Leni didn’t smile back. “Maybe the doctor will ask us something at our next blood exam, surprise us with a question!”
“That would be funny.”
“What’s so funny about it?”
“It’s like we’re peeking into Hitler’s innards,” I said with incomprehensible cheerfulness. “If we make a rough estimate, we can calculate when his sphincter will dilate.”
“That’s disgusting!”
It wasn’t disgusting, it was human. Adolf Hitler was a human being who digested.
“Has the professor finished her lesson? When the lecture’s over we can applaud you.” It was Augustine, the woman with square shoulders dressed in black. The guards didn’t order us to be quiet. At the chef’s request, the lunchroom was to be a schoolroom, and his request was to be respected.
“I’m sorry,” I said, lowering my head, “I didn’t mean to bother you.”
“We all know you studied in the city, okay?”
“What do you care what kind of studies she did?” another woman, Ulla, broke in. “In any case, she’s here now, eating just like the rest of us. Delicious food, no doubt, dressed with a drizzle of poison.” She laughed, but no one joined her.
Narrow of waist, firm of bosom, Ulla was quite a dish—that’s what the SS guards said about her. She liked to clip out photographs of actresses from magazines and glue them into a scrapbook. At times she would leaf through them and point them out to us one by one: the porcelain cheeks of Anny Ondra, who had married Max Schmeling, the boxer; Ilse Werner’s lips, soft and plump as she pursed them to whistle the refrain of “Sing ein Lied, wenn Du mal traurig bist” on the radio, because all it took to keep from feeling sad and lonely was to sing a song. Especially, Ulla admitted, to German soldiers. But her favorite was Zarah Leander, with her high-arched eyebrows and the little curls framing her face in the movie La Habanera.
“Coming here to the barracks wearing elegant clothes is a good idea,” she said to me. I wore a wine-colored dress with a French-cut collar and puffed sleeves. My mother had made it for me. “This way, if you die, at least you’ll already be in your good dress. They won’t even need to prepare your corpse.”
“Why do you all keep talking about such horrible things?” Leni protested.
Herta was right: the others noticed my appearance. Not only Elfriede, who had scoured the checks on my dress on our second day there and was now leaning against the wall as she read her book, a pencil between her lips like a burned-out cigarette. It seemed to weigh on her, having to stay seated. She always looked like she was on the verge of leaving.
“So you like this dress, then?”
Ulla hesitated, then answered me. “It’s a bit chaste, but the style is almost Parisian. And it’s definitely much nicer than the dirndls Frau Goebbels wants to make us wear.” She lowered her voice. “And that she wears,” she added, pointing with her eyes to the woman next to me, the one who had stood up after lunch on the first day. Gertrude didn’t hear her.
“Oh, what nonsense.” Augustine slammed her palms on the table for emphasis and turned away. Unsure how to conclude her dramatic finale to the conversation, she decided to move closer to Elfriede, though Elfriede didn’t take her eyes off her textbook.
“So do you like it or don’t you?” I asked again.
Ulla reluctantly admitted: “Yes.”
“Fine. You can have it, then.”
A thump made me look up. Elfriede had snapped her book shut and folded her arms over her chest, the pencil still in her mouth.
“So what are you going to do, strip down like Saint Francis right here in front of everyone and give it to her?” Augustine snickered, expecting Elfriede to back her up, but she just stood there staring at me, expressionless.
I turned back to Ulla. “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow, if you like. No, wait, give me time to wash it.”
A murmur spread through the room as Elfriede pulled away from the wall and moved over to sit across from me. She let her textbook thud to the table, rested her hand on it, and began to drum her fingers on the cover, scrutinizing me. Augustine watched her, certain she was about to pass judgment, but Elfriede said nothing. Her fingers fell still.
“She comes here from Berlin to give us handouts,” Augustine said, piling it on. “Wants to give us lessons in biology and Christian charity, to prove she’s better than us.”
“I do want it,” Ulla said.
“It’s yours,” I replied.
Augustine tsked. I would learn she always did that to express her displeasure. “Oh, please …”
“Line up!” the guards ordered. “The hour is over.”
We quickly rose to our feet. Augustine’s little scene had captivated the other women, but their desire to leave the lunchroom was even stronger. Once again, we were going back home safe and sound.
As I joined the line, Ulla touched my elbow. “Thank you,” she whispered, and ran off ahead.
Elfriede was behind me. “This isn’t a boarding school for women, Berliner, it’s a barracks.”
“Mind your own business,” I was surprised to hear myself say. The back of my neck instantly flushed. “You’re the one who taught me that, remember?” It sounded more like an excuse than a provocation. I wanted to get along with Elfriede rather than clash with her, though I didn’t know why.
“In any case,” she said, “the kid’s right: there’s nothing funny about those books, unless you get a kick out of learning the symptoms caused by various forms of poisoning. Do you enjoy preparing for death?”
I kept walking, without replying.
That night I washed the wine-colored dress for Ulla. Giving it to her wasn’t an act of generosity or even a ploy to make her like me. Seeing it on her would be like scattering my life in the capital into Gross-Partsch, dispersing it. It was resignation. Three days later, I gave it to her, dried, ironed, and wrapped in newspaper. I would never see her wear it to the lunchroom.
Herta took my measurements and altered some of her own dresses for me, narrowing the waistline and shortening the back hems slightly, at my insistence. That’s the fashion, I explained. Berliner fashion, she retorted, pins between her lips like my mother and not even one scrap of thread on the floor of her country house.
I kept the checkered dress in the wardrobe that had belonged to Gregor, along with all my work clothes. My shoes were the same—Where are you going in those heels? Herta said reproachfully—but only with them on could I recognize my own footsteps, no matter how uncertain they had become. On foggy mornings I would sometimes pull out the checkered dress, gripping the hanger angrily. There was no need for me to blend in with the other tasters, we had nothing in common, why did I care about being accepted by them? But then I would glimpse the dark circles under my eyes and the anger would wither to despondency. Putting the dress back in the darkness of the wardrobe, I would close the door.
They had been a warning, those circles under my eyes, and I hadn’t grasped it, hadn’t foreseen my fate, blocked its path. Now that death was finally upon me, there was no longer room for the little girl who sang in the school choir, who went roller-skating with friends in the afternoon, who let them copy her geometry homework. Gone was the secretary who had made the boss fall head over heels for her. Instead there was a woman whom the war had suddenly aged. That was the fate written in her blood.
THAT NIGHT OF March ’43, the night my fate had taken a sharp turn for the worse, the air-raid siren had gone off with its usual whine, the smallest run-up and then a leap, just long enough for my mother to roll out of bed. “Rosa,