I doubted if Caspar supported the Nazis. He was infuriated by the stories he heard of Nazi brutality. His older brother was in the Wehrmacht. His younger brother had been arrested for distributing political pamphlets and taken to Plötzensee prison, and there had been no word of him for weeks. I was from a country that declared itself neutral, and my opinions were naturally of little interest to anyone. As for Dorothea, I had no idea what she thought.
My mother liked to claim that a gossip was merely someone who took a healthy and even gainful interest in life, which, of course, allowed her to say whatever she liked, but the gossip in my village was not like the gossip at Löwendorf. If a person managed to escape from Ballycarra, he fled to Philadelphia or London or Sydney, rarely to be seen again—it mattered little to him what people said about him. Few strangers stopped in Ballycarra—perhaps every generation, a wife or two was brought from a nearby town, but no more than that. Gossip tended to have some truth in it, as nothing could remain hidden for long. Mrs. Cumming’s husband beat her. The doctor was drinking himself to death. At Löwendorf, the opposite was true. Rumors were naturally concerned with matters far more grave than the increasing frequency of Dr. Fiske’s visits to the pub, and nothing could be known for certain.
Although Germany was at war, our life at Löwendorf continued in the same slow fashion. There were moments, however, when I was reminded that we were not as safe as we appeared to be. During a lesson, Herr Elias said that I might want to exercise a certain skepticism in regard to the German words that I was learning—I could begin with Vaterland. When I asked what he meant, he said, “Surely, meine liebe, you know that I am a Jew.” I blushed and said that I had not known that he was a Jew. He said nothing more, and I continued my translation of “Puss ’n Boots.”
It seemed to me that many people, including myself, didn’t know the first thing about Jews—what they believed or how they thought. I often heard women in the village frightening their children with the threat that the Jews would get them if they didn’t do as they were told. When I asked Caspar about this, he shrugged and said that German mothers had always been that way. When I pressed him further, he said that while he himself wouldn’t use such threats, he couldn’t vouch for the trustworthiness of all Jews. When I asked if he could vouch for the trustworthiness of all Germans, he didn’t answer me.
I understood that I lived in a house of spies (I heard Kreck say that it was nothing to him, as we lived in a country of spies), but I also knew that we did not spy for gain or even for our beliefs. We spied because it eased our fear—even though any secrets we might chance to discover were of a domestic nature, and of no possible interest to anyone but ourselves (and often not even then). Roeder told me that Herr Felix had refused to engage any new servants long before the start of the war, after he twice caught footmen listening at doors. They must have looked like kingfishers in their livery of blue tailcoats and gold waistcoats, bent at the waist, heads cocked as they peered through keyholes.
Schmidt watched Kreck. Kreck watched Caspar. Caspar watched me. Roeder watched Dorothea. Dorothea watched Felix. I watched all of them (I was sent one day to Felix’s dressing room when he forgot his riding gloves, and I held his enamel cufflinks, one of them depicting the night sky and its constellations, the other a miniature globe of the world, and slipped one of his batiste handkerchiefs into my pocket before grabbing the gloves and quickly closing the drawer, but I wouldn’t have called that spying). If Herr Felix watched anyone, he was good at concealing it.
When Roeder knocked on the door of the sewing room—I’d finished Dorothea’s trousers and was mending a cushion—I thought at first that she’d come to collect the cap she’d asked me to make for her niece’s baby, rather insultingly offering to pay me in buttons, an arrangement I had declined. She had then offered me cash money, an offer that she also expected me to decline, which I did. She knew that I would make the cap, given the intimacy of the household and our growing dependence on one another. The cap was easy enough to sew, taking me only a few evenings’ work, but I resented every stitch.
She was on her way to evensong at St. Adalbert’s (I could hear the bells). Her undersized black hat, two lace lappets hanging on either side of her whiskered face, turned her into an elderly black hare. She stood in the center of the room, her gloved hands folded across her little bulging belly, and said that she wished to be certain that I understood that Frau Metzenburg’s great-grandmother had not been a Jew, despite the lies spread by the wicked. The Schumachers, who were bankers, had been given a Certificate of True Belief when they converted to the Christian faith at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Frau Metzenburg’s great-grandfather, the old baron, had been financial adviser to Queen Victoria, and her grandmother was by birth a baroness. “There are rumors to this day,” said Roeder, working a loose hatpin into her head, “that Prince Albert himself was the unhappy result of a friendship between his mother and her Jewish chamberlain. A story that I have always refused to believe.” She made the small curtsy she executed whenever she mentioned the royal family of any country, lifting her black dress a few inches from the floor.
I gave her the little cap and she thanked me. She said that Frau Metzenburg was driving to Potsdam in the morning and would like me to accompany her. I was surprised, as Roeder often chose not to tell me when Dorothea asked for me, and I realized that she must had been scolded for her forgetfulness, which would not have improved her disposition.
Inéz stopped at Löwendorf that first Christmas of the war on her way to Munich, where she was hoping to collect her two children to take them to safety in Cairo. I was surprised to learn that she had children, as she had never mentioned them. Count Hartenfels was refusing to let the children leave Germany, and Inéz was dining with Reichsmarschall Göring to ask him to use his influence with her former husband. Felix thought there was a good chance that Göring would help her, as he’d once said that he found it unsportsmanlike to kill children.
As Inéz was superstitious, I was summoned at the last minute to join the Metzenburgs and their guests at Christmas lunch—there were to be fourteen, but a friend driving from Berlin had been delayed (“More like arrested,” Kreck whispered to me). I patted Hungarian water on my less-than-clean hair and put on my best skirt—not good enough, I knew, but I also knew that no one would look at me twice—and hurried to the winter dining room.
An expressionless Kreck, his hands shaking in his white cotton gloves, moved haltingly around the table as he slid plates past the gesticulating guests. Caspar, dressed by Kreck in the footman’s livery, filled glasses with champagne. We were having smoked trout, partridges, potatoes Anna, and brussels sprouts, with apple tart for dessert, everything grown or killed on the estate. In the center of the table, four porcelain pheasants and a large porcelain turkey cock sat in nests of holly. On a sideboard, a rhinoceros, a monkey, a ram, a fawn, and a lion, all in glazed bisque, stood around the tiny silver-and-velvet bed I’d packed in Berlin, patiently waiting for the Christ Child to arrive. On the walls, bunches of mistletoe and rowanberries were joined by swags of oak leaves. At the top of each plate was a small lapis bowl holding a pale green hellebore set in ice that had been shaved to resemble snow. Candles had been lit, as it would be dark by the middle of the afternoon.
I was seated next to Felix’s old tutor from Heidelberg, Herr Professor Sigmund Wasselmann, who shook with cold despite the heat from the enamel stove in the corner. He was so thin that his green jacket with horn buttons looked several sizes too large for him (unlike Caspar, whose chamois breeches were a size too small). Professor Wasselmann, who had stayed at Löwendorf that summer, glanced sternly around the room, his large hands folding and refolding a sheet of blue writing paper. He waited until all of the women were safely in their chairs, then sat down, tucking his large napkin into his collar. The woman on his right, whose name was Mary Barnard according to her place card, and who was dressed in a man’s tweed suit and striped tie, spoke to the professor in Latin.
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Don Jaime, a son of the king of Spain, was on my left (Roeder had hurriedly whispered to me that Don Jaime would one day, as Henri VI, be heir to the throne of France, even though he could neither speak nor hear). Across from me was a handsome young man in the uniform of an army staff officer. I saw instantly that he was glamorous. His elegance of form and his nonchalant yet haughty assumption of masculine power were pleasantly disturbing, and I steeled myself to resist him.
Inéz, who was next to the young officer, had spent the night in Berlin. She looked particularly beautiful in a cream wool suit weighted with two large emerald clips. She gleamed across the table at me and said, “My dear, the city is overrun with fortune-tellers. It always happens. I’ve seen it before.” Despite all that Inéz had done for me and, I was sure, for others, I’d begun to feel a bit weary of her. She spoke and moved as if she meant to be admired (she was rarely disappointed), and I’d found myself refusing to attend to her during her brief visits (more like incarnations). I’d begun to wonder if I were envious of her—like most people with charm, she required an atmosphere of adoration to stimulate and satisfy her, and it could be tiring. Before I could answer her, she turned to the officer, her hand resting lightly on his wrist.
On Don Jaime’s other side was Maria Milde, who had arrived with the officer. I’d seen Maria Milde’s movie Winter Carousel in Berlin the year before, and although the story, a musical comedy, was sentimental, I admired Maria Milde very much. I knew that she lived at the Jagdschloss Glienicke near the bridge in Babelsberg because I’d read it in a film magazine (she was being groomed at Ufa Studios as the Reich’s answer to Greta Garbo), which, though censored, was still published for the good of our morale. There was something winning about her, in addition to her beauty—her pinched nostrils gave her a slight look of disgust—and I had to keep myself from staring (Caspar, who hovered behind us, not only did not look at Fräulein Milde, he did not, to my annoyance, look at me—I wasn’t seeking his admiration but his complicity). Her thin lips were the color of lavender—I’d learned from Inéz that lavender lips (she considered it her husband’s only physical flaw) were the sign of an opium addict. As I studied her hair, which was pulled into a silver snood at the nape of her neck, I heard her tell Don Jaime that she lived with ten other young actresses in the castle in Babelsberg. “I’ve decided to be a most unreasonable roommate,” she said with a sly smile, “so that when I am famous, they will already dislike me.” Undeterred by his silence, she said that her ermine stole had been a Christmas gift from the officer, turning to blow him a little kiss across the table, which he ignored. Don Jaime, increasingly agitated, seemed to be reaching a state of near exaltation, which confused me, given his condition.
On the other side of Fräulein Milde was Felix’s lawyer, Hans Koch, with whom Felix had been at school as a boy. I knew Herr Koch, as he came to the Yellow Palace every few weeks, when he and Felix would lock themselves in the library for the day. Herr Koch had difficulty getting Maria Milde’s attention, taken as she was with Don Jaime, and he soon turned to the dark-haired woman on his other side, a journalist named Hilde Meisel. Fraülein Meisel was wearing the chicest hat I’d ever seen—I could tell that even Inéz envied it from her expression when they were introduced. The hat of black tulle, raven feathers, and velvet pompoms did not accentuate her plainness, as sometimes happens, but turned her into a creature of enchantment.
At the end of the table were a husband and wife, Herr and Frau Prazan, cousins of Felix, who had arrived unexpectedly, and sat on either side of him. They were traveling from Hamburg to their estate near Prague and carried letters to Felix from his sister, who had left the country for Argentina. Their arrival made my presence no longer necessary, but no one seemed to notice.
I recognized Count von Arnstadt, who’d come frequently to Löwendorf that autumn. He worked for the Ministry of Information as editor of the Reich’s magazine Berlin-Rome-Tokio. Herr Elias had translated one of the count’s controversial articles for me, entitled “The Third World War,” in which he claimed that should the United States ever enter the war, it would emerge the most powerful nation in the world. He believed that the fury with which Russia and America were bound to clash would be far more threatening to peace than any conceivable conflict among England, the Continent, and Russia.
“Every few days,” I heard Arnstadt say to Dorothea, his face twitching with mischief, “I find myself in the cramped office of the Head of Section, where I am left to study in solitude the Little Friend, which is my name for the log of telephone conversations gathered each week by the Gestapo. Most of it I cannot repeat, as it consists of the highly indiscreet conversations of most of our friends and their lovers. Each Friday, after a most careful reading, I prepare a copy of the transcripts for the Führer—double spaced and in bold type—which is rushed by hand to the Chancellery. He can hardly wait to receive it.” The count seemed careful not to appear in earnest, causing me to wonder if that was why he was considered the most amusing man in Berlin. I thought that his mild mockery of the Gestapo and even the Führer was a sign that he trusted the Metzenburgs and their guests. I also wondered if it were a trap. It was exciting to think that anyone at the table (although perhaps not the professor) might be a spy.
Across from me, Inéz described the dinner that had been given in her honor the night before. Her friend Danielle Darrieux had been there, and they’d danced to Cuban music on the gramophone. Their host, the tireless Japanese ambassador Mr. Oshima, had arranged a shooting match with air guns, and Inéz had won second prize, which was a bottle of Chanel No. 5—Serge Lifar, another guest, had cheated, according to a still-angry Inéz, winning first prize of a bottle of perfume, a powder puff, and a pair of stockings. Later they’d gone to a nightclub in Kurfürstendamm. “A towering Negro woman, the last black left in Berlin, danced with a white horse,” said Inéz.
“I don’t think she means ‘danced,’ ” Herr Koch said mysteriously to Hilde Meisel.
As Inéz described the horse (she found the Negro woman a bit coarse), I felt something brush against my leg. I thought, given the circumstances, that someone might be trying to signal me, and I sneaked a glance under the tablecloth. A slender foot—the toenails painted crimson and encased in a pale silk stocking—darted from between Don Jaime’s shaking knees and disappeared.
Don Jaime, who had been following Inéz’s every gesture with a concentration so intense that I feared he might explode, tried with no success to catch her eye. As she was careful to beguile everyone in sight, I wondered if Spain had offended her by behaving badly to Cuba, then quickly dismissed the idea. Inéz did not take sides. Suddenly, Don Jaime thrust a hand in her direction, interrupting her and compelling her at last to look at him. She waited—we all waited—but Don Jaime was silent.
I’d noticed Professor Wasselmann eyeing Maria Milde’s plate of uneaten food for some time (he was a little drunk), and without thinking, perhaps because Don Jaime was making me nervous, I reached across him to exchange Fräulein Milde’s plate for the professor’s empty plate. To my relief, Fräulein Milde behaved as if it had been her idea, beaming with condescension as the professor whisked the last of her potatoes into his mouth.
The officer (Maria Milde, perhaps in explanation of his rudeness, had announced that he was a Battenberg prince) lit a cigarette with a silver field lighter. Smoke streaming from his mouth, he leaned across the table. “Our Führer,” he said in English, “does not take kindly to princes of the blood like myself in the field, and he would deny us our ancient and honored privilege of dying in battle. Sons of noble families are forbidden to serve at the front, but I have thought of nothing but war since I was a boy. I have been trained for nothing else. Dreamed of nothing else. The Führer has robbed my life of all meaning, while he talks aloud to the portrait of Frederick the Great he keeps at his side.” He pushed back his chair and strode from the table, Maria Milde following him anxiously with her eyes, as Caspar hurried to open the door for him. Don Jaime jumped t
o his feet and rushed around the table to take the officer’s empty chair, and Inéz, at last, turned to him with a smile, causing Don Jaime to fall back in his chair.
I knew that Felix did not like political talk at the table, but there was little he could do to prevent it. He looked ill at ease, which wasn’t like him. He was inclined to indulge the comfort of others, if only to alleviate his boredom. His politeness, I’d come to realize, served, among other things, to afford him the distance that he preferred and even required. As Kreck carried an apple tart to the table, a young, pleasant-looking couple who I assumed were newlyweds, so intent were they on each other, arrived with shy apologies and sat in two chairs alongside Dorothea. Kreck told me later that they were the children of Felix’s boyhood music teacher, who’d been arrested in Regensburg in November. Felix had arranged for them to travel to Algiers with the exit visas that his friend in the Foreign Office had obtained for him and Dorothea, should they ever need them.
Maria Milde leaned toward Don Jaime. “In my experience,” she said as if imparting a secret, “it is the Dutch and the Norwegians who hate us the most. The French, as I’m sure you know, like us the very best.”
To my relief, I heard Felix’s familiar cultivated voice. “In 1918, when I was twenty years old, I was so ashamed of our country that my father’s death at the Somme was in some ways a relief. If he had survived, I would have held him, along with my uncles and the rest of his generation, responsible for the horror of the war. In those days, we schoolboys no longer trusted our elders who, in any talk of the reasons for our country’s shame, always avoided the truth by claiming that there was nothing they could have done to stop it.” He paused. “When I was older, I realized that schoolboys in England and France and Turkey must have felt just as I did. Some now say that our friends in France yearn for a quick German victory simply because they cannot bear the responsibility of another million killed in battle. We are in the same position as those men we once blamed, only it is we who are at fault, we who are making the same mistakes as our fathers so that our country can bring about another fatal catastrophe. And what is one to do? To leave Germany is inconceivable. All we can know for certain is that the abyss awaits us.”
The Life of Objects Page 5