Fraulein M.

by Caroline Woods

  I wiped my chin on my sleeve and tried to catch my breath. “I must share this with Berni. It will protect her, too. She’ll have to register to become a citizen as well, won’t she?”

  His pale eyes, which had been droopy, almost drunk, sharpened. He nudged me off his shoulder, squared his face with mine, and held my wrists. “I will not have you torturing yourself over Berni’s choices. She’s a grown woman. Nobody is forcing her to be a prostitute.”

  “She isn’t a prostitute.” I couldn’t keep the edge from my voice, even though I feared I’d ruined the moment.

  “Don’t defend her, Margarete. She nearly destroyed my family.”

  “You’re right, of course,” I said. “Of course, Klaus. But I wonder . . . the Hereditary Health Court. Anita, Berni’s friend, the—the one who dresses like a woman. Will they go after him?”

  “If ‘Anita’ doesn’t mend his ways, then yes, I think they will go after him.” Klaus wiped my tears with his thumbs, a didactic expression on his face: patience and impatience mixed. “Nobody wants unnecessary violence. In the case of a Transvestit, like ‘Anita,’ there doesn’t have to be any. He and your sister are Aryan, thus part of the Reich. I’m sure the authorities’ approach would be rehabilitation. You see? You don’t have to worry.”

  He’d moved his hand to my lips. That old gesture, his dry fingers against the hot breath of my mouth, stirred me. My eyes rolled back. They were tired of crying, and I was tired of fear.

  I did something that would have been nothing to you, nothing to Berni, but set off explosions in my little mind: I kissed the rough tips of his fingers. I used my tongue. When I opened my eyes, I found his face closer to mine than it had ever been. Our noses touched, and a thrill like a small electric shock jolted my nervous system.

  We breathed heavily for a moment. I could taste his breath. His lips moved forward half an inch, and then they were on mine. We began to kiss, slowly at first, his lips sliding over mine. His breath tasted yeasty and sweet, like beer. Our front teeth clicked when he opened his mouth.

  I made a noise, something between a moan and a sob. Could this be happening to me, in my plain room? If only he would stop for a moment! I needed him to stop so that I could make sure I would remember it later. I pulled away and gazed at him, up into his face, to be sure of him. He smiled at me; he knew how long I had been imagining this. I tried to swallow, but there was a lump in my throat. I was on the verge of crying again, though now I didn’t know why.

  I heard something like violins inside my head as he came back down to me and his tongue touched mine. Explosions happened within me, in my throat and heart and thighs. My hands were on his warm neck and the soft back of his blond hair. His went around my waist, to my breasts. He pulled me onto his lap and I could feel the stiff shape in his pants. My thumb lingered on the button on his waistband.

  Then, just as quickly as it had started, he stopped. He got hold of my wrists, turned me around and put me in the chair so that I sat and he stood. His face returned to its characteristic smoothness.

  “We will find a way for you to thank me, Margarete.” A note of gentle rebuke crossed his face. “Not like this.”

  He left me throbbing all over, stunned, sitting there in my dark room alone. I went to the mirror and studied my swollen lips, which felt as though he’d stung them. My throat ached from crying. Yet I went to bed that night feeling hopeful. If he planned to find a way for me to thank him, that meant I would see him again, and that was all I could think.

  Too late Janeen heard a rattling, and before she could gather the pages strewn all over her quilt, her mother had burst into the room. Quickly Janeen sat up and wiped her eyes, coming back to the present. Outside it was pouring, the rain drumming the roof and splashing on the sills of her open windows. Her mother looked at them and tsk-tsked.

  “I have been thinking about what you can do this summer,” Anita began, crossing the room in a few big strides to yank the sashes down. “It may do us both good if we visit colleges next month, nicht?” She looked at Janeen strangely. “My God, you are hyperventilating. What is the matter? What are you reading?”

  Janeen wasn’t fast enough to hide it. In a second her mother was standing over the bed, rifling through the pages.

  “What is this? This is—” Anita read a few words, mumbling them to herself. Then she closed her eyes. Her entire body swayed, as if a wave had hit first her head, then her chest, then her hips. “This is for me.”

  Janeen shook her head vigorously, still unable to speak.

  “It is. You have been reading my mail.” Anita grabbed for the stack of pages in Janeen’s grasp, but she held tight to them.

  “Are you . . .” Janeen couldn’t begin to ask the question. “It’s for Anita,” she said, her heart pounding. “It’s for someone named Anita, but maybe you’re not Anita. What I mean to say is that this might be a different Anita.”

  Something flickered over her mother’s face. “What do you mean?”

  Janeen took a long, unsteady breath. The letter was written to an Anita who had been a transvestite. It couldn’t be for her mother. Yet there was so much in it that felt familiar. “Who’s Berni?” she blurted out, her voice strained. “What happened to Berni?”

  Her mother swayed on her feet. “What? Who told you that name? Die Wahrheit sagen!” She yanked the remaining pages out of Janeen’s hands. “We are going to forget this, as soon as you tell me where you got it. Tell me.”

  Janeen couldn’t. She put her face in her hands. Through her fingers she watched her mother stumble toward the door, and for a horrible moment she knew what would happen. Anita would take the letter to the garbage. “You have to read it!” Janeen cried. “You have to tell her what happened to Berni!”

  Her mother paused on the threshold but didn’t answer. The back of her trim head, the erect carriage of her shoulders, were regal yet terrifying, eerily calm. She stalked out of the room and slammed the door shut behind her.

  Janeen waited a moment, breathing hard. She’d been weeping, she realized, for Grete and Klaus. What kind of monster was she? Klaus Eisler, the man who’d murdered Jews, the man who’d come to rescue Grete in his SS uniform—she’d been able to taste his lips.

  Through the wall she heard an uncannily familiar sound: the screech of rusted iron. Where had she heard that sound before? It brought to mind Christmas, her father bent over their rarely used fireplace, wondering how he could open the damper . . .

  She bolted into the living room in time to see her mother toss the decorative logs aside and throw the letter onto the grate. Janeen cried out to her as she lit a match and threw it atop the first page. It caught a corner, which curled up and blackened. Janeen clawed at her mother’s shoulders, shouting to her to pull it from the flames. But Anita was too strong for her; she held Janeen back with one firm shoulder. Kneeling behind her mother’s back, Janeen watched in horror as another page lit.

  “Please, Mutti,” she said, sobbing. “Please, take it out. You need to read it—to read about your parents. Please!”

  A low groan leaked from Anita’s lips, and she fell forward. Janeen lunged toward the fireplace and dragged out the paper, blowing on it, lifting clouds of white soot. Grit went under her fingernails. She left the singed pile on the bricks and sat back on her haunches, panting. Rain still pummeled the roof, darkened the sky outside. She could hear it dripping down the chimney. Her mother had her face in her hands.

  Janeen felt stunned, as though she’d just suffered an electric shock. Neither of them had spoken since “your parents”—she wasn’t even entirely sure why she’d said it. “You could have told me,” she spat, her voice high-pitched and bitter. “You could have warned me.”

  Anita glanced up, her face tear-streaked. “But I had to leave it behind me, Liebchen. You were an American child. I didn’t want you to have to even think of all this—”

  “No, dammit,” Janeen said, and now she could barely get the words out. “About Daddy. Why didn’t you tell me?
” Her stomach lurched. “His father had it too, Mutti. Prostate cancer. His father had it. You never tell me anything.”

  Her mother’s mouth constricted. She swallowed a few times. “I had to worry for twenty-five years.” Her voice wobbled. “But it is not always true that what kills the father kills the son. I didn’t want to think his day would come. Why would I let my little girl worry the same?”

  “It wasn’t fair. You should have told me. He should have told me. Instead I had to be surprised, blindsided—” Janeen tried catching her breath; she was truly hyperventilating now. In her mind’s eye she saw her father packing her lunch on their last normal morning; that afternoon they told her he had cancer. She’d whined she was tired of tuna fish. Seven months later he was dead. “Who expects their dad to die when they’re seventeen? I could have prepared, I could have done more with him . . .” Her breaths came in great gulps. “I would have . . .”

  Anita came toward her, arms outstretched, making shushing sounds. “I know this now. I’m sorry. I am sorry.”

  “I would have been . . .” But Janeen could no longer talk. She covered her mouth with her hand, then leapt up off the floor and ran to the bathroom. Her teary face stared back at her in the toilet water, puffed and red. Her mother’s reflection appeared behind her, and then Janeen retched more violently than she ever had before. It all went into the bowl—her mother’s secrets, her father’s death—and when she had finished, she felt better.

  For a while they sat on the linoleum as Anita held her, cradling her forehead in one large, cool hand. Janeen let herself melt into her mother’s chest. Slowly, slowly, they rocked together.

  “Perhaps you can go for a little drive?” Anita finally asked, and Janeen nodded.

  Through the octagonal window beside the door, she saw that the sky had cleared. It was orange and purple. Outside she gulped lungsful of the cooling air before she and her mother got into the car. The streets were wet, the blacktop pungent. Nightcrawlers wriggled in hot little pools along the road. Their neighbors’ houses, shielded by trees like ladies peeking from behind fans, revealed people lighting charcoal grills or washing their cars. Their normalcy felt startling to Janeen; it was almost an affront to everything she and her mother had endured.

  Fireflies grazed the tops of the spartina grass along the path to the gazebo in Shortleaf Park. A summer chorus of clicking locusts, lawnmowers, traffic, and birdsong surrounded them, thick as the humid air. Janeen took a seat on the wooden bench, Anita across from her. Janeen watched her mother reach over the gazebo railing for a lily past its prime, its petals like elephant skin. She plucked the bloom from its stem and lifted it to her lips. Her pale Teutonic skin was flushed with exertion.

  Finally, she spoke. “I have told you I do not remember when my own father died. But I do. I remember when my mother received the news. Trudi . . .” She looked at the ceiling and frowned. “She used to tell me that my father, Joachim, was out winning the war. You see, unlike Grete I did not need my Nazi file to confirm who my parents were. I always knew.”

  Janeen’s breath caught in the roof of her mouth. A minute passed before her mother continued.

  “When I was a girl in Berlin, I was called Berni.”

  There was something Klaus had said about Berni, a word he’d used; it lingered on Janeen’s pursed lips, but before she could ask, her mother said, “Listen.” The blush-colored lights around the perimeter of the park went on, one by one, as Anita began to speak.

  Part III

  Berlin, 1935

  Jove spoke, and Ceres felt sure of regaining her daughter. But the Fates would not allow it, for the girl had broken her fast, and wandering, innocently, in a well-tended garden, she had pulled down a reddish-purple pomegranate fruit, hanging from a tree, and, taking seven seeds from its yellow rind, squeezed them in her mouth.

  Ovid, The Metamorphoses

  Berni, 1935

  Berni was on her third cigarette of Trommler’s visit; she needed something between her fingers, something to do with her mouth. The air above her head was translucent, a sickly blue. The room was dark. Sonje had installed thick curtains to keep out the neighbors’ eyes.

  The radio switched to Nazi-approved music: “Sieht eine Frau dich an.” Trommler hummed a little. “My dears, the worst part of the regime change is nearly over! I’ve had personal audiences with Herr Göring—”

  Trommler and Göring, together: Berni rolled her eyes toward Anita, imagining giant troughs where the powerful elephantine men of the city congregated. Anita stared straight ahead, half-hidden behind the rubber plant, her dessert untouched. Ever since the burning of the Institute for Sexual Science, she had not been herself. Her laughter, even the nervous kind, had all but disappeared.

  “Once they’ve established Gleichschaltung, which naturally involves growing pains, the fist will open . . .” Trommler unrolled his thick fingers and grinned at Sonje. He was as Anita had first described him: an enormous man of about sixty, whose clothing clung tight and smooth to his girth. His wide upper lip seemed flattened by a previous mustache, the way land is after a glacier. “Then I’ll sell the flat back to you, expecting unlimited visitation, of course, ha-ha!”

  Sonje smiled wanly. So far, he hadn’t seemed to notice Berni’s scraped wrists, the bruise on Sonje’s lip. He burped and pointed at the empty doily atop his dessert plate and nodded at Berni, who brought over a wedge of cake teetering on the knife, his third slice. Her finger wobbled as she used it to slide the cake onto his plate: mousse, raspberry crème, sponge. He had brought it over since the closest bakeries now refused to deliver to Jews. Their upstairs neighbor, Frau Anwalt, had revealed Sonje as such.

  “Gracious, my girl, you’re all a-tremble,” Trommler said to Berni, resettling himself in his armchair and brandishing his fork with the flourish of a violinist.

  “Perhaps our Berni is a bit hung-over,” Sonje said with a thin smile.

  “The young and their nightclubs!” he trumpeted, in a burst of crumbs.

  “Prost,” said Berni, tilting some liqueur into her mug. “There aren’t enough nightclubs in existence to get me drunk anymore. I stayed in with Anita last night.”

  Anita did nothing to corroborate this lie. She refused to speak to Trommler, even though Sonje had asked them repeatedly to be courteous to their new landlord.

  Berni had barely had time to process the news that the flat had a mortgage before she learned Trommler would be buying it from Sonje. Complications with Sonje’s new loan officer—it was no longer legal for the previous one, a Jew, to work at the bank—were, as she put it, “smoothed” by Trommler. She had taken that little bit of equity and sewn it into the linings of quilts and coats.

  A voice interrupted the song on the radio: “. . . a bloody scene on the Ku’damm last night as Jewish rioters . . .”

  Everyone froze.

  “Not the way to respond,” Trommler muttered, “not if they know what’s good for them.”

  “. . . screening of the foreign film Pettersson & Bendel was interrupted, first by jeers and catcalls, then by violence, in what appeared to be a planned public disturbance by Jewish agents provocateurs . . .”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Berni saw smoke coil from Anita’s nostrils. Last night they hadn’t been to the theater to see Pettersson & Bendel, nor to protest; they had tickets for Lotte Reiniger’s animated Papageno. The Nazis might enjoy Mozart, Sonje had said, but she and Reiniger would not let them ruin The Magic Flute.

  They hadn’t heard a sound from the adjacent theater until the men burst through the doors, not in full uniform, but it was obvious: brown pants, heavy boots. Any dark-haired or Roman-nosed men were yanked away by their collars. Outside the men were stopping cars in the street, smashing windows, yelling “Jew!” as the police stood aside, fretting with their dogs’ leashes. As they fled, Sonje had turned to Berni, her mouth opened in a shout, and Berni saw Anita on the ground, the knees of her stockings torn, clawing at an SA man’s neck.

  Sonje’s n
ose quivered. Berni gripped the arm of her chair. All Trommler had to do was look at Sonje, notice her bruised lip, and ask where she had been last night.

  Instead he fixed his small eyes on Berni. “You have your papers in order, don’t you? Makes no sense not to for an Aryan girl. You’ll spare yourself a great deal of trouble.”

  Berni could feel Sonje and Anita looking at her, and her lips tightened. It wasn’t her fault she could join the Volk without a forged ID or genealogy-for-pay. All she had to do was go to St. Luisa’s and ask for her birth certificate. But she hadn’t. Not yet. “Anita lives underground, I live underground,” she said, leaving Trommler to sputter and cluck.

  • • •

  Jewish cabaret, the Nazis proclaimed, was dead. As evidence they had places like the Cabaret Finck on Grunewaldstraße, once a dark place, witty and elegant. It was now renamed Weingut Keller and plastered with the kind of faux Bavarian decor that made Berni sick: oversized beer steins flowing with papier-mâché foam, fake purple grapes, wooden benches in place of the little round tables, which had seemed somehow too French. Its new name wrapped around the front and side of the building in block letters as though inscribed by a giant calligrapher’s pen, and the new owners had hung swastika flags on both façades and from the upper story, beside the neon signs advertising Radeberger Pilsner and Fetzer’s bratwurst.

  Berni and Anita worked at the Keller, Berni upstairs, Anita down. The Finck had gone underground the way Sonje had, hiding behind Aryan owners; a secret stage in the cellar, available only to those in the know, maintained a repertoire of political satire. The stage manager, Hansi, hid his homosexuality behind sexist jokes and free drinks for Nazis, who were shown only the main floor. Hansi loved the theatrics of playing dress-up for conservatives, and made Berni come to work in a ruffled blouse and gingham dirndl. It was a sad irony that Anita longed to trade places, play the Überfrau. She had repeatedly turned down the role Hansi offered her in the cellar show: Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor.