Читать книгу The Women at Hitler’s Table - Rosella Postorino - Страница 9

Once we arrived in Krausendorf, they lined us up and walked us single file to a red-brick schoolhouse that had been set up as military barracks. We crossed the threshold as docile as cows. The SS guards stopped us in the hallway, searched us. It was terrible to feel their hands linger on my sides, under my arms, and not be able to do anything but hold my breath.

We answered the roll call and they marked down attendance in a register. I discovered that the brunette who had wrenched Leni’s shoulder was named Elfriede Kuhn.

Two by two, we were made to enter a room that smelled of alcohol while the others waited their turn outside. I rested my elbow on the school desk in front of me. A man in a white coat tied a tourniquet tightly around my arm and tapped on my vein with his pointer and middle fingers. With the drawing of blood samples, we were officially test animals. While the day before might have been seen as an inauguration, a rehearsal, as of this moment our work as food tasters had officially begun.

When the needle pierced my vein I looked away. Elfriede was beside me, staring at the syringe that drew her blood, filling up with a red color that grew darker and darker. I had never been able to stand the sight of my own blood—recognizing the dark liquid as something that came from inside of me made me dizzy—so I looked at her instead, at her posture straight as two Cartesian axes, her indifference. I sensed Elfriede was a woman of beauty, though I still couldn’t see it. Her beauty was a mathematical theory I had yet to prove.

Before I knew it, her profile became a face glaring at me sharply. Her nostrils flared, as if lacking air. I opened my mouth to catch my breath and said nothing.

“Keep pressure on this,” the man in the white coat told me, pressing a cotton ball against my skin.

I heard Elfriede’s tourniquet come off with a snap and her chair scrape the floor. I too stood up.

IN THE LUNCHROOM I waited for the others to sit down before me. Most of the women chose the same place they had sat in the day before. The chair across from Leni was free, and from then on it was mine.

After breakfast—milk and fruit—they served us lunch. On my plate, asparagus pie. With time I would come to learn that giving different food combinations to different groups of us was one of their control procedures.

I studied the lunchroom as one studies a foreign environment—the windows with iron grilles, the French door leading to the courtyard guarded at all times, the pictureless walls. On my first day of school, when my mother had left me in the classroom and walked out, the thought that something bad might happen to me without her knowing about it filled me with sorrow. What affected me wasn’t the danger of the world around me but my mother’s powerlessness. It seemed intolerable that my life could go on happening with her oblivious to it. Whatever remained concealed, even if not on purpose, was already a betrayal. I had searched the classroom for a crack in the wall, a spiderweb, anything that might be mine, like a secret. My eyes wandered the room, which seemed enormous, and finally noticed a missing fragment of baseboard, which calmed me.

In the lunchroom in Krausendorf the baseboards were all intact. Gregor wasn’t there, I was alone. The SS guards’ boots dictated the pace of the meal, clicking away the countdown to our potential death. This asparagus is delicious, but isn’t poison bitter? I swallowed and my heart stopped.

Elfriede was also eating asparagus, staring at me as she did, and I drank one glass of water after another to dilute my anxiety. It might have been my dress that made her so curious. Maybe Herta was right, maybe I was out of place wearing that checkered pattern, it wasn’t like I was going to the office, I didn’t work in Berlin anymore. Get rid of those city airs of yours, my mother-in-law had told me, otherwise everyone’s going to look down on you. Elfriede wasn’t looking down on me, or maybe she was, but I had put on my most comfortable dress, the one most worn—the uniform, Gregor used to call it. It was the one I never had to question, neither if it flattered my figure, nor if it would bring me luck. It offered me shelter, even from Elfriede, who was scrutinizing me with a serious look on her face and didn’t even bother to hide it, her eyes scouring the checks on my dress with enough vehemence to make them fly off the fabric, with enough vehemence to unravel the hem, unlace my heeled shoes, make the wave of hair that framed my temple fall flat as I continued to drink water.

Lunch wasn’t over yet and I didn’t know if we were permitted to leave the table. My bladder ached, like it had in the cellar in Budengasse where Mother and I would seek refuge at night with the building’s other tenants when the air-raid sirens went off. But there was no bucket in the corner here, and I couldn’t hold it any longer. Without even consciously deciding to, I stood up and asked permission to go to the washroom. The SS guards nodded. As one of them, a very tall man with big feet, escorted me into the hallway, I heard Elfriede’s voice. “I need to go too.”

The tiles were worn, the grout blackened. Two sinks and four stalls. The SS man stood guard in the hallway, we went in, and I hurried into one of the stalls. I didn’t hear another stall door close or a faucet run. Elfriede had disappeared, or was standing there listening. The sound of my stream breaking the silence was humiliating. When I opened the door she blocked it with the tip of her shoe, grabbed me by the shoulder, and shoved me back against the wall. The tiles smelled of disinfectant. She moved her face close to mine, almost sweetly.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Me?”

“Why were you staring at me during the blood sample?”

I tried to break free. She blocked my way.

“A word of advice: mind your own business. In this place, everybody’s better off minding their own business.”

“I can’t stand the sight of my own blood, that’s all.”

“Oh, but the sight of someone else’s blood is okay, is it?”

The scrape of metal against wood made us start. Elfriede pulled away.

“What are you up to in here?” the guard asked, stepping inside. The tiles were cold and damp, or maybe it was the sweat on my back. “Having a little tête-à-tête, are we?” He wore enormous shoes, perfect for crushing the heads of snakes.

“I had a dizzy spell. It must be because of the blood sample,” I stammered, touching the red mark over the bulging vein on the inside of my elbow. “She was helping me. I feel better now.”

The guard warned that if he caught us like that again, so intimate, he would teach us a lesson. Or better yet, he would take advantage of it. Then he burst out laughing.

We went back to the lunchroom, the Beanpole watching our every step. He was wrong: it hadn’t been intimacy between Elfriede and me, it had been fear. We were sizing up each other and our surroundings with the blind terror of someone who’s just been born into the world.

That night, in the bathroom of the Sauer home, the scent of asparagus that emanated from my urine made me think of Elfriede. She too, sitting on the commode, probably smelled the same odor. Even Hitler, in his bunker at the Wolfsschanze. That night, Hitler’s urine would stink like mine.