The German House Read online

  Nurse Heide peered in and said, with characteristic disapproval, “Your sister is on the line.”

  Küssner addressed Annegret in an overly businesslike tone, “Thank you, Nurse, I think that covers it.”

  Annegret crossed the hallway, where the night-light had already been turned on, and stepped up to reception. The phone receiver lay on the counter. She steeled herself for the conversation, because it was unusual for Eva to call her at work.

  “Did something happen to Dad?”

  “No, Annie, don’t worry, I just need your help.” Annegret leaned against the counter. Nurse Heide had sat down on the other side and was labeling forms and trying to look busy. Annegret was then astonished to hear that Eva wanted her to check on someone in emergency surgery.

  “I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying, Eva. Who had an accident? Otto who? Who is that?”

  “A witness. In the trial.”

  Annegret fell silent. Her eyes focused on the wall behind Nurse Heide, at next month’s schedule hanging there. The days were clearly marked with colorful fields. Hers were light blue, like the armbands on the baby boys she liked so much. An especially sweet little nugget had been born two days ago and was now in the first nursery. Michael. He had weighed nearly three kilos at birth.

  “I’ll check,” Annegret said into the receiver.

  “Thank you. Please call me back as soon as you find out.”

  Annegret hung up. Nurse Heide looked at Annegret quizzically, her expression surly as ever. Annegret ignored her. She crossed the hallway and paused at the threshold of the first nursery. None of the children lying here in the dark was crying yet. Annegret still had half an hour before feeding. She crossed the room to Michael’s bassinet and patted his little head; he was awake, and he stared past her with black eyes and shook his fists erratically.

  AT THE BRUHNSES’ APARTMENT, Eva fetched a bucket and cleaning rag from the storage closet off the kitchen. She wiped up the puddle Purzel had left in the hallway. They hadn’t changed his walking schedule, but he had recently peed in the apartment a few times. He was already eleven, so it was probably a sign of old age. Eva tried not to think about the fit Stefan would throw if they had to put the dog to sleep. She washed and wrung out the rag in the kitchen sink, then looked at the clock. Her call with Annegret was half an hour ago. Did these inquiries really take that long? At that moment the phone rang. Eva dashed into the hallway and answered, “Eva Bruhns here?!” But it was Jürgen, calling from West Berlin. He was there for a few days on business, to visit a factory in East Berlin that manufactured bedclothes. Jürgen seemed cheerful. He told her he’d been positively surprised by the quality of the East German products. He hoped to get the linens for a good price. The Wall was an oppressive presence. He’d had an excellent Tafelspitz for dinner. He was staying at a hotel on Ku’damm, with a view of the destroyed Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. He thought it was a mistake not to rebuild the church. “We don’t need these memorials. People already carry them around within themselves. Within their souls.”

  But Eva didn’t have the patience for one of Jürgen’s philosophical diatribes. “Jürgen, I’m sorry, but I’m expecting a call.”

  “From whom?”

  “I’ll tell you in person when you get back. Okay?”

  Jürgen was silent, but Eva could picture his face plainly, the way his eyes darkened in suspicion, yet he was too proud to ask any more questions. Jürgen was a jealous person, something Eva had noticed a few times while out together, when other men would ask her to dance. But it flattered her. After all, it meant she was important to him.

  “Fine, I suppose we’re hanging up now. Have a good night.” He really was hurt.

  “All right. Well, you know we’ll see each other tomorrow. Sleep tight,” Eva responded. She waited for him to hang up.

  But then his voice buzzed out of the receiver, “By the way, my father and his wife want to meet you. We’re going to dinner on Friday. To the InterConti. Agreed?”

  Eva was stunned but answered happily, “Yes, of course! What did you tell them?”

  “That I want to marry you.” Jürgen’s voice was strangely icy as he said it, but Eva didn’t care.

  “What? And? What did they say?”

  “Like I said: they want to meet you.” Jürgen hung up. Eva needed a moment to fully comprehend that the “breakthrough,” as she’d dubbed it for herself, had finally come. The fear of Jürgen leaving her was finally banished. The Schoormanns knew that she existed. That she was their son’s bride. Eva called loudly for Purzel, since there was no one else in the apartment she could hug with joy. But the dog didn’t come. Eva went into the living room and squatted down. There was Purzel, a black spot with two shining eyes, in his usual spot under the sofa. Considering how sly he could be, and how painfully he would nip people when they least expected, he had a highly pronounced sense of shame.

  “Come on out, I’m not going to rip your head off.” Purzel didn’t move, but she could see the whites of his eyes. Eva reached out and slowly pulled the dog out from under the sofa by his collar. Then she picked him up. The phone rang again, and Eva carried Purzel into the hallway and answered for a second time. It was Annegret. She had spoken to the chief physician in the emergency department.

  “That Cohn fellow, he’s doing fine.”

  Eva exhaled in relief. “How wonderful. It really did look bad—”

  “It was just a concussion.”

  “Can I visit him? I have his hat—”

  “He’s already been discharged. It was his idea.”

  “What? Oh . . . thank you, Annie, I’m so happy. Thank you.”

  Click! Annegret hung up. Or the connection was cut. Eva squeezed Purzel, who struggled in protest. “What do you think about that?! Today’s my lucky day!” Eva spun around the hallway with Purzel and kissed his short, wiry fur. “And I won’t tell anyone what you did. I promise!” Purzel snapped at Eva’s face in response. She dropped him. “You always were a little beast!”

  AT THE HOSPITAL, Nurse Heide and a colleague wheeled the babies to their mothers in the maternity ward. Annegret was tending to Michael, whose mother was not yet lactating following the difficult delivery and was still too weak to bottle-feed him. Annegret was at the nurses’ station, filling a glass bottle with four tablespoons of powdered milk and boiling water from the kettle. From the pocket of her uniform, she pulled out the glass syringe containing the brownish liquid. She slowly added the contents to the milk mixture, screwed the nipple into place, and shook the bottle vigorously. Then she entered the first nursery, plucked Michael from his bassinet, and sat down with him in a cozy chair by the window. Michael flailed his head about and pressed his mouth against Annegret’s smock. She smiled—he was looking for his mother’s breast. She tested the temperature of the baby formula by pressing the bottle to her cheek. Then she put the rubber nipple in the boy’s mouth. He immediately began feeding hungrily and evenly. He made little chortling sounds as he did. Annegret looked down at him, and she felt the small, warm body and the trust it had in her. A great sense of peace spread through her body, a heavy, golden honey that flowed warmly into all of her limbs. She forgot everything—she forgot that she had just asked the head nurse in emergency surgery about Otto Cohn. She forgot that the older nurse, whom she knew casually, had taken her across the hallway to a special room. Her colleague described the imposition the patient had presented. His condition had been utterly squalid. He had smelled terribly. Annegret also forgot that the nurse had opened the door to that windowless room with a cross on the wall. There, covered by a white cloth, lay a figure on a gurney. The nurse explained that a rib had pierced his lung. He had already suffocated by the time the medics loaded him up. Annegret gazed at Michael suckling blissfully and no longer heard the nurse’s question: “Did you know him?” Annegret forgot that she had stepped up to the gurney, and that beside the body’s blanketed feet, she had seen the man’s small collection of possessions. A shabby wallet with
several new bills peeking out, a flattened pocket watch, whose hands had stopped at ten minutes to one, and two old photographs. She forgot that she lied to her sister about this troubled man.

  LATER THAT EVENING, just as David was leaving the office, the lead prosecutor informed him that the witness had died as a result of the accident. The men stood facing each other in the office door and shared a silent look. The thrill of the pharmacist’s arrest had taken on a bitter aftertaste. The blond man then asked that David tend to the formalities. Cohn had no one left in Budapest who would pay for his body to be brought back home. They would need to apply for a pauper’s funeral with the authorities. David assured him that he would of course see to it. The blond man watched him walk down the corridor and disappear through the glass door at the end. He couldn’t help it—he was starting to like the young man.

  As David left the office building and stepped into the damp evening air, his legs felt unusually heavy. Cohn must have died as he and Fräulein Bruhns knelt beside him. His soul had slipped between them and climbed into the heavens. Or disappeared down a manhole. Depended on one’s views of eternity. David was tired. But he wasn’t ready to return to his room yet. He took a left, to visit Sissi. He knew that her shift at Suzi’s didn’t begin till ten, which would still give them a good hour together. He hadn’t returned to the bar after their first encounter, but had instead tried other establishments and their ladies.

  Not too long ago, though, he’d been in a chilly, cramped fruit and vegetable shop buying three oranges, because he had a cold and his mother’s lectures about vitamins echoed in his mind. As the warmly bundled shopkeeper, who was wearing wool gloves with the fingertips missing, packed the fruit into a paper bag as carefully as if they were raw eggs, another woman—slender and somewhat pinched—entered the shop. She slowly took off her gloves and checked the potatoes in the crates by turning them over and over. She wore bright red nail polish, which didn’t match her otherwise colorless appearance. “These caught some frost.” “Now listen here! I only sell the best products!” The woman seemed strangely familiar to David. He stared at her while paying for his oranges and dug through his mind, trying to remember how he knew her. From the municipal building? From the prosecution? She didn’t look like one of the older typists. Or was she a cleaner in the office? She sensed his gaze, turned to him, and pleasantly said, “Guten Tag.” At that moment, he picked up a vaguely sweet smell. It was Sissi, whom he had been in bed with. Whom he had been inside, and inside whom he had burst. David turned as red as his hair. Sissi smiled, and her face was transformed into a web of fine wrinkles David hadn’t noticed in the darkened brothel room. He carried the potatoes home for her like a schoolboy hoping to earn a few pennies, and had visited her several times since. In her small apartment off a back courtyard, where she lived with her fourteen-year-old son—an “occupational mishap,” as she said—they would sit at the kitchen table, talking and smoking. Sometimes they watched a show on Sissi’s new television, which was her pride and joy. They were like two friendly dogs that liked each other and lay peacefully side by side. He hadn’t slept with her a second time. It would have felt inappropriate, now that he knew Sissi in her real life. She wasn’t interested in hearing about the trial. The war had been hard on her too. Especially after the war, when the Russians reached Baulitz, where she’d had a small farm with her husband. On the outskirts of town.

  Tonight, Sissi noticed that David wasn’t behaving as superior as usual. He seemed shaken and started talking as soon as the door opened: about traffic, the weather, the strange smell just now in the front building. While Sissi washed her stockings in the sink, her back toward him in the narrow kitchen, David sat up tall at the table and leaned against the wall and talked—not about Cohn, but about himself. Himself and his big brother. They had been deported to the camp from Berlin. His brother had been in the resistance and was sent to the political department. He was tortured to death in an interrogation. And they called him, the baby brother, to dispose of the body. He hadn’t even recognized him anymore. The interrogation was performed by the head of the political department. Defendant Number Four. When David reached the end of his story, Sissi turned around and began hanging the wrung out, but still damp, stockings on a line she had stretched the length of the kitchen. David waited for her to say something in sympathy or outrage. But all she asked, without looking at him, was, “Have you told your boss yet?” David fell silent for a moment, snubbed, then snapped with disproportionate severity, “You really don’t understand, do you? I’d be out on my ear!” He elaborated that having a personal stake would bar him from working on the trial. They called that conflict of interest! He’d had to make a decision. And he had decided not to be a witness, but to convict the perpetrators by law. Dramatic music swelled in the next room. Sissi’s son was hunkered down in front of the television in the bed-sitter, watching a crime movie. David broke off. There were shots and someone screamed. Sissi continued hanging her stockings. David thought he must not have told the story properly. He cleared his throat and added that he’d never told this to anyone. Which was also a lie, because he had been out twice with Fräulein Schenke, the attractive stenotypist. He had confided in her the second time. And sworn her to absolute secrecy. Since then, Fräulein Schenke had sent him pitying looks from across the courtroom. And it wasn’t just her—the other girls had been acting more solicitous toward him too, all except for Fräulein Bruhns. The story apparently hadn’t reached her yet. Sissi had finished hanging her fourteen stockings. Several of the toes were dripping gently on the stone floor and David’s thighs. Sissi said she had a headache. It wasn’t good to think back on bad things. “You know,” she said, as she opened David a bottle of beer, “I have this little chamber in here.” She pointed at her belly, directly below her heart. “I piled everything in there and turned out the light and locked the door. The chamber aches sometimes, but then I just take a teaspoon of baking soda. I know it’s there. But luckily I don’t know what’s inside anymore. Five Russians? Ten Russians? My dead husband? And how many dead children? No idea. Door’s shut and light’s out.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, right after breakfast, Eva packed the narrow-brimmed hat in a large paper bag and set out for the inn. The reception desk was deserted, and the murmur of voices and clatter of silverware emerged from a room behind it to the left. The guests were having breakfast, while the innkeeper’s wife strolled between the tables with the coffeepot. The innkeeper was nowhere to be seen. Eva remembered which room Cohn had booked. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and walked down the dark, carpeted corridor. She stopped outside the door bearing the number eight. She knocked softly. “Herr Cohn? I’ve brought you something.” There was no response, and she knocked again, waited, and then tried the door handle. The room was empty, the window wide open, revealing a tall firewall, and the bright curtains moved in the breeze. Despite the fresh air from outdoors, a penetrating smell hung in the room. Like gas or the chloroform they give you at the dentist to numb the pain, Eva thought and involuntarily covered her nose and mouth with her hand. She drew back into the hallway.

  “What are you snooping around for, Fräulein?” The innkeeper approached.

  “I wanted to visit Herr Cohn.”

  He looked her over with his slightly puffy eyes. “Weren’t you the one who first brought him here? Are you related to him?”

  Eva shook her head. “No, I just have something of his . . .” Eva lifted the paper bag by way of explanation, but the man wasn’t interested. He stepped into the room.

  “He stayed in here for weeks,” he noted and closed the window. “They just don’t know the first thing about personal hygiene and care. So now I need to clear the lice out of all the cracks. And it’s not like you can just ask nicely—you have to fumigate.”

  “Did he leave?”

  The innkeeper turned to face Eva. “No, he was hit and killed by a car.”

  Eva gaped at the man and shook her head incredulously. “But . . . he was
. . . I thought it was just a concussion.”

  “Beats me. One of the prosecutors, or something, already stopped by early this morning, red-headed guy—he picked up his suitcase. Everything’s paid up. Except the fumigation. I’ve got to cough that up myself, of course. Unless you were planning to pay?” Eva turned and slowly made her way down the corridor without answering, the paper bag in her left hand. She brushed the wall with three fingers of her right hand. She felt she needed the support.

  WHEN EVA GOT BACK to the Bruhnses’ apartment half an hour later, she was surprised to hear noises coming from her room. Voices and laughter. Her mother and sister were standing at her opened wardrobe and rummaging through her clothing. They had already pulled out two of her best dresses and hung them side by side from the wardrobe door. Eva frowned at the two women. “What are you doing here?”

  “We’re trying to help you!” Annegret declared, without turning to face Eva.

  “We’re looking to see what you should wear tonight, child. You’ve got to look stunning for the Schoormanns,” Edith added.

  “But you can’t just come into my room and go through my wardrobe—” Eva protested. They both ignored her objection. Instead, Annegret pointed out the dark blue sheath dress hanging from the door.

  “I prefer this one, because it’s so slimming, but Mum likes the light brown one. You know Mum’s taste can be a bit common, though.”

  Edith playfully threatened Annegret with a raised hand. “You had better watch out!”

  “Well, just look at you in that old sack.” Annegret tugged at the blue checkered smock Edith wore whenever she wasn’t working at the restaurant.

  “How about that hair of yours? Like cotton candy. It defies the laws of nature—”