Читать книгу The Women at Hitler’s Table - Rosella Postorino - Страница 11

I can’t make heads or tails of this,” Leni moaned. We were sitting at the cleared table after dinner with open books and pencils provided by the guards. “There are too many hard words.”

“For example?”

“Salivary alym—no, amyl—wait.” Leni checked the page. “Salivary amylase, or that other one: peps—err … pep-sino-gen.”

A week after our first day, the chef had come into the lunchroom and handed out a series of textbooks on nutrition, asking us to read them. Ours was a serious mission, he said, and we should be knowledgeable as we carried it out. He introduced himself as Otto Günther but we all knew the guards called him Krümel, or Crumbs, maybe because he was short and skinny. When we arrived at the barracks in the mornings he and his staff would already be working on breakfast, which we ate immediately, while Hitler ate at around ten, after being briefed on news from the front. Then, at around eleven, we had what he would have for lunch. When the hour-long wait was over they took us home, but at five in the evening they returned to pick us up to taste his dinner.

The morning Krümel gave us the books, one of the women flipped through a few pages and then pushed her book away with a shrug. She had broad, square shoulders disproportionate to her slender ankles, which were left bare under her black skirt. Her name was Augustine. Leni, on the other hand, went ashen, as though they had announced a big exam and she was certain she would fail. As for me, the task was a consolation—not that I thought it was useful to memorize the phases in the digestive process, nor felt the need to make a good impression. In those diagrams, those tables, I recognized my age-old thirst for knowledge so strongly that I could almost make believe I wasn’t losing myself.

“I’ll never manage to learn this,” Leni said. “Do you think they’ll quiz us?”

“The guards sitting at the teacher’s desk and giving us grades? Don’t be silly,” I said, smiling at her.

Leni didn’t smile back. “Maybe the doctor will ask us something at our next blood exam, surprise us with a question!”

“That would be funny.”

“What’s so funny about it?”

“It’s like we’re peeking into Hitler’s innards,” I said with incomprehensible cheerfulness. “If we make a rough estimate, we can calculate when his sphincter will dilate.”

“That’s disgusting!”

It wasn’t disgusting, it was human. Adolf Hitler was a human being who digested.

“Has the professor finished her lesson? When the lecture’s over we can applaud you.” It was Augustine, the woman with square shoulders dressed in black. The guards didn’t order us to be quiet. At the chef’s request, the lunchroom was to be a schoolroom, and his request was to be respected.

“I’m sorry,” I said, lowering my head, “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“We all know you studied in the city, okay?”

“What do you care what kind of studies she did?” another woman, Ulla, broke in. “In any case, she’s here now, eating just like the rest of us. Delicious food, no doubt, dressed with a drizzle of poison.” She laughed, but no one joined her.

Narrow of waist, firm of bosom, Ulla was quite a dish—that’s what the SS guards said about her. She liked to clip out photographs of actresses from magazines and glue them into a scrapbook. At times she would leaf through them and point them out to us one by one: the porcelain cheeks of Anny Ondra, who had married Max Schmeling, the boxer; Ilse Werner’s lips, soft and plump as she pursed them to whistle the refrain of “Sing ein Lied, wenn Du mal traurig bist” on the radio, because all it took to keep from feeling sad and lonely was to sing a song. Especially, Ulla admitted, to German soldiers. But her favorite was Zarah Leander, with her high-arched eyebrows and the little curls framing her face in the movie La Habanera.

“Coming here to the barracks wearing elegant clothes is a good idea,” she said to me. I wore a wine-colored dress with a French-cut collar and puffed sleeves. My mother had made it for me. “This way, if you die, at least you’ll already be in your good dress. They won’t even need to prepare your corpse.”

“Why do you all keep talking about such horrible things?” Leni protested.

Herta was right: the others noticed my appearance. Not only Elfriede, who had scoured the checks on my dress on our second day there and was now leaning against the wall as she read her book, a pencil between her lips like a burned-out cigarette. It seemed to weigh on her, having to stay seated. She always looked like she was on the verge of leaving.

“So you like this dress, then?”

Ulla hesitated, then answered me. “It’s a bit chaste, but the style is almost Parisian. And it’s definitely much nicer than the dirndls Frau Goebbels wants to make us wear.” She lowered her voice. “And that she wears,” she added, pointing with her eyes to the woman next to me, the one who had stood up after lunch on the first day. Gertrude didn’t hear her.

“Oh, what nonsense.” Augustine slammed her palms on the table for emphasis and turned away. Unsure how to conclude her dramatic finale to the conversation, she decided to move closer to Elfriede, though Elfriede didn’t take her eyes off her textbook.

“So do you like it or don’t you?” I asked again.

Ulla reluctantly admitted: “Yes.”

“Fine. You can have it, then.”

A thump made me look up. Elfriede had snapped her book shut and folded her arms over her chest, the pencil still in her mouth.

“So what are you going to do, strip down like Saint Francis right here in front of everyone and give it to her?” Augustine snickered, expecting Elfriede to back her up, but she just stood there staring at me, expressionless.

I turned back to Ulla. “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow, if you like. No, wait, give me time to wash it.”

A murmur spread through the room as Elfriede pulled away from the wall and moved over to sit across from me. She let her textbook thud to the table, rested her hand on it, and began to drum her fingers on the cover, scrutinizing me. Augustine watched her, certain she was about to pass judgment, but Elfriede said nothing. Her fingers fell still.

“She comes here from Berlin to give us handouts,” Augustine said, piling it on. “Wants to give us lessons in biology and Christian charity, to prove she’s better than us.”

“I do want it,” Ulla said.

“It’s yours,” I replied.

Augustine tsked. I would learn she always did that to express her displeasure. “Oh, please …”

“Line up!” the guards ordered. “The hour is over.”

We quickly rose to our feet. Augustine’s little scene had captivated the other women, but their desire to leave the lunchroom was even stronger. Once again, we were going back home safe and sound.

As I joined the line, Ulla touched my elbow. “Thank you,” she whispered, and ran off ahead.

Elfriede was behind me. “This isn’t a boarding school for women, Berliner, it’s a barracks.”

“Mind your own business,” I was surprised to hear myself say. The back of my neck instantly flushed. “You’re the one who taught me that, remember?” It sounded more like an excuse than a provocation. I wanted to get along with Elfriede rather than clash with her, though I didn’t know why.

“In any case,” she said, “the kid’s right: there’s nothing funny about those books, unless you get a kick out of learning the symptoms caused by various forms of poisoning. Do you enjoy preparing for death?”

I kept walking, without replying.

That night I washed the wine-colored dress for Ulla. Giving it to her wasn’t an act of generosity or even a ploy to make her like me. Seeing it on her would be like scattering my life in the capital into Gross-Partsch, dispersing it. It was resignation. Three days later, I gave it to her, dried, ironed, and wrapped in newspaper. I would never see her wear it to the lunchroom.

Herta took my measurements and altered some of her own dresses for me, narrowing the waistline and shortening the back hems slightly, at my insistence. That’s the fashion, I explained. Berliner fashion, she retorted, pins between her lips like my mother and not even one scrap of thread on the floor of her country house.

I kept the checkered dress in the wardrobe that had belonged to Gregor, along with all my work clothes. My shoes were the same—Where are you going in those heels? Herta said reproachfully—but only with them on could I recognize my own footsteps, no matter how uncertain they had become. On foggy mornings I would sometimes pull out the checkered dress, gripping the hanger angrily. There was no need for me to blend in with the other tasters, we had nothing in common, why did I care about being accepted by them? But then I would glimpse the dark circles under my eyes and the anger would wither to despondency. Putting the dress back in the darkness of the wardrobe, I would close the door.

They had been a warning, those circles under my eyes, and I hadn’t grasped it, hadn’t foreseen my fate, blocked its path. Now that death was finally upon me, there was no longer room for the little girl who sang in the school choir, who went roller-skating with friends in the afternoon, who let them copy her geometry homework. Gone was the secretary who had made the boss fall head over heels for her. Instead there was a woman whom the war had suddenly aged. That was the fate written in her blood.

THAT NIGHT OF March ’43, the night my fate had taken a sharp turn for the worse, the air-raid siren had gone off with its usual whine, the smallest run-up and then a leap, just long enough for my mother to roll out of bed. “Rosa, get up,” she urged me. “They’re bombing.”

When my father died, a year and a half after we entered the war, I had begun to sleep in his place beside her. We were two adult women who had both experienced everyday familiarity with the marriage bed, had both lost it, and there was something profane in the similar smell of our two bodies beneath the covers. Still, I wanted to keep her company when she woke during the night, even if the siren wasn’t going off. Or maybe I was afraid to sleep all alone. That’s why, six months after Gregor had gone off to war, I had rented out our apartment in Altemesseweg and moved back in with my parents. I was still learning the ropes of being a wife and already I had to stop that and become a daughter again.

“Hurry,” she said, seeing me search for a dress, any dress, to change into. She threw her coat on over her nightgown and headed down in slippers.

The siren was no different from the previous ones, a long wail that built up as though to last forever, but after eleven seconds it diminished in tone, abated. Then it started up again.

All the ones before it had been false alarms. Each time we had run downstairs with our flashlights on, despite the blackout orders. In the dark we would have tripped over the other tenants, bumped into them as they too headed for the cellar, carrying blankets and children and canteens filled with water, or descended terrified and empty-handed. Each time we had found a tiny patch for ourselves on the floor and sat down beneath a dim, bare lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling. The floor was cold, the people cramped, the dampness sinking into our bones.

Huddled against one another, we who lived at Budengasse 78 wept and prayed and cried for salvation. We urinated in a bucket too close to the eyes of the others, or held our bladders though they were ready to burst. A young boy bit into an apple and another boy stole it out of his hand, taking as many bites as he could before the first boy snatched it back and slapped him. We were hungry and sat there in silence or dozed, and would reach the dawn with haggard faces.

Soon afterward, the promise of a new day would drift down onto the light blue façade of our stately building in the outskirts of Berlin, making it glow. Hidden away in the depths of the building, we couldn’t see that light, much less believe it possible.

As I raced down the cellar stairs with my arm around my mother on that March night, I wondered what note it was, the sound of the air-raid siren. As a girl I had sung in the school choir, the teacher had complimented my pitch, the timbre of my voice, but I hadn’t studied music, so I couldn’t tell the notes apart. And yet, as I nestled down in my spot beside Frau Reinach with her brown kerchief on her head, as I stared at Frau Preiß’s black shoes deformed by her bunioned big toe, at the hairs sticking out of Herr Holler’s ears, at the Schmidts’ son Anton’s two tiny front teeth, and as my mother’s breath—Are you cold? she whispered to me. Bundle up—became the only profane yet familiar smell I had to cling to, all that while the only thing that mattered to me was finding out what note corresponded to that long blare of the siren.

The rumble of planes overhead instantly banished the thought. My mother squeezed my hand, her nails piercing my skin. Pauline, who was barely three, stood up. Her mother, Anne Langhans, tried to pull her down, but with all the obstinacy of her scant ninety centimeters the little girl broke free. She tilted back her head and looked straight up, turning around as if to seek the origin of the sound or follow the plane’s trajectory.

The ceiling shuddered. Pauline toppled over as the floor lurched, a deafening hiss drowning out every other sound, including our screams, her cries. The lightbulb flickered out. A massive explosion burst into the cellar, caving in the walls, hurling us every which way. The blast sent our bodies flying through the air, slamming into one another, tangling together as the walls spewed plaster.

After the bombing ceased, sobs and shouts reached our injured eardrums, muffled. Someone pushed on the cellar door. It was blocked. The women shrieked, the few men present kicked it again and again until finally it burst open.

We were deaf, blind, the dust had masked our features, made us strangers even to our own parents. We searched for them, calling out, Mother, Father, unable to utter any other words. My eyes saw only smoke. And then Pauline: she was bleeding from the temple. I tore the hem off my skirt with my teeth and stanched the wound, tied the strip of fabric around her head, looked for her mother, looked for mine, recognized no one.

The sun arrived by the time everyone had been pulled out. Our building hadn’t been leveled but the roof had a gaping hole in it. The roof of the building across from ours was entirely gone. Lined up on the street were the wounded and dead. Survivors leaned back against the wall, gasping for breath, but the fine debris had left throats stinging, noses clogged. Frau Reinach had lost her headkerchief, her hair clumps of smoldering dust that sprouted from her scalp like tumors. Herr Holler was limping. Pauline had stopped bleeding. I was intact, no aches, no pains. My mother was dead.