by Paul Griner
“You must let him go with her. It’s good for him.”
“I know. But I worry he’ll fall.”
“Which he knows. He must do some things without being watched.”
Kate’s face turned warm as she blushed. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t try to mother him. He doesn’t need it.”
“No.” Mrs. Zweig touched her arm. “Sometimes he does. But it will only work if he allows it.”
From her purse, Mrs. Zweig pulled a few hundred marks. “If you pass a butcher’s and the lines aren’t too long, see if you can find some meat.”
Kate put the money in her own bag and said she would.
“And then I want you to take the afternoon to yourself.”
“Mother, I can’t. Where would I go?”
“Where doesn’t matter. You need time away from us.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You must. It’s not healthy to have to care so much for us. That and the hospital are all you do.”
“He’s my husband!”
“And my son. But I can see how he wears on you.”
It was true, blindness had changed Horst. During the war Kate had chastised him for his occasional solitary walks because they put him in considerable danger, but now, though she hated to admit it, his constant insistence on solitude was wearying. More than a few times she’d delayed coming home when her shift was done, explaining her late arrival by extra work. She did not want to pity him, as pity was dangerous. Today she was glad they would walk; the cold air and sunshine often drove such gloomy thoughts from her mind in a way that nothing else did, not music, not work, not church, where they only intensified—the dark, the cold, the morbid deep notes of the organ. She found comfort in the open air instead.
As if she’d read Kate’s mind, Mrs. Zweig pulled out from behind her a pair of new shoes. Leather, shiny. Kate couldn’t imagine what they would have cost, or what she could have sold to buy them. Not the violin—it had been her husband’s and was the one thing she wouldn’t part with—or the medical texts, and not furniture; they had only two chairs left, and all the spare beds were gone, and the armoires had been the first to go. What, then? She couldn’t ask, and Mrs. Zweig wouldn’t tell.
She was afraid to touch them. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing, child. Just try them on.”
“Where could you have bought them? No one in the city has shoes.”
“I have my connections. Please, hurry,” she said, her face excited.
They fit beautifully. Kate turned her foot in the light. And she would be done with those horrible boots from the east.
“But they’re extravagant!”
“Enjoy them, child,” her mother-in-law said.
“They should be yours.”
“No. I’m not out as much as you, and they’re your size, not mine.”
There was nothing more to say. Kate hugged her silently and turned away.
They steered first for the Hotel Atlantic, their normal route—stumbling or falling was less likely if Horst knew where they were going—the cold wind off the lake numbing their faces. Kate tucked her chin into her coat and wrapped her arms around Marie, and they made their difficult way through the piled snow past the gabled hotel front, where all was quiet at three in the afternoon. Formerly, even at midnight it had been all light and gay. In August 1914, they’d stayed in rooms overlooking the lake, to help get over the shock of their departure from England and while awaiting Horst’s medical posting. Then the hotel’s shores had been lined with willows and roses, white sails and swans, and peaches had floated in the bottoms of champagne glasses. Now all the swans had been eaten, champagne was reserved for the foreign rich, and peaches were from a past so distant they seemed imaginary.
They turned toward the esplanade and the botanical gardens, past a row of grand houses where roosters crowed from basements, and Horst asked, “Has our route varied? We seem to be near carpenters,” he said.
“Sawdust,” Kate said. “It’s the trees. They’re being cut down.” The trees in all the parks had already been denuded by the hungry, and now they were being cut down for wood.
“Our fires have been warmer recently,” he said.
“Thanks to the parks.”
He smiled. “Well, good. It’s nice to put them to use. Do we have enough?”
“Some.”
“It was stolen,” Marie said.
“No,” Horst said. “We’re just borrowing it. The trees will grow back. By the time you’re my age, it will look as though they’d never been gone.”
“No, not that,” Marie said. “I mean from Aunt Kate. The wood plunderers.”
He turned to Kate for clarification.
“The last load I gathered, they took from me. On my way home. It was nothing.”
She didn’t want Horst to fret; it always made him feel powerless. Marie’s next interruption saved Kate from having to. She pointed to a male pigeon with a proud purple chest strutting beside a female over the dirty snow and said, “Look at that!”
Horst turned his head in the right direction and laughed. Kate set her down and let her toddle after them, wanting Marie to strengthen her legs by walking.
“How did you know it was funny?” Kate asked.
“Her tone. She was shrieking with delight.”
“Very good,” she said, and took his cold face between her hands. “I’ll have to watch my step around you, won’t I, Horst Zweig?”
“And the wood plunderers,” he said. But he smiled to show her he wasn’t worried. “My God,” he said. “Wood plunderers. What kind of world have we created?”
“One where I can do this in public,” she said, and leaned forward and kissed him.
“And to what do I owe that honor?” he said.
“Nothing. I’m just happy.”
“Ah,” he said. “The shoes.”
“That obvious?”
“They sound different. Squeaky. And the smell. I don’t recognize it. Leather?”
“I think so.” She lifted one. “Your mother is very kind.”
“Too kind, perhaps.”
“Horst!”
“No. Not those. I’m happy about them. The coal. She needs to be a bit more cold-hearted, really. She can’t go giving it away to the porter.”
Kate thought of the porter’s injured hand. “She’s not, Horst. He deserved it. And don’t worry. Your mother is fiercer than you think.”
The tram whirred down the street toward them, ringing its bell.
“Shall we ride today?” Horst said.
“I think not.”
“Your coat should get us a free ride,” Horst said. Then, as if an idea had just come to him, he reached out to touch her arm. “You still have it, yes?”
She let his fingers work over the wool. “I’d rather walk. For Marie.”
“But she doesn’t walk, you carry her. It’s the smell, isn’t it?”
“Horst.” But it was. Wasting flesh, starving riders, it was too much to endure, although everything else about the ride was more civilized than it had been in Berlin, in Hamburg, even, months before. People were more polite to women, the soldiers and sailors no longer so bold; revolution had not been quite what people had expected.
They circled around the queue, and Marie pointed out a soup kitchen as they passed. “It’s the one Kate eats at.”
“What’s that?” Horst said.
“Marie,” Kate said, “you have too much of an imagination.” To distract her, she pointed out a series of lurid posters on the wall, which turned out to be anti-Semitic.
“What are those about?” Marie asked. “They look scary.”
“Nothing,” Kate said. “Foolishness, put up by bitter soldiers.”
Over the next blocks Horst fell silent, and Kate guessed he was working out that she did indeed eat at the soup kitchen, that on her frequent night walks after she’d said she wasn’t hungry or occasionally when she went out with Marie, this was where she s
topped. He would be ashamed, picturing her producing her ration card for coffee and food. The brown, tasteless liquid and the watery bean soup, and the place itself, dirty tables and a dirtier floor, dirty plates and cups and bowls and dirty people. How could they not be? There was no soap, no hot water, and heating was nearly impossible. If they hadn’t their extra coal, they would be dirty too.
Yet she wasn’t ashamed; she’d come a long way from Berlin. However meager, the soup provided some nourishment, and she couldn’t afford to give it up; it made the food at home go that much farther. What would they think if she went in now with new shoes? No matter; she didn’t have to. She’d had an egg, and next time she was out she wouldn’t wear them.
They turned a corner and Horst stopped abruptly. “Wait,” he said. A cab coming from a side street made him hesitate, and he patted his forehead as if trying to remember something until he was sure it had passed, a gesture Kate recognized; it was how he bought himself time.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Now we can go.”
Closer to the port the neighborhoods grew shabbier, and the nauseating smell of soaking cod leaked from the buildings, even with all their windows shut against the cold. Kate held her nose, depressed by it as always, but grew happier when they heard their first foreign accents among the sailors, English, French, Yiddish, and Spanish. Horst turned his head at each, liking to pick them out, and began sniffing the air. The prostitutes could afford perfume, of course, but it was the cargo from the ships lingering on the various sailors that he was really detecting: coke and ash, manure and straw; one even smelled of licorice.
“You’re like a hound,” Kate said, which made him laugh.
He sped up now, head down, hands in his pockets; he’d counted the streets and knew the number of steps for each block. He liked to be independent, to fool people into thinking he could see, hated how people yelled at the blind as if they were also deaf, hated even more when they spoke to Kate as if he weren’t there. “He should become a piano tuner,” one well-meaning neighbor had said. “Many of them are blind.” Horst had looked as though he wanted to strike her. At the bar he was always comfortable, enjoying the company of other crippled former soldiers; blind or deaf, missing limbs. The Zokor. Affectionately, he called it the “house of the damned.”
It was smoky and raucous, and Kate pushed her way through the crowd, pleased to see von Hoppe sitting on a stool by the billiards table. She could leave Horst safely in his company, and Horst would be happy. They made quite a pair, Horst tall and thin, with his broad straight forehead and narrow nose and his lank blond hair made lanker by poor nutrition, and the squat, stout von Hoppe, whom even hunger hadn’t thinned.
“Theodore,” she said, and von Hoppe turned and gave a mock bow. “Frau Zweig. How good of you to come.”
He appeared to have a sun emblazoned on his face, a perpetual reminder of his luck and his stupidity, as he himself said, making a joke of disaster. During intense shelling two years into the war, von Hoppe had been distracted by six heads that appeared in a crater, unable to tell whether they were six men buried up to their necks or six corpses newly exposed. The latter, he’d decided, as he unscrewed the fuse from a toffee apple that had fallen into his trench, and, finding the powder smoldering, leaned forward to light his cigarette. It had exploded, miraculously not killing him, though blinding him and burning his face.
Horst enjoyed von Hoppe’s stories of high jinks in the ranks, which he’d joined despite his aristocratic name, or perhaps because of it. Early in the war there had been stoves in the barns where they were billeted, and one night von Hoppe had rolled against one and caught fire. Though his comrades put him out, the back side of his uniform had been scorched, so he’d had had to wear a greatcoat for weeks, even in summer. In that same barn, fun had been to pour water or cold coffee into the mouths of snorers. It all seemed so innocent, part of a forgotten time, and she thought that for Horst, hearing the tales was like going over imaginary meals was for her: a pathway to an otherwise vanished past.
“Listen,” Horst said, tilting his head toward the billiards table. “Did you hear that? In my mind, I can see the balls on the table, and I know from the sound of the striking cue if it’s a good shot, whether or not a point will be scored. I can even make out the impacts of the balls against the bumpers. Before long, I might try a game myself.”
“It’s like being in the trenches,” von Hoppe said. “That concentration. Listening to all the clatter and roar of incoming shells, rifle grenades, and mortars, all sensation concentrated on one thing: picking out the sound of one’s own approaching death.”
Kate thought it gruesome, but it seemed to please Horst, who nodded sagely beside him. “You’re sure you’re all right here? The lamps don’t bother you?”
“No. It’s the only place I can stand their smell. Odd, isn’t it?”
Inconvenient, too. At home, the garlic odor of the acetylene lamps gave him headaches, so they all had to read by candlelight.
“All right, then,” she said. “I’ll leave you. We’ll be back in a couple of hours.” She loosened his muffler so he wouldn’t grow overly warm.
He stopped her hand. “No need to,” he said, and waved her off. “Nor to come back. I’ll make my way home as usual.”
He could, though she often feared he wouldn’t, and she sometimes imagined him lost or stumbling, robbed, but it was part of his self- imposed therapy.
“Come, Marie,” she said. “Now it’s our turn for fun.”
“Wait!” von Hoppe said, and pulled gift vouchers from his pocket.
“Oh, thank you,” Kate said. “You sure you don’t want them?” They were from cigarette packs.
“No, no,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “Use them for Marie’s book.”
“I will.” She counted them quickly—a dozen; he must have been collecting them from friends. Now they had nearly enough to buy the picture book. In a month they would. That made her mood going outside all the better, where for a few minutes she would sit on a metal park bench—the wooden ones had disappeared—while Marie played with other girls.
They passed a row of butchers, each with its own policeman stationed outside, and Kate decided not to try her luck just yet. She was tired from holding Marie, the long lines were dispiriting, and it wouldn’t do to have to carry whatever she might get throughout the long afternoon. On their way back, then.
She avoided a puddle and looked with great satisfaction again at her new shoes. Foolish, how good they made her feel, but it was true, they did, a bit of brightness in a dull and deadening world. And wasn’t that what they were searching for on these endless foraging expeditions, not just food and fuel, warmth and light, but tokens from their own past, buried under the decade’s rubble? If not for hope, at least for its possibility?
“How about the market, Aunt Kate?” Marie asked. “I’d like to go there.”
“Would you? Good. The market, then.”
One of the peculiarities of the ongoing blockade was that in the relentless hunt for food, people brought all their possessions to the market to trade for food and fuel, so it was lush with furniture, carpets and furs, expensive Victrolas and musical instruments, books and bedding and baths. Home, meanwhile, was cold and dark and depressing, a place more often to be avoided than embraced. It was only in such surreptitious markets that one felt at all the vanished sense of abundance; Kate liked at times merely to run her fingers over fabric.
They picked through an impromptu bazaar, established not far from the harbor, stopping randomly at vendors, knowing they wouldn’t buy—couldn’t—which freed them to pretend. Hats, white gloves, a sterling silver place setting; Marie became entranced with a porcelain doll, rubbing its turquoise eyes with her thumb, hugging it, stroking its pale hair.
“How much?” Kate asked, part of their game.
The woman selling it, hair covered by a faded red shawl, shook her head.
“It’s not for sale?” Kate asked.
“
For trade. Your shoes.” She nodded at Kate’s feet.
Kate felt her throat clutch. Those beautiful shoes! What would her mother-in-law say? But the woman had treasures; it would be worth it, and Marie’s face was shining.
“Yes, all right,” Kate said before allowing herself to think, and heard Marie’s breath catch, filled with pleasure. When was the last time the child had been so happy? “But I need something to wear home. Boots, preferably. Have you any?”
Now the woman became animated. The shoes were worth far more than a doll and a pair of discarded boots; Kate was offering a truly amazing deal.
“Here,” she said, and held up two matching teacups. “Meissen.”
Kate didn’t bother to handle them. “Useless as shoes, I’m afraid.”
“Or this.” The woman reached under the asparagus crate for a bucket of coal.
“The whole thing?” Kate was careful to modulate her voice. It was jet black and lustrous, not the brittle brown lignite they had, and would heat better. Czech anthracite, probably.
The woman’s eyes narrowed and she pulled the bucket back. “Half,” she said, and quickly added, “And you’ll have to provide your own basket.”
“I see.” Kate breathed deeply, pretending to consider the offer, understanding the woman’s sudden reluctance. The last Czech shipments had been stopped as soon as the war ended, and Czech coal was a vanishing commodity; that she had any left at all meant she was a good businesswoman, one it would be worthwhile to know. Even at a loss, trading the shoes might be a smart thing to do. “I don’t need the coal,” she said at last, “and I don’t want the teacups.”
The woman’s face fell.
“But I’ll take them. The coal and the teacups and the doll.” Becoming like the Polish woman, Kate thought. “I have other errands to run. I’ll be back in about an hour. If you’ve found some boots in the meantime—size six would be best, but seven will do—we’ll trade.”
“Thank you, Your Excellency,” the woman said, and bowed.