Finally Trudy throws off the covers and pads down to the kitchen, where she takes the bottle of pills from the spice rack—alphabetized under S for sleep, between sage and thyme. She pours herself a large tumbler of brandy and washes down a caplet, grimacing at the burning, chalky residue in her windpipe. She has not wanted to do this, to dare this combination with a class tomorrow—particularly the first day. Despite all the years she has taught, Trudy still suffers stage fright at the thought of walking into that basement room with all those wary and curious eyes fixed on her. Good morning , folks, and welcome to our lovely Bunker. Standing by the window over the kitchen sink, staring at houses and garages black against a sky the pink of undercooked meat, Trudy forces herself to drink the rest of the liquor.
When the glass is empty, Trudy rinses it and sets it in the drainer, then steals back upstairs. As she passes the guest bedroom she pauses. There is no sound from within, no stripe of light under the door. Of course not; why should there be? But then Trudy hears it again, the noise that has arrested her: a stealthy creak, and then another, as if somebody sitting in a cane-bottomed rocking chair is moving it very slowly so as not to wake others in the household.
Trudy raises an eyebrow. Then she tiptoes down the hall to her room. So Anna, too, has her troubles sleeping. Trudy isn’t really surprised—like mother, like daughter. And since the daughter can’t help even herself, apparently, best to leave the mother alone.
Trudy climbs into her own bed and pulls the duvet up over her face. In the tented dark she measures her heartbeat, hushed and hammering. There is something familiar about this, too: a flash of memory, of lying very still beneath some rough fabric—burlap? flour sacking?—of the humidity of her own trapped breath; of her mother saying as if from a distance, bright and false, That’s right, little rabbit, go to sleep, I will fetch you when he is gone. Then the recollection is also gone, swimming away like a minnow with an insolent flick of its tail.
Trudy stares at the cotton she knows is an inch from her face, although she can’t see it. In the other room, the chair creaks back and forth.
Creak. Silence. Creak.
I will never get to sleep, Trudy thinks.
She falls into unconsciousness as suddenly as if she has been dealt a blow to the head.
SHE IS PLAYING IN THE REAR DOORYARD, BEHIND THE house that houses the bakery. She has been banished there. Her mother has told her to go outside and amuse herself until called. Why don’t you clean your Trog , little rabbit? Anna suggests, urging a glass of milk on Trudy before guiding her to the door. Trudy dutifully fetches the broom from behind it and walks to the stand of lilac bushes that conceals her Trog , her rabbit hutch, a child-sized play space in which she serves tea and Brötchen to imaginary companions. When she is sure her mother isn’t watching, she pours the milk into the grass; she doesn’t like the taste of it, fatty and cloying. Then she sets about sweeping the dirt floor of the Trog , which she and Anna have industriously tamped down. This she usually enjoys. But today, though it is spring, the weather is raw and damp; the Trog is muddy so that soil clings to the broom, and really it is not much fun being outside.
After a quarter hour spent drawing bristles through the mud, trying to create orderly swirls, Trudy parts the bushes and abandons her Trog. She stands in front of it, watching the house. It is a gray house made of gray plaster, its steeply canted roof jutting into a gray sky. A light rain starts to fall, mist condensing in droplets. Trudy chews a finger and wiggles her bottom back and forth; surely her mother doesn’t intend for her to remain out in this wet! Dragging the broom behind her, Trudy marches toward the door.
But on the stoop she hesitates. An upstairs window is cracked open, the one in Tante Mathilde’s bedroom; Anna keeps it this way for air, Trudy knows. From behind the blackout curtain comes her mother’s voice, forming not words but sounds: nnnnff, nff, uff, nnnff!, like the whimpers of a dog asleep and dreaming of an owner who kicks it.
Mama? Trudy calls.
The noises stop. Trudy slings the broom aside and, without removing her shoes as Anna has always admonished her to, she runs into the kitchen.
There she finds not her mother but Saint Nikolaus. He is wearing trousers and a white shirt, Anna’s ruffled apron knotted about his waist. When Trudy bursts in, he is bent over the oven, taking something from it.
Why, hello, he says, turning to her with a sheet cake pan in his hand. He sets it on the wooden worktable and perches on a stool.
I’ve just finished baking, he says. Would you like a slice of delicious cake?
Trudy stares.
Come now, says Saint Nikolaus; don’t be shy. Clapping, he starts to sing:
“ 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—”
He breaks off, smiling.
It’s got all those good things, he says, butter and milk and eggs. Won’t you try even a little piece?
Trudy shakes her head.
Saint Nikolaus makes a tsch tsch tsch noise with his tongue and pulls the other stool over next to him. He pats it.
I’m not accustomed to having my invitations rejected, he says. You’ve hurt my feelings.
He splays a hand over his heart and inclines his head toward Trudy with an expression of exaggerated sorrow. His eyes are like quartz with two black flaws dead center, the pinprick pupils, floating black specks.
Trudy tries to back away in the direction of the door, but her legs will not obey her. They carry her to Saint Nikolaus.
That’s better, he says. That’s much better.
From the pocket of Anna’s apron he removes a straight razor and shears away a square of cake. It is golden and spongy, and Trudy salivates helplessly over the unfamiliar sugary fragrance. Saint Nikolaus extends the slice in his bare hand.
Take it, he says.
Trudy reaches for it. As she does, she sees a single blue eyeball embedded in the sponge. Saint Nikolaus has put her mother in the oven and baked her. Trudy wants to scream; the skin around her mouth hurts from being stretched so wide, but she can’t make a sound.
Poor appetite? Saint Nikolaus asks. A shame.
He shrugs, then folds the cake in half and pops it into his mouth.
Delicious! he says, and claps his hands to dust off her mother’s crumbs.
Anna and the Obersturmführer, Berchtesgaden, 1943
30
ANNA HAS NEVER GIVEN MUCH THOUGHT TO THE OBER-sturmführer’s mode of transport to and from the camp. In her mind, he simply appears in the bakery, not there one moment and demanding all attention the next. She would not be that surprised if told that he drops out of the clouds, ejected from the doors of some dark carriage, or that he materializes from the ground itself, drawn up from the bowels beneath it like an emissary from the Brothers Grimm.
In actuality, his chariot is a Mercedes, a sleek black staff car that seems to Anna to be as long as the bakery’s front room. Its ornaments gleam even in the muted light of this overcast April morning; two Nazi flags flutter on the hood. As the Obersturm-führer hands Anna into the cave of the backseat, she allows herself the small pleasure of inhaling the smell of well-tended leather, boot polish, hair pomade, smoke. She thinks for a moment of Gerhard.
Then the Obersturmführer lowers himself in beside her with a grunt, the seat squeaking under his weight. The young driver closes Anna’s door and races around to attend to the Obersturm-führer. Anna can’t see the chauffeur’s hair beneath the peaked uniform cap, but his face has the naked, lashless look of the redhead. Anna wonders whether he was driving the first afternoon the Obersturmführer came for her. And has he been idling within this steel cocoon throughout subsequent evenings, smoking and peering at the bakery windows, picturing his master’s activities within? He looks through the windshield, expressionless,
but Anna thinks she has glimpsed a gleam of prurient interest. She stares with hatred at the vulnerable hollow between the tendons of his neck, just below the skull.
The driver starts the engine and maneuvers the staff car around the holes in the road. Anna turns to watch the bakery’s thick gray walls and darkened storefront recede from view. For a moment she is terrified. Then they are passing the villas on the outskirts of the city, and Anna cranes at her neighbors’ houses. Like the bakery, they are in glum disrepair. The Weisbadens’ home looks as though it hasn’t been inhabited for months; starlings swoop in and out of a nest beneath the eaves. Anna is seized by the sudden certainty that the townsfolk have all been evacuated, that she and the Obersturmführer and the driver are the only people left in Germany. She begins to feel carsick.
The Obersturmführer pays little attention to her. He is in something of a temper. His briefcase acting as a surrogate desk on his knees, he shuffles through documents, tossing some aside and scratching his signature on others so viciously that the nib of his pen tears the paper. He purses his lips, emitting pfffffs of irritation. He glares through the side window, then pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He mutters phrases under his breath. He unbuttons his uniform tunic and shrugs it off. Then he swears.
Ach, look at this, he says.
Anna isn’t certain whether he is addressing her or the driver, but she looks anyway. One of the Obersturmführer ’s shirt cuffs bears a brown scorchmark.
It’s a disgrace, the Obersturmführer says. After Koch assured me she possessed impeccable credentials. What kind of laundress can’t even handle an iron? What do you think, Karl?
I don’t know, sir, the driver says. His voice is surprisingly froggy.
I think she falsified her papers, that’s what, says the Ober-sturmführer. I think she was a Jew. A Jewish laundress who can’t iron a shirt—the joke’s on me, eh, Karl?
I suppose so, sir, the driver says.
The Obersturmführer raises his cuff to eye level, squinting at it.
Jew or not, she’s ruined her last shirt, he says. It should be enough that I have to cope with this endless paperwork—everything in duplicate, triplicate—I have to be bothered with these petty domestic details too? Where am I to find time to find another laundress?
I don’t know, sir, the driver says.
The Obersturmführer rolls up his sleeve with short, jerky movements, hiding the scorchmark.
Maybe she was a Pole, he muses.
The driver says nothing. Except for the rattle of the Ober-sturmführer’s papers, the car is silent. Anna pictures the Obersturm-führer ’s office, reconstructing it from details she has gleaned. He is a man of Spartan tastes: the room contains his desk, a chair, a bank of file cabinets, and a portrait of the Führer. There is also the window from which he surveys the inmates. On bright days, he can see beyond them to the patchwork fields and hills in which Weimar nestles. The hapless laundress would stand in front of his desk, her head covered with a neat white cloth.
But here Anna’s imagination falters. Does the laundress sink to her knees, her hands grasping at the Obersturmführer ’s boots; does she babble pleas for clemency? Or does she stand hollow-eyed, silently accepting her punishment? Does the Obersturm-führer take her around the side of the building himself, or does he summon an underling? Perhaps the laundress never saw the inside of his office; perhaps she was pulled from a cot in the basement of the Obersturmführer ’s lodgings, her eyes grainy with sleep, stumbling as she was led outside.
Suddenly conscious of the eely speed of the car, Anna gropes at the inside of her door for the window crank.
What is it now? the Obersturmführer asks, frowning over at her.
I’d like some air, says Anna. Please.
The Obersturmführer sighs.
Karl, he snaps, and the glass glides down a few inches.
Anna tilts her face into the rush of wind, which loosens her hair from its careful roll. The breeze is cold but sweet, its smell of damp earth heralding the advent of spring. This reminds Anna of something, but what? After a moment it comes to her: she remembers wresting her hand from her mother’s to run ahead, skipping through the puddles on the flagstone walk, delighting in the flutter of the ribbons on her braids. She can hear her mother calling, Anchen, slow down! Little girls never run in the churchyard.
Anna has not regularly attended church since her mother’s death, over a decade ago. The Partei, as Gerhard often reminded her, frowns on such activities, such blind obedience to the antiquated dictates of Catholicism. And so it has come to pass that now, Anna has no opportunity to tie her own daughter’s hair in ribbons: at the Obersturmführer ’s request, Anna has placed the child in the care of Frau Buchholtz, the butcher’s widow, and on this Good Friday, Anna is accompanying the Obersturmführer to Berchtesgaden for the weekend.
Her nausea slides away, replaced by an emptiness at the pit of her stomach. Initially, Anna mistakes it for hunger; then she recognizes it as an uneasy anticipation. She has not been to the Alps since she herself was a child. It is Easter 1943, and she has not left Weimar in five years.
31
THE CESSATION OF MOVEMENT JOLTS ANNA AWAKE. FOR hours, it seems, she has been dreaming of being in a lift, rising and falling in an iron cage. Now she climbs from the car with the discombobulated sense of having traveled back four months as well as south, because Berchtesgaden presents the impression of permanent Christmas. The frigid Alpine air, more reminiscent of December than April, seeps through Anna’s coat and tweed suit. Candles glow in the windows of the houses. Anna imagines breaking a piece from one of the stepladdered Bavarian roofs and biting it to find the taste of gingerbread. She yawns, coughs in the thin air, then yawns again, shivering.
Anna, the Obersturmführer says. Is it your intention that I stand in the cold all night?
His glacial tone signifies extreme displeasure, his sour humor exacerbated by the flat tire they suffered in the foothills. As the driver unloads the bags from the trunk, the Obersturmführer propels Anna toward the entrance of the hotel, his hand iron against her spine.
The reception room is more opulent than one would guess from the Gasthof ’s storybook exterior. The walls are draped with hunting tapestries in red and gold and forest green; Anna’s feet whisper over Oriental rugs. Two men wearing the gray tunics of the SS lounge in carved wooden chairs before a snapping fire. They examine the new arrivals before turning back to their schnapps. The woman with them, a stunning brunette Anna’s age, doesn’t bother to look up at all.
The Obersturmführer stalks to the front desk and summons the innkeeper, a middle-aged Brunhilde with coiled braids and a chest on which one could balance a plate of Schnitzel. Anna feels drunk with color and sudden warmth. Yawning convulsively, she watches a little drama unfold by the door: yet another officer, young and with flat Ukrainian features, has just stumbled in, clinging to a girl whose tongue is in his ear. When he notices the other guests, he pushes her away, saying, Shh. Shh. But flecks of spittle fly from his lips with each Shh, and he begins to laugh.
The girl can’t be more than sixteen; the sharp planes of her face are blurred with drink, and she wears no coat. The ruffled neckline of her tea-party dress, far too flimsy for the altitude and season, slips from her shoulder. She claps a hand to the young officer’s behind.
Stop that, you shameless slut, he slurs; behave yourself or you’ll get a spanking.
Bitte, she says, and cups his crotch, looking around with drunken craft. Then she spots Anna.
Well? she says. What are you staring at?
Pulling a long face of prudish dismay, she sways toward Anna. I didn’t know we were in a convent, she says. Something smell bad to you, Sister? Or do you just have a spindle up your ass?
Really, Gitta, you are incorrigible, the young officer says, and sniggers.
The Obersturmführer crosses the room in three strides and seizes the girl by the nape of the neck, forcing her into a chair. She sputters,
struggling to rise, but he shoves her back down. Then he takes the younger officer’s elbow and murmurs something too low for Anna to hear. The group by the fire watches intently.
Whatever the Obersturmführer says, it has the desired effect: a blush suffuses the young officer’s face, starting at his neck and climbing upward like wine filling a glass. When the Obersturm-führer releases him, he sketches a salute, staggering a little. Then he drags the complaining girl out into the night.
One of the officers by the fire sets his schnapps on the table and applauds. You have preserved the spotless reputation of the Schutzstaffeln single-handedly, he calls. Well done.
Shut up, Dieter, the other says amicably. He smiles at the Obersturmführer. Pay my friend no mind; he has so few opportunities to be gallant himself, you know.
For a moment, the Obersturmführer looks uncertain, as though trying to decide whether these comments are genuine or sardonic. Then his colorless gaze sweeps past his brethren and alights on the innkeeper.
What kind of establishment are you running here? he barks. Have you no discernment in your clientele?
No, sir, she says, wheezing. Yes, sir. We cater exclusively to officers—
And to their whores as well, apparently, the Obersturmführer snaps. I have been a visitor here since 1933, and I have never seen such behavior. It is a disgrace to the Reich.
Yes, Herr Obersturmführer, sir, the innkeeper says. Bitte—
I am mortified, says the Obersturmführer, that my wife should have witnessed such a scene.
He turns his back on the innkeeper.
Heil Hitler, he says to the other officers, and then, Come, Anna.