–
As things went, Luisa Hozzel was lucky. The Russians who’d swept into Fulda hadn’t raped her. They seemed to be behaving better than they had in the last war. The house had lost its windows, but it hadn’t taken any direct shell hits. Now she had plywood or cardboard over all of them.
And she’d taken Gustav’s Third Reich medals up into the attic and out of sight before any Red Army soldiers came in. Most of the men around here had served in the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS, and most of the ones who had served fought on the Eastern Front. The Russians hadn’t dragged anybody out of his house and shot him in the town square for what he’d done then. A couple of men on the block had gone missing, though, and their families with them. Maybe they’d died in the first hours of the invasion. Maybe they’d fled. Luisa didn’t believe it, though.
She stayed indoors as much as she could. Almost all the women in Fulda seemed to do that. The Russians might show better manners than they’d had before, but how far could you trust them? People still whispered horror stories about everything they’d done in eastern Germany.
She couldn’t stay in all the time, though. She had to get food. Whenever she headed for the grocer’s, she put on her oldest, frumpiest clothes. She messed up her hair so it looked more like a stork’s nest than anything else. She scrubbed her face with harsh laundry soap. She did her best to look as if she were in her late forties, not her late twenties.
So far, it had worked. The Americans who’d held Fulda before had whistled and howled at her when she walked by. She’d always ignored them, which made them laugh. They went no further than laughing and whistling and howling, though. Plenty of other German girls didn’t ignore them. If you were out for what you could get, you could get plenty from the Amis.
By contrast, the Russians now in Fulda ignored her. Or they had so far, though every time she left the house her heart jumped into her mouth till she got inside again.
Another trip today. She stuck a stringbag inside her purse, fortified herself with a knock of straight schnapps, and stepped out into the big, dangerous world. Sunlight, even the watery sunlight Fulda usually got, made her blink and squint. She didn’t mind. With her face screwed up, she’d look older and homelier yet.
Fulda had changed since the Russians drove the Americans out. Part of that was battle damage; the Amis and the German emergency militia had fought hard to hold the town, but they’d got overwhelmed. (She had no idea what had happened to Gustav after he and Max and some others went off to play soldiers again. She prayed he was all right. She didn’t know what else she could do.)
And part of it was the different flavor of propaganda she had to put up with. When Fulda was part of the U.S. occupation zone, posters had said things like It goes forward with the Marshall plan! It had seemed to go forward, too. Now…
Now she stared at Joseph Stalin and his bushy mustache-more impressive than Hitler’s, she had to admit-everywhere she went. For a free, socialist Germany! the message under his portrait said. Other posters showed the Russian hammer and sickle and the East German hammer and compass side by side. Together to victory! that one shouted. Still others showed Russian tanks and soldiers going forward. They declared The proletariat on the march is invincible!
Walls, fences, lampposts, telephone poles-they’d all got a thick layer of those posters. She hadn’t yet seen a dog with one of them pasted to its side, but that had to be only a matter of time.
Three Russian soldiers came up the street toward her. They reeled instead of walking-they were drunk. Everything people said about how Russians poured it down seemed to be true. Luisa got out of their way and ducked into a shop that sold secondhand clothes. With Russians, as with her own people, drunks were dangerous. They didn’t care about what they did, and they forgot rules they respected sober.
Ice ran up her back when one of the Ivans peered in after her. But then he staggered after his friends. She breathed again.
“Can I show you anything?” asked the shopkeeper, a woman-probably-too old to need to worry about Russian attentions.
“Thank you, no,” Luisa said. “I’m sorry, but I just wanted to get away from those…people.” She didn’t know the woman wouldn’t report her, so she used a neutral word.
“Oh.” The shopkeeper nodded. “Well, it’s not as if you’re the first one. They’ve made me worry about them a couple of times. Me!” She laughed. She knew she was no spring chicken. Lowering her voice, she went on, “The Führer was right, you know. They really are Untermenschen.”
Didn’t she remember anything from the Nazi days about keeping her mouth shut? She’d just put her life in Luisa’s hands. “I think I’d better go,” Luisa said. “I want to see what the grocery has left.” She didn’t say I want to see if the grocery has anything left. Whether this foolish woman did or not, she knew better than to come out with anything so suicidal.
“Auf wiedersehen,” the shopkeeper said wistfully as Luisa left. She couldn’t have got much business even before the Russians came. She was bound to have even less now.
The grocer’s was another two and a half blocks along the street. Several more Red Army men passed Luisa as she walked. They were all more or less sober, and none of them bothered her. Maybe her hideous disguise was working. Maybe they just had orders not to fraternize.
No, it couldn’t be just that. The first couple of years after the last round of fighting stopped, the Amis had orders like those. Orders or not, they’d done their best to pick up anything in a skirt.
“Guten Tag, Frau Hozzel,” the grocer said when she walked in.
“Guten Tag, Horst,” Luisa answered. “Wie geht’s?”
He shrugged and waved at the half-empty shelves. “It goes like this, that’s how. Whatever I can get, I put out.”
“It’s not as bad as it was in ’44 or ’45,” Luisa said. There’d been nothing on the shelves then. People got by with turnips and cabbages. And older folks, the ones from her parents’ generation, claimed even those bad times were nothing next to 1917 and 1918.
She picked up a tin of pickled beets. The label was in German, but it was no brand she’d ever seen before. It was no brand at all, in fact: it said Canned at State Canning Plant Number Fourteen. “Where did this come from?” she asked.
“Somewhere in the east,” the grocer answered. “It’s not very good, but the Russians want to get rid of them, so I have lots.”
“It’s food.” Luisa put three tins in the stringbag. She walked along till she came upon sardines in smaller, flatter tins. Their label said they’d come from State Canning Plant Number Three. “How about these?”
“I won’t lie to you. They’re pretty bad,” Horst said.
“Well…” Luisa hadn’t seen anything like them since the invasion. “How bad is pretty bad?”
“My cat wouldn’t touch them-that’s how bad,” the grocer told her. “You might want to use them if you’re fertilizing a garden in your yard. Otherwise? Not a chance.”
“They’re expensive for fertilizer. We’ll see.” She put one tin in the stringbag. She chose some potatoes that didn’t seem too wretched. Horst’s spinach actually looked good. Up and down the aisles, doing the best she could.
When she came to the counter to pay, he took a box out from under it. “Want some of these? I save them for my good customers.” The box held strawberries.
“You bet I do! How much?” She winced when he told her, but nodded.
He wrapped them in brown paper and string so no one could see what they were. She paid him and walked out the door happier than she’d dreamt she would be. Strawberries! Something nice when you didn’t expect it made even life under the Russians worth living.