Fraulein M.

by Caroline Woods

  Sonje raised an eyebrow. “All I’ve ever heard you say is that you want to visit London, you want to—Hello? Hello? Yes, I’m looking for a friend who might’ve come to your bar in the last few days. She’s about twenty-two, very thin. I’m afraid I’ll embarrass her but I believe she wears a wig. A red one. She’s ah, how do I put this, an unusual-looking girl . . .”

  • • •

  A few days later a bill from Trommler arrived, asking for that month’s rent and the previous two months’ back pay. Weeks had passed since his last visit, which Berni realized now, with a sinking feeling in her gut, corresponded with the new miscegenation law.

  “So, we have a true landlord now,” said Sonje.

  “Bastard,” Berni whispered.

  “Do you see what he added at the bottom of the page? ‘Landlord respectfully requests that Fräulein Metzger deliver back rent in person, presently.’”

  “What does that mean?” Berni asked, but she already knew. She could imagine Trommler naked and bloated beneath her, white hairs on his chest and under his arms. She could almost feel the way her hands would sink into the spongy flesh of his shoulders.

  Sonje reached for her elbow. “I’m going to pay him more than he’s asked, to keep him at bay. But you don’t have to do anything but deliver the cash, nicht?” She ran a hand through her unwashed hair, then reached for her coat. “Don’t let anyone in while I’m at the agency. Pretend no one’s home.”

  Not five minutes after Sonje left, the telephone rang. Berni made it there just before it stopped ringing. “Hello?”

  Nobody replied.

  “Are you calling about Anita?” She could hear nothing, no breathing or background noise, as if the caller were sitting inside a closet. Her abdomen quivered, and she waited, waited, until she heard it: three little huffs. Berni shut her eyes and repeated the signal. “Oh, my little darling, it’s you.”

  She heard the squeak of a tiny swallow on the other end of the line.

  “Listen, Bird, I’ve found a way. There are people who arrange group visits to Switzerland, Finland, the United States, for people who need to take the cure. My bronchitis will be our savior! We’ll go through Liège. If the border guards at Aachen are as lax as Sonje says they are, we will not be harassed, even if we take some money.”

  Grete still hadn’t said anything. Words spilled out of Berni’s mouth with such incredible speed that she had to catch her breath. “We can live in the mountains in New York. Or the pine forests of the Carolinas, in the south. Don’t worry, I’ll protect you from alligators.”

  No reply. What if the person on the other line wasn’t Grete? “Say something,” Berni pleaded. “Tell me it’s you and that you have your passport.”

  After a moment, Grete’s voice: “You’re saying too much. I have my passport. When can we leave?”

  “I still have to visit the doctor. I’m sorry, Bird. So much has happened . . .”

  “Please hurry.”

  “Why?” The need to cough prickled the back of Berni’s throat. She suppressed it. “It isn’t him, is it? He hasn’t turned violent on you?”

  She could hardly hear Grete’s response. “No. Never. But do please hurry, Berni.”

  “I’ll drop in to the office tomorrow. There’s just one thing I have to take care of, and then I’ll go. Afterward we’ll meet. Could you meet me on Monday, at five? Meet me at the Bahnhof Zoo restaurant. It’s loud in there.” Berni caught her breath. “You haven’t said a word to him, have you, Grete? Have you?”

  “No. We need to stop talking now.”

  “Agreed, my love. We’re almost there. I’ll see you on Monday, at five in the evening.”

  Inside the receiver she heard a click, and a moment later, the voice of the operator.

  • • •

  Trommler’s apartment in the Hotel Excelsior, where he met Sonje when he wanted to get away from his wife, reminded Berni of the inside of a fish tank, and Trommler, at its center, an engorged blowfish. Watered silk wallpaper in deep blue covered the walls of the sitting room. Trommler had the maid set the tea tray on the seat of the velvet armchair, so Berni was forced to sit either beside him on the divan or on an embroidered footstool. She chose the footstool.

  He rattled a tortoiseshell case. “Shall we play dice?”

  “No thank you, Herr Trommler,” Berni said, watching snow float past the enormous windows. The doctor could be getting in his car right now, closing his practice to get home to his family in the suburbs. Trommler already had the rent money. She watched the pendulum of his cuckoo clock and decided she would wait ten more minutes.

  “How is dear Sonje?” Trommler asked, biting an almond cookie. “The laws aren’t getting to her too terribly, are they?”

  “She’s managing,” Berni said, unable to look him in the eye. Sonje had instructed her to act polite, but coy, to turn down his advances, but make it seem as though it were simply a matter of time before she caved.

  “I’d like to see her, of course, but you know I was raised to be a law-abiding citizen. You can’t fight the law.”

  Berni took a deep breath through her nose. “This is a beautiful suite.”

  He puffed up a little and chuckled. “Yes, I saw you appraising the Persian carpet. You ladies know exactly how to calculate what a man’s worth. Why, the last girl I invited here, before Sonje, had my annual income down to the pfennig after fifteen minutes. Down to the pfennig!”

  A clump of gray snow clung to the heel of Berni’s boot; she switched the cross of her legs, and it fell to the rug. “You’re making me blush, Herr Trommler.”

  “You? Blush? Berni, my dear.” His thumb began rubbing her skin. “I’m a modern man. I have no illusions about girls these days. It doesn’t bother me that you’ve given yourself out.”

  Eight more minutes. “Given myself out?”

  He raised her hand to his wet lips, leaving a trail of slobber on her skin. “If you think the parlor’s nice,” he murmured, moving her sleeve so that he could get to her forearm. “You should see the bathtub. It is massive.”

  “It must be,” Berni said. “Otherwise you’d still be stuck in it.”

  “Sonje is a very close friend of mine,” he sputtered. “I doubt she’d want you speaking to me with such—such disrespect!”

  She had to get out of here, get to the doctor. “Pardon me, Herr Trommler. I’m not feeling quite myself today. I think soon I should be going, so that I can elevate my feet.”

  He settled back into the cushions, saucer balanced on his stomach. “I’m not a bad man to befriend, nicht wahr? Not only because I can procure the best Baumkuchen in the city. I have more serious connections. Reinhard Heydrich is an old friend from university . . .”

  “Is that so.” She’d heard Trommler rattle off the names of his important friends a dozen times. Six more minutes. Two more days until she met Grete at the Zoo station.

  Trommler was still talking, his breath enveloping Berni in a radish and onion fog. “. . . Heydrich’s the one who told me the Gestapo are watching Sonje.” His beady eyes sparkled.

  “What did you say?”

  He opened his mouth in mock surprise. “Goodness, girl. Hadn’t you noticed any secret police lingering outside your building?”

  “No,” Berni lied. Since Sonje had pointed him out, she’d seen the man chain-smoking across the street. Cigarette butts were beginning to pile in the gutter.

  Trommler’s lips pursed. “Herr Heydrich thought I’d be very interested to know my rental apartment showed up on a list. Apparently Sonje has become involved with some Jewish groups? ‘Reinhard,’ I said—we’re on familiar terms—‘She’s not a concern, just one of these women who always needs to feel involved.’ I think I may have had some influence.” He put his cup down and rested his elbows on his knees. “You see? I am a good friend.”

  Berni’s body trembled all over. Sonje had kept Anita hidden in the apartment, all the while freely coming and going, taking the trolley to the Jewish Relief Agency with h
er cello case, her briefcase full of sheet music. Berni realized with chilled detachment that she would have to sleep with Trommler. She had to convince him there was still something for him in this arrangement. And then she had to get Sonje to leave her parents’ apartment.

  Already Berni could feel a dulling of her senses. The tea tasted like mud. Trommler patted the space beside him on the couch, and as she went to join him, the little walleyed cuckoo sprang through its wooden shutters, mocking her.

  Best to get it over with quickly. “Herr Trommler . . .”

  He didn’t let her finish the sentence. His rib cage crushed her into the divan, her face smashed against a velvet cushion. He interpreted her groan as a moan of pleasure and began kissing her neck, the round drum of his hips pressed between her open thighs. She let her hands drop as she listened to his belt buckle flap open. Her eyes searched desperately for something on which to focus, to take her out of what was happening to her body, and fell on a newspaper folded under the coffee table. The cover featured recently apprehended traitors to the Volk.

  “Wait,” she said. A last gasp of energy surged through her arms, and she put her hands to his shoulders, locked her wrists, and pushed. “Wait!”

  He toppled toward the arm of the sofa. “What the hell is the matter?”

  She grabbed the paper from under the table and shook it open. The story was about an alleged putsch planned by a group called the Catholic Action. Two priests had been accused of undermining the government at their pulpits. They’d hoarded foreign cash, according to the Völkischer Beobachter, so that they might strengthen the Vatican at the expense of the Reich. Photos of two men who looked like clerics ran beside one of their accused accomplices. She had the jowls of an elderly woman, but she held her blunt chin high above her wimple. The newspaper claimed she’d stored vast amounts of money in a girls’ orphanage in Charlottenburg.

  • • •

  Later Berni had no recollection of how she’d gotten to St. Luisa’s. Of course she must have taken the elevator to the lower level of the hotel and walked through the tunnel underneath Askanischer Platz toward Anhalter Bahnhof. When she arrived at the orphanage, her S-Bahn pass was in her pocket, so she must have taken it out to show a ticket inspector, and at some point switched to the U7.

  She knocked, repeatedly, on the old oak doors. Finally the one on the right creaked open, a sheet of warm air leaking out. “The reverend mother isn’t here,” said the girl, the same one Berni had spoken to before.

  “Please,” said Berni. “I need to see someone. Anyone. Please.”

  “Just a minute.” Berni was shut out in the cold again. Behind her she heard people laughing, the ringing bells of a sleigh. Then there was whispering inside, and the door groaned open again. Now two faces stared down at her.

  “Sister Josephine!”

  In the time that had passed the old woman had become shriveled, too small for her skin. It seemed all the hair on her face had drifted away. At one time she would have pulled Berni to her bosom, but she kept back, eyes fearful. When Berni tried to cross the threshold she held up a hand. “We can’t let you in, Berni. It may be that you had nothing to do with it, my dear, but we have to be ever more careful now.”

  “To do with what?” Berni felt as though her guts were on fire.

  Sister Josephine inhaled, then put her hand on the girl’s shoulder and told her she was free to join the others for lunch. When she’d gone, the sister turned to Berni. “All right, hurry in, you’ll catch cold out there.”

  Inside the vestibule, the dark wooden walls were saturated with bright white light coming from the snowy street. Berni blinked hard, trying to clear the spots from her eyes, trying to make sense of things. Sister Josephine stood at arm’s length, peering up into her face with both apprehension and pity. “When’s the last time you saw Grete?” she asked quietly.

  Berni’s breath hitched in her throat. “About a month ago, Sister.”

  “She came to ask for a position as a nurse here, and even though we hadn’t advertised for one, Sister Maria Eberhardt allowed her to come in.”

  “I know. Sister Maria turned her down.”

  Sister Josephine nodded. “Well, Grete paid us another call last week. She said she wanted to ask some questions about her parents, but Sister Maria said she seemed nervous, asked to go to the restroom and then left in a hurry.”

  Berni breathed hard. “And then?”

  “Two days later the reverend mother was arrested. The Gestapo knew exactly where to look for hidden money. The strange thing is they found a briefcase of American and British currency, thousands of marks’ worth, under the desk in her office. But Sister Maria didn’t keep money there. She kept it—”

  “In the chapel,” Berni whispered.

  Sister Josephine nodded; she winced as she swallowed. “They took her into protective custody,” she said softly.

  Berni’s ankles wobbled. She’d forgotten how to stand. She collapsed into Sister Josephine’s arms, making the old woman gasp. She had no warm feelings toward Sister Maria Eberhardt. But if the SS considered her enough of a threat to put her away, she must have had some good in her.

  “The thing is,” Sister Josephine whispered, “we were receiving funds. A kind lawyer, part of the Catholic Action, provided us with foreign cash, verboten. Sister Maria took such a risk for all of us . . .” Her words ended in a sob. “The officers who arrested her were just boys. I couldn’t believe the faces of these boys.”

  Eventually Sister Josephine pulled away and blotted her eyes with her sleeve. “You mustn’t mention this conversation to anyone, do you understand? Not to anyone.” Her hand was cold and soft on Berni’s. “Stay out of trouble, my dear.”

  Berni went slowly down the steps under the skeletal chestnut tree. She could barely lift her feet. On the fourth stair she slipped on a patch of ice and went down, her shins crunching old chestnut husks. She lay there for a while, unmoving. Nobody inside her old childhood home came out to help her. She lingered long enough to hear the Angelus bell ring and the swell of a hundred voices, praying together.

  • • •

  Grete arrived at the Bahnhof Zoo on Monday at twenty minutes of five in the evening. Because she was early, and the temperature mild for November, she took a slow walk around the perimeter of the zoo. Children holding balloons dragged their feet through the exit, following parents and nannies pushing sleeping toddlers or holding crying infants. The sun had gone down half an hour earlier but still cast a faint bluish glow on the half-finished rock wall they were building for the penguins. She passed a polar bear rubbing its oily yellow fur on a concrete boulder, looking frisky and happy to be outside in the increasing cold, and as she gazed up at the glistening Indian tiles on the turrets and spires of the elephant house, she, too, felt something: if not happiness, then something close to it. The elephant house reminded her of the wider world beyond Berlin. She knew she never deserved to be happy again. But in another place, with Berni, away from Klaus, she could try to start over. She’d live a better life; she’d do good, to make up for the damage she’d caused. She took one long breath of the fresh, brisk air, and went into the restaurant to wait for Berni.

  Berni saw all of this from a train bound for Amsterdam.

  Her face, in the window’s reflection, looked gaunt against the black branches of passing trees. Somewhere, over a hundred miles away by now, her twin waited, cheeks pulled upward in anticipation, the same shallow divot in her chin. Grete would have ordered her first beer by now. It would be sitting on the copper surface of a table in the Zoo waiting room, untouched, foam still intact.

  In the seat beside Berni, closer to the window, the little boy put his head back against the seat cushion and made an almost inaudible sigh. She could see his face in the reflection as well, his brow furrowed from trying not to cry. On the other side of the aisle, the two girls, Herr Grotte’s nieces, clung to each other and sniffled. The boy sitting with Berni didn’t want her to touch him. He’d recoiled from h
er, the strange tall woman in the bright red wig, when she tried to take his hand as they climbed the platform in Hanover. She wanted to tell him she felt the same way he did: as if everything inside her head had turned to liquid the instant they’d gotten in the car with Herr Petersen in the middle of the night, a day and a half ago. She knew she couldn’t show emotion in front of the children, but she wanted to tell the boy it was all right if he did.

  “How about some sweets?” she said, her voice foggy. “You can eat anything you want.” As soon as she said it, she knew she shouldn’t have; the unspoken phrase was because your mother isn’t here. The boy shook his head vigorously, pulled his little knees to his chest, and put his head against the window. She let him alone.

  What was it Sonje had told her before she left? “Circumstances have made it so that a lack of trust in someone is no longer an insult.” The last Berni had seen her, she’d been in Gerrit’s spacious apartment in Kreuzberg. Gerrit had been happy to welcome Sonje into his home after Berni told her everything, about Trommler, the Gestapo, and finally, about Grete.

  “I told Grete about Liège, and the border crossing at Aachen,” Berni said, her voice cracking, in the security of Gerrit’s study. “Klaus must know. We are ruined.”

  “Shh, shh.” Sonje handed Berni an envelope. The student visas were inside, with three letters of acceptance to an exchange program in New York, including a note allowing Anita a three-month visitor’s permit as the children’s guardian. There were also four passports, including Anita Metzger’s, and four train tickets from Hanover to Amsterdam.

  “The group was never going through Liège,” Sonje said quietly. “The only ones who knew were Herr Grotte, Herr Petersen, and I. Not even Anita. Not even the children.”

  Berni tucked it all back inside the envelope. She had never felt so relieved to learn she hadn’t been trusted. “Promise me you won’t return to your old apartment,” she said, tears catching in her throat. “Let it go. It’s Trommler’s now.”