The Life of Objects

  The Russian Orthodox Easter was celebrated at the end of April, and Madame Tkvarcheli and the women insisted on making us a feast in the stables. We had roast squirrel, homemade vodka, mint tea, and black-currant jam. The children painted ducks’ eggs with Dorothea’s French watercolors (to their disappointment, we immediately ate the eggs). One of the women had a mouth organ and the children danced to a folk song called “Kalinka.” Felix explained that the song compares the beloved to a snowberry, a raspberry, and a pine tree, which I thought was very apt.

  In November, Felix asked if I would accompany Dorothea to Berlin, as she needed to see her doctor, Herr Professor Müller, whose clinic was in the north of the city. She’d not been able to reach him on the telephone, and she required his care. As Dieter had been hoarding petrol for just such an emergency, he would drive us to Professor Müller’s clinic and wait for us before driving back to Löwendorf.

  I hadn’t been to the city since my afternoon with Felix at the Adlon, and I dreaded the trip. It wasn’t the bombing that I feared (there’d been only nine raids in Berlin that year), but the SS and the Gestapo. Sensing my reluctance—as if I had the choice of remaining behind—he apologized that he was unable to go with us, as he had important business in Ludwigsfelde. Although I was frightened, I told him that I would be happy to accompany Dorothea to Berlin. Foreigners and even Germans who looked prosperous were often attacked (we would be riding in the Rolls-Royce, driven by a chauffeur in livery), and Caspar wanted me to carry his revolver, which I refused. Dorothea dressed me in some of her clothes, salvaged from trunks in the Pavilion—a brown Chanel coat, organdy skirt, Nordic ski sweater, and a pair of leather boots (they fit perfectly)—and we left for Berlin.

  At first, the countryside seemed deceptively the same, although loose cattle and horses plunged back and forth across the roads, forcing Dieter (dressed, to my relief, in a sweater and trousers) to swerve out of their path. As we passed the Potsdam lake, beams of light were reflected from what looked like a row of submerged crucifixes. Dieter explained that the metal crosses had been placed just beneath the surface of the water to bounce back the radar signals of the Allied bombers. In October, the RAF had dropped hundreds of flares over Hannover, tricking German defenses, and then, without releasing a single bomb, had flown to Kassel, where they then dropped everything they had—a wicked ploy that could never happen in Potsdam, thanks to the crosses in the lake.

  As we reached Schöneberg, a young man running alongside the car said there’d been an air raid in Berlin the previous night. A long convoy of lorries on its way to the Eastern Front moved slowly toward us, horns blaring to scatter the growing number of frightened people in the road, and Dieter had to pull into a field until it passed. It was thanks only to his persistence, which at times seemed deranged, that we were able to enter the city.

  We were still some distance from Professor Müller’s clinic when Dorothea told Dieter to take us instead to the gallery of her friend Hans Kreutzer. It was already late afternoon. If the bombers returned—they arrived promptly at seven o’clock, Dieter said—we would spend the night at the small flat she kept in Goethestrasse. If the flat had been bombed, Dieter would take us to her father’s villa in Dahlem. If that, too, had been bombed, we’d have no choice but to return to Löwendorf.

  Men and women climbed over the smoking piles of brick and rubble. Children sat in the ruins, their faces burned black. Streams of refugees wandered past, then wandered back again. Even though the windows were closed, there was a sharp smell of burning rubber and petrol. I heard sirens, but there were no fire engines or ambulances. When I asked Dorothea if we shouldn’t return immediately to Löwendorf, she didn’t answer. When I asked again, she shook her head, turning to stare into the street.

  I knew that Herr Kreutzer sold books, many of them by writers banned by the party, as well as the occasional illuminated manuscript or painting taken as a favor on consignment. Herr Kreutzer sometimes even gave exhibitions. In a show of classical sculpture at the start of the war, a statue of a slender nude boy had been removed by the Gestapo, who found it suggestive of hunger, while a sculpture of a woman with large breasts and thighs had been permitted to remain as an example of contented maternity. Every few months, Herr Kreutzer packed his books and pictures, assisted by a young Polish prisoner of war he’d found hiding in his shop, and moved to a new address.

  The gallery was in one of two buildings left standing on Hardenbergstrasse. Dorothea recognized it as the former salon of her couturière, who had disappeared that summer. The rooms were littered with bricks, wet bolts of cloth, and broken champagne bottles. Dressmaker forms lay across the floor like headless, armless torsos, the names barely visible—KRONPRINZESSIN CECILIE, FRÄULEIN KITTY, MLLE. LIDA BAAROVA.

  Herr Kreutzer’s books and gramophone records were in cardboard boxes on four rickety gilt tables. He was not there, but a young man, presumably the Pole, sat on a mound of bricks, a notebook and pencil in his hand.

  “Yes?” he asked coolly as we stepped around a shattered mirror.

  Dorothea said that we were there to buy books, which she wished to be sent to friends in prison. “To everyone’s continued amazement,” she said, “including the Nazis themselves, the Gestapo still allows prisoners to receive parcels and letters.” She looked through the boxes, making two piles of books, and gave the young man the names of twelve people and the prisons where the books were to be sent. When she finished, I asked if we could send some books to Herr Elias.

  “But we don’t know where they’ve taken him,” she said quietly. At my expression, she said, “Yes, please do find some books for him.”

  I chose a collection of short stories by Thomas Mann, a biography of Duke Ellington, and a novel by Joseph Roth as the man repeated the names and addresses to Dorothea. She corrected one or two spellings (paying with an emerald brooch), and we left the shop, taking Herr Elias’s books with us. As we stepped into the street, there was a loud undulating wail—I’d never heard anything like it, and I was frightened. Dieter had disappeared, but we weren’t far from the Zoo Station, and we joined the crowd hurrying there.

  Inside the flak tower, we stood with ten thousand people in two cavernous rooms. I could feel Dorothea trembling beside me, and I remembered that she was fearful in crowds (“Claustrophobia has me by the neck,” she once whispered in a rural train station in which there were two other people). The crowd, groaning and swaying around us, emitted a smell of camphor, old sweat, and wet wool. A young woman standing next to me suddenly disappeared—as it was impossible to fall in any direction, she had simply folded into herself and sunk to the floor. In the effort first to find her and then to lift her, I lost Herr Elias’s books.

  The flat monotone of a woman’s voice on the loudspeaker made it difficult to talk: “Five hundred B-17 and two hundred B-24 bombers are now overhead, accompanied by five hundred seventy-five fighters of the Royal Air Force. Seventeen British bombers in the first wave have been shot down, and several parachutists have been spotted over the southern suburbs.” I added the numbers quickly—more than twelve hundred planes! I felt very proud, forgetting for a moment that the planes were dropping their bombs on me. I wondered if Mr. Knox’s cousin was in one of the squadrons. The irony, as Felix might have said, was compelling.

  Although we were in near darkness, Dorothea was sure that she saw Princess Dadiani, the companion of the French ambassador Monsieur Scapini. Dorothea called out to her, but her voice could not be heard over the loudspeaker and the moaning of the crowd. She shouted in my ear that Scapini had once told her that Africa would be extremely useful in any negotiations after the war, as Africa belonged to Europe.

  We were released after two hours, but it took another hour to get out of the tower, directed by coldly inefficient twelve-year-old girls from the Bund Deutscher Mädel. In the street, the thick smoke made it difficult to see. We pushed our way through the crowd, our eyes burning. Broken glass splintered under our feet like ice. Ragtag groups of the
Home Guard appeared suddenly out of the smoke, then ran away. When we at last reached Goethestrasse, we saw to our relief that the building where Dorothea had a flat was unharmed.

  Her rooms were on the ground floor of a former royal villa that had been a gift from the last emperor to his favorite mistress. A garden ran along one side of the house, with four Japanese maples, their bark bright pink in the fading light. There was a kitchen and a bathroom, and a sitting room that also served as the bedroom, with French doors leading to the garden. The walls were bare. On either side of the fireplace were pale squares where there’d once been portraits of two royal jesters by Velázquez. “They’re in the bank,” she said when she saw me looking at the wall.

  There was no heat or electricity, no lamp oil or firewood. I found two candelabra and lit the candles. We were filthy with soot and ash, but there was no water, and we were too cold to undress. She pushed the books and papers from a large bed onto the floor and lay down in her coat, placing one arm over her eyes. I was uncertain what to do.

  “Come lie down,” she called from the bed. “Felix prefers it here at night.” She uncovered her eyes. “In candlelight. Just like this.”

  I found myself wondering if a life devoted to achieving perfection might not be somewhat trying. I’d learned to distinguish one thing from another (I knew that her chairs were Louis Seize), but the compulsion to limit the world to the exquisite seemed an increasingly meaningless affectation (as opposed to my affectation of courage). The water lilies rushed from the Buckow lake half an hour before the arrival of guests and placed among porcelain water lilies so that no one could tell the difference, the table set with Catherine the Great’s swan dinner service, Felix’s amber birdcages filled with live lovebirds and Xing dynasty enamel parrots (I’d described the lovebirds in one of my letters to Mr. Knox, but he had never referred to them and I realized belatedly that birds caged for effect would not have appealed to him).

  “That world no longer exists,” Dorothea said as if she could read my mind. “Its disappearance is of less significance than you like to think. Even beauty is of less importance now. Besides, Felix was always more interested in intelligence and wit. And style, of course.” She smiled. “Although anyone extremely rich was allowed to be stupid.”

  I looked at the chairs, wondering if they were witty.

  “It was difficult at first,” she said, raising herself to lean against the pillows. “I was eighteen when we married. Four years younger than you are now. He had never been married, had no children, had grown up indulged and adored with only a younger sister to torment. His father had died in the Great War, and he lived in Paris with his mother and her lover.

  “I was sent to live with my grandfather in London after my father exiled my mother to Löwendorf. My great-grandfather had been banker to Queen Victoria, and she had appointed him honorary consul in gratitude. I first met Felix at one of my grandfather’s dinner parties. He came with his mistress, an older American woman who was a photographer. It was the first time I’d seen a woman other than an army nurse in khaki. They’d come from Nepal, where the American had been taking pictures of snow leopards. I fell in love with Felix that night, as did several other women in the room. He was taking the photographer the next day to see the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar. They were staying near Baden in a monastery where the monks wear white cassocks and black opera hats. No one seemed to think these things exceptional—white leopards, American mistresses in khaki, monks in silk opera hats—and I learned to accept such things as commonplace.” She rested her head on the pillows.

  As I watched her, I realized that I, too, had come to view certain things as commonplace—adulterous countesses, impotent Egyptian princes, movie stars in ermine stoles. Nothing as exotic as white leopards, perhaps, but once shocking to a girl from Ballycarra.

  She lit a cigarette with one of the candles. “I convinced my perfectly healthy grandfather that he was in need of taking the waters, and three days later, we happened to meet Felix and his friend sitting before Grünewald’s green Christ. I was furious that he took no notice of me and I announced that I wasn’t at all sure that I liked the altarpiece, one of the most beautiful things in the world. A trick that I would have thought rather obvious, but it worked. He suggested that I read Rousseau, who despised Gothic art—it would help to sharpen my desires. Despite my obvious fascination, he treated me like the child that I was, aside from the reference to desires in need of sharpening (something which, I might add, he never mentioned again). It was only when we saw each other a year later in Paris, a meeting I also contrived, that he spoke to me as if no one else were present, although only to ask if I was familiar with the memoirs of Saint-Simon. I was fifteen years old, and I knew that if he did not love me, I would die.” She paused. “Fortunately, my inclination to indolence kept me from further rashness. Although I did read Saint-Simon.”

  “And here you are.”

  “Yes,” she said, looking around the room. “Here I am.”

  “And you didn’t die.”

  “Whether Felix loves me or not remains a mystery. A mystery I hope never to solve.”

  I sat in one of the chairs. I’d never known Dorothea to be melodramatic, and it disappointed me. It was the most she had said to me in five years, and she wasn’t finished.

  “His life was a torment of interests—an excursion to Mesopotamia to look for artifacts was as intensely experienced as the season’s new melons. He had ideas about everything. How something should look or taste or smell. How a person should behave. For someone who mistrusted opinions, he had more rules than anyone I’d ever known. He would have said that these views were only his own, but I had to learn his rules very fast. I disappointed him our first night together by wearing a blue dressing gown in a gray-and-red bedroom.”

  “What color should you have worn?”

  “Black. Red.”

  I was silent, thinking about the shades of color suitable for a dressing gown in a gray-and-red bedroom. Felix’s exaggerated manner, no matter how refined—perhaps because of its refinement—would have seemed artificial and even forced had it not been for Dorothea. She was no less refined, no less complicit than Felix. She just wasn’t adamant about it.

  “I discovered to my surprise that taste can be very inconsistent. Someone may be impeccable about food, but not dress well. Someone’s rooms might be charming, but you dread dining at home with him, and know not to ask what he is reading. But Felix was really rather perfect. His great flaw—his sister liked to say it was his only flaw—was his endless capacity for boredom. I could recognize the moment, and unfortunately it came rather soon, when he began to lose interest—there was a change in the color of his eyes. That is when I would remind him that boredom is really one of the least terrible things in the world.” She paused. “I speak of him in the past tense because he has changed.”

  I wondered if he was ever bored with me. I wouldn’t have been able to bear it if he was tired of me. “Why have you kept me?” I asked.

  “Felix says that you are ready to steal horses with us.” At my look of surprise, she said, “It’s a German expression. It’s not that we’ve kept you. You’ve kept us. We sometimes wonder why. You’re an Irish citizen. There’s nothing to stop you from leaving.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “At the start of the war, when Felix refused the posting in Madrid, people said that he was frivolous. He would once again be in a position of power and, most important of all, we would be out of the country. Even our friends were mystified.

  “People think he’s a spy.”

  Her face, naturally very pale, was gray with strain. “The truth is that Ribbentrop told Felix that he would have to divorce me if he accepted a post.” There was the sudden moan of sirens, and she jumped from the bed. “What would Felix have us do?” she asked, her voice rising. “The most he does is ask Kreck to close the shutters. It is a relief that they’ve come. It will only last an hour. They won’t come twice. Surely.”
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br />   She’d heard that there was a private air-raid shelter at the Spanish embassy across the square, and we decided to go there. We quickly put on our hats, and I blew out the candles. There were few people in the street, and I wondered if perhaps we’d left it a bit late. There was a loud droning hum that could only signal the approach of hundreds of planes. My mouth was dry, and my eyes burned. She took hold of my sleeve and found my hand. “Are you afraid?” she asked. “I am a bit. The only dangerous animal to have escaped from the zoo was a terrified gray wolf, not a tiger, and he was found last week hiding in a bush behind the Opera, extremely relieved to be captured.”

  We crossed the square and ran up the steps of the embassy. The heavy front gate was unlocked, and we pushed our way inside, stumbling over furniture as we ran through a number of large rooms. I was sure that I touched something alive in the third room, perhaps a cat, and I lit the candle I’d put in my pocket when we left the flat.