David Gillham - City of Women

“How much of this kerosene have you swallowed already?” he asks, examining the bottle.

“Never mind. That’s beside the point. The point is that you lied to me.”

“No, I simply omitted the truth.”

“A fine distinction.”

“One with which you’re familiar.”

“I’ve tried to be truthful with you, Kaspar.”

“No. Perhaps you haven’t lied outright, but you’ve tried not to be truthful with me, unless absolutely necessary. Another fine distinction, I know, but an important one.”

“All right, then, since you’re asking for the full truth? The truth with no holes in it? You’ll get it. More than you’ll have wished for,” she assures him. Killing her shot, she exhales a flat breath. “I’m hiding Jews from the Gestapo.”

Kaspar’s face is unmoved for a moment. Then he almost smiles, as if his hearing must be playing tricks. He looks at her again with incomprehension. For an instant she can recall the puzzled expression of the young man she had married. It’s the expression he would wear when faced with a dilemma outside the prescribed lines of his experience. An expression she had always found at once irksome and endearing. “Is that a joke, Sigrid?” he finally asks. “Are you trying to shock me?”

“Not a joke, Kaspar. Just the truth you were asking for. I’m part of a group.”

Incredulous. “A group hiding Jews.”

“Not restricted to Jews. Anyone who needs help.”

“Help?” A wire of anger is weaving itself into his voice. “Well, this is rather insane,” he says, with his teeth clenching into a humorless grin, as if he might decide to chomp on the air. “This is really rather insane.”

“Yes. I’ll agree.”

“ Will you? Well, very nice. How very nice it is that my wife agrees with me,” he steams, “on the subject of her insanity.”

“Not my insanity, Kaspar.”

“And by help , when you say the word help , what does that mean? You help them evade the police?”

“Yes.”

“Criminals.”

“That depends on your definition of the word.”

“ Criminals. People who have committed crimes . People have broken the law .”

“Unjust laws.”

“But the law , just the same.” His eyes are darkening.

“Yes.”

“Deserters, too?”

“You mean men who have ‘simply had enough of this war’? Weren’t those your words?”

His voice gains volume. “I mean men who have abandoned their posts. ”

“Probably. I often don’t know their reasons for having gone underground. Only that they have them.”

“And is that where you’ve found your lover? Among these men?”

“It’s not just men, Kaspar. Also women. Also children.”

“Women, children, yes.” He nods starkly. “But that doesn’t answer my question, does it? Please, Sigrid,” he says, with a hollow, almost manic note entering his voice. “Please tell me that my wife is screwing a criminal or a deserter. Please tell me that at least she’s screwing a German and not a—”

But he doesn’t finish the sentence. The look on her face has stopped him, so the unspoken word of the unfinished sentence weights the air between them. Kaspar drops his head and shakes it at the table.

Sigrid says nothing. She is watching him around the edges, where the hidden heat of his temper has always been signaled by a twitch of muscle, a flex of his fist. But there is an eerie animal stillness to him now that she does not recognize. She can hear him breathing. Thin, measured breaths. As if he has gone in to a kind of hibernation inside himself.

Finally, she touches his knuckles with the tips of her fingers. It’s a gesture that, after years of marriage to him, has become unconscious. “Kaspar,” she says. But the touch of her fingers is a trigger, and he detonates, ripping the tablecloth from the table, and sending everything flying. The schnapps bottle smashes on the hardwood floor. On his feet, Kaspar glares furiously at the bare table, and then overturns it with a wounded groan.

Sigrid has shoved herself back from the violence, and sits, clenching the chair as if desperate to keep it in place, as if Kaspar might next rip up the floorboard. An echo of the noise of his outburst is stuck in Sigrid’s head. The sound of the crashing bottle. The crashing table. He is breathing roughly now, but he doesn’t appear to see her any longer. Instead, he is gazing wildly into some dark hole. There are tears streaming down his cheeks.

They are motionless like this, both staked to their positions, unmoving.

Until slowly, carefully, Sigrid lets go of the chair, and rises. Her heart thumping. The tears draw her to him. “Kaspar,” she whispers.

That night, she removes her clothes, with the dim bedside lamp still burning, and climbs beneath the blankets as Kaspar watches her. His uniform is already laid out for the morning, draped over the chair. They lie together naked. Not touching, but still sharing the bed while Mother Schröder snores on the other side of the flat.

“So what are you going to do?” she asks in their careful voice. Over the years, they had developed a way of talking in bed, so that Mother Schröder could not hear, even if she was trying to. Not really a whisper, but more like an undertone.

He takes a breath slowly and exhales it. “You mean, am I planning on telling the police? Telling them that my wife has made a hobby of smuggling deserters and Jews? No,” he tells her. “I think I’ll forgo that pleasure.”

She fixes his eyes. “No. That’s not what I meant. You know, Kaspar, if you’re intent on committing suicide, you don’t have to travel all the way back to the Eastern Front. You can simply step in front of a double-decker.”

“I’m not going back to commit suicide.”

“You are. Why else would you be doing it , if not to die?”

“Because I can’t live . Not here. I have no purpose here.”

“Because you won’t permit yourself to have a purpose here. Because you can no longer make sense of your world, you have decided that the world no longer makes sense.”

“No. Honestly, the world has never made sense to me.” His voice picks up a beat of distance. “I have always felt that I was playing a game of catch-up.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.”

He looks at her with a strained weariness. “Yes, of course. My wife has the answer to everything,” he says with muted bitterness.

“When are you leaving?”

“I’m to report to the mustering officer tomorrow morning. We ship out from Anhalter Bahnhof the next day.”

“Goddamn it, Kaspar,” she whispers. “What were you planning to do? Drop me a note in the Feldpost from the Ukraine?”

“I’ve written you a letter. I planned on leaving it.”

“For me to read after you were gone. Dearest Wife: Sorry to say, but I’m off to die for the Führer and Fatherland. Please send Pervatin .” When had she started to cry? She jams her palm into her eyes to wipe them clean. Even with their door closed, she can hear her mother-in-law’s snoring. She swallows. “I’m assuming that you have not yet told the other Frau Schröder in the household?”

“I’ve written her a letter as well. I must ask you, Sigrid, not to say anything to her.”

“Are you joking? You think this is the sort of news I would break to your mother? She’d only blame me. Of course, she’ll blame me in any case. But that makes no difference. Blame is what keeps your mother alive.” She takes a breath free of tears. “I won’t be waiting for you again, Kaspar,” she tells him.