Those Who Save Us (13 page)

Did you hear that? he asks. Did you hear what he said?

He delivers a kick to the prisoner’s kidneys, driving the man face-first into the mud, then clubs him in the head, across the shoulders, on the back. He flips the prisoner over with his foot. He waits until the prisoner has regained consciousness, then stands on his throat and presses down with his full weight. The prisoner’s limbs flail, his hands scrabbling for purchase on the officer’s boot. When he has stopped gurgling, Hinkelmann or Blank bends over and peers into his face. Satisfied, he administers a last kick.

Another one shot while trying to escape, he says. Did you get that, Rippchen?

He turns to an adjutant standing a few meters away. Orating like an actor projecting to the last row, pantomiming the act of writing down the words, the
Unterscharführer
bellows: Shot—while trying— to escape.

I got it, Herr
Unterscharführer,
the adjutant reassures him.

Behind them, the prisoners continue working, with a bit more energy than before.

Jesus Christ, Blank or Hinkelmann says, frowning at the smudges the prisoner’s death grip has left on his boot. Give me some of that.

His partner hands him the cognac.

Neither notices a third officer who has arrived during the beating. This fellow, whose decorations proclaim him to be of higher rank than Hinkelmann or Blank, is bigger than both, dark-haired, sober. He moves with purpose to the pair and holds a brief conference with them, his voice pitched too low for his words to carry. The
Unterscharführers
react with indignation.

Come on, Horst, Blank or Hinkelmann says. You’ve had this shit detail. You know how it is!

He swirls liquor from cheek to cheek and then spits it onto the ground near the corpse.

The third officer says something else, and Hinkelmann or Blank gives an extravagant salute.

Yes SIR, Herr
Obersturmführer,
SIR, he says, and gestures to the adjutant, who blows a whistle. The prisoners each pick up a rock, form columns, and run double-time to the entrance of the quarry, helped along by blows from the
Kapos.
The
Obersturm-führer
lingers behind, inspecting the dead prisoner.

Suddenly, as though he were a dog scenting the air, the
Ober-sturmführer
’s head snaps up and rotates toward Anna. He stares in her direction, and Anna thinks for a moment that he is blind. Then she realizes that this is, of course, not the case; it is simply that his eyes are so light that he appears from this distance to have no pupils. Yet even after he turns and leaves, Anna’s fear of him is so great that it approaches superstitious conviction. Somehow, the
Obersturmführer
has seen her. He knows she is there.

She huddles behind the tree, her hands over her mouth to stifle the tiny, terrified hitching noises she makes as she weeps. How can human beings do such things to one another? What thoughts ran through the prisoner’s mind as his life was squeezed out of him, as he looked up at a slice of Blank’s or Hinkelmann’s face, knowing that the foot on his throat belonged to a man with the same skin, blood, the same basic tube of meat between his legs, as his own?

Eventually, when it grows dark, Anna undoes the sack and shoves the rolls into the rotted hollow of the pine as fast as she can. Somehow she remembers to scrabble beneath the big stone for the condom. Her hands are shaking so that she tears the thin greasy membrane while excavating it. She stuffs it into her pocket nonetheless and picks up the empty flour sack and flees in the direction from which she came.

16

BY DECEMBER, THE RESTRICTIONS OF RATIONING HAVE tightened even further. Weimarians exist on a diet consisting almost solely of lentils and turnips. They queue in lines for hours for the privilege of purchasing meat so gristly as to be inedible; they come to blows over bones and hooves for broth. The forests of Thuringia are said to be devoid of game. The loaves Anna and Mathilde produce are heavy as rocks and in fact often contain small pebbles, as even the flour provided by the SS is substandard.

Nor is food the only thing in short supply. Gasoline and cigarettes are used in lieu of money. Thread, so necessary for mending clothes already worn for three years or more, is nowhere to be found. And the Reich has decreed that all Germans may bathe only on Saturdays, as any type of fuel for hot water, be it coal or wood, has been declared a national resource.

So it is no surprise to Anna, who has gone to the city’s remaining and octogenarian doctor for medicine for Trudie’s cough, that she returns to the bakery empty-handed. We have reentered the age of leeches, she remarks acidly to Mathilde; if only I could find some! The child’s croup worsens, and the baker employs an equally archaic if more violent method: Anna will never forget the sight of Mathilde reaching into Trudie’s flour crate cradle in the cellar, her nightgown ripping with a flatulent sound as she hefts the choking toddler by the heels and thumps her on the back. This proves an effective temporary cure, but within a few days Trudie can no longer draw a full breath, so Anna decides to disobey one of the Reich’s edicts. After securing the blackout curtains, she feeds the porcelain stove in the upstairs WC with coal, ingot upon ingot, more precious than gold. Enough to produce a full bath and a roomful of steam.

It is late at night. Anna sits on the side of the tub with Trudie in her lap, rubbing the child’s back. The humidity seems to be helping; Trudie is finally dozing when Mathilde pushes the door open. She is spattered with mud that fills the room with the reek of sulfur.

How is she? the baker whispers.

A little better, thank God. But she can’t go on this way. Do you think you could get some stronger medicine on the black market?

No need, says Mathilde, wheezing from her charge up the stairs. She pats her voluminous coat pockets, finds a bottle from one of them, and she hands it to Anna.

This will take care of it, she says.

Craning over her dozing daughter, Anna squints at the label but doesn’t recognize the name.

You got this on the black market? she asks. From Pfeffer?

No, not that crook, he’d sell you sugarwater as soon as look at you. I bought it off Ilse, Herr
Doktor
Ellenbeck’s maid, when I made the Eickestrasse deliveries this afternoon. It cost me a fortune in cigarettes, I can tell you, but she swore it would work. She has four little ones of her own.

This is an SS doctor’s medicine? Anna says, aghast. It’s probably cyanide!

They don’t keep cyanide in their houses, Mathilde says, missing Anna’s irony. Only in the hospital block.

The baker hangs her coat over the robe on the back of the door and plunges her forearms into the tub. Anna waits for her to comment on the fact that the water is a good eight inches higher than the black line painted on the porcelain.

But Mathilde only sighs.

Ach, that feels good, she says. It’s a filthy night. Snowing. I almost went off the road three times.

I take it you made a Special Delivery, Anna says, nodding at the now-brown water, on which pine needles float. How did it go?

Fine. Fine. Last week’s bread was gone. And I got a new message from the prisoners.

Good, says Anna.

She rouses Trudie to give her some of the medicine, which the sleepy child accepts without her usual protest. Every woman who visits the bakery comments that she has never seen a sturdier toddler, and Anna has to agree. But her pride in her daughter is somewhat tempered by a bewildered exasperation. When she is well, there is little of either her mother or her father in Trudie. She is solid and round, built like a small truck with legs sturdy as pistons, and her rages when she is thwarted, her charm when she has worn down her opponent and gotten her way, her general bullish constitution: they are exactly like Gerhard’s. In a quirk of genetic hopscotch, the traits have skipped a generation.

In fact, the only similarity Anna can draw between her daughter and Max, aside from the blue of her eyes, is the light hair that grows in whorls, uncowed by any amount of brushing. Now, because of the steam, it curls in damp corkscrews that Anna smoothes from the child’s flushed forehead.

Mathilde smiles as she lowers her bulk onto the closed lid of the toilet. As if catching the run of Anna’s thoughts, she observes, Her hair is so like her father’s.

Anna puts her hand on the small chest. The constriction within it has eased, she thinks.

Don’t you want to know? the baker asks.

Know what?

Whether there’s any news of your Max. You haven’t asked in ages.

Anna shifts Trudie into a more comfortable position on her lap and murmurs to her.

I have to tell you, Anna, it doesn’t look good. Ilse says they’ve finished building the crematorium. Even in this shitty weather the SS have had the poor bastards working on it night and day.

This doesn’t surprise Anna. She has overheard the women discussing it in the bakery. They say that the SS have been bringing corpses in vans to Reinhard’s funeral parlor in central Weimar for cremation, but that on occasion something goes wrong and the dead spill out into the street. The SS can’t have this; it is bad for morale. Naturally they would devise their own methods for disposing of their victims.

Well? says Mathilde.

Well what?

Don’t you have any reaction?

Anna shakes her head. A needle to the heart, dysentery, hanging, malnutrition, the murderous whims of Hinkelmann and Blank, simple overwork in the mud and snow: what good is it pretending that Max will survive? There are so many ways for him to die. When Anna thinks of him at all, which she does only when her guard is down before sleep, it is of his knowing smile over the chessboard, the narrow triangle of his freckled torso in the room behind the stairs. There have been no messages from Max since August.

He may still be all right, Mathilde says.

Angrily, Anna wipes her eyes with the back of a wrist.

Don’t lie to me, she says to the baker. And please, don’t be kind. I can stand anything but that.

Mathilde gets up to feed the last of the coal into the stove.

Did you love him very much? she asks shyly, her back to Anna.

Anna ducks her head. The tears Mathilde has unwittingly unleashed darken her shirtwaist in blotches and further dampen Trudie’s hair.

Yes, she says. I did.

Well, at least you’ve had that, Mathilde says, sitting down again with a whistling sigh. At least you’ve got that to hold on to.

Anna looks up at the forlorn note in the baker’s voice.

Why, so do you, she says. You have the memory of your Fritzi.

Oh, Fritzi, says Mathilde, shrugging. That was different.

What do you mean?

Ach, Anna, you wouldn’t understand. A pretty girl like you, you must have had ten proposals before you were sixteen. But a woman who looks like me, she has to take what she can get. My Fritzi married me for the bakery, nobody ever pretended otherwise. He came from such a poor family. He never loved me, not really, not like your Max loved you.

How do you know? Anna says loyally. People who marry for convenience often grow to love one another. It happens all the time.

Mathilde gives a small rasping laugh that turns into a cough.

Not with Fritzi. He was different, she repeats.

Different how?

You know, Anna, queer! He didn’t like women. He would go to Berlin on weekends and—Well, we had an understanding. He did as he pleased and I didn’t end up a spinster.

The baker reaches over to take hold of Trudie’s foot, which she cradles as gently as she might an egg.

The only thing I regret, she adds, aside from him getting himself blown to bits in the last war, was that because of our arrangement he never gave me a child.

Anna looks down at Mathilde’s pudgy hand, thinking of the bashful young man with the pink-tinted cheeks in Mathilde’s bedroom portrait. She now understands why Mathilde stares so hungrily at Trudie when she thinks Anna isn’t looking, why the baker only laughs when she finds that the toddler has poked holes in the crusts of the valuable loaves to dig out and eat the soft insides.

Is that why you started feeding the prisoners? Anna asks. I’ve often wondered why you take the risk when everyone else turns a blind eye. Is it because some of them are . . . different, like Fritzi?

Mathilde blinks at Anna, startled.

I never thought of that, she says slowly. I just feel so sorry for those poor men. But . . . yes, I guess that could have had something to do with it.

She runs a thumb over Trudie’s small foot. A silence falls between the two women, broken only by the hiss of water on the stove.

Oh, Anna, Mathilde says abruptly. Her little voice wavers. What will become of us? After the war, maybe you’ll marry. The child will need a father. And me, I guess I’ll go on running the bakery. But it’ll never be the same, you know? The world has gone crazy. To burn people in ovens...That we talk about this the same way we used to talk about—about— whether Irene Schultz’s husband was going to leave her, or the price of turnips, or the weather—

I know, says Anna, alarmed. Shhhh.

For now it is the baker who cries, her body quivering with the force of it, her small black eyes, fixed imploringly on Anna, awash with tears.

There’s no use in getting yourself so upset, Anna tells her. We do what we can and that’s all we can do.

Mathilde lowers her head and wipes her cheeks with her filthy skirt.

You’re right, she says after a time. She heaves an enormous sigh. You’re right. We won’t talk of such things anymore. It’s no use. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, bringing it up tonight of all nights.

Getting to her feet with a grunt, she bends and gives Anna a clumsy kiss on the hair.

Happy Christmas, she says.

Anna smiles at Mathilde, unable to return the gesture for fear of joggling and waking the child. War makes for strange bedfellows, it is said; apparently it makes for strange friendships as well. The brave, unlucky baker is the only true friend Anna has ever had.

Happy Christmas to you too, she replies, and doesn’t tell Mathilde that she had completely forgotten.