Читать книгу The Cigarette Girl - Caroline Woods - Страница 9

They were stopped on a corner of the Kurfürstendamm, the busiest shopping street in the city. A place where they very decidedly did not belong, Grete thought. Their clothes gave them away; donated dresses did not grow at the same weedlike pace that girls did. Strings hung from Berni’s broken hem, and still the fabric did not cover her knees.

Berni didn’t seem to notice. Her hand shielding her eyes, she had the optimistic, faraway look of a sea explorer. She held the last of the three boxes of communion she’d been asked to deliver to churches in west Berlin, Grete the red cash tin. Berni had been ordered to return to the home in time for lunch. Grete was not supposed to be out at all.

“Can you read the time, Grete-bird?” Berni pointed to the clock on the Memorial Church, its stones blackened with city pollution.

Grete squinted up at the gold numerals. For a moment, she considered telling a lie to get Berni moving. “Eleven thirty,” she said honestly. “We need to go home, Berni.”

“Eagle eyes!” Berni bent down so that her lips touched Grete’s earlobe. “That means we have time,” she said in a low voice, affecting an Eastern accent, “to visit Libations of Illyria.”

A blade of fear stabbed Grete’s stomach. “Please, no. Let’s find St. Matthias, then take the U-Bahn home before anyone notices I’m missing.” She leapt back when an omnibus lumbered to the curb, sending oily water toward her shoes.

Earlier in the day she’d been peacefully changing beds in the nursery when Berni burst into the room. Grete would join her, she declared without asking, on her communion-delivery adventure. It was something to celebrate, Berni insisted: the sisters entrusting her with the communion wafers the Lulus baked, worth more than a pfennig apiece, meant they were on the verge of choosing her for the academy.

Grete had given her usual excuses, knowing they would not deter Berni: she had to carry soiled sheets up to the laundry, she had a Latin exam to study for. Tomorrow, Sister Maria would fire questions at her in Latin, standing behind the dais so that Grete could not see her mouth. Her only hope was to study until she could recite the whole dead language in her sleep, and here was Berni, pressuring her to go on one of her larks. But Berni promised they’d practice this evening; she’d have Grete speaking like Julius Caesar by the end of the night.

“Come, one more detour,” Berni said now, shielding Grete from two women in trousers walking and smoking, moving at breakneck speed. “I’ll buy you a pretzel.”

Bells tinkled, and a young man rode by on a bicycle. He tossed some change into a homeless veteran’s cap. Grete had seen only the thin white arms of the cyclist’s companion, clasped around his waist. Watching them, Berni’s face took on a look of naked yearning. It seemed she longed for those pale arms to belong to her.

Grete pulled at her sleeve. Berni had to remember they weren’t both Rose Red. Somebody had to be Snow White. “I must prepare for Latin.”

“This is more important.”

“You always say nothing’s more important than schoolwork.” In a matter of weeks, the sisters would choose three girls out of Berni’s class of forty to study with the Ursulines in Wedding. For months Berni had been struggling to behave, to polish her shoes, to bite back crude comments. Around the sisters she smiled so broadly she’d developed an eye twitch. Why would she risk that now?

Berni shook her head. “They sell real potions at Libations of Illyria—love spells, strength tonics. I’ll buy an elixir for luck.” She patted her pocket, which jingled. “I’ve enough change saved for both of us.” To show she’d won the argument, she began to walk up the boulevard so quickly that Grete had no choice but to scramble after her. Berni’s long black braids flagged behind her, the plaits of a little girl; on Berni’s gangly, sixteen-year-old figure, they reminded Grete of garlands tacked up long after Christmas.

Grete tried to keep up with her, dodging pedestrians. The Ku’damm was packed with people. Behind iron gates, cafés crammed table after table onto the sidewalk to enjoy the damp May weather. A waiter with a tray bent to show the Viennese strudel, the obsttorte, the black forest. Two delivery boys in aprons hauled loads of pink flowers down the restaurant’s cellar steps. Grete’s mouth watered; she smelled coffee, browned onions, custard.

“Everyone looks so angry,” she said breathlessly, when she’d caught her sister.

“That’s the Berlin sneer. Watch.” Berni affected an exaggerated frown and strolled with her shoulders thrown back. “You have to hold your Schnauze high.”

Graffiti was everywhere, even in this neighborhood; someone had defaced every National Socialist poster adorning a Litfaß column. When the girls stopped at an intersection, Grete pointed to a row of perfectly trimmed hedges on which KPD and BLUTMAI were scrawled in white paint. Berni chuckled. “Serves them right for trying to make shrubs behave like walls. If I had a garden, I’d let it grow wild.”

“But what does that mean? What does blood have to do with May?”

“It’s for the anniversary, I’d imagine.” Berni worked her lower lip over her teeth. “Some troubles between the police and Communists. The demonstration turned . . . heated.”

“Did anyone die?”

Berni drew a long, impatient breath. “We aren’t political. We don’t have to worry. Wait!”

The passing motorcar honked its horn at them, seconds after Berni yanked Grete off the curb by the back of her collar. “I heard it,” Grete said, clutching her throat, though she hadn’t. She’d heard the horn, of course, but not the approaching engine.

“You have to look into the street before you cross, little bird.”

“Everyone does,” Grete muttered.

• • •

It would have been foolish to tell Berni what happened at this year’s physical exam. Grete had hoped somehow her hearing would improve with age, that thirteen would be a magic number, but Sister Lioba had declared her ears, if anything, were getting worse.

In her left ear, Grete had heard enough of Sister Lioba’s whisper to be able to repeat it: “Hoppe, hoppe Reiter, wenn er fällt, dann schreit er.” But in the right, she could only feel the little blasts of breath. She did her best to guess, filling in the next two lines of the nursery rhyme. Sister shook her head. “It will only make matters worse if you lie, Margarete.” She glanced heavenward as she said this, indicating what might be the source of Grete’s problems.

Grete already knew the blockage inside her ears kept her at a remove from God. At Mass, she watched the concentration and piety on the other girls’ faces as they listened to the sermon, while she was distracted by the echoes of the organ, the odor of incense, the pressure inside her ears. Sometimes she wondered if God was punishing her or her parents, since she’d had problems hearing little things since she was born. Birdsong had always eluded her unless she stood directly under a tree. Raindrops jumped noiselessly in their puddles.

The intermittent ringing, however, hadn’t always been part of her life. It began when she was five or six. “There’s a faucet left on somewhere,” she had complained to Berni. “A pipe is running. Don’t you hear it?” In time Grete realized the high-pitched sound belonged only to her, and that it tended to appear most often when she felt scared or nervous.

“You shouldn’t mind if people know about your ears,” Berni tried to reassure her. “You can’t help that any more than I can help my hair becoming knotty.”

Grete shook her head. Berni could help it if her hair tangled. Other people could and would hold it against her if she were a mess. And they’d hold Grete’s deficiencies against her, too. Of course they would.

“You have lost the high frequencies in the right ear,” Sister Lioba had announced at her last physical, “though the lower ones seem present, for now.” She wrinkled her nose so that Grete could see the black hairs. “It may be progressive. Time will tell.”

That spring, the words it may be progressive had become the rhythm of Grete’s life. She vowed to develop her other senses before they were all she had left. When the sisters took them on a hike in the Grunewald, Grete smelled smoke half an hour before Sister Odi spotted a farmer burning his fields and hustled them to the train. She spied an osprey’s nest spraying off the corner of a building in Sophie-Charlotte-Platz. And at Mass, when the tip of Father Radeke’s finger lingered on Konstanz’s lip as he gave her communion, Grete lowered her face but not her eyes and told no one, not even Berni.

• • •

“This is the address,” said Berni, her face uncertain. They’d stopped in front of the eight double glass doors of Fiedler’s department store.

Grete’s gaze scrolled up the enormous façade, its windows a code: a row of triangles, a row of circles, a row of squares. “A department store?”

Berni shrugged. “Sure,” she said, though Grete could tell she wasn’t.

Three security guards in black-and-gold uniforms stood together between two sets of doors. In the shining glass, Grete caught her sad reflection: her overwashed blue dress and limp, pale braids. Berni stood almost a foot taller. Beside her Grete felt stunted and anemic, like the albino frog they’d discovered in a gutter, which Berni declared would be picked off by a bird in no time. At thirteen she looked no different than she had at age nine. A late bloomer, Sister Josephine called Grete, like the hickory tree in the yard. “Berni matured late as well,” she’d say, “and look how tall she’s gotten.” This did little to comfort Grete. She had a feeling she’d never measure up to her sister.

“Come on,” Berni said, gripping the polished brass doorknob, and before Grete could argue, she found herself inside the store.

For a moment, they did not move. They gazed upon a maze of velvet-draped tables. Jewelry, crystal, and leather shone in the soft light. In the middle of the marble floor a bronze goddess held scales in the middle of a fountain. Berni pointed up. The arched ceiling, three stories high, was made of stained glass. Grete watched a saleswoman reach languorously for a silk scarf. Everyone in here moved in a kind of trance, it seemed to Grete, the un-hurry of the rich; it took a moment to figure out which were people and which were mannequins, so uncannily did they resemble one another.

“Look over there,” Berni said, and before Grete could ask where, Berni was on the move. In the far corner Grete saw a passageway labeled in gilt letters: Libations of Illyria. She began breathing quickly. Perhaps the wealthy really did have access to liquid magic.

They had to pass through a tunnel of exotic plants, ferns that offered caresses. The air smelled floral, fruity, sweet, strong—how awful the dormitory toilets would be after this! When Grete opened her eyes, Berni had stopped in a plant-laden cave of sorts, in front of a glass case. Behind it was a young woman in the same black-and-gold cap the doormen wore, but with silk stockings and a fitted jacket. Looking bored, she dabbed her deep-plum lips with a tissue.

Berni had her hands on the top of the case, inside which were bottles of all shapes and sizes, some with long delicate necks, some with tasseled ionizers. Grete saw nothing miraculous. Instead of Luck Tonic or Courage Elixir, there were Spirit of Myrcia and Essence of Lilac.

The shop girl used a nail file to nudge Berni’s hand off the case; it left a steamy print. Her hair was artificial red, too shiny to be real, and her large nose was twisted to the side in amusement. Grete realized in horror that poor Berni had been duped. This was where rich ladies bought their toilet water, nothing more. She had never experienced fremdschämen for Berni—usually it was the other way around—and she felt the world tip on its axis.

“Berni,” she whispered. The shop girl licked her teeth, waiting. “We can leave now.”

Berni cleared her throat. With a fingernail she tapped the glass. “Where are the potions?”

The salesgirl took a breath and paused, then opened her mouth in a wide grin. Her teeth were yellow and crowded. “They’re all potions. Would you like to try the Oriental Lily Nectar?” When she talked, a string of saliva like spider’s silk linked her upper and lower incisors. She produced a deep-purple bottle with a cap shaped like a flower.

“What does it do?”

The salesgirl’s forehead wrinkled momentarily. “What does it do?” She inserted a dropper into the bottle, then squeezed it twice on Berni’s wrist. “This perfume is extracted from the blooms that grow around the Taj Mahal.” Her voice was deep, deeper than the average woman’s, and as long as Grete watched her lips move, she could hear her voice better than she could Berni’s. She put a drop on Grete’s wrist as well. “Want to know the price?”

Grete hesitated a bit, then sniffed. Perfume, ordinary perfume. “Berni . . .”

Berni put her nose to her wrist and inhaled. “Very nice. But no, I don’t want to know the price.” She was sixteen, too old to believe in magic. Yet she sounded so desperate that Grete longed to hide. “I want to know where the real libations are.”

The salesgirl tilted her head, and finally Grete could see the brown eyes under her cap, alarmingly large and quick. “You’ll get the true fragrance after a little. Let the bouquet develop.”

“Tell me where you’re hiding the real stuff.” Berni took one of her long, heavy arms and draped it around Grete’s shoulders. “What do you carry for hearing loss?”

Grete’s face suddenly felt hot under the fluorescent lights. So this was Berni’s purpose. She should have known.

Berni cupped her cheek and said, eyes filled with worry, “Don’t you want to be able to hear Sister Maria during the Latin oral?”

Whenever she had a problem, Grete thought, shutting her eyes, Berni swooped in to solve it. Bullies were vanquished, spills cleaned. Even when Grete could glimpse a solution, Berni would pluck it from above her, as though snatching a feather from the sky. The one thing she’d never been able to attain for Grete was a normal ear.

The salesgirl looked confused. Delicately she ran a hand over her red hair, petting it, as if to confirm it hadn’t gone anywhere. “Look,” she said. “I’ve humored you enough.”

“Berni, this is stupid.” Grete yanked her sister’s hem so hard she felt a seam tear. Berni froze, looking down at her, her face wrought with failure, and for a moment Grete wished it had worked. If only she could allow Berni to cure her. She opened her mouth to say something—but what was there to say?—and then she heard high heels on marble.

The salesgirl straightened up when a blond woman appeared. She wore a short red coat and black leather gloves. Her eyes were as dark as the gloves, saucy and round. “Darling,” the woman said, reaching for the salesgirl. They kissed on both cheeks. “How’s the new job?”

The salesgirl’s face turned the color of her hair. “Old hat.”

“I can wait my turn,” said the blond woman, smiling politely at Berni and Grete.

“We’re finished,” the salesgirl snapped. “They aren’t buying anything, is that right?”

“No,” Berni said, her voice cracking a little. “You don’t have what we came for.”

The blond woman looked closely at Berni and Grete, taking in their shabby dresses, the worn shoes, and her face rose and fell in pity. Berni crossed her arms. Nobody but Grete saw the salesgirl produce an ivory-and-gold phone out of nowhere. She dialed one number and murmured something Grete could not hear into the receiver.

“Berni,” she whispered, lifting her sister’s dark braid. “We have to go . . .”

“I have a good one for you,” the blond woman said to the salesgirl, accepting an amber bottle. “Why are the Sturmabteilung uniforms brown?”

The salesgirl hesitated. Berni answered for her. “Something to do with shit stains?”

Grete’s mouth fell open. The woman began to laugh. Then one of the doormen came crashing through the plants, a big man, white-eyebrowed, his face florid. He lifted his chins at the salesgirl, who nodded with satisfaction toward Berni and Grete. The blond woman turned in the act of squeezing the ionizer at her throat to watch him take each girl by the arm, and Grete thought she heard her say, “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” as they were ushered away.

Grete squeezed her eyes shut and stumbled beside him so that she wouldn’t have to watch the tranquil salespeople and shoppers being disturbed. She mumbled to herself, practicing for her Latin test. Decem, viginti. Trentrigintata.

“Pick up your feet.” The man’s breath smelled of ham. “I won’t carry you up the stairs.”

Berni’s voice: “I can carry her.”

Octoginta. Nonaginta. After this, they would be in such trouble. Berni would never be chosen for the academy.

Berni began to cough, the sound deep-throated and animal. It echoed in the glassy space, and the man told her to hush. Outside rain fell gently, little more than mist. The doorman let Grete cower behind Berni, but he kept his grip on Berni’s arm. A few times she spasmed, hand to her mouth, suppressing the quakes of her lungs.

“You girl . . . know better . . .” In the noise on the street, Grete lost parts of what the man was saying, but watched in a panic as he tapped the lid of Berni’s white box.

“We didn’t steal anything.” Berni’s voice, very close to Grete’s left ear, squeaked a bit. “It’s the host. We bake it at St. Luisa’s, then take it to the churches.”

His chin puckered in disbelief. Grete could imagine the sisters’ reaction when they were returned to the orphanage by the police. Let’s run, Berni, she wanted to shout, let’s just run—but she couldn’t form the words, and she knew even if they ran it would do them no good. Everything was over now, all their dreams, all Berni’s good behavior erased in one poor decision. Why hadn’t she been strong enough to tell Berni no?

A voice cut in, saying something Grete couldn’t hear, and she whirled around to see the blond woman in the red coat had joined them on the sidewalk. “There’s no need to harass these girls.” She leaned in between Berni and Grete. “You don’t have to show him anything, Fräulein,” she said. Her skin smelled of citrus. “Don’t let him tell you otherwise.”

“Remind me how this is your business,” the doorman shouted. A drip of water fell from the canopy onto his face, and Berni snickered. He grimaced. “We catch thieves all the time.”

“Well, if they did steal something I can pay for it. I have plenty of money to share.” The woman opened her white rectangular purse and pulled out a smaller rectangular wallet.

“We didn’t steal!” Berni ripped open the cardboard box. With her grimy hands she rifled through the disks of bread. “We’re on our way to St. Matthias. I swear on the Bible.”

Grete put her hands to her mouth. She wasn’t sure which was worse, the swearing or the desecration of the host. The woman looked down at Grete and said, “It’s all right, my dear, God won’t smite you. It’s just a bit of bread in a box, after all.”

Bread in a box? But it wasn’t; it was the ultimate gift. Grete scowled at the ground, at the backs of Berni’s shoes.

“And there are only a few marks and a handful of pfennig in the red tin,” Berni said. “Go ahead and count it. We’d be the poorest thieves in the world.”

The doorman looked back at his two colleagues, neither of whom moved to help. Finally he made a dismissive motion with his arm and said something Grete couldn’t hear.

“Come on,” Berni said, hugging her so closely around the shoulders that Grete had to walk sideways. Rain fell steadily now; she felt it dripping down the center of her scalp. Ahead of them, the pointed spires of the Memorial Church were wrapped in fog. Grete felt Berni sigh and realized she was staring not at the church but at the Gloria-Palast movie theater. Through its arched doorway Grete could see burgundy carpets and crystal chandeliers; above the doors of its café was a giant plaster pretzel.

Just before they reached the U-Kurfürstendamm station, someone stepped in front of them: the woman in red. She stood there hugging her square white purse, her lips poised in a little smile. An umbrella dangled from her forearm.

Berni jumped apart from Grete and curtsied. “Thank you for your help.”

The stranger took Berni’s chin into her bare hand. “Where do you two come from?”

“St. Luisa’s Home.”

“That makes you orphans.” She replaced her glove, smiling, working her fingers into the leather. “I had a feeling. You have that look.” She tapped her cheek twice, and as if by magic, a dimple appeared. “Determination? Desperation? A little of each? What were you doing in Fiedler’s, if I may ask?”

“We were looking for potions,” Berni said.

A smile broke over the woman’s face. “Magic potions?” She moved to open her umbrella, but then she held it out to Berni. “You take this. I don’t have far to walk.”

Grete stared at the brilliant blue silk, imagining what the sisters would say if they strolled into the orphanage with it. “Oh, thank you, but we can’t,” said Berni, coughing into her sleeve.

“I’m not offering it for keeps. I’ll come so that you can return it. St. Luisa’s, right? And your names are?”

“Bernadette Metzger. This is Margarete Metzger, my sister.”

“And I am Fräulein Schmidt. How do you do.” She pressed the umbrella toward Berni, smiled, and walked away so there could be no argument. Grete’s toes uncurled inside her shoes.

“She was beautiful,” Berni said as they watched Fräulein Schmidt stroll up the Ku’damm, her bottom twitching from side to side in her slim skirt. When she was gone, Berni fiddled with the clasp and slid open the umbrella. They each took hold of the black lacquered handle.

Grete gasped. “What will we tell Sister Maria when that lady comes for her umbrella?”

“Oh, Grete, she’s never going to come,” Berni said.

This filled Grete with relief. She watched Berni look wistfully up at the brilliant blue-purple silk and metal spokes. She’d loathed hearing Berni swear, but more than that, she’d hated the way Berni’s face had lit up when she made that woman laugh. They stood still, twirling the umbrella above them for a moment, before Grete asked her to point the way to St. Matthias.