news of your Max. You haven’t asked in ages.
Anna shifts Trudie into a more comfortable position on her lap and murmurs to her.
I have to tell you, Anna, it doesn’t look good. Ilse says they’ve finished building the crematorium. Even in this shitty weather the SS have had the poor bastards working on it night and day.
This doesn’t surprise Anna. She has overheard the women discussing it in the bakery. They say that the SS have been bringing corpses in vans to Reinhard’s funeral parlor in central Weimar for cremation, but that on occasion something goes wrong and the dead spill out into the street. The SS can’t have this; it is bad for morale. Naturally they would devise their own methods for disposing of their victims.
Well? says Mathilde.
Well what?
Don’t you have any reaction?
Anna shakes her head. A needle to the heart, dysentery, hanging, malnutrition, the murderous whims of Hinkelmann and Blank, simple overwork in the mud and snow: what good is it pretending that Max will survive? There are so many ways for him to die. When Anna thinks of him at all, which she does only when her guard is down before sleep, it is of his knowing smile over the chessboard, the narrow triangle of his freckled torso in the room behind the stairs. There have been no messages from Max since August.
He may still be all right, Mathilde says.
Angrily, Anna wipes her eyes with the back of a wrist.
Don’t lie to me, she says to the baker. And please, don’t be kind. I can stand anything but that.
Mathilde gets up to feed the last of the coal into the stove.
Did you love him very much? she asks shyly, her back to Anna.
Anna ducks her head. The tears Mathilde has unwittingly unleashed darken her shirtwaist in blotches and further dampen Trudie’s hair.
Yes, she says. I did.
Well, at least you’ve had that, Mathilde says, sitting down again with a whistling sigh. At least you’ve got that to hold on to.
Anna looks up at the forlorn note in the baker’s voice.
Why, so do you, she says. You have the memory of your Fritzi.
Oh, Fritzi, says Mathilde, shrugging. That was different.
What do you mean?
Ach, Anna, you wouldn’t understand. A pretty girl like you, you must have had ten proposals before you were sixteen. But a woman who looks like me, she has to take what she can get. My Fritzi married me for the bakery, nobody ever pretended otherwise. He came from such a poor family. He never loved me, not really, not like your Max loved you.
How do you know? Anna says loyally. People who marry for convenience often grow to love one another. It happens all the time.
Mathilde gives a small rasping laugh that turns into a cough.
Not with Fritzi. He was different, she repeats.
Different how?
You know, Anna, queer! He didn’t like women. He would go to Berlin on weekends and—Well, we had an understanding. He did as he pleased and I didn’t end up a spinster.
The baker reaches over to take hold of Trudie’s foot, which she cradles as gently as she might an egg.
The only thing I regret, she adds, aside from him getting himself blown to bits in the last war, was that because of our arrangement he never gave me a child.
Anna looks down at Mathilde’s pudgy hand, thinking of the bashful young man with the pink-tinted cheeks in Mathilde’s bedroom portrait. She now understands why Mathilde stares so hungrily at Trudie when she thinks Anna isn’t looking, why the baker only laughs when she finds that the toddler has poked holes in the crusts of the valuable loaves to dig out and eat the soft insides.
Is that why you started feeding the prisoners? Anna asks. I’ve often wondered why you take the risk when everyone else turns a blind eye. Is it because some of them are . . . different, like Fritzi?
Mathilde blinks at Anna, startled.
I never thought of that, she says slowly. I just feel so sorry for those poor men. But . . . yes, I guess that could have had something to do with it.
She runs a thumb over Trudie’s small foot. A silence falls between the two women, broken only by the hiss of water on the stove.
Oh, Anna, Mathilde says abruptly. Her little voice wavers. What will become of us? After the war, maybe you’ll marry. The child will need a father. And me, I guess I’ll go on running the bakery. But it’ll never be the