The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  Anna bows her head over her woolen stockings, which she rolls slowly up her legs.

  Yes, she says. I understand.

  23

  THE OBERSTURMFÜHRER PROVES TO BE A MAN OF HIS WORD, a punctual man. He comes every Thursday evening, after the bakery is closed, often bearing some trinket: a bar of Belgian chocolate, a scarf, a tube of lipstick too bright for Anna. She stows these in a drawer of Mathilde's bureau after he leaves. But the gifts for Trudie she uses, the blue blanket of softest lamb's wool with sateen border, the warm red dress, the only spots of color in the bakery.

  They have developed a routine. The Obersturmführer makes a cursory inventory of the bakery's output, which is now picked up by a noncom on Friday mornings; he prowls about the kitchen while Anna gives Trudie the fresh milk he brings. She suspects that it is laced with a mild opiate to make the child sleep, but at least it is real, fatty and nourishing, not like the powdered stuff Anna must use now in her patrons' bread. When Trudie's eyelids begin to flutter, Anna leads her to her bed in the cellar. Then she and the Obersturmführer proceed upstairs. The heaviness of the silence is like being underwater.

  Beneath him on Mathilde's bed, lying completely still so as not to give offense, Anna makes a game of envisioning the lives she might have had if not for the war. She is in the sunny back garden of a house on the Rhine, the child squatting to watch a glittering line of ants in the dirt while Anna hangs laundry, the sheets snapping and fresh in the wind. Or: Curtains ripple at the window of a breakfast room, city traffic purrs on the street below; her husband stuffs an extra roll in his pocket and kisses Anna before rushing out the door. Perhaps these are her real lives, after all. The gray walls of the bakery, the cracks Anna traces in the ceiling beyond the Obersturmführer's shoulders: perhaps she is really asleep in a warm safe bed somewhere, twitching through the details of this recurring nightmare, this grinding existence that has become such a bad joke that she sometimes thinks she will laugh until she rips out her throat with her nails.

  Often, afterward, the Obersturmführer talks. He is irritated by his small, stuffy office, by the amount of paperwork he must cope with, by the pressure of forcing constant production from the munitions factory and the quarry. He is frustrated by the fact that, living at the camp, it's impossible for one to ever feel quite clean. It's not that I have direct contact with them, you understand, he explains, but the constant mud, and the Jews just have this dirty air about them; I swear it impregnates one's clothes, one's skin. Anna knows about the latter. The Obersturmführer's sweat emanates an odor much like woodsmoke except fattier, richer, as if he eats nothing but bacon; a smell that, despite herself, makes her stomach growl.

  But he rarely seems to expect a response, so when he first asks her a direct question, Anna is startled. It is a muggy August evening, the air tired and stale; Mathilde's bedroom is musty with the Obersturmführer's exertions and dust from the rugs. It smells like an attic unopened for years, and perhaps because of this Anna has been thinking not of her whitewashed breakfast room nor the sun of a summer garden but something cooler: strolling down a broad avenue lined with rows of linden trees, her toes hot and pinched in her shoes, strands of her damp hair clinging to the nape of her neck; spying a café, she sits in the shade at a wrought-iron table, eases her feet from her pumps and orders an icy drink, something with a slice of lemon in it. She sips it while gazing at the passersby, her mind blank.

  The Obersturmführer repeats his question, not without a note of impatience.

  Pardon? says Anna.

  He sighs in exasperation and runs a thumb over the stretch marks on Anna's soft belly.

  I said, how did you come to be in this position? You've no husband; you don't wear a ring.

  The war, Anna says. There wasn't time.

  The Obersturmführer nods. But you're from a good family; that's obvious from your breeding. They didn't take you in?

  My father didn't think much of the match, Anna tells him. He drove me from the house. Frau Staudt gave me room and board in exchange for labor.

  Ach, fathers, the Obersturmführer says. He crosses his arms behind his head and smiles at the ceiling, which is lost in the darkening room. I know about fathers. Did I ever tell you about mine?

  It is as if they are real lovers, sharing pillow talk. Next he will offer her a cigarette. For a vertiginous moment, Anna thinks she might laugh.

  The Obersturmführer digs in his ear and absently examines his finger. A stupid little man, he says, a nothing really, a weakspined dilettante who never did a day's honest work in his life, but always throwing his weight around as if he were God. Horst, bring me the newspaper! Horst, where are my cigars? He used to beat my brother and me with a belt if we didn't move fast enough to suit him.

  Horst? Anna moves her lips, silently tasting the Obersturmführer 's Christian name. It has a dark feel in the mouth, a little thorny. Then she realizes he is waiting for her to say something. She makes a noise in her throat.

  One day I took the belt from him, the Obersturmführer continues. I must have been fifteen, sixteen—he didn't realize until then how big I'd become. I threw it across the room and said, Let's go, then, let's fight. But I promise you only one of us will get up, and it won't be you. He never touched me after that.

  Anna glances sideways at him.

  He still had egg in his mustache from breakfast, the Obersturmführer says reflectively.

  Then he pushes her legs apart again.

  Maybe we shouldn't, Anna ventures. My—monthly flow is beginning.

  And this is true: she feels the cramps, her womb a big dumb fist clenching and easing in slow waves, ignorant as to what goes on outside.

  The Obersturmführer pauses for a second before flashing Anna his ersatz grin.

  Then I'll remove my clothes, he says.

  Without the chafe of worsted trousers against Anna's thighs, without the Obersturmführer's shirt buttons branding her face, the ordeal isn't as painful as it usually is. The slippery sensation of skin on skin, the unexpected breezes, shock Anna. She blinks in an effort to summon the café of her daydream, the leaves on the linden trees turning up their silvery undersides, but the Obersturmführer, watching her, thrusts a hand between her legs. He works diligently at a kernel of sensitive flesh, and Anna's interior muscles clutch in spasms. She can't prevent herself from letting out a yelp. This is not supposed to happen, this has never happened to her before.

  From the doorway, there is an answering cry: Mama?

  Still pinioned, Anna rolls her head to the right and sees Trudie standing there, arms and braids akimbo. In Anna's impatience to get this over with, she has been careless in ensuring that the child finish her milk. She should have known Trudie would disobey and climb the steps.

  Go downstairs! Anna tries to call.

  But before she can draw the necessary breath, the Obersturmführer says, Shit! Without withdrawing, he leans halfway off the bed and grabs one of his boots from the floor. He hurls it at Trudie; it thuds against the wall near the door, leaving a black mark. Anna hears the child's wooden soles clopping quickly, unevenly, down the risers. The Obersturmführer continues his business. When he levers himself up and out of Anna, she sees her blood clotted in his pubic hair, smeared on his stomach.

  In ominous silence, the Obersturmführer cleans himself with a handkerchief and then offers it to Anna. She shakes her head. He departs quickly, slamming the door, leaving Anna to collect his boots before she too descends to the bakery.

  She looks for her daughter in the kitchen while fetching the brush and boot polish the Obersturmführer has brought her, but Trudie isn't in any of her usual hiding places. Anna finds her instead in the storefront, wedged behind the display case. The Obersturmführer stands in front of the child, fists on hips; when he bends over her, she shrinks farther into her corner, staring.

  Why are you hiding back there? he asks. Don't you want to see what I've got for you?

  Anna, buffing the boots, watches Trudie shake her head.r />
  From his briefcase, the Obersturmführer produces a pair of red child's shoes, actual leather. He sighs.

  What a shame, he says. I suppose I'll have to find another little girl to give these to.

  The child says nothing, but she extends a hand toward the shoes. Then she draws it back as if they might burn her.

  I wonder if these would fit you, the Obersturmführer says, dangling the shoes by the straps at Trudie's eye level. What do you think?

  The child nods. The Obersturmführer sets the shoes on the floor and ruffles Trudie's hair. Then he turns to Anna, beckoning with two fingers. She hands his boots over in silence. They are three sizes too big for him, Anna knows. His masculine vanity won't permit public display of his childlike feet.

  Next week, he says, standing.

  After Anna unlocks the door and latches it behind him, she draws the curtain aside to watch him go. She can barely make him out, a dark shape in the dark. Whenever he leaves, the night seems blacker than it is, a solid thing pressing against the windows.

  She lets the curtain fall.

  You must never come upstairs when the man is here, do you understand? she says to Trudie.

  But Mama—

  Never! Because ... Anna gropes at sudden inspiration. He's Saint Nikolaus; do you remember what I told you about Saint Nikolaus? He doesn't like to be seen.

  Trudie frowns.

  But it's not Christmas, she says.

  That doesn't matter. Saint Nikolaus has magical powers; he can do whatever he wants. He travels the world year-round, looking for good little girls. And if you're a bad girl and try to see him, do you know what will happen?

  No more red shoes? Trudie whispers, gazing at them.

  A rotten taste thickens Anna's saliva to the consistency of aspic. This has always happened to her, periodically and for no apparent reason. No amount of throat-clearing can get rid of it; if she waits, it will usually disappear on its own. Yet now this feeling isn't just in her mouth. Tainted gray jelly clings to her like a membrane. It is beneath her skin, inside and out, invisible and foul.

  That's right, she says to her daughter. She scrubs her arms with both hands, shivering, although there isn't a hint of a breeze. No more milk. No more red shoes.

  24

  ANNA LEARNS A GREAT DEAL FROM THE Obersturmführer, the first thing being that, postcoitus, he talks talks talks talks talks, a broken faucet from which words pour instead of water. From this, she conjectures that either superior rank precludes private conversation or that the Obersturmführer's peers do not like him well enough to listen.

  She learns the difference between Hinkelmann and Blank, although she will never truly be able to separate them: in her mind, they remain a single murderous demigod, vaudevillian and double-faced, blithely dispensing death. In actuality, however, Hinkelmann is the taller fellow, while Blank is the squat bureaucrat, and the former has been considered so effective at his job that he has been awarded promotional transfer to a camp called Mauthausen, where there is a bigger stone quarry.

  She learns that the quarry is considered the worst work detail, and that for this reason, to avoid mutinous dissatisfaction, the guards are rotated fortnightly. The prisoners refer to one of the current crop as Gretel because of his feminine prettiness, while another is known as Lard Ass, for equally obvious reasons; it is said that they have a particular friendship, though nothing of the sort can be proven. In any case, the Obersturmführer adds, one never takes such rumors seriously, as they are either fairy tales or downright malicious. He turns a deaf ear to the prisoners' nicknaming the guards, though in other camps their doing so might be considered treason. It is good for them to feel that they have some modicum of power, he explains; this allows them to blow off steam and keeps them from perpetuating other, more serious mischief.

  Anna further learns that the Obersturmführer was, before the war, a telegram delivery boy and then a police officer. That during the war, he served first at the front, during which he earned decorations for bravery and the craterlike wound in his right shoulder, and secondly in the Einsatzgruppen, the SS mobile death units in Poland. From his description of these glorious but trying days, she learns that the Jews there went meekly to their liquidation. How, the Obersturmführer asks rhetorically, can one respect a race such as that? We Germans, he says, we place a high premium on obedience, of course, but not at the expense of bravery.

  She learns that the Obersturmführer's mother, unable to stomach his father's tyranny or perhaps simply faithless, ran off with a traveling salesman of wigs; that the Obersturmführer reported his father, his childhood nemesis, to the Gestapo as having had repeated sexual congress with a Jewish woman, which, although untrue, earned the man a prolonged stay in KZ Dachau. That the Kommandant of KZ Buchenwald, Koch, does have a Jewish mistress, but nobody dares say a word, of course. That the Obersturmführer sometimes suffers wretchedly from insomnia brought on by the stresses and contradictions of his work, and at these times, nothing but hot milk with pepper in it will soothe him.

  Much of this information Anna discards, for it is useless stuff. The prisoners will not benefit from it, and as for herself, whom would she tell, and to what purpose? However, she does remember the SS designation for the crime she and Mathilde have committed: füttern den Feind, feeding the enemy, punishable, as has been made all too obvious, by death. Anna thinks of the phrase every time she delivers bread to the quarry, which she does every Wednesday evening. It is madness, of course, given her liaison with the Obersturmführer. Why, then, Anna asks herself, as she stuffs rolls into the trunk of the tree, does she continue to do it? Unlike Mathilde, it can't be a subliminal urge toward suicide. If it were just her, Anna, the option might seem appealing, but there is Trudie to consider; everything Anna does, including yielding to the Obersturmführer's demands, is for Trudie. Except for these Special Deliveries: they are less for the prisoners than a way for Anna to convince herself that she is more than a whore, a whim, a plaything; they forge a link with the recent past, during which, though it was unpleasant in many respects, she at least felt human.

  So, on Wednesdays, Anna gives Trudie some of the Obersturmführer's narcotic milk, which she has been careful to store in the icebox from the week before, and she makes the Special Delivery to the quarry and hurries back to the bakery to cook the drowsy child's dinner. Thus far, everything has gone like clockwork, but on this particular Wednesday, Anna is late. She has lingered overlong at the quarry, hypnotized into stupid reverie by the sight of the prisoners, hoping against hope to find Max among them. Her flight back through the woods thus takes place in the dark, and as Anna runs, the phrase plays over and over in her mind: füttern den Feind, füttern den Feind, like the opening bars of a catchy waltz, The Blue Danube perhaps. Clumsy in her haste, she snags a foot on a root, wrenches her right ankle, and falls headlong into the dirt.

  And when she finally limps through the back door of the bakery, calling reassurance to her daughter, Anna sees to her horror that the Obersturmführer is there. He stands with his arms crossed in the center of the kitchen, a monolith, while Trudie sits red-faced and crying in the corner. Anna hobbles to the child and lifts her. My God, is it Thursday already? How could she have made such a fatal mistake? It can't be; Frau Buchholtz came for her weekly bread this morning, as she does on Wednesdays, always on Wednesdays, or has she altered her schedule? Or has the Obersturmführer acted on uncharacteristic impulse and changed his instead? If it is indeed Wednesday, what is he doing here?

  Not that this matters: he is here, impassively watching the maternal scene.

  Where were you? he asks, when Trudie's squalling has trailed off into snuffles and hitches.

  I? says Anna idiotically. I was—Well, the child is sick, you see, with stomach pains, she's been complaining of them all week, so I—I ran to the doctor for medicine.

  The Obersturmführer eyes her from head to toe, his scrutiny doing a much more eloquent job of indicating Anna's torn dress, her scratched and dirt-staine
d hands, than if he had pointed at or touched them.

  Flushing, Anna turns away to help Trudie climb onto her chair.

  I tripped and fell, she says; I was in such a hurry that I caught my heel in a grate, and I—

  Because her back is to him, Anna doesn't know the Obersturmführer has crossed the room until she feels his gloved hand on her neck. His kidskin fingers dig into the soft troughs behind her ears, making Anna's arms instantly numb. She gasps.

  I won't stand being lied to, the Obersturmführer says, shaking Anna by the nape as though she were a puppy. Her teeth clack painfully together. I won't tolerate falsehoods, Anna, do you hear?

  I—wasn't—lying—Anna stutters between shakes. She pulls at his hands, but his grip is like a manacle. I went—to the doctor—I swear!

  In her peripheral vision, Anna sees Trudie watching quietly from the table, which upsets her more than if the child had been screaming.

  The Obersturmführer releases Anna and she stumbles, the wounded ankle sending up a flare of pain.

  Get upstairs, he says.

  Please—can I at least give her the medicine—some milk—

  Now.

  The Obersturmführer seizes Anna by the arm and half propels, half drags her toward the staircase.

  It's all right, little rabbit, she calls gaily to Trudie over her shoulder. You stay here. I'll be down soon—

  In Mathilde's bedroom, Anna backs to the window. Despite the time of year, the weather is still deceptively hot; the curtains hang limp as bandaging, and Anna wishes like a child that she could hide behind them. The Obersturmführer closes the door quietly, with finality.

  Get undressed, he says.

  Please, Herr Obersturmführer, the child truly is sick, you heard her crying when you came in, she—

  I don't have time for this, the Obersturmführer says. Your clothes.

  He flicks a finger and sits on the bed, watching as Anna obeys. Inept with fear, she has trouble undoing her garters. When she dares glance up, the Obersturmführer is leaning forward, the familiar greedy look in his ghostly eyes.