The frost in October 1931 had a way of biting through the soles of cheap boots, turning the soles of Franziska’s feet into blocks of numb wood. She was nineteen, her knuckles were raw and chapped like cracked porcelain, and her stomach was a perpetual, hollow ache that no amount of boiled potato water could soothe. She sat in the wooden shack near the gate of St. Marx, the smell of damp earth and rotting autumn leaves clinging to her woolen shawl like a shroud.
She was not there for the ghosts. She was there for the four schillings a night, a wage the cemetery board paid because no man wanted to guard a place where the dead were so casually crowded together. The city outside the walls was starving in elegant silence; inside St. Marx the hunger was at least honest. It didn’t pretend to be anything else.
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