At the Wolf's Table

by Rosella Postorino

  “Who’s Edna Kopfstein?”

  He pulled away and, after lazily circling around his desk, sat down and picked up the dossier. “Don’t ask.” He slid it into a drawer.

  “Please, tell me what’s going on. What does that woman have to do with Elfriede? Why do you have a file on Elfriede? Do you have one on me as well?”

  “That isn’t information I can share.”

  No, he wasn’t on our side. He had reported a noncommissioned officer only because it was within his power, and he wanted to wield that power.

  “Well, what can you share with me? Until a minute ago you were embracing me.”

  “Please, return to the lunchroom.”

  “So now you’re treating me like a subordinate. I don’t follow your orders, Albert.”

  “But you must.”

  “Because we’re in your stupid barracks?”

  “Don’t make a fuss, Rosa. Pretend you never saw it. It’ll be better for everyone.”

  Cursing, I leaned over the desk and grabbed him by the collar of his uniform. “I’m not going to pretend anything. Elfriede Kuhn is my friend!”

  Ziegler stroked the backs of my hands, my knuckles. “Are you sure? Because there is no Elfriede Kuhn. At least, if there is one, she isn’t the woman you know.” He yanked my hands off his collar. I staggered backward and he grabbed me by the forearms. “Edna Kopfstein is a U-boat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your friend Elfriede is an imposter, Rosa. A Jew.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Among Hitler’s food tasters was a Jew.

  “Show me the dossier, Albert.”

  He stood up, came over to me. “Don’t you dare breathe a word of this to anyone.”

  There was a Jew among us, and it was Elfriede, of all people.

  “What’s going to happen to her?”

  “Rosa, are you listening to me?”

  “I have to tell her. She has to escape.”

  “You’re so funny.” A grimace flashed over his face, the same grimace I had glimpsed in the barn once. “You plan to have her escape and you actually tell me?”

  “Are you going to send her away? To where?”

  “This is my job. No one can stand in my way, not even you.”

  “Albert. Help her, if you can.”

  “Why should I help a clandestine Jew who’s been making fools of us? She hid all this time, changed her identity, ate our food, slept in our beds, thinking she could trick us! But she can’t. She’s wrong about that.”

  “Please. Make the dossier disappear. Who gave it to you?”

  “I can’t make a dossier disappear.”

  “You can’t? Are you admitting you’re of no importance around here?”

  “That’s enough!” He clamped his hand over my mouth. I bit his fingers. He slammed me against the wall and I hit my head. Squeezing my eyes shut, I waited for the pain to spread and reach its peak and then lessen. The moment it vanished I spat in his face.

  I found myself with the barrel of his gun pressed against my forehead. Ziegler wasn’t shaking. “You will do as I command.”

  That was what he had told me the first time, in the courtyard, when his little eyes, so closely set they made him look cross-eyed, hadn’t managed to frighten me. The same hazel-colored irises stared at me, now that the metal was stamping a cold ring onto my skin. I felt a tic below my cheek, couldn’t swallow, my throat sealed in a knot, two tears welled up by my tear ducts—I wasn’t crying, it was the inability to breathe.

  “Very well,” I murmured.

  And all at once Ziegler lowered the gun, shoved it awkwardly into its holster, his eyes locked on to me. Then he held me tight, his tiny nose on my neck, asked me to forgive him, touched me, my collarbones, femurs, ribs, as though making sure I was still intact. He was pathetic.

  “Forgive me, please,” he said. “You gave me no choice.” He repeated, “Forgive me.”

  I couldn’t speak. I was pathetic. We were pathetic.

  “If she runs away it’ll be worse,” he said, his face buried in my hair.

  I said nothing, and he added, “You mustn’t tell her anything. I’ll do what I can, I promise you.”

  “Please.”

  “I promise you.”

  * * *

  WHEN I RETURNED to the lunchroom, the ladies asked me where I had been.

  “You should see your face,” said Ulla.

  “She’s right,” Leni said. “You’re pale.”

  “I was in the washroom.”

  “This whole time?” Beate asked.

  “Oh, god, don’t tell me we’ve got another one,” Augustine said, glancing at Heike.

  Heike hung her head. So did Beate, who had to pretend she hadn’t heard.

  “You’re as tactless as always, Augustine,” I said, trying to deflect their attention.

  Heike looked at me, then looked at Elfriede, then hung her head again.

  I also looked at Elfriede, all through lunch. Every time she caught me doing it I felt my heart squeezing like a bellows.

  As I was getting on the bus someone grabbed my arm. I turned around.

  “Berliner, what’s wrong? Still afraid of the sight of your own blood?”

  Elfriede smiled, our inside joke.

  I had to tell her. Even if I trusted Ziegler, I couldn’t trust a lieutenant in the SS. Elfriede had to know what was going on. But what would she do? Would she run away? How could I help her? Only Ziegler could—there was no alternative. He had promised me. If she runs away it’ll be worse, he said. I had to believe him. We were pawns in his hands. I needed to stay quiet—it was the only way to save Elfriede.

  “I’ve never gotten used to it,” I told her, “to blood.”

  With this, I sat down beside Leni.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY the ladies continued to tell me I was acting strangely. Had I heard from Gregor, by chance? Received another letter from the headquarters of military families? I hadn’t. That’s good. You know, we were all worried. What’s wrong, then?

  I wanted to confide in Herta and Joseph, but they would ask me how I knew what I knew, and I couldn’t confess that. The afternoon when Ulla had put my hair into rollers and Elfriede and Leni had drunk tea, after they all left, Herta said she hadn’t been able to figure out Elfriede. Yes, there’s something about her, Joseph agreed, pressing down the tobacco in his pipe with a tamper, something sorrowful.

  I spent the week in terror that they would come and take Elfriede away as inexorably as they had arrested Mr. Wortmann. I never looked out the window, not at the birds or trees or flowers. Nothing could distract me, I had to stay on guard, watch over Elfriede. There she was, sitting across the table from me, eating roasted potatoes with linseed oil.

  Friday arrived.

  No one came for her.

  39

  Ziegler walked in as we were almost finished tasting breakfast. He and I hadn’t locked ourselves away in the office again, there had been no further contact between us.

  We were eating cake with honey, walnuts, cocoa, and raisins, which Krümel called “Führer Cake.” I don’t know if it was the Führer who came up with the recipe or if the cook had been the one to combine in a single pastry everything his boss liked, as a tribute to him.

  After that day I never ate raisins again.

  Standing stiffly in the doorway, legs apart, hands on his hips, chin high, Ziegler said: “Edna Kopfstein.”

  I whipped my head up, breathless. He avoided looking at me.

  The other women stared at one another, confused. Edna who? None of us were named that. What was going on? Kopfstein, the lieutenant had said. That was a Jewish name. They rested their cutlery on the table or on the edge of their plate, clasped their fingers over their bellies. Even Elfriede had rested her fork, despite the piece of cake skewered on its tines, but after a brief hesitation, she raised it and stuck it in her mouth, slowly starting to eat again. Her audacity astonished me. She was always like that, Elfriede, always preten
ding she wasn’t afraid, never letting anyone—not even an SS officer—injure her self-respect.

  Ziegler let her finish. What kind of game was he playing?

  When Elfriede’s plate was empty, he repeated: “Edna Kopfstein.”

  I shot to my feet so brusquely that my chair toppled over.

  “Don’t steal my spotlight, Berliner,” Elfriede said. With this, she walked over to the lieutenant.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and she followed him without turning back.

  It was Saturday. That evening we would go home.

  * * *

  THE BUS TOOK off without Elfriede on board.

  “Where is she?” Leni asked me. “She wasn’t at lunch or dinner.”

  “She’ll tell us all about it tomorrow,” I said, trying to calm her.

  “Who’s Edna Kopfstein? What does she have to do with her?”

  “I don’t know, Leni. How should I know?”

  “Do you think they had to talk about Ernst again?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Why did you jump to your feet like that, Rosa?”

  I turned away and Leni gave up. We were all shaken. From time to time, from her row, Augustine tried to catch my eye. She shook her head, as if to say, It can’t be, I can’t believe it, a Jew, Rosa, did you know about this? As if to say, What do we do now that they’ve discovered her, do you know what to do?

  The next day, at the spot on the road where Elfriede usually waited for the bus, there wasn’t even a cigarette butt.

  In the lunchroom, they announced that on Monday the Führer would be leaving town and wouldn’t be back for ten days, so for ten days no barracks for us. Neither that night nor the following nights did Ziegler appear at my window. Of Elfriede, no news.

  * * *

  SPEAKING WITH A group of military men she hadn’t stopped socializing with—I don’t know if Heiner was among them, but by then everyone knew what had happened—Ulla learned that it had been Ernst who said, Can you believe what she told me? You know what that woman did? She took one of the food tasters to get an abortion from a man who lives hidden in the forest, and nobody knows who the guy is or why he’s hiding, maybe he’s a deserter or an enemy of the Reich.

  Leni had told him the story. Maybe it had seemed adventurous to her, a way to show off, an attempt to seduce him. She had trusted Ernst.

  Ziegler had gone to Heike’s house and interrogated her for hours. When he began to threaten her children, she talked. In the Goerlitz Forest, she said, in the area of Lake Tauchel.

  The man had no documents, but it wasn’t difficult for the Sicherheitsdienst to discover that he was a Jewish doctor, one of those barred from practice. He had managed to get by all that time. Elfriede had always known him; he was her father.

  The mother, a pureblood German, had asked for a divorce. Elfriede, half Jewish, had chosen not to abandon him, though they didn’t live together. Years earlier, when she still lived in Gdańsk, a friend of the family gave her her ID card. Together they bleached some of the writing to change the date of birth, detached the photo and replaced it with another, used a marker to re-create the four stamps, refining the eagle’s wings and the ring around the swastika, and Edna Kopfstein had become Elfriede Kuhn.

  * * *

  FOR A YEAR she had managed to fool the SS. They had had an enemy in their midst and every day they served her succulent food, convinced she was one of their own.

  She must have lived in a constant state of alert, Elfriede, with every mouthful the fear of being unmasked, with every bus ride a sense of guilt over those who had departed on trains and would never return, over those who hadn’t been shrewd enough, hadn’t been good enough at lying—not everyone has those talents.

  Perhaps after the war she would reclaim her name, her documents, would recall her clandestine period with the dignified composure of someone who’s saved herself, even though those years would return to her every night in nightmares. To exorcise them she would tell her grandchildren about it over Passover dinner—or maybe not, maybe she wouldn’t say a word about that period, like me.

  If she had never been summoned to be a food taster, maybe she would have managed to survive. Instead Elfriede was deported, along with her father.

  * * *

  HERTA WAS THE one who told me. She’d heard it while at the well, the women waiting in line for water had told her. The story about the Jewess who had made fools of the Nazis was spreading all through town. In Gross-Partsch, had they always known about us women and our work?

  “Deported,” Herta confirmed, and she didn’t tuck her upper lip between her teeth, didn’t look like a turtle, only a mother. There was only one true source of grief in her life: the loss of Gregor. She couldn’t suffer for anyone else.

  I left the house, slamming the door. It was evening and Joseph asked me, “Where are you going?” but I wasn’t listening to him anymore. I walked off with no destination, with an agitation in my legs that only muscular exertion could ease, or sharpen.

  Nests on the utility poles and no storks. They would never return here, to East Prussia. It wasn’t a healthy environment, nothing but swamps and the stink of rot. They would change course, forget this plain forever.

  I walked without stopping, thought, Why did you do it, you could have kept quiet, what need was there to avenge Leni, who didn’t even want to be avenged?

  It had been suicide—Elfriede hadn’t been able to bear it anymore, her survivor guilt. Or maybe it had been a false move, a momentary form of recklessness that had proved fatal for her. The same impulse she hadn’t been able to contain with me when she shoved me against the wall with its blackened grout. Only now did I realize she had felt watched, had lived with the anxiety of being found out. That day, in the washroom, had she been testing me? Or was the caged animal, so eager to get out, seeking a reason—any reason—to have the gates opened, even at the risk that they wouldn’t be opened in order to set her free? Maybe it was simply the only way for her, entrenched and proud, to establish a closeness with me.

  We hadn’t been dealt the same fate. I was safe. I had trusted Ziegler and he had betrayed me. It was his job, that’s what he would say. After all, every job involves compromises. Every job is a form of slavery—the need to have a role in the world, to advance in a specific direction, to save oneself from derailment, from marginality.

  I had worked for Hitler. So had Elfriede, who had ended up in the Wolf’s Lair and had hoped to get away with it. I didn’t know if she had grown so accustomed to a clandestine lifestyle that she felt safe, safe enough to make a misstep, or if she had delivered herself to a fate she could no longer avoid.

  We had all unintentionally ended up in the Wolf’s Lair. The Wolf had never seen us. He digested the food we had chewed, had excreted the waste of that food, and had never known anything about us. He stayed curled up in his lair, the Wolfsschanze, the origin of all things. I wanted to penetrate it, to be forever swallowed up in it. Maybe Elfriede was there, locked in a bunker, waiting for them to decide what to do with her.

  I wandered down the train tracks through the tall grass that stung my legs, passed the railroad crossing—a slender tree trunk to which two boards painted red and white had been nailed together in an X shape—and continued without once turning back. The rails went straight on, embedded in a tangle of purple flowers. It wasn’t the clover in the meadow; there was no beauty that could reawaken me. I advanced like a sleepwalker, with the determination of a sleepwalker I followed my path until the very limit, wanting to cross it, plunge into the beating heart of the forest, be part of it once and for all, as much a part of it as the reinforced concrete of the bunkers, the moss and wood chips in the camouflage plaster, the trees on the rooftops. I wanted to be swallowed up. Perhaps thousands of years later the Wolfsschanze would expel me and I would be nothing more than fertilizer.

  * * *

  A GUNSHOT TORE me out of my stupor. I fell backward.

  “Who goes there?” they shouted. I
remembered the land mines Ziegler had told me about. Where were the mines? Why hadn’t I been blown up? “Hands over your head!” Had I taken a different road, a road that wasn’t mined? Where was Ziegler? “Don’t move!” A shot into the air, nothing more than a warning, they were being indulgent.

  The SS men came over, their weapons trained on me. I raised my arms, was on my knees, uttered my name: “Rosa Sauer, I work for the Führer, I was walking in the woods, don’t hurt me, I’m one of the food tasters.”

  A rifle aimed at the center of my back, they grabbed hold of me, shouted, I don’t remember what, just their angry voices crashing into my ears, their gaping mouths, their hands intruding on me, the fury with which they dragged me away. Maybe they would take me into the Wolfsschanze, lock me up in a bunker too.

  Where was Joseph? Was he looking for me? Herta was waiting, sitting in the kitchen, her fingers—her deformed fingers—interlaced. She had been waiting for me, or only for Gregor, her entire life, but night had already fallen, her son wasn’t going to return with a hearty appetite, and I was no longer hungry.

  * * *

  THEY TOOK ME to the Krausendorf barracks. How foolish of me to think they would let me enter a place reserved for the Führer’s elite. They sat me down at the lunchroom table. I had never been there alone. On that table Leni had lost her virginity. What was wrong with it? Ernst must have thought. Leni seemed consenting, I swear. We all seemed consenting in Germany. They closed the door. I sat there counting the empty seats, a guard barring the way out into the courtyard.

  After half an hour, fifty minutes, Krümel opened the door. “What are you doing here?”

  My eyes filled with tears. “What are you doing here, Crumbs? Aren’t we on vacation?” I was seeking compassion.

  “You can’t keep out of trouble, can you?”