Those Who Save Us (12 page)

15

ANNA SOMETIMES SPECULATES THAT HER NEW LIFE, PAR-ticularly given the arrival of her daughter, might actually be pleasant but for Mathilde’s gift for petty tyranny. From dawn until dusk, the baker issues a constant stream of orders and admonitions in her girlish voice. Everything must be done immediately and exactly the way she likes it; otherwise, her red-faced tantrums are terrible to see. During an especially bad argument over a misshapen batch of hot-cross buns, Anna, reeling with fatigue from Trudie’s nightly feedings, points out that the Reich suffered a great loss when Mathilde became a member of the Resistance, since under different circumstances she would have made an excellent
Feldsmarschall.
Anna expects the baker to respond with the usual threat to throw her charges out into the street, but Mathilde takes this as a compliment and laughs.

Anna’s fantasies, which have progressed from escaping her father’s reign to running off with Max to what their child might look like and finally to hours of uninterrupted sleep, now consist of imagining her existence without Mathilde in it. And in late April 1941, she is granted a temporary opportunity to find out, since Mathilde falls ill. The baker’s ailment, food poisoning, is not serious, but she wallows moaning in her bed as though she has suffered a gunshot to the stomach. Anna has to race up and down the narrow staircase in answer to the bell ringing from the sickroom while simultaneously attending to the bakery’s patrons and her infant daughter. She does so with great cheer. In fact, Anna is so delighted that Mathilde is confined to her quarters that she charitably refrains from saying, I told you not to eat those three tins of black market sardines.

Toward the end of the afternoon, Anna decides to close the shop a bit early. She enters the day’s earnings into the ledger while sitting in Mathilde’s chair, pretending the bakery is her own. Yes, life is very pleasant when Mathilde is out of the way, and Anna is just speculating as to how long this might last when the bell jingles yet again.

What is it this time? she yells, without moving.

There is no request from above, however, and Anna realizes that what she has heard is the bell over the storefront door. Startled, irritated with herself for not locking the bakery after setting the Closed sign in the window, Anna goes into the front room to send this latecomer away and finds, standing on the other side of the counter, an SS
Rottenführer.

Anna’s stomach plummets, but the apologetic smile she has summoned for the tardy patron remains fixed on her face.

Can I help you, Herr
Rottenführer
? she asks.

The man doesn’t answer right away. He is examining the bakery’s sole decoration, a gaudy Bavarian landscape purchased during Mathilde’s long-ago honeymoon, with an air of contempt.

I’ve come for Frau Staudt, he says, when he has finished his inspection.

Anna conceals her shaking hands in the folds of her apron.

She’s indisposed at the moment, but perhaps there is something I can do for you?

The
Rottenführer
turns his attention to Anna, who sees that he is not much older than she. If not for the Sudeten accent, he might have been someone with whom she attended
Gymnasium.
His thick neck and insolent expression mark him as one of the boys who would have been a poor student, interested only in sports, his education otherwise consisting of yelling jibes from the back of the classroom.

Frau Staudt failed to make her weekly delivery to our facility, he says.

I see, says Anna. Well, she’s quite ill, unable to get out of bed. She ate something that disagreed with her—

The
Rottenführer
grimaces, apparently disgusted that he should be bothered with the intestinal problems of a fat widowed baker.

Whatever the cause, he says, it violates her contract. If Frau Staudt doesn’t provide the bread by Friday, we’ll have to take the appropriate measures.

I— I’m sure that won’t be necessary.

Good, says the
Rottenführer.

He looks at Anna’s bosom and smirks. It is almost time for Trudie’s evening meal, and Anna’s breasts are leaking in anticipation. Anna straightens her spine and thrusts her chest forward, some silly vestige of female pride insulted by this boy’s sneer.

I’ll pass on your message, she says.

The
Rottenführer
probes a cheek with his tongue as if searching for a particle of food. Remind her that if she can’t fulfill her obligations, he says, plenty of others would be grateful for the business.

I’ll tell her.

Heil
Hitler, the
Rottenführer
says, with a stiff-armed salute. Then he leaves.

When she hears his motorbike purring up the road, Anna locks the bakery and returns to the kitchen, where she scoops Trudie from her laundry basket under the table. The infant mewls and waves her fists, hitting Anna hard enough on the cheekbone to make her eyes water, but Anna barely notices. This may be just the opportunity she has been waiting for. She stands thoughtfully inhaling the milky scent of her daughter’s scalp. Then, unbuttoning her blouse as she goes, Anna climbs the staircase to the bedroom and recounts the conversation with the
Rottenführer
for Mathilde.

The baker seems to take this news stoically enough. She listens without interrupting while Anna talks, and when Anna is done, she says only, Bring the basin, would you? I’m going to be sick again.

Anna fetches the porcelain bowl from the bureau, cradling Trudie in the crook of the other elbow. It still amazes her, after five months, how heavy the baby’s head is. Trudie, undeterred by Mathilde’s retching, feeds fiercely, her lips a tiny hot circle of suction. With each tug, Anna feels a simultaneous contraction of the womb, as though all of her maternal organs are connected by a delicate but tensile thread.

That gives us two days, Anna says, when Mathilde falls back onto the pillow. You won’t be well enough to make the delivery by then. I’d better do it.

Mathilde hoots.

You! You don’t even know how to drive the van.

I could learn, Anna argues.

Who’d teach you? Don’t worry, I’ll do it, if I have to get out and vomit every five meters. Those Goddamned sardines. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted anything I bought from that crook Pfeffer.

Anna wipes Trudie’s mouth with the hem of her apron and refrains once more from saying, I told you so.

Instead, she asks, What about the inmates?

Didn’t I say I’ll make the delivery?

Yes, and if you’re sick by the quarry? The SS will hear you from a mile away.

The baker turns her face toward the bureau, where a portrait of her dead husband smiles shyly at her from amidst a shrine of candle stubs.

They’ll have to wait, she mutters.

They can’t wait, Anna counters, pressing her advantage. How many times have you told me a single roll can make the difference between life and death? You said—

Mathilde glowers at the portrait. I know what I said. What do you want me to do about it? You see what condition I’m in.

Nothing, Anna says. I’ve already told you. I’ll make the Special Delivery myself.

Trudie digs her fingers into Anna’s breast, as if in appreciation of the idea. A ragged nail scrapes the tender skin, leaving a thin red line.

Ouch, Anna murmurs. Greedy little beast!

That’s why you can’t go, says Mathilde. If something should happen to you, who would take care of the child?

Why, her Tante Mathilde would, Anna says.

She detaches the infant from her breast and dangles Trudie over the baker.

Look how she’s smiling, she says. She wants to go to you.

That’s just gas, Mathilde snaps. Don’t bribe me, Anna. It won’t work.

But she heaves herself into a sitting position against the headboard and takes Trudie from Anna, settling the baby on her thighs. Bouncing her, the baker sings:

“
Backe, backe
Kuchen!”

der
Bäcker
hat gerufen.

“
Wer will guten Kuchen backen,
Der muss haben sieben Sachen:

Butter und Salz,
Zucker und Schmalz,
Milch und Mehl,
und Eier machen den Kuchen
gel’.”

Trudie belches.

You liked that, did you? the baker asks her. She sighs.
Butter und Eier
— I’d kill for some real butter, some unpowdered eggs. I’d eat them right now, even in my sorry state...You don’t even know where the drop-off point is, she adds, smoothing the dandelion fluff on the baby’s head.

So tell me, says Anna. I know the woods of the Ettersberg well enough. I played there as a girl.

And this is true, for as Anna wends her way into the forest just before sunset, carrying a flour sack bulging with rolls, she can still make out the trails she hiked as an adolescent, during her mandatory participation in the League of German Girls. And although the paths don’t lead there, Anna knows her way to Buchenwald. In the days before her mother’s death, Gerhard often marched his small family up the Ettersberg to picnic beneath Goethe’s Oak, which, according to all reports, the Nazis have left standing in the center of the camp. Sentimental fellows, these SS.

Also industrious, or at least the men in their custody are: the rumor is that the prisoners have been forced to build a five-kilometer road from the Weimar train station to the camp. Anna encounters it about a third of the way along. Naturally, rather than walking on the pavement, she threads through the dense undergrowth, keeping the road to her right as a guide. The inmates must have had a hellish time clear-cutting these trees; the hoary stands of spruce and fir, hundreds of feet tall, are so densely packed that they permit only
Pfennig
-sized blotches of light to fall on the forest floor, reminding Anna of the Grimm woodcuts in
Hansel und Gretel
that so terrified her as a child.

But oddly, she is not afraid now. Her senses are keener than they have been since Max’s disappearance, and Anna notices the clumps of crocuses, the coo of mourning doves, as though she were still storing these details to bring to him in the room behind the stairs. This is ludicrous, of course; it isn’t as though she is going to have tea with the man in the Buchenwald mess! But the inconsonant joy Max inspires in Anna is as strong as it ever was, and to catch sight of him, even from a distance, is all she wants. Perhaps she will be able to exchange a message with him somehow—

So thinking, Anna doesn’t see the stone quarry until it yaws before her. She shrinks back among the trees, her heart thudding, a taste of iron in her mouth. Unlike what she has heard of the camp proper, the quarry isn’t encircled with barbed wire, but the guards standing at regular intervals denote a sentry line. The sight turns Anna’s muscles to gelatin. Mathilde has assured her that the quarry will be deserted at this hour, the prisoners having been marched back to Buchenwald for evening roll call. The baker has either forgotten about daylight saving time or underestimated the SS zeal for production.

When she has recovered herself, Anna steals around the circumference of the quarry until she spies the enormous pine Mathilde has described. The bread will go in its hollow trunk; beneath the flat stone at its base, Anna might find one of the information-bearing condoms. She will obviously have to wait, however, until the quarry is empty. Anna debates retreating to a safer distance. It is the more intelligent course of action, the wisest being to abandon the venture altogether. But Anna fears that if she does, she will never be brave enough to try again, and she can’t stomach the thought of returning with her full sack of rolls to the bakery and Mathilde’s derision. Besides, Max is here. So Anna conceals herself behind the tree, and waits, and watches.

The prisoners, laboring in tandem against a sunset striated the gentle lemon and orange of sherbet, are a black organism from which smaller organisms detach to carry rocks to one side. The
Kapos
who oversee them are likewise indistinguishable. But the SS who supervise the
Kapos
stand closer to Anna, and she has read enough of the prisoners’ messages to discern that the taller one is the infamous
Unterscharführer
Hinkelmann. The shorter fellow, nondescript as a bank clerk, is
Unterscharführer
Blank. Or is it the other way around? In any case, they both look bored, and also quite drunk, passing a bottle of cognac back and forth between them.

Yet apparently the precious liquor isn’t enough to keep them occupied, for the taller officer, Hinkelmann or Blank, levels his truncheon at a prisoner who makes the mistake of staggering too close to him with a boulder.

You, he says. Come here.

When the prisoner, trying to remain invisible, trundles onward, Blank or Hinkelmann lunges unsteadily at him, knocking the man’s cap off with the club.

Pay attention when I talk to you, he says.

The prisoner, dazed, releases the boulder.

Yes, Herr
Unterscharführer,
he says. Blood trickles in a thick rivulet from his ear.

Hinkelmann or Blank fishes the cap from the mud with his truncheon, not without some difficulty, and slings it through the air. It sails past the guards.

Get your cap, he orders.

But Herr
Unterscharführer,
begging your pardon, that’s beyond the sentry line.

Blank or Hinkelmann fetches the man such a blow to the head that he falls to his knees.

I
said,
get your cap. Are you fucking deaf ?

The prisoner blinks up at the
Unterscharführer
through the blood sheeting down his face.

No, and I’m not fucking crazy either. Get it yourself.

Hinkelmann or Blank pivots, gaping at his SS brother in burlesque amazement.