his comrades, in the presence of an officer, have jumped to their feet. Wolfram looks embarrassed. It is the first time she has ever seen such an expression on his face.

“Please, gentlemen. Let’s dispense with such nonsense,” he tells them, and then leans heavily on his cane, making sure he is displaying the combat credentials pinned to his tunic as he offers his hand. “I’m Kessler.”

“Kamphauser, Herr Leutnant,” Unteroffizier Kamphauser declares with a heel click as he shakes.

“Kamphauser.”

“Messner, Herr Leutnant,” Unteroffizier Messner declares with a heel click as he shakes.

“Messner.”

“Schröder,” says Kaspar as he takes Wolfram’s hand. His eyes are wary as if he might be expecting an ambush.

“Ah, Schröder. The master of the house. I can’t tell you how highly my sisters speak of your wife.”

“Yes. Thank you, Herr Leutnant,” Kaspar answers tonelessly.

“In fact, I was just stopping by to deliver a small token of appreciation. We had the good fortune of obtaining a few bottles of French cognac at my office. I thought I should like to share the wealth.” He slips a bottle from under his arm and presents it. “Will you accept?” he asks. “Frau Schröder?”

“You’ll have to ask my husband, Herr Leutnant.”

Wolfram turns his face expectantly. “It is quite smooth,” he prods. “Perhaps the French are second-rate soldiers, but they are quite expert at brandy.”

“We’ll accept, thank you, sir,” Kaspar answers. “But only if the Herr Leutnant will stay for a glass.”

And now a gleam of bemusement lightens Wolfram’s eyes. “What an irresistible invitation,” he says. “I can’t say no.”

Within a half hour one drinks turns into several, as the level of the cognac bottle declines. While Sigrid is drying the dishes for return to the cabinet, Wolfram is amusing his new comrades with an overtly hilarious tale of how his commanding officer had his pisser nipped off by a Red Army sniper while taking a leak. The men howl. And it’s only the return of Mother Schröder to consciousness, angered and embarrassed by the spill on her dress, that finally brings the evening to a close.

In the bedroom, Sigrid lies down, still in her clothes, and stares up at the ceiling. The smooth surface is marred by a spidery web of cracks and flaking paint. When she falls asleep she dreams of climbing stairs. She knows that she must get to the top. That everything depends on this, but the stairs never end. Up ahead she can hear Ericha’s voice begging her to hurry. But all she can see is darkness.

When she wakes, Kaspar is laid out on the bed beside her, still in his boots.

“Kaspar?” she asks, drowsily.

“Have you been with him?”

She feels the tension at the back of throat. “What?”

“The Herr Leutnant. I don’t assume he was actually delivering that bottle of cognac to share with a gang of lowly foot-wrapped Indians.”

“If you’re asking me to read the man’s mind, Kaspar,” Sigrid answers quite truthfully, “I assure you, I cannot.”

Kaspar says nothing more for a moment. He exhales thickly, and then informs her, “What I don’t understand,” she hears him say, “what I don’t understand is why I am alive . I should have been killed a hundred times. But for reasons I cannot imagine, I wasn’t. Men died all around me, but I remained alive. One morning, we were just outside of Rzhev. It was snowing. We were up to our knees in it. Pinned down by a couple of Bolshie MGs. I was watching one of my squad mates bleeding into the snow. Bright, bright red on the white. The color was so beautiful. So very seductive,” he says. “And suddenly I decided I had had enough. So I stood up. Just…”—he hesitates—“stood up. I was going to walk straight into the Maxims and let them riddle me to pieces. I refused to survive again when all around me all my squad mates were dead or dying. But then came an explosion. It was a mortar round. That’s the last thing I remember before waking up on a hospital cot.”

Sigrid is surprised by a sudden feeling of compassion for her husband. A feeling of common mystery. Thousands transported. So many dead. Who decides who lives? Divine calculation? Fate? All evidence aside that neither exists, that life is a random series of numbers. One lives, six die, three live, a thousand die. She cannot help but believe that there is some kind of unknowable clockwork in operation. Some vast pattern, unseen at street level. Perhaps, because otherwise what would be the point? She starts to say something like that. Such things cannot be known, but stops when she realizes that, in fact, Kaspar is no longer beside her. Even though he may be still filling the other half of the bed with his body, he has returned to the East.