“I look nothing like him,” she complained. “The insult!”
Hansi’s skit involved Hitler instructing Breker and Speer to erect an obelisk in the Lustgarten. “Higher!” Hitler would say. “Higher! Higher!” as the set grew, with Speer eventually adding a domed top and round base, until the three stood back gazing at a statue of Hitler’s cock, shouting, “Magnificent! Perfection!” Hansi could not stop giggling about it. “I just need a Breker,” he’d add, and Anita would storm out.
One warm August afternoon, as Berni and Anita dressed for work in the staff room at the Keller, Berni tugged the empty spaces in the blouse where her bosom was supposed to spill out. “One day I’m going to burn this getup,” she said, “and dance naked around the flames.”
Anita tugged at her stockings and said nothing. The walk to the Keller was always hard for both of them. Anita refused to hide her face, putting Berni on her guard, forcing her to look at the people they passed on the street, really look at them. It seemed impossible that people could still find things to laugh about as they waited for trams or bought sausage under the red umbrella of the Koschwitz cart. Bureaucrats lay on blankets in the park beside the Rathaus Schöneberg, tipping back after-work beers. “Hitler’s weather,” as people called it, was also their weather. They were Berni’s peers, professionals who sat behind desks while she wiped lipstick from glassware. Every blonde reminded her of Grete. She’d seen Grete at the subway station in March, wearing a Nazi nursing uniform. Berni had tried not to think about her since.
We’re the sisters, Anita had told Berni once, and lately Berni had been trying to adopt this as truth. Anita was her sister now, the one to be protected, and she was, Sonje worried, becoming unmanageable. Too angry. Too defiant for her own good.
Berni wrapped a floral choker around her neck. “I look like a donkey tarted up as a parade horse,” she said, producing a tiny laugh from Anita, more of a grunt.
“At least you’ll see sunlight as you work.”
“And Nazi faces.”
The side of Anita’s mouth lifted in a slight smile. “Some look ripe to bite in those uniforms. What I’d do to them with some whips and spiked boots . . .”
“Stop!” Berni cried, clutching her side. “You’re terrible.”
Anita adjusted her stockings once more, then removed a pack of cigarettes from her apron and put it in one of the cubbies on the wall. “For our break.” She glanced at the mirror and sighed. “Off to the dark place, where they put things like me.”
“Don’t be dramatic.” Berni meant it to sound lighthearted, but seeing Anita’s reaction made her feel like one of those girls in the park.
She waited only a minute after Anita left, then slipped on her pants and blouse and stamped into her oxfords without untying them. She scribbled a quick message and rolled it to about the thickness of a cigarette, then pulled one from the pack in Anita’s cubby and replaced it with the note: Felt sick. Went home. See you there for dinner.
The cigarette behind her ear, Berni crept into the dining room. She hated leaving Anita alone. See you there was a hopeful message: it meant don’t spend the night out with strangers.
“Leaving so soon?”
Hansi stood behind her with arms crossed, one foot tucked above the other knee, a faded apron tied round his waist. From the kitchen came the smell of burnt sausage.
“My cough is bad today—” Berni let out a weak hacking sound. She put her hands to her neck, then her belly. What had she written in her note? “My stomach . . .”
“Save it. I haven’t the patience. Brigit will have to cover your tables.” Hansi looked at her over his round glasses. “Next time you miss work, there’ll be trouble.”
• • •
Berni walked quickly from the U7, head down, watching her plain shoes strike the sidewalk in front of the Café Royal. The sweat on her neck went cold as she looked around. Could this be the street on which she’d spent her childhood? The trees, once giant, now stood no taller than the tops of the three-stories. She passed the laundry with its yellow façade, a display of clean bloomers and underpants pinned to a clothesline in the window. As a girl she’d found this titillating, but it now seemed vaguely sad. The French-doored balconies she and Grete had coveted looked the same but for the swastika flags. Splashes of red pocked this street like a rash.
St. Luisa’s stood at the end of the street. No flags. So much had changed everywhere else, Berni thought, while here all that had happened was the chestnut tree had grown a few feet. Its bark looked leprous, marred with green summer fungus. Berni listened, expecting to hear the shouts of a thousand girls coming from the courtyard, but there was silence as she knocked.
A girl of about thirteen, her hair in a kerchief, answered. “May I help you?”
The door was only open a crack, the girl’s pale nose poking through, but now Berni could hear it, the buzz of this little hive. The hum gave her a burst of energy, and she stood straighter. “I’m here to see Sister Josephine,” she said, praying her favorite hadn’t died.
“State your purpose?”
“Sister Josephine was my math teacher. I’m paying a visit.”
A bit more of the girl’s face emerged, her dark brows lifted in the middle. “You’re here for your records, nicht, to prove you aren’t a Jew? No need to beat around the bush, you’re far from the first.”
“What? No.” To prove you aren’t a Jew. There it was, in crass terms. Was that why she’d felt the need to be secretive?
The girl sighed. “If you want your records I can send you to the office. If not I can’t help you. Sister Josephine is teaching now.”
Berni paused. “Fine. Yes.” She followed the girl into the main hallway, past the marble staircase, toward the refectory. She stared at the dusty metallic radiators, the worn wooden handrails along the steps, the oversized cross above the double refectory doors. There may as well have been grooves worn into the floor; if she followed them, she half expected an eleven-year-old Grete would be sitting there, huddled on the bench.
She was swallowing hard by the time they passed a classroom. Through the window in the door she saw a dozen girls gazing toward the board. Their hands went up in unison.
“Bernadette Metzger.”
Berni and the girl turned to see Sister Maria Eberhardt walking toward them, carrying a silver pitcher of water. She looked at Berni as though she’d seen a ghost.
“You can leave us, Jacinta,” Sister Maria said, though she still looked alarmed and didn’t take her eyes off Berni. “You came for your paperwork, Bernadette? Why?”
Why? Berni blinked. Surely Sister Maria couldn’t be unaware of what was happening outside. “Why, Sister?”
“Shh. I’ll take you to the office. That’ll be all, Jacinta,” she called after the girl, who lingered ahead of them in the hallway, peeking over her shoulder.
Stunned mute, Berni followed Sister Maria toward her office. The nun took long, masculine steps, her wide flat feet showing in their comfortable shoes, and Berni was struck by the comfort and nostalgia she felt watching this woman whom she’d hated as a child. At the office, Sister Maria shut the door behind them. Berni took a seat in the chair in which she’d sat when offered the chance at the academy.
Sister Maria poured them each a glass of water. “I was under the impression you and your sister didn’t need help from us.”
Berni took a sip. “What do you mean?”
Sister Maria took in Berni’s hair and her men’s shirt. Berni expected her to hold forth about lifestyle choices, but she didn’t. “Grete seems to be well connected, don’t you think?”
“You’ve seen her?”
“Haven’t you?”
Berni looked at the tiny stained-glass window she had once thought so beautiful. Light shone dully through its lily and cross. “I bumped into her at the train. We didn’t speak long.”
“I see,” Sister Maria said quietly. “Then you know she’s studying to beco
me a nurse.”
Berni shrugged. Choice words from their conversation at the train station echoed in her mind. Whore: she’d accused Grete of being Hitler’s. Jealous: Grete’s old fallback. And, of course, Berni was. The unfairness overwhelmed her. Her sister, a nurse. Herself, a waitress. Afterward Grete sent her a bottle of antibiotics in the mail, for her cough, just to show how much more she knew than Berni did. The bottle had gone in the trash.
“She came here in late May,” Sister Maria continued, “to inquire about a job. Grete thought she might finish her practicum here; apparently one of her professors had suggested it. Naturally we had to turn her away.”
“Why ‘naturally’?” Berni asked, feeling reflexive prickles of irritation under her arms. “Why did you ‘naturally’ have to turn her away?”
“Because of her Party membership, of course. More than that: she’ll be one of their nurses when her schooling’s done. She could join the SS. I’m sorry if this is the first you’ve heard of it, but my guess is you knew?”
Berni bit the edge of her glass. “I knew,” she said. “What did you give as a reason you couldn’t hire her?”
“I told her she lacked the proper qualifications. We couldn’t tell her—or any of the others who came in Nazi uniform, of course—the truth. They’d have gone straight to their superiors.”
Berni knew how Grete would have taken this rejection. She felt an echo of it now, in her stomach. “You made it seem personal.”
“Bernadette, I’m here to keep our girls and our church safe.” Sister Maria lifted her glass, using her other hand to steady a tremor in her wrist, the first feeble gesture Berni had ever seen her make. “I’m not the bad wolf, even though you think I am. It wasn’t easy to choose girls for the academy.” Her tone softened. “The best moments were the ones in which we told an unlikely girl we were giving her a chance. But even that sometimes didn’t go as planned.”
Sister Maria looked hard at Berni, who studied the floor, her shoes. After a minute, Sister Maria sat up straight. “Now then. Your paperwork.”
“I don’t even want to see it.” Berni slouched in the chair. “Why should I cooperate? Why obtain papers to prove I’m not Jewish?”
“There are Jewish Germans who would give everything they had to be in your position. Think of it that way.” There were deep grooves above Sister Maria’s eyebrows, as if the thumbs that formed her had pressed down the clay. Berni shivered as she waited for her to find the file.
Later she couldn’t remember saying goodbye or the exact wording of Sister Maria’s parting warning to her, something about staying alert and secretive and mentally guarded. All she knew was that the folder was in her hand. She opened it under the chestnut tree in the front yard, certain Sister Maria watched from one of the upper windows. When she’d read the file she nodded once, then walked away, heat pulsing in her earlobes.
Her file shouldn’t have affected her; she’d never doubted who her parents were. Still, at home she went to her room and cried until she coughed her throat raw. She stayed in bed three days, her emotion taking on the symptoms of influenza: dizziness, a weight on her chest.
There would be trouble if she missed another day of work: that was what Hansi had told her, and he turned out to be right. On Berni’s second day in bed, Anita left the Keller after her second shift with two Dutch tourists, men in flannel suits with an outdated sex guidebook. Hansi had overheard her boasting that she could show them which boy-bars were still open. “That girl,” he said sadly. “She’ll never pass up an opportunity to play queen of the scene.”
That night the Gestapo made a sweep of homosexual clubs in Berlin. Everyone inside was arrested.
Berni, 1935
After one night, Sonje and Berni could tell themselves Anita had escaped, that she’d holed herself away in a hotel room with a wealthy foreigner. It had happened before.
As days went by without word from Anita, Berni found it more and more unlikely that she hadn’t been taken. She couldn’t tell Sonje she’d ridden past Anita’s favorite bar, Der Regensturm, on her bicycle, and had seen the boarded-up door, the sign: Closed Due to Moral Turpitude. Crudely painted swastikas marred the glass and brick. She’d gotten off to search the sidewalk for spots of blood, but all she’d come away with was someone’s small beaded purse, emptied of cash. Sonje was right—they couldn’t just call the police and ask if a young man with long hair and women’s clothing had been arrested. Anita had no paperwork; you could not follow up on someone who did not exist.
After eight days Trommler telephoned Sonje and finally proved himself useful: he’d learned where they’d taken Anita. She’d been tried two days after her arrest in a closed court and found guilty of sodomy and prostitution. The judge had pronounced her a traitor to her race. For reformation she’d been sent to the Columbia concentration camp in Tempelhof.
“Well?” Berni said. “What’s Trommler going to do about it?”
They were sitting at the dining-room table. A piece of wurst had turned to jelly in Berni’s mouth. Nobody said anything when she spat a chewed-up mess of pink into her napkin.
Sonje looked toward the window. Strips of late-summer sunlight peeked around the corners of the black curtains. Frau Pelzer held the coffeepot, its neck drooping. They’d all heard of KZ Columbia: its damp basement cells, its interrogation rooms.
“He thinks you should write to the commandant of the camp,” Sonje said into her cup. “They’ve booked her as Otto Schulz, of course. You can pretend you’re Otto’s girlfriend.”
“Not a bad idea.” Frau Pelzer recovered and began to pour more coffee. “Tell them you want to make more Germans with him. That’s the whole issue, nicht?”
“Yes, that’s the idea,” said Sonje, her voice low. She put her pointer finger on the table and drew lines with it, as if they were in a war tent, outlining their strategy on a map. “You claim Otto’s your lover. Then Anita has a character witness.”
Berni threw her napkin at the table. “Trommler’s suggestion is for me to do something? Where are his connections now? What if it brings the SS to our door?”
She closed her eyes. Right now Anita would be curled against the stone wall of her cell. She’d refuse even to look at the others, to eat, to use the chamber pot the six men had to share. Constipated and dry-lipped, she’d shield her face so nobody could see her week-old makeup and greasy, tangled hair. What would the other prisoners do to her? What about the guards? Berni could imagine the look on the guard’s face on the day he finally opened the cell to announce that Otto’s girlfriend, Bernadette, had promised she’d get him out of those silly clothes for good. You mincing son of a bitch, the guard would say with a wink and a slap between Anita’s shoulder blades. Still like getting your shit pushed in? Poor, poor Bernadette.
“You’re a fool,” Berni told Sonje. “You sold your flat to Trommler so that I could write a damned letter.”
“I sold the flat to Trommler so the bank wouldn’t take it away,” Sonje replied. “Don’t be obtuse.” They looked at each other. Then the doorbell rang. The sound sent a staticky zing through Berni’s bones. When it rang again, the three of them leapt into action. Berni ran to the parlor to hide Sonje’s valuables: an heirloom clock and a gold-footed dish went under the sofa, along with a small urn that hid at least a hundred marks. Frau Pelzer put the cello on the balcony, then went to the door and peered through the hole. A man, she mouthed.
Nazi? Sonje replied.
Frau Pelzer shook her head and at Sonje’s signal opened the door a few inches. “May I help you?” Berni could see leather shoes, the creased knees of a suit.
“Won’t waste much of your time, gnädige Frau,” a pleasant voice said. “My name is Josef Grotte. I’m collecting for the Jewish Winter Relief.”
Sonje went to the door. “Do come inside, please. We have neighbors who listen.”
Quickly he stepped over the threshold. His hands were covered in wiry fur, even the knuckles, and a bit cre
pt out the top of his collar. “If you ladies have spare clothing, household goods, anything will help. We have thousands of families to support now.”
“I can give you a little cash, if that’s all right,” Sonje said, accepting her purse from Frau Pelzer. “You’ve caught us at a lean time, I’m afraid.”
“Bad times for everybody,” said Herr Grotte. “I hear Herr Göring’s had to start forming his personal medals out of nickel.” Frau Pelzer gasped. “Forgive me,” he said. “I find humor to be the best form of resistance.”
Sonje’s mouth twitched into a smile. “Frau Pelzer, I think it would be best if you turned on the radio.” Frau Pelzer huffed into the parlor, and after a moment, a Chopin waltz filled the room. Herr Grotte closed his eyes, his hairy fingers moving through the air. “We will appreciate any donation you can make, of money, of time. We’ve begun preparing people to emigrate.”
“Emigrate,” Sonje repeated. “Leave everything behind. Their language and land. Give Hitler what he wants.”
Berni held her breath. She and Sonje had had this conversation as well. With the violence against Jews, the indignities Sonje had to suffer, the answer seemed simple to Berni: leave Germany. Sonje and Anita had every reason to apply for passports and hop on a train to Paris or London. Whenever Berni mentioned this, Sonje asked why she didn’t consider doing the same, and Berni could not answer. Deep down she knew it had something to do with a lingering hope, something to do with Grete.
“We’ve already had to abandon much,” Herr Grotte told Sonje gently. “Those on the extreme side of the völkisch movement won’t stop until they take everything we own.”
The Cigarette Girl Page 18