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I remember them all, from those years before the Fuehrer rose to power: Herr Bradshaw, Fraulein Bowles, Herr Ludwig, Fraulein Kost.
Herr Schultz. Dear, dear Herr Schultz.
To think that, in those more innocent (you might think it an odd description for the time of the Weimar Republic, but I stand by my choice) days, I might have become Frau Schultz. A wife. His wife, loving and beloved.
And I would, by now, likely be dead.
It was his kindness, his old-fashioned courtesy, that drove him to leave my house after I broke our engagement. He would not want me to feel uncomfortable in my own establishment, he said. There were other rooms to let – if not so clean nor so comfortable, he hastily added, as if afraid I would take offense – across the Platz. And across the Platz he went, leaving me only with an empty room, swept clean.
I could never bring myself to let that room. It remained his until the day the building was bombed, near the end of the war. In my heart, it is his still.
Because he lived across the Platz, I did not see him taken, the day the Nazis raided the area in search of Jews. But I knew he had been. He would not hide himself -- he could never believe he needed to – and his new lodgings no doubt had their own Fraulein Kost, ready to denounce. My own Fraulein Kost – and of course I could never dislodge her from my place, not with her powerful friends – made a point of telling me she had seen him taken. She added, viciously, that he had been shabby and unshaven and downcast, with the six-pointed star badly sewn upon his battered coat; clearly (she crowed) he had never succeeded in luring another good German woman into caring for him! She commended me on my “wisdom” in escaping the trap of his proposal, and herself for having advised me to do so.
I managed, somehow, to thank her for her information, and struggled to avoid her after that. Though of course there was always the rent to be collected, and I could not avoid her then unless I had no need of marks that week.
Fraulein Bowles was still with me in those days, though not so smiling or cheerful as she had been before Herr Bradshaw’s departure. As she lived in their room alone, the rent she gave was less, and I feared she obtained it in the same way Fraulein Kost obtained hers. I was more inclined to forgive her that, though, for the fact that her heart was not so dark, and that sometimes she would shield me from encounters with Fraulein Kost or Herr Ludwig or their friends. If she was there when one of them happened to appear, she would take my arm with childlike spontaneity, and chatter about this or that fashion or trend, squeezing my forearm in support and perhaps friendship, never letting on that she was conducting a rescue as she led me away.
If I had wed in my youth, and had a daughter, I do not think she would have been much like Fraulein Bowles – indeed, I would have tried to ensure that she was not. And yet I was glad of her presence, for as long as she remained. And I had the chance to return her gallantry once, when I found her, vastly more drunk than usual, in the corridor. She had fallen, and appeared to be too intoxicated to get to her feet, though she managed to rise with my assistance. I half-led, half-carried her to her room, and stayed a few minutes when she begged it of me.
I learned then why she had not left with Herr Bradshaw. She had been with child, and he had fantasized of a happy family life, the three of them, in his small hometown in America. But she had known that he was not, as we would have said, “the marrying kind,” and that a baby would not make him so. And she did not want to live in a country town in America, with a child and with a man who would have come to resent them both. So she had had an abortion, and he had left, alone.
As the Fraulein lay half-insensible on her bed, she admitted that she was beginning to wish she had gone to America, or at least out of Germany. And that, even though she knew it would not have worked, she missed Herr Bradshaw. Mad, isn’t it? she said, and tried to laugh.
Now you see, I told her. Life is more complicated than you used to think, is it not?
One night, Fraulein Bowles did not return to my rooming house. I tried to tell myself that it meant nothing, that she had merely found another protector and moved in with him, just as her attachment to Herr Bradshaw had once brought her to my lodgings. Or perhaps she had found one of the increasingly rare channels that would take her out of my country; she was, after all, a citizen of a different one which would presumably be willing to take her in. But I knew deep within that nothing so benign had happened: she was probably dead in the street or worse. At least this time Fraulein Kost had nothing to say about it.
And so I lived on. I learned how to stretch rations that were not enough to feed a cat, and to hone my skills of mending and darning to preserve my threadbare clothes and linens. I learned to “volunteer” to support the Army, and so keep my precious rental permits. I learned to pretend I knew less of politics than I did, and to feign agreement on such matters when it was expedient – which it nearly always was. I learned how to put up blackout curtains, and to take shelter in a raid, and to give first aid to bombing victims.
In short, I learned how to live when one has ceased to want it.
And as I predicted to Herr Bradshaw and Fraulein Bowles these many years ago, I have survived. The war is over, the Nazis either dead or in hiding, the city is devastated and the world turned upside down – but I have survived. I told you so, I tell their ghosts, silently.
As Herr Bradshaw was a writer, sometimes I wonder if he ever wrote of us in Berlin. What would he have said of me? Not much, probably. Who wants to read the story of a small, frightened woman who stood for nothing, took no risks, and in the end still lost everything and everyone that ever mattered to her? No, that story is too depressing. Not even I want to read it.
But then, I already know how it ends.