Clelia fled the bedroom and hurled herself onto her cot.
“You’re a dirty—whore!” she whispered. “A dirty whore!”
Hearing herself, she immediately sat up and clamped her mouth shut with her fingers. Tears in her eyes gave trembling, diaphanous wings to the bars of sunlight leaking in around the heavy curtains that the stomach insisted be kept closed. My God, she thought. How can I say that? I’m a terrible person! And then, throwing herself back down on the narrow mattress, she expelled more words into her pillow: “A whore! A whore! A filthy whore!” At the same time, she beat on her head with her knuckles. She felt herself to be the world’s most terrible person, also one of the most unlucky and ridiculous. Her legs were so long that to sleep on the cot she had to bend them or leave her feet hanging off the end. She was more than one and three-quarters meters tall, a ridiculous goose in the too-small cage of her cot, with the ugliest name any girl was ever given. People at the bakery had the impression that she was stupid because she giggled for no reason and tended to blurt out whatever came into her head.
She wasn’t stupid. She got excellent marks in school and could have been taking classes at the university if the committee had let her. The official word was that her father was bourgeois, but her father was dead and her mother and uncle came from the correct social class. The real stigma was that her mother had granted favors to one and then another black-uniformed officer in the worst years. Clelia’s little sister was the daughter of the second one. And, yes, Clelia had eaten the meat and butter and candy, but she’d been a child, unversed in evil. It was to the evil stomach that one of the officers had brought an entire case of authentic Pepto-Bismol. Annelie had sold herself for the stomach, not for her children.
In my mother’s many tellings of this story to me, she always stressed that when she’d changed out of her ruined dress and dropped one hard roll and two books into her purse, she hadn’t been intending to abandon her siblings, hadn’t been acting on any long-contemplated plan. She just wanted an evening away from the stomach, at most a night and day of relief from an apartment that made her both wholly conscious of the misery of being German and wholly unable to imagine not being German. Until that Saturday in June, the worst thing she’d ever plotted was to buy a Western sundress. Now she’d never have the dress, but she could still go walking in the West, the American sector was only a train ride away.
With thirty marks in her shoulder bag, she hurried downhill to the center of town, which was still being rebuilt, with socialist unhurry, from the pummeling it had received for harboring the manufacturer of bomb sights and rifle scopes for the war. The round-trip ticket to Berlin cost her nearly all her money. With the little that remained she bought a small bag of candy that left her all the hungrier by the time the train reached Leipzig. So little had she planned to run away, one dry roll was the only other food she had. But what she mainly yearned for now was fresh air. The air in her train compartment stank of socialist underarm, the air from the open window was hot and rank with heavy industry, the air at the Friedrichstraße station was befouled with cheap tobacco smoke and bureaucratic ink. She had no sense of being one drop in the bucket of brains and talent that was draining out of the republic in those years. She was just a blindly running goose.
The West was even more ruined than the East, but the air really was a little fresher, if only because night had fallen. The impression Clelia had on Kurfürstendamm was of a place that had experienced a hard winter, not permanent socialist ruination. Already, like the first green shoots of spring, like snowdrops and crocuses, the vital signs of commerce were emerging on the Ku’damm. She walked up the length of it and back down again, never stopping, because to stop would mean to think about how hungry she was. She walked and walked, through darker streets and neighborhoods more demolished. Eventually she became aware that, in some unthinking animal way, she was looking for a bakery, because bakeries dumped their stale Schrippen after closing hour on Saturdays. But why, when a person was desperately seeking one particular kind of store in an unfamiliar city, did she invariably choose the best route to not find it? Every intersection was another opportunity for error.
Error by error, Clelia blundered into the extremely dark and deserted neighborhood of Moabit. A light rain had started falling, and when she finally stopped walking, under a mutilated linden tree, she had no idea where she was. But the city seemed to know — seemed only to have been waiting for her to stop walking. A black sedan, windows open, roof poxed with raindrops, pulled up alongside her, and a man leaned out from the passenger side.
“Hey there, Legsy!”
Clelia looked around to see if the man might be addressing someone else.
“Yes — you!” the man said. “How much?”
“Excuse me?”
“How much for the two of us?”
Smiling politely, because the two men were smiling in such a friendly way themselves, Clelia glanced over her shoulder and started walking again in that direction. She stumbled and began to hurry.
“Oh, hey, wait, you’re fantastic—”
“Come back—”
“Legsy — Legsy — Legsy—”
She felt she was being impolite, even though the two men appeared to have mistaken her for a prostitute. It was an honest mistake and understandable given the circumstances. I should go back, she thought. I should go back and make sure it really was a mistake, and try to think of the right thing to say, because otherwise they’re going to feel embarrassed and ashamed, even though it’s my own stupid fault for walking on this street … But her legs kept carrying her forward. She could hear the sedan turning around and coming after her.
“Apologies for the misunderstanding,” the driver said, slowing the car to match her pace. “You’re a decent girl, aren’t you?”
“Pretty girl,” the other man averred.
“This is no kind of neighborhood for a decent girl to walk in. We’ll give you a ride.”
“It’s raining, sweetheart. Don’t you want to get out of the rain?”
She kept moving, too embarrassed to look in their direction, but also unsure of herself, because it really was raining and she was very hungry; and maybe this was how it had started for her mother, too, maybe her mother had once been a girl like she was now, lost in the world and needing something from a man …
On the dark sidewalk in front of her another man loomed up. She stopped and the car stopped. “You see what I mean?” the driver said to her. “It isn’t safe to walk alone here.”
“Come, come,” the other one urged. “Come with us.”
The man on the sidewalk wasn’t physically imposing, but he had a broad, honest face. And this would have been my father: even on a dark and rainy night in sinister Moabit, he was unmistakably trustworthy. I’m helpless to picture him on that street in anything but cheerfully terrible clothes, his L.L.Bean walking shoes, his khaki high-water pants, and one of those fifties sport shirts whose collar tabs opened wide and flat. After sizing up the situation with a frown, he spoke to Clelia in self-taught German: Entshooldig, fraulein. Con ick dick helfen? Ist allus okay here? Spreckinzee english?