City of Women Read Online Free PDF

cohorts. In the event that a bomb comes through the roof, their job is to sledgehammer the layer of bricks that opens up an escape route into the next building. They grunt and spit tobacco and chortle, and scratch their rumps, but they’re relatively harmless. The real danger is the Hausleiter’s
wife
. The Portierfrau Mundt. It’s
her
connections to the Party that count, not the old man’s. She has caught her husband’s wink in Sigrid’s direction, and now scrutinizes Sigrid with flinty, unforgiving eyes.
    Sigrid turns her head away. To her right, the eternally harried Frau Granzinger struggles with the youngest members of her brood. One who fidgets and one who fusses. The infant in her arms is only a peanut, and the rest are squirming in this dank cellar, mad for attention with only one mummy to share. The woman scolds and coos at them in succession.
    Sigrid thinks of the touch of his hand on her skin under her clothes. The mad connection of their bodies.
Wait, not yet, not yet
, his words burning in her ear. His pulse invading her.
Not until I tell you
.
    She tasted blood as she bit his lip, her skirt hiked up, his mouth burrowing into her neck, his hands searching, traveling under her blouse. She had no resistance to offer, only her own need, only her own rage, like that of an animal out of its cage. The film projector muttering mechanically above them, beaming sterile, blue-white light. The old man at the mezzanine rail had turned his head to stare at them. A piece of silk ripped, and her back arched. He entered her, one nylon-clad leg hooked around his thigh, his trousers sagging to his knees as he thumped into her, pounding her against the velour cinema seat. She gazed blindly at the silvered dance of images on the screen. She begged him, commanded him, her mouth raw with demands. But then her words broke up and there was nothing but the shrieking inside her, which she bit her own knuckle to contain.
    Near the door to the cellar, Frau Remki coughs coarsely, and the Portierfrau Mundt makes a performance of shielding herself from contamination by germs, or perhaps from the contamination by Frau Remki herself. The old lady is Sigrid’s fourth-floor neighbor. Once Hildegard Remki was the queen of the block. Her husband was a dentist, and she could afford mink fur collars and luncheons once a month at the Hotel Adlon, along with new shoes and a private tutor for her son, Anno, to learn the piano. When it was her turn to act as hostess for the kaffeeklatsch, it was always with the English sterling coffee service, and the Meissen porcelain. Even Mother Schröder deferred to her taste in chanson singers on the radio.
Don’t you really find, Petronela, that Marika Rökk has the superior vocal cords? I know you’re fond of that Swedish woman, but don’t you really agree?
But all that changed when her husband was thrown out of his practice because he was a Social Democrat. When he died, suicide was rumored. And then Anno was conscripted into the army and killed in the Balkans. Now Frau Remki is the block’s pariah. Thin and threadbare as a ghost, she wears only mourning black. Looking into her eyes is like staring through the windows of a bombed-out building.
    More screaming from Frau Granzinger’s hobgoblins. In a jealous effort to displace the smaller creature from the coveted position on its mother’s lap, the larger one, with the piglet’s nose, has started to bawl with a forcible vengeance and pinch its mother’s arm repeatedly. The harried Frau Granzinger attempts to combat the attack by increasing the volume of her scolding, but it’s a losing battle. She quite suddenly capitulates, and shovels the crying infant over to Sigrid with a beleaguered appeal. “Please, Frau Schröder. Take the baby, won’t you?” And before she can refuse, Sigrid is holding the child as if it were a time-fused bomb that has dropped through the ceiling. She feels the unaccustomed weight of the squirming baby, feels the sticky