a particle of food. Remind her that if she can’t fulfill her obligations, he says, plenty of others would be grateful for the business.
I’ll tell her.
Heil Hitler, the Rottenführer says, with a stiff-armed salute. Then he leaves.
When she hears his motorbike purring up the road, Anna locks the bakery and returns to the kitchen, where she scoops Trudie from her laundry basket under the table. The infant mewls and waves her fists, hitting Anna hard enough on the cheekbone to make her eyes water, but Anna barely notices. This may be just the opportunity she has been waiting for. She stands thoughtfully inhaling the milky scent of her daughter’s scalp. Then, unbuttoning her blouse as she goes, Anna climbs the staircase to the bedroom and recounts the conversation with the Rottenführer for Mathilde.
The baker seems to take this news stoically enough. She listens without interrupting while Anna talks, and when Anna is done, she says only, Bring the basin, would you? I’m going to be sick again.
Anna fetches the porcelain bowl from the bureau, cradling Trudie in the crook of the other elbow. It still amazes her, after five months, how heavy the baby’s head is. Trudie, undeterred by Mathilde’s retching, feeds fiercely, her lips a tiny hot circle of suction. With each tug, Anna feels a simultaneous contraction of the womb, as though all of her maternal organs are connected by a delicate but tensile thread.
That gives us two days, Anna says, when Mathilde falls back onto the pillow. You won’t be well enough to make the delivery by then. I’d better do it.
Mathilde hoots.
You! You don’t even know how to drive the van.
I could learn, Anna argues.
Who’d teach you? Don’t worry, I’ll do it, if I have to get out and vomit every five meters. Those Goddamned sardines. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted anything I bought from that crook Pfeffer.
Anna wipes Trudie’s mouth with the hem of her apron and refrains once more from saying, I told you so.
Instead, she asks, What about the inmates?
Didn’t I say I’ll make the delivery?
Yes, and if you’re sick by the quarry? The SS will hear you from a mile away.
The baker turns her face toward the bureau, where a portrait of her dead husband smiles shyly at her from amidst a shrine of candle stubs.
They’ll have to wait, she mutters.
They can’t wait, Anna counters, pressing her advantage. How many times have you told me a single roll can make the difference between life and death? You said—
Mathilde glowers at the portrait. I know what I said. What do you want me to do about it? You see what condition I’m in.
Nothing, Anna says. I’ve already told you. I’ll make the Special Delivery myself.
Trudie digs her fingers into Anna’s breast, as if in appreciation of the idea. A ragged nail scrapes the tender skin, leaving a thin red line.
Ouch, Anna murmurs. Greedy little beast!
That’s why you can’t go, says Mathilde. If something should happen to you, who would take care of the child?
Why, her Tante Mathilde would, Anna says.
She detaches the infant from her breast and dangles Trudie over the baker.
Look how she’s smiling, she says. She wants to go to you.
That’s just gas, Mathilde snaps. Don’t bribe me, Anna. It won’t work.
But she heaves herself into a sitting position against the headboard and takes Trudie from Anna, settling the baby on her thighs. Bouncing her, the baker sings:
“ Backe, backe Kuchen!”
der Bäcker hat gerufen.
“ Wer will guten Kuchen backen, Der muss haben sieben Sachen:
Butter und Salz, Zucker und Schmalz, Milch und Mehl, und Eier machen den Kuchen gel’.”
Trudie belches.
You liked that, did you? the baker asks her. She sighs. Butter und Eier— I’d kill for some real butter, some unpowdered eggs. I’d eat them right now, even in my sorry state...You don’t even know where the drop-off point is, she adds, smoothing the dandelion fluff on the baby’s head.
So tell me, says Anna. I know the woods of the Ettersberg well enough. I played there as a girl.
And this is true, for as Anna wends her way into the forest just before sunset, carrying a flour sack bulging with rolls, she can still make out the trails she hiked as an adolescent, during her mandatory participation in the League of German Girls. And although the paths don’t lead there, Anna knows her way to Buchenwald. In the days before her mother’s death, Gerhard often marched his small family up the Ettersberg to picnic beneath Goethe’s Oak, which, according to all