Those Who Save Us (33 page)

50

LATE THAT NIGHT HERR LIEUTENANT SCHLEMMER BRINGS Trudie back to the bakery, where Anna is sitting on a stool behind the display case, staring at nothing.

She’s fine, the Ami says, urging the girl forward for Anna’s inspection. She’s just fine—you see?

And indeed, though Trudie’s braids are undone and her face a streaky mess of what looks like dirt but is probably chocolate, she seems to have forgotten the events of the morning. In fact, she is more animated than she has been in months: she swings the Lieutenant’s hand in high arcs and hangs on it like a monkey, babbling something about
tootsie pops.

Anna’s gaze wanders past her daughter to the window, the walls. Her filthy hands lie limp in her lap.

The Ami watches her, blinking.

Where does Trudie sleep? he asks finally. I will put her to bed.

At this Anna stirs. She doesn’t want him poking about upstairs, prying into their private quarters and seeing how she and the girl have been living. Entering Mathilde’s bedroom with its stained and sagging bed.

Thank you, I will do it, she says.

But Trudie is already pulling her new friend from the storefront.

This way, she says; this way, in Tante’s room, I’ll show you.

Anna follows the pair to the base of the steps and stands there, arms crossed, slit-eyed and listening. She hears nothing more than the Ami’s deep loud voice, mingling with the girl’s soprano chatter. And after a while, quiet; then a clank and the squeak of water being pumped in the WC; then the Lieutenant humming to himself as he jogs down the stairs. Anna hastily returns to her stool.

The Ami comes into the storefront and stops when he sees her expression. He ducks his head, rubbing a wrist bone over his shoe-brush hair.

Are you
okay
? he asks.

Okay
? What is this
okay
? Anna gives a curt nod, wanting nothing more than for him to be gone, to be rid of his earnest, well-meaning presence.

If you please, Fräulein, he says. Come upstairs. I’ve—Whatever else he says is lost on Anna, who finds herself on her feet, hands clenched in fists. She is grateful, of course, for his taking care of the child, but this is going too far. So he too assumes she will express her appreciation in physical form, does he? He of all people, with his earnest, porridgy face, his sad bachelor’s eyes, now shining at her with such hope and such pity!

How dare you, she says, her voice low and quivering.

The Ami flushes.

No, no, you misunderstand, he says. My fault. I put it badly. I don’t— I don’t have much experience with women. It’s just that I have drawn you a bath. I thought you might like to wash, after . . .

He makes an awkward gesture in Anna’s direction, encompassing her ruined dress, the clots of mud on her shoes and her earth-smudged face.

Please, he says. It will do you good.

Anna stays where she is, measuring him. He is by now so red that it appears as though he has suffered a burn, but everything in his posture signifies quiet insistence. If she spurns his offering, he may turn ugly, like the rest. If she complies, he may leave her in peace. She brushes past him and up the stairs.

The tub is full almost to the brim, steam curling from the undulating skin of the water. Anna slaps it with the side of a hand, sending a wave across the room. That he should assume such familiarity, such proprietorship, should interfere to such a degree! Yet he has her trapped up here, and there is nothing else to do. Anna removes her soiled clothes and climbs in, hissing in pain at the temperature. She immerses herself fully and surfaces. She sits dripping and staring at the wall. There is no need to bother with soap. She will never rid herself of the stench of corpses she has buried no matter how hard she scrubs. It is inside her. It will coat her nostrils and the back of her throat as long as she lives.

After some time there comes an uncertain knock.

Fräulein? Fräulein Anna?

The door opens a centimeter.

Is everything all right? I thought perhaps you . . .

Herr Lieutenant Schlemmer sidles sideways into the room, eyes conspicuously averted from Anna’s nudity.

It’s just that you’ve been in here so long and I didn’t hear anything, he says. I was afraid you might have—

Anna turns on him, her face mottled and ferocious with shame.

Go away, she hisses. Go away and leave me alone.

The Ami ignores this. He steps around the puddles on the floor and comes to sit on the side of the tub, still looking anywhere but at her, heedless of the wet stain spreading on the seat of his Lieutenant’s trousers. He reaches past Anna for the soap.

Please, he says again. Allow me.

Tentatively at first, then with more assurance, he lathers Anna’s hair. He fetches the pitcher and rinses it once, twice. His touch is as gentle as a mother’s. Anna submits, head bowed. Tears slip from beneath her smarting lids and into the cooling bathwater. She keeps her eyes closed the entire time.

THEY ARE MARRIED A MONTH LATER, IN AN OFFICE IN THE Rathaus, which the Amis are using for administrative purposes. The ornate furniture of the former government seat has long since been hauled away by desperate Weimarians and chopped up for kindling; it has been replaced by filing cabinets and folding tables and chairs. The rooms are full of men in olive drab, their footsteps echoing in the denuded halls.

Jack wears his uniform; Anna, the June bride, a clean workday dress; Trudie, who watches the proceedings with acute interest from a corner chair, swinging her heels, her least-mended dirndl. The thick sunlight of a summer afternoon slants through the dirty windows onto the couple, making them squint at the army chaplain as he performs the ceremony. He tugs at his earlobe throughout. The hasty mumbled rites are punctuated by the shouts of soldiers outside—
Hey, got a cigarette? Hey, Sarge, where do you want me to put this?—
and the grinding of truck gears in the square.

Within minutes they are husband and wife. After a quick glass of beer at the base, Anna will pack what belongings she and Trudie have and move into lodgings near Jack’s barracks. He has already applied for discharge, he has told her; as a translator he is near the top of the list. They should have to wait no longer than four months, he promises Anna. Then they will board a ship for America.

51

AND WHAT DOES ANNA TAKE WITH HER FROM GERMANY? Nothing.

Except:

A week before leaving Weimar for her new homeland, Anna surrenders the child to the care of a Red Cross nurse and returns to the bakery. It is a day in early September yet hot as summer: the air still, the sky white, the trees resigned and drooping. A sad afternoon, somehow; abashed, as if the weather is aware that it is acting improperly but lacks the conviction to change seasons.

The door to the storefront is unlocked. Anna opens it and steps inside. She has not been here since moving to her new husband’s quarters three months ago. She walks through the rooms, rubbing her arms. It is cool inside these thick walls.

Crumbs, buttons, dust. Mouse droppings. Anna tries to feel something but cannot. In this place where she has spent the most important moments of her life! She lists each event under her breath as she revisits the site of its occurrence.
Here I gave birth to my daughter. Here she was baptized. Mathilde sat here, on the side of this tub.
Anna puts a hand on the porcelain. It is chilly; it gives nothing back.
Here, in this cellar, Mathilde hid them, people far more desperate than I. Are any of them still alive?
Anna looks at the abandoned pallet, the filthy sheets wrinkled as if somebody has just arisen from it, and marvels that she ever slept there.
Here I lay awake and thought of Max. At some point he must have walked over these floors, perhaps leaned against the display case. Sat at the worktable and had a cup of tea.

Still she feels nothing.

Here I stood when
he
first came for me. And here in Mathilde’s bedroom the rocking chair where he deposited his tunic and trousers. Here the brushes with which he smoothed his dark hair, the mirror in which he smiled. Here the corner in which he made me stand, naked with my eyes closed while he walked toward me. His breath on my shoulderblades, stirring my hair. My back to him but still I knew he was grinning.

Here this bed.

Why has she come back? What possible good can it do to try and remember, one last time, these things best forgotten? And if one must surrender the memory of the good along with the bad, well, perhaps this is not too high a price to pay. Better to remain so distant, a blessing to be so detached, as if all of this has happened to somebody else.

Anna gives the rocking chair a tentative push. It creaks wearily. The rush matting of its seat sags from years of carrying the baker’s weight; its back is missing a slat. Anna stops the chair in its track and bends forward to look through the window at the view Mathilde might have contemplated in happier times. The road, the winding stone wall alongside it. The light is brownish and sad.

It is time to go. Anna turns to leave the room. As she does, she passes the bureau, where Mathilde’s hapless Fritzi still smiles from amidst his shrine of dead flowers, now crumbled to dust. And next to it in a cracked china bowl in which Anna kept odds and ends, candle stubs and needles and earrings and some other jewelry the
Obersturmführer
brought her, is the small gold case with the swastika on its cover, containing the photograph snapped on her birthday. Anna takes this from the dish without thinking about it; it is as if her hand acts of its own accord. She slips it into the pocket of her skirt before she walks downstairs and away from the bakery for good, never suspecting that in the years to come her daughter will lift this sole relic of her mother’s past from among layers of lacy undergarments in another bedroom across the ocean; that again and again she will stare at this portrait of what could be a family with longing and horror and a species of awe.

Trudy, April 1997

52

TRUDY IS HAPPY. SHE HAS NEVER BEEN THIS HAPPY. SHE IS not sure that, prior to this, she has even known what happiness is; she is awed by the force of it. It is like coming in from the cold, cheeks red and tingling and thighs blushing beneath one’s clothes, and sitting down to a hot meal and suddenly discovering how ravenous one is, a hunger not recognized until this moment.

She is lying on one side in Rainer’s bed, watching him as he stands by the window in his briefs and undershirt, a sleeveless cotton vest that Trudy’s students would refer to as a wife-beater. Divested of its typical garments, Rainer’s body in the astringent afternoon light looks old. True, the height of his frame does not belie the power within it, and he is bull-chested and covered all over with a smattering of grayish hair. But his flesh is powder-white and soft in places it wouldn’t be on a younger man—for instance over his biceps, still apple-hard, it hangs slack and stretched from the muscle. Trudy doesn’t care one bit. She is no spring chicken herself. And with Rainer, Trudy feels no shame; she is no longer plagued by images of blood, the smell of saliva paint-sharp on skin, the phantom gristle of pubic hair against bone—all things she has not realized have troubled her until now, in their absence.

Trudy stretches luxuriously and yawns, then says
Mmmm
to get Rainer’s attention. It doesn’t work; he doesn’t turn from his pensive inspection of the yard. Unlike Trudy, Rainer is moody after lovemaking. Smoke curls against the windowpane. He is halfway through his second cigarette, a luxury he permits himself only postcoitus, tapping ashes into a small crystal bowl kept in a bedside table drawer specifically for this purpose, wiping it clean with a rag as soon as he is done.

When he lights a third Trudy sits up and reaches for the robe Rainer has bought her, a slippery silk garment of shocking and splashy pink Trudy would never have chosen for herself, so bright it verges on vulgar. Trudy loves it. She cinches the fringed sash around her waist and pads over to Rainer, the wooden floorboards cool against her feet. Standing behind him, she stretches on tiptoe to rest her lips very lightly on the back of his neck, where the silver hair is as short and prickly as that on a dog’s muzzle.

Aren’t you cold? she murmurs.

No. But you are. Your nose is like an icicle.

Trudy puts her arms around him.

Come back to bed, she says.

In a minute.

Rainer grinds out his cigarette and carries his makeshift ashtray from the room. Trudy hears the toilet flush down the hall and water running in the sink. When Rainer returns, he takes the cloth from the windowsill where he has left it and begins to polish the bowl dry. Trudy, observing this routine from the side of the bed, begins to laugh.

What is so funny? Rainer says, without looking up from his task.

You, says Trudy. You have to be the most German Jew in the entire world.

Rainer scowls. He drops the ashtray into its drawer and slams it shut.

And what, precisely, is that supposed to mean? he asks.

Oh, come on, Rainer. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just that you’re so obsessively neat. I’ve never met anyone as compulsive as I am before—aside from my mother, of course.

Rainer lifts his trousers from a chair, shakes them out, and steps into them, then turns to the closet for a shirt.

Hey, says Trudy. Aren’t you coming back to bed?

No, says Rainer shortly. Get dressed.

But—

Rainer gives her a look over his bifocals. He points at Trudy’s clothes, folded on the bureau. Then he leaves. Trudy sits bewildered in her robe, listening to him descend the steps. She takes a deep breath.

Okay, she says to the room, which is as large and square and neatly kept as its owner. Then she sheds the robe and pulls on her turtleneck and sweater and slacks and hastens down the stairs.

Rainer is in the kitchen, slapping sandwiches together, luncheon meat on brown bread. Trudy goes to the refrigerator and takes out the mayonnaise.

You forgot this, she says, setting it on the table.

A deliberate oversight. I do not want it.

But you like mayonnaise, Trudy says.

Don’t hover.

Trudy retreats to the counter and leans against it, folding her arms.

Rainer, don’t be angry, she says. What I said upstairs, I wasn’t implying— I mean, I certainly didn’t want to offend—Oh, hell.

Rainer cuts the sandwiches into triangles and puts them, tongues of bologna and lettuce protruding from their crusts, first into plastic bags and then a large brown paper one.

Get your coat, he says, adding napkins and a thermos.

Are we going on a picnic? Trudy asks. She ducks her head to glance through the window at the thermometer affixed to the garage. You must be joking. It’s two degrees out there!

Get your coat, Rainer repeats. I will meet you in the car.

Bemused, Trudy complies. When she is all bundled up, she leaves the house through the back door and runs through the cold to where Rainer’s white Buick is idling in the driveway, exhaust pluming from its muffler. It is a big low boat of a car with sharky tail fins, so absurdly long as to appear an optical illusion. The passenger’s door cracks open at Trudy’s approach and she gratefully throws herself inside.

This is crazy, she says, as Rainer reverses into the alley and accelerates out onto Fiftieth Street. Where are we going?

I want to show you something.

What?

In reply, Rainer reaches over and switches on the radio. He changes stations until he finds a Rachmaninoff prelude, then dials the volume up so that the swelling chords fill the car. Trudy sinks back in the prickly plush of the seat, watching Rainer from the corner of one eye. His profile is inscrutable, calm beneath the brim of his hat; he steers the big Buick with the twist of a finger, his hand relaxed on the wheel.

They drive through the quiet streets of Edina and the busier avenues of Uptown. Past Lake Calhoun, white and flat as a dinner plate—it being a weekday, there are no die-hard exercise fanatics on its paths, jogging in hamsterlike circuits or huffing along on skis. Onward over a bridge toward Lake of the Isles, where Rainer pulls right up to the shoreline and parks. He rummages in the backseat for the bag lunch and a tartan cloth, then gets out of the car and stands with the blanket folded over his arm.

Trudy looks at him and then through the windshield. Of all the lakes in Minneapolis, Lake of the Isles is her least favorite; its amoeba shape confuses her, turning her around on its walkways until she loses her sense of direction and can’t tell whether the city is in front of her or to her back. There are no people here either, just a few ice-fishing shacks scattered about, smoke trailing thinly from their stovepipe chimneys.

This is silly, Rainer, Trudy says in her sternest tone. I’m not going out there.

Rainer shrugs, the wind whisking his streaming breath away into the air.

As you wish, he says.

He walks away from Trudy and out onto the ice, where he spreads the blanket and sits, fedora and overcoat and all, and opens the brown sack.

Trudy climbs from the car.

Get back here, you idiot, she yells. You’ll catch your death of pneumonia!

Rainer appears not to hear her. He bites into a sandwich. He eats half of it with apparent relish, then sets it down and stands.

Come, he calls.

Trudy shakes her head, then slams the car door and picks her way over frozen mud and reeds to the ice. She puts a foot on it and hesitates. It appears solid, thick and rutted. And the temperature is certainly low enough that it should hold. And if people are still fishing . . . But there was a thaw a few days ago, and local newscasters have issued warnings to be extra cautious when venturing onto the ice, and Trudy has always thought that plunging through it would be a particularly terrible way to die. Flailing in frigid water, in the dark, bumping one’s head against the hard ceiling, unable to breathe—

Come on! Rainer shouts, waving her forward.

Trudy takes another step. Then she runs out toward him, arms extended for balance, as pell-mell and clumsy as a child. Rainer catches her as she hurtles into him, so hard that they both stagger and nearly fall. But he rights himself in time and Trudy squeezes her eyes shut and pushes her face into the reassuring wool of his coat, which smells of the cedar closet in which he keeps it.

They stand for a minute like this, breathing hard.

Then Trudy hears Rainer say—or feels it, rather, his voice rumbling through the layers of cloth to her cheek: We have a problem.

What? What is it?

Rainer detaches her.

Turn around, he says.

Why?

Must
you always be so argumentative?

Rainer grips Trudy by the shoulders and spins her so her back is braced against his chest. Then he takes his hands away. Trudy tucks her own into her armpits for warmth, even though they are gloved.

Look, Rainer says.

Trudy does. She sees nothing out of the ordinary: the gray-white lake, the overcast sky a darker gray above it, the dense black calligraphy of branches on the far shore. Behind them is a brilliant lemon-colored slash of light that somehow has the effect of making the afternoon seem even colder than it is. The wind rushes ceaselessly over the ice, teasing water from Trudy’s eyes; her cheeks will be bright red when she and Rainer get back indoors. But this is also thrilling, like being, Trudy thinks, on the deck of a ship embarked on an Arctic expedition.

A brace of geese flies overhead, returning from some warmer clime, honking.

What is it I’m supposed to be looking at? Trudy asks.

Rainer chuckles and puts his arms around her from behind.

This is our problem, Dr. Swenson, he says into her hair. You think too much. Stop it. Don’t think. Don’t talk. Just look. Be.