“Mother likes hearing about your promotions. Maybe you could tell her more about your work.”
“She just likes to keep an eye on my career because she’s afraid one of these days, I’ll be powerful enough to get her back for her meddling.”
“Karl! You wouldn’t!”
“Of course not, darling,” Karl replied smoothly. “Of course not.”
Elspeth gave Karl a baleful look, then stood and walked over to the door. “She said she’d join us for a drink. I wonder . . . Oh, there you are!”
Frau von dem Bach swept down the steps and into the sitting room as if into a grand reception. She kissed Elspeth on the cheek, gestured toward Peter for a cognac, then seated herself, saying, “Don’t bother to stand, Karl.”
“Didn’t even cross my mind,” Karl replied, settling deeper into his armchair, and gesturing to Peter to get him another cigarette. “In fact, that is just one more positive benefit of our revolution, no more of this silly class nonsense.”
“Oh,” Frau von dem Bach replied, eyeing Peter smugly.
“Peter, lower the shutters!” Elspeth snapped testily. “Do I have to tell you everything?”
“Yes,” Karl continued,“we’ve recognized the superiority of all Germans as the Aryan nobility and we no longer look down on those who work. It did not go far enough though. We really need even more fundamental changes.”
“How so?” Frau von dem Bach asked without interest.
“We should have cleaned house more efficiently. We got rid of the damn Jews and all those other troublesome types—the Communists, the religious zealots, the foreigners, you know . . .”
“Uh-huh.”
“But we should have cleaned out the aristocrats as well. Wiped out the goddamned gentry and the intelligentsia! Just like we did in Poland.”
Both Elspeth and her mother looked at him aghast. “Karl! What are you saying?” Elspeth asked in horror.
“I think, dear, he’s forgotten that we are all good Germans as well,” Frau von dem Bach commented as she accepted the cognac from Peter.
“Oh, I only meant the troublesome ones,” Karl soothed unconvincingly. He downed his whiskey in a gulp.
“No, you clearly said ‘like in Poland,’ ” Frau von dem Bach reminded him, sipping her cognac. “If I remember correctly, it was decided that they were all troublesome—the Polish gentry was exterminated nearly without exception.”
“That’s because they thought they were noble, but there is only one Herrenvolk, and that is the Germans!”
“If all Germans are the natural nobility of the Aryan races, then how can there be a German nobility?” Frau von dem Bach asked pointedly.
“There can’t!” Karl sneered. “We should have followed Stalin’s lead on that. He purged Soviet society of its disloyal elements very efficiently. The kulaks certainly learned their lesson.” Karl smiled to himself and added quite admiringly, “Seven million disloyal Ruthenians in one single terror famine. Seven million and the world hardly blinked! You’ve got to admire the guy. Now that’s a way to keep order!”
“Since when do we take lessons from the Communists?” Frau von dem Bach asked archly.
“Since they have the right idea!” Karl slammed his fist on the end table.
Elspeth interrupted, “Peter—refill our drinks! Can’t you see Herr Vogel’s is empty? And top mine up.”
“Ah, I do so like Mozart,” Frau von dem Bach commented, obviously following-Elspeth’s lead and trying to change the subject.
“I don’t care for all that highfalutin crap music. Who wants to hear it anyway?” Karl snarled, then gulped down the whiskey Peter had just poured and motioned for another.
“Karl, dear,” Elspeth soothed, “it’s what’s playing on the television now. Don’t you hear it? Don’t you like it? I thought you liked this station in the evening.”
“Oh, that, yeah, yeah. What I meant was . . . Yeah, I like it, I just don’t know the stupid names. Isn’t it enough to listen? Who needs the names of this stuff.”
“Yes, that’s quite observant of you,” Frau von dem Bach cooed, “certainly one can enjoy the essential beauty of the music without knowing the composer.”
“Damn right!” Karl snapped. “After all, knowing the names of all those composers and that sort of crap didn’t help that traitor down the street, now did it?”
“What?” Frau von dem Bach looked to Elspeth for clarification.
“I think my husband is referring to our neighbor. He was a very cultured man. A real gentleman. Loved his books, had a vast collection of music. Anyway,last month, his son turned him in for listening to illegal broadcasts. He’s in prison now. Or at least that’s the last we heard.”
“His son? His very own son?”
“Yes, sad, isn’t it?” Elspeth agreed reluctantly.
“I can’t imagine one’s own child doing something so horrid!”
“Mother, it was for the state.”
“Still, children owe their parents loyalty.”
“I suppose . . .” Elspeth fell uncomfortably silent.
“There’s even a famous quote about ungrateful children,” Frau von dem Bach remarked pointedly.
“You mean, ‘A disloyal child is sharper than a serpent’s tooth,’ ” Karl asserted pompously. “It’s Goethe!”
Frau von dem Bach looked at Karl as if deciding what to say. Elspeth bit her lip nervously.
“ ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, to have a thankless child,’ ” Peter quoted quietly in English from where he was standing. He realized, too late, that he had spoken aloud. Frau von dem Bach nodded slightly; Karl and Elspeth stared at him nonplussed. He translated for them, then added, “It’s from Shakespeare. King Lear.”
The silence was deafening. Elspeth sat stock-still. Frau von dem Bach glanced curiously from Peter to Karl and back again as if, heretically, comparing their intellectual capabilities. Karl ground out his cigarette, stood, and walked over to Peter.
Peter met Karl’s glare with an even expression. “I just thought mein Herr might like to know,” he said, aware that Karl was already so furious that there was no point in apologizing.
“You self-satisfied, arrogant little worm!” Karl hissed in a cloud of alcohol. “You think you’re so damn intelligent, don’t you! You think you’re better than me, don’t you, you swine. Well, I’ll show you how useful all that learning is. I’ll show you who’s better here. You’ll regret those words!”
“I already do,” Peter replied truthfully.
“Karl, Karl,” Frau von dem Bach interrupted. “Your class is showing, Karl. Leave him alone. Come, sit down, join civilization. He was right, after all.”
Karl spun to face her, nearly losing his balance. He glowered at the women, but was unable to summon up any appropriate words.
“Darling,” Elspeth interjected softly, “please. We’re having a nice chat. Just forget it. Please?”
Karl took a deep breath. He looked from one woman to the other. Finally he said, “I’m going out.” He turned back toward Peter and mouthed, so that the women could not see him, Later.
After he left the room, Elspeth sighed and shook her head. There was a moment of awkward silence, then Elspeth ventured, “Perhaps you’d like some tea?”
“Child, how in the world—”
“Mother, he is my husband. I will not hear a word against him in this house!”
“I’m not trying to break up your marriage, dear. God knows with seven children you don’t need that! But really, Elspeth, how do you put up with such nonsense!”
“Oh, he didn’t mean anything by that.” Elspeth nodded her head toward Peter.“He wasn’t going to hurt him.”
“That’s not what I meant!”
“What then?”
“His comments about our people.”
“Our people? I left that all behind when I married Karl. You and Daddy saw to that,” Elspeth retorted bitterly.
“Elspeth! He was talking about murder! Haven’t you an
y idea?”
“He was exaggerating.”
“He said ‘wipe them all out’!”
“Oh, that was referring to the Poles.”
“Elspeth,” Frau von dem Bach’s voice grew soft, “you don’t know much about what went on then. Maybe we should have told you more, but we were afraid.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you know—we lost friends. Relatives even!”
“Relatives? How could we lose relatives? They were Slavs! They’re not like us! They are a different race, an inferior race!”
“Borders, child, are lines drawn on a map. As a class, most of us mixed freely, visited each other’s estates, married. Our names reflected chance histories; our language . . . well, we preferred French.” Frau von dem Bach glanced at Peter and muttered, “And now it is the servants who speak more than one language.”
“Decadence,” Elspeth declared.
Frau von dem Bach chose to ignore her. “I can still remember my mother and father finding out about all that went on there. They were horrified to learn that belonging to a landowning, educated class was equivalent to a death sentence in German-occupied Poland!”
“It was always part of Germany,” Elspeth corrected. “We took back what was ours.”
Frau von dem Bach was undeterred. “Of course, some saved themselves by proving they were, after all, ethnically German— Volksdeutsch —but still there were those brave, romantic souls who refused on principle, or those who had uncooperative officials handling their case, or those who were swept away in the firestorm before they could even react. Oh, it was terrible! Whole noble families wiped out! Those whom the Nazis didn’t kill, the Soviets liquidated by executing en masse in their anonymous forests or by sending to their deaths in Siberia.”
“You are not comparing us with those Communist beasts are you?”
“For my parents, your grandparents, it was rather too close for comfort, but then it was too late for them to withdraw their support from the regime—yousee, they had made quite a profit out of it. So they were obliged to accept the slaughter as an unfortunate fait accompli.”
Elspeth yawned.
“Don’t you see?” Frau von dem Bach pleaded. “But for an arbitrary border, barely twenty years old, it could have been us!”
“Nonsense.”
“They were destroyed for their class! It was class that mattered. It still does. Your husband and his ilk despise us as a class! You watch, they’re going to try and destroy us!”
“Oh, Mother, don’t fret. Germans are the natural master race; the Führer won’t ever allow harm to come to us. Now that we’ve purified the land, we can live in everlasting peace.”
Frau von dem Bach grimaced with frustration. Patiently she said, “The question, Elspeth, is who will be considered polluted next? You don’t realize how many Germans were slaughtered to make way for your New Order. Look at how many Jews fought for the Fatherland in the Great War. Look at how many ran industries which kept our economy on the cutting edge!”
“They weren’t proper Germans.”
“One day, my dear, you might wake up to find you’re not a ‘proper German’ either.”
“Nonsense, I’m completely loyal! I do wish you’d stop talking such rot. Especially in front of . . .” Elspeth nodded her head at Peter as though not invoking his name would be sufficient to prevent him from understanding all that had gone before.
Frau von dem Bach said something in French, which he guessed, using what little he knew, meant that they could always speak in a language he did not understand. Elspeth looked completely blank and he bit his lip to keep from laughing.
Frau von dem Bach rolled her eyes in exasperation, then she addressed him directly in German: “Get me another cognac—a really large one.”
After the women retired for the night, Peter cleared up the drink glasses and finished his other work from the day. He then went into the cellar and looked at his supplies. There was a bit of sausage left; he sniffed it and wrinkled his nose in distaste. It was hard keeping meat during the summer months: even the coolness of the cellar was insufficient to prevent rot. He wiped off the mold and decided to boil the meat for a while. He knew he had plenty of time since Karl would not be back until very late and he was obliged to stay up until then.
Once the meat had boiled, he inspected the greasy water and decided it would serve as a reasonable base for soup the next day. No point wasting all those wonderful globs of fat—the calories were precious. He decided to prepare the soup then and there since he had the time, and he chopped some onions, acarrot, and a bit of cabbage and even diced up some of the meat to add to it. He was running low on salt and decided to pilfer some from Elspeth’s pantry. While he was at it, he decided to borrow a few spices and a bit of barley as well. That would give the soup some flavor and body. It was a good time to pilfer—what with Frau von dem Bach in the house, Elspeth was too distracted to notice such things.
After he had added the extra ingredients, he set the coil to its lowest setting and went upstairs to eat his meal in the relative comfort of the kitchen. When he was finished, he returned to the cellar, turned off the coil, and covered the soup. A rat ventured out from the shadows, and without thinking, he killed it by slamming the edge of his heel on its neck. Grasping it by the tail, he picked it up and spent a moment contemplating it. They must be edible, he thought; certainly cats eat them. The rat swung unappetizingly back and forth, blood filling its mouth. Of course, it would have to be cooked thoroughly. Really thoroughly. Some sort of recipe was lurking in the back of his head—something he had heard in his youth. Scald it, then use cold water, then defur and gut the thing. Then something about soaking it in brine and spices. Hammer the muscles into steaks, dry for a day, and then cook.
The rat continued to swing, ticktock, ticktock. Probably his method of execution had sprayed the rodent’s guts throughout its body: it was probably totally inedible. And, he decided with a smile, he wasn’t that hungry yet. Maybe in a year or so he would establish a rodent-meat assembly line: little rat steaks hanging out to dry in the cellar. Wouldn’t Elspeth be horrified! It would be worth doing just to see her expression. He went up the steps and tossed the cadaver into the back garden. It was too risky stepping outside at night; he would bury it tomorrow. He returned to the cellar, spent a few minutes washing and shaving, and then decided he should probably return to the ground floor. It was one o’clock in the morning—Karl might well be back soon. He rubbed his face in irritation: he was tired and had to get up in a few hours to fetch the morning bread, but he could not go to sleep until Karl returned home.
Upstairs, he opened the front door and looked out into the well-lit night. Still no sign of Karl. The air was warm and humid, and the division between inside and outside seemed obscured; it all looked so normal, so peaceful. It struck him as odd that if he walked out the door and into the street, he could be arrested or shot; it was past curfew, and nothing but an emergency could explain his presence out of doors. It had been that way all his life: always some boundary, always some curfew. He closed the door and went to the drinks cabinet. He had carefully obscured Elspeth’s view when he had put the whiskey away so she would not know how low the bottle was, at least not until she had a chance to check when her mother was not around. Since she was a great believer in the power of locks, he could usually pull out a shot or two with no problem; now, with her mother visiting, he estimated that he could easily pour a tumbler without hernoticing. He pulled out his pick and opened the lock and, pouring some whiskey into a glass, drank it down in several gulps. It felt good going down, burning him with the sensation of a genuine life. He poured more and, keeping his ears open for Karl, savored it. When he finished, he rinsed and replaced the glass, then went into the hall and sat down on the floor near the door so he could hear Karl arrive.
He felt quite worried about what Karl would do to him since their little interchange that evening. He wished that the ladies had let Karl take w
hatever revenge he needed then and there, in the sure knowledge that Karl would have controlled himself in their presence. Now, however, he was not sure what to expect. From his position on the floor, he reached up to the little hall table, the one with all of Elspeth’s stupid glass figurines, the ones that needed to be cleaned all the time, and opened the cigarette box and grabbed one. She usually counted them, but again, with her mother in the house, he doubted she would be able to keep track of each and every one. He grabbed the little crystal lighter that sat next to the box and lit the cigarette.
He inhaled deeply, listening carefully for Karl as he took what pleasure he could from the cigarette, but he need not have worried as Karl did not return until nearly four. He awoke from a deep sleep when he heard the car door slam and only managed to get up just in time to open the door. Karl staggered in, nodded toward the cigarettes, and Peter nervously lit one for him. Karl blew a stream of smoke into Peter’s face and then told him to fetch some whiskey.
“Frau Vogel is asleep, mein Herr,” he protested gently.
Karl did not reply, rather just looked at him with that don’t-make-merepeatmyself look.
Resigned, he climbed the steps to Elspeth’s bedroom, rapped lightly on the door, and went in when she responded.
“What is it? What time is it?”
“Four o’clock.”
“Where’s my husband? What do you want?” She sounded dazed.
“Herr Vogel is in the sitting room; he wants the keys to the drinks cabinet.”
Elspeth sighed heavily. For a moment she seemed about to engage in a longdistance debate using him as the go-between, but then decided better of it. She removed the small key she wore on a ribbon around her neck and opened the drawer of her bedside table.
“Here,” she said, flinging the entire ring of keys at him. “Tell him to serve himself; you should be in bed already.”
He raised an eyebrow at the ludicrousness of her suggestion, but did not comment. He returned with the keys to the drinks cabinet and poured the whiskey. He waited, standing tiredly, as Karl drank that, and then Peter poured another and waited some more. Karl smoked and drank and stared at him but did not say a word. Eventually, Karl had enough and, checking that the cabinet was locked, took the keys and headed toward the bedroom. Peter followed,helped Karl prepare for bed, and then, utterly dispirited, climbed the next flight of steps to his own attic room.
The Children's War Page 26