Along the Infinite Sea (26 page)

“Johann, I'm right here. I sleep next to you every night.”

“We have not made love since he was born.”

“I didn't realize you wanted to.” Florian burped against my shirt. I
picked up a cloth, dabbed my shoulder, and brought him back into the cradle of my arms. His eyes were closed, and the sight of his cheeks brought the splinters back to my skin.

“Of course I want to make love to you, Annabelle. I am only a man, after all. But it is for you to decide when you're ready to have another baby.”

Again I looked up in surprise. “But we don't have to make a baby. There are many ways to prevent conception.”

He frowned. “What do you know of these?”

“Lady Alice.”

He brought his fist against the window, making it rattle through the curtain, and pushed himself away to cross the room. “A man does not wear a sheath with his wife, Annabelle. They are for whores and mistresses.”

“Nonsense,” I said crisply.

He muttered something to the carpet.

“I'm simply not ready for another baby, Johann. I want to wait until Florian is at least a year old before we try again.”

“A year!”

“Johann, please. It's not unreasonable, is it? We can still make love, if you want.”

“If
I
want? Don't you want to make love with me?”

I looked back down at Florian's sleeping face. “Of course I do. But we must take precautions, that's all.”

He came toward us in two giant strides and knelt next to the chair. “Annabelle, I need you. Look at my two hands. They are aching to touch you again, the way we used to. Don't you ache for me?”

I looked at him helplessly. “Of course I do.”

“No, you do not. Of course you do not.” He closed his eyes. “But you are so good and loyal, Annabelle. That, I could not do without. I could not live without your loyalty. You don't understand, I think, how much I need you.”

“Then touch me, Johann. Kiss me.”

“I cannot. I cannot stop if I do.”

“I'll put the baby to bed.”

He rose and looked down at us both. “No. I don't wish to disturb you.”

He walked to the door, and I called after him. “Johann, there's something I need to speak to you about.”

He stopped with his hand on the door handle and said, over his shoulder, “So do I, with you. But it is time for dinner,
Liebling
. It can wait.”

5.

At Johann's house in Westphalia, which his family had owned since the seventeenth century, we dined at a magnificent walnut table in a paneled room, attended by two servants, and we dressed in formal clothes. The wine was always German. After the main course was cleared away and the table stripped for dessert, Johann dabbed his mouth with his napkin and rose to his feet.

I sat at the other end of the table, with the girls on my right and the boys to my left. I drank the last of my wine and set down the glass. Everyone had turned to Johann, who stood there like a colossus, making even the table seem small. He looked around the room, across the tops of our heads, and I had the feeling he was hesitating.

“Johann, what's the matter?” I said.

“I have a bit of an announcement.” He pressed his fingertips into the edge of the table. “I have been asked to assist the government with a project of great importance in Berlin, which will shortly require us to move to the capital for a certain period.”

“Move to Berlin?” I said stupidly.

“Yes, my love. We will live in Berlin, much closer to the children and their schools, which, among other things, will enable us to raise
Florian in his own country with a proper understanding of his home and his native language.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

Frederick spoke up, saying something enthusiastic in German, and Johann stopped him.

“Speak in English, Frederick, so your mother can understand us.”

“I'm sorry,” Frederick said, glancing at me with his startling pale eyes, exactly the same shade as his father's. “It is wonderful news, that's all. We will be more like a family again.”

“That is my hope,” Johann said, smiling benignly across the table, as if he had not just laid the perfect ambush and executed it without mercy. “Don't you agree, my love?”

My face was hot. Johann's image blurred in front of me. I laid my napkin on the table and rose.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I believe I'll go check on the baby.”

6.

I had fallen in love with the Kleist family estate at the moment Johann had driven me up the road in his black Mercedes Roadster. The top was up, because it was December, so I couldn't see the house itself until we had come around the last bend in the graveled drive, and then it appeared, yellow-walled, in perfect proportion, too sober to be called baroque and too exuberant to be classical. In the center grew a small blue dome, decorated with elegant stone scrollwork. The shrubbery outside was covered in sacking against the bitter frost.

“Oh, it's lovely!” I had exclaimed, peering forward through the windshield. “Why didn't you tell me it was so lovely?”

“Would you have married me sooner if I had?”

I had turned and kissed his cheek. “I don't think it would have been possible for me to marry you sooner.”

He had taken me on a long and thorough tour—
You are the baroness now, my love, it is all yours
—which had taken most of the afternoon and evening. I had felt disoriented in the profusion of rooms and furniture and artwork, the reek of beeswax and old plaster, and held on firmly to Johann's elbow, wondering how on earth I could possibly be expected to manage all this.

The next day, while the younger ones were outside playing in a new fall of snow, and Johann had settled himself in his office to scale a mountain of neglected paperwork, I had begun to explore the house on my own. The eastern wing was my favorite. At the other end of the library was a pair of intimate rooms, connected by a door that could be left open or shut, where I could read quietly by myself, or practice the cello. The decoration was simpler, as if the old castoff furniture had traveled here to die in peace. Johann told me that his wife, Frieda, had spent much of her time there, too, and I had often wondered how much we were alike, and whether we would have liked each other.

After Johann's grand announcement at dinner, I didn't return to the dining room, nor to the music room, where we usually spent the last of the evening. Johann found me around ten o'clock in the smaller of the two rooms, playing Schubert while the snow blew horizontally outside the window and the gusts of wind made the chimney whistle.

“It was just a surprise, that's all,” I said, without looking up from the music. “You should have told me.”

“There wasn't time.”

“Of course there was time. But you wanted to tell me in front of the children, so I couldn't contradict you.” I rested the cello against my knee and looked up.

“But why would you want to contradict me?” He appeared genuinely bewildered. “It's a great honor, this post. A tremendous advance for my career.”

“Paris is my home.”

“Annabelle, we are a family. You are German now.”

I rose from the chair passionately. “I am not German! I won't be German. Do you know what your daughter said today, when we were leaving Berlin? She said that we shouldn't shop at Wertheim, because it's owned by a Jew. She said the department stores are like leeches, sucking Germany dry.”

He blinked his eyes. “What's this?”

“It's true. That's what they're teaching her at school. And all over Berlin there are signs in the shops and restaurants, about Jews not being welcome. I don't know much German, but I understood that. It's disgusting, the bigotry. I won't live in a city like that. I won't allow my son to be poisoned like that.” I knelt and laid the cello in its case and picked up a cloth to wipe the resin from the strings.

Johann stood silently in the center of the room. His hands were closed against his sides, flexing slightly. “He is
our
son,” he said quietly.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Go ahead and denounce it.”

“Annabelle.”

“Please denounce it, Johann. You can love Germany and still denounce this. If you
do
love Germany, you will.”

“Of course it is distasteful,” he said.

“Distasteful? Is that all?”

“What do you want me to say, Annabelle? Of course I do not share this opinion.”

“But you won't do anything about it, will you? You'll go on supporting these horrible men who stir up people's lowest instincts just for their own gain. You'll allow them to poison your own children instead of standing up for what's right.”

“That's not fair, Annabelle. This . . . this thing, it is just a kind of sickness, a malady of spirit. It will pass. It will fade away, when times are better. It always does.”

“But in the meantime, people will suffer. It isn't
right
, Johann. I won't live here. I won't do it.”

“You speak as if Germany is the only place where this happens, the only place where Jews are not welcome. Look at France, the Dreyfus affair. Look at the pogroms in Russia. Even in New York and London, Jews are not received in the clubs or the drawing rooms. It is simply how things are.” Johann's face was turning red, right up to the roots of his hair, so that his pale blue eyes looked like chips of ice perched in a tomato aspic.

I tilted up my chin to face his passion. “Don't be disingenuous, Johann. You know what's going on here.”

“I am not. I admit it's wrong. But this is not such a great matter as you say. It is just a yearning for racial separation, which is a primeval human instinct, and therefore difficult to control. We see it in all countries. I do not advocate it. I have nothing against the Jews. But I understand why these passions are stirred, and I understand there is nothing to be done. It must simply run its course.”

“Run its course? Are you mad?” I stabbed my finger at his chest. “You're a powerful man, an army general, a baron! You can do something! But you won't, will you? You're too scared of that stupid man. You're scared they will call you a Jew lover, or say you're un-German. You're—”

“You know
nothing
about this, Annabelle.
Nothing.
Don't speak of things of which you are ignorant.”

“Oh, of course. How stupid of me. My job is to lie on my back and spread my legs and make more babies, and to raise your children and adorn your house, not to have opinions and especially not to discuss them. I don't know why I bother with this old thing anymore.” I kicked the cello case. “It's not as if you're going to let me out of the house with it, God forbid.”

Johann's face was aglow, his shoulders rigid. He turned and grasped the edge of the mantel with his right hand, so forcefully I thought it might splinter. The clock ticked endlessly next to his chest. “Forgive me,” he said at last. “I have made you unhappy.”

“I am not unhappy. But I don't want to move to Berlin.”

“It is only temporary. Six months, or perhaps a year.”

“I can't do it.”

He picked up the poker and nudged a charred log into place. “You have become a champion of some cause, it seems.”

“I'm a champion of humanity. And it's inhuman, what I saw in Berlin. What your own daughter said to me.”

He went on poking needlessly at the simmering fire. He was still dressed in his dinner jacket, sharp and black against the pale blue walls and the creamy mantel. Sometimes I forgot how big he was, until his size rushed against me—like now, when I measured him and realized he took up half the wall. I wondered how we looked together, to an outsider: my delicate bones against his blunt ones. When I was wearing high evening shoes, the top of my head came to his collar. I must look like a child next to him.

“I wonder,” he said, in the same soft voice, “whether it is really Berlin you object to.”

“What else would it be?”

He set the poker in the stand and turned to me with his bleak face. The blood had drained away from his skin, as if he had gained conscious control of his unruly circulation. Another gust hit the chimney, and the wind whistled down the column at a furious pitch. The sound made me shiver.

“I don't know,” he said. “Perhaps you would like to tell me, Annabelle.”

“There's nothing to tell. I don't understand.”

“Marthe tells me you met a man named Stefan at the department store today.”

I crossed my arms. “I saw someone on the stairs, in the crowd. I thought I recognized him, but I was wrong. It wasn't him. Very silly.”

“Did you want it to be this man? This Stefan?”

“Of course not! He just looked familiar, that's all. Is that what you're so mournful about this evening?”

Johann stepped away from the mantel and took my left hand in a
sandwich between his. “I want to make you happy, Annabelle. I want to be a husband to you.”

“You
are
my husband, Johann. I don't understand.”

“I mean the husband you
want
. The husband in your heart.”

There was something so melancholy in his voice, as if his own heart lay in two pieces on the floor between us. I leaned forward and touched his cheek. “You are, Johann. Of course you are. You're a wonderful husband, the most wonderful father to Florian.”

“But you cannot follow me.”

“I can't go against my own conscience. If you really loved me, you wouldn't want me to.”

He sighed and released my hand. “Is it really your own conscience? Or is this only an excuse?”

“Johann, wait. You're turning everything upside down, you're making it sound as if—”

“I must go to bed now,
meine Frau
. I will be very busy over the next few weeks.” He turned and walked to the door. “I hope you will change your mind.”