The Life of Objects

by Susanna Moore

  It took several minutes for Caspar to arrange his room to his liking. He pulled a rush chair to the fire, then to the window, then back to the fire again. He placed a tray with a few walnuts and a pot of verbena tea next to the chair. On the nights when Herr Elias joined us, often arriving after midnight, there was wheat beer as well as tea. Herr Elias liked to sit on the narrow bed that once belonged to the footman. Caspar sprawled across his own bed, his long arms folded behind his head, his arms as white as milk where his sleeves fell away. I kept my eyes on the radio, but sometimes it was difficult. I’d been embarrassed at first to be alone with Caspar, having never before been alone with a man in his bedroom. Although the small room with its low ceiling seemed to encourage confidences, I could think of nothing to say. Soon enough, however, those things that had at first alarmed me—a chamber pot, only partially hidden under the bed, where he kept his slingshots and his collection of fossils, the bed itself, even his clogs—resumed their more prosaic significance, and I was able to listen to the news with composure. I could even have a conversation now and then.

  There were many programs from which to choose, but Herr Elias preferred one called Weltchronik, broadcast from Switzerland every Friday by a Professor von Salis. One night as Caspar tirelessly manipulated the dials (the radio was old and often broke down, despite the short lengths of wire inserted through the back panel), he said that before his accident with the otter trap, his dream had been to be a fighter pilot. “Yes,” said Herr Elias, lighting a cigarette from a straw held to the fire. “The Luftwaffe holds the last vestige of élan for us.” At Caspar’s look of interest, he said, “A word we learned in the Great War.” Before Herr Elias could explain, the radio crackled into life, and we listened to a report of the bombing of London. I shakily poured them glasses of beer, but they did not want any. We listened late into the night, the men only leaving the room to visit the lavatory, which I, despite the tea, was still too embarrassed to do.

  Sometimes I found Kreck in Caspar’s room, polishing boots while they listened to the radio. They had become friends. I knew that Kreck often saved an egg or a potato for him, and I once found him clutching a sweater that Caspar had left in the library.

  Caspar said that the strict laws against the mixing of races had been devised, in part, because the government feared that there was insufficient hatred of the enemy. On the contrary, Kreck said, huffing and puffing, there are at least two kinds of hatred—the lower classes blame the war on rich English lords, and the rich quite rightly blame the peasants of Russia.

  In early June, we heard a broadcast on BBC by Winston Churchill, which began with the terrible words “The news from France is very bad. What has happened in France makes no difference to our actions and purpose. We have become the sole champions now in arms to defend the world cause. We shall do our best to be worthy of this high honor.” I left my chair to sit with Caspar at the bottom of his bed, closer to the wireless. He was ashen, and Kreck had left the room.

  A few days after Churchill’s speech, Dorothea invited me to swim with her in the river. As I couldn’t swim and didn’t own a bathing suit, I told her that I’d be happy to accompany her, but that I couldn’t go into the water, leading her to believe that I was menstruating, which was a little less shaming than not knowing how to swim.

  As we walked across the park, she asked if I would make her an evening gown, perhaps in lace. I was surprised, as she had never shown an interest in lace, despite Inéz’s claim. Although I now and then looked at my books of patterns, I myself had less interest than I once had—what had been romantic in Ballycarra seemed fussy at Löwendorf. What had once beguiled the long days no longer served to distract me. She said that it had been years since she’d had a new dress and she admired the lace dress I’d made for myself. I said that I’d be happy to make it for her. I had wondered why she’d asked me to go with her to the river and I had my answer.

  I sat on the bank as she took off her robe. Her body was pale and straight, the bones protruding from her back like bleached twigs. She tucked her hair into a white rubber cap and slipped without a sound into the cold water. With her sleek white cap, black swimming goggles, and black bathing suit, she looked like a spectacled eider—I thought of the noisy tumbling of the Irish girls as they splashed in the river in their summer dresses, the light cotton far more revealing than any swimming costume, and I felt homesick. As I watched her swim slowly across the river, her head turning stiffly from side to side, I heard someone call her name.

  Roeder, out of breath, her hand on her heart, was stumbling across the park. She’d come to tell us that the Germans were in Paris.

  Felix asked Caspar and Herr Elias if they would carry Frau Schumacher’s harpsichord from the music room to the cellar. Most of the furniture, as well as the paintings and porcelain, had already been removed and buried in the park or hidden. There’d been so much treasure that many things had to be carried across the park to the Pavilion.

  While the men measured the doorjamb, I sat at the harpsichord to play the one song that I knew, an air composed by Carolan for my ancestor Frank Palmer. Felix, having returned at the sound of the first tentative notes, unnaturally loud in the empty room, waited politely out of sight until I’d finished. “Well, it isn’t Bach,” he said, not unkindly, as I jumped to my feet.

  It was soon determined, to Caspar’s and Herr Elias’s relief, that the door to the cellar was too narrow for the harpsichord, and the men had a glass of schnapps. As I was leaving, Herr Elias stopped me on the stairs to ask if I would mind helping him in the library. A number of Italian quartos in Felix’s collection were going to the bank in Berlin, and he needed my help in packing them.

  I followed him to the library, waiting as he removed the parchment folios from their calfskin folders. “I like it here,” I heard myself say. “I mean in this room. And the very idea that it will take me twenty years to read every book.” I realized that I sounded like Felix. It was the sort of thing that he might say. I would never read every book. I couldn’t even read the titles.

  I noticed an ink stain on his cuff. He smelled like peaches (the schnapps). He said that one of the manuscripts was Lives of the Philosophers, and the other, its frontispiece an engraving of a swan, its neck tied in a knot, was the Decameron. I wondered if the brush of his fingers as he handed me the folios was accidental, and I felt my face grow warm. He said that he had known that Felix owned the manuscripts, but given the war, he had never dreamed that he would see them. He’d forgotten to turn off the gramophone, and the record went round and round with a faint scratching sound. “Do you dance?” he asked suddenly.

  I’d seen Felix and Dorothea dance, although not the fox-trot (when I’d read about the fox-trot in Ballycarra, I’d imagined that it required dainty mincing steps, curled hands held chest high, wrists limp—another of the many things I had wrong). He went to the gramophone to fit the needle into a groove. It was a recording of “Body and Soul” by Benny Goodman. He held out his hand.

  Wiping my damp palms against my sides, I stepped (daintily, but without the raised paws) into the center of the room. He placed my hand on his shoulder. He pressed his own hand against the small of my back and pulled me close.

  I wasn’t sure that he was familiar with the fox-trot himself. Our faces were so close that it was a relief to be able to stare into the distance, giving me, I fear, an exceedingly dreamy look. I was dreaming! Nothing had prepared me—certainly not my mild fantasies about Felix, which required the Rolls, cigarettes, and a gardenia corsage, or the nagging, itching curiosity I’d felt about the Catholic boys—for the combination of calm and hysteria that overcame me. I was afraid that he could hear the beating of my heart. As he moved me tentatively around the room, now and then bumping into a table, I could feel the most intimate parts of his body, creating in me a strange sensation of protectiveness and desire. For a moment, his mouth rested against the side of my face.

  The music would soon end, and I forced myself to look at him.
I knew that it was important to remember everything. I’d memorized the shape of his brow and moved on to his mouth—there were traces of charcoal between his teeth (no toothpaste)—when there was a sharp rap at the door. He stopped dancing, but he did not release me. I pulled away and went to the door.

  It was Caspar. He peered around the half-opened door. “Frau Metzenburg sent me,” he said.

  Herr Elias appeared behind me. “Fräulein Palmer and I were dancing,” he said. For an instant his hand was on my back again. For all that I had stared at him, I saw that he remained hidden, would always remain hidden, and I stepped aside to let him pass. He bowed slightly, smiling gently at Caspar as he pushed past us into the room, looked around wildly, and then ran out. Herr Elias closed the door and played the song again.

  A few days later, Caspar found me in the kitchen garden to tell me that Herr Elias lived with a woman in the village. I said nothing but continued with my weeding. He also told me that Germany had invaded Romania. He sat cross-legged on the sandy path and began to cry.

  He said that his sister, who’d once been as fat as butter, had been arrested in May and taken to Sachsenhausen for the crime of racial defilement. As the lover of a Frenchman, she’d been sentenced to three years of hard labor. She’d been chosen at random to work in a dye factory, where the workers were suffering from chemical poisoning. She had already lost her sense of smell, and she had difficulty breathing. The dyers were like diseased birds, their eyes inflamed and their skin covered with scales.

  I gave him my handkerchief. He wiped his face and then placed the handkerchief on his thigh, smoothing it with his hands. Some of the lace bridges had torn, and he pieced them together before folding it into a square. I reached to take it from him, but he slipped it into his pocket. I gave him a basket of tomatoes to take into the house and went back to my weeding.

  British bombers on their way to Berlin flew over Löwendorf for the first time that summer. There were hundreds of them, and the steady drone of their engines shook the windows and doors of the Yellow Palace. As soon as one wave was gone, another would arrive—it sometimes took two hours until the last of the planes passed overhead.

  One moonless night when Felix was in Berlin, the sound of the bombers so frightened me that I felt my way down the stairs and ran from the darkened house to the stables, where I knew Caspar would be calming the horses. Dorothea was there, too, standing next to her hunter, Cloonturk, her hand on his quivering neck.

  There was a smell of dry sacking and liniment as Caspar walked a horse back and forth in the dark. “The English usually fly by day,” he said to the horse. “Their radar isn’t very good, as I’ve told you, although it hardly matters. Their pilots are kings.”

  “They are on their way to Berlin,” Dorothea said to me.

  “They prefer a summer night like this, when the days are long and the skies are clear. But summer is almost over,” Caspar said, sounding disappointed.

  Dorothea and Caspar went from stall to stall, quieting the horses and the whining dogs, and I followed them. When Dorothea noticed that I was trembling, she put her scarf around my shoulders.

  That Christmas, we heard the news that wild animals had escaped from the Berlin zoo during an RAF bombing. Crocodiles, snakes, and Siberian wolves were said to be hiding in every stairwell and hedge. A tiger strolled one morning into the Café Josty on Potsdamer Platz, where he devoured a Bienenstich cake and immediately died. One of the customers insinuated that it was the fault of the confectioner, and the café sued for slander. The court ordered that an autopsy be conducted. When pieces of glass were found in the tiger’s stomach, the case was dismissed. We believed these stories because they eased our terror.

  1941

  It was bitterly cold in the new year, and Felix ordered that the gates to Löwendorf be left open at night so that strangers, whether escaped workers or refugees or even German soldiers, could be given cider and bread and a warm place to rest for the night—there were sometimes twenty people sleeping in the stables. Felix did not hold the soldiers responsible for the war. He often spoke to them and even wrote letters for them, which he arranged to be sent to their families. A young Dutch worker whose chest had been crushed by a cart was brought to the Yellow Palace, but we did not have the medicine or the skill to help him, and he died the next day. When Caspar buried him in the meadow, Kreck said, “That, I trust, is not going on Herr Felix’s treasure map.”

  While working alone in the library one morning, I came upon a receipt tucked into an old photograph album of the old baroness and a woman companion on the Nile. The receipt, written to Felix Metzenburg, had a list of numbered items with the amounts paid for them. The figures were quite high, and I wondered if he’d been buying more treasure. I meant to give the receipt to him, but I forgot. He’d been feeling very low after hearing from Count von Arnstadt that Professor Wasselmann had been executed as a spy at Flossenbürg (I’d kept the note that I found at Christmas lunch, but when I heard the news, I burned it). Dorothea tried to comfort him by reminding him that it might be a rumor, but he said that he knew that it was true. He asked to see my passport in order to make certain that it was in order. I told him that Inéz had never returned it to me, and he nodded as if to say, Of course, she didn’t return it. I made a note in my journal to ask her for it when I saw her.

  I also found a collection of old Jugend magazines. There were beautiful women on the covers and more women inside, frequently entangled with animals—snakes but also sea lions, horses, and giraffes, although birds, especially those with long beaks, were given special favor. I was shocked at first, not knowing that such things were possible, and then less and less shocked and more and more intrigued. I could feel myself grow warm as I looked at the pictures, and later I wondered if such practices were known to Mr. Knox and what he thought of naked women cavorting with storks. I knew about Leda and the swan, of course, but it had never occurred to me that it wasn’t a metaphor. Looking at the pictures, I realized that it was both a metaphor and real, and this discovery was thrilling to me. I sometimes took the magazines to my room.

  Shortly before my birthday, I received a letter from Mr. Knox, dated 10 January 1941.

  My dear Maeve, I would not be Irish did I not begin my letter with a remark on the weather, even though it is just as you remember, winter in Ballycarra being unfailingly damp and drear.

  I asked Peter’s brother, a new student, to look after Wedgwood when I was away, but the Catholic boys threw stones at them, and Peter’s brother threw stones back at them, ending our arrangement.

  Last October, my cousin, Clive Knox, was a crew member on an RAF bomber that overshot its base returning from an air raid on Berlin—I trust that you are still at Löwendorf, as it would be distressing to think that my cousin is bombing you—and was forced to ditch in the Irish Sea. He and his crew were, I’m delighted to report, rescued by a trawler from Waterford.

  I wondered if Mr. Knox had written his letter late at night, perhaps after finishing the week’s sermon. I imagined him at his neat desk, an oil lamp lighting the pages spread before him. He would have his pipe, and perhaps a glass of porter. He wrote that he was keeping busy with his research on the occurrence of infidelity in swallows and chickadees. He had observed over the years that when there was much rain and some fruit, the female tended to seek a male with the short bill best-suited to eating seeds, regardless of any previous commitment. You might consider, he wrote in closing, learning the calls of certain birds—cuckoos, green pigeons, moorhens, and quails (as well as bees), to put to use when someday you marry. He’d read this tip, as he called it, in Burton’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights. He added in a postscript that he’d found no one who could read to him with my particular gifts of curiosity, innocence, and cupidity. A compliment, I decided. Although I often wrote about the Metzenburgs, he never mentioned them.

  There was something new in his tone. He no longer addressed me as a girl, but as a young woman. I was flattered, of course
, but also uneasy, as if I’d been given praise that I didn’t deserve. When Inéz spoke to me in a knowing way, I was flattered (it was one of the reasons I so quickly agreed to go with her to Berlin), but it was different with Mr. Knox. It never occurred to me that his new tone might have something to do with my own letters.

  Late one night, Roeder knocked on my door to ask if I would read to Frau Metzenburg. One of Dorothea’s childhood friends had disappeared during the invasion of Yugoslavia. She’d written and telephoned her acquaintances in the Ministry and had gone twice to Berlin to spend the night in the small flat she kept, but her friend had not been found. She’d been unable to sleep since, and I often heard her walking through the house at night.

  I was already in bed, but I told Roeder that I would go at once. My room was cold, and I dressed quickly. I’d been tatting a snood for Dorothea, not unlike the one that Maria Milde had worn to Christmas lunch. Dorothea’s hair had not been cut in two years. As Felix did not like things to lose their freshness, including people, I thought that she might find the snood useful. I’d used the last of my silk thread, and I sewed with the strands of horsehair that Caspar collected for me. I’d been working on her lace dress, but I was so unused to making lace that my hands tired quickly, and I’d had to put it aside.

  I could speak a plain German, thanks to patient Herr Elias, but it was still easier for me to read it than to struggle for the right word. I’d been reading Flaubert to her in a German translation, as well as the diaries of Edmond de Goncourt, despite the occasional references to Jews and Jewesses. She’d scolded me for skipping a line in Bouvard and Pécuchet (They all have hooked noses, exceptional minds, and servile souls that think of nothing but making money), and I no longer omitted a word.