The Obersturmführer glances sideways at Anna and clears his throat.
– her feminine opening. What happens when she is not permitted her monthly flow? Do the internal organs wither, stop functioning? Fascinating prospect. Impractical for use on the general population, but scientifically…
Anna feels her stomach muscles convulsing. Cold sweat breaks out beneath her arms, on her neck. She puts a hand to her mouth as if stifling a belch.
Excuse me, she says.
Certainly. In any case, that's what Mengele is, first and foremost, a scientist, perhaps the Reich's most valuable. Though what a surgeon he must have been as a civilian! We stood in the balcony with a hundred others, mirrors placed all about the table so we could see. He must have been under enormous pressure. And the Jewess kept moving. But did Mengele's hands falter? Not once! Golden hands, as swift as hummingbirds.
Anna knows she is going to be sick. She sits up, breathing shallowly and staring into the hallway; she focuses on the lamplight, lying in a skewed rectangle on the floor. Then a shadow moves, eclipsing it.
Trudie? she calls. Go downstairs.
The shadow doesn't move.
Anna squints at it. Behind her, the Obersturmführer has fallen silent, a bad sign. Anna sinks back onto his damaged shoulder, as he has not yet signaled that he wishes her to do otherwise.
She is coming apart, imagining things, seeing shadows that aren't there.
Even the way Anna sleeps now is unfamiliar to her: each morning she wakes with a stiff neck, unable to turn her head more than a few degrees to either side. She has slept on her back, her arms flung above her head, in a position of abject surrender.
Trudy, January 1997
26
SLEEP DEPRIVATION, TRUDY HAS COME TO REALIZE, IS A form of torture. The Nazis knew this, of course: one of the Gestapo's favored interrogation methods, quieter and less messy than the extraction of fingernails or breaking bones, was to isolate subjects in a room where the lights were never extinguished, shocking them with a low dosage of electricity whenever they started to doze off. Trudy thinks she can now understand, to some degree, why people were so forthcoming with information after only a few days of this treatment. Since the continuation of her project she sleeps little, and when she does her dreams are frequent and bad. She is lost in a forest, diminished to child-size, the hoary trunks of trees towering on all sides: calling out and searching for something she is doomed never to find. Or she is a Berlin hausfrau, wandering from room to room in an endless, unheated flat, rubbing her arms and stooping to peer through windows for something dreadful that never comes. Trudy is ever hungry and always cold; she thrashes awake to find she has kicked the covers onto the floor. And although he hasn't made another appearance per se, Trudy senses that she has also dreamed of Saint Nikolaus; he is somewhere nearby, the officer, engineering bureaucratic destruction at his desk or eating a leg of chicken, wiping on the sleeve of his tunic a mouth glistening with grease.
Actively afraid of the dreams, Trudy takes to swallowing sleeping pills to ward them off. But the drugs don't work; they keep her perversely alert, sweating and twitchy, staring owl-eyed at the ceiling until, just before dawn, she succumbs to a soupy doze from which she jerks violently awake with the sensation of falling. As Trudy slumps sour-stomached over the kitchen table with her first coffee of the day, watching the sky turn from black to gray to white, she debates over and over the wisdom of proceeding with this project. She vows each time that this afternoon's interview will be her last. Then she gets up and goes into her study, where she listens to a recording of Thomas Mann reading Lotte in Weimar in German while she memorizes the day's questions. She can't give it up now. Whether because of word-of-mouth-Frau Kluge spreading the news of Trudy's sympathetic ear and access to the university's checkbook-or because they have seen her advertisements, Trudy has more subjects than she can handle.
At first deciding to continue her interviews simply to overcome her fear of doing so, Trudy has discovered her anxiety unfounded: none of them has been as shocking as Frau Kluge's. The women profess relative ignorance of the Nazi regime and regret over its consequences; they speak of bombs, of hunger, of husbands killed or returning terribly changed, disfigured or missing limbs or wraithlike and prone to strange tempers. Of cold and illness and privation. The garden-variety grim tales. So Trudy, far from having her confidence further eroded, feels it growing with each interview. She has a talent, it seems, for interrogation. And although Trudy despises her trust-invoking methods-widening her blue eyes, touching her blond hair, wearing her high black boots, her Stiefel-she also takes acerbic satisfaction from their success. There is more than that, too: sometimes, when lying awake and waiting with dread for sleep to overtake her, Trudy has to admit to a certain comfort, the relief of accepting her genetic predisposition-to her odd sense, in those neat houses, of coming home. Sitting in tidy kitchens much like hers, Trudy rediscovers things she didn't know she had lost: the tang of Teewurst on the tongue, the delicious sibilance of a forgotten German word. And as much as she hates herself for it, Trudy finds she is hungry for her subjects' praise, for their delighted clapping over her fluency, for their compliments on her appearance and their treating her-though they are sometimes not much older than she-like one of their own Kinder, their children.
Mrs. Rose-Grete Fischer, Trudy's seventh subject, is a case in point. She welcomes Trudy and Thomas-who has mercifully agreed to film more interviews, even sounding a bit startled at Trudy's assumption that he wouldn't-into her bungalow with a flutter of hands. While Thomas sets up his equipment in the living room, mumbling happily to himself about the open space and comfortable armchairs, Trudy sits with Rose-Grete in the kitchen, nibbling a slice of Kaffeekuchen. This, too, Trudy has come to expect; most of her subjects have proven more hospitable than Frau Kluge, and although in her current state Trudy doesn't dare eat much for fear of nodding off under Thomas's hot lights, she always takes a little something so as not to offend her hosts.
Rose-Grete watches Trudy appreciatively from the corner of her eye.
You are a good girl, she says, to take the time to visit an old lady. To be interested in what she has to say.
Trudy smiles at her, a trifle uncomfortably. Rose-Grete is a tiny woman, all delicate bones poking at skin the texture of an old peach, and at sixty-eight is still lovely but for the eye patch she wears, which lends her something of a piratical air. Trudy longs to know why she wears it, but as Rose-Grete hasn't brought the subject up, Trudy is determined to act as if she hasn't noticed it either. It is difficult not to stare at the black triangle of cloth, though, and when Trudy concentrates on Rose-Grete's remaining eye, she feels as though her gaze is unnaturally and insultingly forced.
She takes a bite of cake and evades Rose-Grete's lopsided appraisal by looking around the woman's kitchen. it is small but cheerful, the walls yellow, the table cluttered with the detritus of widowhood: a wicker basket containing fruit and prescription bottles, a magnifying glass, a litter of Social Security check stubs on the sunflowered oilcloth. The heat from the radiator beneath the window creates a shimmering distortion through which Trudy sees birds hopping around a backyard feeder.
She glances at the refrigerator, anticipating the ubiquitous family photographs, but there is only a stainless steel sheet with a few dents in the center.
Do you have children? Trudy asks-one of the best questions, she has discovered, for fostering rapport.
But Rose-Grete has turned her head so as to be able to see the yard.