She was no taller than me, though almost a year older. Now that she was being nicer I couldn’t dislike her so much. Something about her was like a bird, a hungry little bird, eager and quick.
She looked at me with a thoughtful expression. “Red Indians won’t give their names away. They hold them quite wertvolle, just as you.”
I gave in. “Billy. Billy is my name.”
“Very good. You may read my Winnetou novels. Author: Karl May. They are on my shelf in my father’s library. I’ll tell him you have permissions to read. Karl May is a superb writer. I say they are the finest books ever written. What’s it like in England? I barely can remember. Do you think they’ll hate me?”
“I don’t know. You’re a German.”
“I don’t hate them, though the English ships have starved us, nearly. People down the road are eating crows. People eat their dogs and cats. I don’t hate the English, though all the good Germans they’ve killed.”
She stepped off the path and approached the tree where her arrow had stuck. With a sharp tug, she pulled it out and inspected the head before dropping it into the quiver.
“When strangers meet, they ought to smoke. That’s the custom on El Llano Estacado.”
El Llano Estacado. The first time I heard the phrase.
“But tobacco’s rare these days. My father has cigars given him by an American general.” Suddenly she held out the bow. “Here. Take it. Yours.”
I didn’t know what she meant. “No, it isn’t.”
“Yes. I hardly can carry it to boarding school, can I? Yours.”
Stunned, I accepted the massive, sleek weapon, nearly five feet in length with a double curve. The smooth mulberry, stained with red ocher, was widest at the handle and tapered gracefully toward the ends.
Slipping the quiver off her shoulder, she held it out. “Arrows break, arrows fly off and don’t come back. When you need more, one of the foresters here—Old Rudi, too old for the army—is quite good at making them. Now I’ll show you the graves. You’re to look after the graves until the men come back.”
Without another word she started down the path, walking quickly.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to see the graves. The daylight was fading, the air was getting colder, and I didn’t want to get lost in the dark.
But I couldn’t bear her thinking I was afraid, even though I was. So I slung the quiver of arrows on my shoulder and started after her, clutching the bow. My hands were cold; my eyes were leaking; my nose dripped. I was in fact on the cusp of the flu, the infamous influenza of 1918–19, which killed more people than the war. Maybe that’s why that afternoon is so sharp in memory, why it feels inflicted: The stubborn scent of ground, though it was frozen hard. The weak but piercing daylight, the crackle of twigs, my own garbled breathing as I struggled to keep up. If I lost sight of her, I’d never catch up.
The woods broke open at a small grassy clearing. The stiff tufts of grass were winter yellow. Six metal crosses were arranged in precise formation—it was a cemetery. A soldiers’ cemetery.
Karin stood facing a headstone that was set off on its own, away from the uniform iron crosses marking the other graves. I approached and stood beside her, quiver slung on my shoulder, clutching the Apache bow.
“All right, Billy. My brother.”
The granite was scabbed with tawny lichen. The iron Fraktur letters on the stone were difficult to read in the dim light.
HIER RUHT IN FRIEDEN
Hermann
von Weinbrenner
7.9.96–2.2.97
“You come in here from time to time, Billy, do you accept?” Her expression was stern. “The old parents will never come out. So you must, from time to time—agreed? When it snows, brush the snow off. In spring you may put some simple flowers. There’s nothing else to be done. He’s dead, after all. But you shall come out? You won’t forget?”
“No—yes—I will.”
She looked around at the metal crosses marking the other graves. “These poor fellows were all soldiers. I knew them. Some were quite nice. That one—third in the first row, the little Oberleutnant, Fröhlisch—from him I first had the Winnetou novels. He gave me his own books, his mother brought them from Bavaria. We spoke quite often of El Llano Estacado.”
She used the correct Spanish pronunciation: yah-no.
“He wished very much to cross el llano before he died, but he did not. Do you think he crosses it now? That would be nice, only I can’t believe it. Fröhlisch as well taught me to play the piano. Ragtime! Do you play?”
“No.”
“Do you do anything especially well?”
“I can ride.”
“They’ve taken all the horses for the war,” Karin said. “Except my mother’s hunter. But my father will buy others, and the farrier shall find his way back from the front, and the saddlemaker and the vet. Only I shall be in England. Some of our old grooms showed up last week. One lost his arm. One was drunk. I must go now. I’m expected for tea.”
Abruptly she started back the way we had come, following the path. I trailed her. The sky was cold blue, weak winter sun sinking fast through the trees. When we came to a place where two paths crossed, she pointed. “You go this way, I go that. Goodbye. Remember to do what you have promised.”
“I’ll remember.”
“No snow on my brother. Flowers in spring. I hope you get enough to eat. In Germany we live on potatoes and turnips. No meat in ages. A scrap of bacon sometimes. My mother says there’s plenty of food in England.”
“Well, there is.”
“Why can’t they share it?” She scowled, then began walking away into the dark, the crisp dark of winter.
“Auf Wiedersehen!” I called.
“Auf Wiedersehen!” Her voice flew back at me, haunting and quite alone, like an owl winging deftly among the trees.
My father’s interview with the baron took place in his library at Walden. It was a grand house, built by Karin’s grandfather in the 1880s, in the craggy style of an East Prussian hunting lodge, except three or four times larger, with massive timbers, mounted heads of stags, and a dining hall that would have swallowed up a corps of Teutonic knights.
Karin’s father believed Walden to be not only the largest but also the most beautiful house in Frankfurt, and when she was a girl he often reminded her how fortunate she was to grow up surrounded by one hundred and eighty four hectares of forest and meadow and artworks and beautiful horses. Whereas the children of Niederrad, just down the road, thought themselves fortunate just to have shoes on their feet and cabbages for supper.
In his library on the wintry afternoon of our first day in Germany, Hermann Weinbrenner proudly showed my father the Iron Crosses (second class and first class) kept in a leather box on his mahogany desk. The desk itself had once belonged to Admiral von Spee.
Then the little baron displayed his right hand, missing two fingers shot off at Courland, where his squadron of Garde-Reserve-Uhlanen had been in a cavalry skirmish. After recovering from the wound he wasn’t permitted to return to the front and instead was ordered to supervise a team of chemists developing new poison gases at his dyeworks, Colora GmbH.
The baron had a passion for geography and cartography. He owned a collection of globes, atlases, and gazetteers, some quite ancient. He collected books on the history of organic chemistry, on German naval history, and the history of the Jews. Also Russian novels. He’d been a chemist, a businessman, a champion polo player, a yachtsman, and a soldier, but the library at Walden was where he felt most himself, with his Eiserne Kreuz in their leather box and his Uhlanen saber, its blade stamped IN TREUE FEST—Loyalty Forever—slung on the wall.
During the First World War, when Walden had been a rest home for wounded officers, the library was the one room in the main house reserved for use of the family. Karin spent hours in there alone, reading Winnetou stories.
The baron offered Buck a cigar from a box of Havanas an American general had given him. Weinbrenner started cu
rsing the English sea lords, who’d commandeered his wonderful Yankee schooner Hermione II at the start of the war, and confiscated his English island house, Sanssouci, where we had once made our home.
“You must agree, Captain Lange, that house was without question the most beautiful, modern, and well-situated house on the Isle of Wight.”
“It was a fine house.”
“Why, English gentlemen—men whom I had considered my friends!—stood up on hind legs in the House of Commons and accused me of being a spymaster! It was poor you, my poor captain, whom they would shoot for a spy but it was me, Captain, whom they hated—the dastardly Hun who won their races too often! I tell you I shall never again enter the harbor of Cowes. I have no more taste for yachting. Bloody Englishmen and the Royal Yacht Squadron can go to hell!”
Buck’s head spun. No yachting meant—no skipper’s job. How then was he going to earn a living? We couldn’t stay on as charity cases at Walden. And the Germany glimpsed between the Hauptbahnhof and Walden’s iron gates looked savage and famished.
He was afraid my mother would decide to return to Ireland and take me with her and he’d never see either of us again.
“Of course, after this monstrous and wasteful tide of war, my complaints are petty and ridiculous even to myself,” the baron remarked. “Now to the case of yourself, Captain, who has lost on my account four and a half years.”
“There’s many who’ve lost a good deal more,” said Buck.
The baron struck a match and held it to my father’s cigar. “No doubt. A business proposition I wish to make—and, by the way, is that not a fine smoke? The best since the war, do you agree?”
My father—reeling from disappointment but struggling not to show it—had nothing to say. He didn’t really enjoy cigars.
“Captain Lange, my proposition.” Hermann Weinbrenner enjoyed playing the role of bluff, shouting Prussian squire, but he could switch gears very quickly. And sitting down behind Admiral Spee’s mahogany desk, he proceeded to offer Buck—the three of us—a new life.
“Here at Walden I intend to found a racing stable and stud. The best in Germany. In Europe, perhaps. In short, I wish you to be the manager of all: men, horses, breeding, training, racing. I intend to place the operation in your capable hands.” The baron licked the tip of his own cigar and struck a match to light it. Then he smiled. “Do you accept?”
“You’re not serious,” my father said.
He thought Weinbrenner must be pulling his leg, and it made him angry.
Picking up his hat, he looked around for a place to put down his cigar. He couldn’t bear being teased, even—especially—by his old benefactor.
You have to remember our vulnerable position, as deportees. And of course my father felt himself responsible for our poverty, our homelessness.
“Believe me, dear Captain, I can’t make any such proposal without being utterly serious. If you agree, we start tomorrow.”
Still holding his cigar—the approximate size of a baby’s forearm—in one hand, hat in the other, Buck felt dizzy, as if he’d stood up too quickly. Though he’d never actually sat down.
“But why? How? Surely there are—”
“Dear Captain, you were undoubtedly the best horseman, the most instinctive, the most knowledgeable, of our Uhlanen. And that, my dear fellow, is saying something.”
Buck had not thought of it for some time, but the fact was their relationship did go back to their days in the Uhlanen-Garde at the turn of the century, when Weinbrenner was the first Jewish (Reserve) officer in the history of the regiment, and Buck a young conscript with a reputation as a horse wizard, Pferdezauberer. The baron had known my father as a horseman before he knew him as a skipper.
And my father had known horses all his life. When Captain Jack was still a skipper in the Australian grain trade, Buck and Con lived in Melbourne, near the famous Flemington racetrack. At twelve my father was earning pocket money as an exercise rider. At fifteen he rode a horse called War God to a second-place finish in the Melbourne Cup.
In the Uhlanen Buck had been renowned for his uncanny skills as a horsebreaker and trainer of cavalry mounts. Even the rugged old instructor sergeants and veterinarians used to ask the raw recruit’s advice, and that’s when Hermann, Freiherr von Weinbrenner, who was in those days a famous polo player, as well as a reserve officer, first noticed him.
“Every aspect of your military career, not to mention our sailing days on the Solent, tells me you are exactly the racing manager I require.”
“I don’t know. Honestly, Baron…”
It was so different from what he’d expected. Abruptly, he sat down in one of the leather chairs. The cigar in his fist was smoldering fragrant silver smoke.
Cigars like that smelled of the jungle afire, he once told me, the jungle burning.
“And you are without a position at present, Captain, so I understand. Or so my wife believes. But perhaps she is misinformed?”
Suddenly my father was afraid that Weinbrenner was offering him the job out of charity. Making up a role for him, improvising. Was it merely a generous gesture of loyalty? Of gratitude? Of reparation? Was the racing stable and stud a moment’s whim, and never a project the baron would commit himself to seriously?
But Weinbrenner was never one for gestures, generous or otherwise. He was above all a businessman.
“Let me make clear, my dear Captain Lange. I want you for one reason. I believe you will give me victories. I’ve seen you handle a race crew, dear Captain. I know what you can accomplish. And I shall rely on your instincts for bloodstock, for choosing our mares, breeding them, training up our offspring.”
Karin once said her father loved mine because the baron was so accustomed to people wanting things from him, and Buck wanted so little. That wasn’t entirely accurate: he wanted to win races. But the baron wanted victories even more and, as it turned out, he was more than willing to pay for them.
In the library that afternoon Buck listened to the baron outline his plan to make Walden the top racing stud in Europe. Before the war he had bred polo ponies and cavalry mounts at Walden, but his damaged hand could no longer grip a polo mallet, and his precious Uhlanen had been decimated on the eastern front and destroyed at Verdun. No more yachting, no more polo ponies, no cavalry horses—instead the baron intended to apply to the sport of kings the scientific and business methods that had made him one of the most successful colorists in history.
As general manager of Rennstall Walden, Buck Lange would be responsible for choosing breeding stock and overseeing the trainers, riders, grooms, and everyone else, with an excellent salary and a percentage of the winnings. For the greater glory of their Germany, they were going to breed, raise, and race the best bloodlines in Europe.
Our first dinner at Newport was exactly what Karin said it would be—turnips and potatoes. Buck and Eilín had a bottle of champagne from the baron’s cellar, and I was offered a taste. That evening neither of my parents was able to muster much interest in my Apache bow.
We had all seen glowering, defeated Germany on our drive from the station, those gaunt faces and empty shopwindows, and half-dead nags pulling carts of junk. But now my father had a position, and during the afternoon Lady Maire had stopped at Newport to welcome my mother and ask her help organizing and cataloging the Walden art collection.
We had a future again.
While I handled my bow and inspected my beautiful, delicate arrows, I couldn’t escape a feeling that I owed Karin a gift in exchange, but what did I have to offer a girl who had once started swimming for America?
There were twenty-two arrows in the quiver, striped red and black (the pigments came from Colora GmbH dyeworks). They were precisely feathered and had hammered-metal tips. The deerskin quiver smelled like a smoked ham, much more appetizing than the rude vegetables steaming on our table. The arrows were delicate, surprisingly frail, and the bow was the first thing I owned that wasn’t a toy but an instrument shaped to accomplish certain specif
ic business in the world—a machine, really. The baron had obtained an authentic Apache design from an ethnologist at Heidelberg University, and the same craftsman who made the ship models in his library had carved and steam-bent the bow for Karin. It had a draw weight of fifteen kilograms, and I would teach myself to hunt with it. In the winter of 1919 there was no game left on the estate, but the next year it started coming back—a few rabbits—and by then I had a good-enough aim and technique (the three-fingered Apache draw) to kill some of what I shot at.
While my parents sipped champagne from china teacups, toasting the future, I was worrying where I should keep my bow, keep it safe. I was afraid that if I didn’t find the right spot for it, the bow would be ruined or smashed even before I learned to use it properly.
When my mother suggested I store my bow in the ugly brass barrel near the front door where umbrellas and walking sticks were kept—or, worse, toss it into the hall closet with our boots and overcoats—I felt physically sick. I didn’t want my Apache bow mixed up with ordinary things.
I was nine years old. Yes, probably I was exhausted. Enough turmoil and dislocation had been thrown my way.
But in practically all cultures, powerful rituals and taboos govern the proper storage and keeping of weapons.
At last my father suggested that we take down a Dürer print above my bed and hang the bow in its place. It looked magnificent there, graceful and forceful, and it would be near at hand. I hung the quiver from the same picture hook, and suddenly my bedroom wasn’t the barren bedroom of a deportee, a refugee, Herm the Germ, but the spartan lodge of a hunter and warrior.
Then I remembered the Sweet Afton cigarette tin Mick had presented when I left Sligo. There were even a few cigarettes left inside, dry, crumbly, a little bent, perhaps—but Karin had said tobacco was rare.
I threw on my coat and walked the gravel avenue to the main house with the Sweet Aftons tin in my pocket. I don’t think my parents noticed me leave. My flu fever may have been coming on, for I wasn’t at all cold.
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