The Life of Objects

by Susanna Moore

  Although the beautiful rooms were a bit dusty, the garden a bit wild (Kreck told me that nothing had been changed at Löwendorf in a hundred years), the Yellow Palace was the most vorzügliche place I’d ever seen.

  Seven of us lived at Löwendorf—the Metzenburgs, Fräulein Roeder, Kreck, Schmidt the cook, myself, and a young man from the village named Caspar Boerner, who was the gamekeeper. Herr Felix’s donkey, Zara, and seven dogs were kept in the stables with the horses.

  It was hoped that Caspar Boerner would be able to assume some of the simpler tasks of Herr Felix’s valet, as well as those of the footman, both of whom had been mobilized along with the farmworkers, gardeners, and grooms. Caspar, who was nineteen years old, lived with his widowed mother in a farmhouse near the village. His two brothers had been conscripted, but Caspar was exempt from military service, at least for the moment, thanks to the loss of three fingers on his right hand.

  Kreck said that it was bad enough without servants, but with only Caspar to help in the Yellow Palace, it would be a Katastrophe. Caspar, whose cropped hair was the color and texture of swans’ down, had lost his fingers in an otter trap. As the Reich was opposed to cruelty in all forms, Herr Felix thought it best that no one know the details of his accident, as just that month a man in Potsdam had been sentenced to four months in prison for throwing stones at a bird (Roeder hinted that Caspar had injured himself on purpose—Caspar’s brother, according to her, was a Communist).

  Kreck said that no one in Caspar’s family had ever been a house servant, the Boerners fit only for fieldwork, and he wondered if Caspar’s new responsibilities would be too difficult for him, the boy more adept at twisting the neck of a pheasant than winding a cravat around Herr Felix’s neck. Herr Felix had a very precise morning routine, including the playing of jazz records as he dressed, but Kreck suspected that Caspar had never even seen a gramophone (Kreck, himself very fond of a band called the Weintraub Syncopators, had brought several boxes of gramophone needles with him from Berlin). Caspar, who moved into a room over the stables, would also serve as groom, cut and store wood, and polish our boots when we left them outside our doors at night. He would take me to the village in the dogcart when I needed to buy anything of a personal nature. In the village, which was three miles away, there was a church, a blacksmith, a mill, a baker, a dry-goods store, and a small inn.

  I didn’t like to think of myself as a servant, but I knew that I fell into that less easily defined company that included governesses and ladies’ maids. It was Catholic girls who went out as servants, not Palmers (a thought that sounded so alarmingly like my mother that I immediately put it out of my head). It was to the Metzenburgs’ credit that they did not live by the more simple rules that governed domestic life in Ireland. Because her wealth served to isolate her, Frau Metzenburg did not trouble with the customary prejudices of her class. Herr Felix, despite the railroads in South America, and a boyhood position akin to godhead in a house of doting women, was unusual in that neither money nor adoration had ruined him. Although the distinctions between master and servant were maintained in traditional ways—the taking of meals, forms of address (I called them Dorothea and Felix only in my head), clothing—as well as a more subtle sublimation of self, I was surprised by their courtesy (the best manners in Europe). But I counted myself so fortunate to have escaped Ballycarra that I would have endured anything.

  At night when the house was quiet, I would arrange the silver dish and the gold pen and the cigarette holder, as well as a pair of doeskin gloves I’d found drying in the laundry, around my room. (As I didn’t intend to keep the lovely objects, I didn’t consider myself a thief.) My rash decision to accompany Countess Inéz to Berlin had been made in ignorance, I knew, but I did not regret it. The disturbing restlessness of my girlhood was gone, my longing replaced by the sense that a world in which anything might happen had opened to me and, even more astonishing, that I’d been allowed to enter it. It cannot be chance that my favorite book that winter was All This, and Heaven Too, in which a French nobleman murders his wife in order to marry the governess.

  As I didn’t speak German, Herr Felix arranged for me to spend an hour each afternoon with Herr Elias, whom Felix had recently brought from Berlin when the Ministry of Information drafted his secretary. I found Caspar lurking in the library when I arrived for my first lesson, dusting books as he sang a ditty in German. He grinned when he saw me and sang the verse again. When Herr Elias came into the library a few minutes later, Caspar abruptly stopped singing, although apparently not soon enough. Herr Elias said something to him, and Caspar lowered his head and went back to work.

  Kreck had told me that Herr Elias’s father was Italian, which explained his dark eyes and thick black hair, but he put me more in mind of the Saracen warrior Saladin, whose adventures I’d followed in Mr. Knox’s book about the Crusades. Although Herr Elias did not have the easy elegance of Herr Felix, there was a manliness about him that I found most engaging.

  Kreck also said that Herr Elias was fortunate to be alive. In early November, a Jew had been accused of murdering a German diplomat in Paris, and Nazi storm troopers, assisted by enraged citizens, had looted and set fire to many Jewish shops and houses in Berlin. A synagogue on Fasanenstrasse had been burned to the ground, and another in Savignyplatz. Women had roamed the streets with empty prams, the better to load them with looted goods. Thousands of Jews had been arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen prison in the north of the city. “You’re not a Jehovah’s Witness, are you?” Kreck asked, peering at me. He made me think that I could end up in Sachsenhausen—that we all could end up in Sachsenhausen.

  Dorothea’s grandmother had liked to mark the year with saints’ feast days and festivals, and on Christmas Eve, the villagers had visited the Yellow Palace to drink Weihnachtspunsch and to sing carols. As Dorothea wished to continue the tradition, a big spruce was cut in the Night Wood on the second Sunday of Advent. Roeder and I decorated the tree with the baroness’s collection of Neapolitan ornaments, and Kreck prepared baskets of ham and schnapps for the families of the workers on the estate. As I hung branches of holly in the dining room, I had a sudden longing for home. Although I didn’t miss the gray winters of Ballycarra or the cold pews in Mr. Knox’s stone church or the awkward exchange of practical presents Christmas morning (with the special treat of a glass of sherry and an orange), I felt sad at the thought of my mother and father.

  It was very cold that first winter at Löwendorf. It snowed for weeks, softening all sound but for the constant roar of the wind from the east. The river was frozen, and in the park, the trees splintered and cracked in two. Caspar and I trudged through the fresh snow with long poles to knock the snow from the branches of the fruit trees. As we swung our poles, the snow flying through the cold air, the crows lifted themselves noisily into the sky. The boys from the village sometimes followed us, unable to resist pelting us with snow, and we chased them across the frozen meadow, shouting with happiness.

  1939

  In the new year, Dorothea engaged some women and old men from the village to work as laundresses, kitchen maids, and gardeners. I was put to work in the library, helping Herr Elias to separate those books collected by Dorothea’s mother from Herr Elias’s own rare and valuable books. There was a gramophone in the library as well as in the drawing room and in Felix’s dressing room, and Herr Elias played music as we worked, beginning the day with Dido and Aeneas and ending with Django Reinhardt.

  Although I was sometimes asked to mend a torn curtain hem or one of Felix’s jackets (Caspar too busy dusting books), the making of lace was never mentioned. I’d once thought of nothing but lace (and of escape, the two linked in my mind). I’d seen patterns everywhere—in Mr. Knox’s handwriting, in nests, in the wings of a mayfly and the scales of a trout—and I felt uneasy without a piece of lace in my hands. I often dreamed that I had unraveled a piece of lace in the park, the white silk strung through the trees like a web. My hands, no longer sore and swollen, seemed to belon
g to a stranger.

  Aside from the works of Karl May, many of Frau Schumacher’s books were about horses or missionaries, and many of them were in English. I sometimes took books to my room—Oil for the Lamps of China, The Painted Veil, and The Bridge of Desire—books that were a revelation after George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell. In an attempt to be friendly, I asked Roeder (she was on her way from church in the village and seemed slightly less disdainful than usual) if she’d like to read a book from the library, but she said that she found the Book of Life entirely sufficient for her needs. I disliked her intensely (I worried at first that she’d notice, until I realized that she didn’t care in the least). Kreck told me that she had inherited her position as lady’s maid from her own mother, who had served Dorothea’s mother for sixty years until her death. Her many fears were as real to her as the Almanach de Gotha. When she came upon a thorn bush in which the carcasses of small birds and frogs were impaled, she announced that a spell had been cast on the Yellow Palace, hinting that the foreign princess, as she called Inéz, had been practicing black magic again. She refused to believe me when I explained that the little corpses were merely the leftovers of the greedy shrike, kept for another day’s feast, and she took to wearing two gold crosses around her neck.

  When Herr Elias asked me to tell him a story in German, Caspar, who somehow contrived to be in the library each afternoon during my lesson, noticed my reluctance and quickly offered to tell a story in my place. Herr Elias said that he would like to hear Caspar’s story, but he still expected me to take my turn. A grinning Caspar stood before us, hands clasped at his waist, and began to speak.

  “I’ve been hunting in the Night Wood all my life, first using a slingshot made by my late beloved father and later a rifle given to him by Frau Schumacher in gratitude for saving one of her dogs from drowning. We weren’t starving—my father died from wounds suffered in the Great War when I was ten years old—but my mother relied on the rabbits and birds I brought home to feed us. Most of the game at Löwendorf had been killed off before I was born, and the one remaining gamekeeper spent his days sleeping in a forester’s hut. I went into the woods whenever I liked. When the coachman, who had quarreled with my father over politics, caught me one night with a bag of squirrels, I was sure I’d be beaten, but after only a few blows, he took me by the ear to Frau Schumacher, who then and there made me her new gamekeeper. It seems she had a madness for roast squirrel.”

  “It’s the beginning of a fairy tale,” I said in German, with the help of a dictionary. To my relief, our time had come to an end. I could conjugate verbs and even recite some poetry, but I didn’t like to talk about myself—it was only thanks to Mr. Knox that I had conversation in English. As I hastily gathered my books, Herr Elias said to me, “Don’t think that you’ll escape every time, Fräulein,” and he and Caspar had a good laugh, irritating me, as I couldn’t imagine that Caspar had understood him.

  The next day, Herr Elias lit a cigarette, and the two men (Caspar arriving just in time) settled themselves at the library table. Kreck brought a pot of black-currant tea and seed cake each afternoon, and Herr Elias poured himself a cup of tea.

  I hadn’t slept, writing and then learning my speech by heart, and I was a bit shaky. I pushed back my chair and began. “I was taught to fish by Mr. Hugh Knox when I was a child, using my grandfather’s salmon flies, and his bamboo rod, which was nine feet long and too heavy for me. Mr. Knox would cast into the Ridge Pool and I would guide the line between my fingers as he slowly turned the reel. Later, he made a rod for me that was more suitable to my size and I began to catch small muddy trout of my own.” I paused for breath. Some of the vocabulary was difficult—Lachsfliegen, kleine schlammige Forellen, geeignet—and I was uncertain of my grammar, my Irish accent rendering some of the words incomprehensible, but both my tormentors looked pleased, even interested, and I continued. “My father and mother had no interest in the river. We lived in rooms above my father’s shop. My grandmother died of consumption when my mother was a girl, and she lived in fear of catching the disease. I wasn’t allowed to play with the Catholic children, and my only companion was Mr. Knox. My mother was relieved to have me taken off her hands, and I was grateful to be gone. When I returned from my walks with Mr. Knox, she would ask if I’d been near the village children, and I would say that I had not, even when I’d passed them in the road. I often imagined what it would be like if the germs killed my mother. I would live with Mr. Knox and I would be happy.”

  Caspar and Herr Elias were no longer lounging in their chairs but sat with straight backs, staring at me with solemn faces. Herr Elias’s tea was untouched. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Herr Elias said, “Thank you, Fräulein. Sie überraschen mich immer wieder. You surprise me again and again.”

  All that Caspar said was “Ich wusste nicht, dass Sie angeln Können.” I didn’t know you could fish.

  My reading that summer, thanks to Herr Elias, who loaned me novels (I’d quickly grown bored with Frau Schumacher’s books), had grown to include stories that Mr. Knox would have considered very exotic. Other than the fairy tales, there’d been nothing but English and Irish books in Mr. Knox’s library, with few German characters.

  I noticed that many of the young men in Herr Elias’s books begin their careers with love affairs with older women—Rousseau’s Confessions, The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma (his aunt!), and Lost Illusions, among others. When I asked Herr Elias about this, he said that it was what they did in France. When I reminded him that The Charterhouse of Parma is set in Italy, he said, “There, too.”

  At his suggestion, I read Effie Briest (slowly and with his help), in hope of better acquainting myself with German literature. The book made me long for a lover of my own and, even more, I longed for the wiles I imagined necessary to hold such a lover. The story made me wish that I were beautiful. Herr Elias was often in my dreams (I no longer dreamed about lace), so you might say that we spent quite a bit of time together.

  Like Felix, Herr Elias had a passion for music, and I began to make a tray cloth for him with a punto in aria pattern of musical instruments—it was the first lace I’d sewn in some time—but I had to put it aside when Dorothea asked me to make a pair of trousers for her. I knew little about sewing clothes, but I began by taking her measurements. I was unaccustomed to seeing women in their underwear (she stood calmly in her peach silk knickers). It wasn’t her lack of modesty that made me uncomfortable but her evident disdain. She seemed to be defying me to blush, and I’m pleased to say that while it was a struggle, I did not oblige her.

  On the first day of September, a distraught Kreck rushed into the sewing room to tell me that Germany had invaded Poland. He said that Herr Felix was waiting to speak to us in the library. I rose immediately, my apron dotted with blood—I’d pricked myself when he told me the news—and followed him downstairs.

  Herr Felix was at his desk. Dorothea was not there. Schmidt, Caspar, and Roeder stood together, and Kreck and I took our places beside them. Felix said that we were free, of course, to return to our homes now that Germany was at war. He understood that I might be particularly alarmed to find myself at Löwendorf at such a perilous moment. He was relieved that he and Frau Metzenburg had left Berlin, especially as some of their friends had begun to disappear simply because their names were in the wrong address books. Although his voice was calm, I noticed that his hands were shaking when he picked up a newspaper he’d been reading. There appears to be a new law, he said. “Forbidding Jews to own—” He stopped to read directly from the paper. “Radios and—”

  Roeder interrupted him to say that her place was with Frau Metzenburg. Schmidt and Caspar also said that they did not wish to leave Löwendorf. Kreck, whose face was wet with tears, said nothing, and Felix turned to me.

  Caspar, his blue eyes narrowed with expectation, nodded at me in encouragement, but Roeder had difficulty concealing the smirk of superiority that implied that she’d taken me for a bolter from the start
. Schmidt seemed distracted, gazing in wonder at the row of Meissen pagodas. When I said that I, too, chose to remain at Löwendorf, Caspar dropped his head in relief. Felix, impassively prepared for a different answer, thanked me. He said that he would do all that he could to keep us safe. As we left the library, Kreck took me aside to say that Herr Metzenburg had many friends in the diplomatic corps and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that because of this, he knew things that the rest of us could not possibly know. He said that I should do whatever Herr Felix asked me to do, no matter how implausible.

  Later, when I took up my sewing, my hands, too, were shaking, and I was unable to thread my needle. I understood nothing of Germany and the forces that had brought her to war. For the first time, I regretted the hours I’d spent reading French novels, rather than the newspaper. Although I sometimes read the paper from Hamburg (it was one of the German exercises given me by Herr Elias), I’d been more interested in the views of my companions than in news of the world. That Felix had declined the offer of an important post abroad seemed to indicate his opinion of the Reich. I knew that Kreck had been with Herr Felix since Felix was at university, and that he’d lost his eye in 1916 in service to the emperor (he’d said more than once that he had no intention of losing his other eye for his own or any other country). Fräulein Roeder, who’d tended Dorothea since she was sent as a girl to live with her grandfather in London, did not hesitate to express her admiration of Hitler’s frequent speeches, particularly the one in which the Führer said that the geniality, diligence, and steadfastness of the German people would be harnessed for works of peace and human culture, but Roeder did not exhibit any signs of the Führer lovesickness that I’d noticed in other German ladies (when she said that many Nazis were, in fact, practicing Christians, Felix closed his eyes, his hand on his forehead, and nodded). Her favorite nephew had been mobilized that winter, and she frequently sent him packages—I saw her in the village when I was posting my letters to Mr. Knox.