The Life of Objects (10 page)

While working alone in the library one morning, I came upon a receipt tucked into an old photograph album of the old baroness and a woman companion on the Nile. The receipt, written to Felix Metzenburg, had a list of numbered items with the amounts paid for them. The figures were quite high, and I wondered if he’d been buying more treasure. I meant to give the receipt to him, but I forgot. He’d been feeling very low after hearing from Count von Arnstadt that Professor Wasselmann had been executed as a spy at Flossenbürg (I’d kept the note that I found at Christmas lunch, but when I heard the news, I burned it). Dorothea tried to comfort him by reminding him that it might be a rumor, but he said that he knew that it was true. He asked to see my passport in order to make certain that it was in order. I told him that Inéz had never returned it to me, and he nodded as if to say, Of course, she didn’t return it. I made a note in my journal to ask her for it when I saw her.

I also found a collection of old
Jugend
magazines. There were beautiful women on the covers and more women inside, frequently entangled with animals—snakes but also sea lions, horses, and giraffes, although birds, especially those with long beaks, were given special favor. I was shocked at first, not knowing that such things were possible, and then less and less shocked and more and more intrigued. I could feel myself grow warm as I looked at the pictures, and later I wondered if such practices were known to Mr. Knox and what he thought of naked women cavorting with storks. I knew about Leda and the swan, of course, but it had never occurred to me that it wasn’t a metaphor. Looking at the pictures, I realized that it was both a metaphor
and
real, and this discovery was thrilling to me. I sometimes took the magazines to my room.

Shortly before my birthday, I received a letter from Mr. Knox, dated 10 January 1941.

My dear Maeve, I would not be Irish did I not begin my letter with a remark on the weather, even though it is just as you remember, winter in Ballycarra being unfailingly damp and drear
.

I asked Peter’s brother, a new student, to look after Wedgwood when I was away, but the Catholic boys threw stones at them, and Peter’s brother threw stones back at them, ending our arrangement
.

Last October, my cousin, Clive Knox, was a crew member on an RAF bomber that overshot its base returning from an air raid on Berlin—I trust that you are still at Löwendorf, as it would be distressing to think that my cousin is bombing you—and was forced to ditch in the Irish Sea. He and his crew were, I’m delighted to report, rescued by a trawler from Waterford
.

I wondered if Mr. Knox had written his letter late at night, perhaps after finishing the week’s sermon. I imagined him at his neat desk, an oil lamp lighting the pages spread before him. He would have his pipe, and perhaps a glass of porter. He wrote that he was keeping busy with his research on the occurrence of infidelity in swallows and chickadees. He had observed over the years that when there was much rain and
some fruit, the female tended to seek a male with the short bill best-suited to eating seeds, regardless of any previous commitment.
You might consider
, he wrote in closing,
learning the calls of certain birds—cuckoos, green pigeons, moorhens, and quails (as well as bees), to put to use when someday you marry
. He’d read this tip, as he called it, in Burton’s translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
. He added in a postscript that he’d found no one who could read to him with my particular gifts of curiosity, innocence, and cupidity. A compliment, I decided. Although I often wrote about the Metzenburgs, he never mentioned them.

There was something new in his tone. He no longer addressed me as a girl, but as a young woman. I was flattered, of course, but also uneasy, as if I’d been given praise that I didn’t deserve. When Inéz spoke to me in a knowing way, I was flattered (it was one of the reasons I so quickly agreed to go with her to Berlin), but it was different with Mr. Knox. It never occurred to me that his new tone might have something to do with my own letters.

Late one night, Roeder knocked on my door to ask if I would read to Frau Metzenburg. One of Dorothea’s childhood friends had disappeared during the invasion of Yugoslavia. She’d written and telephoned her acquaintances in the Ministry and had gone twice to Berlin to spend the night in the small flat she kept, but her friend had not been found. She’d been unable to sleep since, and I often heard her walking through the house at night.

I was already in bed, but I told Roeder that I would go at
once. My room was cold, and I dressed quickly. I’d been tatting a snood for Dorothea, not unlike the one that Maria Milde had worn to Christmas lunch. Dorothea’s hair had not been cut in two years. As Felix did not like things to lose their freshness, including people, I thought that she might find the snood useful. I’d used the last of my silk thread, and I sewed with the strands of horsehair that Caspar collected for me. I’d been working on her lace dress, but I was so unused to making lace that my hands tired quickly, and I’d had to put it aside.

I could speak a plain German, thanks to patient Herr Elias, but it was still easier for me to read it than to struggle for the right word. I’d been reading Flaubert to her in a German translation, as well as the diaries of Edmond de Goncourt, despite the occasional references to Jews and Jewesses. She’d scolded me for skipping a line in
Bouvard and Pécuchet
(
They all have hooked noses, exceptional minds, and servile souls that think of nothing but making money
), and I no longer omitted a word.

She was sitting in bed. Despite the fire, her room was as cold as my own room. The walls were covered in raw silk painted to resemble a forest. French doors opened onto the park, and mirrors were arranged so that the trees were reflected in them (in the morning, in the light, she appeared to be floating over a wood). On one wall was a large painting reaching from floor to ceiling of her mother in a red gown. The chimneypiece was painted with trompe l’oeil vines that climbed the wall and snaked across the ceiling. There was an alabaster lamp on either side of the ivory bed.

I pulled a chair to the bed and found my place in the book. The light from the fire gathered itself on the page, and I began
to read.
One morning in the terrible winter of 1837, when she had put him in front of the fire because of the cold she found him dead in the middle of his cage, hanging head down with his claws caught in the bars. He had probably died of a stroke, but she thought he had been poisoned with parsley, and despite the absence of proof, her suspicions fell on Fanu. She wept so much that her mistress said to her, “Why don’t you have him stuffed?”

Pausing for breath, I saw that she’d fallen asleep. I closed the book and tiptoed across the room. As I reached the door, I heard her voice. Like most people who are reserved, she was intimidating, and I was always startled when she deigned to speak to me.
Part of her fascination, of course, was her secretiveness. She could not bear to be anticipated, or forestalled, taking great care to conceal a meaningless or innocent gesture, with the inevitable result that we were obsessed with her every movement. Although she had no fear, she was as wary as a mouse.

“Perhaps you don’t know that my mother went mad.” She was under the covers, the quilt pulled to her chin. Her slanting hazel eyes, set far apart in her pale face, looked yellow in the light. The hair on either side of her center part was lifted into two small peaks, reminding me of a scops-owl with its feathered horns. With the painted walls and the smell of burning juniper boughs, I felt as if I were lost in a forest. “Last summer in Vienna,” she said, “they rounded up all of the people walking in the Prater. The Jews were separated from the others, and they were ordered to remove their clothes. The men were made to crawl on all fours in the grass. Ladders were provided so that
the women could sit naked on the branches of the trees, where they were made to sing like birds.”

I was silent. I wondered in my confusion what kind of birds.

“Do you believe that story?” she asked, clutching the top of the quilt, the tips of her fingers like talons.

“I would like not to believe it.”

“Far worse things are done every day.”

“I’d prefer not to believe it.”

“There is a certificate that acquits me of all tainted blood. I wouldn’t believe that, either, if I were you.”

“No.”

“Good night then.”

“Good night.” I could hear her voice as I hurried down the passage, and I wondered if she was talking to her mother.

The spring was unusually cool, with rain nearly every day. We lived in a state of dampness, coughing and sneezing from morning till night. Toward the end of April, Countess Inéz, or, rather, the Princess Alkari, arrived from Cairo, where her husband served as secretary to his uncle, King Farouk. The prince had beauty and charm, but no money, and Inéz had volunteered to act as courier for Farouk as her nationality allowed her to travel more freely than others. She said that no one wanted Farouk himself, as he was known to steal everything in sight. Although Inéz could not bear the sight of anyone fat, she’d made an exception of the king.

To our joy, the royal dispatch bag was packed with dates,
salt fish, barley, olive oil, lemons, figs, and fava beans. Kreck called Inéz “our beauty of humble and tropical origin” when he carried the plates into the kitchen after lunch, and I realized that he was drunk.

Roeder found a small wooden box of rosewater jellies, dusted with powdered sugar, when she unpacked the princess’s bags and, for a moment, thought that it was a present for her. “Her Highness seems to have a weakness for seamstresses,” she said upon discovering my name on the card.

“I’m not a seamstress,” I said.

“But
her
mother was a seamstress,” Roeder said as she staggered under a pile of the princess’s furs.

It had been months since I’d seen Inéz. I no longer wore my hair in a plait, having cut it myself after coming across a photograph of Louise Brooks in
Pandora’s Box
. At dinner, I wore the black dress she’d given me, and for the first time, she complimented me on my chic. I was thrilled, of course, especially as I’d anticipated wearing the dress for her. Although Dorothea always looked smart in her navy suit (cashmere or raw silk, depending on the season), she didn’t have Inéz’s dash. Inéz had arrived at Löwendorf in her husband’s red felt fez, and a golden sable coat, which, I suspected, did not come from the prince.

During a walk along the river, she again urged Dorothea to leave Germany. “It’s not too late to dig up your treasure,” she said in irritation, “if that’s what keeps you from leaving.”

“No, it’s not the treasure that keeps us,” Dorothea answered quietly. “Felix says they have no reason to mistrust us. That they haven’t bothered us shows how little we concern them.”

They were no longer guarded in their talk when I was with them—the prince’s impotence, the ugly new hats, Don Jaime’s gift to Inéz of an emerald necklace and a Titian (Felix said that Don Jaime gave it to her because Hitler had said in a speech that not everyone was in a position to buy a Titian). Their conversation seemed to distract them from the graver matters that troubled them.

Dorothea’s favorite cousin, a major in the Luftwaffe, had been shot down over Belgrade during Operation Punishment. Inéz’s former husband, Count Hartenfels, was a colonel in the Wehrmacht. Her distraction may have accounted for her vagueness when I told her that I needed my passport. Felix had been pressing me for it (and, I suspect, pressing her as well), and she promised to bring it with her on her next visit to Löwendorf.

That night, I ate all of the jellies in bed, one after another, my teeth glued together, unable to stop myself.

There were rumors that Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, had flown a Messerschmitt across the Channel to Scotland in hope of negotiating a peace treaty with the Duke of Hamilton. Swiss radio reported that Hess had assumed that the British would be better disposed to Germany after Hitler’s surprising decision to allow the British Army to escape at Dunkirk. The German news reports about Hess were very brief, and the BBC said nothing at all. In Ludwigsfelde, Caspar found leaflets that read
Deranged brown budgie mysteriously escaped from locked cage. If found, return immediately to Führer
.

Felix was called unexpectedly to Berlin, and Dorothea, who had been walking in the park, decided that dinner would be served on the roof of the temple, under the black-and-white striped awning. She sent Caspar to the village to ask Herr Elias to join us, and told Kreck to arrange everything for our arrival at dusk. Schmidt was making vichyssoise, a salad of wild greens, and a fruit compote. Dorothea told Kreck that he would not be needed once he’d set the table and brought the food. She would do the serving herself.

Dorothea’s mother had grown honeysuckle on the roof in big earthenware pots, and the overgrown vines climbed the tent posts and across the awning. There was a rustic wicker table and two chaises with cushions, as well as comfortable chairs. The roof terrace did not really suit the austere little temple, and Kreck attributed this to Frau Schumacher’s lack of refinement. There was a small high-ceilinged room on the ground floor where garden furniture and boating equipment were stored in the winter, with a narrow and dark staircase leading to the roof.