“I know that girl. The girl with the limp.”
“You know her?”
“We were in the art school,” Angelika says. “Years ago when I was a student at Feige-Strassburger. Her hair was shorter then, but I remember that goose’s waddle.”
Emil sounds pleased. “Well,” he says, “sometimes the manna simply falls from heaven.” Crushing out his cigarette, he slips on his snap-brim hat and stands, removing a Walther PPK automatic pistol from his coat pocket. “So are you with me,” he asks her, “or am I working alone?”
The Grosse Hamburger Strasse Lager. Inside the dreary room, her father jumps to his feet as if to rush to embrace her under the gaze of Himmler’s portrait. “Angelika,” he cries aloud, but then he stops dead, stands like he’s nailed to the floorboards. She closes the door behind her, gazes back at his fearful, hopeful eyes.
No embrace is offered. “Sit down, Tatte,” she instructs. But he remains on his feet.
“Your mother,” he says. “She is still abovestairs.”
“Yes,” Angelika tells him. “I didn’t want to deal with her hysterics,” she explains bluntly. “I wanted to speak to you alone. Now, sit.” This time, it’s fully a command. A command he follows, sitting slowly. Carefully.
“You’ve done well, Gelika,” he tells her with a cautious touch of pride. “Managing yourself. Look how beautiful in such clothes. Like a page from a magazine.” Angelika says nothing.
“So?” he asks. “Are we to be released soon?” he wants to know. In other words, has she done her work? Has she done what is necessary—whatever is necessary—to rescue them?
“Released?” She swallows the word with a stroke of anger. “No. Not released, Tatte. But you’ll be seen to.”
And now her tatte looks wary. “Seen to? What does this mean, Daughter?”
“It means you’ll both be given work,” she tells him. “There’s a factory in Kreuzberg. It manufactures buttons. You know buttons, Tatte. You and Mamme will be taken there in the morning and brought back here at the close of the day,” she says.
“Buttons?” Her father is trying to smile. “To sell them I know. But to make them?”
“You’ll both learn what is required,” Angelika assures him. “There’ll be food. You’ll be safe from transport. But you’ll—both of you—remain on the camp rolls.” At this point, she removes two yellow cloth stars from the pocket of her coat and places them on the table. Yellow cloth edged in black, the dimensions officially proscribed. “Tell Mamme she must sew these to your clothing. Tell her to trade some bread for a needle and thread. If you don’t wear them,” she says, “if you’re seen without the stars, you’ll be put on the next transport and shipped east, and no one will be able to save you from that. Not me, not anyone.”
Her father suddenly has nothing to say. He appears dumbstruck. Blinks at her in pained confusion.
“This is the best I could do, Tatte,” Angelika informs him. Her eyes are suddenly hot with tears, which makes her even angrier. “This is the only deal I could strike.”
“And you?” her tatte asks, looking closely at her now, as if he is only now seeing her. Really seeing her. “What will become of my Angelika? I notice she wears no star.”
Angelika can feel her face harden. “She has her own work to do.”
Herr Kommandant Dirkweiler is also an Obersturmführer in the SS. Forty-two years of age. Father of four girls. Twenty years in the police services. A middle-ranked detective with the Kriminalpolizei before transferring to the Gestapo when the war began. Athletic once, obviously, but aging into his body with a certain sag. Fingers stained from too much nicotine as he types at his desk, then yanks the rectangle of green card stock from the rubber roller with a flourish.
A signature is scribbled with his fountain pen before he employs the franking stamp, blots it in a businesslike fashion. GEHEIME STAATSPOLIZEI BERLIN the stamp reads in a circle around the Reich’s eagle. And the name he has typed on the card? Angelika Sara Rosen. When he hands it over, he says, “Now you’re one of us,” as a joke.
Angelika accepts the gift, gazing at it with a kind of covert exhilaration. Even as a prisoner, she feels truly free for the first time in her life.
So she and Emil share a comfortable ersatz existence. They share a room, share a table, share the bed. They share like a married couple, Emil likes to joke, but in fact, Herr Kommandant Dirkweiler has pressed them to marry. Really! As if all those bürgerlich morals and strictures still mean something. He likes to keep his world tidy and in order, the Herr Kommandant. He like to keep his command in order too, likes to keep the moral niceties in place, though sluicing doesn’t bother him. Sluicing meaning a routine of theft. Using his whip on a prisoner’s back doesn’t bother him either. Shipping people to their death? That doesn’t qualify as a matter of morality; it’s a matter of following orders. The Führer commands, I obey! But permitting Angelika and Emil to remain shacked up under the roof of his police lager? This offends his sense of propriety.
But for now she is sharing a sweaty bed out of wedlock. She lies there in her satin slip, listening to the tinny sound of Emil’s phonograph. Heinz Müller singing an upbeat hit, “So Schön Wie Heut!” As Beautiful as Today! The bedsprings creak as Emil stands and starts dressing. His body is lean, as lean as his face. There is something detached about the way he approaches intercourse with her. Something lonely. As men go, he is skilled at touching her. She has no objections there. And they are vigorous together. But she is given the feeling that he is searching for something in the process that has nothing at all to do with her. Searching for something lost. It’s baffling, his lack of animal passion for her. Sometimes she feels rejected, even insulted. Could it be that she is losing her allure? Men have always been frantic for her. She’s learned to count on that as fact.
“Light me a cigarette,” she commands him. A small power play.
He glances at her distantly. But then sits down on the bed beside her, his shirt still unbuttoned, and removes a cigarette from his case. Tapping it, then igniting it and passing it along. She accepts. It both annoys and charms her that he has answered her command in such a way as to quietly rob her of any power over him. Inhaling, she expels smoke in a plume aimed at the ceiling. “So what do you think?” she asks him. “Shall we resolve the Herr Kommandant’s moral quandary for him?”
He snorts a short breath. Lights his own cigarette and breathes the smoke toward his feet. “Is that what you want?”
Angelika lies back. “It wouldn’t kill me, I suppose. To be married. To be Frau Cronenberg,” she says. “I mean, don’t you ever think about the future? About our life after this war is done?”
And now Emil smiles. Not in a happy way but as if he’s smiling at the stone on his own grave. “You really think we’ll have a life after this war?”
An uncomfortable shrug. “Why not?”
Emil doesn’t answer her. He simply smiles again and buttons his shirt, when there’s a knock at the door.
“Angelika?” she hears a familiar voice inquire.
But Emil answers the voice, buckling his belt. “Who is it?”
A pause, and then the answer comes: “It’s Fritz Landau. I’m here for Fräulein Rosen.”
Emil glances back to her with a questioning expression. She shrugs. Blows smoke. Doesn’t bother to cover herself. When Emil answers the door, she sees Fritz’s posture stiffen. He’s aged over the years since they parted, and he looks like an old rubbish collector in his orderly’s coveralls. All his glamour whittled away. It was a shock when she first spotted him in the camp, dressed as an ordner with his red armband. A shock and not a shock. He may be a prisoner, but he still retains his cunning for accumulating power, shred by shred, doesn’t he? Even as a Jew in an SS prison camp. They’ve spoken—briefly. She’s aware of his position as the deputy to the Jewish lager manager and honestly has been expecting this visit sooner or later. So here he is, frowning from the threshold at her casual half-dressed insolence.