She was sitting in bed. Despite the fire, her room was as cold as my own room. The walls were covered in raw silk painted to resemble a forest. French doors opened onto the park, and mirrors were arranged so that the trees were reflected in them (in the morning, in the light, she appeared to be floating over a wood). On one wall was a large painting reaching from floor to ceiling of her mother in a red gown. The chimneypiece was painted with trompe l’oeil vines that climbed the wall and snaked across the ceiling. There was an alabaster lamp on either side of the ivory bed.
I pulled a chair to the bed and found my place in the book. The light from the fire gathered itself on the page, and I began to read. One morning in the terrible winter of 1837, when she had put him in front of the fire because of the cold she found him dead in the middle of his cage, hanging head down with his claws caught in the bars. He had probably died of a stroke, but she thought he had been poisoned with parsley, and despite the absence of proof, her suspicions fell on Fanu. She wept so much that her mistress said to her, “Why don’t you have him stuffed?”
Pausing for breath, I saw that she’d fallen asleep. I closed the book and tiptoed across the room. As I reached the door, I heard her voice. Like most people who are reserved, she was intimidating, and I was always startled when she deigned to speak to me. Part of her fascination, of course, was her secretiveness. She could not bear to be anticipated, or forestalled, taking great care to conceal a meaningless or innocent gesture, with the inevitable result that we were obsessed with her every movement. Although she had no fear, she was as wary as a mouse.
“Perhaps you don’t know that my mother went mad.” She was under the covers, the quilt pulled to her chin. Her slanting hazel eyes, set far apart in her pale face, looked yellow in the light. The hair on either side of her center part was lifted into two small peaks, reminding me of a scops-owl with its feathered horns. With the painted walls and the smell of burning juniper boughs, I felt as if I were lost in a forest. “Last summer in Vienna,” she said, “they rounded up all of the people walking in the Prater. The Jews were separated from the others, and they were ordered to remove their clothes. The men were made to crawl on all fours in the grass. Ladders were provided so that the women could sit naked on the branches of the trees, where they were made to sing like birds.”
I was silent. I wondered in my confusion what kind of birds.
“Do you believe that story?” she asked, clutching the top of the quilt, the tips of her fingers like talons.
“I would like not to believe it.”
“Far worse things are done every day.”
“I’d prefer not to believe it.”
“There is a certificate that acquits me of all tainted blood. I wouldn’t believe that, either, if I were you.”
“No.”
“Good night then.”
“Good night.” I could hear her voice as I hurried down the passage, and I wondered if she was talking to her mother.
The spring was unusually cool, with rain nearly every day. We lived in a state of dampness, coughing and sneezing from morning till night. Toward the end of April, Countess Inéz, or, rather, the Princess Alkari, arrived from Cairo, where her husband served as secretary to his uncle, King Farouk. The prince had beauty and charm, but no money, and Inéz had volunteered to act as courier for Farouk as her nationality allowed her to travel more freely than others. She said that no one wanted Farouk himself, as he was known to steal everything in sight. Although Inéz could not bear the sight of anyone fat, she’d made an exception of the king.
To our joy, the royal dispatch bag was packed with dates, salt fish, barley, olive oil, lemons, figs, and fava beans. Kreck called Inéz “our beauty of humble and tropical origin” when he carried the plates into the kitchen after lunch, and I realized that he was drunk.
Roeder found a small wooden box of rosewater jellies, dusted with powdered sugar, when she unpacked the princess’s bags and, for a moment, thought that it was a present for her. “Her Highness seems to have a weakness for seamstresses,” she said upon discovering my name on the card.
“I’m not a seamstress,” I said.
“But her mother was a seamstress,” Roeder said as she staggered under a pile of the princess’s furs.
It had been months since I’d seen Inéz. I no longer wore my hair in a plait, having cut it myself after coming across a photograph of Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box. At dinner, I wore the black dress she’d given me, and for the first time, she complimented me on my chic. I was thrilled, of course, especially as I’d anticipated wearing the dress for her. Although Dorothea always looked smart in her navy suit (cashmere or raw silk, depending on the season), she didn’t have Inéz’s dash. Inéz had arrived at Löwendorf in her husband’s red felt fez, and a golden sable coat, which, I suspected, did not come from the prince.
During a walk along the river, she again urged Dorothea to leave Germany. “It’s not too late to dig up your treasure,” she said in irritation, “if that’s what keeps you from leaving.”
“No, it’s not the treasure that keeps us,” Dorothea answered quietly. “Felix says they have no reason to mistrust us. That they haven’t bothered us shows how little we concern them.”
They were no longer guarded in their talk when I was with them—the prince’s impotence, the ugly new hats, Don Jaime’s gift to Inéz of an emerald necklace and a Titian (Felix said that Don Jaime gave it to her because Hitler had said in a speech that not everyone was in a position to buy a Titian). Their conversation seemed to distract them from the graver matters that troubled them.
Dorothea’s favorite cousin, a major in the Luftwaffe, had been shot down over Belgrade during Operation Punishment. Inéz’s former husband, Count Hartenfels, was a colonel in the Wehrmacht. Her distraction may have accounted for her vagueness when I told her that I needed my passport. Felix had been pressing me for it (and, I suspect, pressing her as well), and she promised to bring it with her on her next visit to Löwendorf.
That night, I ate all of the jellies in bed, one after another, my teeth glued together, unable to stop myself.
There were rumors that Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, had flown a Messerschmitt across the Channel to Scotland in hope of negotiating a peace treaty with the Duke of Hamilton. Swiss radio reported that Hess had assumed that the British would be better disposed to Germany after Hitler’s surprising decision to allow the British Army to escape at Dunkirk. The German news reports about Hess were very brief, and the BBC said nothing at all. In Ludwigsfelde, Caspar found leaflets that read Deranged brown budgie mysteriously escaped from locked cage. If found, return immediately to Führer.
Felix was called unexpectedly to Berlin, and Dorothea, who had been walking in the park, decided that dinner would be served on the roof of the temple, under the black-and-white striped awning. She sent Caspar to the village to ask Herr Elias to join us, and told Kreck to arrange everything for our arrival at dusk. Schmidt was making vichyssoise, a salad of wild greens, and a fruit compote. Dorothea told Kreck that he would not be needed once he’d set the table and brought the food. She would do the serving herself.
Dorothea’s mother had grown honeysuckle on the roof in big earthenware pots, and the overgrown vines climbed the tent posts and across the awning. There was a rustic wicker table and two chaises with cushions, as well as comfortable chairs. The roof terrace did not really suit the austere little temple, and Kreck attributed this to Frau Schumacher’s lack of refinement. There was a small high-ceilinged room on the ground floor where garden furniture and boating equipment were stored in the winter, with a narrow and dark staircase leading to the roof.
When we arrived, Kreck had done his work. The table was set, and there were candles and a bowl of white peonies. Herr Elias was on one of the chaises, looking as if Kreck had arranged him, too. He wore a pale linen suit with white canvas shoes. His Panama hat rested at the foot of the chaise. He was a bit of a dandy, I realized, and I found myself grateful that he did
not lounge against the cushions, but sat with his legs hanging over the side, smoking a cigarette. Just as there are all kinds of strangeness, there are all kinds of seduction.
Dorothea blushed when she saw him. Kreck was busy with a hamper of food, and she asked him to open a bottle of champagne. She moved restlessly around the table, arranging the silver and refolding the napkins. When she saw that Kreck had no intention of leaving, she sent him to the house for some salt. She asked me to take the peonies away, perhaps downstairs, as their smell was too strong. Banishing the peonies was something that Felix might have done, and I was surprised. When I returned, having struggled with the heavy bowl on the stairs, I heard Herr Elias say, “You’re distracted tonight.” His fingers encircled her wrist.
“I don’t believe in distraction,” she said, pulling away from him. “It’s a way to be innocent and guilty at the same time.”
“I find it useful,” he said.
The sun had fallen behind the Night Wood, but she did not light the candles, knowing, as she would, that there was more beauty in the growing darkness. A smell of wet leaves rose from the park. I heard the loud hiss of a moorhen, threatened by a river rat perhaps. Bees, heavy with pollen, emerged reluctantly from the honeysuckle, staggering in their flight, and I reminded myself not to drink too much champagne. I sometimes had too much wine when I was ill at ease, and Dorothea and Herr Elias had unsettled me. He spoke to her in a low voice, and I turned away so as not to watch them. I wished that I could tell them that it was all right, that there was not enough love to go around as it was, but I suspected that they knew that.
There was a sound on the stairs. The top of Kreck’s head appeared, and then his mustache. He had the salt, and some walnuts collected by Caspar in the woods. “Ein besonderer Leckerbissen,” he said. A special treat.
Dorothea took the tray from Kreck’s hands. “Perhaps we should eat,” she said with a sigh. “Kreck has gone to such trouble.”
Herr Elias came to the table as Kreck poured the soup into bowls with a silver ladle. Dorothea sat next to me. Her hands were shaking and she put them in her lap. I thought about the fineness of suggestion, and the way that truth can be conveyed by a stray gesture, or even a sound. Of course, hints tend to contain too much, at least for me, but I managed to calm myself. Nothing had changed. What was worse, at least for them, nothing would change.
Dorothea asked if I would like a pear with my soup—we had abandoned certain conventions in regard to food—and when I said that I would, Kreck moved around the table to hold the dish at my side (we had not abandoned certain formalities). When I looked up from my soup, I saw that Herr Elias was watching me. His face, as always, was guarded, but still it was melancholy. He smiled hesitantly at me. It was a way to start again, I knew, and I smiled, too. The soup was delicious.
As Kreck seldom came to the second floor during the day, I knew as soon as I heard his shambling step that something bad had happened.
He’d come to tell me that Germany, breaking its pact with the Soviets, had invaded Russia. The few men and women under the age of sixty who had managed to remain in the village had been mobilized overnight, while others had been forcibly conscripted to work in factories in the newly conquered territories. He had hidden Caspar in a linen closet for the day.
With the swift capture of Minsk and Smolensk, Germany grew even more confident of victory. There was much talk of the Reich’s secret weapon, which would soon be used to destroy London.
One evening in July, Dorothea asked me to walk with her to the clearing at the center of the Night Wood. The paths were made of softened dirt, but there’d been no gardeners in some time, and the way was scarcely visible beneath drifts of leaves and fallen branches. The trees, some of which had been trained to meet overhead, hadn’t been trimmed, and the path was narrow.
Her grandfather had made the wood, planting maritime pines from Canada, Japanese larch, and silver firs from the Alps, as well as weeping birch, linden, yew, elder, oak, and ash so that the effect of pine would not be too overwhelming. He claimed that the smell of the Night Wood intoxicated him (less expensive than ether, said Felix), and in fine weather he had a camp bed carried to the clearing to watch the changing sky through the night.
The many paths were intended to be confusing, only one of them leading to the clearing at the center. “North, then west, south, and east, before proceeding in the reverse.” She paused to make sure that I was listening. I memorized each turning (a rook’s nest, a stand of ghost bramble, an oak split by lightning). Caspar had told me that he sometimes found bones in the woods that were not the bones of foxes or badgers, and Werewolves—the villagers’ name for escaped criminals and lunatics—had recently been seen by the bridge. As we walked, I glanced nervously over my shoulder. The sky darkened, and the air grew heavy as the trees disappeared into the blackness.
The clearing was bright and fresh after the gloom of the forest. Japanese moss grew in tiny hillocks, soft to the foot. It began to rain, the drops sharp and cool on my face. When we left, Dorothea made me lead to make certain that I knew the way.
Felix asked Caspar to bury a painting by Cranach that he kept in his bedroom (the last thing he sees at night, I heard Dorothea say), but he changed his mind and told Caspar to hide it instead in the cellar of the Pavilion, where he could at least look at it now and then. As Dorothea did not consider any cellar to be a good hiding place, she had Caspar bury the Meissen turkey cock and pheasants and a necklace of yellow diamonds that had belonged to the Empress Josephine in the park.
The horses were requisitioned that summer by two German officers whose car broke down outside the gates. They harnessed Felix’s hunters to an old victoria they found in the garage, tied the other horses to the back, one of them Dorothea’s horse, Cloonturk, and drove away at a trot, the harness jingling loudly.
Once I’d finished packing Felix’s books, Dorothea asked me to help her sort through her mother’s papers and photographs. “Have you noticed,” she said, looking at a picture of her father, “that the simplest of good-byes now fills you with despair? Each time that Kreck leaves for the village, I’m certain that I will never see him again. I worry when Felix goes for a walk, unsure if he’ll return. When Herr Elias does not appear for two days, I’m sure that he’s been arrested. And such remorse! To be reminded, day after day, of all that hasn’t been said or done.”
“Is there something you wish to say now?” I asked, teasing her a little.
She frowned. “I’ve never thought that one should say everything. Even now.”
I nodded, aware that I had been scolded, and we went back to work.
In the fall, Felix asked me to accompany him to Berlin as he wished to sell some treasure. He said that he preferred not to trouble Dorothea or Herr Elias, which I understood to mean that I was not to mention the purpose of our visit.
In the past, he’d sold his pictures through a friend in Amsterdam, the dealer Jacques Goudstikker, but the SS, he said, had broken Herr Goudstikker’s neck as he tried to leave Holland. As Reichsmarschall Göring had promptly confiscated Herr Goudstikker’s collection, Felix thought it safe to assume that Göring owned many of Felix’s former paintings. After the fall of France, Göring had made twenty visits to the Jeu de Paume to choose art for his private museum, so his paintings, Felix said, were in excellent company. As it was forbidden to remove objects of cultural or artistic value from the city without permission from the Institute of Culture, which refused to give it, I nervously wondered if it was permissible to bring objects into the city. I’d begun to notice that when I was overwhelmed by the big things—Goudstikker, Göring—I permitted myself to worry about the small things. I said that I would be happy to help him.
On the train to town, Felix put aside his book and turned to me with an unaccustomed gravity, further unnerving me. He said that in conversations with friends still in the Foreign Office and in listening to the BBC, it had become apparent that Ireland was less neutral than she pretended to be. �
�Militant nationalists clearly hope to take advantage of England’s engagement in a European war to reclaim the six Ulster counties, but this somewhat unrealistic plan is already collapsing. It doesn’t help, of course, that the chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army was killed in a U-boat off the Irish coast. Did you know,” he asked, “that RAF bombers returning from North Africa are permitted to refuel at Shannon?”
“Enraging the Führer, who had counted on a bit more help from us Irish.”
He looked at me quizzically, and returned to his book.
In Berlin, he took my umbrella (the treasure, which I assumed was paintings, was inside both our umbrellas), suggesting that I spend an hour or two at the Ufa-Palast cinema before meeting him at the corner of Französische Strasse and Glinkastrasse. He needed a few hours, as he was hoping to see his tailor once his business was finished. I did as he said and went to the cinema, where I watched a newsreel in which Maréchal Pétain asked his countrymen to honor France by volunteering as foreign workers—a man could earn top wages, as well as the release of a French prisoner of war (four workers for one prisoner). There was also a report encouraging Frenchwomen to cut their hair and send it to the government, as hair was needed to make clothes. I was not so sure about the high wages for foreign workers. The workers who’d been sent to the countryside around Löwendorf earned no wages at all. A new film, Hab Mich Lieb, starring Marika Rökk, followed the newsreel. In the finale, Fräulein Rökk rips away her gown of white feathers at the distant sound of a jazz band to reveal a spangled bolero and a tiny pair of shorts. I wondered what the Nazis were trying to tell me (I’d thought that swing music was banned). The film so disturbed me that I was incapable of leaving my seat when it ended.
I was late for my rendezvous with Felix. As I hurried along (it was difficult to walk in Inéz’s alligator shoes, two sizes too big), I noticed that the once-familiar Jewish shops and businesses had Aryan names. Although the passersby behaved as if nothing in Berlin had changed, I saw several well-dressed women scavenging for food in trash bins and signs prohibiting Jews from buying newspapers or sitting in gardens after dark.
The Life of Objects Page 8