David Gillham - City of Women

THAT DAY SIGRID GOES to the films. She tells her mother-in-law this, but her mother-in-law is silent, planted in her chair by the wireless. Some popular tune babbles, but she seems not to hear it.

On the way to the Elektrischetram, she spies her shadow. Brown, snap-brim fedora. Beer belly. Ears like a monkey’s. She sees him on the tram, and again when she exits. It feels strange being followed. To know you are being followed. So she decides to give the fellow a test, and lead him on a bit of a chase. Down one block and up another. At some point he vanishes. Either he’s doing better at camouflaging himself, or has nipped into a lokal for a quick glass or two.

At the cinema there’s no sign of him. Hans Moser’s petulant expression on the poster fills the display case by the ticket booth. Love Is Duty Free: A Comedy of Vienna . The interior of the lobby smells of cold wool and singed wiring from the portable heater. The patrons file into the auditorium with funereal silence. Sigrid passes a girl in an usher’s uniform and follows the carpeted runner up to the mezzanine balcony. There’s a hefty Berliner in a fur-collared coat seated in the front row by the rail. Squinting, he turns his head to inspect Sigrid, but then frowns, disappointed. In the back row, she takes a seat at the end of the aisle. When the lights go down, she tries to claim comfort in the darkness, but this time there is none to be claimed. She feels simply alone. Then light shudders from the projector and the screen silvers. She opens her eyes to a roar of newsreel Heils and Wagnerian thunder. It’s another petulant Austrian. The Führer speaks in honor of Heroes’ Remembrance Day in the courtyard of the Zeughaus, flanked by captured Red Army flags. His peaked uniform cap is jammed down onto his head, and he resembles a curmudgeonly family uncle, slumped into his greatcoat and favoring his right arm as he grumbles into the microphone.

When another patron finds a seat in a row by the balcony, his silhouette blocks her view. Sigrid feels her breath shorten. The man is wearing no hat, and she can recognize the shape of the back of Egon’s head. Recognize his shadow. He sits beside the only other occupant of the row, the fellow in the fur-collared coat. There’s an exchange of some sort, and Sigrid watches the other man suddenly stand and make his way out. But when she watches Egon stand a moment later, he stops. She can feel his gaze penetrate her. She is at once terrified and overjoyed when she watches him close in on the spot where she is seated. His silhouette cuts its contours out of the Führer’s face on screen. When he dumps himself into the seat beside her, she can smell the aroma of his cigarette tobacco.

“So, this is a surprise,” he states. “Since you haven’t shot me on sight, am I to assume that you have discarded your shiny pistol?”

“I have it still,” she answers.

“Then I should assume you simply prefer point-blank range.”

“That depends. Do you still intend to throttle me?”

“No. I’m here on business, as you witnessed.”

“The tubby gentleman.”

“A small cog in the great machinery.”

“More diamonds stolen from Jewish coat hems?”

“No, contraband stock certificates, actually. Not really my market, you understand. I deal in stones, not paper. I’m just earning a cut of the proceeds as a go-between.”

“A bagman. How demeaning for you.”

“You didn’t leave me much choice. I couldn’t blow my nose on the money you left me. Two hundred marks. Perhaps I will throttle you, after all.”

“And who will remove the bullet from your belly after you try?”

He actually laughs at this. A thick familiar chuckle. In spite of herself, she feels her skin tingle at the sound of it. She turns her eyes to the screen, but can feel his gaze attaching itself to her, as a squadron of Stuka bombers dive murderously through the air, sirens shrieking. “There’s a boy who is stalking you,” she says.

“A what?”

“I don’t know his name. But he was one of the U-boats I was hiding. He’s been trailing me , apparently, hoping to find you . And he does not have kind intentions.”

“And who am I to him, this boy?”

“He’s under the impression that you are the responsible party in the deaths of his sisters at the hands of the Gestapo.” Her voice is detached. Almost mild. “Can that be true?”

A panzer column speeding through a burning townscape fills the cinema’s screen. Egon’s silence at the end of her question is crushing.

“I can’t forgive you, Egon,” she hears herself say.

“I haven’t asked you to. Forgiveness means nothing to me in any case. Just more words.”

“Can you tell me why?” she asks. The ground explodes on the screen, spewing whorls of dark earth.

“Why?”

“Why you did it ?”

“You mean, why did I betray my fellow Jews to those pigs in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse? You think maybe it wasn’t just my love for the Führer and Fatherland?”

“Were you afraid? Did they threaten you? Did they threaten your family?”

“So.” He laughs again, but this time there is nothing appealing about the sound. “All that bravado, Sigrid. ‘I can’t forgive you, Egon.’ Yet you’re still trying to. Still trying to give me a way out. A moral escape route. ‘Did they threaten your family?’ the lady asks.” He shakes his head at the joke. But then a silence follows. She can feel something inside of him ebb. “I’m going to tell you the truth this time,” he says finally, with distance. “So that no one is operating under any delusions.”

Sigrid is a stone, waiting. She watches him swallow, staring into the truth before he can consider speaking it.

“Just before the war started, my wife,” he says. “My wife had begged to go to Palestine. Begged . She’d had a cousin, you see, who liked to style himself as a Zionist. He’d paid a fortune for a berth on a Portuguese freighter, and had been smuggled into the Mandate right under the noses of the British. But I thought, a kibbutz ? Not for me. Thank you, no. I was not interested in eating sand for breakfast with the zealots. And, anyway, I was already working on visas, and not to some salt bed on the Dead Sea. My brother had made a contact in the American embassy. He claimed he was bouncing the wife of a legation secretary, but I never got the truth out of him. The Gestapo picked him up before I had the chance, the stupid schmuck. Maybe they got the truth out of him. I don’t know about that, either, because three weeks later they sent an urn full of ashes to my sister-in-law, along with an itemized bill to cover the cost of his execution.” He says this as the gray-white flashes from the screen mottle his face. “I tried to pick up where he’d left off with the visas, but it was too late. The Americans were through talking to Jews. And then the Wehrmacht stormed over the border into Poland, and the lid clamped shut on emigration.” He draws a breath and then expels it. “That was when Anna came up pregnant. She was so angry with me,” he says, as if seeing her face. “She said it was my doing that her baby would be born in a concentration camp. I told her she was being hysterical. I told her the Nazis were swine, but they understood the value of money. I could deal with them. And for a while I could. One year passed, and then another, and I managed. In fact, I was rather impressed with myself. We’d lost the flat in Schöneberg, but I’d found a spot down by the docks. Noisy, though not so bad, I thought. It wasn’t a dump. There was food, and coal for the stove.”

I saw your face, and I knew that I simply had to hear the sound of your voice.