Well, whatever way you want to look at it, it’s destroyed him in Weimar.
Poor man.
Poor fellow...
The flock moves off down the street, dawdling, heads together.
Anna turns from the window, her mouth crimped in a wry smile. She has known all along that there must be some reason why Gerhard hasn’t come in search of her; how could he relinquish his handmaid, his valet and laundress, his personal chef ? So he has gone away, has he? Whether he has fled to Berlin or some other city, Anna knows that Bettina Borschert has come closest to the truth: Gerhard is hardly heartbroken. Either his sycophancy has finally secured him a better position or he is escaping arrest on charges of abetting race defilement. In any case, he is saving his own skin.
But there is one thing Anna doesn’t know. She carries the trays from the display case into the kitchen, where Mathilde is wrapping unsold goods in brown paper and marking reduced prices on them for the next day. Anna drops the sheets of metal in the sink with a resounding clang, but the baker doesn’t look up.
Anna scrubs the trays and stacks them in their racks, then rinses her mouth with water. Recently she has been plagued by a bad taste, like rancid butter coating the tongue, although she hasn’t had any real butter, spoiled or otherwise, for over a year. She clears her throat, but the fatty flavor persists. Nothing will get rid of it.
Mathilde, she says, bracing her tired back against the sink. What have you told people about this baby?
The baker scribbles more busily than ever.
What do you mean? she asks, glancing at Anna with eyes so wide that Anna can see the whites all around the pupils.
Anna can’t help snorting.
You’d better hope the SS never catch you and interrogate you, she says. You’re a poor liar. You know what I mean. Who do they think the father is?
You shouldn’t be listening to idle gossip, Mathilde tells her primly. It’ll poison your milk.
She packs the markdowns in the icebox, then looks at Anna over one shoulder.
All right, you want the story?
Given that crafty expression on your face, I’m not so sure—
Mathilde lumbers over and grasps Anna’s arm.
Poor Anna, she says, in a hoarse stage-whisper. Raped by a drifter, an a-social, during her morning walk! Dragged into the bushes behind the church! But thank God for the SS. They caught the bastard double-quick and put him in the camp, where they—zzzzsht!
Mathilde draws a finger across her throat.
And too good for him, too, she finishes, slapping her hands together.
The baby aims a kick at Anna’s navel, as if in protest at this absurd tale. Anna silently agrees. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Couldn’t you have come up with something a little more seemly? she asks. A soldier, for instance, killed in battle?
Mathilde turns away, her jowls quivering with obvious affront.
It’s good enough, she snaps. It distracts them from the truth, doesn’t it? All right, back to work. We need a big batch of dough, enough for fifty loaves. I’m making a run to the camp tomorrow. You take care of that and I’ll start on the pastries.
Why must I always make bread while you decorate cakes?
Mathilde scowls.
Because you’re not yet experienced enough, she retorts.
Recognizing the futility of resistance, Anna gathers the ingredients for bread: flour, yeast, water in massive quantities. She bangs an enormous mixing bowl on the worktable. Inexperienced! As if she were incapable of laying a lattice for Linzertorte, something any child could do! But Mathilde is right, in a fashion; nothing in Anna’s years of tending to Gerhard have prepared her for this sort of labor. She rises before dawn to feed the mammoth oven its coal briquettes, dragging each pail up the steps, encumbered by her own distended body. She stokes the fire throughout the day, stocks the display case, waits on the customers, washes the trays and pans and mops the floor. She has kneaded enough bread, lifted enough loaves from the oven, to feed the entire Wehrmacht. Her fingertips have cracked and split from the dryness of flour. The drudgery is endless, endless.
Too much flour, Mathilde says from behind her.
Anna dips her hands in the water bowl and flings droplets onto the dough.
Shit! Not so much!
I know how to make bread, Anna mutters.
What did you say?
Anna bites the inside of her cheek to keep from replying. Because of her stomach, she must stand a meter away from the table; her outstretched arms throb as she slaps the dough into shape. Tonight, she knows, they will thrum as if the tendons in them have been electrified. The baby drums its heels against her ribs.
How long are you going to knead that? For God’s sake, you stupid girl, it’ll be tough as leather.
Without forethought, Anna whirls and heaves the dough at Mathilde. The heavy mass catches the baker squarely in the chest, and she emits a startled Uff! The bread thuds to the floor, and Anna thinks glumly that Mathilde was right again: from the sound of it, the finished product would have been much too dense.
She sinks onto a stool, waiting for the inevitable scolding. The dough, of course, is now useless, and in a time when they must cobble together even the smallest scraps of pastry to form crusts for tortes, the wasting of any ingredient whatsoever is the blackest of sins. But the baker remains as uncharacteristically silent as the child, who stops moving and drags at Anna’s belly like a stone.
The consensus of the Weimarian women, from the way Anna is carrying, is that the child will be a boy. But Anna already knows this without the old wives’ tales, without the wedding rings dangled on strings in front of her belly. She has so often envisioned Max’s son. At night, Anna holds the baby’s image before her in the cellar, adding and subtracting features, discussing them with its absent father. What a sad specimen we’ve created, Max, she tells him; with our blue eyes and pale skin, he’ll look anemic, poor thing, especially in winter. And he’ll probably have your skinny ankles to boot. I’ll have to give him a strong name, then, something sturdy to compensate: Wolfgang, Hans, Günter—yes, Günter. Wishing she could shift on her back, her stomach, to entice sleep, Anna thinks that Max was wrong. Loneliness isn’t corrosive. It is eviscerating.
Now, bending with difficulty, Anna retrieves the dough from the floor and sets it on the worktable. She begins working at it, punishing it, pummeling it. Then Mathilde catches her arms, trapping them at her sides.
Shhh, the baker says. Shhh. Stop. That’s enough now. It’s all right.
She enfolds Anna in a floury embrace. At first Anna pushes against her, weary of pity, but after a minute she droops against Mathilde’s bosom, which is so large that she seems to have only one breast rather than two, like a bedroll. The baker smells of yeast, cigarettes, perspiration, and, faintly, of unwashed feet.
When Mathilde releases her, Anna reaches for her sleeve.
I’m frightened, she tries to say; so frightened that I can’t sleep, so angry I could kill—
But all she can manage is, I’m— I’m—
Mathilde gazes at the floor, as if ashamed of her spontaneous show of affection and, perhaps, her inexperience in the business of comfort. Then she settles a tentative hand on Anna’s hair.
I know, she says.
14
ONE NIGHT IN NOVEMBER, ANNA HAS A VIVID DREAM. Unlike Mathilde, who recounts each of her own in relentless detail, Anna is not given to dreams. She can’t remember a single one from all her twenty years. She doesn’t know whether she is unusual in this respect; she has simply never given it any thought, and therefore this unexpected vision etches itself in her mind with remarkable clarity, so that, when she recalls it later, it is as if she is reliving something that actually happened.
In the dream, she is standing in the vestibule of the Catholic church she attended as a child, waiting to be married. The women of Weimar brush her cheeks with their own, murmuring compliments and blessings before passing through th
e arched doorway to be seated, but none of them looks straight at Anna. Anna knows that this skittishness stems from the fact that her dress is pink, as garish a color as the frosting on the petits fours delivered to the camp for the SS Comradeship Evenings. She is also hugely pregnant, a giant ripe strawberry in satin and tulle.
Edging behind the doorway, Anna peers into the church. She is late; she has been standing here for some time, her entrance delayed for no fathomable reason, and the vaulted space echoes with whispered speculations as to where she is. Every pew is full. People Anna has known since childhood are scattered among SS officers and the Buchenwald prisoners in their striped rags, their shaved heads gleaming dully in the light of the tapers. Ignoring them all, remaining half-concealed, Anna cranes until she spots Max, standing by the altar.
He waits calmly in a dark suit, his profile turned to her, his hands clasped behind him like a headwaiter or a diplomat. His hair has grown too long and it curls over his high collar. The congregation’s agitation increases, but nobody thinks to turn in Anna’s direction except Max, who does, and suddenly, as if Anna has called to him. He quirks his eyebrows over the rims of his spectacles and sends her a small half-smile. Anna makes no move to go to him, nor he to her; they are content merely to look at one another, and she feels across the rows of rustling people his serene, wordless reassurance that all will be well.
In the world of real things, their child, a girl, is born the following day, the eleventh of November 1940, after fifteen hours of labor. Anna, unequipped with female names, seizes on the first that comes to mind, one that, like those she has chosen for a son, is serviceable rather than pleasing to the ear, selected for strength rather than grace. She bestows upon the squalling infant the name Gertrud Charlotte Brandt, but within days of her daughter’s birth, Anna adopts Mathilde’s habit of calling the child Trudie. Despite Mathilde’s fears about the baby’s immortal soul, Anna refuses to bring her to church to be baptized. She is done with churches. The two women perform the rite themselves, in an impromptu ceremony in the bakery’s kitchen sink.
15
ANNA SOMETIMES SPECULATES THAT HER NEW LIFE, PAR-ticularly given the arrival of her daughter, might actually be pleasant but for Mathilde’s gift for petty tyranny. From dawn until dusk, the baker issues a constant stream of orders and admonitions in her girlish voice. Everything must be done immediately and exactly the way she likes it; otherwise, her red-faced tantrums are terrible to see. During an especially bad argument over a misshapen batch of hot-cross buns, Anna, reeling with fatigue from Trudie’s nightly feedings, points out that the Reich suffered a great loss when Mathilde became a member of the Resistance, since under different circumstances she would have made an excellent Feldsmarschall. Anna expects the baker to respond with the usual threat to throw her charges out into the street, but Mathilde takes this as a compliment and laughs.
Anna’s fantasies, which have progressed from escaping her father’s reign to running off with Max to what their child might look like and finally to hours of uninterrupted sleep, now consist of imagining her existence without Mathilde in it. And in late April 1941, she is granted a temporary opportunity to find out, since Mathilde falls ill. The baker’s ailment, food poisoning, is not serious, but she wallows moaning in her bed as though she has suffered a gunshot to the stomach. Anna has to race up and down the narrow staircase in answer to the bell ringing from the sickroom while simultaneously attending to the bakery’s patrons and her infant daughter. She does so with great cheer. In fact, Anna is so delighted that Mathilde is confined to her quarters that she charitably refrains from saying, I told you not to eat those three tins of black market sardines.
Toward the end of the afternoon, Anna decides to close the shop a bit early. She enters the day’s earnings into the ledger while sitting in Mathilde’s chair, pretending the bakery is her own. Yes, life is very pleasant when Mathilde is out of the way, and Anna is just speculating as to how long this might last when the bell jingles yet again.
What is it this time? she yells, without moving.
There is no request from above, however, and Anna realizes that what she has heard is the bell over the storefront door. Startled, irritated with herself for not locking the bakery after setting the Closed sign in the window, Anna goes into the front room to send this latecomer away and finds, standing on the other side of the counter, an SS Rottenführer.
Anna’s stomach plummets, but the apologetic smile she has summoned for the tardy patron remains fixed on her face.
Can I help you, Herr Rottenführer? she asks.
The man doesn’t answer right away. He is examining the bakery’s sole decoration, a gaudy Bavarian landscape purchased during Mathilde’s long-ago honeymoon, with an air of contempt.
I’ve come for Frau Staudt, he says, when he has finished his inspection.
Anna conceals her shaking hands in the folds of her apron.
She’s indisposed at the moment, but perhaps there is something I can do for you?
The Rottenführer turns his attention to Anna, who sees that he is not much older than she. If not for the Sudeten accent, he might have been someone with whom she attended Gymnasium. His thick neck and insolent expression mark him as one of the boys who would have been a poor student, interested only in sports, his education otherwise consisting of yelling jibes from the back of the classroom.
Frau Staudt failed to make her weekly delivery to our facility, he says.
I see, says Anna. Well, she’s quite ill, unable to get out of bed. She ate something that disagreed with her—
The Rottenführer grimaces, apparently disgusted that he should be bothered with the intestinal problems of a fat widowed baker.
Whatever the cause, he says, it violates her contract. If Frau Staudt doesn’t provide the bread by Friday, we’ll have to take the appropriate measures.
I— I’m sure that won’t be necessary.
Good, says the Rottenführer.
He looks at Anna’s bosom and smirks. It is almost time for Trudie’s evening meal, and Anna’s breasts are leaking in anticipation. Anna straightens her spine and thrusts her chest forward, some silly vestige of female pride insulted by this boy’s sneer.
I’ll pass on your message, she says.
The Rottenführer probes a cheek with his tongue as if searching for a particle of food. Remind her that if she can’t fulfill her obligations, he says, plenty of others would be grateful for the business.
I’ll tell her.
Heil Hitler, the Rottenführer says, with a stiff-armed salute. Then he leaves.
When she hears his motorbike purring up the road, Anna locks the bakery and returns to the kitchen, where she scoops Trudie from her laundry basket under the table. The infant mewls and waves her fists, hitting Anna hard enough on the cheekbone to make her eyes water, but Anna barely notices. This may be just the opportunity she has been waiting for. She stands thoughtfully inhaling the milky scent of her daughter’s scalp. Then, unbuttoning her blouse as she goes, Anna climbs the staircase to the bedroom and recounts the conversation with the Rottenführer for Mathilde.
The baker seems to take this news stoically enough. She listens without interrupting while Anna talks, and when Anna is done, she says only, Bring the basin, would you? I’m going to be sick again.
Anna fetches the porcelain bowl from the bureau, cradling Trudie in the crook of the other elbow. It still amazes her, after five months, how heavy the baby’s head is. Trudie, undeterred by Mathilde’s retching, feeds fiercely, her lips a tiny hot circle of suction. With each tug, Anna feels a simultaneous contraction of the womb, as though all of her maternal organs are connected by a delicate but tensile thread.
That gives us two days, Anna says, when Mathilde falls back onto the pillow. You won’t be well enough to make the delivery by then. I’d better do it.
Mathilde hoots.
You! You don’t even know how to drive the van.
I could learn, Anna argues.
Who??
?d teach you? Don’t worry, I’ll do it, if I have to get out and vomit every five meters. Those Goddamned sardines. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted anything I bought from that crook Pfeffer.
Anna wipes Trudie’s mouth with the hem of her apron and refrains once more from saying, I told you so.
Instead, she asks, What about the inmates?
Didn’t I say I’ll make the delivery?
Yes, and if you’re sick by the quarry? The SS will hear you from a mile away.
The baker turns her face toward the bureau, where a portrait of her dead husband smiles shyly at her from amidst a shrine of candle stubs.
They’ll have to wait, she mutters.
They can’t wait, Anna counters, pressing her advantage. How many times have you told me a single roll can make the difference between life and death? You said—
Mathilde glowers at the portrait. I know what I said. What do you want me to do about it? You see what condition I’m in.
Nothing, Anna says. I’ve already told you. I’ll make the Special Delivery myself.
Trudie digs her fingers into Anna’s breast, as if in appreciation of the idea. A ragged nail scrapes the tender skin, leaving a thin red line.
Ouch, Anna murmurs. Greedy little beast!
That’s why you can’t go, says Mathilde. If something should happen to you, who would take care of the child?
Why, her Tante Mathilde would, Anna says.
She detaches the infant from her breast and dangles Trudie over the baker.
Look how she’s smiling, she says. She wants to go to you.
That’s just gas, Mathilde snaps. Don’t bribe me, Anna. It won’t work.
But she heaves herself into a sitting position against the headboard and takes Trudie from Anna, settling the baby on her thighs. Bouncing her, the baker sings:
“ Backe, backe Kuchen!”
der Bäcker hat gerufen.
“ Wer will guten Kuchen backen, Der muss haben sieben Sachen:
Butter und Salz, Zucker und Schmalz, Milch und Mehl, und Eier machen den Kuchen gel’.”