Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  I lay on the chaise longue, a skinny boy, undeveloped, brown from summer, and watched Karin Weinbrenner swim lengths of the pool. It occurred to me that my confusion, stupor, might mean I was in love with her. And this was an astounding revelation. I didn’t wish to be in love. Not with her, not with anyone. I had other things to do. I preferred the raucous company of schoolfellows, my tribe. I certainly didn’t need to be in love with a girl.

  She pulled herself out of the pool, picked up her towel, and that was when we both heard the scream.

  My first thought was Horse down, broken leg. In the spring a colt had gone down with a shattered foreleg, and my father shot him. He allowed me to watch, and I stood with a somber bunch of grooms, trainers, and stableboys as Buck held the Browning pistol to the colt’s forehead, took aim along the spine, and pulled the trigger. That was how death was delivered: quickly. “Den Gnadenschuss geben,” the men called it. The mercy shot. Death in an instant.

  More screams, but now recognizably human, German, and female.

  Then a batch of furious masculine shouting.

  “That’s Solomon and Herta, winding up,” Karin said. She was drying herself with a towel. “He’s beating her again, the cur.”

  The brick garage/coach house where the chauffeur Solomon Dietz and his Sorb wife, Herta, lived was across the lawn and down the avenue a little way. The one-eyed chauffeur was one of the few Walden employees who did not report to my father. Solomon was like an ogre out of a German folktale, rude and surly to everyone. He was a veteran front soldier, a Jew, and an active member of the Reichsbanner, the Social Democrat street fighters’ organization. Solomon Dietz considered himself the baron’s bodyguard and always kept a Browning pistol tucked under the front seat of the Mercedes.

  “That man’s not all right in the head,” Lady Maire had cautioned my mother. “The war has scrambled him up. Do be careful.”

  More screams and shouting.

  “Aren’t you going to do something, Billy?” Karin said.

  My father tried to have as little to do with Solomon as possible. Me? What could I do? I was a boy. Solomon was a man.

  “Well then,” Karin remarked, “if you won’t, I must.”

  Wrapping the towel around her bathing costume Karin picked up her tennis racket in its press and started for the coach house. I caught her scent—chlorine and a trace of eau de cologne. Her father had recently given her a bottle of eau de cologne, to which her mother had objected.

  Of course I had to follow. Had to demonstrate pluck. Though I didn’t feel plucky. I was barefoot and wearing a bathing costume. My tennis shoes were in the cabana—no time to put them on.

  Karin was already climbing up the rickety outside staircase that led to the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage.

  Another scream. By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, she was pounding the door with her fist.

  She looked down at me and grinned. “What if they’re in bed together?”

  Her skin was brown with summer, freckled across the nose and cheeks. Her teeth were white. Her thick, rough chestnut hair was bluntly cut and streaked red and golden by sun.

  I started upstairs. Another shout, a blow, another scream.

  “What say you, Billy Lange? Perhaps they are in bed having fun.”

  “It doesn’t sound like fun.”

  Standing next to her, again I smelled her scent. She pounded the door with her fist. “Herta? Was ist das Problem? Was ist los dadrinnen?”

  She tried the door, and it opened.

  The chauffeur’s apartment was like a hut in some peasant village on the steppe, floor and walls painted bright red lacquer and decorated with painted wildflowers. Solomon stood with his back to the kitchen sink and his forearm crooked around Herta’s throat. His eye patch was askew and the hollow of his empty eye socket was purple, like a bruise.

  “Lass sie gehen, du Verbrecher!” Karin ordered him.

  Instead of releasing his wife, Solomon tightened his choke hold. She flailed her arms and made croaking sounds. Stepping forward, Karin struck Solomon with her tennis racket, banging at his neck and shoulders until he had to let Herta go. Gasping and coughing, Herta tried to seize the racket from Karin.

  “No, no, Herta!” Karin warned.

  “Du Bastard! Ich schneide dir deinen Schwarz ab!” Herta lunged for a kitchen knife but Karin swung the tennis racket and knocked the knife off the table along with a bottle of schnapps which smashed on the floor.

  Karin started pushing Herta toward the door. The husband and wife were screaming curses at each other. The room smelled of schnapps. Karin got Herta out the door and began forcing her down the steps. Herta kept trying to start back up, but Karin wouldn’t let her. I was afraid Solomon would come out after us but he didn’t appear.

  At the bottom of the stairs Herta was kissing our hands. Maybe she was drunk.

  “That brute will murder her one day,” Karin said. “My father must get rid of him. Come along, Herta.”

  I watched them going along the birch-lined avenue that led to the main house, Karin in her bathing costume with her white towel wrapped around her waist.

  Her father, of course, was never going to fire his ultra-loyal, very well-armed chauffeur-bodyguard, not after Walter Rathenau had been murdered in his car on his way to work.

  Herta turned down the baron’s offer of a train ticket to Berlin, excellent references and enough money to get a room of her own, and returned to the apartment above the coach house in time to fix her husband’s lunch.

  The newspapers had printed a “death list” found in the pocket of Rathenau’s assassin, with Hermann Weinbrenner’s name on it. After that, my father and Solomon—and occasionally the baron—would walk deep into the Walden woods to take weekly target practice. The chauffeur had begged my father to accept a Belgian Browning pistol and practice shooting so that he could help defend the baron from reactionaries.

  Buck insisted they go as far from the stables as possible because he didn’t want to spook the mares. The men blasted at paper targets pinned to tree stumps. I was a better marksman than any of them—but a good bow, once you know how to use it, is always more accurate than a pistol.

  Then my father decided I might as well learn to use a pistol and showed me how to load a magazine and slide it into the butt of the Browning. Those nine-millimeter cartridges were shiny little deadweights, cold and greasy to the touch. He demonstrated flipping off the thumb safety and drawing back the slide, then handed the weapon to me.

  “Fire when ready!”

  The pistol had a strong kick, and I emptied my first magazine without hitting the target once. But over the summer my aim improved. The pistols spat out brass cartridges which it was my job to collect from the forest floor.

  Just before she returned to school I taught Karin to shoot. We used my father’s Browning. He approved, and so did the baron. Walter Rathenau’s blood had spilled over everything, or at least over the lives of rich Frankfurt Jews. It was nearly five years since the end of the war, and the baron was about to publish the first volume of his memoirs. No one reads his Lebenserinnerungen U. Politische Denkwürdigkeiten these days, but the books touched a raw nerve in Germany of the 1920s. Using official documents, including Foreign Office telegrams, Weinbrenner argued that Germany had been chiefly responsible for the world war and that it was bunglers in Berlin, including the kaiser, who brought about the debacle of August 1914.

  After the first volume appeared the right-wing papers began referring to Karin’s father as der verräterische Judenbaron—the Jewish traitor baron—and then the nationalists really got him in their sights.

  An automatic pistol is no marksman’s weapon, but Karin’s aim improved very quickly. Something about gunfire seemed to calm her instead of flustering her, which is how it usually affects people who aren’t accustomed to it. At first we shot at paper targets and pieces of old crockery, but that didn’t satisfy her. She said she wanted something “human” to shoot at.

&n
bsp; “Something with a scent of human, at least.”

  Returning to the main house, she came back with an armful of her own dresses. It made me uneasy when she began draping them over tree branches.

  “All right, dear Billy, let’s load and fire.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Silly old frocks. Let’s make use of them.”

  “You could give them away.”

  “Of course, of course, I could,” she said impatiently. “I’ll give away plenty, give away everything, but these I want to shoot. Come, dear Billy, please hand me the pistol and show me again how to load it.”

  I loaded and reloaded, and we took turns firing at her things. Sometimes a bullet took a dress down, whipped it to the ground, like a bird killed in midflight. Sometimes bullets tore through the fabric but left the dress hanging, fluttering from the impact. Karin was calm and steady and shot very well for a beginner. Afterward she gave me the pistol to clean, and we shook hands, and the next morning she started back to England.

  She had one more year at boarding school, then her parents packed her off to a finishing school at Lausanne.

  1938

  “Billy! Hier bitte!”

  I was wandering the Walden grounds, floating on a weird mood of nostalgia and self-importance, when I encountered Karin on the bridle path.

  In her narrow slippers and her fitted Harris Tweed overcoat she looked very sleek and mondän, very Berlin, very out of place. Her mother had crammed the estate with medieval iconography, her father bred the fastest thoroughbreds in Europe, her brother was buried in a clearing with six young soldiers from the war—but Karin had always insisted she felt more herself in other places.

  “Whatever have you been doing with yourself, Billy? I watched you coming up the drive an hour ago!”

  “Oh, just wandering. Trying to get my fill.”

  I reminded her we had an appointment at the American consulate in Köln in two days—Kop had made it for us. We needed our passports stamped with tourist visas so that we could drive across the United States.

  She linked arms with me. “I regret my Berlin,” she said.

  “There’s nothing for you there these days.”

  But I knew I’d miss Berlin, too. Weekends in the metropolis had always left me humming like an electrified wire. We’d never had more than two or three days together, I’d always wanted more, but what we had seemed enough for her. I possessed her physically, but on every occasion she possessed far more of me.

  She said, “Whatever fails you, Billy, you miss the most.”

  We started back toward the house. I was not looking forward to the interview with her father. Almost everything he owned had been looted by the regime, and now I was stealing his daughter.

  When I was a boy, and she offered them to me, I had taken in the Winnetou stories as delicious fantasy. Until one afternoon when I was ten or eleven, leafing through a North American atlas, Ortsverzeichnis von Nordamerika, in the baron’s library. That’s when I saw the words

  L L A N O E S T A C A D O

  strewn across an otherwise empty map of West Texas and eastern New Mexico and realized that the landscape of Winnetou actually existed. For me, this was a great, wonderful shock—like finding God listed in the Frankfurt telephone directory.

  But Karin had always understood el llano was real space. She’d started collecting books and scholarly articles when she was a girl. She read everything she could get her hands on having to do with that country.

  “The point of el llano, Billy,” she remarked, one morning in Charlottenburg, “is that this is the world we should much prefer. It’s bare and clean. There’s nothing infected. Out on el llano one might climb on a horse and ride for days with the sun and the wind. That’s salvation, if you ask me.”

  After five years of Hitler’s Germany, the idea of crossing el llano together seemed to offer—I won’t say salvation, but cleansing. Caustic sunlight and dry desert heat, to burn the drag of history from our wings.

  The bridle path was unkempt, with overhanging branches that might have knocked an unwary rider from the saddle. But no one rode the Walden bridle paths anymore. The horses were gone; so were the foresters. Maybe they were all working in IG Farben plants, synthesizing airplane fuel or buna rubber. Maybe they’d all been scooped up by the army.

  Walden was never a handsome house, and with the brown leaves of November blowing helter-skelter across the shaggy, untended lawns it looked gloomier than ever.

  “He’s waiting to see you in the library.”

  Karin ran upstairs before I thought to ask if she’d told her father she was pregnant.

  When I entered the library the little baron was sitting behind Admiral Spee’s enormous mahogany desk, which for some reason the city had left behind when it expropriated the rest of the furnishings.

  Baron Hermann von Weinbrenner sat with hunched shoulders, like a windblown little hawk perched on a wire. He’d once seemed ageless: brown and tough as a walnut. After his wife’s death he started losing weight. Now he seemed meager and frail.

  “America at last!” he croaked. “Hurra!”

  His bookshelves were stripped bare but for his collection on Jewish history and philosophy. I suppose the dealers who helped themselves to the rest of his books had not dared express any interest in those. And there was also the shelf of Karin’s old Winnetou books, popular editions, probably too battered and common to interest the bookmen.

  “We really must get out, sir.”

  “Good for you! I’m delighted to learn you’ve taken matters into your hands.”

  “It’s time.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what are you sorry?”

  The library had been his aerie, locus of his power. It was where he’d offered my father a new career, and all three of us a new life. It was where he’d written the memoirs that made him such a target, der verräterische Judenbaron.

  When I was a boy, his library seemed the most powerful room in the world.

  “I’m sorry to be taking Karin so far away.”

  “I’m not sorry! Berlin’s a dreadful place, worse than ever, I hear. America—your father’s American born, is he not?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I expect to see you back in Germany after this bunch of petit-bourgeois finaglers, Rasputins, and champagne salesmen go to the wall. They can’t last much longer, the generals have had a bellyful of the corporal and are getting ready to shit him out. Anyway, they can’t bother me anymore. From me they already have everything. I recognize it’s quite time that my daughter flew from this increasingly filthy cage, however. I wish I could write a good-sized check to send her off with, but I can’t.”

  “I have a job waiting in Canada.”

  “Yes, yes, good for you. When I was a young man, I imagined going out to Canada. Some did. One of these days the army’s going to knock that fellow off his perch, you know. The Germans won’t stand him much longer. You’ll see. The army will put him up against the wall, and then—who knows? Who’ll heal Germany? The old kaiser? Well, I loved him in his day, but he was an absolute nincompoop. Not wicked, mind you, but he was never master of himself, and he was terribly angry at his poor English mother. Not such a good combination for Germany.”

  “We have your blessing, then?”

  “My blessing?” He shrugged. “You want that? From an old Jew? It isn’t worth anything. But if you want it, take it. My blessing? Ha! A bank draft on Mr. Morgan’s bank would serve you better! At one time I could have managed it. Not now. Yes. Care for my daughter. Care for each other. Don’t forget your people in Germany.”

  THE DANUBIAN ODDBALL

  Lady Maire acquired her Ford in the spring of 1927. The baron’s chauffeur, Solomon Dietz, taught my mother to drive and to perform maintenance and small repairs. The women were planning a summer motor trip through Spain.

  On previous expeditions Solomon had driven them in the Mercedes, but he’d
been thrown in jail the summer before after brawling with French army recruits at Avignon, and Lady Maire had made up her mind to do without him. So she bought the black Ford, and my mother practiced her driving on hilly roads in the Taunus.

  My grandmother Con was due to arrive at Walden a few days before Lady Maire and my mother left for Spain. Aunt Kate, who’d married a rich grazier, kept an eye on things at Wychwood and had written to say there was now more sky than slate in the roof of the house. In her opinion, Con couldn’t possibly last another season there.

  Buck wrote inviting his mother to come to live with us at Newport cottage. To his surprise Con accepted the invitation. He arranged that she travel out to Germany in the company of a famous mare, Lovely Morn, that had belonged to her old friend Sir Charles Butler of the Knockmealdown Stud, county Galway. Charlie Butler was dead, and his stable was being sold off at Tattersalls. My father had seen Lovely Morn win the Grand International d’Ostende. He wanted her for a broodmare, and the baron had wired an offer straight to Knockmealdown, which was accepted.

  Con hadn’t left county Sligo in years, and Buck was concerned that the journey by train to Dublin, steamer to Liverpool, train across England to Hull, steamer to Rotterdam, and train to Frankfurt via Köln might be too much for her. So he’d asked if Charlie Butler’s groom, who was bringing the mare to Germany, might keep an eye on my grandmother as well.

  The three traveled together, and on a shiny August morning Eilín drove us to Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof in the Ford to meet them. Karin and her beau Longo came with us. One-eyed Solomon followed, driving the horse van.

  After Lausanne Karin had spent part of a year in Paris before her parents agreed to her living in Berlin with an allowance, quite unsupervised. My parents were surprised. According to my mother, Karin was “running wild” in Berlin. Twice we’d heard she was engaged, but both engagements had been broken off.

  Longo was her latest beau and, from the Walden point of view, her first acceptable suitor.