The Life of Objects

by Susanna Moore

  With the fear of starvation came other fears. Some of the deserters spoke of the Charlemagne Battalion, a group of fighters composed of SS men and fanatics from across Europe who fancied themselves the new Crusaders, an exclusive cult of warriors who would be the last defense against the Asian barbarians steadily edging their way across the continent. The men vowed to keep fighting even when there was an armistice, and there had been reports of them in the woods south of Berlin. I hoped that Caspar hadn’t joined the Charlemagne Battalion.

  Felix, who’d been feeling low, asked me one morning to shave him. It was a task that Kreck would customarily have performed in the absence of Caspar, but Kreck’s crippled fingers made him a dangerous barber. Felix handed me a crude razor he’d laboriously fashioned from a broken knife blade and a piece of wood and calmly rested his head on the back of his chair. The razor was unsteady in its improvised binding, but he did not flinch. I drew the blade back and forth across his face, the knife making a harsh sound as it scraped against his dry skin. Kreck watched solemnly as I worked. “Sei vorsichtig, das ist seine empfindlichste Stelle!” he shouted, pointing with a shaking finger. Be careful, that is his delicate spot! Felix’s face was bright red when I finished, and there were two small nicks, but his beard was gone. Although we had no mirror, he said that he could tell just by touch that I’d done a finer job than his barber in Berlin.

  Dorothea had once resented it if even one of the trees in her grandfather’s wood was cut, but since the beginning of the war, she’d allowed anyone to enter the forest to take whatever wood he needed. As Dorothea and I left camp one morning to cut wood, accompanied by two Latvians who would actually do the work, Felix said, “The best fires, of course, are those made with ash. Pine and fir burn too quickly, as I’m sure you know.” I looked at him in astonishment—I should have known that he even had an opinion about firewood. I took it as a further sign that he was feeling better.

  In deference to Felix, an ash was chosen, and the Latvians made a good cut before they began to saw in earnest. The axe was heavy, and it was not easy to find the mark each time. The wood was moist, and the saw stuck in the wood, but after an hour of sawing—the men took turns and were eventually able to use a rusty two-handed saw—the tree began to sway hesitantly. The branches were entangled with the trees surrounding it, which seemed to bend toward it in support, but it was too late, and with a last shudder and groan, the tree fell to the ground. I, who had done nothing, was too exhausted to speak.

  The children met us when we returned to camp, the wagon piled with wood, watching as the logs were arranged in a pyramid. Kreck and Felix watched, too, waiting patiently for the fire to catch. Dorothea, who’d been punished as a child for setting fires with the flints she found in the park, was good at making fires, even with damp spring wood. She’d carried one of her boxes of flints with her when we left the Pavilion, comforted, she said, by the knowledge that the flints, imprinted with centipedes and seashells, were millions of years old. She used one of her flints to light the wood, but it was too green, even for Dorothea, and refused to burn.

  Felix calculated that we’d been in the Night Wood for sixteen days. There was enough food for two more days.

  That night, as I ran back and forth to the latrine, I had the strange feeling that something had changed. It was impossible to grasp hold of it. As the night wore on, however, it slowly came to me that I could no longer hear the faint drone of tanks or the intermittent rattle of machine-gun fire. I didn’t know how to account for it, the overwhelming relief of it, and I decided that I was suffering another trick of my weakened mind.

  I was awakened near morning by cries of jubilation. Women took up pot lids, banging them loudly, and some of the men did somersaults, causing the children to cry. Kreck danced shakily with Dorothea, while Felix, overcome, fell into his chair, his hands over his face. The man who came with the news was making his third tour of the camp, borne on the shoulders of some Belgian prisoners of war. Berlin had capitulated to the Red Army. Hitler was dead. The Americans were entering the city from the west.

  There frequently had been rumors of the war’s end, and we had learned not to believe them, but the empty sky, the cease of gunfire, the silence of the forest itself, told us that the news was true. The war was over. The feeling of shock was so great that for several hours all that we could do was run back and forth through the camp, embracing one another and crying. I found Bresla and the Odessa women and we prayed and sang together, the women holding me in their arms.

  In the afternoon, a man from the village came to tell Felix that the Russian general and his staff had left Löwendorf. He said there’d been talk that the Metzenburgs had abandoned the Pavilion. At this news, Dorothea and Felix decided to return at once. We began to collect our few things, but Kreck, assuring Felix that he and Roeder would soon follow, urged him to leave immediately. Accompanied by Bessie, we set out for home.

  The hawthorn was in bloom. Blue herons paced tentatively along the river’s edge, and there even were bees. I saw two waxwings in the willows, lurking like thieves, black masks over their brown eyes. Mr. Knox had once told me that waxwings were very confiding, and I wondered what stories they would have to tell me.

  Although the general and his staff were gone, one of the tanks and some of the soldiers remained in a disorderly encampment. Clouds of flies, attracted by the stench of rotting flesh, swarmed over the river, its surface marked by astonished trout. Dorothea’s collection of eighteenth-century books, among them prints of frogs and toads from Catesby’s Natural History, was scattered across the park, and the frogs, flying across the torn pages, looked as if they were alive. Strips of carpet hung from the trees, and the ground was strewn with broken porcelain and pieces of painted canvas (I saw the face of Dorothea’s mother on one of them). The windows and doors of the Pavilion had been smashed, and mounds of broken glass and brick were piled high around the house. We had expected much worse.

  In the yard, Frau Blucher from the inn, wearing a blue velvet hat and the jacket of a Lanvin suit, a bit too small for her, was busy trading a soldier a bottle of schnapps for one of Dorothea’s teapots.

  “I would tell you that you’ll have another Lanvin if I thought it mattered to you,” Felix said to Dorothea. I’d noticed that once we were out of the Night Wood and in the light again, Felix looked old. He wasn’t old, I knew, but his face had a yellow pallor, and I wondered if he had jaundice. Many of the refugees in the camp had been sick.

  I followed Felix and Dorothea into the house. A group of Red Army soldiers sprawled on the floor of the drawing room stared at us as if we were unexpected and unwelcome guests. There was a smell of urine, wood smoke, and excrement. Russian words and crude drawings were scratched across the walls. The chairs and sofas had been ripped apart and the stuffing burned. On the bare floor, nearly buried under garbage and waste, were torn books, bed linen, strips of curtain, and broken plates. The gramophone records had been snapped in two, and the gramophone was gone. At the sight of her torn wedding veil, Dorothea looked happy for a moment. “I’d forgotten about my veil,” she said. Felix took her hand, and we left the house.

  A soldier stood in the doorway of the stables, arguing loudly with a woman who looked like Herr Pflüger’s wife, both of them tugging on one of Dorothea’s sheets.

  “Do you remember when I said that if we loved it, we had to protect it?” Felix asked Dorothea.

  “Not likely that I’d forget,” she said.

  “I’m not sure that we were successful.”

  We watched in silence as more soldiers, some of them wearing Felix’s clothes, joined the argument. Suddenly, the commotion in the yard grew louder.

  Coming across the park, a hawthorn stick in his hand, was Kreck, followed by Roeder and a band of drunken and ecstatic refugees. Pipes were played and drums banged as the children twirled and shouted in excitement. Kreck had fashioned an eye patch out of a piece of sacking—he looked like a mountain king, the tips of his overgrown mustache,
no longer black, springing from his face. His rusty frock coat, once a little tight across his back, hung loosely from his shoulders. Dogs swirled around him as he stopped in front of the Pavilion and shook his stick in triumph. Not Ovid, I thought, but the Brothers Grimm. We are rat catchers, bewitched swans, witches.

  We confined ourselves to the upper floors of the Pavilion, sleeping on straw. We had no candles or oil for lamps, and water had to be carried from the well in the yard. Despite the foul smell of my body, I thought constantly of food. The food was always Irish. Brown bread with butter, salmon, oatmeal with cream, boiled cabbage with bacon (but no potatoes). I used to dream of Herr Elias, but after the war I dreamed of food.

  Bresla and her mother chose not to return to Odessa with their friends, and Felix gave them the use of an abandoned farmhouse that he owned in the village. Lazare was taking Bresla’s aunt (she of the Immaculate Conception) with him to France. Bertrand was traveling to Odessa with Bresla’s cousin, explaining that he’d pretended to be her husband for so long, he couldn’t conceive of life without her. The departure of the Frenchmen and the women and their children made us sad, and Bresla and I walked with them as far as the crossroad.

  As there was no telephone service or post, letters continued to arrive mysteriously, passed from hand to hand and village to village, slipped under a door or left at the foot of a tree. I spent two days searching for a pencil, at last finding one at the back of a broken desk drawer. I sharpened it with Felix’s homemade razor and wrote to my parents and to Mr. Knox, entrusting the letters to a foreign worker on his way to Belgium.

  Most of the people in camp had already started for home, but those who remained were invited to stay in the stables for as long as they wished. They were understandably eager to be on their way, and each day there were fewer of them. We had nothing to eat, and Felix sold two of the motorcars to Herr Pflüger for food.

  One morning, the soldiers were gone from the park—Dorothea said that it was thanks to our exhaustion that we neither saw nor heard them leave. They’d retreated only as far as the village, however, coming drunk every day to the Pavilion to demand that Felix tell them where he’d hidden his gold. The villagers did not trouble themselves over vagaries like hidden gold. Herr Pflüger’s son, recently returned from the Western Front, carried away the last pair of firedogs, seven brass doorknobs, and a stuffed owl. Many of the soldiers had never seen a bicycle, and they crashed our bicycles full speed into walls and rode off the bridge into the river. There were fights, and a soldier was shot in a quarrel over a tire pump.

  As Löwendorf and other villages south and east of Berlin had been declared part of the new Russian zone of occupation, landowners in the neighborhood were said to be joining the Communist Party as fast as they could find the local commissar. Some Ukrainian refugees who’d been slave workers in Poznan refused to return to Russia, confiding to Bresla that they and their children had been treated brutally by their own soldiers. If a woman raped by a Russian soldier was later found to be pregnant or suffering from venereal disease, she was sent to Siberia. The Ukrainians were determined to reach Canada, and one morning they were gone from the stables.

  At the end of May, the Russians drove the tank from the village, careening noisily down the rutted road to a nearby town. The armistice had been signed early in the month, and there was no longer any reason to hide the tank. The soldiers took our bicycles with them, except for one that I’d hidden in the meadow.

  Word came that one of the farmers, just returned from the war, had hung himself, and Felix and I walked to his farm. The craters in the road were filled with waste, and we took the path through the orchard. Makeshift shelters had been set up in the fields, and there was a strong smell of sewage. Both of us were still a bit weak, and it took us an hour to reach the farm, eating the apples we’d picked along the way.

  The man’s body was swinging from a beech, a rough ladder leaning against the tree. His wife stood under the body, staring at his bare feet. She said that the Russian soldiers had destroyed his hives for sport and had used his furniture for shooting practice. He’d not been able to bear the loss of his bees and his grandmother’s chairs. Someone, she said, had stolen the shoes from his feet.

  Boys from the village cut down the body at Felix’s direction. The rope had distended the man’s neck, and the distance between his jaw and shoulders was elongated. When Felix bent to help the woman with the body, she spat at him. We left her there, surrounded by the laughing boys. I had to stop twice on the way home, vomiting in the weeds.

  A few days later, Dorothea asked me to accompany her to the basement of the Pavilion. The filth left by the soldiers reached our knees (reminding me of Pepys’s cellar), and we spent the morning clearing a path to a coal chute in the corner where Dorothea remembered that Caspar had hidden a painting—a small Cranach, she said. Using sticks, we searched in several places, finding three bags containing jewelry and two silver chalices, but no Cranach. “Venus, and Cupid stung by bees,” she said, panting with the effort of digging. When she noticed that my hands were shaking, she took my stick from me. “Remember where these are buried,” she said as she returned the treasures to their hiding places, which made me wonder if she feared for her memory. Or perhaps, I thought in alarm, she and Felix were leaving Löwendorf and did not intend to take me with them.

  It was the beginning of summer. The windows and the roof had not been repaired, and it was possible, if you were not too distracted, to hear the unaccustomed sound of motorcars on the road. There was even the sound of singing now and then. Although thousands of refugees and prisoners of war were still moving across the land, there were fewer than before, and the victorious Allied soldiers seemed to keep to Berlin.

  I worried that I would not have the strength to hold on to my happiness (if I still kept lists, my longing to keep at least some small part of it would be at the top). It was difficult to ease my grief, burdened like others with a new and permanent sense of dread. Those moments when I could not help but feel pleasure—eating a fresh egg or finding a book that was not missing its pages—filled me with shame.

  I understood that the division of time is determined by astral and lunar phenomena, but I began to wonder if sorrow and elation also have their own tidal and rotational cycles, all part of the encompassing natural world. If Felix’s generation suffered death and humiliation in the Great War, we had been left with the inexhaustible presence of evil. That people, including myself, could so easily resume their old ways and habits seemed a repudiation of all that had been lost. I couldn’t bear the thought that everything would remain the same, yet I was frightened by the new world that awaited us.

  During the war, we had scavenged at night and slept in the day. Children had not gone to school. Animals had not foaled. There’d been no appointments to keep or to cancel, no market days, weddings, or funerals, and no cars, buses, trains, or horses to get us there, had there been someplace to go. There’d been no telephones, electricity, petrol. No medicine. No money and no food.

  We had survived, but we were different people.

  Dorothea and Felix made no mention of leaving Löwendorf, and I was further relieved when Dorothea asked Bresla and me to help with the restoration of the kitchen garden. Women from the village, who at first watched silently from the garden door, slowly began to offer advice, surprised and pleased to see that we worked as hard and as long as they themselves worked. They brought us seeds and even tools, trading them for a share in the garden. It was too late to plant all of the seeds, but we were in time for tomatoes, snap beans, carrots, and beets, setting them against the east wall where the seedlings would be sheltered from the wind. We mixed dirt with sand from the river to plant parsley and fennel. Advised by the farmers’ wives, we chose a day that was dry to plant cabbage and onions. The women, who once believed that the glittering paths of the garden were paved with gold, thanks to the mica in the sand, taught us to sow with the waxing of the moon, and we planted white poppies and hyssop. Th
e little huts in each corner of the garden, made with bent juniper poles and covered with grapevines, had been stripped by the soldiers when they ate the leaves, and I planted a myrrh-scented climbing rose, winding the stems through the lattice. I also planted a cutting of blue honeyberry, which birds like very much.

  Madame Tkvarcheli worked in the kitchen—walnuts, soft and green, were just right for pickling, she said. Bresla was learning to speak German, and if I was not too tired, I gave her lessons in the evening. Frau Hoffeldt and Frau Bodenschatz had returned to the village with their children, but they, too, came each day to help in the garden and in the house.

  Felix fell ill a few weeks after our return. Although he had a fever, he had no pain or further symptoms of disease. When he refused to eat, Madame Tkvarcheli made nettle tea for him, which she said was a cure for grief. He liked that the leaves resembled the face of a weasel, but he would not touch the tea, and Dorothea and I drank it instead.

  One night, I heard Dorothea say to him, “You must never leave me, Felix. I couldn’t bear it. You must swear to me. I understand nothing. Not money. Not people, especially Germans. I would be lost without you.”

  Felix’s answer was not very satisfactory. “We’ve returned to the time of the Great Migrations. All of Europe is in motion. Everything we learned to take for granted is no longer certain—the preservation of knowledge and life without constant fear of death. We’ll live like medieval monks, modest and humble in our diligence. That might suit us, darling,” he said.