The Life of Objects (14 page)

Dorothea lay facedown in the stable yard, her hands over her head as the dogs swarmed over her back and legs, barking and nipping in excitement. I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. We ran across the yard to the root cellar that Caspar had made into a bomb shelter, the dogs chasing us in frenzied dashes.

It was dark in the root cellar, despite the lantern in Kreck’s hand. The air was thick with the smell of loam (the smell of the grave, Kreck shouted). He sat with Roeder on one of the benches of cracked green leather that Caspar had taken from the baroness’s carriages. Dorothea found a place between them, sitting in silence as she stared at her bare feet. I realized from her expression that she’d lost her hearing in the explosion. Caspar was not there. Felix gave Dorothea his jacket and stood on the stairs, where he watched the Yellow Palace burn to the ground. I whispered to myself the Evening Prayer I’d learned as a child.
Lighten our darkness, O Lord, we pray and in your great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night, for the love of your only Son
. After two hours, the last of the planes, undisturbed by German fighters, swung north for the
short trip to Berlin, and Dorothea, her hearing restored, rose like a tram passenger whose stop had at last arrived.

Across the park, smoke rose in billows. The statues bought by the Schumachers on their honeymoon in Naples lay across the terrace in a tumble of arms and heads. The Yellow Palace was in ashes. All of the ravishing objects that Felix had been unable to live without and the many objects essential to everyday life were gone. The garage and the stables had not been bombed, but it was still too hot for us to approach the Yellow Palace, and we walked across the park to the Pavilion.

Although there was smoke in some of the rooms, only the nursery and the conservatory were damaged. In the pantry, dozens of jars of preserves had exploded, and Dorothea said that we could lick the walls when we were hungry. We sat in the kitchen instead and drank two bottles of Mondeuse Blanche and ate the smoked oysters that Roeder had been saving for her nephew’s wedding (she’d kept the tins in the Pavilion so that she wouldn’t be tempted to eat them). We talked in loud voices, gesturing wildly, perhaps because of the wine, but more likely because we were alive.

It was light when we finally went to bed. Roeder, Schmidt, and I took three rooms on the second floor. Dorothea and Felix were in her parents’ old bedrooms. Kreck and Caspar slept on field cots in the hall, the better to keep watch.
Cranes divide the night into sentry-duty and they make up the sequence of the watches by order of rank, holding little stones in their claws to ward off sleep. When there is danger they make a loud cry
.

Two of the Albanian workers who’d been assigned to labor in the village came to the Pavilion the following afternoon. The men had been sappers in the Resistance, and they offered to defuse an unexploded bomb lodged at the foot of a mulberry tree. Earlier in the year, Felix had noticed that the Albanians looked ill and hungry, and he’d arranged for them to take their meals at the village inn at his expense. The men were devoted to him.

After hours of combing the ruins with a garden rake, Roeder found a jewelry case with the bracelet and earrings that Felix had given Dorothea on their tenth wedding anniversary. Felix found a trunk with more jewels embedded in the lining, some melted gold coins, and several first editions—Ernest Hemingway and the
Fables
of La Fontaine—as well as a rolled-up Picasso that a friend had asked Felix to hide and that Felix had forgotten. I found a small metal casket with an ivory chess set and a drawing in brown ink of a nude woman and a peacock. That first day we found earthenware kegs of
Kirschwasser
, four large iron kettles, the concentric rings of the Schinkel chandelier, andirons, boot scrapers, a zinc bathtub, a steel trunk containing the baroness’s Christmas ornaments, the metal spines of shoe trees, two large cured hams (they smelled delicious), and ceramic jars of pickled herring. When I showed Dorothea the drawing I’d found, she looked at it for a moment and said, “My father gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday. You must have it now.” Before I could refuse, she turned to help Caspar drag pieces of a shattered urn onto the scorched lawn.

Later, we sat with the Albanians in the stables and ate ham and warm herring and drank more of Felix’s wine as we listened to the wireless. Caspar, who’d taken shelter in the icehouse during the bombing, after returning to the stables for his radio, could find only German stations, each of them broadcasting a concert by Heinrich Schlusnus singing Schubert’s “An Sylvia.” Caspar, whose ferret had died of shock, said that the bombers that destroyed the Yellow Palace had been looking for the Daimler factory thirty miles west of Löwendorf, which they’d missed, perhaps because it was draped in netting sewn with half a million brown canvas rocks. In order to confuse the bombers further, clusters of red and green glowing balloons, called Christmas trees by the local people, were released nightly over the countryside, and many villages had been destroyed. The ruby and emerald stars that I saw in the sky over the Yellow Palace had led the bombers to Löwendorf.

As all of our belongings had been lost, we were allowed to choose articles of clothing from the trunks stored in the cellar of the Pavilion (we looked through them as carefully as if we were shopping at Wertheim’s). As we sorted through the trunks, selecting things for ourselves and laying them aside, already covetous and possessive, Kreck pointed to his black monocle and whispered that Hitler had ordered the call-up of all German men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, regardless of illness or injury. When I said that Felix would never allow them to take him or Caspar, he gave me a weary smile.

I chose three summer cardigans, tweed trousers, three skirts,
a pair of boots, a Victorian nightgown, wool ski socks, Felix’s tennis flannels, and a necktie to use as a belt. Kreck dressed himself in a linen suit jacket and dress shirt, the arms too long, with tweed plus fours and gaiters. Roeder, wearing one of Felix’s gray school blazers and a paisley shawl for a skirt, looked the oddest of all, perhaps because we were accustomed to her long black dress.

Two young women from the village who once worked in the Yellow Palace as laundresses, Frau Hoffeldt and Frau Bodenschatz, arrived at the Pavilion with their two girls and three boys, carrying what little bedding and clothing they’d managed to save from their houses. Their husbands had been taken prisoner at Kharkov that winter, and the bombing had left them without shelter or food. Twelve people in the village had been killed, and houses and farms destroyed. The women and their children moved into empty rooms above the stables, next to Caspar, where they were joined later in the week by a group of five foreign women, one of whom was pregnant, six children of different ages, and three men, who claimed to have walked from Odessa, eight hundred miles away. The weary but surprisingly healthy women told Felix, who spoke Russian, that it had taken them four months to reach Berlin, sleeping in abandoned houses by day and traveling at night. They’d bartered what little they had for milk and vegetables, and when they had no more to trade, they had, they were ashamed to say, resorted to theft. The men were escaped French slave workers, who’d fallen in with the women near Budapest, and to whom
the women were indebted. There were many times, the women said, when the Frenchmen had to pretend that they were their husbands, and they had never abused their roles. When one of the women, Madame Tkvarcheli, released the hand of her pretty sixteen-year-old daughter, Bresla, having held it, according to one of the Frenchman, for the entire journey, there was soft applause.

The Russian Orthodox Easter was celebrated at the end of April, and Madame Tkvarcheli and the women insisted on making us a feast in the stables. We had roast squirrel, homemade vodka, mint tea, and black-currant jam. The children painted ducks’ eggs with Dorothea’s French watercolors (to their disappointment, we immediately ate the eggs). One of the women had a mouth organ and the children danced to a folk song called “Kalinka.” Felix explained that the song compares the beloved to a snowberry, a raspberry, and a pine tree, which I thought was very apt.

In November, Felix asked if I would accompany Dorothea to Berlin, as she needed to see her doctor, Herr Professor Müller, whose clinic was in the north of the city. She’d not been able to reach him on the telephone, and she required his care. As Dieter had been hoarding petrol for just such an emergency, he would drive us to Professor Müller’s clinic and wait for us before driving back to Löwendorf.

I hadn’t been to the city since my afternoon with Felix at the Adlon, and I dreaded the trip. It wasn’t the bombing that I feared (there’d been only nine raids in Berlin that year), but
the SS and the Gestapo. Sensing my reluctance—as if I had the choice of remaining behind—he apologized that he was unable to go with us, as he had important business in Ludwigsfelde. Although I was frightened, I told him that I would be happy to accompany Dorothea to Berlin. Foreigners and even Germans who looked prosperous were often attacked (we would be riding in the Rolls-Royce, driven by a chauffeur in livery), and Caspar wanted me to carry his revolver, which I refused. Dorothea dressed me in some of her clothes, salvaged from trunks in the Pavilion—a brown Chanel coat, organdy skirt, Nordic ski sweater, and a pair of leather boots (they fit perfectly)—and we left for Berlin.

At first, the countryside seemed deceptively the same, although loose cattle and horses plunged back and forth across the roads, forcing Dieter (dressed, to my relief, in a sweater and trousers) to swerve out of their path. As we passed the Potsdam lake, beams of light were reflected from what looked like a row of submerged crucifixes. Dieter explained that the metal crosses had been placed just beneath the surface of the water to bounce back the radar signals of the Allied bombers. In October, the RAF had dropped hundreds of flares over Hannover, tricking German defenses, and then, without releasing a single bomb, had flown to Kassel, where they then dropped everything they had—a wicked ploy that could never happen in Potsdam, thanks to the crosses in the lake.

As we reached Schöneberg, a young man running alongside the car said there’d been an air raid in Berlin the previous night. A long convoy of lorries on its way to the Eastern Front moved slowly toward us, horns blaring to scatter the growing
number of frightened people in the road, and Dieter had to pull into a field until it passed. It was thanks only to his persistence, which at times seemed deranged, that we were able to enter the city.

We were still some distance from Professor Müller’s clinic when Dorothea told Dieter to take us instead to the gallery of her friend Hans Kreutzer. It was already late afternoon. If the bombers returned—they arrived promptly at seven o’clock, Dieter said—we would spend the night at the small flat she kept in Goethestrasse. If the flat had been bombed, Dieter would take us to her father’s villa in Dahlem. If that, too, had been bombed, we’d have no choice but to return to Löwendorf.

Men and women climbed over the smoking piles of brick and rubble. Children sat in the ruins, their faces burned black. Streams of refugees wandered past, then wandered back again. Even though the windows were closed, there was a sharp smell of burning rubber and petrol. I heard sirens, but there were no fire engines or ambulances. When I asked Dorothea if we shouldn’t return immediately to Löwendorf, she didn’t answer. When I asked again, she shook her head, turning to stare into the street.

I knew that Herr Kreutzer sold books, many of them by writers banned by the party, as well as the occasional illuminated manuscript or painting taken as a favor on consignment. Herr Kreutzer sometimes even gave exhibitions. In a show of classical sculpture at the start of the war, a statue of a slender nude boy had been removed by the Gestapo, who found it suggestive of hunger, while a sculpture of a woman with large breasts and thighs had been permitted to remain as an example of contented
maternity. Every few months, Herr Kreutzer packed his books and pictures, assisted by a young Polish prisoner of war he’d found hiding in his shop, and moved to a new address.

The gallery was in one of two buildings left standing on Hardenbergstrasse. Dorothea recognized it as the former salon of her couturière, who had disappeared that summer. The rooms were littered with bricks, wet bolts of cloth, and broken champagne bottles. Dressmaker forms lay across the floor like headless, armless torsos, the names barely visible—
KRONPRINZESSIN CECILIE, FRÄULEIN KITTY, MLLE. LIDA BAAROVA
.

Herr Kreutzer’s books and gramophone records were in cardboard boxes on four rickety gilt tables. He was not there, but a young man, presumably the Pole, sat on a mound of bricks, a notebook and pencil in his hand.

“Yes?” he asked coolly as we stepped around a shattered mirror.

Dorothea said that we were there to buy books, which she wished to be sent to friends in prison. “To everyone’s continued amazement,” she said, “including the Nazis themselves, the Gestapo still allows prisoners to receive parcels and letters.” She looked through the boxes, making two piles of books, and gave the young man the names of twelve people and the prisons where the books were to be sent. When she finished, I asked if we could send some books to Herr Elias.