The Cigarette Girl Read online

  • • •

  So much money. Berni dreamt about it, woke up licking her lips. She felt it crunch between her fingers, under the sheets.

  She didn’t tell Grete what she intended to do until Thursday evening, when Sister Maria marched out on her weekly mission to feed the poor and Berni’s accomplice, Konstanz, met them in the dormitory. “Sister’ll be out until eight, at least,” Konstanz announced. She had wide green eyes and a willowy build, more fairy than child. “You aren’t going to tell, are you, Grete?”

  Grete had both hands over her ears, the corner of a blanket in her mouth. Berni knelt down, close to her face. “Nothing bad will happen. She has so much money she can burn it.” She couldn’t explain her need to possess something, anything, even if it did turn out to be worthless.

  “Why must you always put us in danger?” Grete tilted her watery eyes toward the ceiling and sighed. “Every night I wish the next day will be quiet, every night . . .”

  Before long, Berni was pulling Grete down the quiet corridor. Konstanz led the way, grabbing corners as the girls slid through the halls. At last they reached the east wing, where they tiptoed past the wooden doors to the sisters’ rooms. Berni put her arm around Grete, whose face had turned the color of bathwater, as Konstanz worked a hairpin into the lock. When finally the handle gave, Berni entered the room quickly and lifted the shade. Gray evening light illuminated the cot, the desk, the heavy crucifix. Sister’s laundry was folded atop her sheet.

  “I don’t know why, but”—Konstanz’s eyes widened—“I never would have imagined they wore underwear.” Some of the bloomers were even faded pink, large and dainty at once. On a rough wooden table sat a teapot and tiny mug. Berni opened the pot to peek at the stiffened tea bag inside. She ran her finger over the edge of the cup to feel the greasy print of the sister’s lip.

  “Let’s go,” Grete whispered. Berni pretended she hadn’t heard.

  “Look at this.” Konstanz threw off a radio’s cover. It looked like a large wooden jewelry box with black dials. “It’s a TRF set. My father had one.” She began to adjust the reactor.

  “Come, Grete.” Berni picked up the desk chair by the rungs. “You need to be closer to the sound.” Grete glared at her, face deep red, as she took her seat.

  When a song burst out of the radio, they all leapt back. “Turn it down, turn it down!” Berni cried. She yanked Grete’s hands from her ears, trying to get her to smile.

  “And now,” a voice announced when the music faded, “Frieda Pommer and Max Zuchmayer singing their popular duet, ‘If I Could Choose Again.’”

  A lively tune began: horns, strings, accordion. Konstanz leapt into the middle of the room, landing soundlessly as a cat, and curtsied; she would be Frieda Pommer. She put one hand on her hip and glided her mouth over the words as if she’d heard them all her life:

  A skinny man approached me to see if I’d be his bride.

  A poor man with a good heart said that heart was free, but lied.

  I’d gladly dance with either, but I’m already obliged

  To a portly chap in uniform who has something to hide.

  Berni was enthralled. The lyrics did not make her think of politics, only of men and marriage, of dancing and wine. She and Konstanz kept their shrieks silent and clapped without sound. Konstanz twirled and goose-stepped, and when Max began to sing, Berni stood.

  She could not have said where the idea came from. If she had known how Grete would react, or what would come after, she never would have done it. She wasn’t even sure how or when she’d learned what made men different from girls, but she snatched a rolled-up stocking off Sister Maria’s bed and stuffed it into her underpants.

  Konstanz put her hands over her eyes, giggling. Then Frieda looped back to the chorus, and Konstanz threw back her head. She and Berni linked arms, and Berni thrust her little crotch this way and that, hands on her hips like a Prussian soldier, the sock forming a bulge under her skirt. She had tears streaking her cheeks, her tongue pumping silently in her mouth.

  Round and round she and Konstanz went, in dizzying circles—the dull Spartan room a blur, the only color the shockingly intimate laundry on the bed and the bright yellow of Grete’s hair, until—

  The radio’s volume shot sky-high, blasting Frieda Pommer’s voice throughout the building.

  Berni whirled around. Grete’s sticky fingers held one of the dials, and her mouth was pressed shut. She stared past Berni, at nothing. Berni had completely forgotten her as she danced.

  Konstanz cried out, covering her ears. Berni tore the stocking from under her skirt and whipped it at the bed, then slapped Grete’s hand away and shut the darn thing off. Too late; she could hear the sisters’ doors opening, could hear their alarmed voices.

  “If you wanted me to stop,” Berni murmured, “you could have just said so.” But Grete wouldn’t answer. She wouldn’t meet Berni’s eyes, not even when Sister Odi burst triumphantly into the room.

  Grete, 1931

  They were stopped on a corner of the Kurfürstendamm, the busiest shopping street in the city. A place where they very decidedly did not belong, Grete thought. Their clothes gave them away; donated dresses did not grow at the same weedlike pace that girls did. Strings hung from Berni’s broken hem, and still the fabric did not cover her knees.

  Berni didn’t seem to notice. Her hand shielding her eyes, she had the optimistic, faraway look of a sea explorer. She held the last of the three boxes of communion she’d been asked to deliver to churches in west Berlin, Grete the red cash tin. Berni had been ordered to return to the home in time for lunch. Grete was not supposed to be out at all.

  “Can you read the time, Grete-bird?” Berni pointed to the clock on the Memorial Church, its stones blackened with city pollution.

  Grete squinted up at the gold numerals. For a moment, she considered telling a lie to get Berni moving. “Eleven thirty,” she said honestly. “We need to go home, Berni.”

  “Eagle eyes!” Berni bent down so that her lips touched Grete’s earlobe. “That means we have time,” she said in a low voice, affecting an Eastern accent, “to visit Libations of Illyria.”

  A blade of fear stabbed Grete’s stomach. “Please, no. Let’s find St. Matthias, then take the U-Bahn home before anyone notices I’m missing.” She leapt back when an omnibus lumbered to the curb, sending oily water toward her shoes.

  Earlier in the day she’d been peacefully changing beds in the nursery when Berni burst into the room. Grete would join her, she declared without asking, on her communion-delivery adventure. It was something to celebrate, Berni insisted: the sisters entrusting her with the communion wafers the Lulus baked, worth more than a pfennig apiece, meant they were on the verge of choosing her for the academy.

  Grete had given her usual excuses, knowing they would not deter Berni: she had to carry soiled sheets up to the laundry, she had a Latin exam to study for. Tomorrow, Sister Maria would fire questions at her in Latin, standing behind the dais so that Grete could not see her mouth. Her only hope was to study until she could recite the whole dead language in her sleep, and here was Berni, pressuring her to go on one of her larks. But Berni promised they’d practice this evening; she’d have Grete speaking like Julius Caesar by the end of the night.

  “Come, one more detour,” Berni said now, shielding Grete from two women in trousers walking and smoking, moving at breakneck speed. “I’ll buy you a pretzel.”

  Bells tinkled, and a young man rode by on a bicycle. He tossed some change into a homeless veteran’s cap. Grete had seen only the thin white arms of the cyclist’s companion, clasped around his waist. Watching them, Berni’s face took on a look of naked yearning. It seemed she longed for those pale arms to belong to her.

  Grete pulled at her sleeve. Berni had to remember they weren’t both Rose Red. Somebody had to be Snow White. “I must prepare for Latin.”

  “This is more important.”

  “You always say nothing’s
more important than schoolwork.” In a matter of weeks, the sisters would choose three girls out of Berni’s class of forty to study with the Ursulines in Wedding. For months Berni had been struggling to behave, to polish her shoes, to bite back crude comments. Around the sisters she smiled so broadly she’d developed an eye twitch. Why would she risk that now?

  Berni shook her head. “They sell real potions at Libations of Illyria—love spells, strength tonics. I’ll buy an elixir for luck.” She patted her pocket, which jingled. “I’ve enough change saved for both of us.” To show she’d won the argument, she began to walk up the boulevard so quickly that Grete had no choice but to scramble after her. Berni’s long black braids flagged behind her, the plaits of a little girl; on Berni’s gangly, sixteen-year-old figure, they reminded Grete of garlands tacked up long after Christmas.

  Grete tried to keep up with her, dodging pedestrians. The Ku’damm was packed with people. Behind iron gates, cafés crammed table after table onto the sidewalk to enjoy the damp May weather. A waiter with a tray bent to show the Viennese strudel, the obsttorte, the black forest. Two delivery boys in aprons hauled loads of pink flowers down the restaurant’s cellar steps. Grete’s mouth watered; she smelled coffee, browned onions, custard.

  “Everyone looks so angry,” she said breathlessly, when she’d caught her sister.

  “That’s the Berlin sneer. Watch.” Berni affected an exaggerated frown and strolled with her shoulders thrown back. “You have to hold your Schnauze high.”

  Graffiti was everywhere, even in this neighborhood; someone had defaced every National Socialist poster adorning a Litfaß column. When the girls stopped at an intersection, Grete pointed to a row of perfectly trimmed hedges on which KPD and BLUTMAI were scrawled in white paint. Berni chuckled. “Serves them right for trying to make shrubs behave like walls. If I had a garden, I’d let it grow wild.”

  “But what does that mean? What does blood have to do with May?”

  “It’s for the anniversary, I’d imagine.” Berni worked her lower lip over her teeth. “Some troubles between the police and Communists. The demonstration turned . . . heated.”

  “Did anyone die?”

  Berni drew a long, impatient breath. “We aren’t political. We don’t have to worry. Wait!”

  The passing motorcar honked its horn at them, seconds after Berni yanked Grete off the curb by the back of her collar. “I heard it,” Grete said, clutching her throat, though she hadn’t. She’d heard the horn, of course, but not the approaching engine.

  “You have to look into the street before you cross, little bird.”

  “Everyone does,” Grete muttered.

  • • •

  It would have been foolish to tell Berni what happened at this year’s physical exam. Grete had hoped somehow her hearing would improve with age, that thirteen would be a magic number, but Sister Lioba had declared her ears, if anything, were getting worse.

  In her left ear, Grete had heard enough of Sister Lioba’s whisper to be able to repeat it: “Hoppe, hoppe Reiter, wenn er fällt, dann schreit er.” But in the right, she could only feel the little blasts of breath. She did her best to guess, filling in the next two lines of the nursery rhyme. Sister shook her head. “It will only make matters worse if you lie, Margarete.” She glanced heavenward as she said this, indicating what might be the source of Grete’s problems.

  Grete already knew the blockage inside her ears kept her at a remove from God. At Mass, she watched the concentration and piety on the other girls’ faces as they listened to the sermon, while she was distracted by the echoes of the organ, the odor of incense, the pressure inside her ears. Sometimes she wondered if God was punishing her or her parents, since she’d had problems hearing little things since she was born. Birdsong had always eluded her unless she stood directly under a tree. Raindrops jumped noiselessly in their puddles.

  The intermittent ringing, however, hadn’t always been part of her life. It began when she was five or six. “There’s a faucet left on somewhere,” she had complained to Berni. “A pipe is running. Don’t you hear it?” In time Grete realized the high-pitched sound belonged only to her, and that it tended to appear most often when she felt scared or nervous.

  “You shouldn’t mind if people know about your ears,” Berni tried to reassure her. “You can’t help that any more than I can help my hair becoming knotty.”

  Grete shook her head. Berni could help it if her hair tangled. Other people could and would hold it against her if she were a mess. And they’d hold Grete’s deficiencies against her, too. Of course they would.

  “You have lost the high frequencies in the right ear,” Sister Lioba had announced at her last physical, “though the lower ones seem present, for now.” She wrinkled her nose so that Grete could see the black hairs. “It may be progressive. Time will tell.”

  That spring, the words it may be progressive had become the rhythm of Grete’s life. She vowed to develop her other senses before they were all she had left. When the sisters took them on a hike in the Grunewald, Grete smelled smoke half an hour before Sister Odi spotted a farmer burning his fields and hustled them to the train. She spied an osprey’s nest spraying off the corner of a building in Sophie-Charlotte-Platz. And at Mass, when the tip of Father Radeke’s finger lingered on Konstanz’s lip as he gave her communion, Grete lowered her face but not her eyes and told no one, not even Berni.

  • • •

  “This is the address,” said Berni, her face uncertain. They’d stopped in front of the eight double glass doors of Fiedler’s department store.

  Grete’s gaze scrolled up the enormous façade, its windows a code: a row of triangles, a row of circles, a row of squares. “A department store?”

  Berni shrugged. “Sure,” she said, though Grete could tell she wasn’t.

  Three security guards in black-and-gold uniforms stood together between two sets of doors. In the shining glass, Grete caught her sad reflection: her overwashed blue dress and limp, pale braids. Berni stood almost a foot taller. Beside her Grete felt stunted and anemic, like the albino frog they’d discovered in a gutter, which Berni declared would be picked off by a bird in no time. At thirteen she looked no different than she had at age nine. A late bloomer, Sister Josephine called Grete, like the hickory tree in the yard. “Berni matured late as well,” she’d say, “and look how tall she’s gotten.” This did little to comfort Grete. She had a feeling she’d never measure up to her sister.

  “Come on,” Berni said, gripping the polished brass doorknob, and before Grete could argue, she found herself inside the store.

  For a moment, they did not move. They gazed upon a maze of velvet-draped tables. Jewelry, crystal, and leather shone in the soft light. In the middle of the marble floor a bronze goddess held scales in the middle of a fountain. Berni pointed up. The arched ceiling, three stories high, was made of stained glass. Grete watched a saleswoman reach languorously for a silk scarf. Everyone in here moved in a kind of trance, it seemed to Grete, the un-hurry of the rich; it took a moment to figure out which were people and which were mannequins, so uncannily did they resemble one another.

  “Look over there,” Berni said, and before Grete could ask where, Berni was on the move. In the far corner Grete saw a passageway labeled in gilt letters: Libations of Illyria. She began breathing quickly. Perhaps the wealthy really did have access to liquid magic.

  They had to pass through a tunnel of exotic plants, ferns that offered caresses. The air smelled floral, fruity, sweet, strong—how awful the dormitory toilets would be after this! When Grete opened her eyes, Berni had stopped in a plant-laden cave of sorts, in front of a glass case. Behind it was a young woman in the same black-and-gold cap the doormen wore, but with silk stockings and a fitted jacket. Looking bored, she dabbed her deep-plum lips with a tissue.

  Berni had her hands on the top of the case, inside which were bottles of all shapes and sizes, some with long delicate necks, some with tasseled ion
izers. Grete saw nothing miraculous. Instead of Luck Tonic or Courage Elixir, there were Spirit of Myrcia and Essence of Lilac.

  The shop girl used a nail file to nudge Berni’s hand off the case; it left a steamy print. Her hair was artificial red, too shiny to be real, and her large nose was twisted to the side in amusement. Grete realized in horror that poor Berni had been duped. This was where rich ladies bought their toilet water, nothing more. She had never experienced fremdschämen for Berni—usually it was the other way around—and she felt the world tip on its axis.

  “Berni,” she whispered. The shop girl licked her teeth, waiting. “We can leave now.”

  Berni cleared her throat. With a fingernail she tapped the glass. “Where are the potions?”

  The salesgirl took a breath and paused, then opened her mouth in a wide grin. Her teeth were yellow and crowded. “They’re all potions. Would you like to try the Oriental Lily Nectar?” When she talked, a string of saliva like spider’s silk linked her upper and lower incisors. She produced a deep-purple bottle with a cap shaped like a flower.

  “What does it do?”

  The salesgirl’s forehead wrinkled momentarily. “What does it do?” She inserted a dropper into the bottle, then squeezed it twice on Berni’s wrist. “This perfume is extracted from the blooms that grow around the Taj Mahal.” Her voice was deep, deeper than the average woman’s, and as long as Grete watched her lips move, she could hear her voice better than she could Berni’s. She put a drop on Grete’s wrist as well. “Want to know the price?”

  Grete hesitated a bit, then sniffed. Perfume, ordinary perfume. “Berni . . .”

  Berni put her nose to her wrist and inhaled. “Very nice. But no, I don’t want to know the price.” She was sixteen, too old to believe in magic. Yet she sounded so desperate that Grete longed to hide. “I want to know where the real libations are.”

  The salesgirl tilted her head, and finally Grete could see the brown eyes under her cap, alarmingly large and quick. “You’ll get the true fragrance after a little. Let the bouquet develop.”