The Cigarette Girl. Caroline Woods

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      “You always say nothing’s more important than schoolwork.” In a matter of weeks, the sisters would choose three girls out of Berni’s class of forty to study with the Ursulines in Wedding. For months Berni had been struggling to behave, to polish her shoes, to bite back crude comments. Around the sisters she smiled so broadly she’d developed an eye twitch. Why would she risk that now?

      Berni shook her head. “They sell real potions at Libations of Illyria—love spells, strength tonics. I’ll buy an elixir for luck.” She patted her pocket, which jingled. “I’ve enough change saved for both of us.” To show she’d won the argument, she began to walk up the boulevard so quickly that Grete had no choice but to scramble after her. Berni’s long black braids flagged behind her, the plaits of a little girl; on Berni’s gangly, sixteen-year-old figure, they reminded Grete of garlands tacked up long after Christmas.

      Grete tried to keep up with her, dodging pedestrians. The Ku’damm was packed with people. Behind iron gates, cafés crammed table after table onto the sidewalk to enjoy the damp May weather. A waiter with a tray bent to show the Viennese strudel, the obsttorte, the black forest. Two delivery boys in aprons hauled loads of pink flowers down the restaurant’s cellar steps. Grete’s mouth watered; she smelled coffee, browned onions, custard.

      “Everyone looks so angry,” she said breathlessly, when she’d caught her sister.

      “That’s the Berlin sneer. Watch.” Berni affected an exaggerated frown and strolled with her shoulders thrown back. “You have to hold your Schnauze high.”

      Graffiti was everywhere, even in this neighborhood; someone had defaced every National Socialist poster adorning a Litfaß column. When the girls stopped at an intersection, Grete pointed to a row of perfectly trimmed hedges on which KPD and BLUTMAI were scrawled in white paint. Berni chuckled. “Serves them right for trying to make shrubs behave like walls. If I had a garden, I’d let it grow wild.”

      “But what does that mean? What does blood have to do with May?”

      “It’s for the anniversary, I’d imagine.” Berni worked her lower lip over her teeth. “Some troubles between the police and Communists. The demonstration turned . . . heated.”

      “Did anyone die?”

      Berni drew a long, impatient breath. “We aren’t political. We don’t have to worry. Wait!”

      The passing motorcar honked its horn at them, seconds after Berni yanked Grete off the curb by the back of her collar. “I heard it,” Grete said, clutching her throat, though she hadn’t. She’d heard the horn, of course, but not the approaching engine.

      “You have to look into the street before you cross, little bird.”

      “Everyone does,” Grete muttered.

      • • •

      It would have been foolish to tell Berni what happened at this year’s physical exam. Grete had hoped somehow her hearing would improve with age, that thirteen would be a magic number, but Sister Lioba had declared her ears, if anything, were getting worse.

      In her left ear, Grete had heard enough of Sister Lioba’s whisper to be able to repeat it: “Hoppe, hoppe Reiter, wenn er fällt, dann schreit er.” But in the right, she could only feel the little blasts of breath. She did her best to guess, filling in the next two lines of the nursery rhyme. Sister shook her head. “It will only make matters worse if you lie, Margarete.” She glanced heavenward as she said this, indicating what might be the source of Grete’s problems.

      Grete already knew the blockage inside her ears kept her at a remove from God. At Mass, she watched the concentration and piety on the other girls’ faces as they listened to the sermon, while she was distracted by the echoes of the organ, the odor of incense, the pressure inside her ears. Sometimes she wondered if God was punishing her or her parents, since she’d had problems hearing little things since she was born. Birdsong had always eluded her unless she stood directly under a tree. Raindrops jumped noiselessly in their puddles.

      The intermittent ringing, however, hadn’t always been part of her life. It began when she was five or six. “There’s a faucet left on somewhere,” she had complained to Berni. “A pipe is running. Don’t you hear it?” In time Grete realized the high-pitched sound belonged only to her, and that it tended to appear most often when she felt scared or nervous.

      “You shouldn’t mind if people know about your ears,” Berni tried to reassure her. “You can’t help that any more than I can help my hair becoming knotty.”

      Grete shook her head. Berni could help it if her hair tangled. Other people could and would hold it against her if she were a mess. And they’d hold Grete’s deficiencies against her, too. Of course they would.

      “You have lost the high frequencies in the right ear,” Sister Lioba had announced at her last physical, “though the lower ones seem present, for now.” She wrinkled her nose so that Grete could see the black hairs. “It may be progressive. Time will tell.”

      That spring, the words it may be progressive had become the rhythm of Grete’s life. She vowed to develop her other senses before they were all she had left. When the sisters took them on a hike in the Grunewald, Grete smelled smoke half an hour before Sister Odi spotted a farmer burning his fields and hustled them to the train. She spied an osprey’s nest spraying off the corner of a building in Sophie-Charlotte-Platz. And at Mass, when the tip of Father Radeke’s finger lingered on Konstanz’s lip as he gave her communion, Grete lowered her face but not her eyes and told no one, not even Berni.

      • • •

      “This is the address,” said Berni, her face uncertain. They’d stopped in front of the eight double glass doors of Fiedler’s department store.

      Grete’s gaze scrolled up the enormous façade, its windows a code: a row of triangles, a row of circles, a row of squares. “A department store?”

      Berni shrugged. “Sure,” she said, though Grete could tell she wasn’t.

      Three security guards in black-and-gold uniforms stood together between two sets of doors. In the shining glass, Grete caught her sad reflection: her overwashed blue dress and limp, pale braids. Berni stood almost a foot taller. Beside her Grete felt stunted and anemic, like the albino frog they’d discovered in a gutter, which Berni declared would be picked off by a bird in no time. At thirteen she looked no different than she had at age nine. A late bloomer, Sister Josephine called Grete, like the hickory tree in the yard. “Berni matured late as well,” she’d say, “and look how tall she’s gotten.” This did little to comfort Grete. She had a feeling she’d never measure up to her sister.

      “Come on,” Berni said, gripping the polished brass doorknob, and before Grete could argue, she found herself inside the store.

      For a moment, they did not move. They gazed upon a maze of velvet-draped tables. Jewelry, crystal, and leather shone in the soft light. In the middle of the marble floor a bronze goddess held scales in the middle of a fountain. Berni pointed up. The arched ceiling, three stories high, was made of stained glass. Grete watched a saleswoman reach languorously for a silk scarf. Everyone in here moved in a kind of trance, it seemed to Grete, the un-hurry of the rich; it took a moment to figure out which were people and which were mannequins, so uncannily did they resemble one another.

      “Look over there,” Berni said, and СКАЧАТЬ