Berni was on her third cigarette of Trommler’s visit; she needed something between her fingers, something to do with her mouth. The air above her head was translucent, a sickly blue. The room was dark. Sonje had installed thick curtains to keep out the neighbors’ eyes.
The radio switched to Nazi-approved music: “Sieht eine Frau dich an.” Trommler hummed a little. “My dears, the worst part of the regime change is nearly over! I’ve had personal audiences with Herr Göring—”
Trommler and Göring, together: Berni rolled her eyes toward Anita, imagining giant troughs where the powerful elephantine men of the city congregated. Anita stared straight ahead, half-hidden behind the rubber plant, her dessert untouched. Ever since the burning of the Institute for Sexual Science, she had not been herself. Her laughter, even the nervous kind, had all but disappeared.
“Once they’ve established Gleichschaltung, which naturally involves growing pains, the fist will open . . .” Trommler unrolled his thick fingers and grinned at Sonje. He was as Anita had first described him: an enormous man of about sixty, whose clothing clung tight and smooth to his girth. His wide upper lip seemed flattened by a previous mustache, the way land is after a glacier. “Then I’ll sell the flat back to you, expecting unlimited visitation, of course, ha-ha!”
Sonje smiled wanly. So far, he hadn’t seemed to notice Berni’s scraped wrists, the bruise on Sonje’s lip. He burped and pointed at the empty doily atop his dessert plate and nodded at Berni, who brought over a wedge of cake teetering on the knife, his third slice. Her finger wobbled as she used it to slide the cake onto his plate: mousse, raspberry crème, sponge. He had brought it over since the closest bakeries now refused to deliver to Jews. Their upstairs neighbor, Frau Anwalt, had revealed Sonje as such.
“Gracious, my girl, you’re all a-tremble,” Trommler said to Berni, resettling himself in his armchair and brandishing his fork with the flourish of a violinist.
“Perhaps our Berni is a bit hung-over,” Sonje said with a thin smile.
“The young and their nightclubs!” he trumpeted, in a burst of crumbs.
“Prost,” said Berni, tilting some liqueur into her mug. “There aren’t enough nightclubs in existence to get me drunk anymore. I stayed in with Anita last night.”
Anita did nothing to corroborate this lie. She refused to speak to Trommler, even though Sonje had asked them repeatedly to be courteous to their new landlord.
Berni had barely had time to process the news that the flat had a mortgage before she learned Trommler would be buying it from Sonje. Complications with Sonje’s new loan officer—it was no longer legal for the previous one, a Jew, to work at the bank—were, as she put it, “smoothed” by Trommler. She had taken that little bit of equity and sewn it into the linings of quilts and coats.
A voice interrupted the song on the radio: “. . . a bloody scene on the Ku’damm last night as Jewish rioters . . .”
Everyone froze.
“Not the way to respond,” Trommler muttered, “not if they know what’s good for them.”
“. . . screening of the foreign film Pettersson & Bendel was interrupted, first by jeers and catcalls, then by violence, in what appeared to be a planned public disturbance by Jewish agents provocateurs . . .”
Out of the corner of her eye, Berni saw smoke coil from Anita’s nostrils. Last night they hadn’t been to the theater to see Pettersson & Bendel, nor to protest; they had tickets for Lotte Reiniger’s animated Papageno. The Nazis might enjoy Mozart, Sonje had said, but she and Reiniger would not let them ruin The Magic Flute.
They hadn’t heard a sound from the adjacent theater until the men burst through the doors, not in full uniform, but it was obvious: brown pants, heavy boots. Any dark-haired or Roman-nosed men were yanked away by their collars. Outside the men were stopping cars in the street, smashing windows, yelling “Jew!” as the police stood aside, fretting with their dogs’ leashes. As they fled, Sonje had turned to Berni, her mouth opened in a shout, and Berni saw Anita on the ground, the knees of her stockings torn, clawing at an SA man’s neck.
Sonje’s nose quivered. Berni gripped the arm of her chair. All Trommler had to do was look at Sonje, notice her bruised lip, and ask where she had been last night.
Instead he fixed his small eyes on Berni. “You have your papers in order, don’t you? Makes no sense not to for an Aryan girl. You’ll spare yourself a great deal of trouble.”
Berni could feel Sonje and Anita looking at her, and her lips tightened. It wasn’t her fault she could join the Volk without a forged ID or genealogy-for-pay. All she had to do was go to St. Luisa’s and ask for her birth certificate. But she hadn’t. Not yet. “Anita lives underground, I live underground,” she said, leaving Trommler to sputter and cluck.
• • •
Jewish cabaret, the Nazis proclaimed, was dead. As evidence they had places like the Cabaret Finck on Grunewaldstraße, once a dark place, witty and elegant. It was now renamed Weingut Keller and plastered with the kind of faux Bavarian decor that made Berni sick: oversized beer steins flowing with papier-mâché foam, fake purple grapes, wooden benches in place of the little round tables, which had seemed somehow too French. Its new name wrapped around the front and side of the building in block letters as though inscribed by a giant calligrapher’s pen, and the new owners had hung swastika flags on both façades and from the upper story, beside the neon signs advertising Radeberger Pilsner and Fetzer’s bratwurst.
Berni and Anita worked at the Keller, Berni upstairs, Anita down. The Finck had gone underground the way Sonje had, hiding behind Aryan owners; a secret stage in the cellar, available only to those in the know, maintained a repertoire of political satire. The stage manager, Hansi, hid his homosexuality behind sexist jokes and free drinks for Nazis, who were shown only the main floor. Hansi loved the theatrics of playing dress-up for conservatives, and made Berni come to work in a ruffled blouse and gingham dirndl. It was a sad irony that Anita longed to trade places, play the Überfrau. She had repeatedly turned down the role Hansi offered her in the cellar show: Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor.
“I look nothing like him,” she complained. “The insult!”
Hansi’s skit involved Hitler instructing Breker and Speer to erect an obelisk in the Lustgarten. “Higher!” Hitler would say. “Higher! Higher!” as the set grew, with Speer eventually adding a domed top and round base, until the three stood back gazing at a statue of Hitler’s cock, shouting, “Magnificent! Perfection!” Hansi could not stop giggling about it. “I just need a Breker,” he’d add, and Anita would storm out.
One warm August afternoon, as Berni and Anita dressed for work in the staff room at the Keller, Berni tugged the empty spaces in the blouse where her bosom was supposed to spill out. “One day I’m going to burn this getup,” she said, “and dance naked around the flames.”
Anita tugged at her stockings and said nothing. The walk to the Keller was always hard for both of them. Anita refused to hide her face, putting Berni on her guard, forcing her to look at the people they passed on the street, really look at them. It seemed impossible that people could still find things to laugh about as they waited for trams or bought sausage under the red umbrella of the Koschwitz cart. Bureaucrats lay on blankets in the park beside the Rathaus Schöneberg, tipping back after-work beers. “Hitler’s weather,” as people called it, was also their weather. They were Berni’s peers, professionals who sat behind desks while she wiped lipstick from glassware. Every blonde reminded her of Grete. She’d seen Grete at the subway station in March, wearing a Nazi nursing uniform. Berni had tried not to think about her since.
We’re the sisters, Anita had told Berni once, and lately Berni had been trying to adopt this as truth. Anita was her sister now, the one to be protected, and she was, Sonje worried, becoming unmanageable. Too angry. Too defiant for her own good.
Berni wrapped a floral choker around her neck. “I look like a donkey tarted up as a parade horse,” she said, producing a tiny laugh from Anita, more of a grunt.
“At least you’ll see sunlight as you work.”
“And Nazi faces.”
The side of Anita’s mouth lifted in a slight smile. “Some look ripe to bite in those uniforms. What I’d do to them with some whips and spiked boots . . .”
“Stop!” Berni cried, clutching her side. “You’re terrible.”
Anita adjusted her stockings once more, then removed a pack of cigarettes from her apron and put it in one of the cubbies on the wall. “For our break.” She glanced at the mirror and sighed. “Off to the dark place, where they put things like me.”
“Don’t be dramatic.” Berni meant it to sound lighthearted, but seeing Anita’s reaction made her feel like one of those girls in the park.
She waited only a minute after Anita left, then slipped on her pants and blouse and stamped into her oxfords without untying them. She scribbled a quick message and rolled it to about the thickness of a cigarette, then pulled one from the pack in Anita’s cubby and replaced it with the note: Felt sick. Went home. See you there for dinner.
The cigarette behind her ear, Berni crept into the dining room. She hated leaving Anita alone. See you there was a hopeful message: it meant don’t spend the night out with strangers.
“Leaving so soon?”
Hansi stood behind her with arms crossed, one foot tucked above the other knee, a faded apron tied round his waist. From the kitchen came the smell of burnt sausage.
“My cough is bad today—” Berni let out a weak hacking sound. She put her hands to her neck, then her belly. What had she written in her note? “My stomach . . .”
“Save it. I haven’t the patience. Brigit will have to cover your tables.” Hansi looked at her over his round glasses. “Next time you miss work, there’ll be trouble.”
• • •
Berni walked quickly from the U7, head down, watching her plain shoes strike the sidewalk in front of the Café Royal. The sweat on her neck went cold as she looked around. Could this be the street on which she’d spent her childhood? The trees, once giant, now stood no taller than the tops of the three-stories. She passed the laundry with its yellow façade, a display of clean bloomers and underpants pinned to a clothesline in the window. As a girl she’d found this titillating, but it now seemed vaguely sad. The French-doored balconies she and Grete had coveted looked the same but for the swastika flags. Splashes of red pocked this street like a rash.
St. Luisa’s stood at the end of the street. No flags. So much had changed everywhere else, Berni thought, while here all that had happened was the chestnut tree had grown a few feet. Its bark looked leprous, marred with green summer fungus. Berni listened, expecting to hear the shouts of a thousand girls coming from the courtyard, but there was silence as she knocked.
A girl of about thirteen, her hair in a kerchief, answered. “May I help you?”
The door was only open a crack, the girl’s pale nose poking through, but now Berni could hear it, the buzz of this little hive. The hum gave her a burst of energy, and she stood straighter. “I’m here to see Sister Josephine,” she said, praying her favorite hadn’t died.
“State your purpose?”
“Sister Josephine was my math teacher. I’m paying a visit.”
A bit more of the girl’s face emerged, her dark brows lifted in the middle. “You’re here for your records, nicht, to prove you aren’t a Jew? No need to beat around the bush, you’re far from the first.”
“What? No.” To prove you aren’t a Jew. There it was, in crass terms. Was that why she’d felt the need to be secretive?
The girl sighed. “If you want your records I can send you to the office. If not I can’t help you. Sister Josephine is teaching now.”
Berni paused. “Fine. Yes.” She followed the girl into the main hallway, past the marble staircase, toward the refectory. She stared at the dusty metallic radiators, the worn wooden handrails along the steps, the oversized cross above the double refectory doors. There may as well have been grooves worn into the floor; if she followed them, she half expected an eleven-year-old Grete would be sitting there, huddled on the bench.
She was swallowing hard by the time they passed a classroom. Through the window in the door she saw a dozen girls gazing toward the board. Their hands went up in unison.
“Bernadette Metzger.”
Berni and the girl turned to see Sister Maria Eberhardt walking toward them, carrying a silver pitcher of water. She looked at Berni as though she’d seen a ghost.
“You can leave us, Jacinta,” Sister Maria said, though she still looked alarmed and didn’t take her eyes off Berni. “You came for your paperwork, Bernadette? Why?”
Why? Berni blinked. Surely Sister Maria couldn’t be unaware of what was happening outside. “Why, Sister?”
“Shh. I’ll take you to the office. That’ll be all, Jacinta,” she called after the girl, who lingered ahead of them in the hallway, peeking over her shoulder.
Stunned mute, Berni followed Sister Maria toward her office. The nun took long, masculine steps, her wide flat feet showing in their comfortable shoes, and Berni was struck by the comfort and nostalgia she felt watching this woman whom she’d hated as a child. At the office, Sister Maria shut the door behind them. Berni took a seat in the chair in which she’d sat when offered the chance at the academy.
Sister Maria poured them each a glass of water. “I was under the impression you and your sister didn’t need help from us.”
Berni took a sip. “What do you mean?”
Sister Maria took in Berni’s hair and her men’s shirt. Berni expected her to hold forth about lifestyle choices, but she didn’t. “Grete seems to be well connected, don’t you think?”
“You’ve seen her?”
“Haven’t you?”
Berni looked at the tiny stained-glass window she had once thought so beautiful. Light shone dully through its lily and cross. “I bumped into her at the train. We didn’t speak long.”
“I see,” Sister Maria said quietly. “Then you know she’s studying to become a nurse.”
Berni shrugged. Choice words from their conversation at the train station echoed in her mind. Whore: she’d accused Grete of being Hitler’s. Jealous: Grete’s old fallback. And, of course, Berni was. The unfairness overwhelmed her. Her sister, a nurse. Herself, a waitress. Afterward Grete sent her a bottle of antibiotics in the mail, for her cough, just to show how much more she knew than Berni did. The bottle had gone in the trash.
“She came here in late May,” Sister Maria continued, “to inquire about a job. Grete thought she might finish her practicum here; apparently one of her professors had suggested it. Naturally we had to turn her away.”
“Why ‘naturally’?” Berni asked, feeling reflexive prickles of irritation under her arms. “Why did you ‘naturally’ have to turn her away?”
“Because of her Party membership, of course. More than that: she’ll be one of their nurses when her schooling’s done. She could join the SS. I’m sorry if this is the first you’ve heard of it, but my guess is you knew?”
Berni bit the edge of her glass. “I knew,” she said. “What did you give as a reason you couldn’t hire her?”
“I told her she lacked the proper qualifications. We couldn’t tell her—or any of the others who came in Nazi uniform, of course—the truth. They’d have gone straight to their superiors.”
Berni knew how Grete would have taken this rejection. She felt an echo of it now, in her stomach. “You made it seem personal.”
“Bernadette, I’m here to keep our girls and our church safe.” Sister Maria lifted her glass, using her other hand to steady a tremor in her wrist, the first feeble gesture Berni had ever seen her make. “I’m not the bad wolf, even though you think I am. It wasn’t easy to choose girls for the academy.” Her tone softened. “The best moments were the ones in which we told an unlikely girl we were giving her a chance. But even that sometimes didn’t go as planned.”
Sister Maria looked hard at Berni, who studied the floor, her shoes. After a minute, Sister Maria sat up straight. “Now then. Your paperwork.”
“I don’t even want to see it.” Berni slouched in the chair. “Why should I cooperate? Why obtain papers to prove I’m not Jewish?”
“There are Jewish Germans who would give everything they had to be in your position. Think of it that way.” There were deep grooves above Sister Maria’s eyebrows, as if the thumbs that formed her had pressed down the clay. Berni shivered as she waited for her to find the file.
Later she couldn’t remember saying goodbye or the exact wording of Sister Maria’s parting warning to her, something about staying alert and secretive and mentally guarded. All she knew was that the folder was in her hand. She opened it under the chestnut tree in the front yard, certain Sister Maria watched from one of the upper windows. When she’d read the file she nodded once, then walked away, heat pulsing in her earlobes.
Her file shouldn’t have affected her; she’d never doubted who her parents were. Still, at home she went to her room and cried until she coughed her throat raw. She stayed in bed three days, her emotion taking on the symptoms of influenza: dizziness, a weight on her chest.
There would be trouble if she missed another day of work: that was what Hansi had told her, and he turned out to be right. On Berni’s second day in bed, Anita left the Keller after her second shift with two Dutch tourists, men in flannel suits with an outdated sex guidebook. Hansi had overheard her boasting that she could show them which boy-bars were still open. “That girl,” he said sadly. “She’ll never pass up an opportunity to play queen of the scene.”
That night the Gestapo made a sweep of homosexual clubs in Berlin. Everyone inside was arrested.