The Cigarette Girl Page 8

  “See the dining chairs here? Turn one upside down. We are going to remove their seats.”

  Grete stared at the hammer. Had she heard correctly?

  Frau Eisler laughed, showing overlapping teeth. Thin dimples appeared, and Grete saw how young she was, barely over thirty. “You think I’m joking, nicht? Our family hasn’t had good fortune these past couple of years. When Klaus was a baby and Herr Eisler was a bank teller, we bought this flat and furniture. Now . . .” She caught her breath and put her hand on her forehead and then her mouth. “Now he works on an assembly line. And poor Gudrun has never known what it’s like not to struggle.” She reached for the girl, who sat on the floor, and Grete couldn’t help but put her arms out to Frau Eisler in the same gesture of comfort.

  “We press on!” Frau Eisler burst, bright-eyed. She dropped to her knees and clutched one of the chairs by the legs, turning it over so that Grete could see where the leather cushion attached to the seat. The wood underneath, pale and untreated, was stamped with the manufacturer’s initials. “Pull out these little nails that hold the leather on.”

  “But, gnädige Frau.” Grete swallowed, found her voice. “I’ll ruin the chair.”

  “Just take the back of the hammer like this. It’ll slide out easy.” Frau Eisler popped the first shiny nail head and let it roll in her palm. She smiled with the corners of her mouth down. “I almost forget that these chairs were a wedding present. Herr Eisler didn’t want me to do this. He’ll be at work for another ten hours today. At least.”

  What had happened to the fourth chair? Why did she insist on doing something her husband didn’t want to do? Grete knew better than to ask questions. She took the hammer and slid her first nail out with ease.

  “We’ll make house shoes with the leather, for Gudrun,” Frau Eisler said. “And for you.”

  “For me? Oh, I couldn’t.”

  “Of course you will. I won’t have someone who works for me going around barefoot. Besides, you’ll make them. You can sew, nicht?”

  “Yes, Frau Eisler.”

  “Eisler,” she said. “I am very glad to hear it. You’ll never learn anything more valuable than how to take care of a house.”

  Grete worked until she had a pile of nails. With the chairs denuded, Frau Eisler suggested they test them by sitting and sharing a bit of rum torte that her neighbor had baked.

  “We won’t be having a large dinner tonight. My husband is of course working, and Klaus will be out on a forest excursion.” Frau Eisler’s face glowed. “Klaus is my seventeen-year-old son. He’s a good young man, keeps a paper route. He’s also in a club like the Wandervogel.”

  They split the rum torte with Gudrun. “Just we women,” Frau Eisler said, handing her daughter the lion’s share.

  Crumbs stuck to Grete’s dirndl. She could not believe her good fortune.

  • • •

  In time, Grete found clues to the Eislers’ past. In a drawer, she found a stiffly posed portrait of Herr and Frau Eisler with a young Klaus and a toddler sister and baby brother that she could only presume had died. Nobody mentioned them, but their deaths explained the gap between Klaus’s and Gudrun’s ages. The loss of the middle children, Grete came to discover, had given Klaus the placid confidence of the last remaining gladiator, Gudrun the sour disposition of the overly coddled.

  The family tragedy might also have contributed to Frau Eisler’s neurosis. She and Grete completed all indoor chores together, beginning with the laundry; once a month they hauled coal up to the attic and boiled a cauldron of water in which they washed all the sheets, tablecloths, and towels. But any errands that required leaving the apartment—returning the laundry key to the custodian, taking out the garbage, purchasing groceries—she asked Grete to do.

  On the rare occasion that Frau Eisler did venture out, she walked quickly and muttered under her breath. “Whore-lids,” she said one day when she and Grete passed a drugstore boldly displaying diaphragms in its window.

  When they saw girls who smoked cigarettes and wore short haircuts, she told Grete these were “Germany’s wasted youth.”

  About the Jewish Bolsheviks, whom she blamed for the country’s recent plummet back into economic turmoil: “They’ve sodomized us all.”

  The city was going into the shitter. Since the Social Democrats had gotten their way, they’d become as big in the head as any Kaiser. They’d added six new boroughs to Berlin and were trying to make it the most licentious place in Europe, worse than Paris, worse than London.

  “Where are the good, decent Germans?” Frau Eisler would cry, to which Grete replied, “We are right here.” She listened to this kind of talk for hours, saying little, and afterward Frau Eisler would apologize—they’d driven her to speak this way. She was only using their words.

  • • •

  Grete saw little of Herr Eisler, who worked long hours at the factory, or of Klaus, who woke early to deliver newspapers before he attended classes at his Gymnasium. Klaus frightened her. She could hardly find her voice when he wasn’t around, and when he was, she went mute.

  Every night, after the kitchen gleamed from her efforts, she changed into her nightgown in the darkened pantry. When she climbed the ladder to the loft she felt his eyes on her skinny bare legs. Once she turned over in her bed and caught him staring up toward the top bunk, eyes reflective, like an animal’s.

  When he left for school in the morning, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  Once she overheard him arguing with his parents at breakfast. Their voices came through the window to the balcony where she stood watering the sun-starved flowers. Down below was the shadowy Hof at the center of the building, where people kept bicycles and shared gossip.

  “I’m a man now. I shouldn’t have to share my room.”

  “Maybe he is right,” said Frau Eisler. “It’s already crowded in there with Gudrun.”

  “We cannot send her away,” Herr Eisler replied firmly. “It’s the least we can do in times like these, to give one more soul a place to rest at night.”

  Grete’s fingers slipped around the neck of the watering can. She’d drenched the geraniums. Water drained from the pots and splashed on the courtyard below. Two ladies sitting in chairs, smoking black cigarettes, looked up at her and cackled.

  • • •

  One evening in early September, she dawdled in taking out the garbage. It was a humid night, white clouds still visible as little puffs against the darkening sky. Thus far it had been an unusually warm summer, and the heat was still oppressive, working rancid smells from the stones on the floor of the alley, the odors of damp bricks and cooking fat. She waited down here sometimes, her only solitary place, unpleasant as it was, and tried to fix her speech. She said it a few times aloud: I wish you were my parents.

  Grete wasn’t stupid. She knew she was only their hired help. But there were signs, details she detected if she paid enough attention. When Herr Eisler was home for dinner she sometimes brought her stool to join them at the table. They took her to church once a month, and even though it was a Lutheran service, the gesture touched her. In some ways, they were beginning to see her as part of the family.

  I wish you were my parents. There was no way of knowing if she’d pronounced it right. She dumped the trash into the canister.

  “Grete!”

  Frau Eisler stood at the top of the fire escape, in boots with laces untied. Grete slammed the metal lid onto the trashcan, which toppled over. All sound in her right ear stopped when Frau Eisler scrambled down the stairs, and Grete saw the folded paper in her hand.

  “Why did we receive a letter addressed to Fräulein Metzger? Who is Berni?”

  The greenish-black, mildewed walls of the alley seemed to tilt inward. A letter from Berni! She wrung her hands to stop herself from grabbing it. “She’s my sister.” She bent to pick up the galvanized metal garbage can.

  “Why does she tell you to take the subway to Schöneberg? We cannot train a new m
aid, Grete. Don’t lie to me. It will cost you your dinner.”

  Grete’s heart pounded. “There’s no plan for me to run away, Frau Eisler. I’m sure she’s just inviting me to visit.” She’d never seen the apartment in Schöneberg. More than anything, she wanted to read that letter.

  Frau Eisler tucked it into her pocket and gestured for Grete to follow her back up the rickety metal staircase and into the apartment, where Gudrun sat slurping a glass of milk. She smacked her lips together after each gulp, letting out a small “ah.”

  “Good girl,” said Frau Eisler, cupping Gudrun’s blond curls. “Now, tell me. What does your sister’s husband do?”

  Grete inhaled, thinking. The room smelled of turnips gratin growing crisp and brown. She had made the dinner herself, put the sliced root into the oven in a pan of milk and shredded hard cheese. She’d braved the dark root cellar.

  There was no choice but to be honest. “She doesn’t have a husband, Frau Eisler.”

  Frau Eisler stared. “She lives alone?”

  “Not alone, with a woman named Sonje Schmidt.”

  “She’s Frau Schmidt’s maid?”

  The girls at St. Luisa’s had the same questions, but Grete had no answers for them. They’d come to their own conclusion: Berni had become a loose woman. “Fräulein Schmidt may have adopted her,” Grete said now. Sweat gathered at the collar of her dress.

  “I’m sure she didn’t adopt a teenage girl. If Berni isn’t a maid, what does she do?”

  Grete’s fingers fluttered to her earlobe. “She sells cigarettes,” she said, and Frau Eisler’s eyes got big and round.

  “Oh, child.” Frau Eisler’s face constricted in horror and delight. “She cannot be up to any good.” She pulled chairs out so they could sit. “Do you think she is a whore?” There was a bit of strange pleasure in her eyes.

  Grete winced. She had heard the word before, many times, from a chorus of cruel and desperate girls. Whore. Whore, just like your sister. Frau Eisler took Grete’s silence the way she wanted to and sat back with a grin, stroking her chin. “Whores should know their place, nicht wahr?” she said. “She should know not to write to a respectable house like this.”

  “Whores should know,” Grete echoed, miserable. She longed to melt through the porous seat of the chair. But Frau Eisler gazed down at her with pity and understanding. How different this conversation was from the accusatory shrieks of the orphanage girls, the judgmental silence of the sisters, save Josephine. Suddenly Grete felt the most sincere love for Frau Eisler, so powerful that it took her by surprise. Words poured out of her mouth, too quickly for her to consider how they sounded.

  “Gnädige Frau, you have to know how sad my sister has made me. For weeks I thought she’d return, but she didn’t. I saw Sonje Schmidt’s car in my sleep, whenever I shut my eyes. I kept waiting for it to return, but it didn’t, and my sister became a stranger. Sister Josephine took me into her lap and held me when I cried. I wondered if I should have gone with her after all—”

  She’d forgotten Gudrun, who interrupted her with a laugh. “You’re too old to be in someone’s lap.”

  Her mother shushed her, her attention on Grete.

  Grete breathed heavily, exhausted from so much talking. “Sister Josephine told me my reward would come. It has, in the form of your good family. I want to be here, rather than . . . in Schöneberg.” She wanted to say more, about how respectable they still were in their poverty. She wanted to say that she prayed for Herr Eisler at night, for his pension to be restored, for his crumpled leg and scarred skin to heal.

  At the same time, she desperately wanted to see what was in Berni’s note.

  “Shh, very well, Grete, very well.” Frau Eisler smiled with lips shut, satisfied. “Throw that whore’s letter away and draw some hot water for Gudrun’s bath. That’s the last of any talk about this sister. Throw the letter away now.”

  Her legs shaking, Grete walked as slowly as she could to the rubbish bins by the back door and unfolded the letter without a sound.

  My little Grete-bird!

  How I have longed for your face! I am glad you found work (difficult these days!) and shelter and have broken free from the shackles named Maria and Eberhardt.

  Are you happy now? Are you well fed? I cannot wait to hear that all is right with you. You’ll see my address on the envelope. I’m a U-Bahn ride away, my sweet—come see me for cake and kaffeeklatsch. We’ll add a splash of bitters and toast life outside St. Luisa’s. Where I can even write the word “bitters” in a note to you, ha-ha!

  I cannot wait to kiss your cheek.

  With love, Berni

  Another day, the thought of cake and coffee might have whet Grete’s appetite rather than her jealousy. But how could the prodigal Berni be so naive to assume nobody outside St. Luisa’s read one another’s mail? Grete shivered at her sister’s professions of love, coming right on the heels of a conversation in which she’d let Frau Eisler call Berni a whore. Tonight she would dream of the black car’s taillights again.

  Berni, 1932

  Though Berni was still too young to vote, Sonje asked her to come along when she cast her ballot in the federal parliamentary election in July. “Girls your age can’t remember a time when women were denied suffrage,” she said after she voted for the Social Democrats, as she and Berni hurried through the protestors, sign-holders, and leaflet-pushers outside. “But you should never take it for granted.”

  “Believe me, I don’t.” Berni wouldn’t admit that until now she hadn’t thought much about the German woman’s ability to vote; as a Lulu, she’d felt about as influential as the rats who ran under the city streets. Any rights she now found she had, she treated with wonder.

  “Good,” Sonje said with a wink. “Now let’s celebrate.”

  They took a taxi to Unter den Linden, the stately boulevard that ran between the Brandenburg Gate and the Museumsinsel. Berni followed Sonje to a restaurant with outdoor seating on the grassy park between the two lanes of the street. Before they could sit, Sonje drifted from one table to the next, kissing people’s cheeks: a pug-nosed woman in ermine, three reporters in rumpled flannel suits and oversized hats, a young couple whose slick black pinscher sat beneath the table, still as a statue.

  “What do you think the mood is at the Hotel Kaiserhof this afternoon?” asked the female owner of the pinscher, speaking of the Nazi headquarters. Berni noticed her dog trembling slightly, his eyes fixed on the table.

  “Desolate,” said Sonje right away. “They’re finished.”

  All except Berni murmured their agreement: the Nazis could not have convinced enough people to vote for them. “No one who has read Mein Kampf,” Sonje said, unwinding her gauzy scarf, “will forget Hitler’s lunacy about Jews, despite their efforts to hide that before this election. Curious how they left the word ‘Jew’ out of their plan for job creation, nicht?”

  “Well, they can’t say out loud their plan to create jobs is to take them from Jews,” said the woman in ermine.

  One of the journalists snorted. “Let us hope those in the provinces have the same common sense we do in Berlin. It’ll be up to them.”

  Berni thought she saw something pass over Sonje’s face—a flicker of fear—and then she recovered. “Come, Berni. I’m famished. I’ll be back tomorrow, gentlemen,” she said, tapping her fingernail on the journalists’ table, “to toast the Nazis’ loss.”

  They followed the patient waiter to a table with wicker chairs, afghans draped over the backs, and despite the heat Berni put hers on her lap. It seemed unwise to waste anything that came free. Typically she and Anita ate saveloy sausage from street carts, or sat at counters that sold yellow pea soup for a handful of pfennig and offered free bread. The waiter returned in a moment with two shimmering pillars of beer, a white cloth draped over his arm. This did not seem the sort of place where you might stuff bread into your pockets.

  Bread. It had been on Berni’s mind all morning, because of
the Nazi posters: “Arbeit, Freiheit und Brot! Adolf Hitler will provide Work and Bread!” The slogans were so simple, yet so appealing—Berni wasn’t sure how Sonje couldn’t see it. In contrast, the Socialist flyers showed a man wrestling with a snake, its scales branded with the words “Ten-Hour Day, Slaughterer of Workers.” What did the 4 million unemployed care about a ten-hour workday when what they had now was zero?

  Tomorrow, Berni thought, glancing up through linden branches at the gray sky, everyone in this café might find him- or herself in a very foul mood. When she clinked glasses with Sonje, the gesture felt hollow.

  “I believe my friends think you’re my lesbian paramour,” Sonje said breathily, leaning over the table. “Don’t look now, but they’re staring at us. I feel very avant-garde.”

  Berni ran a hand over the short hair at the base of her neck, kitten-soft. When she wasn’t working she wore trousers, wool blazers, men’s scarves. She’d very deliberately cultivated the garçonne appearance, and it didn’t bother her when people mistook her for a lesbian. Something about it made her feel more grown up. “Shall I give you a little pinch on the bottom as we go?”

  “Depends on how much I drink. Ah, there’s the board with the lunch specials. Schnitzel! Vanilla ice cream with cherry sauce! Lunch is on me. Order something substantial.”

  “I can’t let you buy me lunch. I’m late on this month’s rent already.”

  Sonje fluttered a hand. “It’s nothing. I’ll just put it on the account.”

  “Ah.” Berni let Sonje summon the waiter and didn’t protest when she declared they’d both like the special. An account at a restaurant like this could only belong to one person, and Berni felt a little queasy to think the meal would be covered by the invisible Trommler, Sonje’s “close personal friend.” Berni hadn’t yet met him, but she knew Sonje would disappear into a hotel with him for a weekend every now and then.