So she and Emil share a comfortable ersatz existence. They share a room, share a table, share the bed. They share like a married couple, Emil likes to joke, but in fact, Herr Kommandant Dirkweiler has pressed them to marry. Really! As if all those bürgerlich morals and strictures still mean something. He likes to keep his world tidy and in order, the Herr Kommandant. He like to keep his command in order too, likes to keep the moral niceties in place, though sluicing doesn’t bother him. Sluicing meaning a routine of theft. Using his whip on a prisoner’s back doesn’t bother him either. Shipping people to their death? That doesn’t qualify as a matter of morality; it’s a matter of following orders. The Führer commands, I obey! But permitting Angelika and Emil to remain shacked up under the roof of his police lager? This offends his sense of propriety.
But for now she is sharing a sweaty bed out of wedlock. She lies there in her satin slip, listening to the tinny sound of Emil’s phonograph. Heinz Müller singing an upbeat hit, “So Schön Wie Heut!” As Beautiful as Today! The bedsprings creak as Emil stands and starts dressing. His body is lean, as lean as his face. There is something detached about the way he approaches intercourse with her. Something lonely. As men go, he is skilled at touching her. She has no objections there. And they are vigorous together. But she is given the feeling that he is searching for something in the process that has nothing at all to do with her. Searching for something lost. It’s baffling, his lack of animal passion for her. Sometimes she feels rejected, even insulted. Could it be that she is losing her allure? Men have always been frantic for her. She’s learned to count on that as fact.
“Light me a cigarette,” she commands him. A small power play.
He glances at her distantly. But then sits down on the bed beside her, his shirt still unbuttoned, and removes a cigarette from his case. Tapping it, then igniting it and passing it along. She accepts. It both annoys and charms her that he has answered her command in such a way as to quietly rob her of any power over him. Inhaling, she expels smoke in a plume aimed at the ceiling. “So what do you think?” she asks him. “Shall we resolve the Herr Kommandant’s moral quandary for him?”
He snorts a short breath. Lights his own cigarette and breathes the smoke toward his feet. “Is that what you want?”
Angelika lies back. “It wouldn’t kill me, I suppose. To be married. To be Frau Cronenberg,” she says. “I mean, don’t you ever think about the future? About our life after this war is done?”
And now Emil smiles. Not in a happy way but as if he’s smiling at the stone on his own grave. “You really think we’ll have a life after this war?”
An uncomfortable shrug. “Why not?”
Emil doesn’t answer her. He simply smiles again and buttons his shirt, when there’s a knock at the door.
“
But Emil answers the voice, buckling his belt. “Who is it?”
A pause, and then the answer comes: “It’s Fritz Landau. I’m here for Fräulein Rosen.”
Emil glances back to her with a questioning expression. She shrugs. Blows smoke. Doesn’t bother to cover herself. When Emil answers the door, she sees Fritz’s posture stiffen. He’s aged over the years since they parted, and he looks like an old rubbish collector in his orderly’s coveralls. All his glamour whittled away. It was a shock when she first spotted him in the camp, dressed as an ordner with his red armband. A shock and not a shock. He may be a prisoner, but he still retains his cunning for accumulating power, shred by shred, doesn’t he? Even as a Jew in an SS prison camp. They’ve spoken—briefly. She’s aware of his position as the deputy to the Jewish lager manager and honestly has been expecting this visit sooner or later. So here he is, frowning from the threshold at her casual half-dressed insolence.
“How may I serve you, Herr Landau?” she wonders in a languidly vicious tone.
“I thought you should know,” Fritz informs her. “Your parents are on the list.”
She bursts into Dirkweiler’s office, pushing past the outraged objections of his secretary, that ugly SS bitch. The door bangs open. She finds him standing behind his desk in his shirtsleeves. “Take them off the list!” she shouts into his face. “You
His face reddens, and his response is simple. He strikes her hard across the face with the back of his hand. She staggers, grabs for the chair to keep from falling, but pulls it over when her knees buckle and tumbles to the floor.
“See what happens when you forget yourself!” he roars at her, a vein popping at his temple. “You filthy Jewish sow, you think you are some kind of
She is still trembling from the blow, her head ringing. She paws at the chair.