The German Woman

by Paul Griner

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?” he added.

  Those around her quieted. She felt herself blushing. “No, why?”

  “I could give you milk with the coffee then.”

  She laughed with relief. “No, but thank you. I didn’t expect it. And I’m fine. I’ve been in Poland. Milk is plentiful there.”

  “You see,” the heavier man said to his companion. “The Poles eat better than us now.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t come to us before,” the waiter said. “We used to serve the best stew in the city. Even six months ago it had real meat.”

  A church clock struck five thirty, its somber bells sonorous in the frigid air, which seemed to vibrate in the dark. She was going to be late if she walked; she had enough coins left, so she decided to take a tram. The other people waiting for it were oddly dressed, the men especially: military trousers and civilian jackets, civilian trousers and military caps, military greatcoats over overalls. She leaned out and looked down the tracks, then settled back to wait. Others were apparently used to waiting; several began a dice game, hazard or craps, which reminded her of London, where, during her training, she’d twice found dice in a patient’s stomach under the fluoroscope. Both times, they’d been lookouts at gambling dens and had swallowed them when the police came.

  The tram appeared around the distant corner, bell clanging, car shimmying, the overhead cable sparking. It stopped smoothly before her, the doors swung open, and just as she was about to step forward, men cut in front of her to climb on. Was it just the dark that brought out the worst in people? She waited her turn quietly.

  A giant bearded fellow wearing mismatched boots let three nuns in habits get on, but when two older women started forward he held out his arm to block them. “Not you,” he said. “Walk.”

  They turned without protest and Kate started to join them, hoping Horst wouldn’t grow too worried.

  “You,” the man said, his raised voice making Kate shiver. He dropped his arm. “You’re all right. You can ride.”

  No one offered her a seat. The collector pushed through the crowded tram, bypassing the men and charging women varying amounts, and Kate waited for him nervously, wondering what would happen if she didn’t have sufficient money. But he simply glanced at her and pushed on.

  The bearded man said, “Your coat.”

  Was he asking her for it? She pulled back. “Pardon me?”

  “It’s military. High command, from the looks of it. If you have anything military on, you ride for free.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” She noticed for the first time his army tunic.

  He spit a mouthful of sunflower seeds on her boots and worked his tongue around his yellow teeth. “He must have thought you were a military nurse.”

  “I was.” She opened the coat, showing her nurse’s uniform.

  He spit another pile of seeds on her boots and shrugged. “Perhaps. Everyone would like to have been in the military now.”

  Outside the Adlon with its grand flapping flags another pacifist was hawking his wares; inside, its luxurious lighted lobby was crowded and noisy with well-dressed guests, the raised voices a mixture of French, English, and Italian. The victors’ hotel. Horst sat beneath the overhanging leaves of a huge palm potted in a massive brass urn, moving his foot nervously back and forth over the burgundy carpet, looking like an interloper. Until the last months he would have looked as though he owned the place.

  He jumped up when he saw her. “Where were you?” His angry tone meant his trip had not been successful. How could it have been? He’d had nothing with which to identify himself even if the bank had been open, and little to trade or barter; on the train, the engineer had eventually claimed his surgical instruments. All they had left now was the porter’s coat and Horst’s cigarette case.

  “Walking,” she said, and shrugged. “I’m sorry. I lost track of the time.”

  “No,” he said, his shoulders slumping. “I’m sorry. I was worried, that’s all.”

  If she could get him back toward Potsdamer Platz, she could buy him something to eat and his mood would change; she had enough left for a small meal. He was going to be so happy. She plunged her hand into her pocket and pulled out coins and the flyer for the costume ball. “We could get you something to eat, then have a bit of life.”

  They’d come to Berlin because the train was headed there; Horst had gone to the bank to get some money. Now they had to do what they could; she hoped he understood.

  He smiled, a younger, more spontaneous self. “Yes, let’s.”

  As they climbed the old wooden stairway, they heard a Mozart waltz shift abruptly to a cabaret song, which was itself soon overtaken by an odd assemblage of sounds like metal and wood being struck random blows. The musical battle went back and forth until they reached the top, where a hand-painted yellow sign over the doorway read: ENTERING THE REPUBLIC OF DADA.

  Waves of smoke rolled out when the doors opened, smelling like burning stubble, and the bright, large room was low-ceilinged and overly warm after the biting cold, but Kate resisted the urge to remove her coat. There was no one to hold it for her, and even if there had been she wouldn’t have trusted she’d ever see it again; some smart Pole ready to take advantage of her. Better to be too hot for an hour than cold for days on end, best of all to be quick.

  People crowded in wearing outrageous costumes, bits of pieced-together fabric, an enormously fat John Bull, a tall thin woman with a gigantic raven’s head perched on her narrow shoulders, Russian grand dukes who might have been real, country people with their wooden shoes, one man wearing the tall lacquered hat of a cabman. Three bands seemed to duel from a huge makeshift stage, a classical quartet and a more ragged assembly of wind instruments and then a group of people holding trash-can lids and saws. The room swirled with activity, one group of people sitting and listening as the classical musicians played and then standing to dance to the cabaret songs, another, dressed in more traditional costumes, doing the reverse, and a third group moving about the floor in an odd shuffle that looked like nothing so much as shell shock.

  Just inside the door, a man dressed in a peculiar assemblage of cardboard pieces grabbed Horst by the sleeve.

  “Very professional,” he said. “Herr Doktor.” To Kate he said, “And you?”

  She opened her coat to show her uniform.

  “A nurse, good. Stick close then.” He pointed out a man wearing a mass of pink feathers. “That man there is a hemorrhoid, and I’m an influenza germ.”

  “That’s rather morbid,” Kate said.

  He stepped back as if surprised. “You think so? But God created me, you see. A new plague. I’m killing young women mostly, which I need to do.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I should think it obvious.” He turned away, and as he disappeared into the heaving crowd called back, “To even out the war’s imbalance.”

  Horst leaned close to make himself heard over the noise. His breath was warm on her ear. “It looks like we’ve let ourselves in for quite a night.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I only wish we could get something to drink.”

  “We can,” he said, and showed her a few coins.

  “Where did you get them?” Five or six marks; it looked a fortune. Why hadn’t he shown her when they’d been eating?

  He shrugged. “I’ve talents you’ve never dreamed of. I wanted to surprise you.”

  He wasn’t going to tell her, but she had a hunch. While still taking in the fantastic costumes—the man across from her wearing an outfit made entirely from corn shucks dyed a deep blue—she asked Horst for a cigarette.

  “Yes, certainly,” he said, and hurried away after the cigarette girl. She’d been right, then; he’d sold his silver cigarette case to raise money. She wondered if he’d been planning to sell it all along or had only done so upon finding the bank closed. Well, she wouldn’t spoil his pleasure by letting him know she realized what he’d done.

  The string ensemble was finishi
ng a waltz, but before it did the band next to it—of saws and bamboo poles and trash-can lids—began one of its cacophonous numbers. No one really danced to it, though some women in absurd costumes and yellow- or green-painted faces got up and moved about in odd, rectilinear patterns, while two men took the stage and began reciting poems. Or she supposed they were poems, it was hard to tell; now and then the men would raise their voices, but when they spoke normally their words seemed arranged in meter. Even then they seemed thoroughly angry.

  When they finished, the cacophony started again, and Kate asked a woman dressed as a fish what kind of music it was.

  “Dada,” the woman said, as if Kate should know what that meant.

  She nodded her thanks and turned back to the stage, where the cabaret band was now playing. She felt most comfortable with classical music, and the odd assemblage of musicians made no sense, but as she listened to the cabaret tunes she came to find them intriguing and pleasingly unfettered, a contrast with the classical music, which started to feel almost constrained.

  Horst returned with two jam jars full of punch and handed her one before turning to the stage, keeping time to the music with a tapping foot.

  “I rather like this band,” he said at last, and raised his jar in salute. “Here’s to the birth of the new!” His voice was loud in her ear, but she leaned in to it and put her palm to his shirt front, he seemed so excited.

  Before she could sip her drink a short man in a threadbare tuxedo asked her to dance, and Horst, bowing, took her drink back and let her be led off by the older man. He was so short he barely came up to her breasts, and it was disconcerting to have him staring at them, even more disconcerting that he spoke not a word to her as they swirled around the floor, but in a way his peculiar silence was a pleasant distraction, taking her mind from the difficulty of dancing in boots.

  Her attention wandered to the stage, where a man in a red suit was trying to set fire to the curtains. He was tackled, the curtains doused, and then the music and laughter grew louder and another man took the stage and began reading a nonsense poem with his face hidden by a cardboard tube. Kate excused herself from her partner, who was staring now at the stage, and made her way back toward Horst, first getting sidetracked by two Japanese dressed in tennis whites who were playing chess on a table they carried with them, one darting away after each move to pluck cigarette butts from the floor, and then by a man dressed as a carpenter who was balancing wooden planks on his shoulder. He was clearing a path and all other avenues seemed blocked, so Kate followed him to a corner, where a dozen freshly made coffins were stacked.

  He shrugged the wood from his shoulder, and Kate asked him if it wasn’t a lot of work for a costume.

  “It’s not a costume,” he said, and took a plane from his denim apron and checked its edge with his thumb. “This is my workshop.”

  It seemed absurd. But the wood, the tools, the line of coffins against the wall; they were all real. “You don’t mind a dance here?”

  “No,” he said, and bent with one eye closed to inspect his work. “I enjoy it, really. My job recently, it’s all this.” He gestured at the coffins. “I like to think of other things too.”

  She felt a sharp certainty that the patients they’d left behind in Wilno had been murdered, and she stepped away, back to the music, hoping to find Horst and wanting to leave, but she ran into a group of half a dozen men dressed as officers—and who bore themselves like real officers, backs rigidly straight, uniforms impeccably clean—all blind, traces of their wounds showing behind dark glasses. The next song, a waltz, set them moving, and she turned away so as not to stare, then laughed at herself and watched them.

  Shortly it became apparent that they were happy. They were smoking cigarettes and, in one case, a real cigar—whose scent she found indescribably pleasing after the foul cabbage ones—and dancing beautifully whenever the string quartet played, seemingly untroubled by fears of running into others around them, twirling their partners expertly to the three-beat measures of Strauss and Mozart. And why shouldn’t they be happy? Even if the war was still on in the east, it was no longer their war; they deserved some joy, a feeling that seemed almost universal in the city after years of privation. She had much to learn from them.

  Horst was talking earnestly to an older woman wearing a top hat and little else. Kate caught his eye and took him away. After two dances they sat to rest.

  “Oh, Horst,” she said, and squeezed his hand. “It seems wicked to enjoy ourselves so much.”

  “Yes, doesn’t it? But you know,” he said, “it’s almost feverish, the feeling I have. My God, these Berliners, they know how to live.”

  The music started again and her sense of joy grew. What had restraint and discipline got them? Millions dead, millions of others’ lives blighted. Just live. She decided to dance to every number, and when Horst grew tired and his legs stiff, she danced with the blind officers, one after the other in a blur.

  They laughed, they guided her expertly, they had a young woman smelling of eau de cologne in their arms and if they couldn’t see it was perhaps all the better; she could be every woman they’d ever desired. As for herself, she strode among them, enjoying the reversal of roles, the ability to tap another woman on the shoulder—the woman wearing a papier-mâché raven head, the elderly one in the top hat—to choose her partner.

  After an hour, hot and out of breath, she decided to sit down again, but the quartet struck the quiet rising opening notes of the Blue Danube waltz—the calls of a distant horn answered by the same notes repeated more loudly on strings, and she remembered how when she’d first heard it she’d danced to it in her own room with only a hairbrush to hold as a partner—and then the glorious swirl of its theme began, and her feet were sliding across the sawdusted floor, circling around the axis of her tall, blind partner again and again; she wanted it not to end. The song flowed on like the river, passing in swirling majesty the rocky outcroppings along the banks near Vienna, rising and falling and rising and falling until it reached the tremulous bars of the pause near the end, where the music seemed about to stop while flowing on more quietly, nearly disappearing and then growing gloriously loud again before its final complete stop left her breathless and thrilled and slightly bereft.

  She sat cooling herself by a drafty window, coat thrown open, listening to a man dressed as a palm tree going on about the joys and wonders of the Soviet revolution.

  “Food for every person in Russia, every day. And real food. Nothing ersatz.”

  Two other men stood by, one dressed as a boxer, the other wearing huge spectacles, the rims of which were two small toilet seats. The boxer said, “Just enough bread so no one forgets what it smells like.” The second one said, “Yes, and with all the people they’ve killed, they have plenty for those few left.”

  “Lies,” the palm-tree man said. “Spread by your capitalist brothers.”

  Suddenly, yet so slowly it seemed she could have reached out and stopped him, the boxer punched the palm tree in the nose, bloodying him. Kate ministered to him, tilting his head back to stop the flow and wiping it dry with one of his green linen fronds.

  “Real blood!” the boxer exclaimed, pointing with his padded thumb at spots on her uniform. “Nothing fake about that. Now you’re going to win the contest!”

  Someone came on stage and held up his arms for quiet, shouting that he had an announcement, and silence radiated out from the stage in waves. When at last it was quiet enough, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. There will be no contest. We haven’t a prize to offer.”

  “Liar!” the boxer said, and pushed toward him. Infuriated, other members of the crowd began to scream and throw things—hats, a shoe, a hammer. The speaker ignored them and began reciting Heine’s “Lorelei.” Kate left the palm-tree man with his head tilted back and made her way toward Horst as someone broke a chair and threw a leg at the stage and others began to swear at the poem reader. Then a giant man on stilts duc
ked into the room, his flat level body stretched five or six feet above the floor, an outsize Jew with taped-on side curls and a ridiculous beard, his enormous old coat shiny with wear.

  The recitation stopped as the man on stilts made his rounds, swooping and darting, making the crowd ooh and aah as if at fireworks, looming over them all. Greedily, he sank his face into the punch bowl from a height of ten feet in one dizzying lunge, then stood and moved off, picking up giant rag dolls from the corner of the room, two and three at a time, pretending to dance with them and then throwing them into the crowd when he was done.

  Closer to Kate, he lifted the hems of women’s dresses and stole a wallet from the coat pocket of a passed-out drunk, and people began to whisper as he stood swaying by the stage and holding up his arms. “Be calm,” he said. “Everyone, be calm. We do have prizes, just outside. Stay here and I’ll bring them back.”

  He tucked himself in half and ducked through the opposite door, and people waited. One minute, two, three. Kate found herself unbearably excited. What was he going to bring? And when would he return? At last murmurs began; a man went after him and came back, shouting, “He’s gone!”

  The crowd surged after him. Horst went too, and Kate followed, and just as she reached him she was stopped by a heavy hand on her shoulder.

  “Wait, you two!”

  It was the boxer, holding a wooden crate. “You see,” he said. “I told you. The winners!” Inside was a large ball of butter surrounded by a dozen eggs nestled in straw.

  “But why us?”

  “Why not?”

  Horst took the box from him and held it as if it were a newborn, and Kate covered it with her coat. “So others don’t see what’s inside it,” she said, angling him toward the street, “and so nothing breaks.”