He stopped himself, looking penitent. “Sorry, fr?ulein. But what did they do? Pounded us to hell when the war was all but over. Know what I think? They had to use their bombs before it was too late. What’s the point of having bombs once a war is over? So they dumped them. Killed a thousand people that day. Women and children and older folk too. For nothing.”
“What happened to Elisa . . . Frau Sieland?”
“She got through the raid all right. I saw her outside with buckets trying to put out the flames. The house was still burning when . . .” He tossed a worried look at Frau Berger.
“The soup is ready, fr?ulein,” she said too cheerfully.
“When what? What happened?” Clara asked.
The old man was dabbing his handkerchief at his lips again. “It was a bad time, fr?ulein. So much smoke. Was hard to see anything.”
“See what?”
The old man lowered his handkerchief and studied whatever encrusted it. “Well, they . . . came for Frau Sieland. To be honest, I knew they’d come and get her eventually. She was always out of the house at all hours, as if curfew and raids didn’t apply to her. Work, she’d say. But I ask you, what kind of work did she do that she’d slip in and out of the house in the middle of the night?”
Clara rubbed her neck, feeling the hard knot of anxiety lodged there. “Herr Berger, you’re not making sense. Start at the beginning and tell me exactly what happened.”
The Bergers couldn’t agree on how to tell it. Frau Berger started with a car, a great black car, surprised anyone had the gasoline, she said. “Who cares about the car?” Herr Berger interrupted. “It was two men, big brutes. They went straight for Frau Sieland while she was hauling water to her house. They wouldn’t even let her stay and see the fire put out.”
“It wasn’t put out,” Frau Berger said, “it was impossible. Too big. And there were too many other fires. Now our house was—”
“She argued with them. One of them took her arm but she yanked it right back, threw down her bucket, and went with them, quickly into the car like she wanted to get it over with.” Herr Berger shrugged. “That was it.”
“Who were the men?” Clara demanded.
Herr Berger picked at his lip. “Looked like Gestapo to me.”
She had guessed as much. In the war, they would show up at her office accusing her of violating a regulation someone in Berlin had thought up the day before. The Gestapo men she’d had the misfortune to meet were overworked and not the brightest and she had managed to ignore them a good deal. They could smell disdain, though. She’d had to watch her step. Fortunately, there were never many Gestapo men in the city. More dangerous were the informants, people around her who might talk, people she knew. It was hard to trust anyone, but she could talk to Elisa. Max too—for a time. No one else knew what Elisa was doing to help the foreign workers as head of Falkenberg’s Housing Office. She had informed Clara about the inadequate food supply, the sanitary facilities in need of repair, the overcrowding in the labor camps, the epidemics of illness. Clara had made calls, demanding more resources from the government, more supplies, more medicines, and in the rare times she got them, it was Elisa who spirited them, secretly if necessary, to the workers in their barracks. Her arrest couldn’t have been because of that, or had they made a mistake? Given themselves away? Clara pictured Galina eating bread on the dusty floor, the line of young women contentedly smacking their lips in the shadows while Clara reminded them in whispers to keep their heads down, to avoid the windows, to talk only at night, and always quietly.
At the oven, she rubbed her cold hands and tried to think of a likely explanation for what had happened to Elisa. “I’ll tell you what that was all about,” she said, thinking out loud. “Every time there was a bombardment, most of the foreign workers would stay at the Works or in their camps and help dig us out. But a few would take advantage of the chaos and go scavenging in the city or run off. Once the Gestapo got wind of that, they’d march over to my office and demand to know what we were going to do about our workers stealing food