The Life of Objects (21 page)

The camp had begun to spread into the forest itself—different families, and then clans, and even countries claiming certain areas for themselves. The Sudetenland Germans settled as far as possible from the Czechs. The Ukrainians claimed the beech wood, while the few Jews, like the deserters, were scattered deep in the forest. The children, who quickly learned the borders of each neighborhood, some of the refugees more welcoming
than others, tended to stay in their own territory when they were not roaming through the forest.

With the arrival of new refugees came more news and rumors. Goebbels had poisoned Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, in their cement submarine, and then shot himself. Admiral Dönitz was appointed president of Germany. Göring was hiding in his castle in Veldenstein, protected by nine drugged parachute divisions. Some of the rumors were incredible (the English had made a deal with the Russians, allowing them to take Berlin; the commandant at Sachsenhausen had ordered his prisoners onto barges that were then sunk in the Baltic Sea), but that did not stop us from believing them.

Dorothea and Felix sat as king and queen in the center of it all, not requiring or even desiring their suzerainty, tirelessly dispensing food, clothing, and advice (some of the refugees angrily refused to believe Felix when he told them that their money was worthless). That the Metzenburgs were the commissars of a community run on socialist principles, despite the quickly established borders, amused them in its irony and even compelled them to admit that as a simple system it had much to admire.

The weather at last turned warm, and the magnolia and chestnut trees came into bud. There were bright leaves on the acacias. Under the trees, the dame’s violet leapt into long pods, curving toward the light as it awaited its flowers. (Dame’s violet, Dorothea had once told me, is a garden escape, an idea that had made me smile.) My head was still too heavy for me to read, but Dorothea, studying the book of Chinese history Felix had brought with him, sometimes read aloud to me. I traded
a spool of horsehair for a pair of mouse-lined slippers and a needle with a Hungarian woman, both of us delighted by our shrewd bartering skills.

With the fear of starvation came other fears. Some of the deserters spoke of the Charlemagne Battalion, a group of fighters composed of SS men and fanatics from across Europe who fancied themselves the new Crusaders, an exclusive cult of warriors who would be the last defense against the Asian barbarians steadily edging their way across the continent. The men vowed to keep fighting even when there was an armistice, and there had been reports of them in the woods south of Berlin. I hoped that Caspar hadn’t joined the Charlemagne Battalion.

Felix, who’d been feeling low, asked me one morning to shave him. It was a task that Kreck would customarily have performed in the absence of Caspar, but Kreck’s crippled fingers made him a dangerous barber. Felix handed me a crude razor he’d laboriously fashioned from a broken knife blade and a piece of wood and calmly rested his head on the back of his chair. The razor was unsteady in its improvised binding, but he did not flinch. I drew the blade back and forth across his face, the knife making a harsh sound as it scraped against his dry skin. Kreck watched solemnly as I worked.
“Sei vorsichtig, das ist seine empfindlichste Stelle!”
he shouted, pointing with a shaking finger. Be careful, that is his delicate spot! Felix’s face was bright red when I finished, and there were two small nicks, but his beard was gone. Although we had no mirror, he said that he could tell just by touch that I’d done a finer job than his barber in Berlin.

Dorothea had once resented it if even one of the trees in her grandfather’s wood was cut, but since the beginning of the war, she’d allowed anyone to enter the forest to take whatever wood he needed. As Dorothea and I left camp one morning to cut wood, accompanied by two Latvians who would actually do the work, Felix said, “The best fires, of course, are those made with ash. Pine and fir burn too quickly, as I’m sure you know.” I looked at him in astonishment—I should have known that he even had an opinion about firewood. I took it as a further sign that he was feeling better.

In deference to Felix, an ash was chosen, and the Latvians made a good cut before they began to saw in earnest. The axe was heavy, and it was not easy to find the mark each time. The wood was moist, and the saw stuck in the wood, but after an hour of sawing—the men took turns and were eventually able to use a rusty two-handed saw—the tree began to sway hesitantly. The branches were entangled with the trees surrounding it, which seemed to bend toward it in support, but it was too late, and with a last shudder and groan, the tree fell to the ground. I, who had done nothing, was too exhausted to speak.

The children met us when we returned to camp, the wagon piled with wood, watching as the logs were arranged in a pyramid. Kreck and Felix watched, too, waiting patiently for the fire to catch. Dorothea, who’d been punished as a child for setting fires with the flints she found in the park, was good at making fires, even with damp spring wood. She’d carried one of her boxes of flints with her when we left the Pavilion, comforted, she said, by the knowledge that the flints, imprinted
with centipedes and seashells, were millions of years old. She used one of her flints to light the wood, but it was too green, even for Dorothea, and refused to burn.

Felix calculated that we’d been in the Night Wood for sixteen days. There was enough food for two more days.

That night, as I ran back and forth to the latrine, I had the strange feeling that something had changed. It was impossible to grasp hold of it. As the night wore on, however, it slowly came to me that I could no longer hear the faint drone of tanks or the intermittent rattle of machine-gun fire. I didn’t know how to account for it, the overwhelming relief of it, and I decided that I was suffering another trick of my weakened mind.

I was awakened near morning by cries of jubilation. Women took up pot lids, banging them loudly, and some of the men did somersaults, causing the children to cry. Kreck danced shakily with Dorothea, while Felix, overcome, fell into his chair, his hands over his face. The man who came with the news was making his third tour of the camp, borne on the shoulders of some Belgian prisoners of war. Berlin had capitulated to the Red Army. Hitler was dead. The Americans were entering the city from the west.

There frequently had been rumors of the war’s end, and we had learned not to believe them, but the empty sky, the cease of gunfire, the silence of the forest itself, told us that the news was true. The war was over. The feeling of shock was so great that for several hours all that we could do was run back and
forth through the camp, embracing one another and crying. I found Bresla and the Odessa women and we prayed and sang together, the women holding me in their arms.

In the afternoon, a man from the village came to tell Felix that the Russian general and his staff had left Löwendorf. He said there’d been talk that the Metzenburgs had abandoned the Pavilion. At this news, Dorothea and Felix decided to return at once. We began to collect our few things, but Kreck, assuring Felix that he and Roeder would soon follow, urged him to leave immediately. Accompanied by Bessie, we set out for home.

The hawthorn was in bloom. Blue herons paced tentatively along the river’s edge, and there even were bees. I saw two waxwings in the willows, lurking like thieves, black masks over their brown eyes. Mr. Knox had once told me that waxwings were very confiding, and I wondered what stories they would have to tell me.

Although the general and his staff were gone, one of the tanks and some of the soldiers remained in a disorderly encampment. Clouds of flies, attracted by the stench of rotting flesh, swarmed over the river, its surface marked by astonished trout. Dorothea’s collection of eighteenth-century books, among them prints of frogs and toads from Catesby’s
Natural History
, was scattered across the park, and the frogs, flying across the torn pages, looked as if they were alive. Strips of carpet hung from the trees, and the ground was strewn with broken porcelain and pieces of painted canvas (I saw the face of Dorothea’s mother on one of them). The windows and doors of the Pavilion had been smashed, and mounds of broken
glass and brick were piled high around the house. We had expected much worse.

In the yard, Frau Blucher from the inn, wearing a blue velvet hat and the jacket of a Lanvin suit, a bit too small for her, was busy trading a soldier a bottle of schnapps for one of Dorothea’s teapots.

“I would tell you that you’ll have another Lanvin if I thought it mattered to you,” Felix said to Dorothea. I’d noticed that once we were out of the Night Wood and in the light again, Felix looked old. He wasn’t old, I knew, but his face had a yellow pallor, and I wondered if he had jaundice. Many of the refugees in the camp had been sick.

I followed Felix and Dorothea into the house. A group of Red Army soldiers sprawled on the floor of the drawing room stared at us as if we were unexpected and unwelcome guests. There was a smell of urine, wood smoke, and excrement. Russian words and crude drawings were scratched across the walls. The chairs and sofas had been ripped apart and the stuffing burned. On the bare floor, nearly buried under garbage and waste, were torn books, bed linen, strips of curtain, and broken plates. The gramophone records had been snapped in two, and the gramophone was gone. At the sight of her torn wedding veil, Dorothea looked happy for a moment. “I’d forgotten about my veil,” she said. Felix took her hand, and we left the house.

A soldier stood in the doorway of the stables, arguing loudly with a woman who looked like Herr Pflüger’s wife, both of them tugging on one of Dorothea’s sheets.

“Do you remember when I said that if we loved it, we had to protect it?” Felix asked Dorothea.

“Not likely that I’d forget,” she said.

“I’m not sure that we were successful.”

We watched in silence as more soldiers, some of them wearing Felix’s clothes, joined the argument. Suddenly, the commotion in the yard grew louder.

Coming across the park, a hawthorn stick in his hand, was Kreck, followed by Roeder and a band of drunken and ecstatic refugees. Pipes were played and drums banged as the children twirled and shouted in excitement. Kreck had fashioned an eye patch out of a piece of sacking—he looked like a mountain king, the tips of his overgrown mustache, no longer black, springing from his face. His rusty frock coat, once a little tight across his back, hung loosely from his shoulders. Dogs swirled around him as he stopped in front of the Pavilion and shook his stick in triumph. Not Ovid, I thought, but the Brothers Grimm. We are rat catchers, bewitched swans, witches.

We confined ourselves to the upper floors of the Pavilion, sleeping on straw. We had no candles or oil for lamps, and water had to be carried from the well in the yard. Despite the foul smell of my body, I thought constantly of food. The food was always Irish. Brown bread with butter, salmon, oatmeal with cream, boiled cabbage with bacon (but no potatoes). I used to dream of Herr Elias, but after the war I dreamed of food.

Bresla and her mother chose not to return to Odessa with their friends, and Felix gave them the use of an abandoned farmhouse that he owned in the village. Lazare was taking
Bresla’s aunt (she of the Immaculate Conception) with him to France. Bertrand was traveling to Odessa with Bresla’s cousin, explaining that he’d pretended to be her husband for so long, he couldn’t conceive of life without her. The departure of the Frenchmen and the women and their children made us sad, and Bresla and I walked with them as far as the crossroad.

As there was no telephone service or post, letters continued to arrive mysteriously, passed from hand to hand and village to village, slipped under a door or left at the foot of a tree. I spent two days searching for a pencil, at last finding one at the back of a broken desk drawer. I sharpened it with Felix’s homemade razor and wrote to my parents and to Mr. Knox, entrusting the letters to a foreign worker on his way to Belgium.

Most of the people in camp had already started for home, but those who remained were invited to stay in the stables for as long as they wished. They were understandably eager to be on their way, and each day there were fewer of them. We had nothing to eat, and Felix sold two of the motorcars to Herr Pflüger for food.

One morning, the soldiers were gone from the park—Dorothea said that it was thanks to our exhaustion that we neither saw nor heard them leave. They’d retreated only as far as the village, however, coming drunk every day to the Pavilion to demand that Felix tell them where he’d hidden his gold. The villagers did not trouble themselves over vagaries like hidden gold. Herr Pflüger’s son, recently returned from the Western
Front, carried away the last pair of firedogs, seven brass doorknobs, and a stuffed owl. Many of the soldiers had never seen a bicycle, and they crashed our bicycles full speed into walls and rode off the bridge into the river. There were fights, and a soldier was shot in a quarrel over a tire pump.

As Löwendorf and other villages south and east of Berlin had been declared part of the new Russian zone of occupation, landowners in the neighborhood were said to be joining the Communist Party as fast as they could find the local commissar. Some Ukrainian refugees who’d been slave workers in Poznan refused to return to Russia, confiding to Bresla that they and their children had been treated brutally by their own soldiers. If a woman raped by a Russian soldier was later found to be pregnant or suffering from venereal disease, she was sent to Siberia. The Ukrainians were determined to reach Canada, and one morning they were gone from the stables.