The Life of Objects

by Susanna Moore

  To our surprise, sitting on a sofa in front of us was an elderly man in a wool dressing gown and carpet slippers. He berated us for disturbing him but stopped when he recognized Dorothea. It was the ambassador. “Fool!” he shouted at me. “Put out that candle.”

  The droning sound had increased to a roar, and the walls began to shake. There was the piercing whine of falling bombs. I blew out the candle, and we threw ourselves onto the sofa, my head wedged beneath Dorothea’s arm, our legs entwined. The ambassador, smelling of brandy and singed wool, seemed to be breathing with difficulty, perhaps because we were on top of him, and we moved so as not to suffocate him. I’d wet myself, and there was a smell of urine—for a moment I dreaded the smell more than I did the bombs.

  As the first wave of bombers passed overhead, a second wave could be heard approaching. The raid lasted for more than an hour, the nearby flak tower at Zoo firing its antiaircraft guns without cease. The tower was several streets away, but it sounded as if the guns were on the roof of the embassy. When it was at last silent, the ambassador kicked us in the ribs, knocking us to the floor.

  I was shaking with cold, thanks in part to my wet skirt and stockings, and I struggled to my feet to light the candle as Dorothea searched for our hats. Gathering his dressing gown around his bare legs, the ambassador reached under the sofa for a bottle and took a long drink. Holding the brandy tightly by the neck, he said that as he hadn’t expected us, he had no glasses. No food, either, he added quickly. “And there’s no private shelter. It’s a canard started by that pig, the Japanese ambassador.” He struggled irritably to his feet to kiss Dorothea’s hand. We said good night and found our way to the street.

  It seemed as if all of Berlin was burning. Some buildings were still standing, while alongside them others had vanished. Burned cars and lorries lay twisted in the street. A lone Hitler Youth stood on a corner, screaming over and over again that the Charlottenburg Palace was on fire. The row of embassies on the north side of the square had disappeared, and a dense cloud of dust had settled in the few trees that remained. We could hear the cries of people trapped in buildings. Old men and women and children, pale with ash, emerged from shelters as if walking in their sleep. Figures stood in silhouette before the burning buildings, looking like devils in a morality play. There was a danger, I knew, of the concussion of air that occurs after a bombing, and I walked with my hands over my mouth, as if that would save me.

  It took us several hours to cross the square, stopping every few steps to help the injured and the dying, and it was near daybreak when we at last crept into the flat, ashamed that it was unharmed, ashamed that we were unharmed, but grateful, too. We stood in the center of the room, shaking with cold. Dorothea found blankets, three jars of potted shrimp, and two bottles of champagne. We sat in silence on the bed, the blankets around our shoulders, and ate the shrimp and drank champagne, our hands marked with dried blood. When we’d eaten all of the shrimp, we crawled under the blankets. Dorothea fell into a heavy sleep, but I lay there until dawn, convinced that I’d lost something of great importance, something that would cause our deaths if I did not find it, when I at last fell asleep.

  We awoke in the early afternoon, drank the second bottle of champagne, and went into the street. Children, many of them burned, wandered through the smoke and dust, and injured men and women lay by the side of the road. There was no color except for the red of the fires.

  It was a sign of our shock that we felt no surprise to find Dieter waiting at the end of the street. He’d spent the night in a shelter, afraid that he would not make it to Berlin if he returned to Löwendorf. Seeing that we were safe, he allowed himself a burst of temper. “It’s a miracle you’re alive,” he shouted in fury. “And the villa still standing!”

  “I’ll never see it again,” Dorothea said quietly to me.

  The windows of the car had been shattered, but the motor turned over when he started it, and we climbed into the backseat. We stopped to pick up a family with four children, taking them as far as the road to Zurich. Dorothea gave them what money she had, and her own as well as my coat and gloves. Afraid that she would give them the boots, I sat with my legs hidden beneath me, but it was of no use. The woman left wearing Dorothea’s lovely boots.

  That night, at last safe in my bed in the Pavilion—the American bombers passed overhead for two hours on their way to Berlin—I wondered where I would go if I were to leave Löwendorf. I didn’t have relatives in Zurich who would help me, even if I could make my way five hundred miles to the border. When I left Ireland, I’d felt, for all the recklessness of my flight, that I’d at last pushed off—I’d been set in motion, and I would find the world I so greedily sought, but I saw that night that the world had found me.

  1944

  Felix’s cousin, Herr Prazan, and his wife arrived one morning from Joslitz, their estate south of Prague. Although Joslitz had been requisitioned for the use of an SS commandant, the Prazans had continued to live in the house, confined to the south wing. Felix was not at home. Dorothea explained that while she had little to offer—we were living on small rations of potatoes, carrots, wild garlic, jam, and schnapps (which left us in a state of mild drunkenness)—they were welcome to stay for lunch, which was our one meal of the day.

  In the dining room, Herr Prazan told Dorothea that life in Prague had been easy in comparison with the lives of relatives in Hamburg, where forty-five thousand people had been killed in a single night’s bombing. “Our Czech friends, as no doubt you are aware, don’t like the Gestapo very much, and they certainly didn’t take to Reichsprotektor Heydrich, but at least they cannot be conscripted, and there are still marvelous opportunities to turn a profit. The Czechs have one goal only, and that is survival. They may despise their masters, but they are quite happy to serve them.”

  I saw that with each pronouncement, Dorothea grew more and more agitated, until she at last interrupted Prazan to say that Reichsprotektor Heydrich had participated in devising the Reich’s plan of extermination, which had already resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Prazan raised his eyebrows as if Dorothea were a difficult child, and said that if she was referring to the rumors of extermination camps, those stories were unjust and unproved. Surely she didn’t believe them. He was leaving Joslitz only because he expected the Russians, whose arrival was inevitable, would make German landowners like himself pay for Stalingrad, among other unfortunate mishaps, and that despite her deplorable sympathies, the Russians would not spare Löwendorf, either. “Although,” he said with a malicious smile, looking around the empty dining room, “this isn’t the Yellow Palace.”

  Dorothea rang the bell for Kreck to clear the table, even though we hadn’t finished our soup. She told the Prazans that a number of refugees had arrived that morning, some of them Czech, whose will to survive had fortunately brought them as far as Löwendorf. As she had much work to do before nightfall, she would have to bid the Prazans good-bye. She hoped never to see them again.

  Herr Prazan, slowly wiping his mouth, said that he’d been warned that his chère cousine was sympathetic to the Reds and had for some years heard rumors about her own family too scandalous to repeat. He, for one, had never allowed himself to believe them, but he now saw that he’d been mistaken. As he spoke, Frau Prazan silently drained her glass of schnapps and then reached across the table for Dorothea’s glass and emptied that, too. She slid her hand in my direction, but I picked up my glass just in time. Herr Prazan took his wife’s arm, and they left the room, finding their own way to the door.

  Later when we went to the stable yard, the Czech refugees, looking momentarily dazed, having already finished what remained of our lunch, asked when they might expect supper.

  Kreck told me that Frau Prazan had taken three gray linen napkins with her when she left. The ones that had so delighted me when I first arrived at Löwendorf with their silhouette of Zara, the donkey.

  By the end of February, I’d sent forty-four letters to H
err Elias. As I learned the names of more camps, I added them to the list—Stargard, Woldenberg, Luckenwalde, Alt-Drewitz, Oschatz, Natzweiler-Struthof, Neuengamme, Dora, Potulice, Bergen-Belsen, Jaworzno, Zgoda, and Colditz Castle.

  Because the bombers passed overhead every few nights, a wheezing trumpet, blown by Caspar, sounded promptly each night at six fifteen to announce the approach of the planes, whether they had been sighted or not. There were sometimes five hundred RAF planes in the sky, escorted by one hundred Mosquito fighters.

  We pulled on as many of our borrowed clothes as we could manage, lest we have to join the refugees on the road, and waddled across the lawn to the root cellar, already jammed with people—Frau Hoffeldt and Frau Bodenschatz and their five children, Madame Tkvarcheli, her daughter, Bresla, and the three other Black Sea women and their children, as well as the Frenchmen. The crowded cellar reminded me of pictures I’d seen of emigrants in the hold of a ship.

  The Frenchmen, whose names were Lazare, Bertrand, and Maxime, chattered incessantly, perhaps from nerves, and when Dorothea was not too agitated, she translated for them. They claimed that the best slave workers in the world were Russian (with a gentlemanly nod to the Odessa women and, in particular, to Bresla), and the worst were the Italians. They had dreaded working alongside an Italian, who whined bitterly while he devised ingenious ways to avoid his share of the work. All of the Russian workers had been young unmarried women, which also may have been why the Frenchmen preferred them to Italians.

  Bored with their own stories of life in occupied Budapest, the men had the idea to recite the lines of their favorite movie, La Kermesse Héroique. They performed only a little of the story each night, Felix and Dorothea translating into Russian and German, and we soon found ourselves longing for the sound of the trumpet (Kreck said that Lazare’s miming of a Spaniard using a fork for the first time was the best thing he’d ever seen). Would the duke allow the mayor’s daughter to marry the painter? Would the shrewd Cornelia save the town from the wicked Spanish? I could see why the Nazis had banned the film (unlike Laurel and Hardy and Tarzan of the Apes). On those nights when it was impossible to hear the Frenchmen, we sat in glum silence—even the dogs were disappointed. When the planes at last passed overhead, we emerged to a black sky full of stars, stricken with a sudden and exhilarating happiness.

  For the first time in years, Dorothea, perhaps inspired by the Frenchmen, wished to celebrate Christmas. The Odessa women made a tableau vivant of the Nativity, using Zara (miraculously alive, like Count von Arnstadt, although for different reasons—no one wanted to eat the count yet), the children, and the always-obliging Frenchmen—one beast of burden, five blond angels, and three shepherds in berets. Kreck was put to use as one of the Magi. Bresla was a chaste Mary, eyes lowered and hands clasped at her breast. Felix made a dignified St. Joseph, draped in a striped beach towel from Hermès. The Christ Child was a real baby, born that October to Bresla’s aunt (“Yet another Immaculate Conception,” whispered Kreck). Caspar and I were angels, wearing sheets, and wings made of cardboard and a few feathers. We drank the last of the Kirschwasser saved from the Yellow Palace and ate turnips roasted with wild garlic, and dried pears. Caspar had spread boughs of juniper across the floor, and the stables were as fragrant as a forest. There was music and an attempt at dancing, but despite the Kirschwasser and the charm of the children, our spirits were very low.

  Caspar gave me a small pin box made from his collection of fossils. Felix gave me two of his own books—Die Marquise von O and The Glass Key. I made handkerchiefs for everyone, the women’s crocheted with string. Very useful in time of war, said Felix (I wasn’t sure if he was teasing me—he might have meant it).

  The day after Christmas, Frau Schmidt asked Dorothea’s permission to return to her family in Ludwigsfelde. She’d worked for the Metzenburgs for thirty years, but she wished, she said, to die at home. And, she added as an afterthought, displaying humor that I hadn’t known she possessed, there was nothing left to cook. Dorothea gave her some potatoes and a bundle of warm clothes to take with her. I thought that there would be tears, but Frau Schmidt couldn’t wait to be gone.

  Caspar and I were stunned to hear on the wireless that the Americans had landed in France. We ran to find Dorothea and Felix, who were listening to the news with Kreck and Roeder. On Berlin radio, which was the only frequency that Felix could find, there were descriptions of thousands of American dead in a failed Allied attempt to invade France—the coast of Normandy, said the German announcer, was red with the blood of the defeated enemy.

  Rumors of the landing quickly spread, and the women and the Frenchmen joined us in the library, sitting on the floor, the children in their laps. Almost two hours after the first report, Caspar, who manipulated the dials at Felix’s request, at last found a special BBC news bulletin, broadcast in English and German. “In the early hours of Sunday, the sixth of June, bombers of the Royal Air Force dropped aluminum foil over Calais in the hope of deceiving the radar into believing that an invasion was under way. Meanwhile, more than seven thousand vessels, the largest naval task force ever assembled, moved under darkness to the Normandy coast. Shortly after midnight, the British 6th and American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions began their landing. The Americans landed under heavy cloud cover and extensive enemy flak, causing them to be dropped over an area of one thousand square miles. This caused the Germans great confusion …”

  The refugee women, who did not speak English or German, stared at the wireless as if in a trance. When the program was interrupted, Caspar jumped to his feet to mime the actions of the Allies—swimming, rifle held over his head, firing the rifle, and then crawling on his belly—much to the women’s terror. As I watched him, I thought of the simplicity of the defenses used by both sides, some of which had once made me laugh—sunken metal crucifixes, nets sewn with canvas rocks, green and red Christmas lights, aluminum foil—and I felt ashamed.

  In the morning, we gathered in Caspar’s room to listen to Churchill’s address to the House of Commons, broadcast on a Swiss station. “I cannot, of course, commit myself to any particular details. Reports are coming in rapid succession. So far the Commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan. And what a plan! This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever taken place. It involves tides, wind, waves, visibility, both from the air and the sea standpoint, and the combined employment of land, air, and sea forces in the highest degree of intimacy and in contact with conditions which could not and cannot be fully foreseen … Many dangers and difficulties which at this time last night appeared extremely formidable are behind us.” The Allies had ten thousand dead, but losses were lighter than had been feared. The Germans were said to have half a million dead, which shocked us.

  In the following days, the news that we heard on Swiss and English stations was so contradictory that it was impossible to know what to believe—we were exultant one moment and distraught the next. The previous summer, when the Germans had announced a turning point in the war that could only lead to victory thanks to the launching of V-1 and V-2 rockets against London, we’d learned not to trust the reports. For years we had observed the discrepancy between the German news and what we ourselves saw and heard, and we no longer trusted anything broadcast over German radio, including the music.

  The Americans, who had chosen not to believe that Jews and other human beings objectionable to the Reich had been systematically murdered for years, were said, according to a Swiss broadcast, to have at last accepted the testimony of two escaped prisoners from Auschwitz, a Mr. Rudolf Vrba and a Mr. Alfred Wetzler, admitting as fact what we had known for some time.

  On the twentieth of July, a program of Bruckner, conducted by Karajan in Berlin, was interrupted with a brief announcement that there had been an attempt to assassinate Hitler. There was no other news, and the station immediately went off the air, which made us wonder. Caspar tried to tell the Odessa women, but the verb “to atte
mpt” was impossible to convey in gestures and, in his excitement, he mistakenly led them to believe that Hitler (mustache, goose step, Nazi salute) had been killed. The women fell to their knees to sing a hymn of thanks, and it took an hour for us to calm them, by which time all of us, including Caspar, were crying.

  The assassination attempt on Hitler’s life was not a rumor. Seven thousand people were arrested, half of whom were immediately hung without trial. Felix said that the plot was the belated and somewhat inefficient work of Count von Stauffenberg and his fellow officers in the Wehrmacht, including Count von Hartenfels, who had grown dissatisfied with the political and military goals of the Reich. Their discontent, Felix said, had nothing to do with the deportations and executions of Jews and dissidents or the civil policies of the Reich. The officers’ aristocratic notions of honor had doomed the plot from the beginning. Not only was Hitler alive, but the hapless conspirators were dead. Count von Hartenfels and several officers, including Stauffenberg, had been executed by firing squad on the twenty-first of July in a courtyard lit by the headlights of a truck.

  Count von Arnstadt told Felix that film of other executions—the conspirators hung by a wire suspended from a meat hook—was sent each night to the Führer for his private viewing. The first cameramen, disgusted by their assignment, had quit in protest, which quickly resulted in their own hanging. The count also told Felix that certain Germans in high positions had begun to approach their European and American counterparts to offer the release of certain prisoners (pilots, priests, scientists, and spies, among others) in exchange for foreign passports. Some arrangements had already been made. A set of false papers, which included a passport, travel permit, military pass, and Home Guard Z-pass, could also be bought for a bar of gold. “A yellow star,” Arnstadt said, “costs three times as much, as it is thought that the Americans will be especially nice if they think you are a Jew.”