The Life of Objects (12 page)

“Did you notice, by any chance, that Holbein of a goldsmith in the window of the auction house?” Felix asked. “That is
where Dorothea found the little Nicholas Hilliard she gave me for my birthday.”

“Yes,” I said. “Suitable for hiding.”

To my delight, he smiled. “I can think of nothing else. It’s rather like seeing a woman you desire. Perhaps better. Of course, it belongs to the Czernins. I’m thinking of buying it.” He lifted himself from his chair to greet two friends, men who, unlike the others, did not look as if they were on a stage. They didn’t look as if they belonged there, either, despite their natural air of privilege. Of course, it was these men who’d once had the dining room of the Adlon to themselves. Their tense grace barely concealed their rage.

I found it difficult to look at people, fearful of what more I might see. Was the girl with the frowning Oberstleutnant a collaborator? Did she hide Jews in her attic? Did the man in the chalk-striped suit use Polish slaves in his factories? Did that woman sell gold on the black market? Passports? Art stolen from Jews? Felix had told me that in Hamburg the daily auctions of the confiscated possessions of Jewish citizens were so crowded that it was standing room only.
No one was who he appeared to be—it was too dangerous to be yourself, unless you were one of them, and perhaps even then. Even I was pretending to be someone else, at least for the afternoon.

Felix caught sight of Count von Arnstadt, standing in the doorway to the dining room, and nodded to him. My heart sank. I wanted to be alone with Felix, people staring at us as we toasted each other with champagne (even if Felix didn’t toast).

“In the beginning,” Felix said, smiling at a woman in a heavy mink coat (people no longer left their coats with an
attendant, as they were certain to be stolen) whose gloved hand Arnstadt was bending to kiss, “my friends said, ‘Oh, come now,
mon vieux
, it’s not quite so bad as you feared,’ but in a very few weeks, they all said, ‘Nothing could be as hellish as this. What were we thinking?’ ” He was silent, looking both contemptuous and amused. “We once found it humorous to buy those postcards sold at newspaper kiosks—perhaps you’ve seen them or even sent one yourself—Göring in a fur hat and cowboy boots or the Führer looking apoplectic.”

Arnstadt at last reached our table, a mocking smile in readiness for Felix. “The Adlon is full of beautiful women today,” he said as he sat down.

“They can’t
all
be Poles,” said Felix.

“And Helldorf with three of the loveliest. Of course, he is the richest man in Berlin. Thanks to the extremely lucrative market in passports.”

Felix opened his mouth to speak, then closed it as he caught sight of Baron von Dinklage coming toward us. At Felix’s expression, the baron turned into the lobby—Felix’s combination of decadence and rectitude made him difficult to read, but the baron seemed to have no trouble at all.

“
Sie haben Glück gehabt bisher, Felix
,” said Arnstadt.
“All die Jahre hatte ich keine Ahnung, dass Sie so ein Spieler sind
.” You’ve had luck so far. All these years, I had no idea you were such a gambler.

Felix frowned in irritation and turned to me.
“Maeve, du hast deinen Sekt gar nicht getrunken
.” It was not so much my thirst that concerned him, as his wish to warn the count that I understood German. He was silent as the waiter filled his glass with
champagne. “I hope that you’ll have lunch with us,” he said to Arnstadt when the waiter was gone. “Thanks to the precautions taken by our Führer, it is the place where we are least likely to die.”

“Unfortunately, today is the day I deliver the Little Friend to the Chancellery.” He paused to light a cigarette. “You may be interested to know that our friends’ affairs are less Feydeau than we like to imagine.”

“
Quite
interested,” Felix said.

Arnstadt looked at his watch. “We banned Helen Keller today.” Sensing my confusion, he gave me a smile that could only be called sinister.

“Stop teasing her,” Felix said.

“Would that I were,” said the count.

The melodic ring of a gong, more like a dinner bell than an alarm, sent a surge of fear through the room. It was the signal for guests, waiters, bellboys, cooks, and Herr Adlon himself to race for the stairs. We went down a narrow, harshly lit staircase, Felix’s hand not quite touching the small of my back, and found ourselves with sixty people in a large whitewashed room with rows of wooden benches, much like a country schoolroom. Arnstadt had disappeared. I saw Mademoiselle Chanel and her baron ushered into a private room.

Felix made a place for me on a bench, regretting its roughness, and we sat down. It was much colder underground than in the dining room (we never saw our coats again). “I apologize,” he said, “for the smell.” I thought at first that he meant the smell of rotting potatoes, but he said, “When the ban
against bathing more than twice a week was issued, it never occurred to me that some people were relieved.”

There were men and women on the benches behind and in front of us, and in each of the other eight rooms, and the conversations were in many languages. The young man next to me, whom I’d noticed in the restaurant having lunch with a woman I took to be his grandmother, was reading a book by H. P. Lovecraft. The boy’s grandmother was not with him, and I wondered if they’d been separated and if she was safe in another room. The waiters who had shoved their way down the stairs a few minutes earlier draped white cloths over their arms and held trays of pink gin cocktails at the end of each row.

The loudspeaker began to hum. A man’s voice, in the tone he might use to read a child a story, said, “A number of horses from the riding stables in Tiergarten, their manes and tails on fire, are now racing up and down Kurfürstendamm,” and several peopled laughed loudly. Men opened newspapers, women made lists with little gold pens, their handbags used for support, and some fell into a deep sleep, chins propped in their hands. Even Felix was quiet, and I was able to stare at him. I realized as I watched him how much I had come to trust him. With the vanity of a beloved man, he assumed that the doing and undoing of daily life (the smell of the unwashed, the lack of mushrooms, the uncomfortable benches) were, if not his responsibility, at least his to ameliorate, and I had come to expect it of him, too.

“The Chancellery is issuing new regulations concerning
domestic staff,” he said, startling me. “You, Miss Palmer, will be required to sleep at least nine hours a day, and you will have one entirely free day as opposed to two free afternoons a week. Which means that today has been your free day.”

I was sorry not to have a quick answer for him. His odd, sometimes irksome way of speaking as if he were an Edwardian lord still rattled me. A young woman sitting in the row in front of us had no such hesitation. Speaking English with a Viennese accent, she said in a voice just loud enough for us to hear, “Certainly wish
mine
would bring
me
to the Adlon on
my
day off.” She turned her head to smile at us. Having already sized up our relationship from our conversation, she had not yet had actual sight of Felix, and when she did—his imperious, attractive,
rich
self—she liked what she saw. To my irritation, she swung around on the bench, not an easy thing to do, and sat facing us, her silky knees touching Felix’s knees.

I did not look at him for fear that he liked it. I had an impulse to snag her stockings, but to my relief, the little bell rang to signify that the raid was over and that it was safe to return to the dining room. Felix helped the woman to her feet—she was a bit stiff after sitting in such a cramped space—steadying her with a hand on her elbow. Turning every few steps to make sure that we were behind him, he explained that he did not wish to see us survive an air raid only to be trampled by the French ambassador. It was Friday and the foreign diplomats would be rushing to the private dining room upstairs for their weekly lunch meeting with Ribbentrop. In the lobby, Felix kissed the woman’s hand and said that had circumstances been less trying, he would have been pleased to accompany her wherever
she was going. She kept her hand in his rather longer than I thought necessary. She did not say good-bye to me when she left to find her friends.

Felix watched her go and then turned to me with an amused smile. “Would you mind if we didn’t stay for lunch?” he asked.

I said that I didn’t mind at all (I’d been dreaming of the omelet). On the street, a disorderly company of shouting boys, members of Hitler Youth, was marching past, spades in hand, to the excited shouts of the crowd. Felix turned his back to them, the better to light his cigarette.

When I finished my chores, I sometimes took a book or my workbasket (and sometimes nothing at all) to the temple in the park, where I climbed to the roof to sit under the striped awning. I could see across the park to the Night Wood and beyond the river to the village.

As the Reich prohibited Jews from owning a sewing machine or typewriter unless it could be proved that it was a gift from an Aryan, Herr Felix had written a letter that Caspar delivered to the police station in Ludwigsfelde, stating that he, Felix von Metzenburg, had presented Herr Hector Elias with an Olivetti typewriter in 1937. I was curious to know what Kreck thought about this (we both knew it was a lie), but he said nothing, telling me a joke instead. “In the Great War, they used to say it would be over when officers had to eat the same food as soldiers. Now they say it will be over when Göring can fit into Goebbels’s trousers.” I realized that I’d never heard him laugh before.

America at last entered the war. Caspar and I huddled in his room, listening to the reports of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had sent nearly four hundred planes, flying in three waves, to bomb the Americans. Eighteen ships, including two battleships, had been lost, with three thousand dead. The Japanese had also attacked a hospital in Singapore, killing many of the doctors and a British corporal on an operating table. Hundreds of people, both staff and patients, many of them wounded, were marched to a warehouse where they were kept until morning, when the Japanese bayoneted them to death.

T
here had been rumors all year about the murder of Jewish prisoners, but people continued to dismiss them. The villagers, and even some of the Metzenburgs’ friends, said that while they had long and valuable friendships with one or two special Jews, the humiliation and misery inflicted on the country were in part the fault of the Jews, who had forgotten their place, lording it over the German people for far too long. Felix, when confronted with this commonplace (many Jews
were
Germans), answered that the madness that had overtaken Europe served to make us more alike, not less, but the villagers only smiled at him and shook their heads.

Felix said that he once believed that humanism had been
founded on the shared need to know. It had grown more and more apparent to him, however, that the opposite was true—we were united by our shared need not to know.
“By the time that we understand what is happening,” he said, “we are already complicit.”

To the surprise of everyone, including Herr Elias, Felix decided to give a small lunch in Herr Elias’s honor, choosing a day that fell in the same week as the Jewish feast of Passover. Dorothea asked him to reconsider the timing of the lunch, but he was insistent, irritably announcing that he would not succumb to intimidation. “No one is asking you to succumb to intimidation,” she said; “rather, I want you to consider that you are putting your guests in danger.” He refused to change his mind. The trees in the orchard were in bloom, and he told Kreck to fill the rooms of the Yellow Palace with branches of flowering plum and cherry. Caspar and I spent the morning on the river, fishing for brown trout with a footprint dun I found in the gun room.

I didn’t know the story of Passover, and I’m not sure that anyone other than Herr Elias did, either. I’d asked Felix about it, and he read some of Exodus aloud to us at the table, much to the boredom of Inéz, who was spending two nights at Löwendorf on her way from Cairo to Paris. She sat next to Herr Elias, and I was on his other side. Next to Felix was Princess Bibesco, who was traveling with Inéz. Princess Bibesco wore a white silk dress embroidered with red roosters. Ropes of pearls were wrapped around her fingers and wrists, and on her head was
a stiff crown of lace embroidered with a crest. (Inéz later told me that the princess had posed nude for the painter Boldini, something that Inéz herself had always hoped to do—he’d painted Inéz’s portrait when she was sixteen, but unfortunately she’d been clothed.) If Inéz was bored and the princess opaque, Dorothea was enraged. She had again asked Felix to abandon his idea of a Passover lunch that morning, and he had again refused, rather grandly declaring that as horror was here to stay, she’d best get used to it. “Horror?” she’d repeated, over and over again, her voice barely audible.

Felix had placed three tins of his special blend of Turkish tobacco and some packets of cigarette paper at Herr Elias’s place. The guest of honor was late, having walked from the village (Jews were forbidden to ride bicycles), a yellow star pinned unevenly to the left side of his tweed jacket. Felix greeted him affectionately.
“Ihr Stern ist unsere Schande,”
he said. Your star is our shame.