The Life of Objects (17 page)

On the twentieth of July, a program of Bruckner, conducted by Karajan in Berlin, was interrupted with a brief announcement that there had been an attempt to assassinate Hitler. There was no other news, and the station immediately went off the air, which made us wonder. Caspar tried to tell the Odessa women, but the verb “to attempt” was impossible to convey in gestures and, in his excitement, he mistakenly led them to believe that Hitler (mustache, goose step, Nazi salute) had been killed. The women fell to their knees to sing a hymn of thanks, and it took an hour for us to calm them, by which time all of us, including Caspar, were crying.

The assassination attempt on Hitler’s life was not a rumor. Seven thousand people were arrested, half of whom were immediately hung without trial. Felix said that the plot was the belated and somewhat inefficient work of Count von Stauffenberg and his fellow officers in the Wehrmacht, including Count von Hartenfels, who had grown dissatisfied with the political and military goals of the Reich. Their discontent, Felix said, had nothing to do with the deportations and executions of Jews and dissidents or the civil policies of the Reich. The officers’ aristocratic notions of honor had doomed the plot from the beginning. Not only was Hitler alive, but the hapless conspirators were dead. Count von Hartenfels and several officers, including Stauffenberg, had been executed by firing squad on the twenty-first of July in a courtyard lit by the headlights of a truck.

Count von Arnstadt told Felix that film of other executions—the conspirators hung by a wire suspended from a meat hook—was sent each night to the Führer for his private viewing. The first cameramen, disgusted by their assignment, had quit in protest, which quickly resulted in their own hanging. The count also told Felix that certain Germans in high positions had begun to approach their European and American counterparts to offer the release of certain prisoners (pilots, priests, scientists, and spies, among others) in exchange for foreign passports. Some arrangements had already been made. A set of false papers, which included a passport, travel permit, military pass, and Home Guard Z-pass, could also be bought for a bar of gold. “A yellow star,” Arnstadt said, “costs three times as much, as it is thought that the Americans will be especially nice if they think you are a Jew.”

The winter of 1944 was the coldest in a hundred years. The trees in the park bent in the wind like figures in flight, and the river was frozen from December until February. The last of the tundra swans disappeared, killed perhaps by the deserting soldiers moving in increasing numbers across the countryside, and Zara was stolen from the stables.

We heard reports of an uprising at the Birkenau camp in Poland. Those inmates who worked in the gas chambers had attacked their guards with stones and hammers, and although the guards quickly discovered the explosives smuggled into the camp by women inmates who worked in the nearby IG Farben factory, hundreds of prisoners managed to escape, only to be
captured the next day. The women, who were tortured before their execution, refused to name the conspirators. I wondered, as I often did, if Herr Elias were still alive. I dreamed that he had escaped at Birkenau and eluded the guards, coming to us at Löwendorf.

Those nights when Caspar could not find a station on the wireless, we sat on his bed, huddled together for warmth, to discuss the day’s rumors (I’d noticed that the farther you were from the front, the more accurate were the rumors). Sometimes there was even half a cup of acorn coffee to share, and we passed it back and forth in the dark, careful not to spill it, fingers touching.

A letter from Inéz was found in the fork of an elm by one of the children. Once again, she wrote to beg the Metzenburgs to flee Germany (the place that Churchill called the abode of the guilty). The army was abandoning its positions, and the Russians would soon be in Berlin. There were safe houses, she said, and people who would help them. When Dorothea read the letter to Felix, he said that he would never leave Germany, not after all that had happened. But that is exactly why we must leave, she said. He said that perhaps she should think about going without him.

I could see that she was offended that he could imagine living without her, of dying without her. For the first time in their married life, she was better able to cope than her husband, but if he was not able to leave Germany, she was not able to leave him. He offered to send Roeder and me away, but Roeder burst
into tears at the thought of it. I told him that I, too, wished to remain at Löwendorf. We’ve come so far, I said. Dorothea quietly left the room.

One cold morning toward the end of the year, Roeder came to tell me that Felix, who had not been well, wished to see me. I went to him at once. He was in bed,
Anna Karenina
lying open on his chest. He seemed a bit feverish. His former look of indulgent tolerance had become simply a look of tolerance.

“There’s no one else I can ask,” he said. He reached under his pillow and pulled out a worn handkerchief to wipe the corners of his mouth. I began to speak, but he interrupted me. “In the cellar, hidden behind the coal chute, is a metal chest. Inside it, you will find a wooden panel. A painting.”

I was to remove the panel, which would be wrapped in canvas, without looking at it, and take it to the village where men would be waiting for me in a car. I was to follow the car from the village. The men would take the painting from me. It was of the utmost importance that I not be seen with the men.

I did all that he said, except for one thing. It was a painting of a naked woman in a gold necklace and a hat trimmed in swans down. Her body was like Dorothea’s body—small breasts, high waist, pale skin. Like Dorothea, she had a melancholy and foreboding beauty. She stood beneath an apple tree, one arm raised, as a stag and long-eared doe watched solemnly from the woods. At the foot of the tree, an unhappy cupid swatted the bees drawn to the honeycomb in his hand.
There were Latin verses in the upper right corner:
The pleasures of life are mixed with pain
.

I took my bike along the frozen river so as to avoid the road, stopping twice to tighten the string that bound the painting to the handlebars. It was difficult to see where I was going, and I jumped from the bike to push it along the icy path.

A black Daimler was parked in front of the inn. To my relief, the villagers ignored the car, perhaps because it was flying a small Nazi flag. A man in a Nazi uniform was driving, and a man wearing dark glasses sat in the backseat. I stood beneath the oak tree at the entrance to the village and checked my tires, shivering with cold. The driver threw his cigarette out the window and drove away. I counted to fifty and followed them. The car turned down an overgrown wagon track leading into the woods, and the driver parked in a grove of alder and stepped from the car.

Cutting the string with his pocket knife, he removed the painting from its wrapping. I saw that he held it with care, and I hoped that I hadn’t damaged it. The man in the backseat opened his door and took the painting in his two hands. He didn’t look at me, perhaps too entranced by what he saw. He said that he was sorry to hear that our friend was not well.
“Zu meiner Verwunderung hat er ein Mädchen geschickt.”
I’m surprised that he sent a girl.

The driver handed me a bound copy of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
, inside of which was a brown envelope, and they drove away. I stood there, holding my bicycle. I hadn’t said a word. I was too shaken to ride, and I walked the bicycle through the woods,
the book under my arm. I went to Felix’s room as soon as I reached the house. He seemed not to have moved since I left,
Anna Karenina
still open on his chest. I placed the book of fairy tales on a table next to the bed, and he closed his eyes.

I left a note for Kreck in the kitchen and went into the park. My shoes were soon soaked through, despite Kreck’s assurance that they were waterproof (I’d traded him six pairs of socks for them). I began to run, not stopping until I reached the blackened earth where the little temple had once stood. Since the war began, I’d tried to be strong and courageous—not an unusual intention, given the people with whom I lived—but it had been harder than I’d imagined, and I wondered if I’d have the strength to continue.

The following day, Kreck found five large hampers in the stables. There were two hams, four cases of tinned sardines in tomato sauce, cartons of powdered milk, a large sack of Ethiopian coffee, four tins of English biscuits, wheels of cheese, two sides of bacon, a jar of mustard, two vats of sauerkraut, and a box of Swiss chocolates. Food was given to the refugees for dinner (they preferred to cook for themselves once Schmidt left), and what we didn’t eat that night (very little as our stomachs were unsettled) was hidden in the cellar. “We’ll live like kings,” said Kreck, and for a while, we did.

I
n March, news came that a thousand B-17 bombers of the United States Eighth Air Force had destroyed the center of Berlin in an attempt to stop the Sixth Panzer Army from reaching the Eastern Front. The bombing was so heavy that the fires, driven by high winds, burned for five days before the flames reached the canals and rivers that surround the city. The Reich Chancellery, Gestapo headquarters, and the despised People’s Court were gone. Radio Paris, the station of Vichy France, reported that the raid would have resulted in even more death and destruction had it not been led by a Jewish lieutenant colonel named Rosenthal.

Swiss radio reported that soldiers of the advancing Red
Army had found eight thousand prisoners at the Birkenau camp, too weak and sick to join a forced march when their guards ordered the abandonment of the camp. Caspar thought that these reports helped to convince people that the war was coming to an end even more than the daily postings of dead, wounded, and captured German soldiers.

I had written more than seventy letters to Herr Elias, and I’d added more concentration camps to my list—Jungfernhof, Papenburg, Janowska, Donauwörth, Thorn, Hohnstein, Klooga, and Gradiška. They were everywhere.

The apple trees were in bud, and although many of the fruit trees had been cut for firewood, there would soon be apples and pears. I decided to walk to the Night Wood to see if the witch hazel was in bloom. The park was already in shadow when I left the yard, a faint mist moving through the trees. The junipers looked blue in the fading light. There’d been rain that afternoon, and the branches of the yews dragged on the wet ground. At the edge of the river, the reeds lay beaten against the bank.

As I hurried along, I saw a boy moving cautiously on the far side of the river—one of the young men who hid in the woods, stealing at night to his family’s farm for supper and a warm bed before returning to the forest at dawn. A thrush jumped from tree to tree, as if to warn the boy of my approach, but he was from the village and knew that I meant him no harm. I waved to him. He lifted his cap and pointed to the wood.

It would be dark before I could reach the clearing at the center
of the Night Wood, and I decided to walk only as far as the larch grove. As deer had not been seen at Löwendorf for several years, I was surprised to catch sight of one, bedding for the night in a stand of winterberry. I’d been reading the
Metamorphoses
and for a moment I thought that the deer was human—perhaps a bewitchment undone, an old spell reversed by a remorseful goddess. I stopped so as not to frighten it, but it was too late.

To my astonishment, it
was
a man. A torn shirt was knotted around his neck. His arms were covered with sores. His trousers were torn, and he was barefoot. A bloody rag was tied around his thigh.

I turned and ran, not stopping until I reached the park. My heart was beating in my throat, and I rested against the garden wall as I caught my breath, looking over my shoulder to make sure that he hadn’t followed me. For a moment, I felt lightheaded.

Inside the house, a candle was lit and a shadow jumped along the walls of the passage. Smoke drifted from the chimney, and I wondered if Roeder, grown inventive in the kitchen, was making soup. I could hear the river. It would look black where it was deep, I knew, and silver in the shallows. I repeated a passage from one of Mr. Knox’s books.
I am friend to the pilibeen, the red-necked chough, the parsnip land-rail … the common marsh-coot
.

He lay on his back on the path, his eyes closed. I poked him with the tip of my shoe, but he didn’t move. Taking hold of
his wrists, I dragged him slowly down the path, looking for a place to hide him. He was almost weightless, but I had lost my strength. I pulled him through an opening in the hedge that bordered the path and took hold of his ankles, easing him down a shallow bank into a dry streambed.

“American,” he said in a hoarse whisper, startling me.

“If the Werewolves find you, they’ll kill you. Perhaps they’re watching us now.” I sounded a bit wild, and I tried to calm myself.

“Werewolves?” he asked.

I found a candle stub and matches in my pocket and lit the candle, thinking again of Ovid, and of Psyche leaning over the sleeping Cupid. I realized from his expression that I was not in the least like Psyche, but an ugly witch, the candle flickering beneath my chin, and I blew out the candle (my vanity, even then!).

His eyes followed me as I crawled between the trees, collecting dead leaves and pine needles to tuck around his feet and pile on his chest. “Something I never did before, or even imagined,” I heard him say. “A Pullman car! Me in a Pullman car, straight from my mother’s house.”

“I’ll come for you tomorrow,” I whispered, packing the leaves around his legs. He didn’t seem to hear me. “There’s a house nearby where you’ll be safe,” I said in a louder voice. I put my hand on his brow. He was burning with fever.

“There were leaks in the gas tanks,” he said, brushing away my hand. “You had to keep your mask on even when you were sleeping, which I thought was pretty damn funny. How would you know you were dead if you were asleep? How would
you know you were dead if you were dead? The point is you wouldn’t.” He made a harsh sound in his throat that I realized was a laugh.