The Cigarette Girl

“Aren’t you going to change your clothes?” Anita asked.

“Aren’t you going to remove your hair?” For years Berni had wanted nothing more than to get rid of this old dirndl, and now she clung to it. It was the last dress Grete had seen her in. She lay back and opened the book. A smudge of what looked like red jam sat in the upper corner of the page. Nesthäkchen, the doctor’s daughter, was complaining to her grandmother that only boys were allowed to fight in the war.

With every flip and flop Anita made, the mattress creaked. “My sister and I had a rule,” Berni said, yanking the quilt her way. “You choose a position and then you stay there.”

“Another word about your sister, and I’ll scream.”

Berni ignored her. She read until her eyelids drooped from exhaustion. She did not want to be alone with her thoughts for long.

• • •

The Medvedev, on the other side of a horseshoe-shaped park near Sonje’s apartment, was a dim Russian bar filled with more afternoon drinkers than Berni had expected. Men slumped on stools, and Anita prowled among them with a little tray. “Walkure . . . Walkure . . . Gold tips. Walkure No. 4,” she whispered in their ears. Berni watched in disgust as Anita’s fingers curled under the men’s hair. Some kissed her hand; some groaned, rolled their eyes, and pulled out the requisite bills. Most seemed more interested in the radio, which was tuned to a Socialist broadcast.

“I go home for supper,” Anita said later, counting her cash as they leaned against the wall, “then return for the evening shift. That’s when you get the good tips.” So far she seemed to enjoy playing Berni’s guide, treating her as if she knew nothing.

Nobody had mentioned Anita’s job as a perfume girl at Fiedler’s, and Berni felt a little bit of wicked satisfaction when she asked Anita why she wasn’t needed at Libations today.

Anita sniffed. “I don’t work there anymore. As they put it, ‘the novelty had worn off.’”

Berni was trying to figure out what this meant when she noticed Lev, the Medvedev’s owner, making sharp gestures at Anita from the front of the restaurant. Anita slipped her money back into her pocket and sighed. “He doesn’t like me counting it in front of customers.”

It was then Berni noticed the girl tucked inside the coat check. She had a round face and big, sad eyes; she looked like the littlest matryoshka doll in a set. Ignoring Anita’s protests, Berni crossed the room to talk to Lev. He eyed her suspiciously underneath wild eyebrows that fanned toward each other like dove’s wings.

“Tell me,” she said. “Are you hiring coat check girls?”

He took her in: the gray dirndl she refused to take off, her greasy black braids. “You are not coat check girl material.”

“Not me, my sister. A little blond angel.” In the coat check room, Grete would still have to see what went on in a place like this, but at least she’d be secluded. At least she’d be safe.

Lev sneered. “Mischa is my daughter. Believe me when I say I do not even need to hire a coat check girl, especially this time of year. But I have to keep an eye on her, is that right?” A stream of Russian poured from his mouth, and the girl pursed her lips.

“Let us see if you can even sell a cigarette, eh?” he said to Berni, crossing his arms. She stomped back to Anita and grabbed at her tray. “Let me try.”

“What?” Anita’s left eyebrow, penciled red, rose an inch. “I haven’t taught you—”

The strap was already over Berni’s head. She approached the bar, holding out a single box of cigarettes with a red airplane on the cover; she realized, when she turned to see Anita and Lev smirking at her, that she hadn’t a clue how much each of them cost.

“Josetti, meine Herren?” she asked men who ignored her. “Smooth and . . .” Every sad face at the bar already had a cigarette in its lips, dropping ash. She moved on to the tables. “Come on,” she told one particularly hard-looking man with great loops of dark skin under his eyes, “you’re making yourself look cheap.”

“Piss off,” he said, looking toward the radio. “I’m trying to listen.”

She tried offering the tins shaped like bullets, the ones with a winged victory goddess on the box, but nobody gave her a second look. She was ready to give up when she felt someone palm her ass as she passed his table. Not a pinch or slap, or even a grab, but a long, slow swipe, covering both sides of her derrière. She whirled around to see a younger man wearing the broadcloth cap, but clearly German, not Russian.

“Relax,” he said, “I’ll put something in your tip bowl.”

Berni reached down and pressed her thumb into his eye.

The other men at his table started laughing as he shrieked, covering his eye, calling Berni every obscenity she’d ever heard, plus some new ones. Lev and Anita came running. “Is there blood?” The man pried his eye open as Lev murmured, “Let me see, let me see.”

“He touched me!” Berni spat. “On my bottom, like he owned it!” She could tell Anita was trying not to laugh. Their eyes met, Anita’s sparkling. Soon the two of them had collapsed into giggles.

“What is this girl’s name?” the man spat. “Better not see her again, Lev, or I swear—”

“Her name is Berni,” said Lev, “and she is only training, mein Herr.” He glared at her with his hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Berni!” Now the man began to laugh, still holding his eye. He whispered something to his companions. “You should not hire another one, Lev, they’re nothing but trouble.”

“No, no.” Anita laughed lightly. “Berni, it’s short for Bernadette, not Bernard.”

Everyone except Berni laughed together now, and she felt a prickle of panic. What were they talking about? “How’s my given name your business?”

“Calm down, honey,” said another man at the table. “When a big girl like you runs around with a Transvestit, well, people are going to get confused.”

“Transvestit?” Berni looked from the men to Anita. Anita was hiding her face behind her cupped hand, and her shoulders were shaking, but she made no sound.

The table of men were laughing so hard they’d dropped to their knees. Berni growled. She’d had enough of letting all of them get the better of her. “Transvestit,” she said to Anita. “If you don’t tell me what it means, I’ll tell Sonje.”

All color had drained from Anita’s face. Her hands shook as she yanked her skirt down, giving Berni the feeling the joke was on her as well. Even Lev seemed to be in league against them, now that his customers were laughing and happy. “Here,” he said, trying to lift the hem of Anita’s skirt. “Show her. Show her!”

Anita pinched her knees together. Her face became a mask of panic, her eyes wild, and Berni remembered a time she’d seen a group of men in an alley with a cornered dog, kicking it for fun.

She took off running, out the door and into honking traffic. She ran over the mottled lawn of the park, past a group of picnickers opening champagne on a blanket. After a minute she realized someone followed her. She heard a pair of ridiculous high heels slapping the path, heard Anita’s breath wheezing closer and closer behind, but she did not stop. She ran as though lions were chasing her.

She burst into the apartment to find Sonje on the telephone; she took one look at Berni, murmured a goodbye, then hung up. “What is the matter?” she asked, standing up when Anita came close behind, panting. Each breath sounded like a cry.

“I want to leave now,” Berni said. She felt heat coming from Anita. “The men at the Medvedev said Anita was a Transvestit and that I was too. I don’t want to catch what she has.”

“I don’t understand, Berni. Of course you aren’t . . .” Sonje put two fingers between her eyes. “Berni, I—my God, I never did explain, did I? I thought it was obvious . . . my, my.” She tapped the table. “You won’t catch what she has, nicht? It’s how she was born.”

“This is not how I was born,” Anita said to the floor. “It’s how I made myself.”

“Oh yes, yes of course,” Sonje said.

Berni looked from one to the other, her face and fists growing hot. “Fine, speak in riddles. I don’t care. Just take me back—get me away from—from her.”

Sonje sighed and sat back in her chair, arms crossed. “Goodness, Anita, is there anything worse than aggressive stupidity?”

The corner of Anita’s mouth twitched.

“Goethe,” Sonje told Berni.

Berni stamped her foot and ran for the bedroom. She began gathering her few belongings into her pillowcase: one hairbrush, a pair of underpants. The problems of her previous life seemed so simple now. The sisters, frigid as they could be, had never managed to make her feel so ignorant, so foolish. Why hadn’t she tried harder to cooperate with them?

After a moment she heard the front door to the apartment slam, and then a soft knock at her bedroom door. “Go away,” she called.

Sonje stood on the threshold and watched her for a while. “So, you are leaving already.”

“I am.”

“Your life has not been easy, Berni.” She took a seat on the bed. “I thought you might understand her. Your parents are dead. Hers are alive, but they feel their son is dead.”

Berni covered her ears. She saw the veins in Anita’s hands, her hollow cheeks, the wide jaw and skinny neck. “You let me share a bed with a boy!” she cried. “And the men thought I was, too, since I ran around with a—Transvestit.”

“There is no boy here,” Sonje said softly. “She is Anita. She desires men, same as me, same as you. You don’t call her ‘boy.’ It’s sie.”

Berni’s head spun. Did she desire men? “That’s ridiculous.”

“Bernadette, if you leave us, where would you go? I won’t let you live on the street. And I don’t think you can return easily to the sisters.”

“They’d take me,” Berni said, but she wasn’t sure.

Sonje did not say anything. They listened to the wall clock, which seemed to Berni to grow louder with each tick. Finally Sonje cleared her throat. “I had a chance to attend an academy myself as a girl, a music conservatory. My father was a composer, and to him I was more a protégée than a daughter. After the conservatory rejected me, he would not speak to me.” She picked a thread on the quilt. “He must have known I’d blown the audition on purpose.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Why do we sabotage ourselves? I suppose we each had our reasons.” Sonje stood and flicked dust off her skirt. “I found Anita two years ago,” she said in a hardened voice, “unconscious under a nightclub table. Try to imagine how she’d react, hearing us discuss the opportunities we’ve had the luxury of throwing away.” When she left she closed the door to the bedroom, plunging Berni into darkness.

• • •

A few nights later Sonje took both of them to the Tingel-Tangel in Mitte to meet her lover, Gerrit. The air inside was thick with smoke, shot through with electric theater lights, but they soon found him at a round table close to the action. A girl performed a contortionist piano act onstage, back-bending over the keys.

“Pleased to meet you,” Gerrit said as he took Berni’s hand. Like Sonje, he used the du form. “Comradess Berni.”

“You as well,” Berni said, taking a seat. She wasn’t sure what to call him—Comrade? His peaked canvas cap sat on the table in front of him, and his shirt was coarsely woven. His face, however, had a raw smoothness suggesting a recent shave by a skilled barber, and his fair hair looked clean. Too well-groomed to be a real Communist, Berni thought, though his attractiveness certainly didn’t seem to bother Anita. She sat with her back to the stage, her lashes fluttering at him like fervent moths.

Today Anita had offered to lend Berni clothing in what seemed a peace offering of sorts: a skirt and Bemberg stockings made of rayon. “Much better than real silk for preventing foot odor,” she’d said. She looked slightly disappointed when Berni chose to borrow wool jodhpurs and a gray cloche hat from Sonje.

The men’s voices at the Medvedev echoed in Berni’s ears: another one. Did wearing trousers make her a Transvestit? If so, she didn’t care. She’d had her fill of ugly dresses long ago.

Four beers appeared on their table, and Berni passed one to Anita, receiving a slight nod in return. For the past few days she and Anita had been polite to each other, if stiff. Berni had begun sleeping on a pallet on the floor of the dining room. Yesterday Anita had taken her to the Silver Star, where Berni had done much better selling cigarettes. Shockingly, everyone there seemed to treat Anita as if she were normal; there were even others like her. Still, Berni found she could not help looking for the boy beneath the girl. Even now, as she watched Anita paint her lips Coty dark, she stared at the faint ghost of hair on her upper lip.

“How did you come to befriend Sonje?” Gerrit asked Berni, his arm interlaced with Sonje’s. Berni explained briefly why she had to leave St. Luisa’s.

Sonje tittered and said something about Berni’s moxie, but Gerrit shook his head. “Those nuns,” he said, “send the academy the girls they think worthy of joining the middle class. Your sister, with her defect, wouldn’t make the cut.”

“Enough politics for now,” said Sonje. Berni watched the stage. In St. Luisa’s she’d have slapped anyone who said “defect.”

Gerrit went on as the pianist completed her solo. “. . . defenders of capitalism are loath to allow proletarians a hint of social mobility. You should be proud you refused them.”

Should she? She missed her sister. Today she felt the sting of her absence more painfully than ever before. She tried to think what the girls at St. Luisa’s would be doing this evening. Bible story time with Sister Josephine; it seemed so distant from the Tingel-Tangel that it might have been happening on another continent.

Berni’s beer felt cold in her hand and in the pipes of her throat. She watched a stocky emcee appear at the corner of the stage, followed by a spotlight that adjusted itself a few times. “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s turn our attention to the mech-an-i-cal.”

Six young women chugged onstage in a little train, wearing military jackets and sheer hose. “We hear it everywhere—everything’s become too mechanical. Transportation. Communication. Even the act of love!”

The girls thrust out their hips to a drumbeat. Someone whistled.

The emcee tugged his bowtie. “My friends, Berlin is healthier than it’s ever been. Look at how productive we are. We make coal. Rubber. Steam!” Six little clouds of white smoke puffed up behind each girl’s rear end, and in unison, their eyes popped. The crowd laughed and clapped. Berni turned with mouth open to Anita, who shrugged as if to say she’d seen it before.

“Love in Berlin has become mech-an-i-cal, they say. But we know our city still has its beating heart.” Now each of the dancers ripped a panel off the chest of her military jacket, revealing six round left breasts.

Berni was enthralled. She couldn’t help it. Those breasts! Each a perfect sphere or cone, the faces above coldly beautiful, captivatingly stoic. She peered over her shoulder to see the crowd’s reaction through the dim smoky air, and jumped when she found Anita crouched behind her. “Tell Sonje I’m headed to a party.”

Berni glanced toward Sonje, who had her face tucked against Gerrit’s. “Why leave now?” she asked Anita. “The show’s just started.”

“I’m through with this tired old bit,” Anita said, and turned away with a flounce.

Berni took pulls of her beer, growing bored and embarrassed by her tablemates’ necking. By the end of the routine, the dancers were wearing very little. When finally Sonje resurfaced, she glanced toward the exit, then pulled Berni close. “Anita auditioned for this dance line once.” Around them, the crowd burst into applause. “You can see why she wasn’t chosen.”

The alcohol was beginning to make Berni feel dizzy, and very sorry for Anita. “I’ll just make sure she’s okay,” she said and stumbled out, bumping the backs of chairs as she went.

She found Anita standing on the curb, one bony arm flung out to hail cabs. “So,” she said, sucking the end of her cigarette. “You’d like to see the real Berlin.” She yanked Berni’s arm down when she tried to signal a car. “We want a cyclonette. Cheaper. Look for the cabs with three wheels.” Eventually they found one, and Anita gave the driver an address. They drove past the opera, then under the Brandenburg Gate, which glowed pale purple.

“Sonje likes to pretend she’s so modern sometimes, she and Gerrit looking at tits.”

Berni hadn’t heard Anita criticize Sonje before; it felt a bit titillating. “Well,” she said, to be contrary, “I thought the show was clever.”

“Clever? Come on, it’s a tit show.”

“It’s satire. A commentary on modern life.”

Anita snorted. “Satire. No matter how they try to dress up Girlkultur, my friend, it’s naked girls on a stage.”

Berni paused. Should she let on that she knew Anita had auditioned? “Look,” she said after a while. “I’m sorry I ran from you the other day. At the Medvedev.”

Anita shrugged, picking lint off her stockings. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t like it either, what I am.” They were almost to the other end of the Tiergarten now, and Anita’s expression lifted. She pointed toward a stately, darkened building. “But I won’t be this way for long. There’s the Institute for Sexual Science, have you heard of it?”

“They cure homophiles?”

“In a manner of speaking. They can make a man into a woman.”

Berni stared at her, nearly speechless. “You mean they’d—they’d cut it.”

“Snip, snip.” In the electric city glow Anita’s face went from soft and angelic to sharp and sly. “Then I’ll find a handsome Gerrit of my own. All I need is a Gerrit. I don’t have expensive taste, like Sonje. I don’t need someone like Herr Trommler to take care of me.”

“Herr Trommler?”

“Who do you think owns the Maybach? Not Sonje. Pretty women like Sonje always have a daddy. Trommler . . . ach. Picture a man the size of a Holstein steer.”

Berni had thought of Sonje as independent. The news of Trommler depressed her.

“We’ll get out here,” Anita called when they arrived at a row of tenements. At the door, she tugged on her skirt a few times, then rang a buzzer. Berni could hear the party before she reached the flat, could feel it through the soles of her shoes. Inside they were met with a blast of heat and dark. Perspiring people danced: men with women, men with men, women with women.

A man in bloomers mopped at the exotic rug, his hairy, pale thighs showing under the ruffles. “Anita!” he shouted over the music when he finished. He was dressed as a baby, in a bonnet, with a rattle and pacifier hanging around his neck.

“Max,” she purred, “I didn’t know we were to come in costume.” Her shoulder and chin seemed drawn to each other by magnets.

Max’s belly brushed Berni’s hip. “But you are in costume, dear. You’re Anita Berber.”

Berni thought the costume comment wouldn’t go over well, but Anita fluttered her false eyelashes, draping a long-fingered hand across her bony chest. “Max, I go by Anita Bourbon. Der Berber, may she rest in peace.”

“Who’s Anita Berber?” said Berni, and Max and Anita both squealed in disbelief.

“She was a famous nude dancer and actress,” Anita told Berni. “Taken from us too soon.”

“Some say of a sex accident, some of an overdose.” Max put his pacifier in his mouth.

Anita handed Berni a drink that sparkled and excused herself to talk to another man in a fox fur with claws. Berni stood by the wall, glad to have something in her hand. She watched Anita’s friend produce a vial from his purse, and from it he and Anita took a miniature spoon and put it in their noses. Anita caught her watching. Her lips formed the words don’t tell Sonje.

Berni nodded and found a seat on one of the satin sofas. Next to her a girl and boy were wrapped around a pipe with a glowing orange end. The boy elbowed Berni, his eyelids with their white eyelashes drooping. Pale-orange freckles dotted his cheeks and elfin nose. “It’s your turn.”

“Karl,” his companion whined, “we don’t have much more.”

The pipe smelled like Eastern spices. “No, thanks.”

Karl waved the pipe in front of Berni’s face. “This will make you relax.”

How different from a cigarette could it be? Berni inhaled and handed it back to Karl.

“What about him?” Karl pointed to Anita, who stood alone now, peering over the tops of people’s heads, looking for someone. “Isn’t that your friend?”

“Her,” Berni corrected him. She felt suddenly protective of Anita. “It’s her. Sie.”

Karl blinked slowly. “I don’t understand.”

Berni’s mind had slowed. She looked at the men’s clothing on the girl beside Karl, at the outfit she herself had chosen, the jodhpurs and suspenders. They weren’t called “he,” but Anita was “she,” and Anita was “she” all the time. Berni watched Anita’s dark nervous eyes dart around the room, and a sad thought came to her: How complicated Anita’s life is . . . She looked so vulnerable that Berni would have stood and embraced her if her legs hadn’t turned to lead.

Berni watched, as if through water, as the baby-man approached Anita and put his hands on her thighs, rubbing up and down roughly, as an ungainly child might pet a cat. Berni took another pull off the pipe when the boy put it to her lips, surprised to find that she did relax. Karl kissed her on the cheek. She shut her eyes and felt very good indeed, and for a while, wrapped in Karl’s pale arms, she forgot Anita.

Berni did not wake until someone threw her arm around his neck. His elbow went under her knees, and as he lifted her against his chest, she smiled, happy for someone to carry her somewhere. Her eyes opened and she caught a hazy glimpse of a dark beard where she’d expected the smooth curve of Karl’s jaw. But then, from far away, she heard Anita’s voice: Not her, that one’s sixteen, and hasn’t been touched deeply yet. Then Berni was put back on the cushion, and then she was left alone.

Just before she was engulfed in sleep, a thought came to her, perhaps the first clear thought she’d had since she arrived at Sonje’s. Incorporating Grete into this life would be difficult. As difficult as weaving a satin ribbon through burlap.

South Carolina, 1970

The fly had grown comfortable enough to entwine its back legs and let down its sucker. Janeen could have killed it, if she had a swatter; instead she watched it take minuscule gulps of a buttermilk biscuit. For a minute she wished she had one of those machines from the movies, through which she and the fly could switch bodies; how gladly she’d trade her slouching frame in its elephant-leg trousers for a pair of wings! She gazed out the banquet room’s lone window, aching to buzz past the moss-draped oak outside and take to the skies.

Her mother rested a large hand on Janeen’s shoulder, bringing her back to the buffet at the luncheon following her father’s funeral. An impromptu receiving line had formed. Yet another neighbor had made a forced nice comment about how big she’d grown, something wildly inappropriate to tell a five-foot-ten seventeen-year-old.

“Here we are,” her mother, Anita, murmured close to her ear, her cologne thick in Janeen’s nose. “Another vulture. Lacey!” she greeted the next sympathetic well-wisher.

It both amazed and irritated Janeen that her mother, who wasn’t even a born-and-bred American, played this game so much better than she did. “Southerners will tolerate some eccentricity, as long as they can make of you a sort of pet,” Anita had said just that morning as she buttoned her white polyester shirt, a purchase from the men’s department at Sears. “To a few, I am their German pet.”

Janeen felt fairly certain she, herself, was nobody’s pet. Lacey Callahan, mother to the junior prom queen, approached her with the same bless-your-heart smile her daughter had perfected, her teeth hard and white as squares of gum. “Oh, he was a wonderful man, y’all,” Lacey cooed. “So . . . jolly. I thought you might’ve buried him with a tumbler in hand. My Lord, never saw the man without his drink!” She laughed behind her fingers, the nails Pepto pink.