The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  Yes, it's wonderful, murmurs Anna, shouldering her way through the cheerful throng in Frau Staudt's bakery. Yes, yes, I couldn't agree more; it's splendid news.

  Once outside, she takes a deep breath, relieved to be free of the pungent stink caused by the rationing of bathwater and her own hypocrisy. Anna has always been impatient with the gloating over Reich triumphs, and never more so than today, when she has quite different news to impart to Max. She sets off for home at a trot, ignoring the Rathaus bells tolling yet another Luftwaffe victory behind her. How will she tell him? Not an hour ago, Anna will say, Frau Staudt informed me that the new identity cards and passes are ready—two sets, not one. You and I, my dear Max, will cease to exist, but Stefan and Emilie Mitterhauser will be traveling to Switzerland, where they can make their paper marriage real in a quiet ceremony.

  No warm beach or fried seafood, then: instead and more appealing at the moment, the breezes of Interlaken. A simple suite of rooms, perhaps overlooking the deep quiet lake, the mountains ringing it with their snowcapped peaks. cool and sweet and quite a contrast with the afternoon through which Anna walks, more slowly now. To move through this air is like fighting one's way through a dream: all Weimar gasps for breath in heat heavy as cotton wadding, the motionless atmosphere that precedes a thunderstorm.

  Gerhard's car is not in the drive when Anna reaches the Elternhaus, so she goes straight to the Christmas closet.

  Hello, Herr Mitterhauser, she calls, shutting the outer door behind her. How do you feel about a holiday in the mountains?

  Her attempt at gaiety is muffled in the cramped space, as though the stagnant air has swallowed it. Without warning, the dizziness and attendant nausea attacks her. Anna puts a hand on the wall and waits.

  When it has passed, she flicks sweat from her forehead and opens the inner door. You'd better start packing, she says. We leave tonight—

  Then the feeble light from the high window penetrates the stairwell, and the strength runs from her legs like water.

  For there are no sheets, with which Anna has replaced Max's blankets when the days grew hot. There are no scraps of verse pinned to the walls. No empty plates. No chamber pot. There is nothing, in fact, to indicate that anyone has ever been in the hiding space at all, except for the olfactory ghost of Max's perspiration and their lovemaking, a salty smell curiously reminiscent of onions.

  When Anna hears the scratch of Gerhard's key in the front door, it is nearly eight o'clock. She sits in his study, in his chair behind his desk, a position forbidden to her. She toys with Gerhard's letter opener as she waits for him, turning it over and over in her hands. The instrument is embossed with a family crest—not the Brandts', though Gerhard claims it is. Anna runs her forefinger over the curving blade, which is sharp enough to draw blood. The weather has broken; thunder rolls overhead, and as Anna has not bothered with the lamps the fading light that trickles into the room is wet and green.

  Eventually Gerhard throws open the door to his study.

  There you are, he says. Haven't you heard me calling you? Isn't it about time for dinner?

  He fumbles for his pocket watch and makes a great show of checking the hour. Anna watches him. His pores ooze whiskey; his thinning hair has escaped its pomade and hangs in strands over his forehead. Under the influences of his new friends, Gerhard, once a teetotaler, has taken to emptying a bottle nightly. To the casual observer, he would appear a harmless buffoon.

  Yet of course Anna knows Gerhard is anything but, and despite her current resolution to remain calm, her hand clenches on the letter opener. The blade slips, slicing the tender meat beneath her fingernail.

  She sets the knife down and inspects the welling bead of blood.

  I didn't make dinner, she says. And you know why.

  Then she flinches, steeling herself for the tirade she knows will follow. But Gerhard—predictable only in his unpredictability—surprises her by saying nothing as he sinks into one the armchairs usually reserved for his clients.

  How did you know? Anna asks.

  Gerhard smothers a belch.

  How?

  The whiskers in the shaving basin, Gerhard says, were blond.

  You took him to the Gestapo. To be exterminated, as Wagner suggested. Like any other vermin—isn't that right?

  Gerhard's mouth drops open as if he is shocked and aggrieved by this accusation.

  I did it for you, Anchen, he says.

  At his use of her childhood name, Anna feels another surge of nausea. Her blouse and the roots of her hair are instantly soaked with perspiration. She stands and paces with one hand cupped over her nose, hoping that the comforting smell of her own skin will assuage the sickness. Behind her, Gerhard reclaims his throne.

  How much did they pay you, your friends? Anna asks, rounding on him. Or did it merely increase your cache in their eyes? Did it cement your social position, bringing him into Gestapo headquarters? Did they award you a Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords?

  She starts to weep, and her tears, coming at such an inappropriate time, make her even angrier.

  You've killed him, she says, killed him as surely as if you put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger yourself—

  Gerhard crashes a fist down on the desk blotter.

  Enough! he bellows. Stop sniveling, you repulsive slut. You stupid, stupid girl! You're not only a whore, you're a stupid whore. Of all the men you could have spread your legs for, you chose a Jew?

  Anna tries to defend herself but produces only a squeak. Ah, here is the tempest, no less powerful for being belated.

  And to hide him here, here of all places, Gerhard shouts. While all along I was thinking only of you! Your safety. Your future. I should let you rot. Better yet, I should turn you in as well. In fact, I think I will. We'll go to the Gestapo right now—

  He lunges from behind his desk and clamps a hand on Anna's shoulder.

  Come along, he says; we'll go this instant. Is that what you want? Is that what you want, Anna?

  The muscles in Anna's neck seize as her father's fingers dig into them.

  No, Vati, she gasps. Please—

  Gerhard puts his face an inch from hers. It is what you deserve, whore, he says. His spittle, smelling of liquor and herring, peppers Anna's cheeks. He pushes her away.

  Did you ever once stop to think? he demands. Did you ever once consider the consequences for me? When you were discovered—and it was only a matter of time, believe me—you would have been taken into protective custody along with that filthy Jew, and what would happen to your old father then? Living alone with nobody to care for him, afflicted by chronic ulcers?

  Anna braves a look at her father, a tall man running to fat, his head lowered bullishly as he glares. Max would have been no match for him. She feels in her stomach, as if it were Max's, the lift of anticipation when the door to the stairwell opened and then, when it revealed Gerhard instead of her, the catapult of dread. She grasps an end table and screws her eyes shut, trying not to vomit.

  All right, says Gerhard. All right, that's enough.

  Having assured himself of his victory, he can now afford to be magnanimous; his voice drops into the confiding register he uses when, having cowed a jury with the forceful oratorical tactics he has borrowed from the Führer, he wishes to befriend them.

  You're damaged goods now, he tells Anna, tainted by that Jew, but nobody need know, thank God. We'll put the best face on things. Yes, we must think only of the future. Hauptsturmführer von Schoener—he is your future. He may be a weakling, but he is a kind man. Think of all he has already done for you! Who but Joachim spared you being assigned Land Service in some Godforsaken place? He knows the value of family, of keeping a family together. He would marry you tomorrow.

  Anna opens her eyes and stares at Gerhard. can he be serious? Will he never see her as anything but child or chattel? For the past few weeks, Anna has never been more aware of her own body: her swollen breasts chafing against her brassieres; the weariness that dogs her
every step; the tiny aches and pains in her joints, as though she is a house settling; the constant nausea accompanied by the copper taste of Pfennigs. She is not yet that thick in the waist, and she wears dresses without belts. But can Gerhard truly have not noticed that she is four months pregnant?

  But of course, he is the very definition of a selfish man. Anna moves to the chessboard by the window and turns on a lamp. The ivory and onyx squares glow. Perhaps Gerhard never really saw Max either, not as a human being, a fellow man with whom he might bend his head over these handsome pieces and engage in the strategies of small-scale, harmless warfare.

  She touches the crown of the white king. Thunder mutters, distant now.

  Think only of the future, she repeats. I suppose you're right. Gerhard nods.

  I'm so sorry, Vati, for the trouble I've caused you. I will make Hauptsturmfuhrer von Schoener a fine wife.

  That's my Anchen, says Gerhard.

  I'm tired now, Anna tells him. I'd like to lie down. Forgive me, but would you mind getting your own dinner? There is a pigeon pie in the icebox.

  Yes, yes, Gerhard says. He smiles, exuding an oily mixture of schnapps and forgiveness.

  Anna puts her cheek up to be pinched and leaves the study without looking back.

  In her bedroom, she switches on the lamp. Its shade is a globe of frosted glass, bumpy with little nodules. Her mother's choice, as are the flowered coverlet, the extravagant armoire. Nothing in the room is really Anna's. It is the impersonal chamber of somebody perpetually asleep.

  Anna takes her old school satchel from the armoire and packs three changes of clothes. There is no need to bring more; by this time next month, these dresses will not fit her. She adds her hairbrush and a pair of comfortable shoes. She burrows into the bottom drawer of the bureau and retrieves her christening gown, rustling between yellowed layers of tissue paper. Then she steals down the back staircase and runs from the Elternhaus through the servants' door.

  The road to Weimar is deserted, as gasoline is impossible to get without connections and it is long past curfew. The only vehicle that might pass now would belong to SS or Gestapo, and Anna has no desire to encounter either one. She quickens her pace, jumping at movements in the weeds, her palms slick. The night is moonless and black but for the occasional sullen flare of lightning on the horizon, over the hump of the Ettersberg where the camp is. On the outskirts of the city, the sounds of people's ordinary evenings drift from the houses: the thin cry of an infant, a sudden shout of laughter, a man calling to his wife for a glass of water. Anna hates them all.

  As she walks along, her dress clinging to her like bandaging, the poem comes to her. could it have been only twenty-four hours ago that she was in the stairwell, listening to Max recite it? He lay then with his arms crossed behind his head, eyes closed to invoke memory, unaware of Anna's smile as she watched him.

  Ah, love, let us be true to one another!

  ...And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  When Anna reaches her destination, she bypasses the front entrance and rustles through shrubbery to the back. There she taps on the sectioned wooden door. There is no response, no movement within, no flicker of light in a window. Anna whispers the verse into the humid air and waits. After three repetitions, she knocks again, harder this time, and is rewarded by a scuffling sound. Anna closes her eyes: she is still there, then, thank God; she hasn't been picked up and taken away, the only woman who can now help her. The door opens an inch to reveal the cautious, scowling face of Frau Mathilde Staudt.

  Trudy, November 1996

  8

  IT IS ONE OF THE GREAT IRONIES OF HER MOTHER'S LIFE, thinks Trudy Swenson, that of all the places to which Anna could have emigrated, she has ended up in a town not unlike the one she left behind. Of course, Weimar was and is much bigger than New Heidelburg, and it was once a government seat, and it provided a home to Goethe, Schiller, artists and museums. There is certainly no such sophistication about this little farm hamlet. But the countryside of southern Minnesota, through which Trudy is driving, resembles the land around Weimar: the same gentle hills and fields that former Buchenwald prisoners say could be seen from the camp. And Trudy imagines that the mentality of the two places is also similar. People ostensibly turning a blind eye to their neighbors' activities while really harvesting and analyzing every last detail of their lives. The ingredients for their dinners. The color of their underwear, purchased in the local Ben Franklin. Who is sick, who is well, who is adulterous. In the case of wartime Weimar, who had been taken away in the middle of the night.

  Here and now, also in the evening but an ocean away and fifty years later, Trudy is pushing the speed limit as much as she dares: seventy-five on the highway, thirty in the populated zones. These small towns are all speed traps, and the interstate is not much better. When she reaches the New Heidelburg limits she slows still further, though she is frantic with the need to press the accelerator to the floor. Crawling along Main Street, Trudy is aware of curtains twitching, of faces gathering at the windows of Chic's Pizza and Cathy's Chat'N'Chew. She pretends not to see them. She knows that not only her presence here but the reason for it will have traveled through the whole town by morning. In fact, Trudy can hear the conversations as clearly as if she were eavesdropping on the party line: Did you see Trudy Swenson was here today? Nooooo. But I did hear her mother tried to burn the house down. Oh, you know, I heard that same thing! I guess Miss Big-City Swenson'll finally have to put that old witch in the home.

  Trudy doesn't realize she has been holding her breath until she reaches the other side of New Heidelburg, at which point she lets it out in a foooooooof. The speedometer's red needle creeps upward as she passes the last stand of trees, the defunct golf course, the Catholic cemetery—the town's papists segregated from the Lutherans even in death—and a smattering of farms. Then there is nothing, until a few miles farther the New Heidelburg Health Clinic looms suddenly in Trudy's high beams. The big red brick building, along with the nursing home crouched beside it like a mongrel dog, is completely isolated from the rest of the town, as if not only illness but old age—its dementia and vacancy and bed-wetting—demands quarantine.

  Trudy turns into the clinic lot and parks, checking the dashboard clock. It is seven-thirty, two and a half hours since she received the call from Anna's caseworker. Trudy has made good time. She shuts off the engine and headlights and sits in the dark for a minute. Then she sighs, pulls her muffler up over her face, and sprints into the building.

  The hallway is quiet and dim, the check-in desk awash in fluorescence. As distracted by worry as Trudy is, the scene reminds her of a Hopper painting: the zone of bright light and the woman sitting alone in it, the distilled essence of isolation.

  The nurse looks up at Trudy's approach, inserting a finger in the paperback she is reading.

  Can I help you? she asks.

  I'm Trudy Swenson, says Trudy, slightly out of breath. My mother is here? Anna Schlemmer?

  The nurse nods and reaches for a folder in the hanging files in front of her.

  Room 113, she confirms. But visiting hours are over. You'll have to come back in the morning. I'm sorry, hon.

  No, please, says Trudy. I have to see her. I drove all the way from the Twin Cities. I came as quickly as I could—

  I'm sure you did, says the nurse. But I can't go against the rules. Your mom's in the trauma unit—

  Trauma! Trudy repeats. I was told the smoke inhalation was only minor!

  Well, that's true, says the nurse. There's nothing for you to be real concerned about. But at your mom's age, you know, we can't take any chances. That's why we're keeping her for observation.

  She gives Trudy a sympathetic smile. Why don't you get some rest yourself and come back tomorrow? That'd be best.

  Trudy stares at the nurse in frustration. For a moment she wonders whether the woman is delibera
tely barring her access to Anna—yet another slippery New Heidelburg trick. But no, although the nurse is about Trudy's age, Trudy has never seen her before. She is not from the town; she must live somewhere nearby, Rochester, maybe, or LaCrosse.

  Couldn't I just sit with her for a minute? Trudy persists.

  Listen, Mrs.—Swenson, is it?

  Doctor, corrects Trudy automatically.

  The nurse raises penciled brows.

  You're a doctor?

  Of history, Trudy says, smiling.

  The nurse regards her with some pity, and Trudy has the momentary and uncomfortable sensation of viewing herself as another might: a foolishly arrogant little blond woman in a pilled black overcoat, with a determined set to her jaw.

  Please, she says.

  The nurse sighs.

  I really shouldn't, she says. But ... All right. Just for a minute. This way.

  Trudy follows the nurse down the hall. The woman is short and stout, like the teapot. Everything about her, from her plump compact body to her easy-care perm, conveys a cozy capability. To distract herself from what might await her in the trauma ward, Trudy imagines the nurse's life: she has at least two grown children and several grandchildren; on weekends they come over with casseroles of hot dish and brats, which they eat in the rec room while the nurse's retired husband drinks Pig's Eye and watches the Vikings. There would be a basketball hoop on the garage. The nurse is everything Trudy has been raised to be and nothing whatsoever like the person Trudy has become.

  They stop in front of room 113.

  Remember, not too long with her now, warns the nurse. And try not to wake her. She needs her sleep.

  Thank you. I appreciate this.

  The nurse lays a hand on Trudy's arm. Trudy looks down at it, the short pink nails, the freckled flesh bulging on either side of the wedding and engagement rings.