The Cigarette Girl Read online

  They were all laughing when Herr Eisler came in, and everyone froze. Frau Eisler stared, horrified, at the near-empty soup pot.

  “A nice family scene,” he said. “I’m not sure I approve of the subject matter, though.” He kissed Gudrun’s head, causing her to wriggle with pleasure.

  Grete leapt from her chair, jostling the table.

  “No, Grete,” he said. “Sit, please! I’m not hungry.” Frau Eisler watched him with a wrinkle in between her eyes. He kissed her and dropped one hand onto Klaus’s shoulder, then dragged his leg around the table and dug his thumbs into Grete’s back. The pressure radiated through her body. “Do you enjoy life here?” he asked, close to her ear.

  “Ja, natürlich.” Grete knew he was thinking of her salary, how frightfully small it was. He paid her with scarcely more than shelter and food. Had Frau Eisler not been watching closely, she would have told him how lucky she felt that he had chosen her.

  “We were just hearing tales of Grete’s sister,” said Klaus.

  “Oh? And what does Grete’s sister do?” Herr Eisler leapt at Gudrun, his hands up like claws. “Is she a lion tamer?” Gudrun tossed her blond head and giggled.

  Everyone left the table a few minutes later, and Grete went to the sink with Frau Eisler and took a dish brush from her hand. “He’s a superior man,” Grete said softly.

  Frau Eisler worried her hands together and headed toward the bedroom. Grete cleaned the kitchen and dining room alone, finishing after all four Eislers were tucked into bed. It was her duty, naturally, but it was also her pleasure.

  • • •

  On her next free Wednesday afternoon, Grete found herself in Schöneberg.

  The neighborhood looked nothing like what she expected. She had prepared for throngs of thieves, homophiles, beggars, prostitutes, old men who’d grope her or worse. The buildings were smaller and closer together than in Charlottenburg, and she saw more people on bicycles. The odors were different, stronger perhaps, some foods she didn’t recognize. She turned the corner at a dense hilly park and took a breath of damp summer air.

  She’d woken that morning with an ache. She had been sleeping on her stomach, and a dull pain on the right side of her chest had woken her. She crept to the toilet and peeked down into her shirt to find a grotesque sight: one swollen nipple. One small breast. Only one. The other remained as flat as it had been since birth, no more than a freckle on the skin. It figured she’d be disfigured, lopsided, in this way. How long would she be able to hide it?

  Berni’s street, Pfrommerstraße, intersected a much grander avenue at an old hotel, white marble with balconies. So it was a fine neighborhood after all. Perhaps Berni worked at the hotel, Grete thought, until she came close and could see no light behind the front doors of Haus Julen. The hotel was closed, dark, with dead vines staining the stone.

  On Pfrommerstraße she encountered a young woman pushing a black pram and a group of men in nice suits. She stalled for a while across the street from Berni’s building, wiping her palms on her skirt and shivering. Nine concrete steps lined with fat stone railings led to double black doors labeled in brass: 455 and 457. Grete stared at the door to 457, unable to believe it held Berni. And then it opened.

  “Yoo hoo!”

  As soon as she appeared, it was all right.

  “Hello!” Berni’s head and arm waggled out of the partially open door. “What are you doing over there?” Grete felt something tighten and then break loose inside of her.

  “You’re going to wake the neighborhood,” she murmured as she approached the stairs.

  “Let them wake!” Berni’s cheeks were bright pink. “Watch, those steps get slippery.” Grete was relieved to see she wore a dress, a boxy black silk dress with house slippers and a long strand of fake pearls, a few cracked in half. She put her bare arms out and gathered Grete in. Her skin was warm, her heartbeat fast and heavy. They stood that way for a long time.

  When they pulled apart, Grete sniffed and touched her eyes. “Ber-Berni? I’d like—”

  “What? What will make you happy?” Pieces of Berni’s hair stuck to her face.

  “Just that. To call someone du.”

  “You have no one to call . . . ?” Berni’s face collapsed, then recovered. “We’ll call each other du all day, my darling. Du!”

  “Du!”

  “Du! Shall we go indoors? We are living in a police state now, after all, ha!”

  Inside, they studied each other for a moment, grinning. Grete took in Berni’s hair, short as ever and dyed blacker. Her eyebrows had been plucked and redrawn into vermicular commas. Her face, fortunately, had not changed: pudgy and freckled, with chocolate-brown eyes. Grete tapped her finger in Berni’s cleft chin, and Berni echoed the gesture on hers.

  “Let me take your jacket,” Berni said. “My God! Are they feeding you? It’s not in style to be this thin!”

  “Don’t grab my arm like that. Of course they feed me. You know how times are.”

  “I know all too well,” said Berni. “Here, up, up.”

  They followed a patterned blue carpet up a narrow staircase, down a hallway—Grete smelled foreign food again, smoky and sweet—and then Berni put a key into a door. The apartment’s parlor spread wide before them, its bay window facing the paler brick walls of the Hof, with a cushioned seat full of magazines. The furnishings were old-fashioned like the Eislers’, dark and heavy but stylish, more expensive, nothing missing here: a floral divan, an orange leather armchair, and a coffee table piled with newspapers and coffee cups.

  Grete followed Berni through the dining room, which held a twelve-seat table extended too many times; it sagged in the cracks. She could hear a radio in the kitchen: Wagner segued into Margo Lion. A cheery female voice with no sense of pitch sang along with the lyrics. Grete tried to step quietly. She didn’t want to see anyone else.

  “Here’s where I sleep,” Berni announced, pulling aside a curtain. “Wonderful sunlight in the afternoon. This is a two-bedroom flat, really; Sonje has the large one, Anita the small, and mine used to be the dining room—you can tell from the windows—but it’s good to have my own room, alles knorke.”

  Berni spoke the Berliner Dialekt now, saying ick instead of ich and using slang Grete didn’t recognize; she’d have said something were she not overwhelmed by the room where her sister lived without her. The walls were striped in mauve and white, with roses on the white parts. A chair rail went nearly all the way round the room, stopping where a stained outline revealed the ghost of a cabinet. The room smelled of cinnamon and something else culinary.

  Berni showed her the sleeping pallet on the floor, covered by a gray blanket. “They say it’s good to sleep on something hard.” She yanked the curtain back over the threshold; there was no door. Then she pushed a pile of clothing off her chair, offered Grete a seat, and knelt in front of her. “Isn’t it marvelous to be out in the world? Last week I saw the Graf Zeppelin float past the cathedral. Scared me half to death before I realized what the thing was! But I want news from you. How is my bird?”

  Grete put her hands in her lap. “I’m growing a breast.”

  Berni sat still for a minute. Her brow wrinkled, and she swallowed, the corners of her mouth trembling. “Singular?”

  “Stop it!” cried Grete, though she could feel laughter bursting within her, too; it felt good. “It’s not funny.”

  “But it is,” said Berni, wiping her eye, her legs curled underneath her. “Oh, Grete-bird, how I’ve missed you. Let me see this breast.”

  “No.” Grete crossed her arms.

  “I have a feeling you’ll get another one to go with it.”

  Anxious to change the subject, Grete searched her mind for a question. There were so many that she had trouble choosing one. “Where did you get all these clothes?”

  “There are others who live here, and we share. Now! Let me offer you a slice of sauerbraten. Growing breasts requires sustenance.”

  That was
the smell: beef round marinated in vinegar. Looking upon the tender meat, its dark coffee-colored glaze, Grete nearly fainted. “You don’t need to give me some,” she croaked.

  “There, a wafer for you, a wafer for me. And some meat.”

  The biscuit, faintly sweet, crumbled in Grete’s mouth. Berni pulled the vanity stool over to the foot of the armchair and put the plate on a small table. Meat. Fleisch. Grete stared at it: two melting slices with deep-black skins, veins of precious fat. She consumed it without utensils, like an animal. Apple kraut, too, deep red from beets, sharp with onions, stained the tips of her fingers pink. A few cold potatoes in white sauce—those went down in three gulps.

  As her belly filled and Grete came out of her fog, she became more aware. Berni hadn’t prepared this meal. Who had? A maid? Berni had more money than she let on. Her claim that she couldn’t support Grete as well was only an excuse. But why did she need one?

  Before she could ask, Berni began firing questions at her. She wanted to know if Grete slept in a bed, if the Eislers were kind to her. She wanted to know, truly, was she well fed?

  Grete responded between telltale growls, her belly unused to consuming so much at once. She did have a bed, her employers were kind, and she ate better than most of Berlin.

  “Grete.” Berni stood and leaned over the chair to hug her. The smell of cinnamon grew stronger, with a bit of armpit sweat that was not altogether unpleasant. “I am sorry we’ve been apart for so long.”

  Right then Grete’s molars made the unhappy discovery of a piece of gristle. The combined effect, the snap of the gristle and Berni’s words, sent a shudder through her. Why was it that sometimes an apology made everything worse?

  Grete spit the white morsel into her napkin. “What do we do now?” Her voice came out strained and desperate. If someone had mentioned the Eislers to her then, she would have had only a vague idea of the outlines of their features. At the moment they had no more dimension than Gudrun’s paper dolls. They could not compare to the live face in front of her.

  “We save every pfennig. We work and work until we have a little pile of money, and then we look for rooms in a boarding house together.”

  “What about here?” Grete said, ignoring the fact that she had no desire to get to know any of Berni’s neighbors. “This is a boarding house.”

  Berni’s lips twitched. “You don’t want to live here. It’s not the place for you.”

  Grete thought of Frau Eisler calling Berni whore, and her stomach dropped.

  As though she could read Grete’s thoughts, Berni said: “Tell me. What’s your mistress like? Is she pretty?”

  “She is not particularly pretty, but she’s . . . respectable.”

  “What are their political affiliations? I ask because . . .” Berni didn’t finish her sentence. A clock in the parlor began its tinny song, and she looked toward the hallway. “It’s late. The Eislers will wonder where you are.”

  “Berni.” Grete took Berni’s hand and examined the residue underneath the nails. Bluish-black tar—cosmetics—and a deeper yellow-brown stain—tobacco. The cracks in Berni’s palms were red. She had written something on her skin and then smudged the ink. Grete could make out the number 2 and the letter L. “Berni,” she said again. She looked into Berni’s brown eyes. The whites were clear, alert. A question waited at the back of Grete’s mouth, but she could not bring it out.

  Berni lifted the fine blond hairs out of Grete’s face. “I’ll write you again. If that Frau Eisler complains about you getting mail, tell her to go shit in her hat and pull it over her ears.”

  Grete couldn’t help but laugh. She tried to read the look on Berni’s face—guilt? Yes, that, and something else—but then she heard a shout in the street. Berni ran to kneel under the sill, and Grete followed. They watched four Hitler Youths in brown sprint past. A group of men followed, running at top speed. Something glinted in one of their back pockets: the barrel of a gun. Another man followed on a motorbike, making the glass vibrate. Berni covered her ears.

  “It was better when they only threw rocks,” she said. “Do you know about all this?”

  “Yes,” Grete breathed. “Poor Horst Wessel.”

  “Poor Horst Wessel?” Berni gave her a funny look. “Horst Wessel was a thug the Nazis made into a martyr. Don’t tell me you fell for that song.” She chucked Grete’s cheek. “Come on, I’ll take you home. You may not be safe.”

  They went down the fire stairs. Grete wondered for a moment what made Berni avoid her housemates, but then she had nothing to think about but balance as they rode toward Charlottenburg on Berni’s black bicycle, Grete perched on the seat, Berni standing on the pedals. It had begun to rain. Grete squinted and held on to the stem. Berni took her through the labyrinth of tenements off the main streets, and she caught glimpses of the alleys and interlocking Höfe of Berlin. The people here were invisible, but their odors announced themselves: sewage, pickled cabbage, motor oil.

  Berni let her off a block from the Eislers’ building. “We will be together soon, Bird.”

  Grete nodded, but she’d heard this every time they’d parted in the last few years, and the words had lost their meaning. She watched her sister pedal away, still standing though the seat was free. She felt a sudden panic. She’d been given a safe ride home, but nobody would do the same for Berni.

  • • •

  A few nights later, Grete sat up quickly in the dark. A sound had woken her. She saw that the windows were open; a breeze puffed the pale-green curtain, through which she could make out a silhouette crouched on the balcony. She gasped, shut her eyes, shrank into a ball. Klaus would know what to do; she looked for Klaus and found that his bed was empty.

  After much steeling of nerve, she whispered his name. Her voice was strangled with phlegm. “Klaus. Is that you out there?”

  His long-nosed face appeared against the curtain. “Shh. Come down here.”

  “But Gudrun,” Grete said, heart pounding.

  “She won’t wake. Climb down the ladder.”

  Grete put her bare feet on the wooden rungs two at a time. She passed Gudrun, slumbering with her mouth open, clutching the doll she’d scalped that morning. The hair was strewn about the floor. Grete felt sure she was the only one who noticed how much rubbish this spoiled child generated. Uneaten food, little wrappers, torn cards and valentines.

  She put a shaking foot on the sill. Klaus’s thin arms and legs were bent into the wrought-iron cage surrounding the bedroom window, a space about five feet in height and eighteen inches deep. He held a cigarette between his lips.

  “Come out here.” He offered her a dry hand, and when their palms touched, Grete felt a zing. She lowered one foot, then the other, onto the iron bars; her ankles could easily have fit through the spaces between them. Her foot touched fabric. Klaus had tied something to the bars. She found her balance and glimpsed their reflection in the darkened windows across the courtyard, two figures standing above the red, black, and white of the Nazi flag.

  You’re political, Grete wanted to say, but instead she gripped the front of her nightgown so that he wouldn’t notice her new development and looked down. The slate mosaic floor shone in wet squares of black, mauve, and green. The area was empty save for forgotten wet laundry. One lost stocking curled on the ground like a snake.

  “I can’t sleep. This evening we had a Heimabend,” Klaus said, as though a “home evening” explained everything. “At our group leader’s house. There’s another parliamentary election coming in November. We have to maintain the momentum Herr Hitler began building last month. Did you know Hitler was the only one who predicted the current economic crisis?”

  Grete flushed. She couldn’t admit aloud that all she knew of Herr Hitler was that he’d run for president in March and lost. She was surprised to hear he’d gained “momentum” in the meantime. Fortunately, Klaus didn’t wait for her to reply. “It’s a headline in the papers I’m delivering tomorrow,” he said. She
wanted to ask what paper he delivered, if he worked for the Nazi Party, and if that was why she’d never heard him mention payment. But he went on. “Herr Hitler knows how we can get out of this, too, if people would listen. Lower taxes on farms, raise the wage. Think, Grete—farmers could afford to grow more corn, more beans, raise more livestock. Meat for dinner after an honest day’s work. Does that sound good?”

  “It does,” she said in her small voice. “It does sound very good, Klaus.”

  “I wish my father could see it. Righting the wrongs of Versailles should matter to him more than anyone.”

  “Your Herr Papa is busy and troubled, nicht?”

  “He is lost. Our veterans try to work, but others have taken their jobs. We mustn’t look down on them, though, even the homeless and maimed. They, too, are part of the Volk.” He looked intently at her now, his eyes white-shiny in the light coming from the moon. Grete felt dizzy. She opened her feet to steady herself, still standing on the knots in the Nazi flag. A breeze picked up her nightdress, and she remembered that she wore nothing underneath it. Her left nipple throbbed a bit, only the left.

  He cocked an eyebrow at her when she pressed her skirt to her legs. He so clearly wanted to look like a man, his cigarette dangling from his lips. She found it touching.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Almost fifteen.”

  “I see you with your rosary in bed. Why are you Catholic?”

  Why? He might as well have asked why she’d been born, why her eyes were blue.

  “You can be anything you want,” he continued. “I wonder who your parents are. They look to have had good blood.”

  “I know who my parents were,” she said quickly. “My papa was in the war, too.” She knew what Berni would say if she were here, the story she’d trot out. She’d tell him about everything, from the blackbird that nested in the eaves of their mother’s porch to the color of her stocking garters. “I had parents,” she repeated, her voice thin, her skin prickling. Speaking to him in reality felt quite different from the make-believe conversations she had with him when she was alone in the alley. She was irritated with him, she realized, for implying she didn’t know her parents, and she opened her mouth and asked a question. “Why are you a Nazi?”