Книга - The Cigarette Girl

The Cigarette Girl
Caroline Woods


BERLIN, 1931: Sisters raised in a Catholic orphanage, Berni and Grete Metzger are each other’s whole world. That is, until life propels them to opposite sides of seedy, splendid, and violent Weimar Berlin.Berni becomes a cigarette girl, a denizen of the cabaret scene alongside her transgender best friend Anita, who is considering a risky gender reassignment surgery. Meanwhile Grete is hired as a maid to a Nazi family, and begins to form a complicated bond with their son whilst training as a nurse.As Germany barrels toward the Third Reich and ruin, both sisters eventually come to the same conclusion: they have to leave the country. And they will leave together. But nothing goes as planned as the sisters each make decisions that will change their lives, and their relationship, forever.SOUTH CAROLINA, 1970: With the recent death of her father, Janeen Moore yearns to know more about her family history, especially the closely guarded story of her mother’s youth in Germany. One day she intercepts a letter intended for her mother: a confession written by a German woman, a plea for forgiveness. What role does Janeen’s mother play in this story, and why does she seem so distressed by recent news that a former SS officer has resurfaced in America?







BERLIN, 1931: Sisters raised in a Catholic orphanage, Berni and Grete Metzger are each other’s whole world. That is, until life propels them to opposite sides of seedy, splendid, and violent Weimar Berlin.

Berni becomes a cigarette girl, a denizen of the cabaret scene alongside her transgender best friend Anita, who is considering a risky gender reassignment surgery. Meanwhile Grete is hired as a maid to a Nazi family, and begins to form a complicated bond with their son whilst training as a nurse.

As Germany barrels toward the Third Reich and ruin, both sisters eventually come to the same conclusion: they have to leave the country. And they will leave together. But nothing goes as planned as the sisters each make decisions that will change their lives, and their relationship, forever.

SOUTH CAROLINA, 1970: With the recent death of her father, Janeen Moore yearns to know more about her family history, especially the closely guarded story of her mother’s youth in Germany. One day she intercepts a letter intended for her mother: a confession written by a German woman, a plea for forgiveness. What role does Janeen’s mother play in this story, and why does she seem so distressed by recent news that a former SS officer has resurfaced in America?


The Cigarette Girl

Caroline Woods







Contents

Cover (#u18e6746c-8ed3-5252-a8c4-bcfd24a532b3)

Blurb (#u43c51c52-da55-5191-ab39-c8bc616c76ab)

Title Page (#u33c99a1c-62f8-519f-9ef0-1ea9d1e05d2b)

Author Bio (#ucd193caa-3283-554d-b217-ce6acadb2265)

Dedication (#u42ba96ef-25a3-5e28-8c07-dd584746313d)

Part I: Berlin, 1923 – 1931 (#ulink_c4d99760-2ecc-5ead-a3c1-e270943a63ef)

Berni, 1923 (#ulink_661bf716-1486-5d41-9648-bcd62aba3e94)

Grete, 1931 (#ulink_2af9525b-501c-5fcd-b261-5a2cd74ce59e)

Berni, 1931 (#ulink_f3af8df9-c918-5912-a94d-be8d337e7ca5)

Berni, 1931 (#ulink_93550cb1-4459-5207-84c7-db65712404f5)

South Carolina, 1970 (#ulink_b98f028d-ef5c-505d-be37-9c52af4432fe)

Part II: Berlin 1932 – 1933 (#ulink_e5c891b7-a4ba-5c5c-a1e0-0b9d637edba0)

Grete, 1932 (#ulink_865e0fbb-6baa-5629-ab57-7351bbfcb126)

Berni, 1932 (#litres_trial_promo)

Grete, 1932 (#litres_trial_promo)

Grete, 1932 (#litres_trial_promo)

Berni, 1932 – 1933 (#litres_trial_promo)

South Carolina, 1970 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part III: Berlin, 1935 (#litres_trial_promo)

Berni, 1935 (#litres_trial_promo)

Berni, 1935 (#litres_trial_promo)

Berni, 1935 (#litres_trial_promo)

Berni, 1935 (#litres_trial_promo)

Part VI: New York, 1970 (#litres_trial_promo)

Anita, 1970 (#litres_trial_promo)

Janeen, 1970 (#litres_trial_promo)

Anita, 1970 (#litres_trial_promo)

Grete, 1939 (#litres_trial_promo)

Anita, 1970 (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


CAROLINE WOODS

teaches fiction writing and composition at Boston University and the Boston Conservatory, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from BU. Her fiction has been published in Slice Magazine (which nominated her for a Pushcart Prize), LEMON, and 236, BU Creative Writing’s Literary Journal.


For Colin and Camille.


Part I (#ulink_2c4c18d1-0c62-526a-a3bf-2b52d0b789c0)

Berlin, 1923–1931

The world may very likely not always think of them as they think of themselves, but what care they for the world?

Grimm’s Fairy Tales




Berni, 1923 (#ulink_b00e1ab7-0f34-5513-b300-009f0d08844b)


At St. Luisa’s Home for Girls in western Berlin, birthdays were observed, not celebrated. Berni’s eighth, which fell in the winter of 1923, came and went with neither singing nor candles on a wooden Geburtstagskranz.Instead, the nuns burned money.

“They treat us like livestock,” Berni hissed into her little sister’s good ear that morning at breakfast. They were eating dry slices of Vollkornbrot with nothing to improve its taste: no meat, no butter, no jam. “Kannst du mich hören?” This was Grete’s least favorite question, but Berni could never help asking.

Grete, who was five, tugged a lock of blond hair over her left ear. It was smooth and pink as a shell, with fewer grooves in it than in other ears. “I can hear you,” she muttered with a glance at the sisters’ table. “You needn’t speak so loudly.”

Berni took a bite of bread and wrinkled her nose, tasting a distinctive tinge of fish. On Friday mornings, the stink of pickled herring seeped into everything in the refectory: the girls’ hair, their bread, their thin gray dirndls. Having served breakfast, the cook and her staff peeled open tins of Voelker’s fillets to prepare a meatless dinner of herring salad. The one aroma that could cut through the fishy air was the comforting smoke from burning pine logs. But that winter the stack of firewood in the circular rack had dwindled.

“If we had parents,” Berni said, mouth full, “we’d be eating jam, cookies, tea—”

“Hush,” whispered Konstanz, who sat on Berni’s left. “I have a father, and he always said children need nothing more than potatoes to survive.”

“I am sure he didn’t serve you frozen milk.” Berni tilted her cup and glared at the sisters, who ate knackwurst and drank coffee at an elevated table, their faces hidden by the lily petals of their cornets. They didn’t seem even to notice that today, for the first time, there was no fire at all. For firewood you needed money, and the sisters’ money, it seemed, was no longer any good.

Each Friday the firewood man arrived just after morning prayers, when the girls had their hands folded in their laps, their eyes active. Sister Maria Eberhardt, the reverend mother, waited for him beside the back door of the refectory with an envelope of cash.

Over the course of the winter, the envelope had grown larger and larger. On the first of the new year, Sister Maria paid him with a box full of money. Then a basket. Berni had heard the term “inflation,” but she didn’t understand what it meant or why it happened. She didn’t yet know that panic and hysteria were driving Berliners to vice, to risk. Her world was still small; what she knew was the slap of a bleach-dipped rag against the bathroom floor, the chill of chapel marble under her knees. From history class, she knew there had been a Kaiser and now there was a democracy, but as a Catholic—a minority in Berlin—she should not forget the pope sat above everyone else.

She had asked Sister Josephine, her favorite, about inflation one afternoon after mathematics. “Oh, child.” Sister Josephine spun Berni around, pulling her braids into long, dark ribbons of hair. “We have been trying to repay England and France since the end of the war.”

“Then why does there seem to be more money floating around, piles and piles of it?”

“Because there’s a man in an office cranking a printing press, trying to make enough to repay the Frogs. You must quit this nasty habit of chewing the ends of your plaits, Bernadette. You look like a wild orphan.”

If anyone else had said this, Berni would have balked. The word “orphan” was taboo among the girls. They were daughters of St. Luisa. They were Lulus.

Konstanz gave Berni a jab, and Berni looked down to see a yellow cardboard cone in her lap. Both of them watched the sisters eat as Konstanz passed it to Berni under the table.

The cone was a Schultüte, the gift parents gave their children on the first day of school. As Berni’s greedy fingers dug inside, her eyes drifted over the long tables and benches, settling on Hannelore Haas, an eight-year-old who’d arrived the day before. Her eyes were swollen from crying. As had been happening to families more and more frequently, Hannelore’s parents had been unable to support all their children, and so they left their eldest here. Giving her the cone was almost cruel, Berni thought; it suggested this place was just like any other school, though as soon as Hannelore saw it she must have recognized it for what it was.

Of course, the other girls had immediately seized Hannelore’s parents’ parting gift. Nobody was allowed to think she was special just because her parents were alive. Emboldened by Sister Maria’s absence from breakfast, they’d been passing it from table to table. By the time it reached Berni, the toys and school supplies and most of the wrapped candies were gone. She dug out a chocolate-covered nut, then glanced once more toward the sisters before popping it into her mouth. When she looked up, Hannelore’s glazed eyes were fixed on her.

“Don’t,” Grete murmured, but Berni bit into the chocolate, and her eyelids fell shut. The flavor, a bit bitter, stung the sides of her mouth and set her molars buzzing. The nut crunched into a sweet, oily paste. She could see the flavors, somehow, painted on her closed lids: magenta and yellow and aquamarine. When she opened her eyes to the whitewashed brick walls, the bare bulbs dangling from the ceiling, the gray of the girls’ uniforms and the black cluster of nuns, she almost couldn’t believe this dull vision was the real world.

“Try one.” She pressed the cone toward Grete. “They aren’t paying attention,” she added with a nod toward the sisters’ table.

Grete shook her head, her blue eyes wide with fear.

“You have to. The chocolate, it’s—it’s a carnival. It’s May Day and Christmas together.”

Again Grete refused, and Berni pinched her lightly on the arm. If they were caught with Hannelore’s Schultüte, they both knew Berni would be in trouble, not Grete. The sisters scarcely noticed Grete. Sometimes it seemed even to Berni that her sister had been crafted from less substantial stuff than she was, that God’s brush had a little less paint on it when he made Grete, his clay mixed with a little more water. She was pale and petite, with weak hearing; there was nothing weak about Berni. The sisters said she must have had a bit of gypsy in her, with her dark coloring, her big feet and hands, her restless energy. All the proof Berni and Grete had that they were related were the shallow clefts in their chins, and their name. They were called Metzger, not Kirchhof or Ostertag, names the sisters gave to foundlings. Later, Berni promised, when they left St. Luisa’s, they would find other Metzgers. It would mean something.

“Fine,” Berni whispered when Grete refused again. “More for me.” The girls on the other side of Grete groaned.

“Ruhe bitte!” The refectory door swung wide, slamming the opposite wall.

Chairs shifted and spines straightened. Berni pressed the cone against her leg, willing it to disappear.

The reverend mother stood in the doorway with a wheelbarrow. A woman thick of neck and skull, Sister Maria taught six years of Latin to every child who came through St. Luisa’s. As she passed, Berni strained to peek inside her wheelbarrow and saw that it was stuffed with crisp new money. Sister Odi leapt from her table to waddle behind Sister Maria, picking up bills that had fluttered to the floor. When Sister Maria reached the back door, she stood and put her hands to the base of her long spine, straightening it in a series of cracks. Berni waited, holding her breath, for the firewood man to knock on the door. It did not take long.

“Come in,” Sister Maria said, standing impassive beside her wheelbarrow.

Berni had expected him to gasp at the sight of all that money, but he merely looked exhausted. Sister Maria had turned the wheelbarrow around so he could grasp the handles.

“This’ll buy you one log.” He cringed a little, inspecting her face, awaiting censure.

“He said they can afford only one log!” Berni said into Grete’s left ear. Grete nodded and swatted her away.

Sister Maria rose another few centimeters, her forehead level with the firewood man’s. According to rumor, she had been everything from a boatswain’s daughter to a lady wrestler in a traveling circus before taking the vows of the Order. The man shrank in her presence; the hand that held out the one dry log shook.

“We agreed on the price just last night,” she said, her voice firm.

“The price has already changed.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Most likely it has changed as we stand here. Nothing I can do about it.”

“These are children, mein Herr. They will freeze to death without a fire.”

“You know how things are, Sister. Madness.”

Berni could feel every girl in the room watching Sister Maria, waiting to see what would happen, eyes blinking in unison like those of a giant spider. “Keep your log,” Sister Maria said after a long pause. “God bless you in this difficult time.”

The man handed Sister Maria a few slivers of kindling without a word. After he had gone, Sister Maria stared at the kindling and the pile of cash. “Sister Odi,” she barked. “Take all of this and put it in the fire.”

“All of . . .” Sister Odi said, sputtering a bit. “You don’t mean . . .”

“It won’t do us any good as money,” Sister Maria said, flicking her hand over the wheelbarrow. “We might as well use it to light the kindling.”

Sister Odi reached into the pile of money and looked at it as though she wasn’t quite sure what it was. Gingerly she tucked a handful into the fireplace. Then she lit a match. Berni hovered a few inches above her bench to watch the bills curl and crumble, licked by the flames. A few banknotes skirted across the floor, lifted by a draft.

“What a shame,” Berni whispered. “They have so much money they can burn it. They might as well have given some to me, to us.”

The side of her vision went black. Berni turned to see Sister Maria looming, draping the girl across the table in the deep folds of her double sleeves. The odors of incense and lemon soap wafted from the fabric. “You should not be in awe of money, girls,” said Sister Maria, her gray-green eyes fixed on Berni’s.

Behind her the phrase Iudicate egeno, et pupillo, the guiding verse of the Order of St. Luisa, was painted on the wall in Bavarian script. The sisters translated it as “Defend the poor and fatherless.” Berni knew iudicate could mean “defend,” but it could also mean “judge.” Sister Maria insisted the two were interchangeable.

“Remember,” said Sister Maria, “where your treasure is . . .” She held out her hand.

“Where your treasure is,” Berni said, completing the scripture, “there will your heart be also.” She handed the Schultüte to Sister Maria. Across the room, Hannelore yelped.

• • •

Later, in the dormitory, when Berni opened her pockets, Grete was horrified to see the bills crumpled up inside. “Oh, Berni, how could you? You’re already in trouble!”

Berni unfolded one pale-pink banknote, holding it taut between her fists. “Look at this, Margarete. Eine. Million. Mark.”

Grete’s eyes widened. “But where would you spend it?”

Berni let Grete trace the scalloped patterns on the money with her fingertips, then stashed it all in her pillowcase. It would only upset Grete if she told her she longed to use the money to take her to a real ear doctor. Sister Lioba, who worked in the infirmary and performed annual hearing tests using tuning forks and whispers, knew nothing.

Grete said, lip trembling, “They’ll never choose you for the academy if you misbehave.”

“Ach!” Berni shrugged, pretending not to have thought of this. Every year the sisters chose a handful of teenage girls to attend a private Catholic academy in Wedding, run by Ursuline nuns. It was the girls’ only chance, besides finding a husband, at a better life. “I have years until then, to become a model child.”

After the lights in the dormitory went out, the girls slid under Berni’s quilt, leaving Grete’s bed empty. Grete put her face in the crook of Berni’s neck. “Tell me a story.”

For years they’d slept beside each other, even though the sisters liked to arrange girls by age. They’d come to St. Luisa’s when Berni was four and Grete two, after their mother died and they could no longer stay at her cottage in Zehlendorf. Berni remembered the smells of her mother’s home best: cedar chests opened in winter, nutmeg shaved over hot milk. As a baby, blond Grete also had a milky scent, and a fear of thunderstorms; as soon as she could toddle, she’d climb from her trundle into Berni’s carved wooden bed.

At times, Berni could not help feeling that her real life was a kind of river she was always running alongside, searching for a place to leap back into the water and be carried along by the current, back to her mother, Trudi. It was Trudi’s elder sister, a spinster whose name Berni would no longer utter, who had dumped them at St. Luisa’s. She’d come to live with them when Trudi fell ill with pneumonia and saw her through her death. The aunt stank of something briny and woke late every morning without feeding the girls. The last time they’d seen her, she’d been crying in the reverend mother’s office, hanky to her nose, saying she couldn’t do it anymore.

“Are you certain, Berni?” Grete asked once, chewing a fingernail. “That wasn’t our mother who gave us to the sisters, after our father died. Was it?”

“Hush! Mother can hear you in heaven.” Of course it hadn’t been their mother. Berni could vividly remember the first time she’d seen St. Luisa’s. It sat on a bleak corner in otherwise affluent Charlottenburg, gray as a prison, with rows of too-small windows. The trim, painted strenuous red, gave the building a stressed, weeping face, and Berni had known instantly they were in trouble. She’d given their aunt a good kick in the shin.

“Tell me a happy story,” Grete whispered now. Under the bedcovers her feet tickled Berni’s shins, her toenails poking through her holey socks.

“Once upon a time there were two sisters, Snow White and Rose Red. Schneeweißchen preferred the hearth and home; Rosenrot played outside and gathered berries for their mother.”

“No,” Grete said. “One about our mother.”

“Ahem. Once upon a time, in Zehlendorf, there lived a young woman who raised squab in a shaded dovecote in her backyard. She had two little girls who slept in the attic under the eaves: Bernadette and Margarete, one tall and raven-haired, one fair and small.”

“How did the dovecote smell?”

“It smelled foul, and so the mother planted wildflowers all around it.” Berni had recited the story so often she could see discarded feathers on grass. “One day, a magician came to the house. The young mother held baby Grete against her side and took Bernadette by the hand. ‘Choose the whitest birds you can find, my sweet, the ones with the most magic,’ she told Bernadette. The magician took them away with a sweep of his cape.”

“She was a kind mother.”

“Very kind,” Berni said. She did not have to recite the next part of the story, the one they knew best. Their mother had been very kind to introduce them to the magician; she did it to hide the real reason she raised their beloved doves, which was for meat.

• • •

So much money. Berni dreamt about it, woke up licking her lips. She felt it crunch between her fingers, under the sheets.

She didn’t tell Grete what she intended to do until Thursday evening, when Sister Maria marched out on her weekly mission to feed the poor and Berni’s accomplice, Konstanz, met them in the dormitory. “Sister’ll be out until eight, at least,” Konstanz announced. She had wide green eyes and a willowy build, more fairy than child. “You aren’t going to tell, are you, Grete?”

Grete had both hands over her ears, the corner of a blanket in her mouth. Berni knelt down, close to her face. “Nothing bad will happen. She has so much money she can burn it.” She couldn’t explain her need to possess something, anything, even if it did turn out to be worthless.

“Why must you always put us in danger?” Grete tilted her watery eyes toward the ceiling and sighed. “Every night I wish the next day will be quiet, every night . . .”

Before long, Berni was pulling Grete down the quiet corridor. Konstanz led the way, grabbing corners as the girls slid through the halls. At last they reached the east wing, where they tiptoed past the wooden doors to the sisters’ rooms. Berni put her arm around Grete, whose face had turned the color of bathwater, as Konstanz worked a hairpin into the lock. When finally the handle gave, Berni entered the room quickly and lifted the shade. Gray evening light illuminated the cot, the desk, the heavy crucifix. Sister’s laundry was folded atop her sheet.

“I don’t know why, but”—Konstanz’s eyes widened—“I never would have imagined they wore underwear.” Some of the bloomers were even faded pink, large and dainty at once. On a rough wooden table sat a teapot and tiny mug. Berni opened the pot to peek at the stiffened tea bag inside. She ran her finger over the edge of the cup to feel the greasy print of the sister’s lip.

“Let’s go,” Grete whispered. Berni pretended she hadn’t heard.

“Look at this.” Konstanz threw off a radio’s cover. It looked like a large wooden jewelry box with black dials. “It’s a TRF set. My father had one.” She began to adjust the reactor.

“Come, Grete.” Berni picked up the desk chair by the rungs. “You need to be closer to the sound.” Grete glared at her, face deep red, as she took her seat.

When a song burst out of the radio, they all leapt back. “Turn it down, turn it down!” Berni cried. She yanked Grete’s hands from her ears, trying to get her to smile.

“And now,” a voice announced when the music faded, “Frieda Pommer and Max Zuchmayer singing their popular duet, ‘If I Could Choose Again.’”

A lively tune began: horns, strings, accordion. Konstanz leapt into the middle of the room, landing soundlessly as a cat, and curtsied; she would be Frieda Pommer. She put one hand on her hip and glided her mouth over the words as if she’d heard them all her life:

A skinny man approached me to see if I’d be his bride.

A poor man with a good heart said that heart was free, but lied.

I’d gladly dance with either, but I’m already obliged

To a portly chap in uniform who has something to hide.

Berni was enthralled. The lyrics did not make her think of politics, only of men and marriage, of dancing and wine. She and Konstanz kept their shrieks silent and clapped without sound. Konstanz twirled and goose-stepped, and when Max began to sing, Berni stood.

She could not have said where the idea came from. If she had known how Grete would react, or what would come after, she never would have done it. She wasn’t even sure how or when she’d learned what made men different from girls, but she snatched a rolled-up stocking off Sister Maria’s bed and stuffed it into her underpants.

Konstanz put her hands over her eyes, giggling. Then Frieda looped back to the chorus, and Konstanz threw back her head. She and Berni linked arms, and Berni thrust her little crotch this way and that, hands on her hips like a Prussian soldier, the sock forming a bulge under her skirt. She had tears streaking her cheeks, her tongue pumping silently in her mouth.

Round and round she and Konstanz went, in dizzying circles—the dull Spartan room a blur, the only color the shockingly intimate laundry on the bed and the bright yellow of Grete’s hair, until—

The radio’s volume shot sky-high, blasting Frieda Pommer’s voice throughout the building.

Berni whirled around. Grete’s sticky fingers held one of the dials, and her mouth was pressed shut. She stared past Berni, at nothing. Berni had completely forgotten her as she danced.

Konstanz cried out, covering her ears. Berni tore the stocking from under her skirt and whipped it at the bed, then slapped Grete’s hand away and shut the darn thing off. Too late; she could hear the sisters’ doors opening, could hear their alarmed voices.

“If you wanted me to stop,” Berni murmured, “you could have just said so.” But Grete wouldn’t answer. She wouldn’t meet Berni’s eyes, not even when Sister Odi burst triumphantly into the room.




Grete, 1931 (#ulink_6ec77b6c-784c-51bd-a8e0-91ef723e33d6)


They were stopped on a corner of the Kurfürstendamm, the busiest shopping street in the city. A place where they very decidedly did not belong, Grete thought. Their clothes gave them away; donated dresses did not grow at the same weedlike pace that girls did. Strings hung from Berni’s broken hem, and still the fabric did not cover her knees.

Berni didn’t seem to notice. Her hand shielding her eyes, she had the optimistic, faraway look of a sea explorer. She held the last of the three boxes of communion she’d been asked to deliver to churches in west Berlin, Grete the red cash tin. Berni had been ordered to return to the home in time for lunch. Grete was not supposed to be out at all.

“Can you read the time, Grete-bird?” Berni pointed to the clock on the Memorial Church, its stones blackened with city pollution.

Grete squinted up at the gold numerals. For a moment, she considered telling a lie to get Berni moving. “Eleven thirty,” she said honestly. “We need to go home, Berni.”

“Eagle eyes!” Berni bent down so that her lips touched Grete’s earlobe. “That means we have time,” she said in a low voice, affecting an Eastern accent, “to visit Libations of Illyria.”

A blade of fear stabbed Grete’s stomach. “Please, no. Let’s find St. Matthias, then take the U-Bahn home before anyone notices I’m missing.” She leapt back when an omnibus lumbered to the curb, sending oily water toward her shoes.

Earlier in the day she’d been peacefully changing beds in the nursery when Berni burst into the room. Grete would join her, she declared without asking, on her communion-delivery adventure. It was something to celebrate, Berni insisted: the sisters entrusting her with the communion wafers the Lulus baked, worth more than a pfennig apiece, meant they were on the verge of choosing her for the academy.

Grete had given her usual excuses, knowing they would not deter Berni: she had to carry soiled sheets up to the laundry, she had a Latin exam to study for. Tomorrow, Sister Maria would fire questions at her in Latin, standing behind the dais so that Grete could not see her mouth. Her only hope was to study until she could recite the whole dead language in her sleep, and here was Berni, pressuring her to go on one of her larks. But Berni promised they’d practice this evening; she’d have Grete speaking like Julius Caesar by the end of the night.

“Come, one more detour,” Berni said now, shielding Grete from two women in trousers walking and smoking, moving at breakneck speed. “I’ll buy you a pretzel.”

Bells tinkled, and a young man rode by on a bicycle. He tossed some change into a homeless veteran’s cap. Grete had seen only the thin white arms of the cyclist’s companion, clasped around his waist. Watching them, Berni’s face took on a look of naked yearning. It seemed she longed for those pale arms to belong to her.

Grete pulled at her sleeve. Berni had to remember they weren’t both Rose Red. Somebody had to be Snow White. “I must prepare for Latin.”

“This is more important.”

“You always say nothing’s more important than schoolwork.” In a matter of weeks, the sisters would choose three girls out of Berni’s class of forty to study with the Ursulines in Wedding. For months Berni had been struggling to behave, to polish her shoes, to bite back crude comments. Around the sisters she smiled so broadly she’d developed an eye twitch. Why would she risk that now?

Berni shook her head. “They sell real potions at Libations of Illyria—love spells, strength tonics. I’ll buy an elixir for luck.” She patted her pocket, which jingled. “I’ve enough change saved for both of us.” To show she’d won the argument, she began to walk up the boulevard so quickly that Grete had no choice but to scramble after her. Berni’s long black braids flagged behind her, the plaits of a little girl; on Berni’s gangly, sixteen-year-old figure, they reminded Grete of garlands tacked up long after Christmas.

Grete tried to keep up with her, dodging pedestrians. The Ku’damm was packed with people. Behind iron gates, cafés crammed table after table onto the sidewalk to enjoy the damp May weather. A waiter with a tray bent to show the Viennese strudel, the obsttorte, the black forest. Two delivery boys in aprons hauled loads of pink flowers down the restaurant’s cellar steps. Grete’s mouth watered; she smelled coffee, browned onions, custard.

“Everyone looks so angry,” she said breathlessly, when she’d caught her sister.

“That’s the Berlin sneer. Watch.” Berni affected an exaggerated frown and strolled with her shoulders thrown back. “You have to hold your Schnauze high.”

Graffiti was everywhere, even in this neighborhood; someone had defaced every National Socialist poster adorning a Litfaß column. When the girls stopped at an intersection, Grete pointed to a row of perfectly trimmed hedges on which KPD and BLUTMAI were scrawled in white paint. Berni chuckled. “Serves them right for trying to make shrubs behave like walls. If I had a garden, I’d let it grow wild.”

“But what does that mean? What does blood have to do with May?”

“It’s for the anniversary, I’d imagine.” Berni worked her lower lip over her teeth. “Some troubles between the police and Communists. The demonstration turned . . . heated.”

“Did anyone die?”

Berni drew a long, impatient breath. “We aren’t political. We don’t have to worry. Wait!”

The passing motorcar honked its horn at them, seconds after Berni yanked Grete off the curb by the back of her collar. “I heard it,” Grete said, clutching her throat, though she hadn’t. She’d heard the horn, of course, but not the approaching engine.

“You have to look into the street before you cross, little bird.”

“Everyone does,” Grete muttered.

• • •

It would have been foolish to tell Berni what happened at this year’s physical exam. Grete had hoped somehow her hearing would improve with age, that thirteen would be a magic number, but Sister Lioba had declared her ears, if anything, were getting worse.

In her left ear, Grete had heard enough of Sister Lioba’s whisper to be able to repeat it: “Hoppe, hoppe Reiter, wenn er fällt, dann schreit er.” But in the right, she could only feel the little blasts of breath. She did her best to guess, filling in the next two lines of the nursery rhyme. Sister shook her head. “It will only make matters worse if you lie, Margarete.” She glanced heavenward as she said this, indicating what might be the source of Grete’s problems.

Grete already knew the blockage inside her ears kept her at a remove from God. At Mass, she watched the concentration and piety on the other girls’ faces as they listened to the sermon, while she was distracted by the echoes of the organ, the odor of incense, the pressure inside her ears. Sometimes she wondered if God was punishing her or her parents, since she’d had problems hearing little things since she was born. Birdsong had always eluded her unless she stood directly under a tree. Raindrops jumped noiselessly in their puddles.

The intermittent ringing, however, hadn’t always been part of her life. It began when she was five or six. “There’s a faucet left on somewhere,” she had complained to Berni. “A pipe is running. Don’t you hear it?” In time Grete realized the high-pitched sound belonged only to her, and that it tended to appear most often when she felt scared or nervous.

“You shouldn’t mind if people know about your ears,” Berni tried to reassure her. “You can’t help that any more than I can help my hair becoming knotty.”

Grete shook her head. Berni could help it if her hair tangled. Other people could and would hold it against her if she were a mess. And they’d hold Grete’s deficiencies against her, too. Of course they would.

“You have lost the high frequencies in the right ear,” Sister Lioba had announced at her last physical, “though the lower ones seem present, for now.” She wrinkled her nose so that Grete could see the black hairs. “It may be progressive. Time will tell.”

That spring, the words it may be progressive had become the rhythm of Grete’s life. She vowed to develop her other senses before they were all she had left. When the sisters took them on a hike in the Grunewald, Grete smelled smoke half an hour before Sister Odi spotted a farmer burning his fields and hustled them to the train. She spied an osprey’s nest spraying off the corner of a building in Sophie-Charlotte-Platz. And at Mass, when the tip of Father Radeke’s finger lingered on Konstanz’s lip as he gave her communion, Grete lowered her face but not her eyes and told no one, not even Berni.

• • •

“This is the address,” said Berni, her face uncertain. They’d stopped in front of the eight double glass doors of Fiedler’s department store.

Grete’s gaze scrolled up the enormous façade, its windows a code: a row of triangles, a row of circles, a row of squares. “A department store?”

Berni shrugged. “Sure,” she said, though Grete could tell she wasn’t.

Three security guards in black-and-gold uniforms stood together between two sets of doors. In the shining glass, Grete caught her sad reflection: her overwashed blue dress and limp, pale braids. Berni stood almost a foot taller. Beside her Grete felt stunted and anemic, like the albino frog they’d discovered in a gutter, which Berni declared would be picked off by a bird in no time. At thirteen she looked no different than she had at age nine. A late bloomer, Sister Josephine called Grete, like the hickory tree in the yard. “Berni matured late as well,” she’d say, “and look how tall she’s gotten.” This did little to comfort Grete. She had a feeling she’d never measure up to her sister.

“Come on,” Berni said, gripping the polished brass doorknob, and before Grete could argue, she found herself inside the store.

For a moment, they did not move. They gazed upon a maze of velvet-draped tables. Jewelry, crystal, and leather shone in the soft light. In the middle of the marble floor a bronze goddess held scales in the middle of a fountain. Berni pointed up. The arched ceiling, three stories high, was made of stained glass. Grete watched a saleswoman reach languorously for a silk scarf. Everyone in here moved in a kind of trance, it seemed to Grete, the un-hurry of the rich; it took a moment to figure out which were people and which were mannequins, so uncannily did they resemble one another.

“Look over there,” Berni said, and before Grete could ask where, Berni was on the move. In the far corner Grete saw a passageway labeled in gilt letters: Libations of Illyria. She began breathing quickly. Perhaps the wealthy really did have access to liquid magic.

They had to pass through a tunnel of exotic plants, ferns that offered caresses. The air smelled floral, fruity, sweet, strong—how awful the dormitory toilets would be after this! When Grete opened her eyes, Berni had stopped in a plant-laden cave of sorts, in front of a glass case. Behind it was a young woman in the same black-and-gold cap the doormen wore, but with silk stockings and a fitted jacket. Looking bored, she dabbed her deep-plum lips with a tissue.

Berni had her hands on the top of the case, inside which were bottles of all shapes and sizes, some with long delicate necks, some with tasseled ionizers. Grete saw nothing miraculous. Instead of Luck Tonic or Courage Elixir, there were Spirit of Myrcia and Essence of Lilac.

The shop girl used a nail file to nudge Berni’s hand off the case; it left a steamy print. Her hair was artificial red, too shiny to be real, and her large nose was twisted to the side in amusement. Grete realized in horror that poor Berni had been duped. This was where rich ladies bought their toilet water, nothing more. She had never experienced fremdschämen for Berni—usually it was the other way around—and she felt the world tip on its axis.

“Berni,” she whispered. The shop girl licked her teeth, waiting. “We can leave now.”

Berni cleared her throat. With a fingernail she tapped the glass. “Where are the potions?”

The salesgirl took a breath and paused, then opened her mouth in a wide grin. Her teeth were yellow and crowded. “They’re all potions. Would you like to try the Oriental Lily Nectar?” When she talked, a string of saliva like spider’s silk linked her upper and lower incisors. She produced a deep-purple bottle with a cap shaped like a flower.

“What does it do?”

The salesgirl’s forehead wrinkled momentarily. “What does it do?” She inserted a dropper into the bottle, then squeezed it twice on Berni’s wrist. “This perfume is extracted from the blooms that grow around the Taj Mahal.” Her voice was deep, deeper than the average woman’s, and as long as Grete watched her lips move, she could hear her voice better than she could Berni’s. She put a drop on Grete’s wrist as well. “Want to know the price?”

Grete hesitated a bit, then sniffed. Perfume, ordinary perfume. “Berni . . .”

Berni put her nose to her wrist and inhaled. “Very nice. But no, I don’t want to know the price.” She was sixteen, too old to believe in magic. Yet she sounded so desperate that Grete longed to hide. “I want to know where the real libations are.”

The salesgirl tilted her head, and finally Grete could see the brown eyes under her cap, alarmingly large and quick. “You’ll get the true fragrance after a little. Let the bouquet develop.”

“Tell me where you’re hiding the real stuff.” Berni took one of her long, heavy arms and draped it around Grete’s shoulders. “What do you carry for hearing loss?”

Grete’s face suddenly felt hot under the fluorescent lights. So this was Berni’s purpose. She should have known.

Berni cupped her cheek and said, eyes filled with worry, “Don’t you want to be able to hear Sister Maria during the Latin oral?”

Whenever she had a problem, Grete thought, shutting her eyes, Berni swooped in to solve it. Bullies were vanquished, spills cleaned. Even when Grete could glimpse a solution, Berni would pluck it from above her, as though snatching a feather from the sky. The one thing she’d never been able to attain for Grete was a normal ear.

The salesgirl looked confused. Delicately she ran a hand over her red hair, petting it, as if to confirm it hadn’t gone anywhere. “Look,” she said. “I’ve humored you enough.”

“Berni, this is stupid.” Grete yanked her sister’s hem so hard she felt a seam tear. Berni froze, looking down at her, her face wrought with failure, and for a moment Grete wished it had worked. If only she could allow Berni to cure her. She opened her mouth to say something—but what was there to say?—and then she heard high heels on marble.

The salesgirl straightened up when a blond woman appeared. She wore a short red coat and black leather gloves. Her eyes were as dark as the gloves, saucy and round. “Darling,” the woman said, reaching for the salesgirl. They kissed on both cheeks. “How’s the new job?”

The salesgirl’s face turned the color of her hair. “Old hat.”

“I can wait my turn,” said the blond woman, smiling politely at Berni and Grete.

“We’re finished,” the salesgirl snapped. “They aren’t buying anything, is that right?”

“No,” Berni said, her voice cracking a little. “You don’t have what we came for.”

The blond woman looked closely at Berni and Grete, taking in their shabby dresses, the worn shoes, and her face rose and fell in pity. Berni crossed her arms. Nobody but Grete saw the salesgirl produce an ivory-and-gold phone out of nowhere. She dialed one number and murmured something Grete could not hear into the receiver.

“Berni,” she whispered, lifting her sister’s dark braid. “We have to go . . .”

“I have a good one for you,” the blond woman said to the salesgirl, accepting an amber bottle. “Why are the Sturmabteilung uniforms brown?”

The salesgirl hesitated. Berni answered for her. “Something to do with shit stains?”

Grete’s mouth fell open. The woman began to laugh. Then one of the doormen came crashing through the plants, a big man, white-eyebrowed, his face florid. He lifted his chins at the salesgirl, who nodded with satisfaction toward Berni and Grete. The blond woman turned in the act of squeezing the ionizer at her throat to watch him take each girl by the arm, and Grete thought she heard her say, “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” as they were ushered away.

Grete squeezed her eyes shut and stumbled beside him so that she wouldn’t have to watch the tranquil salespeople and shoppers being disturbed. She mumbled to herself, practicing for her Latin test. Decem, viginti.Trentrigintata.

“Pick up your feet.” The man’s breath smelled of ham. “I won’t carry you up the stairs.”

Berni’s voice: “I can carry her.”

Octoginta.Nonaginta. After this, they would be in such trouble. Berni would never be chosen for the academy.

Berni began to cough, the sound deep-throated and animal. It echoed in the glassy space, and the man told her to hush. Outside rain fell gently, little more than mist. The doorman let Grete cower behind Berni, but he kept his grip on Berni’s arm. A few times she spasmed, hand to her mouth, suppressing the quakes of her lungs.

“You girl . . . know better . . .” In the noise on the street, Grete lost parts of what the man was saying, but watched in a panic as he tapped the lid of Berni’s white box.

“We didn’t steal anything.” Berni’s voice, very close to Grete’s left ear, squeaked a bit. “It’s the host. We bake it at St. Luisa’s, then take it to the churches.”

His chin puckered in disbelief. Grete could imagine the sisters’ reaction when they were returned to the orphanage by the police. Let’s run, Berni, she wanted to shout, let’s just run—but she couldn’t form the words, and she knew even if they ran it would do them no good. Everything was over now, all their dreams, all Berni’s good behavior erased in one poor decision. Why hadn’t she been strong enough to tell Berni no?

A voice cut in, saying something Grete couldn’t hear, and she whirled around to see the blond woman in the red coat had joined them on the sidewalk. “There’s no need to harass these girls.” She leaned in between Berni and Grete. “You don’t have to show him anything, Fräulein,” she said. Her skin smelled of citrus. “Don’t let him tell you otherwise.”

“Remind me how this is your business,” the doorman shouted. A drip of water fell from the canopy onto his face, and Berni snickered. He grimaced. “We catch thieves all the time.”

“Well, if they did steal something I can pay for it. I have plenty of money to share.” The woman opened her white rectangular purse and pulled out a smaller rectangular wallet.

“We didn’t steal!” Berni ripped open the cardboard box. With her grimy hands she rifled through the disks of bread. “We’re on our way to St. Matthias. I swear on the Bible.”

Grete put her hands to her mouth. She wasn’t sure which was worse, the swearing or the desecration of the host. The woman looked down at Grete and said, “It’s all right, my dear, God won’t smite you. It’s just a bit of bread in a box, after all.”

Bread in a box? But it wasn’t; it was the ultimate gift. Grete scowled at the ground, at the backs of Berni’s shoes.

“And there are only a few marks and a handful of pfennig in the red tin,” Berni said. “Go ahead and count it. We’d be the poorest thieves in the world.”

The doorman looked back at his two colleagues, neither of whom moved to help. Finally he made a dismissive motion with his arm and said something Grete couldn’t hear.

“Come on,” Berni said, hugging her so closely around the shoulders that Grete had to walk sideways. Rain fell steadily now; she felt it dripping down the center of her scalp. Ahead of them, the pointed spires of the Memorial Church were wrapped in fog. Grete felt Berni sigh and realized she was staring not at the church but at the Gloria-Palast movie theater. Through its arched doorway Grete could see burgundy carpets and crystal chandeliers; above the doors of its café was a giant plaster pretzel.

Just before they reached the U-Kurfürstendamm station, someone stepped in front of them: the woman in red. She stood there hugging her square white purse, her lips poised in a little smile. An umbrella dangled from her forearm.

Berni jumped apart from Grete and curtsied. “Thank you for your help.”

The stranger took Berni’s chin into her bare hand. “Where do you two come from?”

“St. Luisa’s Home.”

“That makes you orphans.” She replaced her glove, smiling, working her fingers into the leather. “I had a feeling. You have that look.” She tapped her cheek twice, and as if by magic, a dimple appeared. “Determination? Desperation? A little of each? What were you doing in Fiedler’s, if I may ask?”

“We were looking for potions,” Berni said.

A smile broke over the woman’s face. “Magic potions?” She moved to open her umbrella, but then she held it out to Berni. “You take this. I don’t have far to walk.”

Grete stared at the brilliant blue silk, imagining what the sisters would say if they strolled into the orphanage with it. “Oh, thank you, but we can’t,” said Berni, coughing into her sleeve.

“I’m not offering it for keeps. I’ll come so that you can return it. St. Luisa’s, right? And your names are?”

“Bernadette Metzger. This is Margarete Metzger, my sister.”

“And I am Fräulein Schmidt. How do you do.” She pressed the umbrella toward Berni, smiled, and walked away so there could be no argument. Grete’s toes uncurled inside her shoes.

“She was beautiful,” Berni said as they watched Fräulein Schmidt stroll up the Ku’damm, her bottom twitching from side to side in her slim skirt. When she was gone, Berni fiddled with the clasp and slid open the umbrella. They each took hold of the black lacquered handle.

Grete gasped. “What will we tell Sister Maria when that lady comes for her umbrella?”

“Oh, Grete, she’s never going to come,” Berni said.

This filled Grete with relief. She watched Berni look wistfully up at the brilliant blue-purple silk and metal spokes. She’d loathed hearing Berni swear, but more than that, she’d hated the way Berni’s face had lit up when she made that woman laugh. They stood still, twirling the umbrella above them for a moment, before Grete asked her to point the way to St. Matthias.




Berni, 1931 (#ulink_c633f372-d675-5c84-8897-480c415e216d)


“Well. Bernadette Metzger! You’re wondering why I called you here.”

“Yes, Reverend Mother.” Berni sat on her hands, perched on the chair in front of Sister Maria’s desk. Her feet jiggled and twitched beneath her as she tried to keep the upper half of her body calm and respectful. She associated this office, with its dark walls and massive desk, with punishment; her knees smarted at the memory of kneeling on rice.

Sister Maria lifted a hand, wide and bony as a duck’s foot. The gesture seemed a kind of blessing, and Berni held her breath. “You will be proud to learn that we, against our better judgment, perhaps, have decided to send you to the Ursuline Academy for further study.”

Berni focused on the painting of the Virgin above the mantle so that she would not shriek. The Blessed Mother looked peaceful as a pond in her comforting blue cloak, her hands spread open and shaped like doves. “Thank you, Sister Maria. I won’t let you down.” Somehow Berni kept her voice even. Inside her mind, flowers burst into bloom. Birds took flight.

Sister Maria hadn’t yet smiled. Her upper lip pointed down in the center like a turtle’s beak. “Do you know why we at St. Luisa’s are in the business of teaching girls Latin and history, Bernadette? Girls elsewhere learn only dressmaking, home economics. The liberal education, most people say, is for boys.”

Berni shook her head. Her knuckles pressed the backs of her thighs. She still could not believe she’d been chosen. She longed to leap from her chair so that she could tell Grete and dance in the yard.

“The Order decided long ago that you girls should have a chance to learn men’s subjects. Most of you will never use them. Yet we expect those of you who study with the Ursulines to continue to prosper. How do you think you will use your education?”

This was easy to answer. “I will start a school for the deaf,” Berni declared.

Sister Maria leaned over the desk, bringing her broad face into the light. “I see.” Her expression was benevolent for once, though there was something behind it Berni could not read. “I will not mince words: I did not choose you for your good behavior. The opposite, in fact. But I could not argue with your academic performance. You seem to do well in examinations, and you are aware the girls who attend the Ursuline Academy sit for the Abitur, the university entrance exam, the same one boys take.”

University. Berni nodded vigorously.

“Each young lady who fails the exam,” Sister Maria continued, “proves to the men of Germany that women have no place taking it. Do you understand?”

“I understand.” Berni squirmed. The reverend mother had already told her she needed to take school seriously.

“Good. I have faith in your ability to control your baser instincts.”

“I will.” Another question lingered on the tip of her tongue, something she knew she should leave for another time, but she could not help asking. “And Grete? Surely if I go, you’ll send her in two years? She’s a better student than I am.”

Sister Maria retreated, pulling her hands into her cowl. “Poor Grete. After she failed the last exam in Latin, I asked her what her favorite subject was. Her response? First aid. It would be a shame to continue putting pressure on her academically, don’t you think, Berni?”

Berni tried to keep her voice calm. “Who’s pressuring her?”

Sister Maria shrugged. “You don’t need a diploma to specialize in Kinder, Küche, Kirche, and we both know that’s where she’s headed. She’s a delicate one.”

Berni felt her face grow hot. “She enjoyed first aid because she’s interested in medicine, not in just being a wife.”

“Don’t say ‘just’ a wife, Bernadette. There is nothing wrong with this path. Grete has homely sensibilities; anyone can see that. And if she doesn’t find a husband, she can stay here.”

Berni’s fingers and the tips of her ears were still tingling with the first good news, yet a weight grew in the bottom of her stomach. “Stay here?”

“Yes, we’d be happy to have her join the lay staff. You, with all your energy, may think this the worst place in the world, but I assure you, it is not.” Sister Maria pointed upward. “God has a plan for each of us, large and small. Who would pollinate flowers if not the humble bee?”

But we are not humble bees. We are Metzgers. “Grete’s more than capable. She simply can’t hear well, but it’s only bad in one ear.” It was a relief to say this aloud. Berni waited for a reaction from Sister Maria, but the woman did not blink.

“That’s why her voice sounds funny,” Berni continued, her voice rising, “and why she doesn’t do well in class. If you look closely you’ll find she reads and writes better than I do.”

The lamp flickered. “I’m aware of this,” Sister Maria said shortly. “It’s why I’d encourage her to seek another path.”

Now it seemed as though the Virgin in her gilt frame was looking past Berni, not at her. She put her hands over her face and then her ears, trying to banish the little voice inside that told her this was true: Grete would shrink and cower at the academy. Berni’s breathing grew faster and faster. The reverend mother knew. Sister Lioba must have told her. They knew all about Grete’s ears and had never done anything about it.

“Berni. Look at me. You cannot let your ambition set her up for failure.”

“You’re punishing her!” Berni said at last. She stuck her hands back under her knees to keep them from flying about. “How can you punish Grete because she can’t hear well?”

“Punish!” The reverend mother shoved her chair back. Her eyes, and then Berni’s, flitted to the corner where she kept a switch. “We at St. Luisa’s have been nothing but charitable to you. We’ve offered both of you shelter, food, an education. Orphans live on the streets and work as prostitutes. Now I’ve just told you that your sister is welcome to stay here indefinitely, as long as she needs a place, and you accuse me of trying to punish?”

Berni shook her head. All her life, she had believed there was indeed a place for Grete and herself, a home, hazy at its edges, with a fireplace's warmth at its center. It would be theirs, theirs alone, and once they found it all would be gemütlich forever.

On shaking legs, she stood. “If you hold Grete back, simply because of her ailment, I—I will never go to Mass again.”

Sister Maria’s mouth opened. For a moment, nothing but air wheezed out. “You’d commit yourself to the devil, thinking it would save your sister?” She came around the desk. “Do not poison your sister’s spirit, girl.”

“Poisoning her?” Berni’s throat felt dry all of a sudden. “Not me! Not me!”

“Come here, child.” Sister Maria locked Berni’s elbow in an iron grip and tried to force her to expose her backside. She was strong, but so was Berni. Berni tucked her thighs, squirming away from the slap. In the process, she twisted Sister Maria’s arm. She heard bones creak.

“Hold still—you devil child!”

The room darkened, and Berni wondered if the devil truly had taken her. Sister Maria dove for the switch, but Berni got there first. She stood poised to fight, legs splayed, the whip dangling from her right hand as the reverend mother watched, panic in her eyes.

Berni meant only to scare Sister Maria, to make a noise, to show she was in charge now. But as she brought the switch down hard on the edge of the desk, its tail end lashed the sister’s face, catching her on the ear and across her cheek. Sister Maria’s hand flew to her face, and her eyes widened and filled with tears. As they stared at each other she reminded Berni of the toddlers in the nursery who’d cry in stunned silence in the wake of a nun’s slap, and she realized then that Sister Maria was a mere human; they all were.

In the stillness Berni knew she’d destroyed everything, all she’d worked for, all her hopes for herself and Grete, in a single moment. She howled, and threw down the switch; before Sister Maria could grab her arm, she gave the desk a kick. The lamp crackled and went out, and Berni ran down the hall toward the stairs. As she sprinted, she thought about the black mark her shoe must have left on the desk. A Lulu would be the one to clean it.

• • •

Berni barely slept the night after she whipped Sister Maria. Grete had known something was wrong, but Berni had simply turned the other way and stared across the row of beds, unblinking, until dawn. When morning came, she knew, she’d be hauled back to the office and sentenced. It would almost be a relief.

But when the call to rise came, nothing happened. Breakfast, Berni realized with a shiver, would begin with the Angelus, and she’d vowed to stop praying unless Sister Maria relented about Grete and the academy. “You go,” she told a puzzled Grete. “I’ll be in the refectory a minute behind you.” Instead, she wandered for the rest of the day. Bell after bell rang, and for the first time she noticed how the home would thunder with hundreds of feet and then go quiet again, during prayer, chores, and meals.

Her stomach growled. The air in the dormitory began to feel close. At four, the recreation hour, she snuck down into the courtyard, hoping to find Grete before word spread. The girls she passed in the corridors avoided her eyes, or perhaps she was imagining it; she hoped she was.

She hadn’t taken two steps out the door when she felt two rough hands seize her arms. She turned to face Hannelore Haas, who had been waiting years to get revenge on Berni for stealing her Schultüte. She must have known nobody would stop her now.

“Go ahead,” said Berni. Tears were already pooling in her eyes.

Hannelore’s blows came quickly, the first grazing Berni’s temple, the second landing squarely on her eye with a loud pop. Berni’s head snapped back on her neck, and for a minute she saw blackness and stars.

She lay on her bed with a cold rag to her eye when Grete came, wringing her hands.

“It’s not true, is it, Berni?” Her lips looked white with fear. “You didn’t.”

“It’s your fault,” Berni cried, her eye pulsing. The washcloth fell to her lap, and Grete gasped. “Why did you tell Sister Maria you liked first aid? It will be disastrous for us if we don’t figure out how to be independent, completely disastrous, don’t you understand?”

Grete backed away a few steps, her lip trembling, and Berni’s anger fizzled. She reached for Grete. “Never mind, little bird. I’m sorry. So it won’t be the academy. It will be something else. I will mend this.” She felt Grete shiver. “Don’t worry.”

• • •

The next day began the same way. When Sister Odi blew her whistle at the front of the dormitory, every girl leapt up, bare feet on the cold floor, except Berni. Sister Odi left her alone. She stayed curled against her pillow, eyes squeezed shut, until she felt someone large and soft plop onto the mattress behind her. She heard the creak of Sister Josephine’s knees.

“My dear Berni. My spirited child. It is not too late to repent. This silly disagreement between you and the reverend mother—you should not allow it to consume your soul.”

She felt a cool hand against the burning skin of her neck. “Silly? She’s against us, Grete and me. She doesn’t care. Why should I sit behind her at Mass and pretend she’s holy?” Why, she thought, burrowing further into her blanket, should she be the one to give in?

The hand withdrew. Sister Josephine seemed to be thinking. Finally she said, “You’re wanted in the office. I’m told you’re to bring your hidden contraband. Tread carefully, Berni. If you won’t take the rest of my advice, at least do this. Tread carefully.”

Berni waited until Sister Josephine had gone, then sat up, rubbing her eyes. She trudged listlessly back to the scene of violence, the umbrella bumping against her thigh as she walked. She felt like a used dish on its way to a sink of hot water.

She was surprised to find the woman from Fiedler’s department store sitting in the office, wearing a green dress and a tilted hat of black felt. When she turned her head, her blond hair swished. She gasped when she saw Berni’s eye. “Du Lieber! What’s happened to this child?”

Sister Maria worked her lower jaw back and forth. The thin red welt running from her earlobe to her chin looked painful. “Bernadette, can you explain your appearance to Fräulein Schmidt?” Her mouth spread smugly, and Berni knew then she’d been in the courtyard and had done nothing. Berni touched the puffed skin of her eye. Her fingertips felt very cold. Flatly she told Fräulein Schmidt that three girls had held her down and beat her.

“That’s what they always say.” Sister Maria chuckled. “The fights are never their fault.”

“Don’t you at least want to ask who hit her?” Fräulein Schmidt asked. “Or call in witnesses?” Berni tried not to grin.

“Berni,” said Sister Maria, sounding tired and irritated, “you have something that belongs to Fräulein Schmidt?”

Fräulein Schmidt smiled and thanked Berni when she handed her the umbrella.

“All is settled,” Sister Maria said. “You may go, Bernadette.”

Before Berni could leave, Fräulein Schmidt grabbed her forearm. “Tell me,” she asked the reverend mother. “What do you know of her parents?” Sister Maria froze as Fräulein Schmidt went on. “Are they alive? Do the families ever reclaim the girls?”

Berni’s heart thudded. For a moment even she thought this woman had gone too far.

“Fräulein Schmidt,” said Sister Maria. “We do not examine the backgrounds of the girls we raise. Each one starts out the same—humble, as we are all humbled before God.”

The two women locked eyes in silence for a while, and then Fräulein Schmidt peered up at Berni from under her asymmetrical hat. “Why don’t you wait outside for a little while?”

Berni did as she was told, coughing, dabbing pus out of her eye with her sleeve. Finally, the door opened, and Fräulein Schmidt’s slim figure emerged. “It’s been decided. You’ll come live with me.”

The words sounded too good to be true. “Live with you?”

Fräulein Schmidt flexed her fingers, then pulled back a glove to check her watch. “Yes. I live in Schöneberg, on the southern side of Berlin. I have an extra room to let.”

Berni hesitated. “The sisters will let me go?”

“Darling,” Fräulein Schmidt said gently, “they don’t want you corrupting the others.”

• • •

In the early morning Berni nudged Grete as soon as she saw a hint of pink through the windows, then went to scrub her face and teeth. When she returned, she found Grete sitting atop the blanket, still in her nightclothes. Her childlike legs, warm and wrinkled from sleep, were curled atop the one wool cardigan Berni planned to smuggle away. She’d been told she could take only one skirt and one blouse, and in the night she’d packed the same for Grete.

“Get dressed,” Berni whispered, stroking her sticky hair. “Today we begin a new adventure.” Slowly, Grete complied.

Sister Maria waited in the corridor to escort them outside; she did so in silence. The welt on her face was beginning to scab. At the door to the yard, Berni felt a tug at her heart when she saw that Sister Josephine would see them off as well. “I must be getting old,” she said, her plump face streaked to the chin with tears. “It seems only yesterday you two came in as babies.” She allowed Grete to tuck under her arm, so that Berni could no longer see her face.

After only a minute, a muscular black motorcar growled under the arched entryway to the courtyard, the grille in front as tall as Grete. Fräulein Schmidt hopped down from the driver’s side, her red lipstick stark against the flat scenery. “How do you do, Bernadette?” she said, disregarding the two nuns, who seemed ruffled in her presence. “Oh, and Grete! Little Grete, what are you doing here?”

“She’s coming with us,” Berni said.

“I see. I hadn’t realized. Well—all right. I can make space.”

Berni turned to Grete, excited now: the last obstacle to their departure had been lifted. The adventure could begin. But Grete hadn’t let go of Sister Josephine. This was to be expected; Berni had known there would be some resistance, that Grete needed persuading. She dug through the fabric of Sister Josephine’s cloak to find her sister’s piping-hot face.

“Come on,” Berni said, a frog in her throat. “It’ll be fine.”

“I’ll start the Maybach,” Fräulein Schmidt said with a nod to Sister Josephine, and she walked toward the car. A little whimper came from under Sister Josephine’s sleeve.

Berni pressed her lips to Grete’s ear. “Come now. If we need to escape, we can.” The engine started behind them, with terrible timing; it lurched and wheezed.

“I can’t,” Grete said, her voice tiny. “How do we know what she’ll do with us?” Berni wanted to shake her, to force her to see this was their best chance.

Sister Josephine laid her gnarled fingers on top of Berni’s and nodded. “I’ll make sure she’s taken care of, Bernadette.” She glanced toward Sister Maria, who stood apart from them, her hands hidden in her cowl.

Berni looked from the black car to Sister Maria, then back to Grete and Sister Josephine. It had started to drizzle. Their faces were wet. Berni kissed Grete’s cheek. “There’s nothing to fear, little bird. We will be together.” Grete remained still, her face squeezed into a grimace. Berni felt as though she’d swallowed an egg. The engine of the car roared behind her. She reached into the pillowcase and took out Grete’s blouse and skirt, her white-bristled hairbrush, and finally, after a moment’s hesitation, the sweater.

“You’ll join me soon,” Berni whispered into Grete’s ear, then kissed the lobe. “I will not be far from you.”

“Bernadette.” Sister Maria had called her name. Reluctantly, Berni went to her and looked up at the thin hard line of the sister’s mouth, the shape of a crow flying. “If you remember anything about us, remember the values we’ve taught you,” Sister Maria said. “You will see. The devil comes in many forms. Some are not as obvious as others.”

What did this mean? Berni hadn’t the stomach to ask, or to thank Sister Maria for her advice. “I—” She took a deep breath. “I am sorry, Sister.” The words did not come out as sincerely as she’d hoped, but at least she’d spoken them; she’d done it for Grete’s sake.

She went to kiss Grete one last time, then climbed into Fräulein Schmidt’s motorcar. Through the scratched window she watched Sister Josephine hold tight to her frail blond sister.

As they drove away, Fräulein Schmidt cracked a silver lighter to her cigarette. Berni shut her eyes, already wondering whether it was she or Grete who had made a mistake.




Berni, 1931 (#ulink_bae91c8b-c3ba-513b-9a8f-58077daaae3b)


“This, as you can see, is the parlor.” Fräulein Schmidt leaned against the long velvet divan. “I plan to bring the dining table out and convert that room to your bedchamber. The parlor wouldn’t look as empty then, nicht?”

Berni stepped around the room, touching everything. The intricate plasterwork around the windows cracked a bit under her fingers. In the corner a cello leaned under a portrait of a woman with a rose pinned at her throat. A bowl of figs sat on an end table next to a lipstick-stained napkin and a pile of stems. “I do not think it seems empty,” Berni said. The spines of Fräulein Schmidt’s books felt worn and well used. Most were collections of sheet music, but Berni also saw volumes of poetry, Virgil’s Aeneid in the original Latin.

“They told me about you and the academy,” Fräulein Schmidt said behind her. “You don’t need to go to school to be educated, you know. You can be an autodidact.”

“Yes,” Berni murmured, more to herself than to Fräulein Schmidt, “it will be a fine place to bring Grete.” Her sister was all Berni had spoken of during the car ride, which would have been exhilarating if she hadn’t been so distracted. She’d apologized for Grete’s timidity around strangers, which she assured Fräulein Schmidt was not personal; she expected Grete to join her here in a matter of weeks.

“I’ll allow you to stay a month without paying rent,” Fräulein Schmidt said. “But after that I will begin to charge you for the room. A pittance, really. I don’t need much money; my father left me this place when he died. He didn’t want to, since I’m not married.” When she smiled, Berni noticed one tooth in front was slightly darker than the others. “He said at least I’d earn an honest living as a landlady. But so far I am running more of a charity than a boarding house. You might say I’ve created a home for lost girls of my own.”

The last part made Berni shiver. “Where will I get rent money?”

“Oh, there are plenty of things you can do. You can run a coat check, or sell cigarettes, as Anita does—you’ll meet her in a moment. And you should call me Sonje, you know. I use the informal du with everyone. Though I’m not as Socialist as some of my friends. I like chocolate and eiderdown too much. And these.” She held out her cigarette, which was wrapped in jade paper and had a gold tip. “Would you believe these little beauties cost nearly a mark apiece?”

It was all starting to make Berni’s head swirl: the smoke, the information. She felt someone’s hand on her back and moved aside so that a petite woman with a tight mop of pinkish curls could get to the table; in one sweep she cleared the fig stems and napkin. “Bernadette,” Sonje said, her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Meet Frau Pelzer, our housekeeper.”

Frau Pelzer shook her hand so hard her shoulder popped in its socket. “Don’t tell me you’re another picky eater,” she said, showing her gold fillings when she laughed.

A housekeeper? Berni could barely stammer a greeting, she felt so overwhelmed. This woman would cook for her? Clean up after her? There had to be a catch. She put a hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry, I—I’m not feeling well.”

“Do you need the toilet?” Sonje asked pleasantly, and Frau Pelzer grunted, “I’m not finished bleaching the tiles.”

Berni stumbled into the little hallway with its worn red rug. She opened the first door on her right, which turned out to be a linen closet. Instead of holding sheets and towels, the shelves were stacked with cigarettes, cartons of cigars, tins of loose tobacco with bright labels, like tea.

“You can stay in the bedroom on the left,” Sonje called to her. “But—ah—Berni—”

Berni put her hand on the knob. What she needed to do now was cry, loudly and messily, into a pillow. But there was already a girl with bright-red hair sitting on the bed reading a magazine, her long legs crossed at the kneecaps.

It was the perfume salesgirl, Berni realized in horror, from Fiedler’s. “You!” she cried.

The girl snapped her legs underneath her. “You? What are you doing here? Sonje!”

Sonje appeared on the threshold, arms crossed. “Berni, Anita, I hope you’ll at least try to be friends, or cordial roommates.”

Anita gawked. “She’s sleeping in here?”

“Only until I can convert the dining room to a third bedroom.”

“I need air,” Berni muttered, and she ran out of the room, past Frau Pelzer, who laughed throatily as she yanked open the main door to the apartment. She sat on the front steps of the building, her hands over her ears. A pile of yellow horse dung gathered flies in the road in front of her. Sonje’s street, which sloped downward at a steep angle, looked completely unfamiliar. Alien territory, though Berni had walked it with Sonje just minutes before.

• • •

For dinner Frau Pelzer served pickles, crackers, and tinned fish. “Sorry for the cold meal, girls,” Sonje said over a newspaper. She had several papers spread over the table.

Berni had to wring her hands to keep from grabbing all the food. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten. She’d have bolted it down if Anita hadn’t been watching her closely.

“Something to read, Berni?” asked Sonje. “Perhaps Germania, that’s the Catholic Center Party’s paper. Or Berliner Tageblatt, for Social Democrats. Ah, here’s Deutsche Zeitung,my personal favorite.” She smiled. “The rag of the anti-Semites.”

Berni recoiled. “Your favorite? That’s disgusting.”

Anita dabbed her mouth, leaving black cherry smudges on the tissue. “She’s Jewish, you pointy-head,” she said. “She’s joking when she says it’s her favorite.”

Berni considered this for a moment, wondering if she’d ever spoken to a Jew before. She knew better than to check for horns under Sonje’s hair; the sisters had told the girls this was a myth. It was Anita who interested Berni more. Powder coated her skin like new snow, making the landscape flawless but stark, a harsh contrast to the scarlet wig. Her eyebrows were delicate as cricket legs, her jaw broad and lips full; they became a deeper pink as she ate and abraded them with bread. She tossed her pilsner down and slammed the foam-laced glass on the table. “What the hell are you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

Anita’s laugh was a high, nervous staccato, a bird’s warning. “Your new friend needs to practice her manners,” she told Sonje.

Sonje folded back a page of her paper. “Oh, you were staring, too.”

After dinner, Berni dallied in the parlor, waiting for Anita to go to sleep. It was out of the question for Grete to join her while they still had to share a room with Anita. She’d have to put her sister off until Sonje found a bed for the parlor.

Before Sonje turned in, she handed Berni a slim red hardcover. “You should fill your mind with genius before sleep. Have you read Rilke?”

Berni opened the book to a well-read page. “Ich bin auf der Welt zu allein . . .” She shut the book with a bang. “No.” She was feeling “too alone in the world,” far too alone to read Rilke.

“Hmm.” Sonje looked over the titles in the hallway bookcase. “Aha! Reliable Nesthäkchen.” She handed Berni Nesthäkchen and the World War by Else Ury. “I loved these as a child. But don’t stay up late. Tomorrow Anita will take you to the Medvedev, to learn to sell.”

“To sell?”

“Cigarettes.”

Berni shrugged. She took the book into the bedroom, where she was disappointed to find Anita fully dressed, glowering at her over the mattress. Her knobby fingers hovered over her buttons. “I bet you’d like to see me nude. You wait in the hall. I’m not a lesbian like you.”

“I’m no lezzie,” Berni said, familiar with the word; it was a favorite accusation among Lulus. She waited outside the bedroom, feeling Hannelore’s fist against her eye with every beat of her heart. When she went in she found Anita wearing a nightgown, her enormous eyes protruding from the top of the quilt. Not only had she left her wig on, but she also hadn’t taken any steps to excavate the makeup. Berni climbed in beside her, lying on the very edge of the bed.

“Aren’t you going to change your clothes?” Anita asked.

“Aren’t you going to remove your hair?” For years Berni had wanted nothing more than to get rid of this old dirndl, and now she clung to it. It was the last dress Grete had seen her in. She lay back and opened the book. A smudge of what looked like red jam sat in the upper corner of the page. Nesthäkchen, the doctor’s daughter, was complaining to her grandmother that only boys were allowed to fight in the war.

With every flip and flop Anita made, the mattress creaked. “My sister and I had a rule,” Berni said, yanking the quilt her way. “You choose a position and then you stay there.”

“Another word about your sister, and I’ll scream.”

Berni ignored her. She read until her eyelids drooped from exhaustion. She did not want to be alone with her thoughts for long.

• • •

The Medvedev, on the other side of a horseshoe-shaped park near Sonje’s apartment, was a dim Russian bar filled with more afternoon drinkers than Berni had expected. Men slumped on stools, and Anita prowled among them with a little tray. “Walkure . . . Walkure . . . Gold tips. Walkure No. 4,” she whispered in their ears. Berni watched in disgust as Anita’s fingers curled under the men’s hair. Some kissed her hand; some groaned, rolled their eyes, and pulled out the requisite bills. Most seemed more interested in the radio, which was tuned to a Socialist broadcast.

“I go home for supper,” Anita said later, counting her cash as they leaned against the wall, “then return for the evening shift. That’s when you get the good tips.” So far she seemed to enjoy playing Berni’s guide, treating her as if she knew nothing.

Nobody had mentioned Anita’s job as a perfume girl at Fiedler’s, and Berni felt a little bit of wicked satisfaction when she asked Anita why she wasn’t needed at Libations today.

Anita sniffed. “I don’t work there anymore. As they put it, ‘the novelty had worn off.’”

Berni was trying to figure out what this meant when she noticed Lev, the Medvedev’s owner, making sharp gestures at Anita from the front of the restaurant. Anita slipped her money back into her pocket and sighed. “He doesn’t like me counting it in front of customers.”

It was then Berni noticed the girl tucked inside the coat check. She had a round face and big, sad eyes; she looked like the littlest matryoshka doll in a set. Ignoring Anita’s protests, Berni crossed the room to talk to Lev. He eyed her suspiciously underneath wild eyebrows that fanned toward each other like dove’s wings.

“Tell me,” she said. “Are you hiring coat check girls?”

He took her in: the gray dirndl she refused to take off, her greasy black braids. “You are not coat check girl material.”

“Not me, my sister. A little blond angel.” In the coat check room, Grete would still have to see what went on in a place like this, but at least she’d be secluded. At least she’d be safe.

Lev sneered. “Mischa is my daughter. Believe me when I say I do not even need to hire a coat check girl, especially this time of year. But I have to keep an eye on her, is that right?” A stream of Russian poured from his mouth, and the girl pursed her lips.

“Let us see if you can even sell a cigarette, eh?” he said to Berni, crossing his arms. She stomped back to Anita and grabbed at her tray. “Let me try.”

“What?” Anita’s left eyebrow, penciled red, rose an inch. “I haven’t taught you—”

The strap was already over Berni’s head. She approached the bar, holding out a single box of cigarettes with a red airplane on the cover; she realized, when she turned to see Anita and Lev smirking at her, that she hadn’t a clue how much each of them cost.

“Josetti, meine Herren?” she asked men who ignored her. “Smooth and . . .” Every sad face at the bar already had a cigarette in its lips, dropping ash. She moved on to the tables. “Come on,” she told one particularly hard-looking man with great loops of dark skin under his eyes, “you’re making yourself look cheap.”

“Piss off,” he said, looking toward the radio. “I’m trying to listen.”

She tried offering the tins shaped like bullets, the ones with a winged victory goddess on the box, but nobody gave her a second look. She was ready to give up when she felt someone palm her ass as she passed his table. Not a pinch or slap, or even a grab, but a long, slow swipe, covering both sides of her derrière. She whirled around to see a younger man wearing the broadcloth cap, but clearly German, not Russian.

“Relax,” he said, “I’ll put something in your tip bowl.”

Berni reached down and pressed her thumb into his eye.

The other men at his table started laughing as he shrieked, covering his eye, calling Berni every obscenity she’d ever heard, plus some new ones. Lev and Anita came running. “Is there blood?” The man pried his eye open as Lev murmured, “Let me see, let me see.”

“He touched me!” Berni spat. “On my bottom, like he owned it!” She could tell Anita was trying not to laugh. Their eyes met, Anita’s sparkling. Soon the two of them had collapsed into giggles.

“What is this girl’s name?” the man spat. “Better not see her again, Lev, or I swear—”

“Her name is Berni,” said Lev, “and she is only training, mein Herr.” He glared at her with his hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Berni!” Now the man began to laugh, still holding his eye. He whispered something to his companions. “You should not hire another one, Lev, they’re nothing but trouble.”

“No, no.” Anita laughed lightly. “Berni, it’s short for Bernadette, not Bernard.”

Everyone except Berni laughed together now, and she felt a prickle of panic. What were they talking about? “How’s my given name your business?”

“Calm down, honey,” said another man at the table. “When a big girl like you runs around with a Transvestit, well, people are going to get confused.”

“Transvestit?” Berni looked from the men to Anita. Anita was hiding her face behind her cupped hand, and her shoulders were shaking, but she made no sound.

The table of men were laughing so hard they’d dropped to their knees. Berni growled. She’d had enough of letting all of them get the better of her. “Transvestit,” she said to Anita. “If you don’t tell me what it means, I’ll tell Sonje.”

All color had drained from Anita’s face. Her hands shook as she yanked her skirt down, giving Berni the feeling the joke was on her as well. Even Lev seemed to be in league against them, now that his customers were laughing and happy. “Here,” he said, trying to lift the hem of Anita’s skirt. “Show her. Show her!”

Anita pinched her knees together. Her face became a mask of panic, her eyes wild, and Berni remembered a time she’d seen a group of men in an alley with a cornered dog, kicking it for fun.

She took off running, out the door and into honking traffic. She ran over the mottled lawn of the park, past a group of picnickers opening champagne on a blanket. After a minute she realized someone followed her. She heard a pair of ridiculous high heels slapping the path, heard Anita’s breath wheezing closer and closer behind, but she did not stop. She ran as though lions were chasing her.

She burst into the apartment to find Sonje on the telephone; she took one look at Berni, murmured a goodbye, then hung up. “What is the matter?” she asked, standing up when Anita came close behind, panting. Each breath sounded like a cry.

“I want to leave now,” Berni said. She felt heat coming from Anita. “The men at the Medvedev said Anita was a Transvestit and that I was too. I don’t want to catch what she has.”

“I don’t understand, Berni. Of course you aren’t . . .” Sonje put two fingers between her eyes. “Berni, I—my God, I never did explain, did I? I thought it was obvious . . . my, my.” She tapped the table. “You won’t catch what she has, nicht? It’s how she was born.”

“This is not how I was born,” Anita said to the floor. “It’s how I made myself.”

“Oh yes, yes of course,” Sonje said.

Berni looked from one to the other, her face and fists growing hot. “Fine, speak in riddles. I don’t care. Just take me back—get me away from—from her.”

Sonje sighed and sat back in her chair, arms crossed. “Goodness, Anita, is there anything worse than aggressive stupidity?”

The corner of Anita’s mouth twitched.

“Goethe,” Sonje told Berni.

Berni stamped her foot and ran for the bedroom. She began gathering her few belongings into her pillowcase: one hairbrush, a pair of underpants. The problems of her previous life seemed so simple now. The sisters, frigid as they could be, had never managed to make her feel so ignorant, so foolish. Why hadn’t she tried harder to cooperate with them?

After a moment she heard the front door to the apartment slam, and then a soft knock at her bedroom door. “Go away,” she called.

Sonje stood on the threshold and watched her for a while. “So, you are leaving already.”

“I am.”

“Your life has not been easy, Berni.” She took a seat on the bed. “I thought you might understand her. Your parents are dead. Hers are alive, but they feel their son is dead.”

Berni covered her ears. She saw the veins in Anita’s hands, her hollow cheeks, the wide jaw and skinny neck. “You let me share a bed with a boy!” she cried. “And the men thought I was, too, since I ran around with a—Transvestit.”

“There is no boy here,” Sonje said softly. “She is Anita. She desires men, same as me, same as you. You don’t call her ‘boy.’ It’s sie.”

Berni’s head spun. Did she desire men? “That’s ridiculous.”

“Bernadette, if you leave us, where would you go? I won’t let you live on the street. And I don’t think you can return easily to the sisters.”

“They’d take me,” Berni said, but she wasn’t sure.

Sonje did not say anything. They listened to the wall clock, which seemed to Berni to grow louder with each tick. Finally Sonje cleared her throat. “I had a chance to attend an academy myself as a girl, a music conservatory. My father was a composer, and to him I was more a protégée than a daughter. After the conservatory rejected me, he would not speak to me.” She picked a thread on the quilt. “He must have known I’d blown the audition on purpose.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Why do we sabotage ourselves? I suppose we each had our reasons.” Sonje stood and flicked dust off her skirt. “I found Anita two years ago,” she said in a hardened voice, “unconscious under a nightclub table. Try to imagine how she’d react, hearing us discuss the opportunities we’ve had the luxury of throwing away.” When she left she closed the door to the bedroom, plunging Berni into darkness.

• • •

A few nights later Sonje took both of them to the Tingel-Tangel in Mitte to meet her lover, Gerrit. The air inside was thick with smoke, shot through with electric theater lights, but they soon found him at a round table close to the action. A girl performed a contortionist piano act onstage, back-bending over the keys.

“Pleased to meet you,” Gerrit said as he took Berni’s hand. Like Sonje, he used the du form. “Comradess Berni.”

“You as well,” Berni said, taking a seat. She wasn’t sure what to call him—Comrade? His peaked canvas cap sat on the table in front of him, and his shirt was coarsely woven. His face, however, had a raw smoothness suggesting a recent shave by a skilled barber, and his fair hair looked clean. Too well-groomed to be a real Communist, Berni thought, though his attractiveness certainly didn’t seem to bother Anita. She sat with her back to the stage, her lashes fluttering at him like fervent moths.

Today Anita had offered to lend Berni clothing in what seemed a peace offering of sorts: a skirt and Bemberg stockings made of rayon. “Much better than real silk for preventing foot odor,” she’d said. She looked slightly disappointed when Berni chose to borrow wool jodhpurs and a gray cloche hat from Sonje.

The men’s voices at the Medvedev echoed in Berni’s ears: another one. Did wearing trousers make her a Transvestit? If so, she didn’t care. She’d had her fill of ugly dresses long ago.

Four beers appeared on their table, and Berni passed one to Anita, receiving a slight nod in return. For the past few days she and Anita had been polite to each other, if stiff. Berni had begun sleeping on a pallet on the floor of the dining room. Yesterday Anita had taken her to the Silver Star, where Berni had done much better selling cigarettes. Shockingly, everyone there seemed to treat Anita as if she were normal; there were even others like her. Still, Berni found she could not help looking for the boy beneath the girl. Even now, as she watched Anita paint her lips Coty dark, she stared at the faint ghost of hair on her upper lip.

“How did you come to befriend Sonje?” Gerrit asked Berni, his arm interlaced with Sonje’s. Berni explained briefly why she had to leave St. Luisa’s.

Sonje tittered and said something about Berni’s moxie, but Gerrit shook his head. “Those nuns,” he said, “send the academy the girls they think worthy of joining the middle class. Your sister, with her defect, wouldn’t make the cut.”

“Enough politics for now,” said Sonje. Berni watched the stage. In St. Luisa’s she’d have slapped anyone who said “defect.”

Gerrit went on as the pianist completed her solo. “. . . defenders of capitalism are loath to allow proletarians a hint of social mobility. You should be proud you refused them.”

Should she? She missed her sister. Today she felt the sting of her absence more painfully than ever before. She tried to think what the girls at St. Luisa’s would be doing this evening. Bible story time with Sister Josephine; it seemed so distant from the Tingel-Tangel that it might have been happening on another continent.

Berni’s beer felt cold in her hand and in the pipes of her throat. She watched a stocky emcee appear at the corner of the stage, followed by a spotlight that adjusted itself a few times. “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s turn our attention to the mech-an-i-cal.”

Six young women chugged onstage in a little train, wearing military jackets and sheer hose. “We hear it everywhere—everything’s become too mechanical. Transportation. Communication. Even the act of love!”

The girls thrust out their hips to a drumbeat. Someone whistled.

The emcee tugged his bowtie. “My friends, Berlin is healthier than it’s ever been. Look at how productive we are. We make coal. Rubber. Steam!” Six little clouds of white smoke puffed up behind each girl’s rear end, and in unison, their eyes popped. The crowd laughed and clapped. Berni turned with mouth open to Anita, who shrugged as if to say she’d seen it before.

“Love in Berlin has become mech-an-i-cal, they say. But we know our city still has its beating heart.” Now each of the dancers ripped a panel off the chest of her military jacket, revealing six round left breasts.

Berni was enthralled. She couldn’t help it. Those breasts! Each a perfect sphere or cone, the faces above coldly beautiful, captivatingly stoic. She peered over her shoulder to see the crowd’s reaction through the dim smoky air, and jumped when she found Anita crouched behind her. “Tell Sonje I’m headed to a party.”

Berni glanced toward Sonje, who had her face tucked against Gerrit’s. “Why leave now?” she asked Anita. “The show’s just started.”

“I’m through with this tired old bit,” Anita said, and turned away with a flounce.

Berni took pulls of her beer, growing bored and embarrassed by her tablemates’ necking. By the end of the routine, the dancers were wearing very little. When finally Sonje resurfaced, she glanced toward the exit, then pulled Berni close. “Anita auditioned for this dance line once.” Around them, the crowd burst into applause. “You can see why she wasn’t chosen.”

The alcohol was beginning to make Berni feel dizzy, and very sorry for Anita. “I’ll just make sure she’s okay,” she said and stumbled out, bumping the backs of chairs as she went.

She found Anita standing on the curb, one bony arm flung out to hail cabs. “So,” she said, sucking the end of her cigarette. “You’d like to see the real Berlin.” She yanked Berni’s arm down when she tried to signal a car. “We want a cyclonette. Cheaper. Look for the cabs with three wheels.” Eventually they found one, and Anita gave the driver an address. They drove past the opera, then under the Brandenburg Gate, which glowed pale purple.

“Sonje likes to pretend she’s so modern sometimes, she and Gerrit looking at tits.”

Berni hadn’t heard Anita criticize Sonje before; it felt a bit titillating. “Well,” she said, to be contrary, “I thought the show was clever.”

“Clever? Come on, it’s a tit show.”

“It’s satire. A commentary on modern life.”

Anita snorted. “Satire. No matter how they try to dress up Girlkultur, my friend, it’s naked girls on a stage.”

Berni paused. Should she let on that she knew Anita had auditioned? “Look,” she said after a while. “I’m sorry I ran from you the other day. At the Medvedev.”

Anita shrugged, picking lint off her stockings. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t like it either, what I am.” They were almost to the other end of the Tiergarten now, and Anita’s expression lifted. She pointed toward a stately, darkened building. “But I won’t be this way for long. There’s the Institute for Sexual Science, have you heard of it?”

“They cure homophiles?”

“In a manner of speaking. They can make a man into a woman.”

Berni stared at her, nearly speechless. “You mean they’d—they’d cut it.”

“Snip, snip.” In the electric city glow Anita’s face went from soft and angelic to sharp and sly. “Then I’ll find a handsome Gerrit of my own. All I need is a Gerrit. I don’t have expensive taste, like Sonje. I don’t need someone like Herr Trommler to take care of me.”

“Herr Trommler?”

“Who do you think owns the Maybach? Not Sonje. Pretty women like Sonje always have a daddy. Trommler . . . ach. Picture a man the size of a Holstein steer.”

Berni had thought of Sonje as independent. The news of Trommler depressed her.

“We’ll get out here,” Anita called when they arrived at a row of tenements. At the door, she tugged on her skirt a few times, then rang a buzzer. Berni could hear the party before she reached the flat, could feel it through the soles of her shoes. Inside they were met with a blast of heat and dark. Perspiring people danced: men with women, men with men, women with women.

A man in bloomers mopped at the exotic rug, his hairy, pale thighs showing under the ruffles. “Anita!” he shouted over the music when he finished. He was dressed as a baby, in a bonnet, with a rattle and pacifier hanging around his neck.

“Max,” she purred, “I didn’t know we were to come in costume.” Her shoulder and chin seemed drawn to each other by magnets.

Max’s belly brushed Berni’s hip. “But you are in costume, dear. You’re Anita Berber.”

Berni thought the costume comment wouldn’t go over well, but Anita fluttered her false eyelashes, draping a long-fingered hand across her bony chest. “Max, I go by Anita Bourbon. Der Berber, may she rest in peace.”

“Who’s Anita Berber?” said Berni, and Max and Anita both squealed in disbelief.

“She was a famous nude dancer and actress,” Anita told Berni. “Taken from us too soon.”

“Some say of a sex accident, some of an overdose.” Max put his pacifier in his mouth.

Anita handed Berni a drink that sparkled and excused herself to talk to another man in a fox fur with claws. Berni stood by the wall, glad to have something in her hand. She watched Anita’s friend produce a vial from his purse, and from it he and Anita took a miniature spoon and put it in their noses. Anita caught her watching. Her lips formed the words don’t tell Sonje.

Berni nodded and found a seat on one of the satin sofas. Next to her a girl and boy were wrapped around a pipe with a glowing orange end. The boy elbowed Berni, his eyelids with their white eyelashes drooping. Pale-orange freckles dotted his cheeks and elfin nose. “It’s your turn.”

“Karl,” his companion whined, “we don’t have much more.”

The pipe smelled like Eastern spices. “No, thanks.”

Karl waved the pipe in front of Berni’s face. “This will make you relax.”

How different from a cigarette could it be? Berni inhaled and handed it back to Karl.

“What about him?” Karl pointed to Anita, who stood alone now, peering over the tops of people’s heads, looking for someone. “Isn’t that your friend?”

“Her,” Berni corrected him. She felt suddenly protective of Anita. “It’s her. Sie.”

Karl blinked slowly. “I don’t understand.”

Berni’s mind had slowed. She looked at the men’s clothing on the girl beside Karl, at the outfit she herself had chosen, the jodhpurs and suspenders. They weren’t called “he,” but Anita was “she,” and Anita was “she” all the time. Berni watched Anita’s dark nervous eyes dart around the room, and a sad thought came to her: How complicated Anita’s life is . . . She looked so vulnerable that Berni would have stood and embraced her if her legs hadn’t turned to lead.

Berni watched, as if through water, as the baby-man approached Anita and put his hands on her thighs, rubbing up and down roughly, as an ungainly child might pet a cat. Berni took another pull off the pipe when the boy put it to her lips, surprised to find that she did relax. Karl kissed her on the cheek. She shut her eyes and felt very good indeed, and for a while, wrapped in Karl’s pale arms, she forgot Anita.

Berni did not wake until someone threw her arm around his neck. His elbow went under her knees, and as he lifted her against his chest, she smiled, happy for someone to carry her somewhere. Her eyes opened and she caught a hazy glimpse of a dark beard where she’d expected the smooth curve of Karl’s jaw. But then, from far away, she heard Anita’s voice: Not her, that one’s sixteen, and hasn’t been touched deeply yet. Then Berni was put back on the cushion, and then she was left alone.

Just before she was engulfed in sleep, a thought came to her, perhaps the first clear thought she’d had since she arrived at Sonje’s. Incorporating Grete into this life would be difficult. As difficult as weaving a satin ribbon through burlap.




South Carolina, 1970 (#ulink_3f129973-98d5-5652-b80d-731840b4f90f)


The fly had grown comfortable enough to entwine its back legs and let down its sucker. Janeen could have killed it, if she had a swatter; instead she watched it take minuscule gulps of a buttermilk biscuit. For a minute she wished she had one of those machines from the movies, through which she and the fly could switch bodies; how gladly she’d trade her slouching frame in its elephant-leg trousers for a pair of wings! She gazed out the banquet room’s lone window, aching to buzz past the moss-draped oak outside and take to the skies.

Her mother rested a large hand on Janeen’s shoulder, bringing her back to the buffet at the luncheon following her father’s funeral. An impromptu receiving line had formed. Yet another neighbor had made a forced nice comment about how big she’d grown, something wildly inappropriate to tell a five-foot-ten seventeen-year-old.

“Here we are,” her mother, Anita, murmured close to her ear, her cologne thick in Janeen’s nose. “Another vulture. Lacey!” she greeted the next sympathetic well-wisher.

It both amazed and irritated Janeen that her mother, who wasn’t even a born-and-bred American, played this game so much better than she did. “Southerners will tolerate some eccentricity, as long as they can make of you a sort of pet,” Anita had said just that morning as she buttoned her white polyester shirt, a purchase from the men’s department at Sears. “To a few, I am their German pet.”

Janeen felt fairly certain she, herself, was nobody’s pet. Lacey Callahan, mother to the junior prom queen, approached her with the same bless-your-heart smile her daughter had perfected, her teeth hard and white as squares of gum. “Oh, he was a wonderful man, y’all,” Lacey cooed. “So . . . jolly. I thought you might’ve buried him with a tumbler in hand. My Lord, never saw the man without his drink!” She laughed behind her fingers, the nails Pepto pink.

Janeen might have slapped Mrs. Callahan if it hadn’t been for Anita, who tapped her chin. “An interesting idea, but as you saw earlier, Remy opted for cremation.”

Mrs. Callahan’s smile cracked a little. “I—yes. I was at the service, o’course.”

“Of course. Biscuit?” Anita asked, reaching for the one the fly had been nibbling. She plopped it on Mrs. Callahan’s paper plate.

As Mrs. Callahan melted back into the crowd, Janeen’s teeth shredded her chapped lips. How many people in this room had really known her father? How many cared he was gone? “I can’t do this much longer,” she murmured to her mother.

Anita squeezed her around the shoulders. “At least we are not wallowing at home, Liebchen. And this crowd is making your father in heaven laugh.”

In heaven. Janeen felt her stomach flip. Her father, who had been perfectly well seven months ago, was in heaven. And here she and her mother were, smiling sadly as people they hardly knew filled their plates with pasta salad.

Then she noticed a scruffy little man lingering beside a fake ficus tree, a young girl on his hip. She crossed the room in ten strides, never taking her eyes off of him. He wasn’t much taller than she—the height came from her mother—and he looked a bit frightened as she gazed into his eyes.

“You came,” she said breathlessly, unsure if she should hug him. “Everett. Maisy. You’re the only family who came.”

Her mother had warned her not to expect any of Remy’s Louisiana relatives to show. They were notorious homebodies—“Hermits, almost,” Anita claimed—who Janeen saw but once every five or ten years. But she had made a point to call Everett, her father’s favorite cousin from childhood. She peered into his face now, trying to find any trace of her tanned, swarthy father in his features. With his thinning hair and sad-dog eyes, Everett Lefevre was at best a watered-down version of the man she’d lost.

Everett hefted Maisy on his hip. He’d borrowed a shirt for the occasion, she could tell; the seams fell far below his shoulders. Tears welled in her eyes. “A cryin’ shame, all of this,” he said. “And you so young.”

Janeen swallowed. “I’m not so young,” she told Everett, and she meant it. She felt like she’d been zapped overnight into middle age. She touched Maisy’s small white shoe. “I’m sure glad you’re here.”

“Daddy told me not to touch the vase,” said Maisy.

“The vase?”

“She means the urn,” Everett whispered.

For a moment Janeen couldn’t look at them. Everett slid Maisy to the ground, and Janeen felt his arm go stiffly around her, then drop. At least he seemed genuinely sad, unlike the others in the room, who appeared anxious to make their tee times.

“A shame your daddy isn’t here to give you comfort. Ironic, I guess.”

“Ironic?” She looked down; Maisy had pressed a tea tassie into her hand. “Ironic how?”

“Maybe that’s not the right word.” He tugged his collar. “I meant because the same thing happened to him, you know, and he just a little older than you.”

The pecans in Janeen’s mouth turned to stones. “I didn’t know he was that young when Granddad died.”

“Well, sure. His daddy had the same thing, early cancer of the prostate. Runs in the family. I’m lucky it’s my mother who was a Moore . . .”

Janeen half-listened, watching Anita. Her hair had grayed significantly in the past year. She wore it as short as Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby and dressed in men’s shirts and trousers, never a bra. Her flat chest, she quipped, helped her “support” women’s lib. She had her hand on Mr. Beecham’s shoulder—the owner of the restaurant where Remy had worked for twenty years.

“Did my mother know about this? About Granddad having prostate cancer, too?”

“Uh, I’d think so.” Poor Everett seemed to know he’d stepped in something. “Your father would’ve told her, right? When they talked about their families?”

“My mother wouldn’t have told him about her family.” Anita acted as though she had no history, as if she’d washed up on the shores of America fully formed, like Aphrodite, or a piece of sea glass, broken and beaten but remade into something better. “And she tells me nothing.”

She left poor Everett in midsentence and strode toward her mother. She didn’t even acknowledge Mr. Beecham. “I’m walking home,” she announced, drowning out his platitudes.

“Liebchen.” Anita lifted a damp, dark curl off Janeen’s forehead. Now that they were close, Janeen could see red at the corners of her brown eyes and around the rims of her nostrils. But when had she wept? She’d been stiff and erect as a lightning rod throughout the service. “Do not run off alone. We have been invited to Charlotte’s for supper. They will close the restaurant tonight in honor of your father, so that we who knew him might dine together, reminisce . . .”

“I’m sorry,” Janeen said in Mr. Beecham’s direction, without meeting his eyes. As she fled her mother managed to grab her fingertips, calling her name. Eyes closed, lashes wet, Janeen wrenched herself free, knuckle by knuckle.

• • •

A few mornings after Remy’s funeral, Anita went back to work.

“I do not think I need explain, Liebchen, why I must return so soon to the library,” she’d said the night before as they watched television. “We need money, for one. Also it will be good for me to have my hands busy. You will see, when you return to lifeguarding. It is a shame you aren’t in school right now.”

“Yeah. Would’ve been nicer of Daddy to die in the fall.” Janeen stuffed her mouth with the last of her TV dinner.

“Janeen, for hell’s sake!”

“Mutti, it’s ‘for heaven’s sake.’ No one says ‘for hell’s sake.’” A newspaper lay on the ottoman in front of Janeen; she tented it in front of her so that her mother wouldn’t see she was about to cry. Anita would only act dismissive. “Chaneen,” she would croon in her accent, “it will all be okay.” It was not supposed to all be okay. They were supposed to be sad. To be angry. To throw things.

“Heaven, hell, whatever it is. You know what I mean.” Anita got to her feet, the long bones in her toes cracking, and went to adjust the rabbit ears. Onscreen, Marlo Thomas had her toe stuck in a bowling ball. The laugh track echoed. “You have been acting as if your father’s death is my fault. And I think it is a bit unfair, considering I am mourning him too.”

Janeen said nothing, staring with glazed eyes at the U.S. section of the paper. On the third page was a photograph of a father and daughter on a beach. The man was swinging his little girl by the arms, and the girl’s head was thrown back, her mouth open in adoring laughter.

“If you become lonely tomorrow, Janeen, have lunch with me in Shortleaf Park.” Anita ran her hand over her head, leaving rake marks in her short, sweaty hair.

Janeen said nothing. She took a second look at the man and his lucky daughter. They’d been photographed from a distance, and the image was grainy. Then she noticed the second photo that accompanied the article, one of a fair, hawk-nosed young man in a black cap and gray jacket, silver bars on his collar. A swastika on his sleeve.

She sat up, knocking her fork to the carpet; she ignored her mother’s squawk. “Neighbor Claims Missing Man Is Former Nazi,” the headline declared. Henry Klein, the man in the beach photo, had been missing for over a month. Before his disappearance, a woman had reported she recognized him as Klaus Eisler, a former officer in the SS intelligence service.

“Huh. Look at this.” Janeen spread the newspaper down on the ottoman. “A Nazi was living in Florida.”

“Psst,” Anita replied, pretending to spit. “May they catch him and string him up by the little hairs.” Her eyes flitted briefly toward the article. Then she did a double-take. She brought Janeen’s arm closer, her fingers cold and rigid. In the blue light from the television, her face seemed drained of color.

“Mutti,” Janeen murmured, “did you know this man?”

“Did I know him!” Anita rolled her eyes and snorted, horselike, but Janeen noticed that the hand holding her tumbler of schnapps seemed to shake.

“It says he grew up in Berlin, like you.”

“Berlin is a large city, Liebchen, didn’t you know?” Anita squeezed her dark eyes shut once, twice, as though she were using her lids to erase what she’d just seen. Her mouth set itself in a hard line. “It is time for me to fall asleep, and so should you. Stop reading this nonsense.”

“Okay,” Janeen said, her eyes on the page.

“And it would not hurt if you would take a minute to clean out the refrigerator in the morning.” With that, she’d gone to bed. Janeen had stayed on the sofa for hours, waking only when faint light began to creep under the drapes. The newspaper lay over her lap like a blanket. Her fingers and the side of her face were stained with black ink.

That morning, alone in the house for the first time in she didn’t know how long, she opened the refrigerator. It smelled terrible. Casseroles wrapped in aluminum foil or plastic were shoved in every which way, behind which she and her mother had let fruit and vegetables molder, a carton of milk turn lumpy. A hastily wrapped block of Cheddar bore green spores. Science experiments, her father would have called them.

At the back of the top shelf, Janeen saw why her mother couldn’t bring herself to throw out the spoiled food. There was the final pie her father had baked, peach crumb. Late at night, after they’d come back from the hospital, her mother had been taking tiny bites directly from the dish with a fork. Now white fuzz dotted its surface.

Janeen stared at the glass dish for a while. Her father’s last pie. His blunt fingertips had crimped the edges of the crust. He’d softened the peach cubes in butter and brown sugar. Come fall, the apples on her father’s favorite scruffy tree would rot on their branches. Come Thanksgiving, there would be no bourbon crème, no chocolate pluff mud pie. A vision flashed past: Janeen and her mother parked glumly in front of a Christmas special, freezer meals on their laps. Silence between them. For a minute, she couldn’t move.

And then she could. She yanked the dish from the fridge, took it to the garbage can, and shook it until the pie went splat across the top of the trash. The underside of the crust looked naked and exposed, shattered into a dozen pieces. She put her wrist to her forehead, breathing hard. Anita had never been sentimental or delicate, but she should have known Janeen wouldn’t want to do this by herself.

Anita’s own father had passed away when she was a girl. Shouldn’t she have understood? All she would say about it was that she’d lost her parents at a very young age—too young to remember, she said. Too young to grieve?

• • •

For a while that afternoon, Janeen lay on her stomach in the spare bedroom, which would have been her sibling’s if her parents had another child. Instead it hosted their record player and her father’s rarely used banjo.

Lately, she’d been dying for a sibling.

Their house was a ranch, the windows low enough for her to watch blue-black birds nip insects off the tops of the grass. Through the screens she could smell pine resin and, from the salty flats of the Lowcountry, a hint of brine. The grass needed a trim, the tops of scattered blades turning to seed.

Tending to the yard had always been her mother’s job. She was the only woman in the neighborhood who could operate a lawnmower, which she did with vigor as she chain-smoked. As a kid, Janeen had sometimes wished her parents would fit in better, that they’d act like normal people. Like squares. Most people’s parents were squares, even though they tended to be ten years younger than hers. Remy and Anita had gone to outdoor concerts and sat on blankets holding hands. On more than one occasion they’d come back smelling of pot. Her father baked. Her mother was a librarian’s assistant who tinkered with their cars in her spare time. When they danced together at weddings, they’d always joked that she liked to take the lead.

People in Pine Shoals always assumed her mother was a war bride, but her parents had met in a bakery in Atlanta right after the war. Her mother had just been let go from a munitions factory, and her father, back from France, had taken the morning shift at a bakery.

Every day at five o’clock in the morning, before anyone else arrived, her mother would be waiting outside the door. Face gaunt, her hair chopped at uneven angles, she’d mumble her order: apple streusel and a coffee. After weeks of watching her stare out the window and take long bites of cake, Remy sat down at her table, and immediately she moved to put on her jacket.

“Must leave,” she told him abruptly. “I must go.”

At first, Remy had found her rude. And when he heard the accent, the one they’d mocked and cursed on the battlefield, he’d almost left her alone. But then he noticed how her long-boned hands—the nails painted red, but shredded, chipped—shook on the Formica, her cup rattling against its white saucer. “Just let me finish my coffee,” he said. “We don’t have to talk.”

At this, she seemed to relax. After a while she cleared her throat. “From where I came . . .” she began, and he flinched again at the accent, “people have cup of coffee and cake in afternoon, then, walk. You will walk with me, in the park?” She smiled, her teeth crooked and gapped, and he realized then how lonely she was.

That first day, she taught him a word in German: Waldeinsamkeit, the sensation of being alone and content in the woods. “But you aren’t alone,” he protested as they strolled through Piedmont Park, a few blocks from traffic. “I’m spoiling it.” And she smiled at him and told him it was sometimes possible to be alone together.

As a young child, Janeen would request this bit of family lore at bedtime, brushing aside Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty in favor of her parents’ romance. But as she grew, questions surfaced. Why had her mother been so sad? Why did she work in a factory? Where did she go before Atlanta?

Her father’s answers were short: because she missed the people she had to leave in Germany; because she wanted to help America win the war; New York City. Ask your mother, he’d say when Janeen pressed for details. But her mother never told the story.

Lying on the floor of the spare room, Janeen tried reading a dime-store mystery for a while to take her mind off her parents. The words blurred on the page. Finally, at two, she plunged into the heat to get the mail. The envelopes scorched her hands a little, like cookies from the oven. She leafed through catalogs and bills; at the back of the stack was a letter addressed to Anita Moore. There was no return address, but the stamp had been canceled in Manhattan.

Something about it sent a shiver down her arms. She took the envelope up to the music room, where her record still droned, two male voices harmonizing sweetly. She sat on the round rug, staring at the envelope.

It was the handwriting, she realized after a minute, and the goose bumps spread to her scalp. It looked exactly like her mother’s. It was as if she’d sent a letter to herself.

She hesitated for another second, then turned it over and ripped open the flap. The letter was written in German. She nearly folded it and put it back into the envelope, but she could make out the first line, and the second—what else were all her years of German class for?—and before she knew it, she’d read the whole thing.

Dear Anita,

It is only fair that I begin with an introduction. Though I go by Margaret now and use my ex-husband’s last name—Forsyth—I am the girl you knew as Grete Metzger. Berni’s sister. I will understand if you stop here and throw this letter away.

By now you will have heard the news about Henry Klein, the one they are saying is Klaus Eisler. His resurfacing will no doubt have taken you back to the past. In remembering the Eislers, you perhaps have remembered me. This is why I felt I must write. For far too long I have let Klaus and his actions speak for me. It is time I speak for myself.

I write to beg forgiveness. It’s too little, too late, I know, but since I cannot tell Berni—and many others—that I am sorry for what I’ve done, I will tell you.

Every day I’m consumed with regret. I consider small decisions, small mistakes. When I stayed at St. Luisa’s instead of climbing into Sonje’s car. When I shouted you out of the Eislers’ courtyard instead of accepting your apology. When I found your address I faced another decision. Would I write to Anita and explain, burden her with my apology, or remain silent? Would I ask what happened to Berni or stay forever in the dark? I know it is no good to open old wounds, but I choose to ask.

All these years I’ve been able to think of nothing but Berni. I wonder if you feel the same. You knew her better than I did. You were her true sister. There is so much I would tell her if she were alive. I’d tell her I loved her, first, and I would do my best to explain what happened between Klaus and myself.

Please accept my gratitude, Anita, for all you did for Berni that I couldn’t. If you are willing to correspond, I’ll write again. If not, I will disappear.

Should we never speak again, I wish you the very, very best.

Grete

The record player whirred and whirred; it had reached the end of Side A.

Janeen’s entire body tingled. There it was, in black ink: Klaus Eisler, also known as Henry Klein. The man in the newspaper. The man Anita had pretended not to know.

Janeen felt sick. Why would her mother have lied about knowing him—an officer in the SS? Had he been her mother’s boyfriend? Or worse, had he been her—Janeen’s stomach lurched—colleague? She’d heard her mother say before, in passing, that the Nazis had been able to seize the minds of all kinds of people. What if she’d been talking about herself?

Janeen sat up shakily. She unwrapped a root beer barrel from a cut-glass bowl on the bookshelf and sucked it to think. She read the note again, then a third time. Anita had stood in the Eislers’ courtyard. She’d been a “true sister” to someone named Berni. Janeen found herself feeling oddly jealous. Her mother had lived an entire life without her, one she knew absolutely nothing about.

She bit the candy in half, grinding it smooth against her molars, and tore a page from her notebook. She wrote very little, so that she would not reveal her limited German:

Dear Grete,

I will listen. That is all I can promise. I’ll look for your letter.

Anita

Janeen read it over and nodded. It was the only way to find out the truth—she couldn’t ask her mother. This woman would respond and confirm that Anita had been no Nazi. Of that Janeen felt certain. Almost certain.

This was how she justified sealing the envelope. Before she could change her mind, she ran the reply down to the mailbox. She waited, breathing heavily, until she saw the mailman loop back around, drawn by the raised red flag.


Part II (#ulink_e6d23e27-2c52-54e0-8c66-cb4e02b318ee)

Berlin, 1932–1933

We take them [the youth] immediately into the SA, SS, et cetera, and they will not be free again for the rest of their lives.

Adolf Hitler




Grete, 1932 (#ulink_e8036860-f40e-5069-bef3-e6e59e319111)


For over a year Grete lived at St. Luisa’s without Berni, and in that time she allowed the other girls to stream around her as a river wears down a stone. It was easier not to talk, not to risk entering conversations she might not be able to hear. By the summer of 1932, she knew the other girls had forgotten she existed. They thought of her as inanimate, a bench or forgotten hymnal.

The plan had been for Berni to find an apartment for them to live in together, and that would have happened long ago, according to Berni, if it weren’t for the Depression. “I can barely make enough money selling cigarettes to support myself,” Berni said on her most recent visit, avoiding Grete’s eyes. “In St. Luisa’s, at least you know you will be fed every day.”

Sister Josephine helped facilitate their meetings. Every month or two she sent Grete on an errand, to get soap flakes or cherry juice for her gout. Like clockwork, Berni would appear outside the store. How she and Sister Josephine communicated was a mystery.

“If you have so little money, why are you smoking?” Grete snapped. Her sister’s excuses were growing tiresome. Sometimes she wondered if Berni was having too much fun to burden herself with a deaf little sister.

The changes in Berni disturbed Grete. First her hair had been chopped to chin length. Then she began wearing ties. She used suspenders to hold up trousers made for men. Her hair became shorter and shorter, combed wet like a boy’s, and her laugh changed; it became deep, hoarse, a smoker’s laugh. Whatever had caused this metamorphosis, it had nothing to do with Grete, and she both hated and feared it. The same unease she had felt with Sonje Schmidt, she felt around Berni now.





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