And at first my mother pretended not to hear. She swatted at his hands and kept walking, facing straight ahead. But this of course had no effect, so eventually she stopped and said to Hansi, Go inside, little boy. You’ll catch your death of cold.
Mutti, said Hansi again, and threw his arms around her, burrowing his face into her stomach. I stood and watched from the doorway as my mother looked about in desperation, whispering to Hansi and trying to disengage him. But she had no luck in doing so, and she was holding up the line of deportees, and one of the soldiers came over, a big fat fellow in a greatcoat, and said to her, Is this your child?
No, my mother said, no, he is not mine, and she finally succeeded in thrusting Hansi away from her and started walking again.
But he trotted next to her, wailing, Mutti, look at me, Mutti, pick me up! until the soldier pulled him away. He took my mother’s arm, too, and turned her to face my brother.
He certainly seems to know you, this soldier said. Are you sure he’s not yours?
Yes, yes, said my mother, trying to smile, although by this point she was weeping as well. He must have confused me with somebody else.
The soldier appeared to consider this. He stood with his legs far apart and—this I will never forget—digging in his mouth with one finger as if there were some food lodged there.
Then he said, I understand. These matters of mistaken identity happen all the time, especially among Jews. Well, then, if he is not yours, you won’t mind if I do this—And he unholstered his Luger and shot Hansi in the head.
Of course there was screaming, my mother loudest of all, and people scattered to try and get away from my brother’s body, which was lying in the street with a pool of blood spreading from it, and my mother on her knees beside him. But I, I . . .
Rainer looks at his cup of tea, then sets it on the floor.
I just stood and watched. I stood while the soldier kicked my mother and then while he pulled her to the feet by the hair and dragged her off, and I stood there while the Jews started walking again and the rest of the people on the street went about their business as though nothing had happened, with my brother’s little body in the gutter with the horse dung and old newspapers. I stood there, you understand, not just because of the shock and disbelief of what I had seen, but because I knew for the first time in my life what it means to be so ashamed that you wish to die.
For I had had ample time to stop Hansi from running from the flat. And even afterward, I could have gone into the street and coaxed him away from our mother. He worshiped me; he would have listened to me. But I did nothing, and I had made a conscious decision to do nothing while all this was happening. Because I was angry with my mother. I was angry that she had broken her promise and had not come to visit us and had abandoned us to Frau Potz. So I deliberately did nothing and in this way caused both of their deaths . . .
Rainer bows his head. He sits that way for a moment, staring at the carpet. Then he turns to Trudy.
So you see, he says softly, we are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?
Without waiting for a response, he stands. Trudy stares at his slippers, wiping her tears with the back of a wrist. Then she looks up at Rainer. His face is in shadow, but his eyes shine like mercury. The silence hums between them, tensile with understanding.
Rainer holds out his hands.
Come, he says.
Trudy puts her hands in his and he pulls her to her feet. Then the two of them, joined this way and by mutual and unspoken accord, go up the stairs to his bedroom and shut the door behind them.
Anna and Jack, Weimar, 1945
48
ALTHOUGH NULL HOUR HAS DESCENDED UPON THE GERmans, shifting the tectonic plates of their lives into new and unrecognizable shapes, Nature proceeds with her spring pageantry just the same. In fact, Anna has to admit that she has never seen a more glorious May. The kitchen window of the bakery affords a view of cherry and lilac trees so heavily laden with blossoms that their boughs graze the ground; the sky above them is so blue it looks enameled; a crisp and steady breeze tosses the new leaves with a sound like the boiling hiss of surf. A fanciful observer might suggest that the world has been washed clean overnight, that even the weather is showing its approval of the events of the past few weeks: the Führer ’s suicide, the German surrender, the end of the war.
But Anna has lost all trace of whimsy, if ever she had any, and to her this beautiful afternoon is a personal insult, a dirty trick sent to lull her into thinking that everything will be fine now. She knows better. She has seen so many atrocious things happen on radiant days. Is she supposed to forget the first evening she went to the quarry, the mild air, that sky with its glowing stained-glass striations? Or a more recent incident, a prisoner being marched past the storefront window en route to the train station. Clubbed in the mouth for not moving fast enough, he squatted to furtively collect his teeth from among a growth of new tulips. That occurred on a lovely afternoon much like this one.
Anna is not alone in being plagued by such images, these insistent apparitions elbowing reality aside in their constant bid for attention. She has glimpsed others, Weimarians and American soldiers alike, standing in the middle of the road like stopped clocks, staring not at what is in front of them but at visions presented by the mind’s eye. However, the knowledge that her misery has company is little comfort, and this jubilant springtime display is not to be trusted. Life is a frosted cake made of worms.
She turns to wash her hands of the clinging remnants of doughy sponge. At least the Americans, disproving rumors of rape and disemboweled children, have proven to be decent, even generous captors. They are also ravenous. After years of living on food from tins, they have an unappeasable appetite for anything fresh. Hence the sacks of flour piled against the south wall of the kitchen like trench fortifications, U.S. ARMY NINTH INFANTRY stamped on their bulging burlap. And what flour it is! Fine as dust on the fingertips, no need to sieve it for insects or rocks. Anna has been baking for days, ever since the first private arrived at the bakery, ducking beneath the white sheet Anna had hung from Mathilde’s bedroom window. Hey, we’ve got bread! Anna heard from where she and the child were crouched in the cellar. We’re dying for bread, Fräulein; make us some fresh bread! Even forgoing sleep, Anna has been unable to keep up with the demand.
Now Anna levers a batch of loaves from the oven with the wooden paddle and slides them onto the worktable. Her nose wrinkles at their smell of yeast, that hot rich fermentation so reminiscent of the whiffs rising from her flesh in the WC after the Obersturmführer’s visits. But her stomach’s commands are stronger than her repugnance, and her mouth is suddenly full of bitter juice. Unable to wait for the bread to cool, Anna rips open a loaf and begins devouring steaming dough by the handful.
She doesn’t immediately notice the soldier standing in the doorway to the storefront, watching her. Then, catching movement in her side vision, she sputters, Oh! and chokes down the bread with effort.
She wipes her face with her apron, smiling apologetically. You startled me, she says in her own language. She pats her breastbone to denote the rapid beating of a heart.
Can I help you? she then asks in English, a phrase she has perfected since the Americans’ arrival.
The Ami advances into the kitchen, head swiveling like a gun turret. Anna tries to place him. Has she seen him before? Yes: although all the Amis are enchanted by Trudie, the girl’s looped braids and storybook clothes, Anna recalls this fellow as being particularly smitten. He has brought Trudie chocolate, which Anna hides from her for fear that it is too rich for the child’s shrunken stomach. Once he gave Trudie a stick of the chewing gum to which all Americans seem addicted. This Trudie promptly grabbed and swallowed, causing Anna to worry that the girl’s innards would be permanently glued together.
Can I help you? Anna repeats, wondering if he has come to play with the girl. I have fresh bread . . .
The soldier continues walking
toward her. His hip thuds against the worktable, and Anna understands that he is reeling drunk. The rotten-sweet smell of whiskey, half meat and half fruit, hangs around him in a vapor. Anna looks about for something she might use as a weapon—a pot, the rolling pin. Then she sees that the Ami is crying, a muscle beneath one eye jumping in a tic that makes him look as though he is winking at her. He is only a boy, poor thing, too young to have coped with the carnage of Europe’s battlefields. He is merely seeking comfort, a female touch, soothing words spoken in a woman’s voice.
So thinking, Anna is caught off guard when the soldier lurches into her, driving her against the worktable. He fumbles at her blouse, the worn material purring as it rips. Buttons pop off and bounce to the floor.
Anna tries to scream, but the Ami, even intoxicated, is too swift for her. Wrenching her arm behind her back, he forces her flat on her stomach on the table, one hand clamped around her throat. Anna’s head knocks against the wood. Through a drift of flickering confetti she sees a loaf not an inch away, still letting off its warm yeasty smell.
The Ami is pushing up her skirt now. Kraut bitch, he is saying, Kraut bitch, you want this, huh? You want this? Huh? Huh?
The bright spots in Anna’s vision spread and grow dark. Her hands, pinned beneath her, are numb and tingling. Even if they weren’t, however, she would not move them. Why bother to fight? Whether this boy or the Obersturmführer, it all comes down to the same thing in the end. She hears the liquid trill of a bird in the tree beyond the window, growing ever fainter. She too is waning, starting to lose consciousness. She is grateful. It will be better this way—Then the Ami’s weight is hauled off Anna and air rushes into her burning throat. She chokes on it, taking great rasping lung-fuls. There is shouting behind her, swelling and retreating like the oscillation of waves. Anna grips the table, waiting for the dizziness to either claim her or pass.
It passes. Anna straightens and turns to find her attacker being restrained by another, older soldier. He, too, Anna has seen before. Unlike the others, who throng around her to flirt and tease, this Ami is made of more timid stuff, standing to one side until it is his turn to accept bread. A quiet man, a man apart. Now, though, he is quite voluble, shaking Anna’s assailant by the shoulders and yelling into his face. The younger Ami is drooling a little, and Anna realizes that throughout the entire encounter he has been chewing gum.
He is also determined to have his say; when the older soldier releases him, he wipes his mouth and mutters. Anna, straining for comprehension, hears him say...Buchenwald. He points at her with hatred.
They asked for it, he says.
The older Ami, unmoved by this argument, shoves the younger toward the door. Anna’s attacker gives her a last poisonous look but slinks from the kitchen. Obviously he is of subordinate rank and must follow orders.
The remaining soldier turns to Anna. To her surprise, he speaks in her own language, albeit with a strangely mushy accent that makes him sound as though he has a cleft palate, and as loudly as if she were deaf.
Are you all right? he shouts.
He puts his face quite close to Anna’s. It is kind, but it is not handsome. His skin is terrible, oddly lumpy as if there were porridge lodged beneath it, and his eyes are small and dark and blink like a turtle’s. Anna looks away.
Do you need a doctor? he yells.
This Ami reminds her of somebody, but who? After a moment it comes to Anna: of course, Hauptsturmführer von Schoener. The American has the same wistful air about him as Gerhard’s old friend, the kicked-dog hopelessness of a man whose looks have condemned him to watching pretty women from afar. Still, Anna can feel the Ami’s interest pulsing from him as surely as she can see the corresponding beat of blood in the hollow of his throat. Another one! She would like to claw at her face with her cracked nails, all the better never to elicit this kind of attention in a man’s eyes ever again.
Yet he has saved her, so Anna supposes she must act grateful. Painfully, she swallows and shakes her head.
No doctor, she croaks.
Are you sure?
The Ami raises a hand as if to touch the bruises ringing Anna’s neck. Anna shies away.
I will not hurt you, he shouts. He thumps himself on the chest.
I’m Jack, he continues; Lieutenant Jack Schlemmer. Don’t worry about that kid, Fräulein. I took care of him. He won’t get fresh with you again. Do you understand?
The Ami nods vigorously, trying to elicit a positive response via encouragement. His small muddy eyes are as anxious as a boy’s.
You’re sure you’re all right?
Anna attempts to say Yes and Thank you, but her outraged throat, swelling now, will not permit it, so she nods as well. They bob their heads in tandem for a moment. The Ami seems to want to say something more, but at last he settles for patting the air near Anna’s shoulder and turns to leave.
When the bell over the storefront has signified his departure, Anna drops to her knees to rescue the loaves that have fallen to the floor during the scuffle. She brushes them off with her apron and lines them up on the worktable like a regiment. Then she rises and staggers through the back door into the grass. Reaction is setting in; her legs shake, threatening collapse. Her neck throbs. She puts a hand to it and leans on the bakery wall for support, gazing across the yard. The bird has fallen silent. The afternoon sun is tangled like a gold net in the trees.
Fresh, this Ami has said; he won’t get fresh with you. What an extraordinary expression! Bread can be fresh, as can vegetables and fruit, flowers and meat. Also fresh is the fragrance of laundry dried in the wind, or newly cut hay. But the interactions between the sexes? The Ami is indeed naive to describe them this way. Anna imagines that, were she able to visit the caves in which people first dwelled, she would find scrawled drawings that have been omitted from museums and history books. There would be scenes of ritual aggression and submission, painted in blood, caked with dried seminal fluid. They are the very antithesis of fresh, the rites between men and women; age-old and rotten to the core.
49
THEY ARE WALKING, ANNA AND TRUDIE, ANNA WITH THE girl’s hand clutched in her own. They walk through the streets of Weimar with the other townsfolk, all those who have not fled the city in a panic during the final deranged days before Null Hour. They walk as quickly as they can, which is to say not very quickly, since they are a malnourished, haggard lot, many of them with ill-fitting shoes or in stocking feet. But the Amis jogging among them with their guns drawn act as incentive, as do their stone-faced brothers on the truck that bounces over the street alongside. There has been an early morning roundup: cellars and attics searched; the Weimarians routed from their breakfast tables, beds, and bathrooms; dragged out by the hair or persuaded with blows from a rifle butt if they protest. And so they walk, Anna and Trudie amid the other women and children and old men who have not been killed or sent away.
It is a bigger group than Anna would have expected, numbering in the hundreds. She recalls hearing that all citizens not working for the military have been evacuated to provinces farther south. Anna is not surprised that she was allowed to remain. In servicing the Obersturmführer, has she not been fulfilling military duty? But she is not sure how the others have escaped the net. Perhaps the mighty machine of the Reich, grinding to a halt in its final days, had greater concerns than the tiny parts that splintered off, personified now in those who surround her.
They walk in obedient lines with their heads down. They pass once-grand houses and familiar storefronts decimated by shells. Though it is drizzling, and though the Amis have allowed the Germans to begin clearing the rubble, wisps of smoke still curl from piles of bricks and stone. A lady’s hat lies among the ruins. A piano’s backbone has been crushed by a fallen timber, its keys scattered on the pavement. Yet nobody dares gape at this grim scenery or elbow a neighbor to share a whispered comment on the destruction. Each stumbles along, eyes down, encapsulated in his own silence. The Americans might not be the SS, who would be using thei
r rifles much more energetically by this time, but nor are they the friendly captors the Weimarians have come to know over the past two weeks. For no apparent reason, they have suddenly become hostile, and to fraternize might be to invite God-knows-what type of punishment.
Yet when Anna spies Frau Buchholtz trudging nearby with her brood, she angles through the ranks toward the woman.
What’s happening? she murmurs to the butcher’s widow from one side of her mouth. Where are they taking us, do you know? Why are they doing this?
Frau Buchholtz shoots Anna a narrow lateral glance, sucks her lips inward, and gives her head a tiny shake. Her eyes slide toward the soldiers in the truck, their weapons leveled at the Germans. Then, guiding her children, she drifts away from the reckless Anna.
I’m hungry, Mama, Trudie whispers. Is it much farther?
I don’t know, little one, Anna says.
She stands on tiptoe to search for the Ami she knows best, Herr Lieutenant Jack Schlemmer. She finally spies him sitting amid the group on the truck. It was he who came to the bakery this morning, just as Anna was setting a bowl of farina in front of Trudie; Anna barely had time to register that he was wearing his helmet with its funny netting of mesh before the others came to take them away. Anna had thought that he was coming to reassure her following the previous day’s attack. She had prepared a speech in English to thank him. Now she catches him staring at her, but when Anna meets his gaze, he severs contact by turning his head.
They reach the train station. Speculation ripples through the throng. Will they be loaded into the boxcars waiting on the tracks? But the Americans, shouting and waving their guns, indicate otherwise. Everyone turns left, onto a paved avenue that leads away from the city. Several streets spoke from this point, but Anna, with a little shock of fear, recognizes that the Americans are driving them up toward the forests of the Ettersberg. She is not alone in this realization. A moan rises from the crowd.