The Women at Hitler’s Table. Rosella Postorino

been a slightly chubby boy.

      “He had red cheeks, even when he wasn’t running around. It often looked like he’d been drinking.”

      “Actually,” Joseph said, “he did get drunk once.”

      “Why, that’s right!” Herta exclaimed. “Oh, what memories you’ve made me recall … Listen to this, Rosa. He might’ve been seven, no older than that. It was summer, we came back from the fields and found him lying right there on that chest.” She pointed at the wooden trunk by the wall. “He was so happy. ‘Mother,’ he says, ‘that juice you made is delicious.’”

      “On the table was an open bottle of wine,” Joseph said, “almost half empty. ‘Good god,’ I ask him, ‘why did you drink that?’ And he says, ‘Because I was really thirsty.’” Joseph laughed.

      So did Herta. She laughed herself to tears. Watching her arthritis-twisted hands wipe her eyes, I thought of all the times they had caressed Gregor when he awoke, had brushed his hair from his forehead as he ate breakfast—thought of all the times they had scrubbed every last inch of his filthy body when he returned in the evening, exhausted from his fierce battles at the edge of the marsh, a slingshot sticking out of his shorts pocket. All the times she had slapped him and then, sitting in her room, had wanted to cut off the hand that caused such disgrace—the disgrace of striking someone who was once you and was now another human being.

      “Then he grew up, grew tall, all at once,” Joseph said. “Sprouted up overnight, like he’d soaked his feet in water.”

      I imagined Gregor as a plant, a towering poplar tree, just like the ones lining the road to Krausendorf—wide, straight trunk; clear bark speckled with lenticels—and longed to embrace him.

      From then on I counted the days by crossing them off the calendar with X’s, each X shortening the wait by a little bit. To fill the time, I followed a self-imposed routine.

      In the afternoons, before getting back on the bus, I would go to the well with Herta to get water, and when I returned I fed the hens. I would leave the feed in the henhouse and they would rush over and peck at it, twitching anxiously. There was always one who couldn’t squeeze her way into the group and would lash her head left and right, wondering what to do, or maybe she would only do so in dismay. Her scrawny head was disconcerting to me. Letting out a deep belly-squawk, the hen would scurry around in search of a gap and then thrust herself between two of her companions, shoving one of them out of the way. With this, the balance of power would change again. There was food for all of them, but the hens never believed it.

      I would watch one of them laying an egg in her nest and would become hypnotized by her quivering beak, her neck jerking up, down, to one side, then the other. Suddenly the hen’s neck seemed to snap beneath a strangled screech that opened wide her beak and her round, emerald eyes. I wondered if she was screaming from pain, if she too had been condemned to painful childbirth, and what sin she might have committed. Or if just the opposite was true and they were cries of triumph. Every day the hens witnessed their own miracle, and I had never had even one.

      I once caught the youngest of them pecking an egg she had just laid and I almost kicked her. It was too late, though. She’d already eaten it.

      “She ate her own child,” I told Herta, shocked.

      She explained that it happened from time to time. The hens accidentally broke an egg and instinctively tasted it. Since it was flavorsome, they consumed it all.

      In the lunchroom Sabine once told her sister Gertrude and Theodora about when her young son heard Hitler’s voice on the radio and was frightened. His chin had begun to quiver, dimples showing, and the boy had burst into tears. He’s our Führer, why are you crying? his mother had asked him. Besides, the Führer adores children, Theodora said.

      Germans love children. Hens, at times, eat their young. Living creatures appalled me. I had never been a good German.

      ONE SUNDAY I went into the forest with Joseph to gather firewood. Among the trees, a symphony of birdsong. We brought the logs and branches back in a wheelbarrow to store them in the barn, which had once been used for animal feed. Gregor’s grandparents had farmed the land and raised cows and bulls, as had his great-grandparents, for that matter. Joseph had sold off everything to pay for Gregor’s education and had found a job as a gardener at the von Mildernhagen castle. Why did you do that? his son had asked him. We’re old now, anyway, Joseph replied, we don’t need much to live on. Gregor had no brothers or sisters. His mother had given birth to two other children but they had both died, and he’d never known them. He arrived by chance, when his parents were already resigned to the thought of growing old alone.

      The day Gregor announced he was going to study in Berlin, his father was openly disappointed. Not only had the son who had come to them so unexpectedly grown up all at once, overnight, but now he’d gotten it into his head to abandon them.

      “We quarreled,” Joseph admitted to me. “I couldn’t understand him. I was angry. I swore he would never leave, that I would never let him.”

      “Then what happened?” Gregor had never told me this story. “He didn’t run away from home, did he?”

      “He would never have done that.” Joseph stopped the wheelbarrow. He twisted his face into a grimace and rubbed his back.

      “Are you aching? Here, let me push it.”

      “I’m old,” he retorted, “but not that old!” He started moving again. “A teacher came to talk to us. Sat down at the table with Herta and me, said Gregor was a very good student, that he deserved it. The fact that a stranger knew my son better than me sent me into a fury. I was mad at that teacher, treated him rudely. Then, out in the cowshed, Herta made me come to my senses and I felt like a fool.”

      After the teacher’s visit, Joseph made the decision to sell off all the animals except the hens, and Gregor moved to Berlin.

      “He studied hard and got what he wanted: an excellent profession.”

      I pictured Gregor back at his office, sitting at the drafting machine, perched on his stool as he moved the scales over the paper and scratched his neck with a pencil. I liked to spy on him as he worked, spy on him whenever he was doing something and forgetting about what was around him, forgetting about me. Was he still himself when I wasn’t there?

      “If only he hadn’t gone off to war …” Joseph stopped again, not to rub his back. He stared into space without speaking, almost as though needing to go back over the events in his mind. He had done what was right for his son, but what was right hadn’t been enough.

      We stacked the firewood in the barn in silence. It wasn’t a sad silence. We often talked about Gregor, he was the only thing we had in common, but after talking about him we had to be quiet for a little while.

      When we stepped inside the house, Herta told us we were out of milk. I said I would go get more the next day. I had learned the way.

      THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, the smell of manure told me I had arrived, well before I spotted the line of women holding empty glass bottles. I had brought a basket full of vegetables to barter.

      A loud moo echoed through the countryside like a cry for help, sounding like an air-raid siren, that same desperation. I was the only one startled by it. The other women inched forward, chatting with one another or standing in silence, holding their children by the hand or calling to them if they strayed.

      Two young women came out of the dairy. They looked familiar. When they were near I realized they were two of the other food tasters. One had short-cropped hair and dry facial skin, and was called Beate. The other had squeezed her bosom and broad hips into a brown coat and full skirt. Her face was a bas relief, her name Heike. On impulse I moved my arm to wave, but then froze. I didn’t know how secret our assignment was, whether we had to deny we knew one another. I wasn’t from their town and had never run into them at the dairy. Besides that, we had never had a real conversation in the lunchroom. Maybe saying hello was out of place, maybe they wouldn’t say