The Life of Objects

by Susanna Moore

  A line of emaciated men and women, walking two abreast, passed in front of me, prodded by a handful of nervous guards. Many of the prisoners, wearing the remnants of yellow stars on their rags, could barely walk. Two women staggered past the gate, their skeletal arms hanging at their sides. One of them turned toward me, her face absolved of all thought—to my confusion, I felt an overwhelming revulsion—and a guard kicked her to hurry her along. When she stumbled, he raised his rifle and shot her. I took a step toward her, and the guard swung around to point his rifle at me. The others kept walking, their expressions unchanged as the guard stepped over the woman’s body and came toward me.

  I turned and ran up the drive, stopping when I reached the pump in the yard to pour a bucket of water over my head, and then another, the water running into my eyes and mouth and down my neck. When I at last opened my eyes, I saw Felix, standing with some men I recognized as German soldiers. They were tall, and they wore boots, jodhpurs, and long underwear, having thrown away their weapons and the rest of their uniforms. Felix had given them what clothes he could find, and they politely waited in line to shake his hand before hurrying across the park—they knew not to use the roads—carrying fishing hats, quilted shooting vests, and the striped silk waistcoats Felix liked to wear to weddings.

  The villagers did not know whether to stay in their houses or to run away (for the first time in years they greeted me with calls of “Guten tag, Fräulein,” rather than the Nazi salute). As it was too late to escape, surrounded as we were on all sides, Felix tried to calm them. They would do whatever Felix told them to do. Intimidated by years of propaganda and the threat of punishment, it was the first time they’d allowed themselves to consider that the war was lost and that their lives were in danger. Felix told them that he would not abandon them. He said that the rumor that Red Army soldiers raped women was undoubtedly exaggerated, and he asked them to return to their homes. He, at least, hoped to finish his breakfast before the Russians arrived, as he assumed they would be hungry. Yes, yes, the men said, you’re right, Herr Metzenburg, there is nothing to do. The men gathered their families and went home, knowing that the end of the world was upon them.

  The Albanians had brought with them a letter they’d written in Russian, attesting that Felix had been like a father to them and humbly beseeching the Russians to grant him and the village every consideration. They asked Felix to attach it to the front of the Pavilion, and together they solemnly nailed the letter to the door, the rest of us watching in silence. The Albanians were leaving immediately for their country. They said that with the victory of Russia, the Resistance would be busier than ever. They had a last drink with Felix and asked for his blessing. Their departure frightened me more than the news that the Russians would soon be in Löwendorf.

  Dorothea’s lament about dread and remorse was always in my mind, and I hurried to Caspar’s room, fighting my way past the refugees, who were running in and out of the stables. The footman’s doeskin breeches that he’d worn to serve at Christmas lunch that first winter of the war were hanging on the back of the door with his ice skates. I sat on his bed. I was wet from my dousing at the pump, and water dripped onto the floor and bare mattress. His radio was gone. I wondered if he’d fled in the certainty that the advancing Russians would take him prisoner—they wouldn’t believe that he wasn’t a soldier, even with his maimed hand, and perhaps because of it. I lowered my head to his pillow, but it was filled with straw and made me sneeze. I wiped my face and hurried back to the yard.

  Despite Felix’s reassurances, the refugees in the stables had succumbed to panic. The small planes, which were Russian scouts, buzzed overhead, children screamed, dogs howled, men quarreled. And in the distance, there was the low and unfamiliar bark of the approaching tanks.

  I gathered the few pieces of food that I could find. I looked for the smoked jerky that a farmer had traded us for a tire—I suspected that it was donkey meat and wouldn’t touch it at first, until I was finally defeated by hunger, even if it was Zara that I was eating—but it was gone. Dorothea’s chest of medicines was empty, but I found a small bottle of comfrey tincture, a jar of Saint-John’s-wort oil, and some aspirin. I still had half a bottle of the pine needles in alcohol that I used on my hands. I put the knife that Caspar had given me for my birthday in a rucksack, along with a blanket, dish towels, and some cotton wool. I thought about asking Dorothea to help me, but she seemed to be verging on madness. Kreck wasn’t able to carry an injured man from the Night Wood, and Roeder was too weak. There was only Felix, who was sickly. I couldn’t ask him to abandon the cares of the village to tend to one American soldier. Besides, I reasoned, the man was my own secret. My own treasure. Perhaps I was verging on madness, too.

  It took me some time to reach the wood, shivering in my damp clothes, worried that one of the Russian scouts in the observer planes would see me—Dorothea swore that one of them had smiled and tipped his hand to her as he flew back and forth over the park. I rode past the Fasanerie where Dorothea’s mother had once kept golden pheasants, long overgrown with brambles and weeds. It would make a good hiding place for Werewolves, and I increased my speed. Flashes of gunfire were visible in the trees across the river, and I could hear the hollow boom of distant explosions. I hid the bicycle in the withies once used by the women to make baskets and entered the forest, moving quietly so as not to be seen by anyone lurking in the woods.

  “I told you I’d come,” I whispered when I as last reached him.

  He opened his eyes. There was a smell of urine over the damp smell of earth and pine tar and decaying leaves. “Did you?” His voice was low, and I had to lean close in order to hear him. His forehead was wet with perspiration. “I don’t remember that. Can you get me out of this?” He smiled in embarrassment.

  The coat was heavy with blood and urine, and I threw it into the bushes. He said that his arm was numb, and I rubbed it. Animals had eaten the candle and the matches, and my little knife was gone. I found the bottle of water in my sack and held his head so that he could drink. “I want to clean your wound.”

  He shook his head.

  “I have a carrot for you. I don’t think you have any idea what it is worth.”

  He smiled as if he knew exactly what it was worth. “Maybe in a minute,” he said.

  I took out the food I’d brought—a boiled duck’s egg, two prunes, the carrot. He ate only a few bites of the egg, and when he’d had enough, turned his head to the side, his lips closed tight, like a child. Perhaps it was the smell of his leg, but he had no interest in food, and I put it aside. I held four aspirin in my palm, and he licked them from my hand, his tongue dry on my skin.

  I forced myself to look at his leg. The rag, soaked with pus and blood, was stuck to the wound. I thought that I might be sick. I wanted him to think that I knew what I was doing. I didn’t want him to know that I was afraid, and I took a quick drink of water. “I’ll have to clean it,” I said briskly. “I’ve brought something for it.” I pulled the stopper from the bottle of alcohol. There was a strong smell of raw spirits. I placed my hand over his groin and tipped the bottle over his leg. He didn’t scream, but his body convulsed with such agony that I was thrown across his chest, spilling what remained in the bottle.

  For a moment, the smell of spirits was stronger than the reek of rotting flesh. I righted myself and, taking a breath, slowly peeled the rag from his leg. I cleaned the wound, using all of the cotton wool, then stood and pulled down my flannel slip and used that, too. I poured the Saint-John’s-wort oil over his thigh and wrapped his leg in six linen dish towels bearing the small red monogram FVM. I covered him with the blanket.

  “If that doesn’t do it,” he at last said.

  I had the sudden fear that he would try to escape if I left him. “I can’t leave you here,” I said. I crawled behind him and hooked my forearms under his armpits and tried to raise him. I could smell his skin and his rotting flesh and the urine, and it made me happy. How strange, I thought. How bold and b
razen of me. I gave another tug, and he sat up for a moment before tumbling onto his side, taking me with him.

  “That’s all right,” I whispered, my arm caught beneath him. “We’ll find a way.”

  He rolled into my arms. “Who are you?” he asked, not without humor. “You speak English.”

  “I’m Irish,” I said. “I wondered if you might be, too. I can’t tell.”

  He touched his head. “How would you know? No hair, no nothing.” He smiled. “I’m from the U.S. of A. A wop from Rhode Island.” At my look of confusion, he said, “Italian. Catholic, like you.”

  I told him that my name was Beatrice. He said that Beatrice didn’t sound like an Irish name, and I agreed. He asked if I had a cigarette. I told him I’d bring some the next day. He put his arms around me. I could feel his breath on my face. His mouth did not smell of death, but the sweet smell of resin, and I wondered if he’d been eating pine needles. There was the sound of gunfire nearby. The horizon, I knew, would be blazing with fire. I kissed him.

  “Did I tell you our nickname for them was the Goons?” he asked after a while. “They were mostly old men. They wore big straw shoes that stuck out from under their pants. It was the funniest thing I ever saw. I figured it had to be for warmth—who’d wear straw duck’s feet if he didn’t have to? You could tell their uniforms were stolen from dead Russians—even old men Germans are taller than Russians.

  “The camp was for Allied pilots. The Goons thought the pilots were gods. To tell you the truth, we all did. The Goons assigned us to the pilots as orderlies—nothing too personal or too un-American, just cleaning latrines and some light sweeping. A little cooking. We’d been captured near Salerno and shipped across the border in cattle cars. All any of us wanted, even the pilots, was water and salt. Not smokes, but salt. And we wanted to escape. In the beginning, it’s all we thought about. It kept us busy day and night, thinking about salt and planning our escape.”

  He began to cry, and I held him closer.

  “Every week, we had a different talk—one of the pilots was from Scotland Yard and another was a history teacher at a big university. The talks were pretty interesting, especially the one on Richard the Lionheart. And the Croydon Airport robbery. It made me think about what I’ll do when the war is over—I mean other than putting my nose to work. I figure maybe I’ll go back to school.”

  I waited for him to continue, not wanting him to stop. I thought of the number of times I’d been held in my life. Once or twice by my father. Never by my mother. Herr Elias when we danced in the library. Once by Caspar when I fell on the ice. “What happened then?” I asked.

  “We found watchmaking tools in one of the Red Cross boxes. Just what we needed. But it turned out Jimmy’s old man was a clock maker, and he knew all about watches. The commandant heard about it and brought him his nice Swiss watch to fix, and soon the guards asked him to fix other things, too. That got us a little extra food.”

  He drifted in and out of consciousness. Once he began to shout, and I rocked him gently until he stopped. He shifted his body to ease the pain, his head against my breast. “It won’t be long now,” he whispered. “Don’t forget me.”

  “Never,” I said.

  We were warm in our little bower, nestled in the leaves. A red fox stopped to stare at us over its shoulder, perhaps drawn by the smell of blood, then turned disdainfully and disappeared in the brush. An owl settled on a branch, ruffling its wings impatiently as it found its perch. A blind vole scuttled past my feet. The whole forest seemed to be moving, not only foxes (there were no rabbits left in Germany), but high above us, even the sky swayed and burned. I sang to him one of the songs that Felix liked to play on the gramophone while he dressed until I, too, fell asleep.

  It was near dawn when his voice woke me, and I wondered if he’d been talking all night. “It was the start of spring,” he said. “It wasn’t so damn cold anymore. We were shaken the hell out of our bunks. The Reds were only a day’s march away, and the camp was shutting down. We started walking, even though it was the middle of the night, stopping only when the Goons couldn’t take another step, giving them, God help us, a chance to rest. There were five hundred of us and twenty of them, but when one of the boys tried to sneak away, a guard shot him dead.”

  He motioned for some water, and I held his head so he could drink. He said that he had no feeling in his leg, and the pain was a little better. “We found some half rations left in a church by the Red Cross, most of them rotten, but we ate them anyway. Some of the men were puking and crapping in the snow, and I felt sorry for them—they couldn’t help it if they ate everything at once. One of the English pilots said he could see the fires in Berlin, but he was only imagining it—he’d already spotted Hitler twice that morning.

  “The first night, about thirty of us slept in a shed in the middle of a field—the others squeezed into a deserted farmhouse and some barns. There was nothing in the shed, not even windows, only a few cow bones and an empty water trough. In the morning when we went outside, everyone was gone. We couldn’t believe it! We celebrated with instant iced coffee, made with a couple of coffee crystals one of the officers had hidden in his pocket. When we calmed down, we realized we had no place to go—we didn’t even know where we were—and we hurried down the road after them. Now and then we’d pass a burning house, and we’d stand close to the fire for a few minutes to get warm. We figured thirty of us could move faster than hundreds of them, and once in a while we saw traces of them—a canteen with my friend’s name and some RAF flight maps the pilots had saved—but we couldn’t catch up with them, and we wondered if maybe they’d turned off the road. We could hear explosions and tank fire, and sometimes even shouting, and from then on we stuck to cattle trails. Sometimes we saw a group of men hurrying through the woods, or a family with their animals, but we all acted as if we were invisible, even the cows. When we stopped that night, I just kept going. No one even noticed, but no one would’ve cared, either. Who was going to stop me?

  “After walking for about an hour, I saw a high stone wall with a pair of fancy iron gates hanging from their hinges. The sound of gunfire was louder, and I could tell there was a road nearby. I could hear people shouting and running. I ducked inside the gates. Trees were planted in two long rows with a sandy road in the middle, and I knew there’d be a nice house at the end of it. I could smell stewed fruit, maybe apricots, which made me worry for a minute maybe I was hallucinating, like the English pilot. My nose again!

  “I saw the burned walls of what must’ve been a big mansion once. There were some other buildings nearby and a yard with a clock tower, but no people. No lights. I was figuring what to do next when there was a flash and then a rifle shot. I knew I was hit, even though I’d heard stories about being shot and not realizing it ’til your boot was full of blood. I heard a low whistle, and suddenly men were coming through the trees. I started to run. It wasn’t easy. I’d been shot in the leg, and I had to keep stopping.” He smiled. “The next thing I knew, a girl was trying to bury me.”

  It was early morning when I left him. Smoke drifted through the woods, and I could hear heavy artillery fire (Caspar had taught me the difference between the sound of a howitzer and that of an antitank gun). As I turned into the park, I smelled gasoline.

  Two tanks were rolling across the lawn. Naked men were in the river, splashing and shouting. A Russian lorry was parked in the yard. Soldiers were in the kitchen garden, kicking through the dirt as they searched for roots to eat. Some of them wore women’s hats and shawls, and one held a parasol over his head.

  There was an explosion—the retreating German army blowing up a bridge, perhaps—and although the explosion must have been a quarter of a mile away, I threw myself to the ground. I lay there, hands over my head, waiting for the next explosion, but none came. The soldiers standing around the lorry laughed and waved as I got to my feet.

  Felix was in front of the Pavilion with a Russian officer and his men. Although Felix spoke Russian,
he listened patiently, leaning on a stick, as a smiling man in the striped jacket of a prisoner of war translated for the Russians. The officer, discerning from Felix’s expression that he understood Russian, turned aside the translator and apologized to Felix, speaking to him directly as he folded the Albanians’ letter attesting to Felix’s goodwill and buttoned it inside his breast pocket.

  Dorothea and Kreck stood in the doorway of the stables with the Black Sea women and children, some refugees I’d never seen before, and the Frenchmen. The interpreter waved to the children gaily, calling in German, then in Polish, but they did not move or change expression.

  Felix went into the house with the officer. When they returned, the officer saluted Felix, and he and his men climbed into the lorry. The tanks had uprooted many of the elms in the avenue, and the lorry appeared intermittently in the gaps between the trees. In the park, the soldiers who’d been left behind dried themselves after their bath, gesturing to the women and waving cigarettes, but the women refused to look at them. Felix explained that the Russians had come to requisition the house for one of their generals. As there was no armistice yet, the tanks and the soldiers would remain in the park, where the trees would conceal them until the war had officially ended. He said that the general and his staff would be at the Pavilion in an hour.