The Life of Objects

by Susanna Moore

  The winter of 1944 was the coldest in a hundred years. The trees in the park bent in the wind like figures in flight, and the river was frozen from December until February. The last of the tundra swans disappeared, killed perhaps by the deserting soldiers moving in increasing numbers across the countryside, and Zara was stolen from the stables.

  We heard reports of an uprising at the Birkenau camp in Poland. Those inmates who worked in the gas chambers had attacked their guards with stones and hammers, and although the guards quickly discovered the explosives smuggled into the camp by women inmates who worked in the nearby IG Farben factory, hundreds of prisoners managed to escape, only to be captured the next day. The women, who were tortured before their execution, refused to name the conspirators. I wondered, as I often did, if Herr Elias were still alive. I dreamed that he had escaped at Birkenau and eluded the guards, coming to us at Löwendorf.

  Those nights when Caspar could not find a station on the wireless, we sat on his bed, huddled together for warmth, to discuss the day’s rumors (I’d noticed that the farther you were from the front, the more accurate were the rumors). Sometimes there was even half a cup of acorn coffee to share, and we passed it back and forth in the dark, careful not to spill it, fingers touching.

  A letter from Inéz was found in the fork of an elm by one of the children. Once again, she wrote to beg the Metzenburgs to flee Germany (the place that Churchill called the abode of the guilty). The army was abandoning its positions, and the Russians would soon be in Berlin. There were safe houses, she said, and people who would help them. When Dorothea read the letter to Felix, he said that he would never leave Germany, not after all that had happened. But that is exactly why we must leave, she said. He said that perhaps she should think about going without him.

  I could see that she was offended that he could imagine living without her, of dying without her. For the first time in their married life, she was better able to cope than her husband, but if he was not able to leave Germany, she was not able to leave him. He offered to send Roeder and me away, but Roeder burst into tears at the thought of it. I told him that I, too, wished to remain at Löwendorf. We’ve come so far, I said. Dorothea quietly left the room.

  One cold morning toward the end of the year, Roeder came to tell me that Felix, who had not been well, wished to see me. I went to him at once. He was in bed, Anna Karenina lying open on his chest. He seemed a bit feverish. His former look of indulgent tolerance had become simply a look of tolerance.

  “There’s no one else I can ask,” he said. He reached under his pillow and pulled out a worn handkerchief to wipe the corners of his mouth. I began to speak, but he interrupted me. “In the cellar, hidden behind the coal chute, is a metal chest. Inside it, you will find a wooden panel. A painting.”

  I was to remove the panel, which would be wrapped in canvas, without looking at it, and take it to the village where men would be waiting for me in a car. I was to follow the car from the village. The men would take the painting from me. It was of the utmost importance that I not be seen with the men.

  I did all that he said, except for one thing. It was a painting of a naked woman in a gold necklace and a hat trimmed in swans down. Her body was like Dorothea’s body—small breasts, high waist, pale skin. Like Dorothea, she had a melancholy and foreboding beauty. She stood beneath an apple tree, one arm raised, as a stag and long-eared doe watched solemnly from the woods. At the foot of the tree, an unhappy cupid swatted the bees drawn to the honeycomb in his hand. There were Latin verses in the upper right corner: The pleasures of life are mixed with pain.

  I took my bike along the frozen river so as to avoid the road, stopping twice to tighten the string that bound the painting to the handlebars. It was difficult to see where I was going, and I jumped from the bike to push it along the icy path.

  A black Daimler was parked in front of the inn. To my relief, the villagers ignored the car, perhaps because it was flying a small Nazi flag. A man in a Nazi uniform was driving, and a man wearing dark glasses sat in the backseat. I stood beneath the oak tree at the entrance to the village and checked my tires, shivering with cold. The driver threw his cigarette out the window and drove away. I counted to fifty and followed them. The car turned down an overgrown wagon track leading into the woods, and the driver parked in a grove of alder and stepped from the car.

  Cutting the string with his pocket knife, he removed the painting from its wrapping. I saw that he held it with care, and I hoped that I hadn’t damaged it. The man in the backseat opened his door and took the painting in his two hands. He didn’t look at me, perhaps too entranced by what he saw. He said that he was sorry to hear that our friend was not well. “Zu meiner Verwunderung hat er ein Mädchen geschickt.” I’m surprised that he sent a girl.

  The driver handed me a bound copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, inside of which was a brown envelope, and they drove away. I stood there, holding my bicycle. I hadn’t said a word. I was too shaken to ride, and I walked the bicycle through the woods,the book under my arm. I went to Felix’s room as soon as I reached the house. He seemed not to have moved since I left, Anna Karenina still open on his chest. I placed the book of fairy tales on a table next to the bed, and he closed his eyes.

  I left a note for Kreck in the kitchen and went into the park. My shoes were soon soaked through, despite Kreck’s assurance that they were waterproof (I’d traded him six pairs of socks for them). I began to run, not stopping until I reached the blackened earth where the little temple had once stood. Since the war began, I’d tried to be strong and courageous—not an unusual intention, given the people with whom I lived—but it had been harder than I’d imagined, and I wondered if I’d have the strength to continue.

  The following day, Kreck found five large hampers in the stables. There were two hams, four cases of tinned sardines in tomato sauce, cartons of powdered milk, a large sack of Ethiopian coffee, four tins of English biscuits, wheels of cheese, two sides of bacon, a jar of mustard, two vats of sauerkraut, and a box of Swiss chocolates. Food was given to the refugees for dinner (they preferred to cook for themselves once Schmidt left), and what we didn’t eat that night (very little as our stomachs were unsettled) was hidden in the cellar. “We’ll live like kings,” said Kreck, and for a while, we did.

  1945

  In March, news came that a thousand B-17 bombers of the United States Eighth Air Force had destroyed the center of Berlin in an attempt to stop the Sixth Panzer Army from reaching the Eastern Front. The bombing was so heavy that the fires, driven by high winds, burned for five days before the flames reached the canals and rivers that surround the city. The Reich Chancellery, Gestapo headquarters, and the despised People’s Court were gone. Radio Paris, the station of Vichy France, reported that the raid would have resulted in even more death and destruction had it not been led by a Jewish lieutenant colonel named Rosenthal.

  Swiss radio reported that soldiers of the advancing Red Army had found eight thousand prisoners at the Birkenau camp, too weak and sick to join a forced march when their guards ordered the abandonment of the camp. Caspar thought that these reports helped to convince people that the war was coming to an end even more than the daily postings of dead, wounded, and captured German soldiers.

  I had written more than seventy letters to Herr Elias, and I’d added more concentration camps to my list—Jungfernhof, Papenburg, Janowska, Donauwörth, Thorn, Hohnstein, Klooga, and Gradiška. They were everywhere.

  The apple trees were in bud, and although many of the fruit trees had been cut for firewood, there would soon be apples and pears. I decided to walk to the Night Wood to see if the witch hazel was in bloom. The park was already in shadow when I left the yard, a faint mist moving through the trees. The junipers looked blue in the fading light. There’d been rain that afternoon, and the branches of the yews dragged on the wet ground. At the edge of the river, the reeds lay beaten against the bank.

  As I hurried along, I saw a boy moving cautiously on the far side of the
river—one of the young men who hid in the woods, stealing at night to his family’s farm for supper and a warm bed before returning to the forest at dawn. A thrush jumped from tree to tree, as if to warn the boy of my approach, but he was from the village and knew that I meant him no harm. I waved to him. He lifted his cap and pointed to the wood.

  It would be dark before I could reach the clearing at the center of the Night Wood, and I decided to walk only as far as the larch grove. As deer had not been seen at Löwendorf for several years, I was surprised to catch sight of one, bedding for the night in a stand of winterberry. I’d been reading the Metamorphoses and for a moment I thought that the deer was human—perhaps a bewitchment undone, an old spell reversed by a remorseful goddess. I stopped so as not to frighten it, but it was too late.

  To my astonishment, it was a man. A torn shirt was knotted around his neck. His arms were covered with sores. His trousers were torn, and he was barefoot. A bloody rag was tied around his thigh.

  I turned and ran, not stopping until I reached the park. My heart was beating in my throat, and I rested against the garden wall as I caught my breath, looking over my shoulder to make sure that he hadn’t followed me. For a moment, I felt lightheaded.

  Inside the house, a candle was lit and a shadow jumped along the walls of the passage. Smoke drifted from the chimney, and I wondered if Roeder, grown inventive in the kitchen, was making soup. I could hear the river. It would look black where it was deep, I knew, and silver in the shallows. I repeated a passage from one of Mr. Knox’s books. I am friend to the pilibeen, the red-necked chough, the parsnip land-rail … the common marsh-coot.

  He lay on his back on the path, his eyes closed. I poked him with the tip of my shoe, but he didn’t move. Taking hold of his wrists, I dragged him slowly down the path, looking for a place to hide him. He was almost weightless, but I had lost my strength. I pulled him through an opening in the hedge that bordered the path and took hold of his ankles, easing him down a shallow bank into a dry streambed.

  “American,” he said in a hoarse whisper, startling me.

  “If the Werewolves find you, they’ll kill you. Perhaps they’re watching us now.” I sounded a bit wild, and I tried to calm myself.

  “Werewolves?” he asked.

  I found a candle stub and matches in my pocket and lit the candle, thinking again of Ovid, and of Psyche leaning over the sleeping Cupid. I realized from his expression that I was not in the least like Psyche, but an ugly witch, the candle flickering beneath my chin, and I blew out the candle (my vanity, even then!).

  His eyes followed me as I crawled between the trees, collecting dead leaves and pine needles to tuck around his feet and pile on his chest. “Something I never did before, or even imagined,” I heard him say. “A Pullman car! Me in a Pullman car, straight from my mother’s house.”

  “I’ll come for you tomorrow,” I whispered, packing the leaves around his legs. He didn’t seem to hear me. “There’s a house nearby where you’ll be safe,” I said in a louder voice. I put my hand on his brow. He was burning with fever.

  “There were leaks in the gas tanks,” he said, brushing away my hand. “You had to keep your mask on even when you were sleeping, which I thought was pretty damn funny. How would you know you were dead if you were asleep? How would you know you were dead if you were dead? The point is you wouldn’t.” He made a harsh sound in his throat that I realized was a laugh.

  “There were hundreds of gases, and we had to learn each one of them. Mustard gas smells like geraniums. Sarge said after the war is over I can use my natural instinct for smells to make good money. That’s what he called it. My natural instinct for smells. Good money! Like there’s bad money.”

  “I’ll come for you tomorrow,” I said again.

  “What I’m really good at,” he said, “is mortars. Almost as good as I am with gas. A mortar could clean every tree from this forest. I could clear out this whole goddamn forest.” He glanced to either side, suddenly agitated. He curled one shoulder into his chest, wincing with pain as he tried to rise, and the leaves and pine needles I’d piled on his chest slid to the side. “My heart,” he said. “It’s loud in my throat.”

  Placing the matches and candle where he could reach them, I told him that I would bring someone in the morning, and we would carry him to a house where he’d be safe. He closed his eyes. His silence was a relief—I’d worried that he would talk through the night. I took off my coat and covered him with it.

  Despite a yellow moon, the path was barely visible, and I twice took the wrong turning. My mind was racing even faster than my heart. There was no medicine at Löwendorf, no hospitals nearby, no doctors. Furze tea is good for scarlet fever, and monkshood in water, but I couldn’t remember how many drops, and too much monkshood brings on a fatal freezing of the heart. Marsh pennywort grew by the river—a leaf applied to a cut stops bleeding—but there would be no leaves for months. Caspar would help me, but Kreck was too old and Felix too frail. There was Dorothea, but the two of us weren’t strong enough to carry a wounded man as far as the Pavilion.

  I suddenly wondered if he was real. My eyesight was cloudy, which is a symptom of starvation, and objects sometimes appeared blurred. For a moment, it was a relief to think that I’d imagined him.

  As I turned into the stable yard, I saw the headlights of a car parked in front of the Pavilion. Felix was standing in the window of the drawing room, next to a man in a uniform and boots.

  I went into the house. The officer had been at school with Felix in Heidelberg. He was on his way to Switzerland, where he would try to cross the border. I immediately thought of giving him my letters to Herr Elias to mail, and ran to find them. The officer, implicated in the plot against Hitler, had abandoned his command. He said that the roads were crowded with deserters and refugees. The Führer was refusing to admit defeat. Berlin was defended by twelve-year-old boys and old men.

  The officer at last drove away with my letters and a bottle of schnapps. I began to tell Felix about the man in the Night Wood, but he stopped me to call Kreck into the room. He told Kreck to bring a bottle of champagne and to ask Roeder and Caspar to come to the drawing room. I went to the fire to warm myself. “Where have you been?” Dorothea asked with a frown. “And what have you done with your coat?”

  Kreck returned with the champagne, followed by Roeder and Caspar, and I heard him whisper to Felix, “Dies ist die letzte Flasche.” This is the last bottle. He placed two glasses on a tray. Felix made a rapid encircling gesture with his hand, and Kreck went to the sideboard, moving like a dog that has been trained to walk upright, where he poured six glasses of champagne, emptying the bottle. He gave a glass to Dorothea and to Felix, and then one to Caspar, Roeder, and myself. Kreck, with his turned-up Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, his eye singed from his head in service to the emperor, took, with a little soundless meeting of his slippered heels, the sixth glass for himself.

  Later, I went to Dorothea’s room to tell her about the American. Her room was cold, and I lit a fire. She was standing at the doors that led to the terrace, her arms folded tightly across her chest. She said that she’d learned that afternoon that her friend Sophia Plessen had been arrested and taken to Plötzensee prison, where she’d been executed. She said that she could no longer live in such a country. She no longer cared what Felix thought, or whether or not she left without him. Whether or not she died without him. She’d wanted to go ever since the disappearance of Herr Elias. I was welcome to go with her. She would never see Berlin again. The entire country disgusted her.

  “There’s a man in the woods,” I said.

  She began to pace. “There are hundreds of men in the woods,” she said impatiently. “Thousands.”

  “An American.”

  She opened a dresser drawer, looked into it for several minutes, and closed it. She went to her writing desk, found her diary, and dropped it into a wastepaper basket. When she began to pull the blankets and sheets from her bed, I asked what she was doing.
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  “We’ll want bedding, but nothing more.” She attempted to fold an eiderdown into a square, then dropped it on the floor. “Won’t you help?” she asked in irritation. When I didn’t move, she said, “It’s not even your country. What are you doing here?”

  I led her to the bed. She lay on her side, suddenly quiet, and I covered her with the quilt. “Stay with me,” she said. She began to hum, her hands over her ears. I climbed onto the bed and put my arm around her.

  I was awakened by cries in the yard. Dorothea was not there, and I ran outside. It was already late morning. The Albanians stood in front of the house with two young priests who’d walked from Genoa with a group of sick and exhausted Italian prisoners. The Albanians had found them in the meadow when the priests stopped to say Mass. The Italians said that the Red Army was a day’s march from Löwendorf. Gangs of citizens were in the nearby towns, looking for Americans and Englishmen who’d escaped from prison camps. An RAF pilot who’d parachuted from his burning plane had been beaten to death in a nearby field, and two Löwendorf men were wearing the pilot’s leather jacket, fleece cap, and boots.

  When the Italians left, Felix asked me to walk to the gates to determine if it was safe to use the road. I looked for Caspar, but couldn’t find him—no one had seen him since the previous evening. I wondered if he’d gone to the village to find his mother. Felix had told him to bring her to the Pavilion for safety. As I hurried down the avenue, I could already hear the high-pitched screams of women and children and the moans of frightened animals. I knew from the wireless that hundreds of thousands of refugees and soldiers were on the roads, but I was not prepared for what I saw—nothing could have prepared me.

  A man carrying a dead dog shouted as he ran past that enemy tanks were at the crossroad. German soldiers, many of them wounded and without their guns, pushed their way through the crowd, kicking and punching. Lost and abandoned children ran screaming back and forth. Women with suitcases strapped to their backs pushed handcarts heavy with children and small animals. Drunken men and women sang and danced. A horse fell dead in its traces, and three men surrounded it and hacked it to pieces, the crowd fighting over the meat. Young men with bayonets robbed those few refugees who looked as if they might have something to steal. Belongings no longer of value to anyone—a birdcage, a pram missing its wheels—were kicked up and down the road. I searched the crowd for Herr Elias, but it was impossible to make out faces. The hedgerows were white with dust, and it was difficult to breathe.