The Life of Objects (11 page)

When we arrived, Kreck had done his work. The table was set, and there were candles and a bowl of white peonies. Herr Elias was on one of the chaises, looking as if Kreck had arranged him, too. He wore a pale linen suit with white canvas shoes. His Panama hat rested at the foot of the chaise. He was a bit of a dandy, I realized, and I found myself grateful that he did not lounge against the cushions, but sat with his legs hanging over the side, smoking a cigarette. Just as there are all kinds of strangeness, there are all kinds of seduction.

Dorothea blushed when she saw him. Kreck was busy with a
hamper of food, and she asked him to open a bottle of champagne. She moved restlessly around the table, arranging the silver and refolding the napkins. When she saw that Kreck had no intention of leaving, she sent him to the house for some salt. She asked me to take the peonies away, perhaps downstairs, as their smell was too strong. Banishing the peonies was something that Felix might have done, and I was surprised. When I returned, having struggled with the heavy bowl on the stairs, I heard Herr Elias say, “You’re distracted tonight.” His fingers encircled her wrist.

“I don’t believe in distraction,” she said, pulling away from him. “It’s a way to be innocent and guilty at the same time.”

“I find it useful,” he said.

The sun had fallen behind the Night Wood, but she did not light the candles, knowing, as she would, that there was more beauty in the growing darkness. A smell of wet leaves rose from the park. I heard the loud hiss of a moorhen, threatened by a river rat perhaps. Bees, heavy with pollen, emerged reluctantly from the honeysuckle, staggering in their flight, and I reminded myself not to drink too much champagne. I sometimes had too much wine when I was ill at ease, and Dorothea and Herr Elias had unsettled me. He spoke to her in a low voice, and I turned away so as not to watch them. I wished that I could tell them that it was all right, that there was not enough love to go around as it was, but I suspected that they knew that.

There was a sound on the stairs. The top of Kreck’s head appeared, and then his mustache. He had the salt, and some walnuts collected by Caspar in the woods. “
Ein besonderer Leckerbissen
,” he said. A special treat.

Dorothea took the tray from Kreck’s hands. “Perhaps we should eat,” she said with a sigh. “Kreck has gone to such trouble.”

Herr Elias came to the table as Kreck poured the soup into bowls with a silver ladle. Dorothea sat next to me. Her hands were shaking and she put them in her lap. I thought about the fineness of suggestion, and the way that truth can be conveyed by a stray gesture, or even a sound. Of course, hints tend to contain too much, at least for me, but I managed to calm myself. Nothing had changed. What was worse, at least for them, nothing
would
change.

Dorothea asked if I would like a pear with my soup—we had abandoned certain conventions in regard to food—and when I said that I would, Kreck moved around the table to hold the dish at my side (we had not abandoned certain formalities). When I looked up from my soup, I saw that Herr Elias was watching me. His face, as always, was guarded, but still it was melancholy. He smiled hesitantly at me. It was a way to start again, I knew, and I smiled, too. The soup was delicious.

As Kreck seldom came to the second floor during the day, I knew as soon as I heard his shambling step that something bad had happened.

He’d come to tell me that Germany, breaking its pact with the Soviets, had invaded Russia. The few men and women under the age of sixty who had managed to remain in the village had been mobilized overnight, while others had been forcibly conscripted
to work in factories in the newly conquered territories. He had hidden Caspar in a linen closet for the day.

With the swift capture of Minsk and Smolensk, Germany grew even more confident of victory. There was much talk of the Reich’s secret weapon, which would soon be used to destroy London.

One evening in July, Dorothea asked me to walk with her to the clearing at the center of the Night Wood. The paths were made of softened dirt, but there’d been no gardeners in some time, and the way was scarcely visible beneath drifts of leaves and fallen branches. The trees, some of which had been trained to meet overhead, hadn’t been trimmed, and the path was narrow.

Her grandfather had made the wood, planting maritime pines from Canada, Japanese larch, and silver firs from the Alps, as well as weeping birch, linden, yew, elder, oak, and ash so that the effect of pine would not be too overwhelming. He claimed that the smell of the Night Wood intoxicated him (less expensive than ether, said Felix), and in fine weather he had a camp bed carried to the clearing to watch the changing sky through the night.

The many paths were intended to be confusing, only one of them leading to the clearing at the center. “North, then west, south, and east, before proceeding in the reverse.” She paused to make sure that I was listening. I memorized each turning (a rook’s nest, a stand of ghost bramble, an oak split by lightning).
Caspar had told me that he sometimes found bones in the woods that were not the bones of foxes or badgers, and Werewolves—the villagers’ name for escaped criminals and lunatics—had recently been seen by the bridge. As we walked, I glanced nervously over my shoulder. The sky darkened, and the air grew heavy as the trees disappeared into the blackness.

The clearing was bright and fresh after the gloom of the forest. Japanese moss grew in tiny hillocks, soft to the foot. It began to rain, the drops sharp and cool on my face. When we left, Dorothea made me lead to make certain that I knew the way.

Felix asked Caspar to bury a painting by Cranach that he kept in his bedroom (the last thing he sees at night, I heard Dorothea say), but he changed his mind and told Caspar to hide it instead in the cellar of the Pavilion, where he could at least look at it now and then. As Dorothea did not consider any cellar to be a good hiding place, she had Caspar bury the Meissen turkey cock and pheasants and a necklace of yellow diamonds that had belonged to the Empress Josephine in the park.

The horses were requisitioned that summer by two German officers whose car broke down outside the gates. They harnessed Felix’s hunters to an old victoria they found in the garage, tied the other horses to the back, one of them Dorothea’s horse, Cloonturk, and drove away at a trot, the harness jingling loudly.

Once I’d finished packing Felix’s books, Dorothea asked me to help her sort through her mother’s papers and photographs.
“Have you noticed,” she said, looking at a picture of her father, “that the simplest of good-byes now fills you with despair? Each time that Kreck leaves for the village, I’m certain that I will never see him again. I worry when Felix goes for a walk, unsure if he’ll return. When Herr Elias does not appear for two days, I’m sure that he’s been arrested. And such remorse! To be reminded, day after day, of all that hasn’t been said or done.”

“Is there something you wish to say now?” I asked, teasing her a little.

She frowned. “I’ve never thought that one should say everything. Even now.”

I nodded, aware that I had been scolded, and we went back to work.

In the fall, Felix asked me to accompany him to Berlin as he wished to sell some treasure. He said that he preferred not to trouble Dorothea or Herr Elias, which I understood to mean that I was not to mention the purpose of our visit.

In the past, he’d sold his pictures through a friend in Amsterdam, the dealer Jacques Goudstikker, but the SS, he said, had broken Herr Goudstikker’s neck as he tried to leave Holland. As Reichsmarschall Göring had promptly confiscated Herr Goudstikker’s collection, Felix thought it safe to assume that Göring owned many of Felix’s former paintings. After the fall of France, Göring had made twenty visits to the Jeu de Paume to choose art for his private museum, so his paintings, Felix said, were in excellent company. As it was forbidden to remove objects of cultural or artistic value from the city without permission
from the Institute of Culture, which refused to give it, I nervously wondered if it was permissible to bring objects into the city. I’d begun to notice that when I was overwhelmed by the big things—Goudstikker, Göring—I permitted myself to worry about the small things. I said that I would be happy to help him.

On the train to town, Felix put aside his book and turned to me with an unaccustomed gravity, further unnerving me. He said that in conversations with friends still in the Foreign Office and in listening to the BBC, it had become apparent that Ireland was less neutral than she pretended to be. “Militant nationalists clearly hope to take advantage of England’s engagement in a European war to reclaim the six Ulster counties, but this somewhat unrealistic plan is already collapsing. It doesn’t help, of course, that the chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army was killed in a U-boat off the Irish coast. Did you know,” he asked, “that RAF bombers returning from North Africa are permitted to refuel at Shannon?”

“Enraging the Führer, who had counted on a bit more help from us Irish.”

He looked at me quizzically, and returned to his book.

In Berlin, he took my umbrella (the treasure, which I assumed was paintings, was inside both our umbrellas), suggesting that I spend an hour or two at the Ufa-Palast cinema before meeting him at the corner of Französische Strasse and Glinkastrasse. He needed a few hours, as he was hoping to see his tailor once his business was finished. I did as he said and went to the cinema, where I watched a newsreel in which Maréchal
Pétain asked his countrymen to honor France by volunteering as foreign workers—a man could earn top wages, as well as the release of a French prisoner of war (four workers for one prisoner). There was also a report encouraging Frenchwomen to cut their hair and send it to the government, as hair was needed to make clothes. I was not so sure about the high wages for foreign workers. The workers who’d been sent to the countryside around Löwendorf earned no wages at all. A new film,
Hab Mich Lieb
, starring Marika Rökk, followed the newsreel. In the finale, Fräulein Rökk rips away her gown of white feathers at the distant sound of a jazz band to reveal a spangled bolero and a tiny pair of shorts. I wondered what the Nazis were trying to tell me (I’d thought that swing music was banned). The film so disturbed me that I was incapable of leaving my seat when it ended.

I was late for my rendezvous with Felix. As I hurried along (it was difficult to walk in Inéz’s alligator shoes, two sizes too big), I noticed that the once-familiar Jewish shops and businesses had Aryan names. Although the passersby behaved as if nothing in Berlin had changed, I saw several well-dressed women scavenging for food in trash bins and signs prohibiting Jews from buying newspapers or sitting in gardens after dark.

Felix was waiting for me on the corner, smoking a cigarette as he glanced at the morning’s paper. The train to Löwendorf would not leave for three hours, he said, and he wondered if I would mind if we had a late lunch at the Hotel Adlon, which was nearby. Just the sight of him lifted my mood, and I was amused, as I often was, by his thinking or at least pretending
that I had the choice of refusing him. One would have thought that having my company was the one thing lacking in his life.

As we walked the short distance to the hotel, he explained that the Ministry of Defense had built two special air-raid shelters at the Adlon at Hitler’s order to ensure the safety of the foreign delegations who were the hotel’s patrons, as well as party members whose offices were in nearby Wilhelmstrasse. The shelters had been rather like first- and third-class compartments on a train. “The original shelter for hotel guests was a square plaster box only five yards underground, while a vast shelter deep in the earth with running water, private rooms, and a loudspeaker system was reserved for more important visitors, who were awarded special pink tickets. Those unfortunate enough to be directed to the first shelter protested with such fury that soon everyone was admitted to the superior shelter, with or without a ticket. The first shelter is now used to store abandoned suitcases.”

Herr Adlon rushed from the dining room when he saw Felix, guiding us smoothly past the crowd of men and women noisily waving cartons of cigarettes in the hope of obtaining a table or at least a room upstairs. Felix waited (I noticed that he was one of the few people who did not glance ceaselessly around the room) while Herr Adlon, smiling as if he had the pleasure of seeing me every afternoon and again in the evening, pulled out my chair (I saw that he knew
not
to kiss my hand). “No morels today, Herr Metzenburg,” he said mournfully as he lit Felix’s cigarette, nodding to an elderly waiter with a magnum of wine. He took our coats with a wink, promising to
look after them. Felix ordered our lunch (caviar with toast, an omelet, endive salad, and champagne). I opened my napkin and spread it neatly across my lap.

I was unused to eating in restaurants, and I watched him closely. I was relieved to be wearing Inéz’s gray suit and lavender gloves—I could see that people were looking at me, but only because I was with Felix. He, too, was staring at me or, rather, staring at Inéz’s suit. “You’re looking very well today,” he said.

The other women in the room wore the new short skirts, some made from curtain material, with shoes cut from cork, and jersey turbans (no shampoo). The men were in dark double-breasted suits, their hats placed next to them on the tables, their coats on the backs of their chairs, and a few were in uniform (Kreck said that it was vulgar to wear your uniform on private occasions). People were staring at a small dark-haired woman who sat with a man wearing a Nazi armband. She wore neither a turban nor a chintz skirt but a tweed coat flecked with metallic thread and a beret stuck with several brooches. Felix noticed that I, too, was staring at her. “Mademoiselle Chanel,” he said, “and her protector, Baron von Dinklage.” Felix caught the eye of the baron, and they nodded to each other. I was shocked, having not yet understood that it was possible to make beautiful things even if you were corrupt, unlike the Irish lace makers in Ballycarra, who made beautiful things and were only thought to be corrupt. I knew of Mademoiselle Chanel, of course—she and Inéz were old friends.