David Gillham - City of Women

“Maybe she has better things to do than change diapers,” Marta Trotzmüller suggests with ladled nuance, but the joke is wearing thin.

Frau Granzinger only shrugs. “I suppose she thinks so. But I swear, when I was her age, I would never have thought of disobeying my elders. It simply would not have crossed my mind.”

“You should get rid of her. Complain ,” Mother Schröder insists. “For God’s sake, Lotti, they awarded you the Mother’s Cross. You shouldn’t have to put up with such insults.”

“Yes,” Marta Trotzmüller agrees fervently. “That’s right! An insult. That’s what it is, all right. You should complain to the Labor Service officer.”

“Exactly so,” Mother Schröder agrees, as if it is all too obvious. “If looking after your children doesn’t interest her, perhaps she’d prefer a year in the Land Army. Have them stick a pitchfork in her hands and let her muck out a stable before she sits down to the supper table,” she insists. “That’ll cool her engines considerably, I’ll wager.”

Sigrid thinks of the girl occupying the seat beside her in the cinema. Please, Frau Schröder. Say we came here together . Oddly, she has some inclination to defend the girl from this onslaught from the kaffeeklatsch. The same inclination, perhaps, that has caused her to tell a lie to a security policeman. A stranger’s impulse to step in and protect a child from a bully? Perhaps, in the end, she thinks, that’s all it was.

Talk in the cellar abruptly dies at the eruption of the Luftwaffe’s air defense guns. Even at this distance, the arsenal of cannons and pom-poms mounted atop the gargantuan Zoo Flak Tower causes a tremble in her heart when unleashed. It is the signal that the RAF bombers have arrived. The dangling cellar light quakes. Faces turn upward to the rafters as the carpet of thunder unrolls.

“Wellingtons,” one of the old farts announces with a scowl. As if he can tell the difference between the engine of a Wellington bomber and a beer belch, or between a sack of sand and his great fat ass. But whatever they are, Wellingtons or no, they are close. Beside Sigrid, Mother Schröder clicks her tongue mechanically at the fretting baby as the whistling begins.

It’s said that if you can hear a bomb whistle, then you’re safe. It’s the bomb you don’t hear that rips the roof from your building, pulverizes the walls, and buries you alive in a heap of smoldering slag. Still, the whistling builds up inside you like a scream. You can’t help but hold your breath.

Sigrid winces as the first explosion shudders through the cellar and the children’s wailing builds in pitch. Fingers of dust filter down from the rafters. People cough and snort. The overhead lamp sways. More bombs fall. More whistling and more bombs and more dust. This is how time passes. Who knows how long? Minutes? Hours? Then, with a deafening thunderclap, the lights black out, and even this tough crowd bellows, because, for a heartbeat, the darkness is solid. Death, Sigrid thinks. This is death. This is how death comes. But then the lamp flickers back to life. Its weak, swaying bulb illuminates the baldly stunned faces. They glare at one another, blinking through the cascades of dust, bewildered, perhaps, by the fact that they are still in one piece. “Well, that was a close shave,” someone observes with a laugh. “Such jokers they are, those Tommies and their bombs.” But the banter stops when the Portierfrau Mundt gives an angry squawk. “Curse that devil Churchill!” she declares. “May he rot in his grave before this war is over!” Typical Mundt performance. And everyone replies with the silence of a well-trained audience. Until a boney black rage rears up from the bench beside the door.

“Churchill? Churchill ?” the voice echoes incredulously. “Never mind Churchill . Curse that devil Hitler ! He’s the one responsible!” All eyes snap to the rising black-clad figure of Frau Remki. She shakes her skinny fist, her narrow face pinched with rage and ruinous grief. “ He’s the one who’s murdered my boy with his war lust! My son! Gone! ” she cries. Eyes as wild as spiders. “He should never have been a soldier, but that devil decreed it! That devil ,” she repeats, her breathing growing coarse, but then her face sags. “Anno was such a beautiful baby. Don’t you know?” she asks, though the women around her recoil from the question. “So very beautiful ,” she explains. “And he slept like an angel, too. Never a night of colic. No trouble at all. But now he’s been torn to pieces, and I have nothing. Not even his body to bury. Not even that . Only a broken metal tag with a number on it. That was all our beloved Führer saw fit to return of my only child!”

Another blast shakes the cellar, and the lamps blink frantically. But by this time the rest of the shelter’s inhabitants must welcome a bomb blast or two, if only to silence Frau Remki’s suicidal indictment. And indeed when the light sputters back to a low-wattage glow, the woman has sunk back down to her place like a pile of rags. The thudding explosions grow more distant, but the cellar remains a densely silent place, like a room full of drunkards with painful hangovers. Only the children cry. Finally, as the drone of the attack fades to nothing, the wail of the children is overwhelmed by the wail of a siren. One long, aching howl, signaling that the RAF has crossed over the line into Hannover-Brunswick airspace, and that Berlin, that vast, rambling city, is all-clear.

The explosions had seemed so close in the cellar, so intimately connected, that Sigrid half expects to be greeted the next morning by a streetscape of destruction. But as she walks to the bus, the damage appears modest in their block of the Uhlandstrasse. A few buildings with blown-out windowpanes. A roof, pockmarked by splinters of flak shrapnel from the Zoo Tower guns, is being patched by a gang of workers up on ladders. A crack here, a hole there. Some smoke hovering farther up. Then she turns the corner and is faced with a scene that no roof and window gang could hope to mend. The façade of the white brick apartment house with the pretty garden terraces has been sheared off completely, exposing the interiors within. There was a time when she imagined Kaspar leasing them a place in this building, with its fanciful scrollwork and clean, whitewashed face. She had often speculated about what the flats might look like on the inside, and now, thanks to the Royal Air Force bombardiers, she can see them clearly. The wallpaper from floor to floor is pinstriped, floral print, woodland. The family pictures are hanging askew. Furniture is coated with plaster dust. Two women and an old grandpa struggle in the morning drizzle to carry a horsehair settee over the rubble to the curbside, where they have piled a few lonely, surviving possessions. A coffee table. A toilet seat. A dining-room chair. A chipped soapstone bust of Beethoven. The maestro scowls at the rain as Sigrid passes. The air smells burned and bitter. She tastes ash and keeps on walking. It’s a chilly morning under brackish green skies. Her scarf is tied over her head. Her breath frosts lightly as she spots her bus lumbering down the street toward her stop. She enters the end of the queue and concentrates on nothing as she stares at the back of people’s heads.

There aren’t many buses running in Berlin these days. Petrol is a military priority, and the Wehrmacht has commandeered hordes of city vehicles. But the No. 8 T-Line bus, with its dingy coat of BVG yellow, still rolls onward, three times a day, from the Badensche Strasse to the Alex and back, as part of the clockwork of the city. More Berliners pack the aisles as the bus trumbles onward. An odor of human dank deepens. A familiar bouquet by now. It is the smell of all that is unwashed, stale, and solidified. It is the smell that has replaced the brisk scent of the city’s famous air. The ersatz perfume of Berlin, distilled from all that is chemically treated and synthetically processed. Of cigarettes manufactured from crushed acorns, of fifty-gram cakes of grit-filled soap that clean nothing. Of rust and clotted plumbing. Damp wool, sour milk, and decay. The odor of the home front.