1
She only ever came to the shop with a navy wool skirt suit, tailored at an atelier in Paris. The waist needed taking in half an inch. A button re-threading. A clean and press. She couldn’t trust anyone else with it, she said. Often, the repair was so small I suspected she just wanted to be touched, admired. I never asked where she took her other clothes. Perhaps each garment required its own seamstress: There were stranger ways a woman might fill her time. I was happy to indulge the customer’s eccentricities, curious about her in the way I was about most women with money. But Mother wasn’t. The customer was nosy and overfamiliar, frankly a little odd, Mother said, smoothing a pile of folded sheets with a vigor that implied they might fight back. Mother soon found ways to occupy herself when this woman arrived, distractedly waving her in before disappearing without explanation into another room.
Out of Mother’s coldness, I became this woman’s seamstress. Her clothes had an aura of quality that was impossible to ignore, like a cloud of white steam in a cold room. She was no less extraordinary. Tallness and thinness accentuated by a large oval face and hair so fair it appeared colorless. She came from a part of Berlin that wasn’t far on the tram but as distant to me as another country. I had a precise image of her house: four stories filled with tasteful antiques, a foyer large enough for twenty guests, the upper floors still and quiet as dawn at all hours. In a low voice, she recounted trips to cities reached on sleeper trains, what might be bought at this bazaar or eaten at that tavern on the hill where locals congregated like a murmuration of birds and music could be heard late into the night. I began to look forward to her visits. When I had her in the room, I retrieved pins from my workbasket one by one, slowed my sewing hand, made subtle mistakes I would have to correct, all to lengthen her stay. When she left, insisting she wouldn’t be back for months—she would normally telephone the shop a few days later—parts of her remained in the room. A jasmine cologne so strong that I always knew the banknotes that came from her purse. Blackened matches on the floor. A clean monogrammed handkerchief, ironed flat: E.G. Mother called her Frau Grese, but when I began to take care of the suit myself, the customer insisted I call her Elke.
I worked in my parents’ workshop off the Grenadierstrasse. The pressure of the needle between my fingers was as familiar to me as my own breath. I was no longer a child, but I wasn’t a woman either. I was my eyes and my hands, the tension of a thread pulled taut. Years were marked by the garments I made. A waistcoat with tortoiseshell buttons that made whoever wore it stand straighter. A pale pink cotton shirt with frills on the sleeves, high at the neck, the shape of a flower in bloom. Long woolen dresses in shades of plum and brown, plumes of colored smoke. I worked according to the seasons, and moved as a weathervane did toward wool, away from silk, when the nights lengthened. To perfect these simple items was to pledge something to myself about my own life, which deserved attention and tenderness despite its ordinariness.
I made a skirt a woman would wear each day for months, years, repairing and adjusting at a small cost until it finally wore out. This was how I spent time with women without ever really knowing them, how I passed through the city’s rooms I would never otherwise enter. Could you lift your arm, please, I would ask, and turn around, yes, just like that. Women raised their limbs and spun in circles as I crouched at their feet. They asked what colors matched their eyes, what would flatter their figures, invitations to regard them without shame or fear. I steadied my hands and looked. Nothing was so important to me then. This was how I came to know women and their bodies. Through measuring tapes and pins, the fabrics that held them. Through stains, lost buttons, tissues blotted with lipstick. The smell of these garments, fragrance and face powder and sweat, was distinct to each client, eloquent of their interests, their routines. An imprint of their inner life. The scent would linger on my hands after women brought garments in for some small repair, and I made sense of their lives from the notes I knew. On Elke, it was cigarettes, coffee, men’s cologne. On the rest, cooking smells, cold cream, spoiled milk.
Occasionally I saw garments I had made in the streets surrounding the shop. Crossing the Alexanderplatz, lit by sunshine, dampened by rain, they clung to the customer’s flesh. It was like seeing a part of myself living independently of my own body. Jealousy shadowed any pride. These items spent the days with women like Elke, admired but inconspicuous, and knew them more intimately than their husband or maid.
Comments about my age and appearance began the summer after I turned eighteen. Mother would point at men in the street and name them as you might different species of birds. He made forty-eight pfennigs an hour. He owned a shoe store. His apartment was only one room, but it was forty square meters. I responded as though these remarks were intended for someone else. Nodding pleasantly, I would turn the conversation to my drawings. Then it was Mother’s turn to feign ignorance. Soon men began to arrive at the shop, furtively glancing about as Mother maneuvered them into another room. Thin walls betrayed the hushed sound of negotiation. I wondered what Mother would say about me. She works hard and wants very little. A functional worker and wife.
“We have someone in mind for you,” Mother said casually one morning. “Older, but in good health, a widower. He’s a good man. Lives nearby. Your aunt will tell you more.”
It was the first decision I made entirely for myself. I knew where Mother kept the money. Better still, the miscellaneous valuables that constituted my dowry. A pawn shop took everything at a price I didn’t know to argue with. I counted the money in an alleyway, a black wind blowing cold through my blouse. I assumed my rebellion would be brief, a spoiled page I would tear from the ledger, but I was wrong. Rooms were advertised in the local papers, and cheaper lodgings required no references. I went to Wedding to inquire after a shared room in a vast building with wet-faced children pressed against the windows. Three tenants shared one bed, and as the other girls worked nights and slept through the days, I would have the privilege of six hours alone on a mattress with a threadbare blanket. This was unappealing but appeared to be all I could afford. I had almost given up when I noticed an advertisement for a room in an apartment in Schöneberg, half the price of others like it, promising modern amenities and home-cooked meals. It had its own telephone, a detail unusual enough that the landlady would repeat it with pride in her subsequent letter. I signed any correspondence with a family name that wasn’t my own. Schmidt: the desirable Christian tenant. The landlady told me the room was mine if I wanted it. I calmly packed my bag. I finished my garments for the week and slipped out of the house while it was still dark one morning. Once the birds began rustling in the trees, I knew everyone would be awake. Mother’s old shoes pinched at my toes, outraged at the betrayal. I tried not to think about how the following week’s mending would get done. Whose hands would replace mine.
At first, every woman in the city was Mother. She appeared on street corners, wavered on the curb as cars rushed by. I could walk for miles like that, meeting Mother’s gaze at the exact moment the resemblance disappeared. In bars she was loud and convivial, and in parks she was languid on the grass, detaching cherries from their stems with her teeth. I waited to be discovered. Three mothers in the grocer’s inspected fruit for bruises. Ten checked their watches at the U-Bahn station. I surrendered myself to Mother, but when another stranger stared back at me, I wasn’t always relieved.
I belonged to nobody. Mother never sought me out. Mother accepted my departure as she did the whims of a stray cat. One month became six. I cut my hair. I drank cheap wine. I slept soundly at night. I had everything I needed. There was nothing for me to fear.
2
The shine of the kettle, a lit stove, discolored Venetian blinds. Patterned rugs worn at their edges, the apartment’s aging skin. A cot with freshly laundered sheets, a sink that produced brown water from its tap. Drinkable, the landlady claimed. My sewing machine like a small animal in the corner. Lamps in the hallway that never gave off much light. A mirror with a sullen, distorted surface that cut me off at the ankles. A cupboard with a loose door into which I put the few possessions I had brought from home. After a few nights, the hinge succumbed to rot.
The landlady insisted on being called by her given name, Olga. When addressed as Frau, which I did automatically those first few days, making practical inquiries about water and heat, she startled. I must call her Olga: She wasn’t a cantankerous old woman. Her tone was sharp, her nostrils huge and black. She was small, her smallness accentuated by rounded shoulders and a short back. She seemed designed to take up as little space as possible, as though reared to make her living like this. I told Olga that I was a seamstress. This was very fortunate, Olga said, because she had garments she needed repaired, and hadn’t the time to trawl through the newspaper to find a woman she trusted. Before I had a chance to respond, she took my hand and pulled me into her bedroom. A tiny, tinselly box that released a fume of cheap powdered cosmetics, rose water, and brandy. It was the same smell as the rest of the apartment, but denser, sealed by the tar-colored draft excluder under the door, and two small, permanently latched windows. Below a huge mahogany wardrobe, a cot arrayed in white bedclothes, more suitable for a child and dressed as though for its christening. Olga fussed with the contents of a drawer as she spoke. This was a habit of hers, I would later discover, a tireless domestic conscientiousness that meant she was always doing two things at once, even useless tasks that were merely for show. She said she was willing to adjust my rent in line with any mending she might need. I hadn’t considered how I would fill the days that comprised my new freedom. She gave me an encouraging look. I glanced down at my hands as though seeking their consent. I said yes.
Yellowed petticoats with a stale odor. Dresses eaten by moths. Could silk shrink in sympathy with the body it housed? Olga carefully handed over her charges. “I paid a tremendous amount for this, bought it for the buttons, real pearl.” Comments directed at the garments, not me. The air shimmered with particles of dust. I coughed behind my hand.
“You aren’t sick, are you?” Olga said. “The last girl was. She couldn’t work. Wouldn’t pay her rent. Lay in her bedroom all day with a handkerchief pressed over her mouth and the curtains drawn. I had to get rid of her.”
I learned to dress lightly for half an hour in the hot dining room, eating oily goulashes from sturdy floral dishes on a spotless tablecloth. Olga scrubbed the three in circulation with feeling, in grave silence, her forearms tensed. She was either diminutive in an armchair or bolt upright, as an ironing board had only two positions. A dour blue dress replaced a black tunic worn during the day, neither garment revealing anything about the shape of her body. She told me her husband and son had been killed at war as casually as she told me the names of the upstairs neighbors. I gathered that the information had been spent of all emotion. These men were phantoms who might be glimpsed moving through the apartment like moths at twilight, if you only knew where to look. The enormous winter coat Olga wore with buttons on its right side. Dim photographs in gilt frames that seemed to recede, as memories did, behind the mantelpiece’s clutter. Rings on her fingers that featured delicate brown plaits of hair studded with floral ornaments, and because they had always been so alike, Olga said, she no longer remembered which belonged to Otto and which to her boy. She knocked on my door much earlier than dinner had been served at home, often when it was still light. I was positioned in a chair opposite her own. I learned to appear receptive to conversation while really thinking about how charcoal pressed hard onto the sheet might capture the solidity of the jug Olga had set down upon the table. The other lodger, Maria, sat with her chair pulled up close to Olga, as though they required each other’s help in cutting up and consuming their food. Maria had a large, beautiful face with permanently overtired eyes and a voice whose volume she was unable to control, always pitching her speech loud enough to address a crowded room. She told me she was twenty-seven, but she looked as young as me because of her clothes and makeup and hair, all immaculate, fashionable, lifted from the magazines she left lying around the lounge.
“We’re very lucky to have Olga,” Maria said in our first conversation, within earshot of Olga, smiling wide enough that I could see all her little teeth. “She isn’t a tired old spinster with nothing to do but pry. You know the type. Steaming open your letters just to entertain herself.”
Olga’s apparent lack of curiosity about our lives suited Maria, whose door slammed at odd hours, often accompanied by a second set of heavier footsteps. A man with small red eyes emerged from the bathroom as I attempted to enter it one morning. He wore a short silk dressing gown untied at the waist. I looked closely before affecting embarrassment and returning to my room. I already knew he was there; I always did. Men’s breath and sweat traveled through the thin partition between our bedrooms and alerted me to their presence as surely as though they had been introduced. Olga never mentioned any of this, nor registered it in her treatment of Maria, despite solemnly telling me when I arrived that there was a strict policy against male visitors. “This is a respectable house,” she said, saying each word extremely slowly as though to allow time for the statement’s full meaning to assert itself.
Maria made a fuss of Olga; that seemed to be the reason for her exemption from the rules. Maria watched Olga’s cigarette diminish, and when she was ready for another, lit a new one in her own mouth. Whenever I entered the room, they were always talking urgently as though the evening was coming to an end and they were parting for good. On my second night, Maria listened intently as Olga recounted her childhood dream to become a doctor. Maria began to scowl long before Olga described her father’s suppression of her university ambitions, clearly aware of the story’s arc. In defiance of her father’s small-mindedness, Olga now read medical textbooks with the absorption of romantic novels. Occasionally I found Maria reading aloud to Olga from some obscure pamphlet about venereal disease with a theatrical emphasis that suggested a story with a plot. Reams of notes in Olga’s neat cursive were put into files piled high in the corner of her bedroom. On Sunday afternoons, on her hands and knees surrounded by her research, Olga prepared what she referred to simply as “my book.” Afterward, she made a show of her mental exhaustion, and played the patriarch returned from work, slumped in an armchair waiting to be served sandwiches she had prepared herself earlier in the day.
It didn’t take long for me to reveal my own ambitions to Olga. “That looks nothing like me,” she exclaimed, with a warmth that made me glad I’d tried. She was interested in why my attempts had failed. I should look at her medical textbooks, she said. Because the color and form of the body were determined by its interior, the seen by the unseen. I read late into the night, as a liquid darkness steadily filled the room to its brim. Sentences were underlined, at times more than once. The margins bristled with illegible commentary. Diagrams of sex organs were annotated with an additional slip of ruled paper in an incomprehensible shorthand. A dissection of the skull, an analysis of men’s and women’s heads with a hierarchy of differences, was laid out across several figures arranged side by side. I never examined any of it closely. Its intensity assumed privacy. After a time, I almost ceased to see the marginalia. I went to Olga with my pencil drawings of feet, their muscles and ligaments, and her comments were full of words I recognized from mother, from the shop. Tissue. Cords. Elastic.
“I know a woman who paints,” Olga announced one evening. She was still ladling food onto our plates. Her tone suggested she couldn’t wait to relay the news.
“Would I know her work?” I asked.
“Oh, no. She isn’t interested in selling them.” The question seemed to bewilder Olga. She removed her spectacles to reveal eyes glazed over in thought. “She paints her house, and who would want a picture of another woman’s house?”
She seemed pleased with this analysis. Her hands beckoned us to eat.
“Most paintings depict things that belong to other people,” I said. “That’s partly what makes them interesting.”
“The houses in Prenzlauer Berg are very attractive, of course.” Olga smiled. She was either unmoved by my argument, or not listening.
“Artists tend to be rather strange people, don’t they?” Maria said, turning to me. “Apparently, women painters are often indistinguishable from men. In their looks and in their manner. Because it’s a male pursuit.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, not looking up from my plate. “I don’t know any artists.”
“Women think differently to men,” Olga said pleasantly, like this didn’t pertain to any of us. “Just as a man’s fist is larger and stronger than a woman’s, so it is with their brains. The same is true throughout the animal kingdom. I’ve read the Englishman Darwin.”
“I heard that they’re mostly unmarried,” Maria interrupted. “Women who paint.”
Olga cheerfully waved this comment away.
“Frau Vogt says painting is more interesting than needlework. You see, she’s alone in the evenings. She has her children. But they aren’t good company until they’re older. And her husband works a lot.”
The conversation ticked on. I listened half-heartedly. I didn’t want to paint to give an empty life the illusion of meaning. I wanted my work to enter the body of those who regarded it, as air was brought into the lungs. A drawing that didn’t just hint at emotion, burying it under demonstrations of technique, but could instead produce that emotion, become that emotion. I did not say any of this, but not out of shyness. The sensation felt closer to greed.
I poured myself a large measure of brandy and took my plate into the kitchen. I fought the urge to fling my leftovers against the wall. I drained the glass just as Maria walked in.
“The other girls weren’t like you. Hardly ever left their rooms.” She paused to stack her plate under mine, and slowly wiped her hands with a napkin. “Unable to express a single interesting thought about anything. They were like children, eating their meals in silence. Trembling when spoken to.” She raised her empty glass in my direction and winked. “I think we should have a little more.”
* * *
I quickly settled into a routine that first spring. I sewed by candlelight while Olga and Maria shuffled around the surrounding rooms, water moving musically through the pipes. I slept with the curtains drawn back and woke early with the birds. I made myself a blue jacket with a lining of yellow and purple stripes, a pocket for my pencils, hair pins, and a small spiral-bound pad. I borrowed Olga’s unused bicycle and rode around the parts of the city that hadn’t existed to me only months earlier. My services were recommended to others, and although I didn’t earn much, it was more than I had ever been given in the shop. I could discard the clothes that made me resemble Mother. I pushed the dark dresses to the back of my wardrobe and understood that everything from my former life was like this: useless and ugly but easily forgotten about.
I no longer kept vigil over the embers of childhood. The envelopes received from the front that Mother wouldn’t let us read: Dear Ruth, one began, I don’t sleep. A cut of meat small enough to fit into the pocket of a child’s coat, divided between four, the hunger that gnawed at us through the night. The elderly man with thinning pomaded hair who had Mother iron shirts stained yellow at the pits, who brought us soap and butter the second winter of the war. How my brothers had argued over whether a sewing needle alone could end another soldier’s life.
When I had money left over at the end of the month, I bought secondhand books about art with decrepit binding. Cold cuts from the butcher in a white box tied with string. Double features in the cinema across the street. Three sugar cubes in a cup of coffee at a nearby café. Maria insisted she would eventually teach me to swim, but I didn’t mind just watching her in the water at the Strandbad Wannsee, admiring as a nursemaid. Reunited with Olga in the evenings, we would read novels as the gramophone hummed, Olga distractedly singing stray words. Maria and I began doing more together. She was often in the apartment engaged in tasks designed to draw comment. I presumed the letters Maria fed into the fire were from men, only because their appearance put her in a philosophical mood. Afterward, she would climb into bed and talk about love. What you let men do, what you didn’t. How to get meals and clothes and cash while giving them nothing in return. What they would want from your body, what you would want in theirs. Her letters, some from men, others from women, were read aloud, slowly and impersonally, so I might learn their language of seduction and refusal.
Quickly we became inseparable. Maria’s gramophone played throughout the afternoon, our voices loud underneath it. Trying on lipstick, brushing each other’s hair. We didn’t need men to bribe us with stockings or chocolates, Maria said, if we bought them for each other. Our friendship was conducted entirely in the present tense, with neither of us mentioning how or why we had ended up with Olga. We promised to remain in the apartment forever, and I imagined us at Olga’s age in those very rooms rearing a pair of young women of our own.
At first, I never quite shook the feeling that I shouldn’t be there, that Mother needed me. I dreamed about garments, and my hands ached when I woke. But I let go of this fear so gradually I didn’t notice when it departed for good. That summer a space opened in me for something else. I held a pencil up to the light. A sheet of paper laid flat on a desk. Birds chirruping through an open window, the sky white before it was blue. Maria dozing in the adjoining room. I drew what moved me. Gradually filling the emptiness, the same risks repeated on every page. Each mark a spark of feeling. A good line could feel like that, a match being struck.
3
Once the run on the banks began, my fees were bartered so low the jobs hardly felt worthwhile. Work I had picked up at the Manheimer department store stopped when it folded. The other shop I relied upon, N. Israel, didn’t need me either. I saw the same women at all the big department stores asking after spots in the workroom. Some carried infants on their hips to underscore their need. The city’s seamstresses were pigeons waiting to fight it out over a handful of stale breadcrumbs. One sent me the number for a brothel madam, another claimed she had become adept at picking pockets. “No use wasting these hands,” she said. Olga began to make panicked requests for more rent. Purposefully loud conversations with her sister suggested she might clear out the storeroom for another lodger, or even give up her own room and set up a cot for herself in the lounge. Like the family dog, she repeated. A grown-up niece who had sent her ten marks a month for many years could no longer afford to, and we never heard the end of it. I pawned my fur coat, a gift from my parents, unsure whether I would ever get it back. I sold all my better clothes to men who traded in secondhand garments who I hoped hadn’t taken pity on me because they recognized me from the neighborhood.
It was out of desperation that I first thought of Elke Grese. I looked through the almost empty address book I had brought from home, and there she was, the only customer who visited so often that she had earned a place among my aunts and uncles. I asked for Olga’s permission to call the number as I lifted the telephone to my ear. From another room she replied in a hoarse voice that only on the condition that I wasn’t calling any men.
I told the maid who answered that my name was Hannah, that I was Frau Grese’s seamstress, and waited.
“I thought you had abandoned me,” Elke said as soon as she got on the line. Her tone was playful, as though carried over from a conversation with someone she knew better.
“You remember me?”
“Of course.”
I had prepared to convince her of our past acquaintance. I felt my face grow hot and briefly took the receiver away from my cheek. I noticed Olga stood barely at arm’s length away from me, not so much eavesdropping as participating in a conversation it was her right to join.
“Your mother was angry when you left. She gave me to your brother, but I’d rather have a woman—and she seemed unwilling to do it herself. I’ve tried a few other seamstresses. They weren’t as good as you.”
I gave her my new address and we agreed she would come over the following day with several items to clean and mend. Over dinner, half listening to Olga present her latest findings on hereditary diseases, I let myself think about Elke. She was warmer, almost conspiratorial. Perhaps I would laugh again with Elke about Mother’s willfulness. I remembered Elke’s expression in the shop as I pinned the skirt tighter, smiling disinterestedly at her reflection in the mirror like she was admiring a mannequin in a shop window.
I took a long time getting ready the next morning. My only nice clothes were borrowed from Maria, and I rarely had cause to wear them. This seemed the right occasion to struggle into a dress I had never worn outside my room. The silk was thin and slippery and tingled as it moved over my body. Olga insisted on meeting customers on the grounds that she wouldn’t have any men or odd characters in her apartment. As I waited in the lounge, I sensed the dress arouse her suspicion. The doorbell rang a full fifteen minutes before the agreed time.
When I met Elke at the door, she raised her cheek to be kissed. This wasn’t our usual greeting. I liked its implication: We were friends. I leaned down and lightly pressed my mouth against her skin. When I withdrew, Elke frowned.
“You took my rouge with you,” she said. A square of silk appeared and was dabbed in a circular motion near my lips. “There, it’s gone.” It all happened so quickly, I only realized I had stopped breathing once she had breezed past me up the stairs.
Olga was visibly taken aback by Elke, who was older and more finely dressed than anyone I had ever introduced before. I could sense her recalibrating the matronly act she put on naturally with other women of my age.
“I’m very selective about who lives here,” Olga said. “Nobody ever leaves unless it’s to marry. My sister says I should start a finishing school. They’re all very good girls.”
“I see that,” Elke said, her hand on my shoulder. I was still thinking about the square of silk in her pocket, soiled by my mouth and her skin. Elke surveyed Olga and, with an opaque smile, the surrounding rooms. “Shall we?” she said to me.
I shut the door to my room. “She’s a little overbearing, but she has a good heart.”
“I assumed you would live in one of those airless courtyard apartments,” she said. “This is much nicer.” She looked around the bedroom, her lips pursed. “I went straight from my family’s home into marriage. Women have a lot more freedom these days. I might have liked it myself.”
I received this comment as a deeply personal compliment. I nodded in agreement with all of it, my luck as the recipient of this freedom, and her own right, should she want it, to that freedom herself.
“The skirt needs adjusting?” I asked. She was wearing the familiar navy-blue suit.
It was easy to return to the choreography of seamstress and customer. I held her body in the indifferent way I always had, but found I noticed new details. There was a slight bend in her posture, a supplication that only emerged when I touched her, and the response was immediate, automatic, like a long exhale of breath. Her bones were prominent and hard but didn’t give the impression of frailty. I had a vision of metal bars moving against metal plates, a perfectible machine. I was wondering whether taking the skirt in another half an inch would cut into her hip bones when I heard her ask a question.
“If you don’t mind my asking, why did you leave?”
She took a breath as I began to fix the pins in place. The button at the waistband bit at her navel through her slip. Her body was warm underneath her clothes. The silk of my dress slid over my thighs and tickled my knees when I moved. The pins were cold and hard between my tongue and front teeth. More sensation, more feeling: That was why I left. I would be careful who I confessed this to, I decided. I watched our reflections in the mirror. A woman kneels at the feet of another. Tense and hierarchical, that was how we appeared. But that wasn’t how it felt. Elke made a small noise of contentment.
“Your mother said it was sudden,” she added. “You weren’t in any trouble, were you?”
“Oh, Mother wanted me to get married,” I said.
“Not an unreasonable wish for a mother,” she replied.
I hesitated. I added in a smaller voice that I was training to become an artist. Not at any school, but from books. That was why I couldn’t marry.
This comment appeared to touch a spring within Elke. Gently she moved my hand off her skirt.
“Leonardo received no formal education,” she said. “Once he was apprenticed, he learned so quickly he outpaced his master within months. His earliest work was so extraordinary, del Verrocchio vowed he would never paint again.”
I blushed. Training had been too grandiose a word. I opened my mouth to correct myself.
“You should try sitting down in it,” I said instead, pointing at the waistband of her skirt.
“I learned that from my governess. Renaissance Italy was her great passion. A fascinating woman. Dead for close to fifteen years, but I think about her every day. She took us to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum once a week until my brothers left home.”
I paused.
“The skirt will only take me a few hours.”
“Have you been there yourself?”
I shook my head.
“You might find it interesting.” She smiled at me. “And you’re right not to marry just yet. I’m sure your mother will understand that eventually.”
I watched Elke leave from the window of my bedroom. I had kissed her again on the cheek as she left, this time only miming contact, and she had laughed like this was an established joke between us. Customers treated me like an object, functional but dull and fungible, a dishcloth that could be forgotten about when it wasn’t in use. I wasn’t acquainted with interest, friendliness. I couldn’t risk assuming it would always be like this between us. Precarious, that was how her attention felt.
“Very fine-looking woman,” Olga said as I passed the lounge. “Where do you suppose her family made their money?”
The next day, Elke collected her skirt. I found myself thinking about what she had done in the hours since our last meeting. I pictured her bent over a bureau writing letters by lamplight, passing a silver spoon through a bowl of soup, her mind elsewhere.
She was talking again about her governess as she counted out the last of the pfennigs, her long white fingers detailed with gold rings. She then reached into her handbag and took out a package wrapped in patterned paper. It was for me, she said. I waited until she left to open it. A book on Michelangelo, worn at its edges, the pages fattened by damp. On the title page she had written: The artist invents what the seamstress merely serves. Your friend, E.G. I was so thrilled that I left the mending I had that day and went for a walk. Elke had seen something in me: I was more than Mother or Olga thought. When I arrived, I saw that I had gone automatically, as though moved by a hand across a board, to the gates of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.
Copyright © 2026 by Rebecca Birrell
