City of Women by David R. Gillham Page B

his rough terrain had caused her to forget just how vulnerable he was to pain. She cursed her own hubris, her own frantic desire to be everything to him. To blot out wives, children, histories. To render them all without consequence.
    Then at the door he had whispered, “Please don’t.”
    “Don’t what?”
    “Let your smaller emotions taint what we have.”
    She gazed at him for a moment, and shook her head. Quite without a drop of fight remaining, she propped herself up against the pillar of his body, and said, “There are times, Herr Weiss, when I could simply murder you.”
    “Well,” he answered calmly, “for that you’ll need to stand in quite a long queue.”
    Suddenly she nearly laughed. She glared up into his face. “Longer, you think, than the queue for milk?”
    He raised his eyebrows. “Longer than milk, shorter than meat,” he said, and then kissed her.
    •   •   •
    C OMING HOME from the patent office, she thinks, for an instant, that she
sees
him. Sees him at the bus stop across the street from the zoo. This happens now and again, causing her heart to flood. She conjures him out of the brisk air of the present. Fleshing her memory into a man on the corner, or sitting at a café window. But, of course, it isn’t him. It isn’t him at all. How could it be? He is gone. Escaped into the world beyond the boundaries the Greater German Reich. She sometimes allows herself silly fantasies that, in her old age, she will travel abroad as a widow, and find him sitting at a café table in Barcelona or perhaps Cairo. She will turn the corner and discover a finely silvered version of him wearing a beret. An Egon Weiss she will finally be able to claim.
    Entering the flat in the Uhlandstrasse, she hangs her scarf on a peg when her mother-in-law appears wearing a black smirk. “You saw the door?” the old woman inquires.
    Sigrid glances at their door. “Saw it?”
    “Not
ours
,” she gruffs. “Frau Remki’s. It’s been sealed. They sealed it up after they took her away.”
    “
Who
took her away?”
    “
Who?
Who do you
think
, dear child?”
Dear child
is not a pleasantry in Mother Schröder’s mouth. Sigrid pastes her eyes to her mother-in-law’s expression, then peers into the hall. Frau Remki’s door has been sealed with four white-and-black adhesive-backed stamps bearing the eagle over the hooked cross and encircled by a ring that reads CLOSED BY THE GEHEIME STAATSPOLIZEI. A fifth stamp covers the keyhole.
    “Three of them arrived with their pistols out. But, of course, she had beaten them to the punch. A spoiler to the last,” says her mother-in-law. “They had to carry her out feet first.”
    Sigrid shakes her head as if to clear it. “
What?
What are you saying?”
    “I’m saying she followed the same path as her exalted husband. A suicide.” The old lady shrugs. “Probably the smartest thing she ever did,” she concludes, then crosses over to the stove and lifts the lid on a large steaming pot. “Soup’s nearly ready,” she announces. “You should put the plates on the table.”
    Sigrid stares. “Was it Mundt?”
    Sniffing at the soup. “Mundt?”
    “Was it Mundt who
denounced
her?”
    “How should I know?” Her mother-in-law picks up the ladle and stirs the pot. “Why don’t you go below stairs and ask her? Knowing Ilse Mundt, she’ll be happy to brag. Now kindly put the plates on the table, will you? I’d like to eat my supper.”

FOUR
    A T A TRAM STOP , the conductor must clear the aisle to make space for a soldier propped on crutches who is boarding without the benefit of a right foot. Several passengers compete to give up their seats for him, but he politely refuses all offers, face flushing. There was an invasion of Berlin after the Aufmarsch into Russia. An invasion by an army of mutilated and crippled young men. A year ago they said the war was all but won. The Party press secretary announced that the Wehrmacht’s victory in Russia was now irreversible. THE