Inéz found me in the kitchen after lunch. “Do keep an eye on my friend, won’t you? Only a child would refuse to save himself.” I was cutting the figs to make jam, and she ate one, wiping her fingers on my apron. “And all because he cannot bear to leave his house or his Rembrandts.”
“I don’t believe he owns any Rembrandts,” I said, offended on Felix’s part.
“Don’t be so sure,” she said, turning to dazzle Schmidt with a smile. Frau Schmidt, unaccustomed to the presence of a princess in her kitchen, was rendered speechless, which was the point. “Remember, my dear,” Inéz said to me, handing the last two bottles of Felix’s Cheval Blanc to Frau Schmidt, who understood that she was to wrap them for the princess’s journey, “that I myself am a very good example that there is always more treasure to be found.” She took my passport from her handbag and dropped it into my pocket. “Let me know everything. The Egyptian ambassador will know where to find me.” She did not tell me how I was to find the ambassador.
Dieter, the son of the innkeeper in the village, who drove Dorothea when she needed to go to Potsdam or Berlin, was taking the two princesses to the train station in one of Felix’s cars. Dieter had not been mobilized thanks to a boating accident, but despite having only one arm, he was a good driver and mechanic. As he brought round the car, there was the sound of tires on gravel, and I heard Inéz say to Princess Bibesco, “Proper gravel at last.”
Later when I took the dogs to the stables, I heard what sounded like weeping. Felix was sitting on the terrace, his face wet with tears. “Quenelle!” he said when he saw me. “Her mother is a Jew.” When he began to laugh, I realized that he wasn’t offended by Inéz’s pretense but admiring of her practicality and her audacity. He wiped his face with his handkerchief and gestured to me to sit with him. A smell of damp rose from the ground. He asked if I was chilly. He lit a cigarette.
I’d recently discovered (spying again) that he occasionally attended the secret meetings of an Italian Jesuit named Father Guardini, who lectured on philosophy. That spring, the priest had been discussing the Duino Elegies. I’d found a book of Rilke’s poetry in the library at Löwendorf in which I came across the line Poverty is a great radiance from within, causing me to put aside the book.
Earlier that week, I’d followed Felix to the well where I knew he liked to hide treasure, watching from behind a wall as he pulled several packets from between the mossy stones, cursing in anger when he dropped one of them into the well. Two days later, three pots of honey, ten sacks of carrots, and a dozen baskets of potatoes mysteriously appeared in the Pavilion kitchen.
He put out his cigarette and said that he’d received an anonymous letter that his friend Bernhard Lichtenberg, the rector of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin, had been arrested for leading his congregation in prayers on behalf of the Jews and other prisoners in concentration camps. He’d learned, too, that a former neighbor in Fasanenstrasse, Frau von Schoon, had been sent to Ravensbrück with her two children. She’d been reported by an old servant for hiding the children’s tutor, who was not only her lover, but Jewish. The tutor had been sent to Auschwitz. “At Ravensbrück,” Felix said, “SS men in doctors’ uniforms await new prisoners in the infirmary, where they are executed by a shot to the back of the neck as their height is measured. A recording of Richard Tauber singing ‘Deis ist mein ganzes Herz’ is played to cover the noise of the gunshots.”
When we at last went inside, I found that Herr Elias had left me his copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions with a note. If you agree with Augustine that memory creates the self, then this is a book that will interest you, meine leibe—if, when this war is over, there remains a self to be created. I’d told him, I’m afraid, that the German novels I’d been reading gave me unsettling dreams. I was a bit disappointed that his answer was to give me the book of an ascetic. That Augustine happened to ask God to defer his chastity to a later time was scant consolation.
The weather was mild through the spring, and Caspar was able to leave the window in his room open when we listened to the wireless. The sun, setting behind the park, gave the room a faint pink cast, and I often asked him to wait to the last moment before hanging the leather aprons he used as blackout curtains. The sky was filled with migrating geese—I thought I recognized the lesser white-fronted goose, but I couldn’t be certain (Mr. Knox had taught me to be fastidious about identification). I no longer minded when my stomach made loud noises, and I regularly excused myself to go to the bathroom.
Caspar fussed with the wireless, using the two fingers of his right hand, while I mended a basket of Felix’s hose. I had yet to finish Dorothea’s evening gown. Although I took pleasure and even pride in my mending, I sometimes missed the sight of a point de Venise slowly taking shape in my hands.
We liked listening to Hilde Monte, who despised the Nazis and broadcast at great risk to herself, but one night, we heard instead the friendly voice of the American woman named Midge as she cheerfully reminded Allied soldiers that their wives and sweethearts were in bed with dirty Jews and Communists. Caspar, embarrassed, turned the dial to static. When I asked him about Midge, he said that the men in the village listened to her to keep Herr Pflüger from questioning their loyalty. When Reichsprotektor Heydrich was assassinated in Czechoslovakia, Herr Pflüger, the blacksmith’s father and a party member, had felt it his responsibility to report those villagers he deemed insufficiently committed to Nazi ideals, and a guileless woman who worked as scullery maid at the inn had been taken away. Caspar was both impressed by Herr Pflüger and frightened by him. He said that until the end of the Great War, it had been impossible for a poor man to gain wealth and power in Germany, but with the rise of the Reich and the new opportunities for profit, it had become easier for men like Herr Pflüger to make their way. He said that someday those men would take over the world, and I wondered if he wished to be one of them.
After several minutes, he found a BBC report of the sinking of a German ship. He pared an apple as we listened, dropping pieces into my palm. Sometimes he lifted a slice to his mouth, holding it against the blade of the knife with his thumb. It was a relief to hear the educated English voice of the BBC broadcaster: “One by one, the Lancasters rolled in for the attack, the large ship easily visible on the clear, still water of the fjord. Accompanied by swift Soviet fighters, the bombers of the Royal Air Force deftly evaded the heavy armament bursting around them. The aerial assault was over in a matter of minutes. The Russian and English pilots watched in pride as the big ship capsized and disappeared into the black, icy water. More than twelve hundred Germans went down, singing ‘Deutschland über alles.’ ” How the pilots knew that the sailors were singing troubled me, but I said nothing.
On a new station called the Calais Soldiers Broadcast, which was on the same wavelength as Radio Deutschland, we heard a report that rumors that the Nazis were murdering Jews in the camps might be true. The announcer (we’d grown adept at interpreting language and even the pronunciation and inflection of certain words) sounded as if he continued to find it incomprehensible, but Caspar believed the rumors. He said that some of the men in the village who were home on leave had been at Kiev, where they claimed to have seen and done terrible things. They had confided in their fathers and brothers, and the stories had been repeated in the village. “The truth,” Caspar said, “will be worse than what we hear on the wireless. The truth will be worse than anything.”
It was unusually hot that summer, and I spent as much time as possible on the river, even though Caspar scolded that it was no longer safe. He checked on me throughout the day and accompanied me to the bottom of the stairs when I went upstairs each night, waiting until Felix and Dorothea decided that it was time for bed.
He showed me a pistol and a box of shells he’d hidden in the gun room, giving me a quick lesson on how to load and fire it. As he returned the gun to its hiding place, he said that Kreck had recently traded a pair of silver brushes on Felix’s behalf for tickets to a Furtwängler concert given
by the Crown Princess Cecilie in Potsdam. “Not to be repeated,” he said, “as Karajan and Furtwängler are enemies. Kreck says that if Maestro Karajan finds out, he will never speak to Herr Felix again.” I promised not to tell a soul.
One morning in September, Roeder rushed into the sewing room to tell me that Herr Elias had been arrested, along with the miller and two foreign workers. I’d been sewing but had put my work aside to soak my hands in the tincture of raw alcohol and pine needles I used to ease the swelling in my fingers. To my dismay, my hands had begun to curl, as if I were hiding something in them.
I rode my bicycle to Herr Elias’s house in the village, taking a shortcut through the fields. The door was open, and I ran inside. I’d often tried to imagine his rooms, and they were much as I’d pictured them. There was a gramophone and records and books, of course, and his typewriter, but also a pair of leather boxing gloves and a brown velvet dressing gown with a fringed sash. The drawers of his desk were open, but nothing seemed to have been touched. There were letters, and for a moment I was tempted to read them. Under the letters was his yellow star, the word JUDE smudged with ink. I found an embroidered handkerchief under a table, but there were no signs that a woman lived there, and I realized that Caspar had lied to me. I walked home, pushing my bicycle before me, stopping twice to sit by the side of the road until I was able to continue.
Felix left immediately for Berlin upon hearing the news and returned three days later in despair. He’d discovered nothing, except that many of his old friends were no longer willing or able to help him. Dorothea remained in her room for several days.
It took me a week to make a list of camps, people not wanting to talk about them, or even to admit that they existed. My plan was to send letters to Herr Elias at two different camps each month—Budzyn, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Soldau, Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, Minsk, Riga, Westerbork, Dachau, Ravensbrück, Zimony, Sobibor, Theresienstadt (where privileged Jews and former members of the military were kept), Fuhlsbüttel, Treblinka, and Chelmno. When I reached the end of the list, I would start again.
Caspar found the body of Herr Elias’s ginger cat in the woods, its fur stripped from its back and tail. When Dorothea at last left her room, I returned her embroidered handkerchief to her. She looked at me for a moment, then turned away, her hand over her mouth.
1943
The butcher in the village disappeared that winter with his wife and twin sons, and yet I was sure that I saw him at the mill in March. An object left momentarily on a table—an inkwell or a branch of witch hazel carried from the woods—was gone when I returned for it, and an apple or a dish of almonds disappeared even if I hadn’t left the room.
One night a month after Herr Elias’s disappearance, I thought that I could hear thunder, but I decided that it was only the hundreds of military transports on their way to the Eastern Front. When the rumbling sound grew louder and the earth began to shake, I knew that it wasn’t the lorries but the hum of hundreds of planes.
A piercing, high-pitched sound like a scream grew louder and louder, and there was the flash and bellow of an explosion. The Yellow Palace shuddered violently twice, and across the park, smoke began to rise from the Pavilion. The oaks marking the path to the stables burst into flames. The temple with the striped awning had disappeared. I thought how strange it was that only moments before I’d been listening in the dark to the applause of a concert audience as The Magic Flute came to an end.
Dorothea lay facedown in the stable yard, her hands over her head as the dogs swarmed over her back and legs, barking and nipping in excitement. I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. We ran across the yard to the root cellar that Caspar had made into a bomb shelter, the dogs chasing us in frenzied dashes.
It was dark in the root cellar, despite the lantern in Kreck’s hand. The air was thick with the smell of loam (the smell of the grave, Kreck shouted). He sat with Roeder on one of the benches of cracked green leather that Caspar had taken from the baroness’s carriages. Dorothea found a place between them, sitting in silence as she stared at her bare feet. I realized from her expression that she’d lost her hearing in the explosion. Caspar was not there. Felix gave Dorothea his jacket and stood on the stairs, where he watched the Yellow Palace burn to the ground. I whispered to myself the Evening Prayer I’d learned as a child. Lighten our darkness, O Lord, we pray and in your great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night, for the love of your only Son. After two hours, the last of the planes, undisturbed by German fighters, swung north for the short trip to Berlin, and Dorothea, her hearing restored, rose like a tram passenger whose stop had at last arrived.
Across the park, smoke rose in billows. The statues bought by the Schumachers on their honeymoon in Naples lay across the terrace in a tumble of arms and heads. The Yellow Palace was in ashes. All of the ravishing objects that Felix had been unable to live without and the many objects essential to everyday life were gone. The garage and the stables had not been bombed, but it was still too hot for us to approach the Yellow Palace, and we walked across the park to the Pavilion.
Although there was smoke in some of the rooms, only the nursery and the conservatory were damaged. In the pantry, dozens of jars of preserves had exploded, and Dorothea said that we could lick the walls when we were hungry. We sat in the kitchen instead and drank two bottles of Mondeuse Blanche and ate the smoked oysters that Roeder had been saving for her nephew’s wedding (she’d kept the tins in the Pavilion so that she wouldn’t be tempted to eat them). We talked in loud voices, gesturing wildly, perhaps because of the wine, but more likely because we were alive.
It was light when we finally went to bed. Roeder, Schmidt, and I took three rooms on the second floor. Dorothea and Felix were in her parents’ old bedrooms. Kreck and Caspar slept on field cots in the hall, the better to keep watch. Cranes divide the night into sentry-duty and they make up the sequence of the watches by order of rank, holding little stones in their claws to ward off sleep. When there is danger they make a loud cry.
Two of the Albanian workers who’d been assigned to labor in the village came to the Pavilion the following afternoon. The men had been sappers in the Resistance, and they offered to defuse an unexploded bomb lodged at the foot of a mulberry tree. Earlier in the year, Felix had noticed that the Albanians looked ill and hungry, and he’d arranged for them to take their meals at the village inn at his expense. The men were devoted to him.
After hours of combing the ruins with a garden rake, Roeder found a jewelry case with the bracelet and earrings that Felix had given Dorothea on their tenth wedding anniversary. Felix found a trunk with more jewels embedded in the lining, some melted gold coins, and several first editions—Ernest Hemingway and the Fables of La Fontaine—as well as a rolled-up Picasso that a friend had asked Felix to hide and that Felix had forgotten. I found a small metal casket with an ivory chess set and a drawing in brown ink of a nude woman and a peacock. That first day we found earthenware kegs of Kirschwasser, four large iron kettles, the concentric rings of the Schinkel chandelier, andirons, boot scrapers, a zinc bathtub, a steel trunk containing the baroness’s Christmas ornaments, the metal spines of shoe trees, two large cured hams (they smelled delicious), and ceramic jars of pickled herring. When I showed Dorothea the drawing I’d found, she looked at it for a moment and said, “My father gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday. You must have it now.” Before I could refuse, she turned to help Caspar drag pieces of a shattered urn onto the scorched lawn.
Later, we sat with the Albanians in the stables and ate ham and warm herring and drank more of Felix’s wine as we listened to the wireless. Caspar, who’d taken shelter in the icehouse during the bombing, after returning to the stables for his radio, could find only German stations, each of them broadcasting a concert by Heinrich Schlusnus singing Schubert’s “An Sylvia.” Caspar, whose ferret had died of shock, said that the bombers that destroyed the Yellow Palace had been looking for the Daimler factory thirty miles west of L
öwendorf, which they’d missed, perhaps because it was draped in netting sewn with half a million brown canvas rocks. In order to confuse the bombers further, clusters of red and green glowing balloons, called Christmas trees by the local people, were released nightly over the countryside, and many villages had been destroyed. The ruby and emerald stars that I saw in the sky over the Yellow Palace had led the bombers to Löwendorf.
As all of our belongings had been lost, we were allowed to choose articles of clothing from the trunks stored in the cellar of the Pavilion (we looked through them as carefully as if we were shopping at Wertheim’s). As we sorted through the trunks, selecting things for ourselves and laying them aside, already covetous and possessive, Kreck pointed to his black monocle and whispered that Hitler had ordered the call-up of all German men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, regardless of illness or injury. When I said that Felix would never allow them to take him or Caspar, he gave me a weary smile.
I chose three summer cardigans, tweed trousers, three skirts, a pair of boots, a Victorian nightgown, wool ski socks, Felix’s tennis flannels, and a necktie to use as a belt. Kreck dressed himself in a linen suit jacket and dress shirt, the arms too long, with tweed plus fours and gaiters. Roeder, wearing one of Felix’s gray school blazers and a paisley shawl for a skirt, looked the oddest of all, perhaps because we were accustomed to her long black dress.
Two young women from the village who once worked in the Yellow Palace as laundresses, Frau Hoffeldt and Frau Bodenschatz, arrived at the Pavilion with their two girls and three boys, carrying what little bedding and clothing they’d managed to save from their houses. Their husbands had been taken prisoner at Kharkov that winter, and the bombing had left them without shelter or food. Twelve people in the village had been killed, and houses and farms destroyed. The women and their children moved into empty rooms above the stables, next to Caspar, where they were joined later in the week by a group of five foreign women, one of whom was pregnant, six children of different ages, and three men, who claimed to have walked from Odessa, eight hundred miles away. The weary but surprisingly healthy women told Felix, who spoke Russian, that it had taken them four months to reach Berlin, sleeping in abandoned houses by day and traveling at night. They’d bartered what little they had for milk and vegetables, and when they had no more to trade, they had, they were ashamed to say, resorted to theft. The men were escaped French slave workers, who’d fallen in with the women near Budapest, and to whom the women were indebted. There were many times, the women said, when the Frenchmen had to pretend that they were their husbands, and they had never abused their roles. When one of the women, Madame Tkvarcheli, released the hand of her pretty sixteen-year-old daughter, Bresla, having held it, according to one of the Frenchman, for the entire journey, there was soft applause.
The Life of Objects Page 10