The Women at Hitler’s Table. Rosella Postorino

who was pouring flour into a mixing bowl, moved closer.

      “Believe me, not one thing!” the chef said, looking over at her. “Spaghetti with quark? He digests it so well but refuses it. Bavarian apple cake, his favorite—just think, I serve it to him every evening for his nighttime tea, after his last meeting—but I swear, if he’s on a diet he won’t touch a single slice. In two weeks he can lose as much as seven kilos.”

      “His nighttime tea?” the Fanatic asked.

      “A late-night meeting among friends. The chief drinks either tea or hot chocolate. He’s wild about hot chocolate. The others guzzle down as much schnapps as they can. Not that he approves of it. Let’s say he tolerates it. Only once has he lost his temper, with Hoffmann, the photographer—the man’s a drunkard. Usually, though, the chief doesn’t bother noticing. He listens to Tristan und Isolde with his eyes closed. He always says, ‘If I were about to die, I would want this to be the last thing my ears hear.’”

      Theodora was enraptured. I took the potato slice off my wrist. The afflicted area had spread. I wanted to show it to her, expected her to scold me, to come over and put the slice back in its place, Keep it there and stop making a fuss. Suddenly I missed my mother. But the Fanatic wasn’t paying attention to me anymore—she was hanging on Krümel’s every word. From the way the chef spoke about Hitler, the man was obviously dear to his heart, and Krümel took it for granted that Hitler was dear to our hearts too, even mine. But then again, I had declared my willingness to die for the Führer. Every day my plate—our ten aligned plates—conjured his presence as though through transubstantiation. No promise of eternal life; two hundred marks a month, that was our pay.

      When they had handed us our first envelope, we stuck it in our pockets or purses—none of us dared open it on the bus. In my room with the door closed, I thumbed through the bills with astonishment. It was more money than my salary in Berlin.

      I chucked the potato slice into the trash bin.

      “The chief says eating meat and drinking wine makes him sweat, but I tell him he sweats because he’s too agitated.” When Krümel started talking about him, he couldn’t stop. “‘Look at horses,’ he tells me, ‘Look at bulls. Those animals are herbivores, and they’re strong and robust. On the other hand, look at dogs. One brief run and their tongues are already hanging out.’”

      “It’s true,” Theodora said. “I’ve never thought about that. He’s right.”

      “Bah, I don’t know about that. In any case, he says he can’t stand the cruelty of slaughterhouses.” Krümel was talking only to her now.

      I picked up a roll from a large basket, separated the crust from the soft insides.

      “Once at dinner he told his guests he’d been in a slaughterhouse and still remembered the fresh blood lapping against his galoshes. Just imagine: Dietrich had to push his plate away … Poor fellow is impressionable.”

      The Fanatic let out a hearty laugh. I balled up the insides of the bread, shaping them into tiny circles and petals. Krümel reproached me for the waste.

      “They’re for you,” I said. “They’re like you, Crumbs.”

      Not listening to me, he stirred the broth and asked Theodora to check on the radishes in the oven.

      “Everything here is a waste,” I went on. “We women are a waste. No one could ever manage to poison him, not with all the security measures here. It’s ridiculous.”

      “Oh, so you’re an expert on security now, are you?” the Fanatic said. “And maybe on military strategy too?”

      “Enough,” Krümel warned, a father whose daughters were quarreling.

      “Well, how did he manage before hiring us?” I asked her defiantly. “Before that, wasn’t he afraid they would poison him?”

      Just then a guard walked into the kitchen to have us take our places at the table. The clumps of bread lay there to dry on the marble countertop.

      The next day, as I made my way around the assistant chefs’ perfect coordination and the Fanatic’s zeal, Krümel appeared with an unexpected gift: in secret, he gave Theodora and me fruit and cheese. He personally put it in my satchel—the leather bag I used to take to the office in Berlin.

      “Why?” I asked.

      “You two deserve it,” he said.

      I took it home. Herta couldn’t believe her eyes when I unwrapped the bundles Krümel had given me. It was thanks to me that she had such delicacies for dinner. It was thanks to Hitler.

       9

      Augustine marched up the aisle of the bus so briskly that the hem of her dark skirt seemed to froth. She rested her hand on the back of our bench, touching Leni’s hair, and said, “Let’s change spots, okay? Just for today.”

      It was dark out. Leni looked at me, confused, then got up and plopped into an empty seat. Augustine took her place beside me.

      “Your bag’s full,” she said.

      Everyone was staring at us—not just Leni. Even Beate, even Elfriede. The Fanatics weren’t. They were sitting way in the front, right behind the driver.

      We had spontaneously broken into groups. Not that we expected affection within those groups. More simply, fractures and shifts had occurred with the same inexorability with which the earth’s plates move. The need for protection that Leni betrayed with every blink had left me responsible for her. Then there was Elfriede, who had shoved me in the washroom. In that gesture I glimpsed my own fear. It had been an attempt to make contact. Intimate, yes; the Beanpole might have been right about that. Elfriede had been looking for a fight, like little boys who understand who they can trust only after duking it out. The guard had averted the fistfight, which meant we still had a score to settle, she and I, a debt that generated a magnetic field around us.

      “It’s full, isn’t it? Answer me.”

      Theodora looked over her shoulder, an automatic reaction to Augustine’s harsh voice. A few weeks ago Theodora had remarked that the Führer worked on gut reaction, that he was a man of instinct. Yes, yes, he has a brilliant mind, Gertrude had said, two hairpins clasped between her teeth, not realizing she had just contradicted her friend. But do you know how many things they don’t report to him? she went on, after sticking the hairpins firmly into the braid coiled up on the side of her head. It’s not like he knows everything that happens, it’s not always his fault. Augustine had feigned spitting on her.

      Now she sat beside me, cross-legged, one knee pressed against the seat in front of us. “For a few days now the chef’s been giving you extra food to take home.”

      “Yes.”

      “Good. We want some too.”

      “We” who? I didn’t know what to say. Solidarity among us food tasters was a foreign concept. We were tectonic plates that shifted and collided, floating beside one another or drifting apart.

      “You can’t be selfish. He likes you. Make him give you more.”

      “Take what’s here.” I held my satchel out to her.

      “It’s not enough. We want milk, at least a couple bottles. We’ve got children and we have to have milk.”

      They earned even more than the average laborer, so it wasn’t a question of need. It’s a question of fairness, Augustine would have said if I had pointed that out. Why on earth should you be given more than us? To this I could have shot back, Ask Theodora to do it. She knew Theodora would refuse. Why did she expect me to agree, though? I wasn’t her friend. But she sensed how desperate I was for approval, had sensed it right from the start, even if I couldn’t admit it.

      How do people become