Etta walked along Augustinerstrasse and Brücknerstrasse and up by the Juliuspromenade, looking for a bakery or a butcher shop, but all the stores were boarded shut. She looked in the little streets, the ones she didn’t know, where the houses sat close together. If only she knew the city better. If she had paid attention when she came to visit Josef all those years before or when Max was still at school, she’d find her way now and she’d have meat for him and not just apples. She had looped around old town already and walked the length of Domstrasse all the way to the river, and the sweat ran down her neck. She turned to a side street and saw the sign. ZELLER’S BUTCHER SHOP, it said, METTWURST FOR SALE and KATENRAUCHWURST. It had prices for all the cuts and for fresh slicing sausages, for bierwurst and schinkenwurst with bacon inside and garlic, and there was tongue and sülzwurst and teewurst for spreading on bread, peppery tongue sausage and knackwurst that popped open when you boiled them. Sausages of every sort and some she hadn’t eaten in years, and still she remembered just the way they tasted.
The store doors were locked. She leaned against the glass and looked inside. The cases and all the hooks inside were bare. The only meat was in the pictures on the walls, colored drawings of pigs and mournful cows and sausages spread on a tray. A note by the stairwell door listed half a dozen family names. For the Zellers ring three times, it said, and for Fritz Drescher ring twice, and for the family Bauer give one long ring. They’re living together like bees in a hive, she thought; they’re squeezed in tight. Someone had set a brick inside the door so people wouldn’t need to ring the bell. She climbed the stairs and knocked at every door, and no one answered. She climbed to the fourth floor and knocked with both her hands. She waited a half minute and knocked again.
After a long while a man opened the door. His head was smooth as an egg.
“I’m here for some sausage.” She held her purse against her belly. “I’m looking for mettwurst.”
“I’ve got no sausages.” He shook his head. “I’ve got no meat at all.”
“I’ll take blutwurst then, as many as you have.”
“I haven’t had meat since January.” He rubbed his chin. “There’s no meat in the city and no blutwurst either.”
She pulled the silk from her purse. She opened it and showed him the pearls. “I can pay.”
“If I had meat I’d eat it myself.”
“There’s no finer quality.” She held them to the light. “They’re white as the day my mother bought them. And look how they shine.”
He opened the door wider. The apartment was dark and smelled of cigarettes and boiled eggs.
“They’re yours for some eggs.” Her chest was tight now. She wanted to be rid of them. “Just think how your wife will love them.”
She sat at the table while he brought out the pot. Dirty dishes were piled by the counter and on the tabletop. The faucet dripped, pinging water into the basin. She shifted in her seat. What a scandal, what a shame, for an old man to live like that. A cat lay across the sill, trying to catch the last light. It fixed a green eye on Etta and closed it again, unimpressed.
“I can give you six.” He set six brown eggs inside a bag. “My wife is gone to the country already. She’s safe up in the hills.” He reached inside his cupboard and brought out a wedge of Swiss cheese. He laid the bag and the cheese in front of her.
It was less than she’d hoped for. She could have gotten all this and plenty more from Ilse, but she wouldn’t go home even if the trains were still running. She took the pearls and spread them on the table, and they looked warm like skin in the light from the window. They were her mother’s and they’d have gone to the girl Max married, and still it was easy to let them go. The bald man touched the strand and its fine gold clasp. He hesitated, and something flickered in his eyes, and then he took the pearls and set them in his pocket. “It’s late,” he said, and he latched his thumbs around his suspenders. He looked at the floor and not at Etta. He was ashamed to take them, she could tell. There was more food where he was going, but he kept the strand anyway and walked her to the door. He didn’t thank her and didn’t say good-bye, and so it was that she gave her mother’s pearls to a bald man in the city and she never learned his name.
Every night she dreamed of food. She’d been frying fleischwurst this time, and Georg was back home, too, and sitting at the table. Her kitchen smelled of butter and onions. There was freshly ground horseradish and mettwurst and tongue sausage sliced extra fine. Her kitchen was full with butter cakes and bacon and herring, with oranges and cut lemons and loaves of rye bread soft still from the oven. Her pantry shelves sagged from all the weight. This was how her dreams went, how they always went. She was cooking, and the house smelled sweet and both her boys were with her and Josef sat with them and he didn’t grumble for once. He smiled the way he used to.
The Amis bombed the main train station. Two hundred bombs and the building was destroyed and all the tracks behind it, and people were almost relieved. The Amis won’t come after us anymore and not the English either, they said. They’ve gotten what they wanted. Churchill himself studied in our city and he doesn’t want to see it burn, and people began to clear the rubble and they worked all the harder to board up the buildings that still stood. The last of the trees began to bud and flowers bloomed in flower boxes though the apartments were empty and their windows dark. Every day Etta went to visit Max in the clinic and she came back to the old woman’s apartment and wrote letters to Georg and to Josef. She told Josef that Max was eating again and the hollows had gone from beneath his chin and he rested most afternoons and sometimes he walked to the window and watched the people working on the streets. She told Georg to be careful, to take care of himself and his room was waiting for him and all his books. Things were just as he had left them. She took the letters to the substitute post office near the old Ludwig station, where lady train conductors in gray skirts stood outside and collected them because there weren’t any bays inside and nobody to sort them. They set them in enormous burlap bags and piled them by the curb, and the piles grew higher and the bags didn’t seem to move.
“When will the mail go out?” Etta asked the lady who took her letters. “It’s no good keeping it on the street.”
The conductor held up her hands. She looked at Etta from beneath her cap and said nothing, and the next time Etta checked, the conductors were gone, but the bags were all still there.