From the racks in the wardrobe, she took the dresses she’d thought she’d never need, and after running her fingers along the silky fabric, and a brief deliberation, changed into the burgundy half-sleeved dress with V-neckline and natural waistline. She paused in front of the mirror. An ample A-line swing skirt billowed to knee length in soft pleats. The pair of black heeled shoes added to her elegant appearance, which pleased her, but taking a closer look at her face, she frowned at her own reflection: sharp bones, hollow cheeks and—in SHON they taught them to read faces—reticence that suggested strong will.
When, after some effort, she brought a smile to her face, she opened the door and froze in the doorway, taken aback by Hammerer’s applause. “Bravo! You look smashing, Ursula.”
Ursula? He had never called her by her name.
“Your gorgeous look entices me to invite you to a restaurant.” He offered her his arm, bent at the elbow.
“One moment, Herr Hammerer. I’ll just pick up my other things.”
The officers’ restaurant was a place where war was talked about, but no other signs pointed to the fact that outside its walls a destroyed and brutally ruled city lay in shambles.
To turned heads, Herr Hammerer took her to an unoccupied table. “Champagne? Cognac? Or maybe Russian vodka?”
In the atmosphere of relaxed and intoxicated elation, he looked different, as though infected by the piano music and bright light, with gorgeous candelabras casting on the snow-white-clothed table loaded with unimaginable snacks and bottles of alcohol.
“I’m not much for alcohol, Herr Hammerer.”
“Please call me Wolfgang.”
Wolfgang. The name of her childhood friend. In an instant, it brought memories colored with an inner pain about her Vati and Engels, her hometown.
“At least in the unofficial atmosphere.” Hammerer’s voice returned her to the present. Taking her off guard, he reached for her hand across the table and, holding it a little too firmly, watched her. “We understand each other, don’t we, Fräulein Kriegshammer?”
What did he mean? She stiffened inwardly.
“Herr Demel!” Hammerer’s voice again jerked her from her thoughts, and she couldn’t recollect if she at least nodded to his question. “Allow me to make you acquainted.” He elaborated, softening his tone, “Herr Demel is the one who makes all these meals and drinks possible at our tables.”
A man in the dark green uniform of the Major’s rank—she would think him in his middle-forties—stepped to their table. “Good evening,” he said, intriguing Ulya with the lack of Hitler salute. He lowered his head at Ulya. “An honor to be acquainted.” Accepting Hammerer’s invitation to take a seat, and after Hammerer filled the glasses with champagne, he lifted his glass.
“To our inevitable victory!” Hammerer proposed.
“To the victory,” Ulya echoed, adding mentally, over you, damned.
Herr Demel tilted his head in a nod as though approving the toast and, after they clinked glasses and drank—Ulya had just a little taste—excused himself and headed to the group of officers who greeted him with a loud welcome.
47
Summer 1943
Nathan’s plea to save his daughter had not gone from Ulya’s thoughts. It took time to make herself face the truth: she had killed the little girl’s mother, and, at that, she didn’t even have solid proof the young woman was guilty of treachery. She, Ulya, couldn’t bring the young woman back to life, but she could save her little girl from the threat of death by starvation.
It was a dreary day when she wrapped in a piece of fabric a small tin box of butter and the other one of marmalade, a hunk of white bread and a sausage and, dressed in the man’s clothes, set off for Kommunisticheskaya 11. The way was familiar despite the newly collapsed buildings adding to the obstacles on her route. For some time, she surveyed the hut, one of the few left intact on the street. No light in the window, no movement. In the gathering dark, she saw the door open and a woman exit. She pushed a stone to the door and scurried away.
When she disappeared behind one of the distant wreckage heaps, Ulya entered the house. What looked like a tiny kitchen with a small Russian stove was bare of anything except a table and a stool. In the other, a much bigger room, dimly lit by the new moon through an uncovered window, she noticed a light movement on the bed and squinted into the semidarkness. Pushed to a wall, lay a little creature wrapped in rags and sucking on something like a gag.
Ulya stepped closer. The girl’s face was that of an old person and her eyes, though a unique green shade, were devoid of life and made Ulya recoil in disgust. Back in the kitchen, she dropped the bundle with her offerings on the table and felt relieved she could leave this dead house.
From now on, once a week in the night, she would come and, seeing the woman heading away, open the door to drop the foodstuff on the little table by the window.
48
October 1943
Working for the Germans earned Ulya a well-fed life. She could buy fresh eggs, milk, and occasionally a one hundred-gram piece of meat at the local market.
On a windy day after the first cold rain in October, the unpaved streets turned into muddy pools. On her way to the Smolensky market for something to complement Nathan’s daughter’s diet, she saw her neighbor with the youngest daughter trudge by. Every so often, the little one used the sleeve of her wooly cardigan to wipe snot from her nose, clutching a lump of what looked like rye bread in her other hand.
Ulya was about to pass them without greeting when a young man snatched the bread from the girl’s hand and darted away, disappearing into a passage. The woman slumped into the mud and started weeping, her body shaking, her face in her hands, the girl beside her with eyes half filling her little bony face, not moving. An immediate
