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, “Fr?ulein 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