her, “We can split this one, and next time you can give me a little of yours.”
Eavesdropping on them embarrassed me. Beate couldn’t afford milk? We hadn’t been given our first payment yet, but we would be paid for our work—that was what the SS guards said, though they hadn’t specified how much. For a moment I doubted the two women were tasters, despite having seen them from close up. How could they not have recognized me? I followed them with my eyes, hoping they would turn around. They didn’t. They kept walking until they disappeared from sight, and a moment later it was my turn to go in.
On the way home it began to pour. The water made my hair cling to my temples and drenched my coat. I shivered from the cold. Herta had warned me to take a mantle but I had forgotten. With my city shoes on, I risked tumbling into the mud. My view blurred by the lashing water, I could easily take the wrong road. Despite my heels, I began to run. Suddenly, not far from the church, I spotted the silhouette of two women walking arm in arm. I recognized them from Heike’s full skirt, or maybe from their backs, which my eyes observed in the lunchroom every day as we stood in line. If they spread out both their mantles all three of us would fit underneath. I called out to them. A clap of thunder drowned out my voice. I called out again. They didn’t look back. Maybe I was wrong, maybe it wasn’t them. Slowly I came to a halt and stood there in the rain.
The next day, in the lunchroom, I sneezed.
“Gesundheit,” someone to my right said.
It was Heike. I was surprised to recognize her voice, though my view of her was blocked by Ulla, who was sitting between us.
“Did you catch a chill yesterday too?”
They had seen me, then.
“Yes,” I replied, “I have a cold.”
Hadn’t they heard me calling to them?
“Warm milk with honey,” Beate said, almost as if she had waited for Heike’s approval before speaking to me. “If we had more milk than we knew what to do with, that would be our remedy.”
THE WEEKS PASSED and our suspicion of the food faded, as toward a suitor with whom you gradually grow more intimate. We women now feasted avidly, but immediately afterward our bloated bellies would curb our enthusiasm, the weight on our stomachs like a weight on our hearts. The hour following each banquet was filled with desperation.
Each of us still feared we might be poisoned. It happened if a cloud suddenly darkened the high midday sun, it happened during those seconds of confusion that often come right before dusk. And yet none of us could hide the comfort given to us by the Griessnockerlsuppe, with those semolina dumplings that melted in our mouths, or our total devotion to Eintopf, despite the fact that we missed pork and beef and even chicken. But Hitler refused to eat meat, and on the radio he encouraged his citizens to have vegetable stew at least once a week. He thought it was easy to find vegetables in the city during the war. Either that or it was none of his concern; Germans didn’t die of hunger, and if they died they were bad Germans.
I thought of Gregor and would touch my belly, now that it was full and there was nothing left to be done. Spare me until Christmas, at least until Christmas, I would repeat to myself, my legs trembling, and with my finger I would secretly draw a sign of the cross in the spot where my esophagus ended—or at least where I thought it did, imagining the inside of my body as a cluster of gray puzzle pieces like the ones I had seen depicted in Krümel’s books.
From the outside, covered with clothes, my body didn’t seem different. But I felt my hips spread out until they brushed against my forearms when I sat down, and when I stood up, my thighs stiffened with the arrogance of new, strengthened muscles. My ribs didn’t press against my skin anymore and my round face, Herta said, had regained its color. The Führer’s food had changed my appearance, had transformed us all.
Maybe for this reason, the tears gradually started to seem pathetic to everyone, even to Leni. If her panic rose I would squeeze her hand, stroke her blotchy cheeks. Elfriede never cried. During the hour-long wait I would listen to her noisy breathing. When something distracted her, her face would forget its harshness and she became pretty. Beate chewed with the same fervor she would have used to scrub bedsheets. Heike, her next-door neighbor since they’d been little girls—Leni had told me that—was seated across from her, and she cut her trout in butter and parsley with her left hand, raising her elbow until it bumped into Ulla’s arm. Not even noticing, Ulla continued to lick the corners of her mouth. It must have been that childish gesture, repeated distractedly, that sent the SS guards into ecstasy.
I would study the food in the others’ dishes, and the woman who happened to have been served the same food as me that day would become dearer to me than a close relative. My heart was suddenly touched by the sight of the pimple that had formed on her cheek, by the energy or indolence with which she washed her face in the morning, by the pillings on the old wool stockings she might put on before getting into bed. Her survival was as important to me as my own, because we shared the same fate.
With time even the SS guards relaxed. During lunch, if they were on their good behavior, they would chat among themselves without taking much notice of us and wouldn’t even tell us to stop talking. If, on the other hand, they were feeling aroused, they would lock their eyes on us and dissect us. They stared at us like we stared at our food, almost as if they were about to take a bite out of us. They would prowl around our chairs with their weapons in their holsters, badly judging the distance, their guns brushing against our backs, making us flinch. At times they would lean over one of us from behind—normally it was Ulla, their “dish.” They would lower their finger to her bosom, murmuring, You’ve got food on your shirt, and all at once Ulla would stop eating. We would all stop.
Leni was their favorite, though, because her green eyes sparkled against her pale skin, which was too thin to mask any uncertainty, any doubt, and because she was so defenseless. One of the guards pinched her cheek, fussing over her in a falsetto voice—Puppy eyes!—and Leni smiled, not from embarrassment. She thought the tenderness she brought out in others would protect her. She was willing to pay the price for her fragility, and the SS men sensed it.
In the Krausendorf barracks we risked dying every day, but no more than anyone else alive. Mother was right about that, I thought, as the radicchio crunched between my teeth and the cauliflower filled the room with its homey, comforting smell.
One morning Krümel announced he was going to pamper us. That’s how he said it—pamper—to us, who no longer believed we had the right to be pampered. He was going to let us taste his zwieback, he said, he had just baked some as a surprise for his boss. “He loves it. He even had it made in the trenches during the Great War.”
“Sure he did. After all, it’s so easy to find the ingredients at the front,” Augustine whispered. “The butter, honey, and yeast he produced himself, by sweating.” Fortunately the SS guards didn’t hear her, and Krümel had already disappeared into the kitchen with his assistant chefs.
A noise escaped Elfriede’s nose, a sort of laugh. I had never heard Elfriede laugh before, and it caught me so off guard that it made me feel like laughing too. Though I tried to retain my composure, when I heard another snort I couldn’t hold back a titter. “Berliner, can’t you control yourself?” she said, and at that point a mixture of snickers and grunts fermented in the lunchroom, growing fuller and fuller until we couldn’t hold back any longer. All of us burst out laughing before the SS guards’ astonished eyes.
“What’s so funny?” Fingers touching a holster. “What’s come over you?” One of the guards pounded his fist on the table. “Do I have to beat it out of you?”
With effort, we fell silent. “Order!” the Beanpole said, though our sense of amusement had already faded.
Still, it had happened: for the first time, we had laughed together.
THE ZWIEBACK WAS crispy and fragrant. I savored the merciless sweetness of my privilege.