The Cigarette Girl

by Caroline Woods

  A chill ran through Janeen’s bones, despite the heat. For two weeks she’d made sure she was first to the mailbox every day, yet she hadn’t received anything from Margaret Forsyth. In the meantime, she’d seen little updates about Klaus Eisler, or Henry Klein, in the news. He’d been spotted in Virginia, then Delaware. The more information about his background emerged, the sicker she felt: Eisler had been special assistant to Heinz Jost, chief of SS intelligence in foreign territories and later the leader of the infamous Einsatzgruppe A, responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews. While Jost had been convicted—and later pardoned—for crimes against humanity, Eisler had vanished from Europe at the end of the war.

  “But is that the worst way to be?” Anita continued, startling Janeen back to reality. “We cannot dwell on your father’s death, or we will fall into the vortex. It is like leading a horse—you cannot turn back to look at him, or he will never move forward.”

  Janeen considered this for a moment. “Who’s the horse in this scenario? Me?”

  Anita chuckled. “I think we both are, Liebchen.”

  “I can’t put Dad behind me like you can.”

  “I am not saying I’ve put your father behind me. I have never put anyone I cared for out of my heart.”

  The boggy scent of the swamp overtook Janeen, stirring her stomach. A little itch of a thought came to her, and before she could control it, pushed its way out her lips. “But you had to leave everyone you knew in Germany.”

  Anita grew very still and sat tall on the log. The toe of one of her shoes dipped into the water and drew absentminded circles in the algae. She cleared her throat and said something, her words lost in the birdsong and the warm breeze rushing through the leaves.

  “Pardon?”

  “I did what I had to.” Anita’s nostrils flared. She removed the baseball cap; underneath, her dark hair was soaked with sweat. She ran a hand over the back of her neck. “Sometimes we must convince ourselves we no longer care for the people we once did.”

  Her words sounded callous, and convenient, and Janeen might have said as much had her mother not turned to her with flashing dark eyes full of anger and grief.

  “Those were end-of-the-world times,” Anita said. Her lower jaw came forward. “You are a lucky child, having never known such. Now”—she pointed toward the boardwalk, the urn tucked in her elbow—“let us go; you’re in my way.”

  • • •

  Janeen waited to get up until her mother had gone to work the next morning. When finally she went down to the kitchen, she found Anita had left her half a pot of coffee and some soft bananas, as well as a list of chores. She ate a banana, then watered the trees in the little backyard orchard her father had kept and pulled weeds from the beds. By lunchtime she was ready to trim the creeping fig that grew up the risers of the front steps. She’d finished two of them when she heard a friendly honk behind her.

  When she stood she felt the static charge to the air. Clouds rumbled overhead. The mailman had parked at the end of their driveway. He waved at her, probably expecting her to come say hello—he was the father of one of her kindergarten classmates—but she waited until he’d put the letters in the box and driven off. The air around her felt thick, giving her the sensation of swimming toward the mailbox. When she yanked it open she heard the grind of rust.

  There it was: a fat envelope postmarked in Manhattan, with a handwritten return address this time. East Seventy-Eighth Street . . . she ran her finger over the delicate script.

  Skin tingly, she dropped the pruning shears on the lawn and took the letter up to her room, closing the door. She tore open the envelope and spread the pages over her mattress. She realized now that a little part of her had hoped this letter would never come, that she’d be able to continue believing her mother was the same woman she’d always thought she was. It wasn’t too late, of course. She could ignore this. She could return it to sender.

  She opened her eyes. The name Klaus caught her eye, right on the first page, and she shivered.

  - - -

  Dear Anita,

  You have sent me a life preserver. You do not know what it means to me, to be able to say the things I should have before. I know I punished Berni with silence, and the fact that you have chosen not to answer me with silence is the greatest gift.

  The last time you and I spoke, in the Eislers’ courtyard, you urged me to look past our differences and write to Berni. I’m sorry to tell you I failed. For the two and a half years that I worked for Helmut Eisler’s sister, Mildred, in Potsdam, I could not find the strength to answer Berni’s letters. I worried she’d want to see me, and after hearing that she’d been intimate with Helmut Eisler, I knew I would not have been able to look her in the eye.

  At Aunt Mildred’s I could disappear. She lived alone in a three-room unit above a delicatessen, and she never looked at or spoke to me once. All day she blinked at the wall and licked her lips. The first night, when I took her housedress over her head and lifted her arms to run a washcloth underneath, I cast my eyes down. Within two days I could bathe and clothe her without hesitation. Numbness and nurture: this was my first taste of my future profession.

  I talked to Mildred, though she didn’t answer, and I practiced my speech. Klaus had attempted to teach me to speech-read, and he’d helped me learn to feel rather than listen for my own voice, parts of which were lost to me. But the speech-reading was mostly a lost cause. German is a dark language, most of its sounds uttered deep in the invisible throat. I had to learn to anticipate what people were saying, to fill in the gaps.

  At Mildred’s I was free. I was lonely. I read Berni’s letters, and I treasured them, even though I offered her as much interaction in return as Mildred offered me. Not long after the Third Reich began, she stopped writing, finally discouraged by my silence, and my only connection to the world became Klaus Eisler, and at his urging, my BDM troop.

  I was no Hitler Youth star. The one area in which I excelled was first aid, mainly because I was immune to disgust. Our leader made me first-aid girl, and the others treated me as I was accustomed to being treated: as a servant. And the Nazi indoctrination, which increased after 1933, made me uneasy. Our leader lectured on eugenics: Why deny humans the science that had made our dogs smarter and faster than any other dog on earth? The other girls ate up the material like caterpillars on leaves.

  I did not mention my doubts to Klaus. I wrote how proud I was to serve Hitler. We had grown far more affectionate in letters than we had in person. Distance had an intoxicating effect. Within five letters we called each other du.

  There is a way for you to go to school again, my dear, he wrote one day, shortly after my sixteenth birthday in August 1933. Ever wanted to work on a farm?

  A farm? I imagined dirt and plows, the dizziness I felt in the sun. Am I suited for that?

  You can’t stay at Mildred’s forever. Consider the Landjahr. It’s for the best of the Hitler Youth, girls and boys. I would do it myself if I weren’t already vetted by the Sicherheitsdienst. Landjahr graduates are first in line for trade schools and colleges. You could go to nursing school after you complete your duties.

  I shook my head; they’d never choose me. But I read the end of his note over and over again. I can recite it by heart:

  I imagine what you have become, little Grete’s face with a womanly shape. At night I think of your fingertips on me.

  I found Aunt Mildred dead one morning in February of 1934. The cords in her neck were stretched out, her eyes open and teeth bared, caught in the act of biting for one more second of life. I stared at her for a long time. Then I washed her body before I called the hospital.

  The Eislers did not attend her funeral. They’d resented her; her money was in a trust they could not touch until now. But even before this, they had moved to a nice new apartment beside the Grunewald. Herr Eisler, through Klaus’s connections, had a new position as a custodian, with a salary and pension. I cringe
d to imagine him cleaning toilets, but Klaus celebrated over putting his parents’ creditors in their place. Jewish bankers, I assume, who’d been after the Eislers for years. Hitler had made such loans defunct.

  Does this mean your father has come to support the Party? I wrote, because I knew this had long been a concern of Klaus’s. He didn’t answer; he told me much later that I should never have put such a thing in writing.

  Knowing full well I had no chance of being chosen for the Landjahr, I approached our leader anyway, at the next sports afternoon. My palms and thighs were dusted with sand, and my tongue felt thick and clumsy in my mouth. Our Gruppenführer tweeted her whistle for a water break, then glanced at me, her face broad, freckled, and clean. I greeted her with “Heil Hitler.”

  Before I could say anything, she put a hand on my shoulder. I wished she’d look at me, instead of gazing out at the field with athletic pride on her face, but I gathered enough of what she said for my mouth to drop open. She told me she’d mentioned my “leadership potential” to the higher-ups in the Party.

  The only area in which I could remember having led was medical training. I do not know how I formed words. “I have considered the Landdienst.”

  “Excellent,” she said. “They need medic girls in the country service, too. I’ll put in the paperwork.” The water break was over; she looked off toward the field and blew a sharp blast on her whistle.

  I was stunned. I’d have felt more like celebrating were it not for the sense that she anticipated my question, that somebody had put in a word for me ahead of time.

  I suppose you will want to know about my current life. I am a professor of nursing. I teach pathophysiology lectures. I have a daughter who lives in London, and I have never been to visit. We have grown distant. We have always been a little distant. My son is still at university but does far too much to take care of me. Neither knows anything about my youth in Germany.

  My ex-husband, Charles, is a former war journalist. We met in a refugee camp in Zurich in 1942. I had been there three years, by way of Stockholm in 1939. Charles found me at the bedside of a woman whose baby we were trying to turn. The version was successful, but when the baby was born she sobbed and sobbed, screaming that it looked like its father, and asked us to take it away. Later we learned the father was in the SS.

  I’d scarcely noticed the photographers, but while I was at the sinks, Charles caught an image of me that would find its way to an American newsmagazine. In the photo my apron is dirty and hands yet unwashed. I’m staring straight into the lens, sheepish, tired. After he took it, he put the camera down and told me I looked like I needed lunch.

  Charles introduced me to America, where I started in the first year of nursing college, even though I already had a degree. Nobody asked where I’d been trained to insert catheters and stitch episiotomies. Nobody asked who taught me to draw blood from even the deepest veins. That was how our marriage went as well: no questions asked.

  The closest we came to discussing my past was when the photo in the field hospital reran in a big magazine for the tenth anniversary of the war’s end. I gave an interview to go with the photos, and the writer asked a few questions about Berlin. He asked what I knew about the concentration camps. Of course I told him I’d heard of them. I said everyone had—and some readers didn’t like that. Dozens of Germans wrote to the editor to insist that they’d had no idea.

  But that was where the interview ended. I sat waiting for him to ask if I’d participated in any substantial way to assist the Third Reich. For weeks I’d been thinking about this moment, and I’d prepared an honest response. The writer searched in his pockets for a smoke and asked whether we planned to have another child, something like that, and Charles, who sat beside me, took over. Neither of them wondered how I’d contributed to make Hitler’s dreams become reality. How could I, they must have thought. I was only a girl.

  The Landdienst program sent me to a farm in Silesia run by a family named Winkler. When we stopped at Dresden someone sat beside me on the train, a handball enthusiast with thick thighs. “Wonderful,” she said, “what we’re doing for Germany. Saving our breadbasket from the Poles.”

  “Yes,” I said, wishing she’d sit somewhere else. “I suppose so.”

  A huge group of young people arrived at the farm, and Herr and Frau Winkler fawned over us and embarrassed us terribly. Frau Winkler wore a clean dress but was missing teeth on the sides. Her husband was equally sun-browned and simple. That first evening they slaughtered a pig larger than I, and we drank so much beer that none of us felt well in the morning.

  The Winkler farm was on the small side, just under thirty acres. We stayed two kilometers away in another, larger house. The Winklers grew sugar beets and golden Raps flowers, from which they made rapeseed oil. When the Raps bloomed, the fields ignited in brilliant yellow underneath the blue country sky. Our primary duty was to convert some fallow fields near our group house. I helped yank out rows and rows of old beetroot. I discovered I could handle far more physical labor than expected, and I wished my BDM leaders and Klaus could see me work.

  Life had never been so easy, so prescribed. I began to wonder about my plan to become a nurse. Perhaps I’ll stay here forever, I thought. The farm could be my place.

  One night, when we’d all had a little too much ice wine, a group of girls gathered to go walking. The rest of us were turning down our beds, or brushing the smell of campfire out of our hair; these girls snickered and stage-whispered, pinching their cheeks. I knew where they were headed. These were the ones who kept photographs of Adolf Hitler under their mattresses, their lipstick prints on his ugly mouth. They’d confused their Führer-lust and all that talk about “good blood” into an insatiable desire for the boys in our camp.

  Disgusted by them, I went outside to take a real nighttime stroll. Alone I walked, through abandoned rows of dry brown corn, my head buzzing from the wine. To the left of the field, the surface of a small pond shone black and stippled. I suspected anyone watching me could have seen the white of my blouse from miles away, glowing blue in the night.

  My pace quickened. I felt chased, even though each time I turned around, nobody was there. I began to run. I ran until I felt my insides would bleed. When I finally collapsed onto the soft earth and turned around, I was alone in the middle of the large field. It was Berni who’d been chasing me. I’d seen her in the excited, amorous faces of those other young women. But those were Nazi girls, of course, who would have called her, and you, whores and deviants.

  For a long while I’d pushed both of you from my mind. In escaping you I felt I’d escaped everything that scared me about life. Sex. The feelings for Klaus that I fought. The confusion over Herr Eisler and Berni. Now I saw that was everywhere, and what a fool I’d been to judge Berni and you. I thought of your particular struggle, Anita. Berni had urged me to consider this, in her letters, and I had shut out any empathy until now. Now it came flooding in.

  I lay on my back, crying. In the sky there were so many stars, so many more than in Berlin. I looked at them for a long time. When finally I went to wipe my tears on my sleeve, I noticed something pink in the dirt. My fingers plucked it out. It was a tiny mitten, for a girl of four or five. It hadn’t been out there long; the yarn was still bright. I turned it inside out and looked at the little knot someone had tied when she finished. I thought about the fingers that would have tied that knot.

  The Winklers had no children.

  I looked around at the land, frozen in blue-white. The abandoned fields. The large farmhouse, adjacent to this field, which had been conveniently available for us to inhabit.

  I told myself it wasn’t possible. The Winklers? Would they have stolen someone else’s . . . and where would that family have gone? Where would they have been sent? I felt something form in my stomach, like a fist of lead.

  Now that I’d found the mitten, I began to see other signs: a chest of delicately crocheted afghans I found in the farmhouse where we
stayed, a ledger at the bottom of my drawer, written in Polish. The leaden fist remained in my stomach for the rest of the time I spent in Silesia. As I went on with my duty, and when the following winter I began nursing school, it grew more painful, despite how I tried to pretend outwardly that it wasn’t there.

  I returned in 1935 to a Berlin I didn’t recognize. I hadn’t been there since Hitler became chancellor, so I hadn’t seen the parades of adoring crowds packing the sidewalks, their children in swastika sweaters. I hadn’t seen the massive swaths of red all over the Brandenburg Gate and the new offices the Party had usurped in buildings all over the city. When my taxi rode past the Silver Star Club in Mitte, I saw dirty snow drifted against its boarded-up doors. Outwardly, the city seemed to be in better order. I heard Hitler had “cleaned up the Party,” tamed the SA, though it would be years before I heard the full extent of the Night of the Long Knives. There were fewer homeless on the streets, fewer soup kitchens. The weather seemed to have improved. Even the sun worked for Hitler.

  There were other, more troubling, changes, of course. Signs outside businesses declared the owners would not sell to Jews. There were whispers about Dachau, but when people claimed it held only criminals I allowed myself to believe them. Hitler supporters, particularly those whose lives had improved, had answers like this for everything. What did it matter if a Jewish woman couldn’t buy her eggs from this grocer if there was another downtown that let her in? What harm was there in denying Jews entry to the civil service, when they could pursue other professions?

  I was one of those people who benefited from measures such as the “law against the overcrowding of German universities.” While in Silesia I’d gotten the news that I’d been accepted to nursing school. The excitement brought back old conversations and dreams I’d shared with Berni, and I vowed to contact her as soon as I’d settled in the dormitory. I bought new white leather shoes with the tiny bit of money I’d saved from my Landjahr, and had my hair cut the way I knew Klaus liked it. My goal, as always, was to please him. We were eighteen and twenty-one, a nursing student and an officer in the SD, the intelligence branch of the SS. We could marry. But I didn’t see him for a while; they needed his assistance in securing the Rhineland. I wasn’t sure exactly what he did, but he made it sound innocuous. Gathering information, he called his work. Getting to know the local population. The 1930s will go down in history, he wrote, as the years in which Germany restored what was rightfully hers.