after we entered the war, I had begun to sleep in his place beside her. We were two adult women who had both experienced everyday familiarity with the marriage bed, had both lost it, and there was something profane in the similar smell of our two bodies beneath the covers. Still, I wanted to keep her company when she woke during the night, even if the siren wasn’t going off. Or maybe I was afraid to sleep all alone. That’s why, six months after Gregor had gone off to war, I had rented out our apartment in Altemesseweg and moved back in with my parents. I was still learning the ropes of being a wife and already I had to stop that and become a daughter again.
“Hurry,” she said, seeing me search for a dress, any dress, to change into. She threw her coat on over her nightgown and headed down in slippers.
The siren was no different from the previous ones, a long wail that built up as though to last forever, but after eleven seconds it diminished in tone, abated. Then it started up again.
All the ones before it had been false alarms. Each time we had run downstairs with our flashlights on, despite the blackout orders. In the dark we would have tripped over the other tenants, bumped into them as they too headed for the cellar, carrying blankets and children and canteens filled with water, or descended terrified and empty-handed. Each time we had found a tiny patch for ourselves on the floor and sat down beneath a dim, bare lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling. The floor was cold, the people cramped, the dampness sinking into our bones.
Huddled against one another, we who lived at Budengasse 78 wept and prayed and cried for salvation. We urinated in a bucket too close to the eyes of the others, or held our bladders though they were ready to burst. A young boy bit into an apple and another boy stole it out of his hand, taking as many bites as he could before the first boy snatched it back and slapped him. We were hungry and sat there in silence or dozed, and would reach the dawn with haggard faces.
Soon afterward, the promise of a new day would drift down onto the light blue façade of our stately building in the outskirts of Berlin, making it glow. Hidden away in the depths of the building, we couldn’t see that light, much less believe it possible.
As I raced down the cellar stairs with my arm around my mother on that March night, I wondered what note it was, the sound of the air-raid siren. As a girl I had sung in the school choir, the teacher had complimented my pitch, the timbre of my voice, but I hadn’t studied music, so I couldn’t tell the notes apart. And yet, as I nestled down in my spot beside Frau Reinach with her brown kerchief on her head, as I stared at Frau Preiß’s black shoes deformed by her bunioned big toe, at the hairs sticking out of Herr Holler’s ears, at the Schmidts’ son Anton’s two tiny front teeth, and as my mother’s breath—Are you cold? she whispered to me. Bundle up—became the only profane yet familiar smell I had to cling to, all that while the only thing that mattered to me was finding out what note corresponded to that long blare of the siren.
The rumble of planes overhead instantly banished the thought. My mother squeezed my hand, her nails piercing my skin. Pauline, who was barely three, stood up. Her mother, Anne Langhans, tried to pull her down, but with all the obstinacy of her scant ninety centimeters the little girl broke free. She tilted back her head and looked straight up, turning around as if to seek the origin of the sound or follow the plane’s trajectory.
The ceiling shuddered. Pauline toppled over as the floor lurched, a deafening hiss drowning out every other sound, including our screams, her cries. The lightbulb flickered out. A massive explosion burst into the cellar, caving in the walls, hurling us every which way. The blast sent our bodies flying through the air, slamming into one another, tangling together as the walls spewed plaster.
After the bombing ceased, sobs and shouts reached our injured eardrums, muffled. Someone pushed on the cellar door. It was blocked. The women shrieked, the few men present kicked it again and again until finally it burst open.
We were deaf, blind, the dust had masked our features, made us strangers even to our own parents. We searched for them, calling out, Mother, Father, unable to utter any other words. My eyes saw only smoke. And then Pauline: she was bleeding from the temple. I tore the hem off my skirt with my teeth and stanched the wound, tied the strip of fabric around her head, looked for her mother, looked for mine, recognized no one.
The sun arrived by the time everyone had been pulled out. Our building hadn’t been leveled but the roof had a gaping hole in it. The roof of the building across from ours was entirely gone. Lined up on the street were the wounded and dead. Survivors leaned back against the wall, gasping for breath, but the fine debris had left throats stinging, noses clogged. Frau Reinach had lost her headkerchief, her hair clumps of smoldering dust that sprouted from her scalp like tumors. Herr Holler was limping. Pauline had stopped bleeding. I was intact, no aches, no pains. My mother was dead.
I would give my very life for the Führer,” Gertrude said, her eyes half closed to show her solemnity. Her sister Sabine nodded in approval. Because of her receding chin I couldn’t tell whether she was younger or older. The table in the lunchroom was bare. Only half an hour to go before we could leave. Standing out against the metal-gray sky framed by the window was another food taster, Theodora.
“I would give my life for him too,” Sabine said. “He’s like an older brother to me. He’s like the brother we lost, Gerti.”
“I, on the other hand,” Theodora said with a grin, “would have him as a husband.”
Sabine frowned, almost as if Theodora had disrespected the Führer.
The window fixtures rattled. Augustine had leaned against them. “Go ahead and keep him, your Great Consoler,” she said. “He’s the one who sends your brothers, fathers, and husbands out for slaughter in the first place. But then again, if they die, who cares? You can always pretend he’s your brother, right? Or you can dream he’ll marry you.” Augustine ran her finger and thumb down the corners of her mouth, wiping away frothy white spittle. “You’re ridiculous, all of you.”
“You’d better pray you’re not overheard!” Gertrude snapped. “Or do you want me to call in the SS?”
“The Führer would have kept us out of war if it had been possible,” Theodora said, “but he didn’t have a choice.”
“I take that back: you’re more than ridiculous—you’re fanatics.”
Though I didn’t know it then, from that point on “the Fanatics” would be our name for Gertrude and her little group. Augustine coined it while frothing at the mouth. Her husband had fallen at the front, that was why she always dressed in black. Leni told me that.
The women had grown up in the same town, and those of the same age had gone to school together. They all knew one another, at least by sight. All of them except Elfriede. She wasn’t from Gross-Partsch or the surrounding area, and Leni told me she’d never met her before we’d become food tasters. Elfriede too was from out of town, then, but no one was giving her any trouble over it. Augustine didn’t bother her. Augustine was nasty to me not so much because I came from the capital but because she saw my need to fit in, and that left me vulnerable. Neither I nor the others had ever asked Elfriede what city she came from, and she had never mentioned it. Her coldness left us apprehensive.
I wondered whether Elfriede had also fled to the countryside in search of peace and had immediately been recruited, just like me. On what basis had they chosen us? The first time I boarded the bus I had expected to find a den of zealous Nazis singing songs and waving flags. Soon I would realize that loyalty to the party hadn’t been a criterion in their selection, except perhaps in the case of the Fanatics. Had they enlisted the poorest ones, the neediest? The ones with the most children to feed? The women talked about their children nonstop, except for Leni and Ulla, who were the youngest ones, and Elfriede. They were childless, as was I. But they didn’t wear wedding bands, while I had been married for four years.
THE MINUTE I got home that afternoon, Herta asked me to help her fold the sheets. She barely even said hello to me. She seemed impatient,