1
Everybody stole. Organized, they called it.
They organized coal off moving trains. They organized cars left alone in the streets. They organized pipes from houses where unexploded bombs nested on the roofs. Mostly, they organized food. Dug up fields and slaughtered cows. Hijacked trucks and robbed stores. Just that morning, Clara had read about a man who brained his friend for a slice of bread. The news sent the faintest prickle down her neck, and then she got on with her plans. Everybody organized one way or another.
Instead of sitting near the oil lamp like the other women, Clara lounged against the wall as far from the light as she could get. After sundown when the Allies restored power, the overhead lights would frost them all, highlighting eye color and birthmarks and all the other details she’d rather nobody concern themselves with. She touched the identity card in her pocket, testing the paper, the cheap card stock, then the smooth surface of the photo. The card was almost legal, issued by the town with signature and stamps.
According to the card, her name was Margarete Müller.
It was too dim to read in the waiting room, so the women sized each other up in silence. They were mostly mothers, gray-faced and younger than her, their children on their laps. As Margarete Müller, Clara did her best to blend in. Her coat was the same patched wool as the other women, her stockings mended just like theirs. A small hole she hadn’t gotten around to repairing was below the hem at her left knee. Still, the women stared. At the heels she’d chosen to wear despite the frost. At the hem of her skirt, slightly too high to be proper. At the dark red on her lips, makeup salvaged from the war. She knew what the women were thinking. Horrible, inappropriate, scandalous thoughts just because she was showing a little knee. Mothers could be so hurtful.
She tried to ignore them and watched the consulting-room door, still firmly closed, made of a thick oak that kept out the sound from the other side. When it opened and Herr Doctor Blum’s voice floated out, the women sat straighter, patting their hair and pinching color into their cheeks. He came out with a mother and daughter, the girl in dirty plaits, her skin as sickly pale as Clara’s not so long ago. His gaze passed over the waiting room, counting the patients, Clara guessed, calculating time, the amount of energy he’d have to expend to see them all. Since she started consulting him six months ago, he’d grown thinner, and now the bones in his face seemed to ripple under the skin.
He stooped in front of the girl, got right down to her eye level like no doctor Clara had ever seen—they were, as a rule, too arrogant for that—and he held his fist to the side of her head. Everyone in the room strained to watch as he gasped and seemed to find in the girl’s ear a sweets wrapper. Empty. Frowning like a clown, he let it flutter to the floor. Then he tried again, the fist at her ear, the gasp . . . and out came a peppermint in silver paper. The girl snatched it and bolted for the door, her mother batting her lashes at the doctor on the way out. Clara knew Dr. Blum well enough to know he’d try to ration his mysterious supply of sweets. Whenever he found some on the black market, he vowed to give them out slowly over a week or more so the sick children had something to look forward to. But he couldn’t bear it. His jar would be empty by the end of the day. Everyone in the surgery knew that.
When he once more turned his attention to the women, they coughed into their handkerchiefs and held thin hands to their foreheads. The children were pinched and poked, and a little boy burst out crying. Clara thought this a cruel way to get the doctor’s attention. She took a moment to examine the hole in her stocking, bending enough for the hem to rise that bit more up her thigh.
Voice neutral, Dr. Blum said, “Fräulein Müller.”
As she limped past him—she hadn’t limped coming in; it had only occurred to her now to begin—the women’s coughs grew hostile behind her.
Once they were alone, Dr. Blum scooped her up and sat her on the examining table. “You’re early, my sweet. We were supposed to meet at five.”
“I have to cancel. Oh, don’t look at me like that. So puppyish.”
She cupped his ears, soft and fragile, and kissed his wonderfully unremarkable face, one sharp cheek, then the other, and finally his chapped lips. He was a small man, shorter than she liked; they would be almost the same height if she stood with the posture she’d had in the war. Back then, the Allies had claimed an iron rod was fused to her spine. They had called her unnatural, part human, part machine. Punch did a caricature of her eating coal and drinking oil, with cogs for joints. She had framed it and hung it next to her office chair to remind herself of what she’d become to the outside world.
Dr. Blum knew nothing about all that.
“Darling,” she said, stroking his cheek, “I’m going to Essen for a few days.”
“You said you were going at the end of the month, for Christmas.”
“The weather is turning so fast. I thought I’d better go now for a short visit before the trains freeze to the tracks. I don’t want to get stranded somewhere.”
He looked skeptical, and it surprised her. He’d always been so understanding, so ready to listen. She’d first come to him complaining of weakness, a sudden darkness in her head, a weight pressing down on her so hard that she had to sit before she fainted. He prescribed pills that tasted of sugar, and foul concoctions that left an oily film in her throat. She’d had a touch of anemia, he told her. By then she knew the real diagnosis. Hunger, the national disease. For the first time in her life, she had gone hungry long enough for it to change her body down to the blood.
“Margarete, there’s something wrong. You’re very pale. I can tell by the shadows around your eyes that you haven’t been sleeping.”
She looked down at their hands, their fingers intertwined. “I’m just worried. Not about us, about my friend in Essen. I told you about Elisa, remember?”
“No, I’m not sure you did.”
“She hasn’t answered my letter. It’s been bothering me for weeks. I must go and see that she’s okay.”
“It can’t wait until Christmas? We have plans tonight.”
She explained again about the weather, and the days off work she’d negotiated with her employer, a cement factory where the management was astonished at her knowledge of production and logistics. She seemed too young, they told her, to know so much. She smiled modestly at that and mumbled about the valuable work experience she’d had—in Essen.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” she said. “We’ll be able to spend Christmas together.”
Dr. Blum pulled away, ruffling his hair on the way to his desk. He yanked open the drawer, reached inside, and went back to her holding out his fists knuckles down. “Pick one.”
“Is it a peppermint?” She brightened. “A chocolate?”
He raised one eyebrow, a cockeyed look that made her smile. He wasn’t one for boyish humor, and she appreciated this side of him she hadn’t known was there. She tapped his left fist. He opened it finger by finger.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh my.”
In the lamplight, the ring in his palm shimmered darkly like old gold. It was a simple band without stones, and her hands went clammy when she looked at it.
“I wanted to do this tonight,” he said. “I’d gotten up the nerve—” He cleared his throat, began again. “Dear Margarete, I’m not a wealthy man.” From there, he outlined his finances, the expenses of the surgery, the reality of living in the rooms upstairs, how the war had wiped out his savings. “But you won’t go hungry,” he said. “I swear you won’t. We’ll manage to live honestly. We won’t be thieves or beggars like the rest.”