The German House

by Annette Hess

  “Was that a bird?” Eva asked.

  Instead of answering, Jürgen leaned over, kissed her quickly and hard on the mouth, then lay down on top of her, tore her dressing gown open with both hands, pushed up her nightgown, pulled down her underwear, his pajama pants, thrust himself deeper between her legs, which she opened; he gripped his stiff member, maneuvered with it, swore, couldn’t find her, then did and furiously entered her. Eva held her breath. He moved a few times inside her, and it hurt her, then he groaned frantically, whimpered, and collapsed on top of her. For a moment he lay there heavily, sobbing quietly. Eva caressed the back of his head. He slid off her then and sat up on the edge of the bed. He rubbed his face with both hands.

  “Forgive me, Eva.”

  He was like a boy, brutal and helpless at once. She rubbed his back as she felt his semen trickle warmly out of her. As though her vagina were crying.

  SISSI WAS COAXED INTO accompanying David. They strolled, almost like a couple, through the deserted holiday streets toward the Westend Synagogue, while David pontificated about the significance of Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks. Sissi linked arms with him; she was wearing her tasteful rust-red suit and a new hat, whose violet hue didn’t quite match. David often spoke about his Jewish faith as if he were reading from a book. Sissi wasn’t listening. She was calculating whether she could afford to send her son to middle school. He wanted to stay in school for another two years, so he could later apprentice as a travel agent. Meanwhile, Sissi could arrange an apprenticeship at the slaughterhouse for him immediately—and with eighty marks pay per month, at that. “I will never become a butcher! Over my dead body!” he had exclaimed in disgust. He wanted to sit in an office and sell trips to faraway lands—not wear a rubber apron and slop around in animal carcasses. Sissi could see where her son was coming from, but things would get tight financially. Her johns weren’t exactly increasing in number, although her experience did help offset the aging process. But how much longer would that last? David was explaining that Shavuot celebrated the day the Torah was presented to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. By reading the Ten Commandments, one renewed one’s ties to the ineffable. Infants, small children, the elderly—anyone who was able to, should participate in this celebration. The faithful traditionally drank milk and ate dairy and honey.

  “Because the Torah is like milk, Sissi! Milk that the nation of Israel drinks as eagerly as an innocent child!”

  “Oh,” Sissi said. She finished her calculations and concluded that she would give it a try, even if it meant she’d need about a hundred marks extra every month. If necessary, she could pour drinks at Mokka Bar. She didn’t need much sleep.

  In the temple vestibule, a throng of worshippers gathered for services. The walls were decorated with birch branches and colorful bands of fabric. The men wore festive yarmulkes, the women their best dresses and silk head scarves. It seemed the kids barely dared breathe, for all their finery. The mood was social and cheery. Rabbi Riesbaum, a serious man with sincere eyes who had helped David work through his many questions concerning faith over the past few months, greeted him warmly. He took quick stock of Sissi, then gave her a nod. David secured his purple yarmulke in place, and Sissi smiled and pointed at her hat and said that now they looked like twins. She moved toward the sanctuary, but David told her to take the stairs to the side. Women had to sit in a separate gallery. Sissi climbed a few steps and peeked into the space upstairs, where several women, girls, and young children were already seated. She hurried back to David and hissed, “You mean to say I’m supposed to go up there and stare at the wall?”

  “It’s tradition.”

  “That’s too much for me. I’m leaving.” Sissi turned and headed for the exit. David grabbed her arm.

  “Please stay. You’ll like it. And there’s food afterward. Pancakes with yogurt. And cheesecake.”

  Sissi paused. “Cheesecake?”

  David smiled. “Cheesecake and the Ten Commandments. That’s what this is all about.”

  Sissi hesitated, then turned and somewhat reluctantly climbed the stairs. David entered the sanctuary, which was now so familiar. A few men nodded amiably in greeting. But he still felt like a fraud.

  Upstairs, behind the wall, Sissi listened to the prayers and songs and reading from the Torah with the other women. She listened to the foreign language. The cantor sang in Aramaic,

  God shall prepare a meal for the righteous.

  May you faithful,

  who hear this praise in song,

  receive invitation to this communion.

  May you be found worthy

  to sit in this hall,

  because you have heard these ten words

  that resound in glory.

  To Sissi, the melody sparked an image of a withdrawn child singing to himself as he played. She didn’t understand the words, but she was well acquainted with the Ten Commandments. She thought every last one was right. Sissi had an uncomplicated relationship with God—he left her alone, as she did him. She had observed nearly all of the commandments her entire life. Only she hadn’t been able to honor her parents. She had never met them.

  “YOU’RE GETTING A DIVORCE?!”

  Annegret almost choked on her meringue cake. She was sitting with Doctor Küssner in the Hausberg Schänke beer garden outside the city; every last seat was taken. They had driven there in Küssner’s car, because Annegret wouldn’t dream of lifting a finger in her free time. Their table was loaded with cups and small coffeepots as well as two plates of cake, although Doctor Küssner didn’t like sweets. The neighboring tables were occupied by howling or hungrily snacking children, courting couples, and sweaty, thirsty hikers. They were surrounded by lively Sunday afternoon activity, but Annegret had frozen.

  Küssner regarded her and said, “I’ve already spoken several times with Ingrid. She is starting to accept it. She’ll stay in our house with the children. You know I’ve never liked this ugly city. And it keeps getting uglier. I’ve been offered the opportunity to take over a practice in Wiesbaden. It’s a beautiful old house. Art Nouveau, with a big yard. Nice area, only cultivated people. Well-behaved children, friendly parents. I’d like to live and work there together with you.”

  Annegret chewed and swallowed, then set down her cake fork and stood. “Excuse me for a moment.”

  She maneuvered her way among tables and chairs. She entered the dim taproom, where just a few older guests had come to escape the sun. She followed the sign pointing the way to the restrooms, along an unventilated hallway, across a small courtyard, and down a long flight of stairs into the basement. The restroom had three stalls, one of which was luckily unoccupied. Annegret went in, lifted the toilet seat, and abruptly vomited half-chewed meringue and cream into the bowl. She yanked the toilet chain and the water gurgled, but the meringue remained afloat, and she flushed again. The white chunks hung in the water like little icebergs. In the meantime, a woman had come out of one of the other stalls.

  “Can I help?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Annegret wiped her mouth with a handkerchief, standing before the spotted mirror. She took her lipstick out of her purse and redid her lips in a slightly garish shade of orange. She began to tease her hair with a comb. She poked around her hair with the handle of the comb for a long time. Finally she let her hand fall.

  Hartmut Küssner sat upstairs in the beer garden and regretted nothing. He had been afraid of this conversation, almost more than of that with his wife. He worried it would feel wrong to map out their shared future. But that hadn’t been the case. On the contrary. As he watched Annegret return—luminous lipstick reapplied, her white-blond hair more cottony than ever, fat and combative in her spring dress with the large floral print, yet her eyes so full of fear and vulnerability—he knew at that moment that he loved her. That he wanted to provide for her and take care of her for the rest of his life. Annegret sat down across from him and began to eat her cake again almost immediately.

  “I’m sorry,”
she said, with her mouth full. “You’ve made a mistake, Hartmut. I won’t be going anywhere with you.”

  “It’s in Wiesbaden-Bierstadt.”

  “Doesn’t matter where. Or living with you. I’ve never been anything but clear with you. We’re having an affair, and that’s it.”

  “It’s true, you’ve never said anything to the contrary. But I don’t care.”

  Annegret looked up. She couldn’t help but laugh at this unassuming, balding man without a single wrinkle, who was demonstrating such unexpected power. Annegret put down her fork.

  “I already have a family.”

  “Where you’ll die an old maid?”

  “Well, not so sure about the ‘maid’ bit.” Annegret smiled wryly. “No is my answer. So what are you going to do, Doctor Küssner? Kidnap me and lock me in the basement of this sensational Art Nouveau house in Wiesbaden-Bierstadt?”

  Doctor Küssner pulled a pair of sunglasses Annegret had never seen out of the breast pocket of his jacket and put them on. “Maybe.”

  Annegret laughed, but it didn’t sound genuine.

  THE FLIGHT BACK FROM the island was, as Brigitte put it, “unspeakably bad.” They had taken off into black clouds, because the pilot initially saw it as an exciting challenge, then flown through heavy rains that turned into a storm. The little airplane shook so badly that even Jürgen discreetly clutched his seat a few times. Furthermore, Walther Schoormann’s morning sedatives weren’t working, which did not become clear till they were already in the air. He feared for his life, but thankfully did not start thrashing about; instead, he babbled incessantly. They could only catch the occasional fragment or word, but the topic was clear: communism as the sole enduring humanist social system. Eva listened and gave in to the shaking; she was the only passenger who wasn’t scared, as though all feeling inside her had died.

  When Eva opened the door to the apartment above German House later, she instinctively expected Purzel to jump up around her as she entered. Instead, Edith came out of the kitchen. She took her daughter’s wet coat. “What’s this weather you’ve brought with you?” she asked in greeting. She usually reserved this line for strangers. She didn’t await a response, either, but immediately started telling Eva that Stefan had dug Purzel up again the day before. Her father, who wandered out of the living room and looked like he’d been sleeping, explained that Stefan had discovered he was missing two of his best soldiers, which he needed to maintain “sufficient troop strength” against his friend Thomas Preisgau. Stefan hadn’t considered this at Purzel’s burial. Stefan was sitting at the kitchen table, doing his homework. He hugged Eva and reported at length about Purzel’s current condition—about his eyes, which were just gone, and about the “beastly” smell. Stefan held his nose at the thought of it, while their mother returned to the stove, where she was preparing lunch, a stew of vegetable and meat leftovers thrown together from Ludwig’s kitchen. Eva liked this dish—“big pot in a little’n,” Ludwig called it—but didn’t have much of an appetite and just poked at her food. She told them about the sprawling beach on the northernmost island in the North Sea, prompting gruff commentary from Ludwig, ever the Juist patriot. That beach was man-made. “They dump sand there from China when the tourists aren’t looking!” Over coffee after lunch, Eva gave them their presents. She had bought Annegret some East Frisian tea and a big bag of rock candy, which she set aside for later that evening. Her parents unwrapped a blue-and-white tile, which depicted a young couple ice-skating, painted in delicate brushstrokes. They were overjoyed, and Eva noticed how tired they both looked. Stefan got a blue captain’s hat with a pom-pom plunked on his head by Eva. He beamed and dashed into the hallway. He saluted before the mirror and marched back and forth.

  “Left, right, left, right, attention!”

  “Stefan, it’s a captain’s hat!” Eva called to him.

  Stefan took a moment, then cried out, “All hands on deck! Pull in the lines! She’s taking on water at the stern!”

  And as a ship threatened to sink in the front hallway, Eva and her parents sat in silence at the kitchen table, Edith and Ludwig both resting their hands on the waxed cotton tablecloth. The rain Eva had brought with her from the island beat against the kitchen window. Eva took another sip of her coffee, which had gone cold and tasted stale. She placed her hands on the table as well. Don’t speak. Don’t move. Hold your breath till it passes and no one will come to any harm.

  DAVID WAS NERVOUS. He had slept poorly and looked unwell. The blond man noticed it the moment they said good morning in the auditorium. He would have liked to put a hand on his shoulder. Instead, he remarked snidely that David’s big day had finally come. They had finally reached Defendant Number Four. David responded so earnestly, however, that the blond man regretted his comment. He still hadn’t managed to figure out what connected David to this defendant—the Beast. To the prosecution’s dismay, the defendant was still at liberty. His request for deferred arrest had been renewed three times for health reasons. Over the next few days, fifteen former prisoners were scheduled to speak about what had occurred in Block Eleven. Six came from Poland and would be dependent on Fräulein Bruhns’s interpreting. Eva showed up at the municipal building that day as if nothing had happened. She greeted Fräulein Schenke and Fräulein Lehmkuhl, and they commiserated over the dearth of fashionable weatherproof clothing. It was still raining outside, as the cold snap dug in its heels. Inside the overheated foyer with its foggy windows, the reporters seemed agitated, besieging the attorney general, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, eavesdropping on each other, and fighting loudly over the use of the pay phones. Two even started tussling and had to be separated by a hall attendant. The reporters felt certain that new atrocities would come to light, which meant good numbers. Seats in the gallery were hard-won too. Defendant Number Four’s wife, the faded beauty, had taken her spot in the front row, her bearing even more erect than usual. She wore a strikingly elegant suit and had carefully done her hair and makeup. Eva regarded the woman from across the auditorium and mused that she was like a one-time opera singer who had played all the major roles—Ophelia, Leonora, Kriemhild—without ever feeling a thing in her heart.

  Silence fell in the room, the judges entered, and the first witness was called: Nadia Wasserstrom, who had worked as the personal secretary to Defendant Number Four at the camp. The ferret face remained impassive as the woman, on crutches, slowly approached the witness stand. Eva helped her into the chair and then translated what the woman could remember. As Nadia Wasserstrom began to speak in a clear Polish, without hesitation, without searching for words—and Eva reproduced the sentences in the same rhythm, without the help of her two dictionaries, detecting meaning and placing pauses—Eva sensed that something had changed. She tried to discern what it was, while she translated testimony that the defendant, who led the camp’s political department with the rank of SS-Oberscharführer, had arbitrarily ordered people shot—and shot them himself—at the Death Wall, men, women, and children. He invented a type of swing, from which prisoners were hung upside down from the backs of their knees. The defendant then questioned them in this defenseless position and beat them with rods and whips, many to death. During these descriptions, Defendant Number Four tilted his head occasionally to the left or to the right. He waved at his wife once, who gave him a quick smile. The chief judge rebuked him and asked what he had to say about the accusations; his attorney—the White Rabbit—replied, after rising, “My client denies these accusations without exception. He was simply performing interrogations as ordered.”

  During the lunch break, Eva stayed seated in the hall. Was she getting sick? She was sweating and wiped a handkerchief over her brow. She took a small bottle out of her briefcase and unscrewed the top. Peppermint water, which she had kept among her things since her fainting spell, and which had helped her stave off nausea on a number of occasions already. She sniffed at it, expecting the sharp, refreshing scent, but she couldn’t smell anything. Her nose must be stuffed. May
be she really was coming down with the flu. David hadn’t left his post, either. He stared over at the empty defendants’ tables, at the seat of the defendant, who was currently sitting with the other defendants at a table on the far side of the cafeteria next door to the auditorium, protected from spectators and reporters by a police guard, eating his lunch.

  Nadia Wasserstrom’s testimony continued after the break. Eva translated. “A very young man, a German Jew, was once beaten to death by the defendant. It was September ninth, ’44. I recall it so clearly because he fainted in my office before the interrogation. From hunger. One of the female wardens had given me a piece of cake. I gave it to him. Then the defendant called him into his office for the interrogation. Two hours later, the door opened. The young man was hanging from the swing. He no longer looked like a human being. His clothes were gone. His buttocks, his genitals—everything was swollen, bloody, open. He was just a sack, a bloody sack. Another prisoner came in then and dragged him out. I had to mop up the blood.” Eva could see the image before her eyes, she was standing in that outside office, registering every detail, the facial features of the deceased, the open door to the office, the red trail leading to the swing. She caught every last detail, yet still felt blind. She looked around the courtroom as though searching for something, and met the blank gaze of the defendant’s wife. Eva started, because it was like looking in a mirror. She now knew what was different about today: she no longer felt anything.

  David stood up and leaned over to the blond man’s microphone. He spoke into it, which wasn’t actually allowed, and asked, “It was his brother who had to carry him out. His younger brother, wasn’t it?”