Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

of milk hidden in a cache under a rug that covered a trapdoor over the cellar. She watched helplessly from her corner as they went through everything she owned and had hoped would last her through this historically harsh winter, which, this month being January, promised to last at least another three.

The platoon corporal leaned back in the available chair at the roughhewn table, picking his teeth with a chicken bone from one of the two surviving chickens, as he contemplated the platoons’ next move. He speculated that this hovel would be a good place as any to sleep in that night, though one eye would be kept on the woman and the collection of knives and cleavers hanging over the water pump stand.

A young soldier, not yet growing whiskers but aged by combat, rifled through drawers and cabinets looking for loot that could make their journey to Berlin a bit more comfortable. As he held up items for the corporal to accept or reject, his eyes fell on the wind-up gramophone, easily the nicest piece of furniture in the house, itself from an anonymous Jewish family that was nowhere to be found these days, and so would not no longer have a need of it. Its wooden enclosure had been water strained by a leak through the roof thatching that no husband was around to repair, causing the veneer to warp and peel. While scheming how to turn the gramophone into an item of barter, or to cart back home to Russia, he noticed a picture frame on top holding a photograph of the woman’s husband, looking proud and confident in a Wehrmacht uniform of a corporal.

The mood in the room changed tangibly as the photograph was passed around the men platoon who recognized the soldier’s regiment as one they had fought at Stalingrad, with no sympathy for the black ribbon wrapped around one corner of the frame indicating he died there, perhaps at their hands.

The woman was raped by every soldier, in order of rank, until sunrise, at which point the combat footing part of the war resumed, and they left with all the food, the remaining chicken, a pig and a goat that had wandered in. As the outhouse was destroyed and out of service, the soldiers merely urinated and defecated on the few pieces of furniture in the house, furniture that had witnessed hard times since they were acquired by the Reich from the Jews that disappeared from the village some years ago, and redistributed to the families of soldiers, such as her husband’s. She would now need to burn them for heat.

By the time Ulf was born eight months later, these and a million other Russian soldiers had similarly ransacked all of Germany, and Berlin was divided into sectors by the Allies. Ulf’s entry into the world was as troubled and painful as his existence within it. Writhing in unyielding pain, his mother pushed him out with the umbilical cord wrapped around his throat, depriving his brain of oxygen for a few minutes, until the attending midwife sorted things out.

His mother, whose name Ulf never learned, was unable to receive the nutrients that the ripped portions of her body needed to repair itself, and no surgeon was available to stop the bleeding and infection. She died two years later, leaving Ulf behind as a ward of the state, which in turn, took possession of the farm and contents as payment. By 1965, Ulf’s primary school grades did not qualify him for advancement in the East Germany school system. However, the Workers’ Paradise offered full employment of course, and his ability with a mop and changing lightbulbs qualified him as the superintendent of one of the new apartment buildings made of prefabricated slabs of concrete in Berlin. His habit of leering at residents as they passed by, while leaning on his mop or changing a lightbulb, drew the attention of the Stasi. He learned that regularly reporting conversations, commute hours, and visitors, as well as radio stations listened to, comments made, and books read, earned respect from the Volkspolizei20.

During one such briefing session, during which the State visitors took copious notes on all the residents, an item of furniture appeared on the front steps—a modular bookshelf known as a stenka, extremely popular for holding books, knick-knacks, and for those with privilege to attain one, a television. Ulf did not read, nor was there any chance of buying a television on his monthly stipend, but the status of owning a full-sized stenka made him proud.

After two years of mopping, foyer sweeping, toilet unclogging, window patching, among other tasks, a GDR housing officer arrived to inform him of a promotion. As part of the promise of full employment, another German citizen would be assigned as his understudy. That day, a crippled girl named Halina arrived and took her place in her one-room flat. It was the first time in her life to have a door to close, and her own privacy. Her flat was on the top floor, six flights up, down the hall from a bathroom with indoor plumbing, and, very often, hot water.

Ulf assigned her, with great pride, to what she seemed best suited, cleaning floors and windows. He would leave the door to his flat slightly ajar so he could watch her, on hands and knees, scrub the foyer floor imagining what was underneath her plain cotton frock, wishing he could find a way to show his interest in her. She walked with a limp, did not wear makeup, and made no attempt to coif her hair. She was not attractive, but the number of women willing to visit him in his flat was not large.

He could not sign, and she could not, or would not speak, so her complete lack of feelings for him went unexpressed. He interpreted her frequent appearance on her hands and knees scrubbing the foyer floor as flirtation, instead of her acting on her natural instincts for fastidiousness, and a