City of Women by David R. Gillham Page A

steps out of the flat just as Sigrid is taking her mental inventory. Her surprise must register clearly on her face, because he lifts his eyebrows and asks, “Did I startle you?”
    He looks to be in his early thirties, not so much older than she, wearing a dark wool cardigan, with a patch at one of the elbows, over a white linen shirt buttoned at the collar. His face is evenly proportioned, with patrician features. What used to be called an “officer’s face.” But his gaze is like a gun sight, as if he is looking at her down the bore of a rifle. When she does not respond, he stacks the skis neatly against the wall. “Well. Shan’t be getting much use out of these anytime soon. Skiing, as I recall it, requires
two
legs,” he tells her, and turns his weight on his cane to reenter the flat.
    “Wait. I’m sorry,” Sigrid hears herself suddenly say.
    Again he takes her into his sights. “You’re sorry? For what?” he says mildly. “That you were impolite, or that I am a one-legged cripple?”
    “Both,” she answers. She can feel a sudden thickening in her blood. A certain dryness at the back of her mouth. It’s not that she feels stripped by his gaze, more like annihilated. “Are you in pain?” Sigrid asks, feeling her face heat.
    “Yes,” he answers. “Are you?”
    “Me?”
    “You look it,” he tells her. “In pain, that is.”
    “Yes,” she hears herself answer suddenly.
    “Then you should do something about it. I could help you.”
    “Help me?”
    “Relieve the pain.”
    She swallows. Absorbs the force of his stare. “No. Thank you.”
    The man fixes her with the gun sight a moment longer, then shrugs. “Well, you should do
something
, gnädige Frau,” he tells her, opening the door to the flat. “I have my pain, and what can be done about it? Stitch a leg back on after it’s been blown off? Not very practical. But you? What’s your excuse?”
    •   •   •
    T HAT NIGHT , Sigrid lies awake, staring up at the darkness of the ceiling. She’s still awake with a wire of tension in her body. Her palms are clammy. It’s been so long that she’s even
thought
about doing this that she’s hesitant. Will she remember how? Shoving off her covers, she gingerly tugs up her nightdress and lets her fingers go seeking. They come up dry at first, but then she feels the dampness. Her body slowing, arching. Tightening. She must bite her wrist to silence her cry. Her cry for the man who has turned her past into a treasury, and her future into an ash pit of hope.
    —
    It’s Saturday. Her day for the dairy shop and greengrocer. So she swallows some belladonna with a cup of sour chicory coffee, eats a slice of tasteless rye bread, and hurries out the door, only to be intercepted at the top of the stairs. Frau Mundt, the porter’s wife, is decked out in her best Nazi fashion. The blue-black Frauenschaft uniform, complete with the felt fedora and swastika pin on the lapel of her overcoat. An ensemble she is known to wear any time she visits the Party’s district office in the Jägerstrasse.
    “’Morning,” Sigrid offers quickly.
    “
Heil Hitler
,” Mundt reminds her.
    “Yes of course. Heil Hitler
.
I’m sorry, but I’m on my way to Brodheker’s, before they run out of milk.”
    But Frau Mundt makes no move to clear the stairwell. “Perhaps you did not see the notice,” she announces, in a tone a bit too sharp for a Saturday morning.
    “Notice,” Sigrid repeats. “I’m sorry,
notice
? I don’t know what you mean.”
    “
Donations
, Frau Schröder,” Mundt replies with a thin frown. “Of warm clothing for our men in the east, struggling against the Bolshevik enemy. Your husband among them, I believe. They were to be placed on the landing for collection.”
    “Yes. Oh, yes, of course. I put out our donation last night. Right here at the door. A box and two coats.”
    “Is that so?”
Mundt replies dubiously with pursed lips. “Well, then. I suppose we have a
mystery
on our hands,