The Women at Hitler’s Table. Rosella Postorino

my heeled shoes, make the wave of hair that framed my temple fall flat as I continued to drink water.

      Lunch wasn’t over yet and I didn’t know if we were permitted to leave the table. My bladder ached, like it had in the cellar in Budengasse where Mother and I would seek refuge at night with the building’s other tenants when the air-raid sirens went off. But there was no bucket in the corner here, and I couldn’t hold it any longer. Without even consciously deciding to, I stood up and asked permission to go to the washroom. The SS guards nodded. As one of them, a very tall man with big feet, escorted me into the hallway, I heard Elfriede’s voice. “I need to go too.”

      The tiles were worn, the grout blackened. Two sinks and four stalls. The SS man stood guard in the hallway, we went in, and I hurried into one of the stalls. I didn’t hear another stall door close or a faucet run. Elfriede had disappeared, or was standing there listening. The sound of my stream breaking the silence was humiliating. When I opened the door she blocked it with the tip of her shoe, grabbed me by the shoulder, and shoved me back against the wall. The tiles smelled of disinfectant. She moved her face close to mine, almost sweetly.

      “What do you want?” she said.

      “Me?”

      “Why were you staring at me during the blood sample?”

      I tried to break free. She blocked my way.

      “A word of advice: mind your own business. In this place, everybody’s better off minding their own business.”

      “I can’t stand the sight of my own blood, that’s all.”

      “Oh, but the sight of someone else’s blood is okay, is it?”

      The scrape of metal against wood made us start. Elfriede pulled away.

      “What are you up to in here?” the guard asked, stepping inside. The tiles were cold and damp, or maybe it was the sweat on my back. “Having a little tête-à-tête, are we?” He wore enormous shoes, perfect for crushing the heads of snakes.

      “I had a dizzy spell. It must be because of the blood sample,” I stammered, touching the red mark over the bulging vein on the inside of my elbow. “She was helping me. I feel better now.”

      The guard warned that if he caught us like that again, so intimate, he would teach us a lesson. Or better yet, he would take advantage of it. Then he burst out laughing.

      We went back to the lunchroom, the Beanpole watching our every step. He was wrong: it hadn’t been intimacy between Elfriede and me, it had been fear. We were sizing up each other and our surroundings with the blind terror of someone who’s just been born into the world.

      That night, in the bathroom of the Sauer home, the scent of asparagus that emanated from my urine made me think of Elfriede. She too, sitting on the commode, probably smelled the same odor. Even Hitler, in his bunker at the Wolfsschanze. That night, Hitler’s urine would stink like mine.

       4

      I was born on December 27, 1917, eleven months before the Great War ended, a Christmas gift to wrap up the holiday celebrations. My mother said Santa Claus had heard me wailing, bundled up beneath so many blankets in the back of his sleigh that he’d completely overlooked me. And so he flew back to Berlin, unwillingly though, because his vacation had just begun and the unscheduled delivery was an inconvenience. It’s a good thing he noticed you, Father used to say, because you were our only gift that year.

      My father was a railroad worker, my mother a seamstress. Our living room floor was always covered with spools of thread and balls of yarn in all different colors. My mother would lick the end of a strand to thread the needle more easily, and I would mimic her. Once, without letting her see, I sucked a strand of thread and played with it on my tongue. When it had been reduced to a soggy clump, I couldn’t resist the urge to swallow it and discover whether, once inside me, it would kill me. I spent the following minutes wondering what the signs of my imminent death would be, but, given that I didn’t die, I soon forgot about it. Then at night I remembered it, certain my time had come. The game of death began at a very early age. I never spoke a word of it to anyone.

      At night my father would listen to the radio while my mother would sweep up the threads strewn on the floor and climb into bed to open a copy of Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, eager to read the latest episode of her favorite serial novel. That was my childhood, the steamed-up windows looking out onto Budengasse, multiplication tables memorized well in advance, the walk to school wearing shoes that were first too big and then too tight, ants decapitated with fingernails, Sundays on which Mother and Father would read from the pulpit—she the psalms, he the Epistles to the Corinthians—and I would listen to them from the pew, either proud or bored, a pfennig coin tucked in my mouth. The metal was salty, it tingled. I would close my eyes in delight, my tongue pushing it to the edge of my throat until it teetered there, ready to slide down, then all at once I would spit it out. My childhood was books beneath my pillow, nursery rhymes sung with my father, blind man’s bluff in the square, stollen at Christmas, trips to the Tiergarten, the day I went to Franz’s crib, stuck his tiny hand between my teeth, and bit down hard. My brother howled like all newborns howl when they wake up, and no one found out what I had done.

      It was a childhood full of sins and secrets, and I was too focused on their safekeeping to notice anyone else. I never wondered where my parents found the milk, which cost hundreds and later thousands of marks, if they held up a grocery store and eluded the police. Not even years later did I wonder if they felt humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles like everyone else, if they too hated the United States, if they felt unjustly treated for being held responsible for a war in which my father had fought. He had spent an entire night in a foxhole with a dead Frenchman and had eventually dozed off beside the corpse.

      During that time, when Germany was a gridlock of wounds, my mother would pull back her lips as she slicked down the end of the thread, on her face a turtle expression that made me laugh, my father listening to the radio after work, smoking Juno cigarettes, and Franz napping in his crib, his arm bent and his hand by his ear, his tiny fingers curled over his palm of tender flesh.

      In my room I would do an inventory of my sins and my secrets, and would feel no remorse.

       5

      I can’t make heads or tails of this,” Leni moaned. We were sitting at the cleared table after dinner with open books and pencils provided by the guards. “There are too many hard words.”

      “For example?”

      “Salivary alym—no, amyl—wait.” Leni checked the page. “Salivary amylase, or that other one: peps—err … pep-sino-gen.”

      A week after our first day, the chef had come into the lunchroom and handed out a series of textbooks on nutrition, asking us to read them. Ours was a serious mission, he said, and we should be knowledgeable as we carried it out. He introduced himself as Otto Günther but we all knew the guards called him Krümel, or Crumbs, maybe because he was short and skinny. When we arrived at the barracks in the mornings he and his staff would already be working on breakfast, which we ate immediately, while Hitler ate at around ten, after being briefed on news from the front. Then, at around eleven, we had what he would have for lunch. When the hour-long wait was over they took us home, but at five in the evening they returned to pick us up to taste his dinner.

      The morning Krümel gave us the books, one of the women flipped through a few pages and then pushed her book away with a shrug. She had broad, square shoulders disproportionate to her slender ankles, which were left bare under her black skirt. Her name was Augustine. Leni, on the other hand, went ashen, as though they had announced a big exam and she was certain she would fail. As for me, the task was a consolation—not that I thought it was useful to memorize the phases in the digestive process, nor felt the need to make a good impression. In those diagrams, those tables, I recognized my age-old thirst for knowledge so strongly that I could almost