“Yes. I know. And you’re a Jew too.”
“By blood,” he answers. “Yes. And unfortunately, it’s by blood we are all judged these days. Ah well. You must know the old saying: ‘Neither cursing not laughing can alter the world,’” he recites. “You want a smoke?” he asks. “Here, have a taste,” the man offers, proffering the cigarette he has just lit.
She stares at it. Then accepts. Inhales. He chuckles as she sputters smoke. “Head swimming, huh?” he says as he lights his own. “You’ll get used to it. A person can get used to anything. We should know, correct?”
Rashka tries to ignore the sickly taste in her mouth as she tempts fate with another but less ambitious draw of smoke. This time, she manages to keep it down instead of choking it back up.
“She thinks you have talent, you know.”
“She?”
“Your ‘gnä’ Fräulein,’” he tells her, retrieving the cigarette. “And maybe it’s true. God knows, she has the talent. I could see that the first time I looked into her eyes. The animal instinct. Honestly? In your eyes, I don’t see it. I don’t see a killer in you. But maybe for you, it’s different, hmm? If she says you have the ‘doppeltes Gesicht,’ then who am I to argue?” Doppeltes Gesicht. The Double Face.
“She frightens me,” Rashka admits.
“She frightens everyone,” the man also admits, removing a leather-bound flask from his coat. Unscrewing the cap, he takes a slug. “I think she frightens the Gestapo bulls as well. You want a drink?” he asks.
Rashka shakes her head tightly.
He nods. Then as he stares out at nothing, the bemusement in the man’s voice dissolves. “Until the Tommies pummeled it, she favored cafés around the Gedächtniskirche,” he says. “We Jews love our coffeehouses, don’t we? At the Trumpf, I watched her jam the revolving door with her own body to keep her quarry trapped until I could come running with the pistol. After that? She got her own pistol. A Sauer Model 38.” He says this and allows the smoke to drift from his lips. “You’ve heard what they call her, haven’t you?” he asks, his eyes slitting.
“Yes,” Rashka answers. “The Red Angel. The Angel of Death.”
“But she doesn’t care. I think she takes a certain pride in what they call her,” he says. And then he asks her, his eyes landing on her, gaining weight. “So how old are you anyhow?”
How old? There are men who’ve asked her this question in a different way now. It makes her uncomfortable. She answers, but he only nods at the information. “I figured it was something like that,” he tells her and whistles out smoke. “I figure my daughter’s about that age too.”
Rashka feels herself sit back. A daughter? Such a man and he has a daughter?
“Course, I don’t know exactly. Last time I saw her, she was just a little pitsl in nappies.” He says this, then something about him quiets, settles for a moment with his cigarette before he says, “If you want, you can make a run for it.”
A blink. Rashka believes she must have imagined that this was said, but then the man glances back at her. “Did you hear me? I said you can make a run for it,” he repeats casually. “There’s the door,” he points out. “You can go. I won’t stop you. But you’ve got to do it now. Now,” he repeats. “Before she comes back.”
A kind of confused panic crackles through her. For an instant, her heart shimmers with the possibility. There’s the door! Head out and run! That’s all. Just run. But when she thinks about moving from her chair, something is wrong. She is paralyzed. Where would she go? How would she hide or feed herself? Mostly, how could she abandon Eema to the Gestapo? That’s what she should be thinking. But she is shamed by the other question in her head. How could she abandon the gnä’ Fräulein? After she has invested such faith in her?
A moment later, it makes no difference. The Fräulein returns to the table. She frowns suspiciously as she sits. “And what are you two plotters up to?” she wants to know.
The man Cronenberg returns to his usual frown. “Just have your coffee and let’s get back on the street,” he says. “It’s getting late. Dirkweiler will think we’ve laid an egg.”
Rashka receives grudging permission from the gnä’ Fräulein to visit her eema down in the morgue. “For a few minutes if you must. Just don’t bring any disease back with you,” the woman commands. A chest infection has begun to circulate among the prisoners. Her mother is burdened by it. Eema lies on straw, coughing and sputtering, sweating and shivering under a thin cover. Rashka brings her something heavier. A wool horse blanket. She brings her tea in a steel thermos and bread with lard. Her mother has no stomach for the bread and is too weak to sit to drink the tea, so Rashka spoons it into her eema’s mouth.
“She’s very ill,” Rashka tells the gnä’ Fräulein.
“Yes?” The woman is clad in a silk dressing gown, showing a stockinged leg as she lounges on the davenport in the room that she shares with Cronenberg. She pages through a copy of a fashion magazine. Elegant watercolors of stylish women are on the cover of Modenschau.
“She has a fever.”
“What do you want of me, Bissel?”
“Some medicine?”
“I can get you aspirin for her,” the gnä’ Fräulein is willing to concede.
Rashka is silent for a moment. The gnä’ Fräulein looks up from her magazine. “Yes? Vo den?”
“I thought…” she starts to say.
“Yes? What? What did you think?”
“I thought,” says Rashka, “you loved her.”
The gnä’ Fräulein glares darkly. Then turns back to her. “Would you like to look like this, Bissel?” she asks and turns fashion pages to face Rashka. “So elegant. Can you see yourself in such modern kleyd?”
Rashka doesn’t know how to answer.
“You’re a woman now, Bissel. Aren’t you? I mean, you’re on your cycle now.”
Rashka’s eyes search the air anxiously.
“Bissel?”
“Yes,” Rashka says.
“Yes,” the gnä’ Fräulein confirms. “So you must know that men are looking at you.”
Again, the uncertain silence.
“I wonder is all. Are you looking back?”
Rashka senses a pulse of danger. Shakes her head. “I don’t…”
“You don’t what? Know they are looking or look back?” The question has gained an edge. “It’s all right. You’re allowed to answer. In fact, I insist.”
“I don’t,” says Rashka. “I don’t know. And I don’t look back.”
“Liar.” The gnä’ Fräulein defines her. “I’ve seen you with Emil. You look back at him. And he certainly looks at you.”
Rashka is stunned. Her skin prickles, and she feels her belly hollow out.
“Do you deny it?” the woman asks her, flipping tightly through the magazine pages. “No? Good. At least now we have the truth between us,” she says. “Do you know what the Stapo men call it here—to iron out a problem? It’s when a problem is flattened. An unwanted wrinkle is pressed out. Do you know how easy it would be for me, Bissel, to iron you out? I need only have the NR erased from your name in the ledgers. Just two little letters.” NR. Nicht registriert. Not Registered for Transport. “I could do it in a snap,” she says, “and you would be on your merry way.” The gnä’ Fräulein allows this to sink in for a moment as Rashka stands frozen in her shoes. Finally, “I’ll get the aspirin to your mother,” she says. “Now, get out.”
The night brings a terrifying bombing raid. An English bomber has dropped from the sky in flames and exploded into a street not so far away. The crash site is still smoking by morning, a tower of black rising upward. In fact, the city as a whole has assumed a pall of smoke that it wears like a shawl over its shoulders. The smell of it follows them even inside. Their little troika has returned to the café in the Friedrichstrasse. Cronenberg has gone outside to smoke. He does this sometimes, Rashka has noted, when the gnä’ Fräulein is in a certain type of mood. Impatient and easily riled.