She is lying on one side in Rainer’s bed, watching him as he stands by the window in his briefs and undershirt, a sleeveless cotton vest that Trudy’s students would refer to as a wife-beater. Divested of its typical garments, Rainer’s body in the astringent afternoon light looks old. True, the height of his frame does not belie the power within it, and he is bull-chested and covered all over with a smattering of grayish hair. But his flesh is powder-white and soft in places it wouldn’t be on a younger man—for instance over his biceps, still apple-hard, it hangs slack and stretched from the muscle. Trudy doesn’t care one bit. She is no spring chicken herself. And with Rainer, Trudy feels no shame; she is no longer plagued by images of blood, the smell of saliva paint-sharp on skin, the phantom gristle of pubic hair against bone—all things she has not realized have troubled her until now, in their absence.
Trudy stretches luxuriously and yawns, then says Mmmm to get Rainer’s attention. It doesn’t work; he doesn’t turn from his pensive inspection of the yard. Unlike Trudy, Rainer is moody after lovemaking. Smoke curls against the windowpane. He is halfway through his second cigarette, a luxury he permits himself only postcoitus, tapping ashes into a small crystal bowl kept in a bedside table drawer specifically for this purpose, wiping it clean with a rag as soon as he is done.
When he lights a third Trudy sits up and reaches for the robe Rainer has bought her, a slippery silk garment of shocking and splashy pink Trudy would never have chosen for herself, so bright it verges on vulgar. Trudy loves it. She cinches the fringed sash around her waist and pads over to Rainer, the wooden floorboards cool against her feet. Standing behind him, she stretches on tiptoe to rest her lips very lightly on the back of his neck, where the silver hair is as short and prickly as that on a dog’s muzzle.
Aren’t you cold? she murmurs.
No. But you are. Your nose is like an icicle.
Trudy puts her arms around him.
Come back to bed, she says.
In a minute.
Rainer grinds out his cigarette and carries his makeshift ashtray from the room. Trudy hears the toilet flush down the hall and water running in the sink. When Rainer returns, he takes the cloth from the windowsill where he has left it and begins to polish the bowl dry. Trudy, observing this routine from the side of the bed, begins to laugh.
What is so funny? Rainer says, without looking up from his task.
You, says Trudy. You have to be the most German Jew in the entire world.
Rainer scowls. He drops the ashtray into its drawer and slams it shut.
And what, precisely, is that supposed to mean? he asks.
Oh, come on, Rainer. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just that you’re so obsessively neat. I’ve never met anyone as compulsive as I am before—aside from my mother, of course.
Rainer lifts his trousers from a chair, shakes them out, and steps into them, then turns to the closet for a shirt.
Hey, says Trudy. Aren’t you coming back to bed?
No, says Rainer shortly. Get dressed.
But—
Rainer gives her a look over his bifocals. He points at Trudy’s clothes, folded on the bureau. Then he leaves. Trudy sits bewildered in her robe, listening to him descend the steps. She takes a deep breath.
Okay, she says to the room, which is as large and square and neatly kept as its owner. Then she sheds the robe and pulls on her turtleneck and sweater and slacks and hastens down the stairs.
Rainer is in the kitchen, slapping sandwiches together, luncheon meat on brown bread. Trudy goes to the refrigerator and takes out the mayonnaise.
You forgot this, she says, setting it on the table.
A deliberate oversight. I do not want it.
But you like mayonnaise, Trudy says.
Don’t hover.
Trudy retreats to the counter and leans against it, folding her arms.
Rainer, don’t be angry, she says. What I said upstairs, I wasn’t implying— I mean, I certainly didn’t want to offend—Oh, hell.
Rainer cuts the sandwiches into triangles and puts them, tongues of bologna and lettuce protruding from their crusts, first into plastic bags and then a large brown paper one.
Get your coat, he says, adding napkins and a thermos.
Are we going on a picnic? Trudy asks. She ducks her head to glance through the window at the thermometer affixed to the garage. You must be joking. It’s two degrees out there!
Get your coat, Rainer repeats. I will meet you in the car.
Bemused, Trudy complies. When she is all bundled up, she leaves the house through the back door and runs through the cold to where Rainer’s white Buick is idling in the driveway, exhaust pluming from its muffler. It is a big low boat of a car with sharky tail fins, so absurdly long as to appear an optical illusion. The passenger’s door cracks open at Trudy’s approach and she gratefully throws herself inside.
This is crazy, she says, as Rainer reverses into the alley and accelerates out onto Fiftieth Street. Where are we going?
I want to show you something.
What?
In reply, Rainer reaches over and switches on the radio. He changes stations until he finds a Rachmaninoff prelude, then dials the volume up so that the swelling chords fill the car. Trudy sinks back in the prickly plush of the seat, watching Rainer from the corner of one eye. His profile is inscrutable, calm beneath the brim of his hat; he steers the big Buick with the twist of a finger, his hand relaxed on the wheel.
They drive through the quiet streets of Edina and the busier avenues of Uptown. Past Lake Calhoun, white and flat as a dinner plate—it being a weekday, there are no die-hard exercise fanatics on its paths, jogging in hamsterlike circuits or huffing along on skis. Onward over a bridge toward Lake of the Isles, where Rainer pulls right up to the shoreline and parks. He rummages in the backseat for the bag lunch and a tartan cloth, then gets out of the car and stands with the blanket folded over his arm.
Trudy looks at him and then through the windshield. Of all the lakes in Minneapolis, Lake of the Isles is her least favorite; its amoeba shape confuses her, turning her around on its walkways until she loses her sense of direction and can’t tell whether the city is in front of her or to her back. There are no people here either, just a few ice-fishing shacks scattered about, smoke trailing thinly from their stovepipe chimneys.
This is silly, Rainer, Trudy says in her sternest tone. I’m not going out there.
Rainer shrugs, the wind whisking his streaming breath away into the air.
As you wish, he says.
He walks away from Trudy and out onto the ice, where he spreads the blanket and sits, fedora and overcoat and all, and opens the brown sack.
Trudy climbs from the car.
Get back here, you idiot, she yells. You’ll catch your death of pneumonia!
Rainer appears not to hear her. He bites into a sandwich. He eats half of it with apparent relish, then sets it down and stands.
Come, he calls.
Trudy shakes her head, then slams the car door and picks her way over frozen mud and reeds to the ice. She puts a foot on it and hesitates. It appears solid, thick and rutted. And the temperature is certainly low enough that it should hold. And if people are still fishing . . . But there was a thaw a few days ago, and local newscasters have issued warnings to be extra cautious when venturing onto the ice, and Trudy has always thought that plunging through it would be a particularly terrible way to die. Flailing in frigid water, in the dark, bumping one’s head against the hard ceiling, unable to breathe—
Come on! Rainer shouts, waving her forward.
Trudy takes another step. Then she runs out toward him, arms extended for balance, as pell-mell and clumsy as a child. Rainer catches her as she hurtles into him, so hard that they both stagger and nearly fall. But he rights himself in time and Trudy squeezes her eyes shut and pushes her face into the reassuring wool of his coat, which smells of the cedar closet in which he keeps it.
They stand for a minute like this,
breathing hard.
Then Trudy hears Rainer say—or feels it, rather, his voice rumbling through the layers of cloth to her cheek: We have a problem.
What? What is it?
Rainer detaches her.
Turn around, he says.
Why?
Must you always be so argumentative?
Rainer grips Trudy by the shoulders and spins her so her back is braced against his chest. Then he takes his hands away. Trudy tucks her own into her armpits for warmth, even though they are gloved.
Look, Rainer says.
Trudy does. She sees nothing out of the ordinary: the gray-white lake, the overcast sky a darker gray above it, the dense black calligraphy of branches on the far shore. Behind them is a brilliant lemon-colored slash of light that somehow has the effect of making the afternoon seem even colder than it is. The wind rushes ceaselessly over the ice, teasing water from Trudy’s eyes; her cheeks will be bright red when she and Rainer get back indoors. But this is also thrilling, like being, Trudy thinks, on the deck of a ship embarked on an Arctic expedition.
A brace of geese flies overhead, returning from some warmer clime, honking.
What is it I’m supposed to be looking at? Trudy asks.
Rainer chuckles and puts his arms around her from behind.
This is our problem, Dr. Swenson, he says into her hair. You think too much. Stop it. Don’t think. Don’t talk. Just look. Be.
53
THE FOLLOWINGMONDAY TRUDY WALKS INTO HER SEMINAR TEN minutes late. The crosstown traffic from Rainer’s has been hor-rendous: cars stalled in pools of standing water, the effect of intense April showers on highways whose drains are already flooded; tow trucks out in force, sending up wings of slush. Trudy, however, is whistling the Colonel Bogie March as she stamps her boots in the doorway. She has had it in her head for days, since to its tune Rainer is fond of singing in the shower, with bellowing enthusiasm and appalling pitch, this verse:
Hitler, he only had one ball
Göring had two but very small
Himmler had something similar
And poor old Goebbels had no balls at all!
Humming, Trudy crosses to the lectern and opens her briefcase.
Good morning, she says.
Some dispirited mumbles from the class. Trudy shakes the sleet from her hair.
What’s wrong with you people? she asks. Granted, this is the sort of day the British would refer to as filthy, but it is technically spring, you know.
Whatever, somebody says.
Trudy smiles and adjusts her scarf, a square of lime-green chiffon that she and Rainer bought over the weekend, Rainer insisting that Trudy make an effort to appear less funereal in public as well as behind closed doors. This caused a prolonged skirmish in the mall boutique, and Trudy smiles again at the thought of it: the saleslady at first flustered, and then, once the purchase had finally been rung at the register, assuming a conspiratorial tone and asking Trudy how long she and Rainer had been married.
Trudy walks to the board to write the topic du jour: Women in the Schutzstaffeln—Enforced Complicity or Lust for Power?
So, she says. Let’s start with the female wardens in the camps. The lovely and heartless SS Kapo Mandel whom Fania Fenelon described in your assigned reading, for instance. What is Fenelon’s assessment of Mandel’s character?
She turns to her students. They stare vacantly at her or the floor, hollow-eyed from staying up all night. Their noses are rab-bity and dripping from the eternal colds they swap back and forth. They are wearing baggy hooded sweatshirts and pajama bottoms with their big bulbous sneakers. They look completely uninterested in the topic at hand, and they are absolutely beautiful.
Trudy puts her chalk down and slaps the dust off her hands.
Oh, forget it, she says. Why don’t you all go get some sleep? Or, God forbid, do something productive, like studying for your midterm.
Pens stop scribbling in margins. The students look at Trudy blankly or with dawning hope.
Go on, get out of here, Trudy tells them with a shooing motion. Enjoy your parole.
Hesitantly at first, as if this is a test they might fail by obeying, a few of them start stuffing their things into their knapsacks and struggling into their parkas. Then, before Trudy can change her mind, the rest leap up and funnel quickly from the room. Trudy watches benignly. The students are laughing and talking, animated, and this pleases her. This is the way they are supposed to be.
Now what’s up with her? she hears Frick or Frack say to his counterpart.
Dunno. She looks—weird. Different. Like she’s been getting laid or something.
Professor Death? You’re on crack, man.
They shuffle out, grumbling.
When the door bangs shut behind them, Trudy repacks her materials and walks out too, without bothering to erase the board. But instead of heading toward the parking lot, she goes upstairs. She has something else to do before she leaves the uni-versity: she has had a wonderful idea. Singing under her breath—Hitler, he only had one ball; Göring had two—Trudy saunters through the History Department toward Ruth’s office.
This, like Trudy’s, is on the first floor, tucked away in a warren of rooms in the rear, and it is similar to hers in other ways as well: overheated, badly in need of a coat of fresh paint, smelling of coffee warmed overly long on a hot plate and dusty old books. But here the resemblance stops, for while Trudy’s office is austere, Ruth is a collector of Holocaust memorabilia. A glass-fronted cabinet too big for the room displays her strange trea-sures: a swastika banner that once adorned the Reichstag; currency from the Warsaw ghetto; postcards sent from the camps, including Buchenwald, with their single lines of typed text—We are being well treated, there is work here. The walls are crowded with Nazi propaganda posters, the largest featuring a terrified Aryan woman who looks much like Anna being menaced by a grinning grizzled Jew. Frauen und Mädchen, its slogan reads, die Juden Sind Ewer Ruine! Women and Girls, the Jews Are Your Ruin! Another, situated directly behind Ruth’s head, shows a giant Hitler and Stalin shaking hands over a stream of tiny screaming Jews plummeting into a fiery abyss, startling Trudy every time she opens the door.
As Trudy has known she would be at this time of day, Ruth is at her desk, scowling at papers. She throws down her red pen at Trudy’s knock.
Oh, thank God, Ruth says. You are my savior. These midterms are atrocious— Wait, don’t you have a seminar now?
I do, says Trudy. I let my kids go.
You did what? That’s unprecedented. Why?
Oh, I don’t know, says Trudy. I guess I’m just in too sanguine a mood to talk about such depressing stuff today.
Ruth pulls her feet up on the edge of her chair, hugging her knees to her chest. She studies Trudy with her sharp little unblinking eyes.
All right, what’s up.
Nothing, says Trudy.
Baloney, says Ruth. She squints at Trudy’s tousled hair—which Trudy has left uncut so she will less resemble, as Rainer has commented, a tubercular young boy—and at the bright green scarf. You look— different somehow.
Trudy shrugs.
Don’t be silly, she replies.
But she can feel herself grinning as she drops into the chair opposite Ruth’s.
Listen, she says. That trip that you and Bob took to the Caribbean over Christmas. Do you still have the brochures?
Ruth leans back with a squoink of springs.
Why? she says. You’re going?
Trudy nods. If the scheduling works out, she adds.
By yourself ?
Well, says Trudy, actually no. There’s a man . . .
Ruth pumps her fist in the air. I knew it! I knew that had to be it, with you grinning that way. It’s about time! Who is he?
Trudy smiles down at her lap. Now that she is here, she can admit to herself that this is the reason she has come to see Ruth instead of calling a travel agent. Trudy wants to talk to Ruth about Rainer. She wants to talk to everybody about Rainer.
She can barely go to the supermarket for toilet paper without announcing to the checkout clerk that Rainer uses the same brand. She can’t pull her socks on in the morning without thinking that Rainer’s are looking shabby, really; she should buy him some new ones. She has been bursting with the need to share all of this with somebody, to crow over her sudden good fortune. And she is certainly not about to tell Anna. But there is, thank heavens, Ruth.
Who is waiting for Trudy’s answer, smiling in anticipation, so Trudy says, His name is Rainer. Rainer Goldmann. He’s big and rude and preemptory and a former teacher and he must have been a terror in the classroom and I am completely smitten . . . What’s wrong?
Nothing, says Ruth. She gives her head a little shake. The name sounds familiar to me, but I can’t think why...Go on. Where did you meet him?
Trudy laughs. Through the Project, can you believe it? It was awful at the time. He’d read one of my flyers and he lured me to his house on the pretext of participating, but once we were on camera it turned out that he’s really one of yours, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and did he read me the riot act for even attempting to record the German side of the story. Which maybe wasn’t unjustified, so I went back to his house that night with some latkes, and . . .
Trudy trails off, for Ruth is no longer looking at her. She has picked up her favorite toy, a Lego facsimile of Herr Doktor Men-gele, and is bending his Lego legs to his waist, frowning at them. Trudy knows that Ruth has ordered Herr Doktor Mengele off the Internet, and that he has come complete with his own Lego operating theater, Lego assistants, and Lego victims, but these, unlike the Herr Doktor who customarily sits propped against a lamp, have been consigned to the supply closet. Trudy also knows that Ruth plays with Herr Doktor Mengele only when she is working through some thorny departmental problem or is otherwise upset. Trudy makes a face, perplexed.
What’s the matter? she asks. I thought you’d be happy for me.