Those Who Save Us (18 page)

Anna and the
Obersturmführer,
Weimar, 1942

22

HE COMES FOR ANNA ON THE DAY OF MATHILDE’S DEATH, in the late afternoon, wasting no time. This is always a quiet hour in the bakery, but now it seems abnormally so, as if the citizens of Weimar have sensed the danger and stayed home with their doors locked and blackout curtains drawn. It is so still, in fact, that Anna fancies she can hear the small noises of her eyes rolling in their wet beds as she looks this way and that, at the door and away. Her every instinct screams to grab Trudie from the pile of sacking at her feet and run. But surely the child will howl if so roughly awakened, and beyond the dooryard, of course, there is nowhere to go.

So Anna forces herself to the door, on which somebody is again pounding so violently that the bell above it jingles. After she undoes the bolt, she retreats behind the counter, gripping her elbows in her hands in an attempt to hide their shaking. Maybe they will assume she is simply cold, a logical mistake. She has not stoked the ovens since the morning, and even within the meter-thick bakery walls her breath is visible.

But when the officer enters, Anna’s trembling stops. The shock of recognition renders her too terrified to move: he is the one she glimpsed in the quarry with Hinkelmann and Blank during her first delivery of bread, the pale-eyed officer whom she initially mistook to be blind. His decorations indeed proclaim him to be an
Obersturmführer
rather than a
Hauptsturmführer
or
Sturmbannführer;
thanks to Gerhard’s attempted matchmaking, Anna is able to make such distinctions. Oddly, this
Obersturm-führer
seems to be alone. At least, Anna hears no commotion outside, no desultory talk or laughter from where his brethren would be lounging against a car, waiting, perhaps smoking.

The
Obersturmführer
crosses the room. He is an enormous man, projecting an air of complete solidity except for a weakness of the jaw; his face disintegrates into his neck. He moves with the same purpose Anna recalls witnessing at the quarry, but his gait is odd, almost mincing. Anna will later discover that this is because his feet are disproportionately small for his body, barely bigger than hers, sometimes causing him to trip over his own toes.

He plants his gloved hands on the counter and leans forward.

Do you always lock the door in the afternoon, Fräulein? he asks. Hardly an astute business practice.

Then he grins as if he were any man flirting with a pretty girl, teasing her into giving him a free sweet from the display case. The expression transforms his face into one nearly handsome, the upward movement of his cheek muscles lifting the flesh from his doughy jawline. There is something wrong about it, however, that Anna can’t put a finger on.

She attempts a return smile. I was just about to close up, she says; I’m afraid we’ve sold out of nearly everything. This time of day, you know. But—

I haven’t come for bread, the
Obersturmführer
says.

Oh, of course! Forgive me. For a special customer such as yourself, I’m sure I can find something more appealing. There’s a
Linzertorte
in the back, and some poppy-seed cake, very fresh.

The
Obersturmführer
examines Anna for a moment. At this close range, his eyes are like those of a sled dog, the pinprick pupils set in an absence of color ringed with black. Anna feels them on her flushed cheeks like small cold weights.

Your business partner, Frau Staudt—

Anna twists her hands in her apron. My boss, you mean? she babbles. She’s not here, she’s delivering the afternoon orders—The
Obersturmführer
makes an impatient noise and strides behind the counter, passing close enough to Anna that she can smell the wind in the folds of his greatcoat, cold air, promising more snow. He glances into the kitchen.

She’s been executed, he says.

Executed! Anna gasps.

She has been rehearsing this moment for hours, knowing how important it is to appear shocked, and now that it has arrived she finds she hardly has to pretend. She braces herself against the display case, her breath materializing in white gusts. She is nearly panting.

That can’t be true, Herr
Obersturmführer;
begging your pardon, but you must have made a mistake!

The
Obersturmführer
’s gaze alights on Trudie, still sleeping in her pile of makeshift blankets. He bends for a closer look, bracing his hands on his knees.

A pretty girl, he says. Yours?

Please, Herr
Obersturmführer,
Frau Staudt is a good woman, absolutely loyal; I haven’t heard her say or do the slightest thing against the
Partei
since I’ve been working here! Why on earth should she have been executed?

Why don’t you tell me? the
Obersturmführer
says absently.

Tell you—? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

He removes his gloves and places a finger on Trudie’s cheek. The toddler stirs.

How old is the child? he asks. One, one and a half ?

One and four months, Anna whispers.

The
Obersturmführer
nods. Then he stands and beams at Anna, who realizes why his grin seems ersatz: he waits a beat too long before delivering it, like a bad actor reminded to perform by a director’s hissed cue from backstage.

Now then, says the
Obersturmführer,
slapping his hands together as if about to tackle a difficult task. Let’s not waste any more time, shall we? Why don’t you tell me how long this has been going on?

What? says Anna. I don’t know what you mean.

The
Obersturmführer
makes a moue of exaggerated surprise.

You don’t? he asks. Really?

The tendons in Anna’s neck creak as she tries to shake her head.

You don’t know, Fräulein, that your boss was feeding the prisoners in our correctional facility, leaving bread for politicals, a-socials, murderers?

No, I didn’t know—

I suppose your ignorance also extends to the weapons we found in the bakery truck, beneath the bread.

Weapons? Of all the— Where would Frau Staudt get weapons?

Why, I haven’t the slightest idea, the
Obersturmführer
says, taking a step toward Anna. But you do, don’t you, Fräulein? Just as you helped load them into the truck yourself; just as you worked all night, every night, to make that extra bread. Come now, don’t look at me that way. Don’t insult my intelligence by pretending you didn’t know where it was going.

I knew it was going to the camp, but Frau Staudt told me it was for you, for the officers. She acted so proud, saying it was such an honor to supply you—

Anna starts to cry. She lied to me! she says, weeping.

The
Obersturmführer
watches her.

Enough, he says.

Anna continues to sob. She took advantage of me. She thought I was an idiot! she wails, spraying spittle.

The
Obersturmführer
stalks to Anna and grabs her by the chin, forcing her to look up at him as though she were a naughty child. Then his thumb is in her mouth, callused and tasting of cigarettes. Anna gags, her eyes tearing afresh. When he withdraws it, she tries to see his face, to gauge his intentions. The
Obersturm-führer
is breathing hard through his nose. He clamps his hands to Anna’s cheeks, kneading the skin, rolling his tongue in her mouth.

Anna struggles free. Please, she says.

The
Obersturmführer
raises an eyebrow.

I don’t want to wake the child, Anna whispers.

Nor does she want to take him to her bed in the cellar, where Mathilde has hidden so many enemies of the Reich, so Anna begins walking toward the staircase. She is thinking of all the rewards she has reaped from being a pretty girl, things she has come to accept as a matter of course: compliments, catcalls, men turning to watch her on the streets, smiling, offering her seats on trams, setting aside the best produce for her at market, imminent marriage proposals, flowers. She would trade every last one of them if only this
Obersturmführer
would now follow her up the stairs. Anna acts with a primitive cunning she didn’t know she possessed, an innate knowledge of an ancient system of barter; she wordlessly urges the
Obersturmführer
onward as she mounts the first step, the second, her breath trembling in her lungs.

Her prayer is granted. Mathilde’s old bed is not meant for such punishment: the mattress spills them toward the middle, and the frame cracks beneath their combined weight. The
Ober-sturmführer
doesn’t bother to remove his clothes; he merely shrugs off his greatcoat and yanks open the buttons of his trousers. He grunts and heaves on top of her, and Anna tries to stifle her own noises by biting the inside of her cheek. Max too was often rough, taking her by surprise and sometimes using his teeth, but he was at least quick. Nothing has schooled Anna for this burning, this prolonged internal abrasion. She concentrates on widening her eyes at the ceiling, knowing that if she permits herself to blink, the tears welling in them will spill over.

When the
Obersturmführer
is finally done, he says, You like to watch.

Pardon? Anna whispers.

You kept your eyes open. I like that.

The
Obersturmführer
sits on the side of the bed for a minute, staring at the floor, a man making a weighty decision. Then he sighs and says, I will come once a week to inventory the bread. I will come myself; I won’t send anybody else. Do you understand?

Anna bows her head over her woolen stockings, which she rolls slowly up her legs.

Yes, she says. I understand.

23

THE
OBERSTURMFÜHRER
PROVES TO BE A MAN OF HIS WORD, a punctual man. He comes every Thursday evening, after the bakery is closed, often bearing some trinket: a bar of Belgian chocolate, a scarf, a tube of lipstick too bright for Anna. She stows these in a drawer of Mathilde’s bureau after he leaves. But the gifts for Trudie she uses, the blue blanket of softest lamb’s wool with sateen border, the warm red dress, the only spots of color in the bakery.

They have developed a routine. The
Obersturmführer
makes a cursory inventory of the bakery’s output, which is now picked up by a noncom on Friday mornings; he prowls about the kitchen while Anna gives Trudie the fresh milk he brings. She suspects that it is laced with a mild opiate to make the child sleep, but at least it is real, fatty and nourishing, not like the powdered stuff Anna must use now in her patrons’ bread. When Trudie’s eyelids begin to flutter, Anna leads her to her bed in the cellar. Then she and the
Obersturmführer
proceed upstairs. The heaviness of the silence is like being underwater.

Beneath him on Mathilde’s bed, lying completely still so as not to give offense, Anna makes a game of envisioning the lives she might have had if not for the war. She is in the sunny back garden of a house on the Rhine, the child squatting to watch a glittering line of ants in the dirt while Anna hangs laundry, the sheets snapping and fresh in the wind. Or: Curtains ripple at the window of a breakfast room, city traffic purrs on the street below; her husband stuffs an extra roll in his pocket and kisses Anna before rushing out the door. Perhaps these are her real lives, after all. The gray walls of the bakery, the cracks Anna traces in the ceiling beyond the
Obersturmführer
’s shoulders: perhaps she is really asleep in a warm safe bed somewhere, twitching through the details of this recurring nightmare, this grinding existence that has become such a bad joke that she sometimes thinks she will laugh until she rips out her throat with her nails.

Often, afterward, the
Obersturmführer
talks. He is irritated by his small, stuffy office, by the amount of paperwork he must cope with, by the pressure of forcing constant production from the munitions factory and the quarry. He is frustrated by the fact that, living at the camp, it’s impossible for one to ever feel quite clean. It’s not that I have direct contact with them, you understand, he explains, but the constant mud, and the Jews just have this dirty air about them; I swear it impregnates one’s clothes, one’s skin. Anna knows about the latter. The
Obersturmführer
’s sweat emanates an odor much like woodsmoke except fattier, richer, as if he eats nothing but bacon; a smell that, despite herself, makes her stomach growl.

But he rarely seems to expect a response, so when he first asks her a direct question, Anna is startled. It is a muggy August evening, the air tired and stale; Mathilde’s bedroom is musty with the
Obersturmführer
’s exertions and dust from the rugs. It smells like an attic unopened for years, and perhaps because of this Anna has been thinking not of her whitewashed breakfast room nor the sun of a summer garden but something cooler: strolling down a broad avenue lined with rows of linden trees, her toes hot and pinched in her shoes, strands of her damp hair clinging to the nape of her neck; spying a café, she sits in the shade at a wrought-iron table, eases her feet from her pumps and orders an icy drink, something with a slice of lemon in it. She sips it while gazing at the passersby, her mind blank.

The
Obersturmführer
repeats his question, not without a note of impatience.

Pardon? says Anna.

He sighs in exasperation and runs a thumb over the stretch marks on Anna’s soft belly.

I said, how did you come to be in this position? You’ve no husband; you don’t wear a ring.

The war, Anna says. There wasn’t time.

The
Obersturmführer
nods. But you’re from a good family; that’s obvious from your breeding. They didn’t take you in?

My father didn’t think much of the match, Anna tells him. He drove me from the house. Frau Staudt gave me room and board in exchange for labor.

Ach,
fathers, the
Obersturmführer
says. He crosses his arms behind his head and smiles at the ceiling, which is lost in the darkening room. I know about fathers. Did I ever tell you about mine?

It is as if they are real lovers, sharing pillow talk. Next he will offer her a cigarette. For a vertiginous moment, Anna thinks she might laugh.

The
Obersturmführer
digs in his ear and absently examines his finger. A stupid little man, he says, a nothing really, a weak-spined dilettante who never did a day’s honest work in his life, but always throwing his weight around as if he were God. Horst, bring me the newspaper! Horst, where are my cigars? He used to beat my brother and me with a belt if we didn’t move fast enough to suit him.

Horst? Anna moves her lips, silently tasting the
Obersturm-führer
’s Christian name. It has a dark feel in the mouth, a little thorny. Then she realizes he is waiting for her to say something. She makes a noise in her throat.

One day I took the belt from him, the
Obersturmführer
continues. I must have been fifteen, sixteen—he didn’t realize until then how big I’d become. I threw it across the room and said, Let’s go, then, let’s fight. But I promise you only one of us will get up, and it won’t be you. He never touched me after that.

Anna glances sideways at him.

He still had egg in his mustache from breakfast, the
Ober-sturmführer
says reflectively.

Then he pushes her legs apart again.

Maybe we shouldn’t, Anna ventures. My— monthly flow is beginning.

And this is true: she feels the cramps, her womb a big dumb fist clenching and easing in slow waves, ignorant as to what goes on outside.

The
Obersturmführer
pauses for a second before flashing Anna his ersatz grin.

Then I’ll remove my clothes, he says.

Without the chafe of worsted trousers against Anna’s thighs, without the
Obersturmführer
’s shirt buttons branding her face, the ordeal isn’t as painful as it usually is. The slippery sensation of skin on skin, the unexpected breezes, shock Anna. She blinks in an effort to summon the café of her daydream, the leaves on the linden trees turning up their silvery undersides, but the
Ober-sturmführer,
watching her, thrusts a hand between her legs. He works diligently at a kernel of sensitive flesh, and Anna’s interior muscles clutch in spasms. She can’t prevent herself from letting out a yelp. This is not supposed to happen, this has never happened to her before.

From the doorway, there is an answering cry: Mama?

Still pinioned, Anna rolls her head to the right and sees Trudie standing there, arms and braids akimbo. In Anna’s impatience to get this over with, she has been careless in ensuring that the child finish her milk. She should have known Trudie would disobey and climb the steps.

Go downstairs! Anna tries to call.

But before she can draw the necessary breath, the
Ober-sturmführer
says, Shit! Without withdrawing, he leans halfway off the bed and grabs one of his boots from the floor. He hurls it at Trudie; it thuds against the wall near the door, leaving a black mark. Anna hears the child’s wooden soles clopping quickly, unevenly, down the risers. The
Obersturmführer
continues his business. When he levers himself up and out of Anna, she sees her blood clotted in his pubic hair, smeared on his stomach.

In ominous silence, the
Obersturmführer
cleans himself with a handkerchief and then offers it to Anna. She shakes her head. He departs quickly, slamming the door, leaving Anna to collect his boots before she too descends to the bakery.

She looks for her daughter in the kitchen while fetching the brush and boot polish the
Obersturmführer
has brought her, but Trudie isn’t in any of her usual hiding places. Anna finds her instead in the storefront, wedged behind the display case. The
Obersturmführer
stands in front of the child, fists on hips; when he bends over her, she shrinks farther into her corner, staring.

Why are you hiding back there? he asks. Don’t you want to see what I’ve got for you?

Anna, buffing the boots, watches Trudie shake her head.

From his briefcase, the
Obersturmführer
produces a pair of red child’s shoes, actual leather. He sighs.

What a shame, he says. I suppose I’ll have to find another little girl to give these to.

The child says nothing, but she extends a hand toward the shoes. Then she draws it back as if they might burn her.

I wonder if these would fit you, the
Obersturmführer
says, dangling the shoes by the straps at Trudie’s eye level. What do you think?

The child nods. The
Obersturmführer
sets the shoes on the floor and ruffles Trudie’s hair. Then he turns to Anna, beckoning with two fingers. She hands his boots over in silence. They are three sizes too big for him, Anna knows. His masculine vanity won’t permit public display of his childlike feet.

Next week, he says, standing.

After Anna unlocks the door and latches it behind him, she draws the curtain aside to watch him go. She can barely make him out, a dark shape in the dark. Whenever he leaves, the night seems blacker than it is, a solid thing pressing against the windows.

She lets the curtain fall.

You must never come upstairs when the man is here, do you understand? she says to Trudie.

But Mama—How old is the child?Never! Because . . .Anna gropes at sudden inspiration. He’s Saint Nikolaus; do you remember what I told you about Saint Nikolaus? He doesn’t like to be seen.

Trudie frowns.

But it’s not Christmas, she says.

That doesn’t matter. Saint Nikolaus has magical powers; he can do whatever he wants. He travels the world year-round, looking for good little girls. And if you’re a bad girl and try to see him, do you know what will happen?

No more red shoes? Trudie whispers, gazing at them.

A rotten taste thickens Anna’s saliva to the consistency of aspic. This has always happened to her, periodically and for no apparent reason. No amount of throat-clearing can get rid of it; if she waits, it will usually disappear on its own. Yet now this feeling isn’t just in her mouth. Tainted gray jelly clings to her like a membrane. It is beneath her skin, inside and out, invisible and foul.

That’s right, she says to her daughter. She scrubs her arms with both hands, shivering, although there isn’t a hint of a breeze. No more milk. No more red shoes.