Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  “No, I’d best get there. My mother’s going to die tonight, isn’t she?”

  “They are certainly worried at the house.”

  “Your mother will feel the loss, she’s such a devoted friend.”

  “How is Berlin?”

  She was lighting the cigarette. “I’ve been a terrible daughter, Billy. A fiend, I’ve been.”

  “I don’t think that’s the case.”

  “Yes, well, what do you know of it?”

  We crossed the river, passed through a dreary bit of Niederrad, sped down the road to Walden, where I’d left the iron gates swung open. There was no porter anymore. As we drove through, she caught her breath sharply; it sounded like someone taking a blow.

  “Are you all right, Karin?”

  “Of course not.”

  I stopped the car and got out to close the gates. When I got back in, she was sitting so stiffly, like a woman holding a clenched fist to her past.

  “I’m sorry you have to go through this,” I said.

  She snorted. “One’s mother dying—nothing out of the ordinary, is it? I see twenty people a day with far more difficult things to manage.”

  “Maybe your mother’s death isn’t something you manage. It just happens, and you rely on your friends.”

  “Oh, don’t talk nonsense, Billy, just get me to the house.”

  I stopped the car under the porte cochere and pulled her suitcase out from the backseat.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Don’t mind me, Billy. You’re the one I count on, old man.”

  She pecked my cheek, then grabbed her suitcase and hurried inside. I knew my mother would be standing guard at Lady Maire’s bedside. Eilín would see to everything that needed seeing to.

  I parked beside Newport cottage. The house was dark, except the kitchen, where Buck and my grandmother were sitting up, each with a schnapps in a small crystal goblet.

  “Any news?” my father asked.

  “None that I know.”

  My parents had been warned they would have to vacate Newport once the city took over the estate. Internment, deportation, hyperinflation, and, finally, a stock-market crash had repeatedly wiped out their savings, so where would they—and my grandmother—live? There wasn’t a plan yet. Con’s brother’s farm in Africa, perhaps they could go there.

  Buck offered me a schnapps, but I was tired and had to go to work in the morning, so I went upstairs to bed. My Conoco road maps, stiff with age, were still pinned to the walls, but had become invisible, I no longer saw them.

  It took a long time to fall asleep. Lady Maire had offered us a home when we were refugees coming into a fierce country. Now she was dying, and everything was flying apart. Nothing really lasted, it seemed.

  The baron happened to be asleep when Lady Maire died early the next morning, but Karin and my mother were with her.

  They had hoped to bury her at Walden alongside her son, but the Catholic bishop wouldn’t permit burial in unconsecrated ground, so plans were hastily made to lower her coffin into a crypt at the dowdy little parish church at Niederrad, Our Lady of Good Counsel, which she had endowed.

  My parents, my grandmother Con, and I made the formal call at the house to pay our respects. I noticed a stack of yellow lumber on a pallet under the porte cochere. Carpenters from the Städel had been building crates for the artwork the museum was commandeering for itself. Work was suspended for the moment, but they would be back after the funeral.

  Lady Maire’s coffin was in the main hall. Weinbrenner and Karin sat in stiff chairs brought in from the dining room. They stood up as we entered, and everyone shook hands formally. The German rituals of a death. The baron looked old and small. He wore his medals. Karin looked tired and pale. She had on the same black dress she’d worn the first time I’d seen her at Frankie’s with a black cashmere cardigan over her shoulders. Ungainly floral wreaths from Lady Maire’s family in England and Ireland were arranged on either side of the altarpiece, The Lamentation. The flowers gave off a cold, unnatural scent. The baron had asked my grandmother to find Irish shamrocks to be placed on the coffin along with a handful of blue German cornflowers, and Con had picked a small bunch of cornflowers, then dug and potted a clump of trefoil clover, which she insisted was certainly shamrock, even if it wasn’t Irish.

  There’d not been many visitors judging from names in the condolence book, which were mostly Jewish. Weinbrenner was the traitor baron, and people were afraid.

  If I’d had a moment to speak to her alone, I’d have asked Karin to meet me across the river at Frankie’s. Martinis, music, dancing—that was what the situation demanded. But another set of solemn people arrived to pay their respects, and Karin and her father had to greet them, and we had to leave, and I never got the chance.

  Word got around the office that old Weinbrenner’s wife had passed away. The day before the funeral, Dr. Best stopped at my desk.

  “That poor old gentleman, they’re peeling everything from him, aren’t they?” Best sounded regretful. “They’re not leaving him much. Kicking him off the supervisory board of directors, really disgraceful. Not right! That old man was one of Germany’s most brilliant colorists. Where is the funeral being held? What time? I’ll certainly be there.”

  Karin announced that she was walking to the church. My grandmother Con asked to walk along with her, and Karin agreed.

  I squeezed into the Ford’s backseat with my father. The baron sat in front, and Eilín drove. On the way we passed Karin and Con walking along the roadside, Karin leading her mother’s old hunter, Paddy.

  There were perhaps thirty people at the funeral Mass, most of them Jews from old Frankfurt families. The others were loyal people who’d worked at Walden: domestic staff, trainers, grooms, stable hands. Dr. Best never showed up.

  Anna Rabou did, however. She stood in the back of the small church, very tall, dressed in her elegant, severely tailored style. She might have been an actor placed onstage in an expressionist play, speaking no lines but carrying heavy dramatic weight.

  After the coffin was lowered into its granite tomb and last benedictions said, Karin and her father left the church arm in arm. The rest of us followed. My mother was crying. The day had cleared. There was sunlight, and traffic hurtling up the road. The air smelled of gasoline. Lady Maire’s old Irish hunter stood tethered to the iron fence, waiting patiently. Lady Maire had often ridden him to Mass. Traffic and passersby didn’t fluster him.

  I watched Anna Rabou shake hands with the baron. Did he know who she was? Probably. He kept track of everyone and everything.

  I saw Anna offer Karin her hand. They briefly shook hands. Anna said something. Karin nodded, but she was already looking past Anna to the next person in line.

  There was a car with a uniformed driver waiting, and I watched Anna get into it and be driven away.

  I was going to stick with Karin whether she wanted me to or not. I approached as she was untying her mother’s hunter from the gate. She didn’t say anything. She took up the reins, and we started walking down the road, with traffic spinning past us.

  “Why don’t you get aboard?” I said. “You must be tired. I’ll give you a leg up.”

  “I’m wearing a dress.”

  “It won’t be elegant, but we could manage.”

  She kept on walking. After a while she said, “Billy, my mother would not approve.”

  “No, probably not.”

  Abruptly she stopped, and tossed me the reins. “You first. He can carry us both.”

  No saddle, no stirrups. I flung myself up on Paddy’s back. He was a good sixteen hands, and I had to struggle to get a leg over. It wasn’t graceful, but I managed at last. I grasped Karin’s arm and pulled her up behind me, and we clip-clopped down the road, keeping to the side as trucks and cars sped past, her dress hiked up, her hands resting on my shoulders.

  A few days later, three lorries belonging to the museum came through the Walden gates and grumbled up the gravel drive to the main house.
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br />   Paintings and artifacts the old Jew’s wife collected rightfully belonged to the Volk, did they not? What right had the old Jew to possess such priceless expressions of Christian faith? And the fellow owed money, taxes, didn’t he? Typical! He’d no doubt been cheating and chiseling the taxman for years. It’s how they are, that tribe. Whatever happens to him now is only justice, isn’t it?

  My godfather was the verräterischen Judenbaron, and they intended to leave him nothing.

  He remained mostly in his library that day. After helping themselves to what they wanted of his books, they left him alone in there.

  When I came home from the office that afternoon there was still one fat gray truck parked under the porte cochere and Karin standing beside it, conferring with a young man who wore a blue museum smock over his white shirt and tie.

  “Don’t you see what you’re doing?” she was saying as I approached.

  “I understand your feelings, miss, believe me, I’m not without respect for your family.” He wore spectacles. He looked sensitive, intelligent. In his twenties, with thinning hair. An assistant curator. “However, honestly, such pieces really do belong in a proper museum like ours.”

  She saw me. “They are crating up The Lamentation,” she said in a flat voice. She turned back to the curator. “This is theft. Stealing. Looting.”

  “That statement I must correct,” he said. “It’s a matter for the proper auth—”

  “How can you let yourself be part of it? Haven’t you any self-respect?”

  She turned away before he could respond and I followed her into the house. In the front hall, where her mother’s coffin had been, two carpenters were on their knees, building a crate for The Lamentation altarpiece: three mourning women with the dead body of Christ. The scent of sawed boards was pungent. The carpenters had a heap of clean straw and sacks of cotton rags for careful packing. It was a massive thing, probably quite frail, although somehow my mother and Lady Maire in 1927 had brought it all the way from Spain in the backseat of the Ford.

  The carpenters avoided looking at us.

  “We’re being taken to pieces,” she said.

  She asked me to accompany her back to Berlin; she didn’t want to be alone. So I asked Dr. Best for a couple of days against vacation time, and he let me have them. I informed my parents I was off to Breslau on business.

  During most of that train journey Karin sat gazing out at green countryside. When the train halted at Leipzig, we were briefly alone in the compartment. She was staring at a horde of travelers out on the platform when suddenly she spoke.

  “All the times I wanted to be held by her. And when she needed me, where was I? Trying to keep four hundred kilometers always between us. I should have been closer, I should have forgiven her, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I forgive her now, I forgive you, my dear mother. I hope you forgive me.”

  We took a taxi to Charlottenburg.

  Whenever I was with her, I always needed cash on hand to pay for taxis.

  As soon as we reached the flat, we went to bed. With the French doors open wide to the little iron balcony and the rumble of Berlin at dusk, I asked if she would miss Walden once the city forced her father to leave, which my father said was inevitable.

  “Berlin is home to me, old man. Walden was my parents’ museum of themselves.”

  She was silent for a while before she spoke again.

  “Do you think my poor old mama’s somewhere out there, Billy? Is she watching me now?”

  “Do you feel she’s watching?”

  “Can’t be sure, old man. Can’t be sure.”

  Another Berlin visit. The following summer, I think. So 1937. I drove up to the city in my Wanderer car so that we could make an excursion out into the countryside.

  An August afternoon in my little car with her, our windows cranked down, salt-scented air—that tasted like freedom.

  We both liked to move.

  There weren’t so many cars on the roads then, especially to the northeast. The regime was planning Autobahnen, even starting to construct them, but you couldn’t travel them yet. The existing roads weren’t much good but were often empty, and we could go as fast as we liked, though the Wanderer had nothing like the feline power of Longo’s Mercedes. She might clock a top speed of ninety kilometers per hour but only on a smooth road and with a tailwind. Still, that seemed fast enough, breezing down empty roads in Mecklenberg. Whenever there were lakes accessible we always made a point to stop and swim. She disliked bathing costumes, said they were pornographic, and refused to wear them. So I had to swim naked, too.

  We stop to go birding in a marsh.

  That world is closed off now, behind the Iron Curtain, rearranged, many villages smashed in the war. Maybe the marsh is still there.

  We’re on a walkway across the wetlands. Silver-gray planks strung together to make a narrow wooden path perhaps a kilometer in length, so narrow that if we meet anyone coming from the opposite directions, passing by will be tricky. This is a well-known birding locale. Hunters come up here, too, in season, but in summer it’s people like us up from Berlin, or down from Rostock, armed only with binoculars, hoping to spot whooper swans, egrets, night herons. She’s ahead of me, wearing a summer frock, white-and-brown checks, sewn in Berlin by her expatriate Parisienne dressmaker. Her shoulders are bare, sunburned, peeling a little bit. On her feet a pair of green sandals, and around her neck a strap from my father’s old naval binoculars, the pair he used for watching sailboats out in the English Channel.

  In Charlottenburg we use the binoculars to play a game she calls Who’s a Rotter? Zeroing in on patrons at café tables across the street we have ten seconds to decide if they are (a) full-blooded Nazis, (b) halfhearted Nazis, or (c) not Nazis at all. She claims to be Olympics caliber at the sport, but there is no way of independently confirming our scores.

  In the wide, fragrant marsh it’s not party members, but egrets and herons, black storks and whooper swans, we’re looking for. We’ve left behind the city and its seas of rippling flags, red and white with the jagged black cross in the center, making hideous use of the breeze.

  But the marsh is a separate world. The wide sky is hazy, a gray-silver sky with rain possible, but if so, it’ll be warm rain. I’m following her along duckboards. The planks are silvery and squeak and bend underfoot as we tread upon them. The marsh is a sea of silver-green grasses, and the wind ripples the grass with a sibilant sound, like bedsheets tearing. There’s no one else in sight, not a single person. It’s a marsh, so you wouldn’t expect a crowd, but it still seems extraordinarily empty from the point of view of city folk like us. And my nose has picked up a first tangy scent of the sea.

  She stops so abruptly I almost bump into her.

  “Egret,” she says, raising the glasses.

  The bird is stalking its next meal, frogs or whatever it is egrets feed on in a marsh. Its stride is awkward, hesitant. And while she peers through the binoculars, I place my hands on her hips.

  It is the first time I have touched her in such an intimate and possessive way outside the bedroom, touch her as only a lover would.

  “Jolly good luck to see an egret,” she says.

  Two young people breezing through the wide countryside in an open car, walking on duckboards across a marsh, breathing the sifting fragrance of the sea—it sounds a charming romance. Was it? I don’t know. I never had any perspective from which to analyze the relationship. It didn’t occur to me to try. Most people in those days were confused and startled by relationships. Young men, anyway—we never imagined or predicted the depth and complexity of our feelings about young women until such feelings overwhelmed us. No one warned us.

  We believed in privacy. Our feelings were our own. Words? Words were facile things, superficial, limited. One only spoiled one’s feelings by talking of them.

  Following Karin Weinbrenner along duckboards set across marsh mud and sea brine, I didn’t own language to discuss my feelings. To “put
them out there,” in the jargon everyone seems able to wield today. To put myself out there. No.

  Perhaps if I had been able to put things in plain language, it might have been plain that things between us were so damnably unequal, that I loved her as I would never love anyone else and that she loved me as a young woman might love a devoted brother, a trusted bodyguard, or a horse that never stumbles, never shies, but takes all fences willingly, and carries her safely across.

  When we were apart and I thought of her, I left words out of it. What came to mind instead were flashes of bold color in sunlight. And always an impression of wide-open country and the pair of us traveling, alone together, great distance at great speed.

  The regime had been in power four years, and the medieval city seemed harder and brighter, a city now trying to march in step, ferocity and declension unmistakable. Here was the street where Meyer had been mobbed, here the sidewalks where Sturmtruppen swaggered; here shopwindows were smashed; along here a lawyer was frog-marched; here loudspeakers sputtered inchoate rage; here drunks howled insults at women getting into taxicabs.

  With the proclamation of the Nürnberger Gesetze, Herr Kauffman as a Jew could no longer practice law, so he put the baron’s affairs in the hands of a decent “Aryan” lawyer, who persuaded the city of Frankfurt that instead of kicking Weinbrenner out it might be profitable to let him remain in his own house for now while extracting an enormous rent. The city did require that we clear out of Newport, however, and my parents went to the hotel at Bad Homburg, and I found my rooms near the Römer.

  My grandmother decided to go to her brother in Africa. After nearly ten years in Germany Con said goodbye to us, to Willy Chopdelau, Eddy Morrison, Count Istvan and all her friends at Frankie’s English Bar. She traveled first to Ireland, where she spent a few weeks with Aunt Kate at Sligo, before sailing from Southampton for Mombasa, via Suez.

  In Kenya, sometime around the middle of the war, my grandmother fell from her horse and broke her neck. She died instantly—so we were told. You never know if that’s true, but I hope it was. Killed in action. Exactly the sort of death she would have wanted.