David Gillham - City of Women

“And that’s where you were living,” she asks, “when you fucked me here in the back row?”

“It was that seat over there, wasn’t it?” he says.

“You have no idea which seat it was, so please don’t try to pretend.”

He shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not. But I’m willing to bet that you know which seat it was.”

“Your arrogance does not promote your case,” she says, then brings him back on track. “So your wife received a letter from the jüdische Gemeinde, ordering her to report to the SS with the children? Isn’t that the next line in the story?”

“Yes.”

“And you made the arrangements to go underground. A few rooms above a warehouse in Rixdorf.”

“Yes. A few rooms above a warehouse in Rixdorf,” he repeats. “I paid plenty for it, too, but apparently the good German I was dealing with was running a side business with the Sicherheitspolizei. First the Jews paid him, and then the Sipo paid him. Anyway. They came while we were sleeping. I kicked out a window, and made it out over the rooftops, but I was the only one to escape. It probably would have been better if I had simply flung myself off one of those rooftops,” he considers. “That would have been the noble thing, wouldn’t it?”

“So there was no arrest in a café. No desperate escape from a work detail. No return to empty rooms above a warehouse. All that was a lie.”

“A man runs away, while his wife and children are ensnared? Not exactly anyone’s idea of a heroic action. But then I thought, I could get them out . I could work the system. What could the Stapos really want with a woman and her two children? I could buy them back. I took up a name I had used once years before, and started working. I found where they were being held, and set up a transaction with a bull named Dirkweiler from the Gross Hamburger Strasse Sammellager. It really wasn’t difficult. The Stapos are greedy old whores when it comes to what fills up their pockets. But Dirkweiler was greedier than most. He made promises, always boasting about how he could free a hundred Jews with the stroke of his pen but then always asking for more.

“And then,” he says, “came the end of February. The Sicherheitspolizei arrested more than ten thousand Jews over the course of a single morning, mostly out of the factories. It was a massive operation. Gestapo, Kriminalpolizei, even squads of Waffen-SS men, stuffing Jewish factory workers into the lorries. All the collection areas began to overflow, the Gross Hamburger Strasse included, so the decision was made to clear out some room. Three days later, Dirkweiler informed me that he had ordered my wife and children transferred to Theresienstadt in Bohemia. The ‘paradise camp,’ he called it. And there they would remain, alive and well fed, as long as I cooperated with his operations.” He stares dimly into the light from the screen. “That was the day I became a catcher.” A shrug. “I was good at it. In the diamond business you learn to read people’s faces, as well as the stones. I would pick out a man in a café and stare at him, until he caught my eyes, and then I would know. I became an expert at betrayal. Finally, one morning Dirkweiler calls me into his office. He was happy. I was making him look good with his bosses in the Burgstrasse office, and he wanted to show his appreciation. He’d laid his hands on a bottle of Napoleon brandy from some old Jew’s cellar, most likely. It was second rate, but he thought it was a prize, and wanted to share it with me. A great honor, at least in his eyes. An SS officer inviting a Jew to share a bottle of cognac. Unheard of .”

Sigrid grits her teeth. “And what did you do?”

Egon gazes at her for a moment. “I told him that I wasn’t interested in his brandy. Or his cigarettes, or wristwatches, or any of his trinkets any longer. I told him that if he wanted me to continue to make him look good with his bosses, then he’d have to do something for me.”

“For you,” Sigrid repeats.

Egon slowly breathes in, then exhales. “At first he didn’t react. Maybe he was curious about what I might want. About what a man like me might consider to be valuable, beyond the daily contraband. So I told him. I told him he’d have to bring my wife and daughters back to Berlin.”

Sigrid feels herself go still. Perfectly still. Egon’s eyes are fixed as if he’s still staring into the SS man’s face. “Suddenly, the Herr Untersturmführer didn’t look too happy any longer,” he says. “A minute later he was on his feet banging his fist and shouting about how he didn’t take orders from a fucking Yid. But it was all a front. I had already read the truth in his face.” He says this and swallows. “Maybe I had always known it.”

There’s a pause. Egon takes a long and distant breath to finish the story. “The next day I was on the train with one of the Stapo bulls. His name was Purzel. Not so bad a sort, really. I’ve certainly known worse men. In his way he was a thoughtful butcher. He liked to perform card tricks. Maybe he actually thought he was doing me a favor by telling me. Anna and the girls had never been sent to any sort of a ‘paradise camp.’ They’d been put on transport to a camp in Poland on the twenty-sixth of February. A place called Auschwitz. Apparently, Anna had grown hysterical when one of the girls was separated from her in the crowd at the station platform. The SS don’t like panic during a transport, of course, and have no patience for shrieking women. So a guard struck her in the head with his rifle butt, hard enough to kill her, and then tossed her body onto the train.”

He says this with an even, toneless voice, but then stares blankly for a moment. “This was the story Purzel told me. As I said, maybe he thought he was doing me a service. Maybe he thought he was being humane . I don’t know. He looked rather surprised when I shoved the knife blade into him. Even disappointed. In any case, that was the moment I ended my career with the Geheime Staatspolizei.”

Tears are rolling freely down Sigrid’s cheeks. She would like to touch him. She would like to feel the texture of the grief on his face. But she is afraid that if she touched his skin, she would burn her fingers. There is something of the furnace about his expression, so all she can do is wipe her eyes and say, “What about your daughters?”

“How will I ever know?” he asks the darkness into which he is staring. Then he turns his head and regards Sigrid for an instant as if regarding one of his gems. “Come with me , ” he breathes.

She feels, for an instant, as if she has been hollowed out. “That’s not possible.”

“It is . Anything is possible. I would have thought you’d have learned that by now. Come with me.”

She shakes her head. “How?”

“How? We get on a train. Madrid is how many hours away by rail? Less than a day.”

“No. I have work here. There are people who depend on me.”

“ Depend on you? For how long? How long until the Gestapo come banging on your door one night? I’ve seen what they do in the cellars at Grosse Hamburger Strasse. There are cellars like that all over the city. Torture is not a strong enough word for it.”

“You can’t frighten me, Egon.”

“I’m not trying to, Frau Schröder. I’m trying to save your life .”

She gazes at the light beading in his eyes.

“Meet me here. Tomorrow. There’s a matinee,” he tells her.

“I can’t.”

“I have a plan I’ve been working on. It’s a bit risky, but if I can pull it off, it’ll put some money in our pockets. Enough to buy you a dozen passports. All I need is that little spitter you’ve been carrying.”