The Girl Without a Name

by ALAN R. MARCUS

MORE than a score of months after their liberation from the Auschwitz concentration camp, both Anna and her friend without a name were still startlingly vulnerable to a whole host of prosaic, unportentous things — the fall of footsteps on a stairway, an unexpected imperious knock, a female shout, a laugh, sudden and mirthless, that might rise up behind them as they walked the streets of the cheerless, undamaged Bavarian town. Sometimes it was even less than these; sometimes it could be nothing but a sigh, a whisper outside a window, an expression of deep malevolence, turned upon their strolling backs, recorded with all the pain of a knife thrust and catalogued with ten thousand others equally unforgotten. Or sometimes it was only the elements alone, the wind repeating elegies, the rain which, coming down casually on the roof of the tiny third-floor room in which they lived, played the same peaceful music they had heard echoing from the shingles of a certain crematorium, in a time not yet long enough removed to be thought of without hysteria.

Yet, though they both struggled in the web of such recollections, they struggled not at all equally. Of the two girls, Anna was by far the more resilient. It was she who had stumbled, after who knows how many days, upon this little lost village. It was she who had insisted that they stay there instead of reporting to a Jewish survivors’ camp. It was she who had rightly guessed that her friend’s condition might be disastrously misunderstood by welfare authorities. As alike in appearance as the two of them were, with their bellies equally bloated, eyes equally cavernous, hair equally lusterless, ankles and wrists equally swollen, and with their left forearms similarly tattooed with a slaughter number, there was a profound mental difference between them.

For Anna no problem of reclamation existed; she knew very well who she was, where she was, what had happened to her, who her relatives and friends had been, and how they had perished. Her friend, on the other hand, seemed to have vomited years of association cleanly and bodily out, under the pressure of too much horror, bloodshed, and inhuman intimidation. It had been all Anna could do, the last few months in camp, to conceal this truth from the exterminators, but now that the thing had been accomplished, she had no intention of allowing anyone else, in the guise of friendship, sympathy, or professional competency, to interfere. She had saved the girl,she had brought her this far, she had even given her a name after her right name, with all other preconcentration camp associations, had fled from her mind; she would continue to save her, if need be, from the willing liberators themselves.

Accordingly, the two of them had, under Anna’s leadership, settled down to a post-liberation life of dull, steady, and rural obscurity, helped by the local Military Government team to secure the little room they had and the meager rations they received. They went nowhere except for a random stroll, saw no one except a few specific food dealers, mingled with no one except the dozen-odd Polish-Jewish survivors in the town, who, like themselves, preferred this life to any life again under any circumstances in a camp, where they would have to be regimented, disciplined, and buffeted about.

In this situation Anna’s friend, to whom Anna had given the name Sophia, after Anna’s own gassed and cremated mother, seemed to improve. She evidenced interest in her own toilet, she no longer went into long, inconsolable sobbing tits, she now could bear to be away from Anna for long periods during the day, although as soon as the dark came, Anna had to be there to ward off phantoms; she could even talk for surprisingly long periods with complete, unhysterical rationality. She had, in fact, started in the right direction towards recovery, and that was the situation up to the time that Anna conceived the idea of buying the piece of cloth.

Even before she had decided upon the cloth, Anna had been thinking about buying something — ever since, in fact, a Jewish-American soldier who had been their benefactor for the five months he had been a member of the local MG team had presented the two girls with a parting gift of money after his redeployment orders came through. For some time now Anna had been considering, with not a little pleasure, just how this money might be spent. She had, moreover, injected the spirit of carnival into the thing. In a life drab to extremes, the prospect of buying something new, what to buy, where to buy it, was a game to be played at all hours, in all contexts, and Anna, after talking it over at length with herself, decided to broach the subject with Sophia early one afternoon when Sophia seemed unusually intelligent and receptive. She leaned down to where Sophia was rocking like a just-wound mechanical toy in an old audible rocking chair, and took the girl’s arm.

“Nu, Sophia,” whispered Anna warmly in Yiddish, “how would you like a new skirt now? What color would you like for a new skirt ?”

Both girls looked down at Sophia’s gray, decomposed-looking skirt, almost an exact replica of Anna’s. Sophia’s voice was electric with delight and curiously childish in inflection.

“Am I going to get a new skirt, Anna?”

“Tell me now what color would you like,”asked Anna importantly. “How would you like a nice new blue skirt?”

“Are you going to get a new skirt too, Anna?” Sophia asked. She had a juvenile mincing way of pronouncing the name Anna, the accent falling on the last syllable. Her rocking speeded up with excitement.

“Yes — I’m going to get a new skirt, too.”

“Will it be blue?” Sophia was asking. “Will yours be blue?”

“Yes, that’s the best color for sure.”

“Well, I want to get the same as you,” Sophia declared positively. “I want to get just the same as you get.”

Anna allowed herself to sigh once with the sudden realization that what she had been trying to do, get a positive preference from Sophia, unramified by reference to herself, was, in the present nature of things, impossible. As she continued to look at Sophia, a sudden tenderness came over her; her eyes were engulfed.

“Why are you crying, Anna?” Sophia asked anxiously. “Aren’t you going to get a skirt, too? You can have mine, Anna.”

“No, it’s all right,” Anna said unsteadily, and turned away, herself puzzled by the attack of tears. Her hands busied themselves with imaginary lint on Sophia’s sleeve.

“Look, Anna!” cried Sophia, pointing towards the window. “Look, there’s Lieutenant Burgess riding down the street. See him there?”

Anna followed Sophia’s finger as it traced the slow movement of a jeep through the square outside. Since the reorganization of the small MG team in the area, Lieutenant Burgess had risen to second-incommand, but it was he who had originally seen to it that the two girls had adequate means to eat and sleep when they first arrived, despairing and frightened, from the East. Of course he was not a Jew; he was not like their benefactor Corporal Levy, who had just gone home. But he was not unkind, he had done the right thing. He had risen in their estimation to be a sort of sub-benefactor and right now he was their one source of protection, support, and security in a glowering alien climate. But Anna’s mind was on a piece of cloth, on a bright blue roll of cotton material she had seen in the dry-goods store window of Herr Meyer. She went over to the cupboard and counted out the marks. She didn’t know how much to take, and then she recklessly decided to take them all.

“Where are you going, Anna?” Sophia cried, as she saw the girl put on her ancient coat and hat. “ Do you want me to go with you?”

“No, you stay here,” instructed Anna. “I won’t be gone long, and don’t worry about anything. Just stay here and watch out the window. I’ll be back in a little while.”

Anna turned the knob of the door and was gone, her precise, flat foot-beats diminishing down the three flights of stairs and fading away. Eyes wide open on the square, humming a tuneless wail-like threnody, Sophia, the girl without a name, continued to rock inexorably back and forth like an ungovernable, indefatigable metronome.

2

LESS than half an hour later, Anna had come to the store front window of Herr Meyer and was standing there, acutely indecisive. The sight of Herr Meyer inside, with his classic facial caricature of a type she had seen too often, weakened her, made her for a moment afraid. She moved away aimlessly from the store window, letting herself drift along the sidewalk, buffeted by the multicolored knobby-legged Bavarians who were swirling so frantically in every direction. She did want that blue material so much. She wanted it for the skirt it would give Sophia, for the work of sewing it would give her, for the bright new interest it would bring into her hopelessly unvaried everyday routine.

Yet there was something which had to be conquered before she could even enter the shop, some undercurrent of terror, vague but real. Nor was this feeling new. Though the sun was warm, the day pleasant, herself a nonentity, the danger past, she rarely felt entirely free from similar feelings of tension and anxiety whenever she walked the streets of the town. She felt too many eyes always on her, and a brutal unseen contagion waiting to strike; she was conscious of her own helplessness against a certain terrible something which might come today, tomorrow, or next week, although what it was exactly she never could say.

Her one specific fear was that the Americans would leave some day, a fear which she never dared express to Sophia. At times she dreamed this in a dream: the Americans were gone, she and Sophia were all alone, the tramping of hundreds of feet became increasingly thunderous, and then the door to their room was being broken in and they were instantly inundated by scores of cursing townspeople. And in the crowd she always recognized faces, the man downstairs, the boy who lived across the street, Herr Meyer, the Herr Burgermeister, all of them with the same unbearable look of hate and savagery —

But this was all nonsense. Anna stopped herself in the crowd and set her lips determinedly. The war was now over. Whatever else she might feel, there was no cause to be so afraid. The Americans were here, they were all around, they were going to stay. Why shouldn’t she go into Herr Meyer’s shop. She had the money to pay, hadn’t she?

Anna turned and breasted the onrush of sidewalk traffic. She found herself before the window again, she crushed down another deep urge to plunge back anonymously into the street. Finally she opened the door, dreading the moment when all eyes would be turned towards her, when she would be spotlighted, pin-pointed, impaled, focused upon. The door closed squeakily behind her, and back of a low counter a pair of pale bleak eyes were raised in question. For a terrible moment, Anna could not speak. Although she had rehearsed, on the walk over, what had to be said in her badly accented German — a German that was, despite all subterfuge, still more Jewish than German — she suddenly could not discover where those carefully planned sentences in her mind had gone to. She stood there, aware that another more powerful presence had come up to stand beside Bleak Eyes, a dark, sweaty, closely shaved face out of which two eyes coldly challenged. Herr Meyer.

“Ja, bitte?”

Suddenly, thankfully, Anna refound her voice.

“I— ” (There’s no excuse for faltering; don’t be so afraid.) “I would like to buy some of the blue material in the window, please.”

Herr Meyer looked incredulous. “The blue material in the window, that is very dear, Fräulein. Very dear indeed. We have so little good material.”

“I — I am very satisfied with that material,” Anna said, refusing to meet the intense hostile gaze. “That is what I have been looking for.”

“Have you Marken?” began Herr Meyer. “Oh — excuse me—” He broke off conversation and moved a few steps to the left to confront an American who had just entered in company with a tall, even-featured blonde.

Anna was glad to retreat for a moment and try to rephrase the dialogue. If he said it was very dear again, she would let him see the money she had. If he remarked on how little material he had, she would assure him it was only a little she wanted. She would be compliant and completely humble. She noticed that Herr Meyer was talking and laughing in an animated way with the American and his friend, and she hoped that some of the good nature would hold over for just a few minutes. Herr Meyer gave the American a package already wrapped, received from him something furtive and bulky, placed it hastily underneath the counter, and said a loud, cheerful Aufwiedersehen. Then he came back again to deal with Anna. His face changed. Again it became a cold, unfriendly mask.

“And now, Fräulein, you have naturally Marken to purchase this material with?”

Anna began to feel a sense of dismay. Her slight assurance crumbled. “Marken?”

“Of course you understand that everything is strictly rationed now. One must have ration stamps before one can buy. That is the system, Fräulein”

When Herr Meyer pronounced the word Fräulein, a certain inflection came into his voice. It was hardly perceptible, unless, like Anna, you were hyperconditioned to register the smallest fraction of a derisive accent. Herr Meyer said the word Früulein the way prosperous businessmen address as Doctor their obscure, academic, financially unsuccessful nephews. But Anna felt her expectation ebbing, ebbing. She stood there in patent uncertainty.

“Bitte, Fräulein?” inquired Herr Meyer, but his voice was like a command.

“Well, I — well, danke —” Anna whispered, wanting desperately to be rid of the overpolite antagonism that exuded from the presence of Herr Meyer.

“Danke schön,” she said, rushing confusedly out and hurrying a full two blocks in the wrong direction before she caught herself and came to a halt. The feeling of fright broke through, came close to the surface, and drained away. She stood there and thought of Sophia back in the room, patiently rocking and expecting. Well, she told herself, you have a right to get Marken now. If that’s what you need, go to the German office and ask for it. Nobody is going to bite you, Dummkopf. You have only to go there and ask in a polite way, and they will give it to you.

But the idea that she, Anna Berg, a Polish Jewess, might go boldly into the offices of the German civil administration and ask for something to which she might not have a completely legal right, seemed too preposterous at first. Reflection was needed. She came to a little strand near an old canal and dropped down upon a bench. Anna, Anna, she said, go get the ration tickets. Don’t be a baby. No anxiety was allayed, however, by such cajoling. There is such a thing as tempting, she told herself.

Tempting what? a voice inquired.

Well, tempting them on to do things —

Nobody’s going to do anything, the voice replied. It’s a little, daily, unimportant thing, going up and asking for ration stamps. Everybody has to do it every day. Come along, now.

Oh, wait a minute, she said. Please wait a minute.

Don’t be a fool, Anna, the voice reprimanded. The war’s over, nobody’s going to hurt you. Now come along.

As Anna sat there, she noticed a German couple strolling down the strand, looking for a place to sit down. The boy was tall, decisive, wearing a dyed Wehrmacht uniform: the girl was an adequate complement, blonde, billowy, pliant. They came up past Anna, looked, noticed the more than enough room on her bench, looked back at Anna, rejected the possibility.

Come on, you must go get your Marken, the voice insisted again. Come on.

Grateful for the excuse, Anna rose and commenced walking to the center of town, steadily increasing her speed. If she had looked back, she would have seen the tall dark boy and the blonde girl circle back, glance towards her a second, and then, laughing conspiratorially together, sit down on the bench. But then Anna didn’t have to look back. Every expression and posture of the couple had been accurately anticipated. Even the laugh—she had known they would laugh in exactly that way. She hurried on towards the Stadtwerwaltung, the ugly squat administrative center in the middle of the town.

3

“Sie wollen, bitte?”

Although the tall, bespectacled secretary reacted with sensitive distaste at what she saw standing in from of her, her official function had to be discharged.

“ I excuse me my German — I was sent here to get Marken for cloth — cotton cloth, and I—

“Have you seen Herr Griebel, Fräulein?” the aquiline-faced receptionist asked. " All requests are to go to him first. That is the usual way.

Anna stood helplessly, fidgeting with the frayed edges of her pockets.

“ Ach, since you are here, we 'll take down the information. Please do not forget that in the future you are to go first to Herr Griebel.”

The sound of the German girl efficiently gathering forms and data into place on her desk was like the quick explosive rattle of some rather complicated slot machine where you push a coin in and six or seven showy things commence to happen at once.

“A 'un — Name, bitte?”

“Anna Berg.”

“ Polish?”

“No, Polish-Jewish,” said Anna quickly, almost inaudibly.

“Ach,” said the secretary, putting down her pen and looking at some undetermined point in space to 1 he right of, and above, Anna’s head. “ That is different. For you, it will be necessary to get a written Bescheinigung from the Military Government. We cannot deal with such cases before we have a Bescheinigung.”

“Please,” said Anna, “I want to buy just a little cotton cloth —”

Before the phrase was completed, a tall, mustached figure had entered the office and plunged into rapid conversation with the secretary, who every now and then indicated Anna by a nod of the head or twist of the eyes. The dialogue was much too fast for Anna to follow. All she could understand was ”Jude” and “judische” and that was, after all, all she needed to understand. She turned to leave, when the mustached man called after her.

“A moment, Fräulein, where do you go now? Do you know where you are to go now?”

Anna, balanced in her half-turned-around position, retreated from the impact of what she saw in the man’s eyes. Her impulse was to flee. She had seen exactly that kind of expression too many times, when its bearers had worn impeccably creased SS uniforms. She came frighteningly near an outcry there in the office.

“Fräulein, you must go to the Military Government for a permission. Verstehen? Eine Erlaubnis.”

What the man said was quite in order, what he told her was quite inoffensive, but how he told her that was something else again. Why did he shout, why did he look at her so, what was behind the spasm of hysterical violence that seemed ready to break through at any moment?

(What indeed? Ask any one of ten thousand spoiled, withered young men and women scattered in hundreds of homeless groups throughout the conquered land. Or the ash heaps, where the remains of a hideous number of their friends and relatives dissolve. Or Anna herself. Ask Anna by all means. She could tell you very, very well —)

Speechless and trembling, the young Jewess turned and fled out of the room.

In the Military Government reception office, two young soldiers, engrossed in a card game, were bent absorbedly over the desk top of the chief clerk, a tall, angular overworked Sergeant whose luck at the moment was all bad. The slap of the cards made a graphic counterpoint to the soldiers apoplectic comments, and for perhaps two minutes they did not notice the quailing, hesitant, figure in the doorway.

Finally the chief clerk happened to look up. A surprised greeting came from him. The other soldier, a squat, cushiony Corporal, followed his friend’s gaze in mock astonishment.

“Well, well!” said the Corporal. “Does it talk now? Is it fish or fowl, I wonder? Ask it does it: know how to talk. Jack.”

“Pipe down, Lou,” the Sergeant advised. And then to Anna in practiced high school German: “Ja, bitte? ”

“I — I would like to speak to Lieutenant Burgess, please.”

“Lieutenant Burgess is out of the city until late tonight,” the Sergeant said, adding curiously, “What is it you wanted, please?”

Haltingly, Anna explained. There was need to repeat whole sentences, to stand in close proximity to the Sergeant, before the story could be communicated to him with any sense at all. The Corporal had come around the front of the desk and was allowing some natural exuberance to escape in the form of a stream of suggestive comments.

“So that’s Lieutenant Burgess’s love,” the Corporal remarked rhetorically. “Well, well. She doesn’t look at all his type, do you think, Jack?”

“Take it easy, Lou,” said the Sergeant. “You know who this is. One of them Jewish concentration camp survivors. I’m sure she appreciates your jokes all right.”

“What’s her royal highness want?” the Corporal asked.

The chief clerk swore. “Go ‘way, will ya?”

He turned and began talking to Anna in slow, grammatically weird German. He was very sorry. Nothing could be done as long as the officers were out. He wasn’t familiar with the procedure for getting clothing stamps. It was late Friday afternoon, and could she come back on Monday; it would be better on Monday.

“Jeez, Jack, what kind of a spiel did you give her there?” said the Corporal suddenly. “Now she’s starting in to bawl. What did you tell her, anyway?”

Uncomprehending, faintly conscious of refusal and loss, Anna had remained grown to the spot, her eyes beclouded with quick, uncontrollable tears.

“Far as I can tell, it’s about clothing stamps,” the Sergeant explained. “She wants to buy some cloth or something, and the Germans say she needs ration stamps. Lieutenant Smith usually takes charge of all that stuff.”

“Well, that’s nothing to cry about. What’s she crying for?”

“How should I know?” the Sergeant snapped, irritatedly. “You can’t figure some of these refugees out, you know. Sometimes you can’t tell what they’re liable to do.”

Anna continued to focus pleadingly on the Sergeant. Hardly understanding him, she was completely unaware that the interview was supposed to have been concluded. All she felt and reacted to at the moment was a deep, frenetic obsession to receive some sort of paper from the Americans, some sort of paper that would say she, Anna Berg, had the right to receive so much blue cotton cloth immediately and no questions asked. The tall, harassed-looking Sergeant could not quite dismiss her. Something stayed him, some unfitting, irreducible, imprudent sympathy.

“Whyn’t you tell her to take off?” the Corporal asked, dealing out imaginary hands to himself. “Come on, I want to make it ten straight.”

“I got no right to give her any kind of a note,” the Sergeant complained. “I’d probably get eaten out for butting my face into it.” He was talking to the Corporal, but the words were directed at himself. “Hell, I got no authority to write her out a note.”

“Sure, that’s right,” the Corporal supported. “Come on, tell her to take off. Hey you—” he addressed himself to Anna. “Scramez-vous, understand? ’Raus.”

“Cut that out,” yelled the Sergeant. “Damn you, I’m handling this woman. Can’t you see she’s been in a concentration camp?”

“Sure, but we can’t do anything about that now, can we? What do you want me to do — cry?”

The Sergeant shook his head disgustedly. Some final emotional urge suddenly dissipated his remaining good judgment. He sat down before his typewriter and typed furiously for two minutes, while the Corporal got up and read over his shoulder.

“Hey!” shouted the Corporal. “Jack, what are you doing? You can’t give her authority to enter a store and buy without stamps. If Lieutenant Smith ever finds out —”

“Ah-h!” The Sergeant spat into the open window at his side. “Never mind, never mind. I know what I’m doing here. Just deal out the hands, I 'll be through in a second.”

“You’re nuts, you dumb dodo. Remember, I didn’t have nothing to do with this deal. It’s all your own responsibility. If they ask me, I told you not to do it.”

“Ah-h-h!” appealed the Sergeant in classic exasperation to an unknown, invisible, but infinitely understanding figure by his side. He struck the last key, pulled the note from the typewriter, and stamped it loudly with an official Military Government stamp. Then he signed it and gave it to Anna, endeavoring to make known to her, through his faulty German, that she only had to go direct to the store; the German agency had nothing to do with it, the note was addressed to the store owner. As Anna received the paper, a rare warm emotion diffused through her. One wasn’t so isolated, the Americans were helpful, her despair had been premature. She repeated Danke a fluttery half-dozen times and withdrew stumblingly, holding the piece of paper in her hand like a rare, magical, evanescent jewel.

“You crazy fool, you.” The Corporal was shaking his head. “You’ll get oaten out plenty for this, you ain’t got no right

“Oh, go take a flying jump.”

“Okay, okay. But remember, you did it yourself, boy. I’m not going to be chewed on your account. Just remember.''

The Sergeant made a derisive sound and walked around his desk to the window where he could observe Anna slowly crossing the square, hesitating for a minute at the traffic intersection, then slowly traversing the main street and vanishing in a crowd of afternoon promenaders on the other side of the square.

4

WHERE was it, where was it? Had they sold it or taken it away? Why wasn’t the lovely light roll in the window any more ?

Anna pressed her face against the glass in unbelief. In the right pocket of her coat, a hand closed lightly over the packet of bills and the Military Government note. A wave of keen fresh disappointment came up in her, obliterating the heady sense of comfort she had just before evoked, destroying even the nameless vague fears which lay always just beneath the level of her consciousness. To open the door, to enter the shop, to find herself again standing before the scornful figure of Herr Meyer was all a business of a few seconds, but now that she had so purposefully acted, words would not come.

“Ja, bitted?”

The enmity-choked tone of Herr Meyer removed her momentary paralysis.

“The the blue cloth that was in the window — I — you said one needed Marken

Three steps away, two curious American soldiers, their jaws chewing rapidly, regarded Anna with interest. Behind her, a tall gray woman moved two steps backwards, delicalclv recoiling. Two German policemen, concluding a purchase at her right, stopped and waited expectantly. She felt every pair of eyes upon her. Her sentence was abandoned, suspended, left dangling in the air.

“Ach, ja, the blue material—” remembered Herr Meyer with a sudden strange amiability. Yet he told her nothing more for the moment. The sequence had already been too carefully planned. Acting immediately would detract from the ultimate pitch of satisfaction that ho looked forward to enjoying. Vague, encouraging, polite, he coaxed Anna s contusion along a moment longer.

“I—the Military Government gave me a paper to show the blue material that was in the window, I —”

“ Ach so. This material?”

With a minor flourish, Herr Meyer drew out from beneath the counter the thin roll of blue cotton cloth, and laid it in front of the girl. His hand caressed it with burlesque appreciation; his eyes still maintained an expression of calm guilelessncss.

“Yes, I should like to purchase some meters — here is the paper from the Military Government

“Moment, Fniulein,” said Herr Meyer. This was the instant lo savor. The five oi her persons in the store looked up expectant ly. Anna found herself regarding a new, triumphant expression on Herr Meyer’s face. Blatant contempt had replaced all amiability.

“All ihis material was sold while you were gone, FranleinHerr Meyer continued. “I regret that there is no more at the moment, it just so happened, you understand. Half a dozen persons called with orders for it, and as you see, there is hardly enough for more than half a dozen. I regret

Herr Meyer inclined his head forward stiffly in postured regret, but his eyes never stopped exposing a certain gloating light that seemetl to illuminate the whole upper part of his face. The breath was expelled slowly out of the two policemen in appreciation. The tall woman coughed contentedly. But Anna suddenly forgot where she was, with whom she was speaking, in what context her words had been uttered. All she could retain was the terrible imparl of the look mi Herr Meyer’s fact*, a classic look that she bad long since slopped Irving to forget. The blue cloth lay so near to her on the counter. Her fingers could almosl touch it. Before she knew how it happened, her hands had suddenly closed over the roll of cloth, a hot hysteria, a kind of madness, had come over her, her feet were running wildly to the door, her voice was crying brokenly in Yiddish, phrases and imprecations were sputtering out in an incoherent rush. Before the two German policemen could get to her and seize her by both arms, she had broken out of the shop and was half a dozen paces onto I he si reel.

When they brought her back inside, she became the instant center of a ring of sternly accusing faces. A group of passing pedestrians pushed in, attracted by the melee, and for a few voluble seconds, no intelligent course of action was taken by anybody. Confusion was multiplied by the scathing comments of what had now grown to be more than a dozen spectators, but Anna’s voice had lost the power to speak. Her eyes regarded the ring of Germans with remembered fright.

In a corner the two Americans lit cigarettes, behind which they amusedly watched the show, a show which, one remarked to the other, was better than a three-ring circus. After a few seconds, Herr Meyer announced to all present that he was demanding t his Jewess be locked up as an attempted thief, and the two policemen, having been witnesses themselves, felt that his demand was just. Somebody threw Anna her wad of money, which she had left on the counter, and somebody else made a jeering remark about the noble Jews, which started a chorus of derision aimed in her direction.

The two policemen finally shouldered their way importantly out, holding Anna jealously bv either arm, and they walked her the five blocks to the local jail, debating the whole thing with each other on the way over. Of course, they knew that such “people” were under the protection of the Military Government, that the rough treatment befilling such low thieves might have to be deferred in the light of this consideration. On the other hand, the question of whether Herr Meyer had been truthful about the sale of cloth didn’t, enter their heads. Like everyone else in the shop at the time, they knew he had been lying; like all the others also, they had felt only an amused and sympathetic admiration for the way in which he had carefully nurtured the dialogue along, for his obvious strength of character in deciding to sell only to those he pleased.

Anna was hurried along between the two men, her head whirring, whirring, whirring. She knew what was going to happen. The Germans had her. They would throw her into a cell, leave her for a little while to imagine horrible punishments, and then come down to where she was after it was dark. Then they would begin to torture her. Thinking about this made her so terrified that she was steeling herself to cry out to the first American she saw, but there was none in sight. Just as she had drawn up enough courage to open her mouth and yell anyway, the three of them reached the jail house, and the next moment they were inside, and it was no use.

She was expecting revengeful violence, her mind was a catalogue of possible horrors, but nothing of the sort occurred. All that happened was that she was escorted after registration and search down the hall to a clean, ungruesome-looking cell. The woman attendant escorting her was not brutal, no one cursed her, no one beat her over the head, no damage of any kind was done to her. The recently appointed jail administrator was very sensitive to possible ramifications of this affair. Not until Anna had been left by herself huddled in a corner of the stone cell, realizing that no immediate harm or attack was coming to her, did she begin loudly and hopelessly to cry.

5

SOPHIA, the girl without, a name, was beginning to feel afraid.

Up to the time the light in her room had begun to fade, she had happily continued to exercise her rocking chair with good concentration. Outside her window, the constant chameleon-like metamorphosis of color, the flux of traffic, the motion, the ever new delineations of groups and groupings had been enough to keep her involved in private fantasies, zippered in tight against terror. Not even the random metallic clang of plated heels on cobblestones, the infrequent calls and conversations rising and falling on the stairs, the thousand and one anonymous rustlings and rallies in the house which before had always so convulsed her with abject fear, could make any inroads at first against the armor of countless interesting distractions. When she had first arrived in the town, only a half-hour separation from Anna in broad daylight had been enough to render her horrified and screaming, defenseless against the phantoms and memories of unspeakable barbedwire years; now, as a measure of her rehabilitation, she could placidly spend a whole afternoon free of old ghosts, calm, devoid of hysteria.

But when the square finally began to empty of pedoslrians, when the light itself began to lower and evaporate, Sophia commenced almost immediately to feel the restirrings of her nameless, unutterable terror. For a while she made no outcry; the rocking chair continued to describe its parabola. While the dusk increased, the rhythm of the rocking chair kept quickening, accelerating; the breathing of its occupant became more and more agonized. Finally, on the very crest of a swing, the metronome faltered, slowed, descended, and was still. Sophia searched wildly about for expected torturers; the gloom pressed evilly in upon her, the silence became unbearable. Anna, Anna, her heart begged, where are you, where are you? The question, repeated desperately to the implacable darkness, echoed weirdly away. Hysteria burst through her, electrically sped through her limbs, veins, arteries, left her trembling, cowering; from her lips there burst suddenly a single unanswered scream.

The echoing fragments of her scream came rushing strangely back at her, thunderously magnified and distorted, made more sinister by whatever forces she imagined lay in every facet of shadow, gathering strength and waiting, waiting, waiting. And now the horrible recollection drove back upon her, the nightmare began again. She was all alone; she was in a corner of the camp with a shovel in her hand. A tall impersonal storm trooper approached and he had no body at all, only a tall, oblong, misfocused head out of which small eyes bulged with unspeakable loathing. He was coming nearer, he was just in front of her, his two giant hands reached out to her. Sophia screamed and screamed again. From the now deep obscurity of the room, a hundred replicas of the storm trooper smiled in perfect contemptuous unison; a. hundred hands reached out to do her violence, a hundred mouths spat out the word Jude, accusingly.

At seven o’clock, when the screams had started upstairs, Frau Hochstein had remarked irritatedly to her husband that it was his duty to inform the Burgerntaster of the crazed Jewess in the house. To allow her to stay on would be a violation of good sense, not to say a risk, and people who are crazed should be in institutions, said Frau Hochstein. To this Herr Hochstein had readily enough agreed and mentally marked a place in his mind to speak with the Herr Biirgcrmeister the following Monday about it. Whereupon he had I urned the radio up a little louder, sett led back in his chair, and taken up his copy of t he afternoon Zeitung.

At eight o’clock Fraulein Heffner made a grimace of severe distaste as she left her room on the second floor to go keep a rendezvous with her lover, Rudolf, on the bank of the canal. Such people, Fraulein Heffner was thinking. She never had thought she would ever live in the same house as a Jewess. Well, one had to live and hope for better days, that was all. She felt contaminated after hearing the screams, but outside in the night, air it was better. She hurried her steps away in the direction of the canal.

At nine five, Frau Fuchs was almost ready to go upstairs and try to help quiet that Jewish Fräulein, if for no other reason t han it was making her husband extremely annoyed to listen to her. At this moment he was in a rage, walking around the room and hurling curses on the heads of the two Jewish girls. Of course they were Jews, so it was probably all right to curse them like that, thought Frau Fuchs, but she herself would never do it. In her early days Frau Fuchs had been fairly religious.

By nine twenty-five Herr Huebner, the shoemaker who lived next door, had given up trying to read and had risen in indecision, almost ready to go over there and tell the two Jewesses what he thought of them. Herr Almestein on the first floor, and the old spinster Fräulein Koerner on the second, were of the same exasperated mind and almost ready to intercede.

Somewhere around nine thirty, Sophia gave a sudden start; a terrific pain and spasm had burst in her heart and was mounting swiftly. The weakness of a fever-induced heart condition, aggravated by hysteria and nightmare, had succumbed to her fatal excitement. With no means of amelioration at hand, the spasm had, in a very quick time, magnified and become final. A terrible weakness came upon her, her strength was withered, pain engulfed her, lack of breath became acute, her eyes blurred and closed, a fatal uneven breathing died out through her lips.

Some seconds after nine thirty-one, the heart of Sophia, the girl without a name, stopped beating. For the rest of the evening, the occupants of No. 31 Darfstrasse were able to amuse themselves in peace.

6

THE next morning, on his routine jail inspection, Lieutenant Burgess learned about Anna and what Anna had done To get her unconfined, freed, and absolved was only a matter of a few more minutes. The jail director, of course, was very receptive to what the Herr Leutnant thought, and agreed absolutely. What the Herr Leutnant said was very true, the poor girl was hardly to blame for her present impulsive condition, and it was a shame he hadn’t been around when they had brought her in. He would see that she was released right away, schnell. The matron retracted the bolt, the attendant opened the door, the jail director invited warmly. Anna stumbled out, avoiding the sympathetic eyes of the prison employees, whose tender expressions were not entirely unrelated to the continued presence of Lieutenant Burgess.

Downstairs she was calmed, reassured, interviewed, and encouraged to recount what had happened. Her answers came haltingly. Her mind and body ached with a terrible anxiety. She wanted to run with all her strength to the third-floor room at 31 Darfstrasse where she knew Sophia must be in a tetrified hysterical state. In less than ten minutes the Lieutenant, who was a man of unseeming sensitivity, let her go. The story was simple enough; it was neilher new nor final. Like altercations had happened before; they would certainly happen again. After all, the scattered incidents were only part of a larger syndrome, and the sickness itself was the thing to be concerned about. Lieutenant Burgess lit a cigarette, thoughtfully, forgot to offer one to the prison director, who stood hopefully near, and decided to meander back to his office on foot.

Well, it was unpleasant, but what could be done? thought the Lieutenant, as he walked slowly back. Theoretically the cloth had been sold, and Meyer would see to it that it was sold now, even if he had to buy it all up himself. But didn’t he have the democratic right anyway, of selling to whomever he wanted — that was one of the things the Americans had given him, wasn’t it? demanded the Lieutenant of himself, enjoying the wry little surface irony that for a moment obscured his main feeling. Ah well, the thing was only a little thing. Why bother about it so? Suddenly the image of Anna obliterated his academic detachment.

Goddam it, where can you begin reconciling such people, what kind of reconciliation would make any sense to them? Suppose you stood around just looking for such incidents, what good could you do yourself? thought the Lieutenant. After all, he told himself, the hundreds of thousands of Herr Meyers didn’t have much to do with the planting of the attitudes they now possess. Talking to them at all is like bellowing to mutes — there’s the same irremediable, immutable incomprehension. But what about the hundreds of Annas, the question rose within him, the hundreds plus the hundreds of Annas?

As always, the baffling unanswerability here irritated Lieutenant Burgess beyond patience. The hell with it, he told himself once more futilely. Forget this now, for godsake; there’s nothing you can do about it, the hell with it. His mind reiterated the word most used in his letters home: morass. After all, what can anybody do in such a morass? He switched his mind to his favorite dream, advanced chemical research one day in a big Eastern university, and started up the MG office steps. Although an unusually intelligent and compassionate young man. Lieutenant Burgess had his very definite ideas about beating heads against walls in fruitless bitter self-debate.

Just about the time Lieutenant Burgess reached his office, Anna opened the door to her third-floor room at 31 Darfstrasse and started forward with a sudden knowing shriek.

The funeral was not very large or very long. Of the eleven attending Jews who stood ringed about in a threadbare half circle, all but one were the sole sibling survivors of what once had been large families; all but three were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six. Of the three oldsters, only one gave himself an outside chance for further survival, and that chance hinged on an American relative who so far had left written pleas unanswered. All eleven, of course, had gone through similar patterns of mischance, ordeal, horror, vilification, and suffering beyond hope. In the faces of all, even of the comparatively husky youths who had managed to live as partisans in Czechoslovakia and so to escape the slow atrophy of barbed wire, a selfless mocking repudiation was evident. In all their expressions was a certain unbreakable core of mistrust, suspicion, and disbelief, to be perceived most readily by observing the area of the face around the eyes. Inherent in every voice, as the ancient Hebrew Kaddish, the prayer for the deceased, was intoned, was a wavery shimmer of hysteria.

“ V’yis go dol, V’yis go dash—” the ageless chant went on. Anna’s knees pressed against the earth into which only a few minutes before the body of Sophia, the girl without a name, had been committed. The last day and a half had been extremely harrowing, with the bored indifference of the medical examiner, the hideous false sympathy of the neighbors, the search for a coffin, which finally had to be built by the two former Czech partisans, the vigil by the body, the dark enervating despair. Old Mr. Avramsky, who was leading the prayers, suddenly became rhythmic and pliant in his lament, caught in an increased vocal sorrow. His body swayed like a languid bamboo. From the others a louder chant arose. Anna, having almost drained the fount of her inexhaustible tears, commenced softly again to weep.

The small desecrated Jewish cemetery absorbed and filled with a brilliant late morning sunshine. The sun came down on all of them there; it beat benignly alike on the heads of busy German peasants hurrying past on the street, on American troops ostentatiously flirting with fat healthy babies, on their inviting, approving, husbandless mothers, on the scrubbed sidewalks, the coffered fields, the chickens and vines and plants in scores of prudent German backyards. The little group of mourners finished their prayer, turned, and began to file hesitantly out again onto the street. Cohesively, keeping close together, the eleven liberated allies moved down the street, threading their way through the populous ranks of the beaten, subjugated enemy.