The Life of Objects (22 page)

At the end of May, the Russians drove the tank from the village, careening noisily down the rutted road to a nearby town. The armistice had been signed early in the month, and there was no longer any reason to hide the tank. The soldiers took our bicycles with them, except for one that I’d hidden in the meadow.

Word came that one of the farmers, just returned from the war, had hung himself, and Felix and I walked to his farm. The craters in the road were filled with waste, and we took the path through the orchard. Makeshift shelters had been set up in the fields, and there was a strong smell of sewage. Both of us were
still a bit weak, and it took us an hour to reach the farm, eating the apples we’d picked along the way.

The man’s body was swinging from a beech, a rough ladder leaning against the tree. His wife stood under the body, staring at his bare feet. She said that the Russian soldiers had destroyed his hives for sport and had used his furniture for shooting practice. He’d not been able to bear the loss of his bees and his grandmother’s chairs. Someone, she said, had stolen the shoes from his feet.

Boys from the village cut down the body at Felix’s direction. The rope had distended the man’s neck, and the distance between his jaw and shoulders was elongated. When Felix bent to help the woman with the body, she spat at him. We left her there, surrounded by the laughing boys. I had to stop twice on the way home, vomiting in the weeds.

A few days later, Dorothea asked me to accompany her to the basement of the Pavilion. The filth left by the soldiers reached our knees (reminding me of Pepys’s cellar), and we spent the morning clearing a path to a coal chute in the corner where Dorothea remembered that Caspar had hidden a painting—a small Cranach, she said. Using sticks, we searched in several places, finding three bags containing jewelry and two silver chalices, but no Cranach. “Venus, and Cupid stung by bees,” she said, panting with the effort of digging. When she noticed that my hands were shaking, she took my stick from me. “Remember where these are buried,” she said as she returned the treasures to their hiding places, which made me wonder if
she feared for her memory. Or perhaps, I thought in alarm, she and Felix were leaving Löwendorf and did not intend to take me with them.

It was the beginning of summer. The windows and the roof had not been repaired, and it was possible, if you were not too distracted, to hear the unaccustomed sound of motorcars on the road. There was even the sound of singing now and then. Although thousands of refugees and prisoners of war were still moving across the land, there were fewer than before, and the victorious Allied soldiers seemed to keep to Berlin.

I worried that I would not have the strength to hold on to my happiness (if I still kept lists, my longing to keep at least some small part of it would be at the top). It was difficult to ease my grief, burdened like others with a new and permanent sense of dread. Those moments when I could not help but feel pleasure—eating a fresh egg or finding a book that was not missing its pages—filled me with shame.

I understood that the division of time is determined by astral and lunar phenomena, but I began to wonder if sorrow and elation also have their own tidal and rotational cycles, all part of the encompassing natural world. If Felix’s generation suffered death and humiliation in the Great War, we had been
left with the inexhaustible presence of evil. That people, including myself, could so easily resume their old ways and habits seemed a repudiation of all that had been lost. I couldn’t bear the thought that everything would remain the same, yet I was frightened by the new world that awaited us.

During the war, we had scavenged at night and slept in the day. Children had not gone to school. Animals had not foaled. There’d been no appointments to keep or to cancel, no market days, weddings, or funerals, and no cars, buses, trains, or horses to get us there, had there been someplace to go. There’d been no telephones, electricity, petrol. No medicine. No money and no food.

We had survived, but we were different people.

Dorothea and Felix made no mention of leaving Löwendorf, and I was further relieved when Dorothea asked Bresla and me to help with the restoration of the kitchen garden. Women from the village, who at first watched silently from the garden door, slowly began to offer advice, surprised and pleased to see that we worked as hard and as long as they themselves worked. They brought us seeds and even tools, trading them for a share in the garden. It was too late to plant all of the seeds, but we were in time for tomatoes, snap beans, carrots, and beets, setting them against the east wall where the seedlings would be sheltered from the wind. We mixed dirt with sand from the river to plant parsley and fennel. Advised by the farmers’ wives, we chose a day that was dry to plant cabbage and onions. The women, who once believed that the glittering paths of the garden were paved with gold, thanks to the mica in the sand, taught us to sow with the waxing of the moon, and we planted white poppies and hyssop. The little huts in each corner of the garden, made with bent juniper poles and covered with grapevines, had been stripped by the soldiers when
they ate the leaves, and I planted a myrrh-scented climbing rose, winding the stems through the lattice. I also planted a cutting of blue honeyberry, which birds like very much.

Madame Tkvarcheli worked in the kitchen—walnuts, soft and green, were just right for pickling, she said. Bresla was learning to speak German, and if I was not too tired, I gave her lessons in the evening. Frau Hoffeldt and Frau Bodenschatz had returned to the village with their children, but they, too, came each day to help in the garden and in the house.

Felix fell ill a few weeks after our return. Although he had a fever, he had no pain or further symptoms of disease. When he refused to eat, Madame Tkvarcheli made nettle tea for him, which she said was a cure for grief. He liked that the leaves resembled the face of a weasel, but he would not touch the tea, and Dorothea and I drank it instead.

One night, I heard Dorothea say to him, “You must never leave me, Felix. I couldn’t bear it. You must swear to me. I understand nothing. Not money. Not people, especially Germans. I would be lost without you.”

Felix’s answer was not very satisfactory. “We’ve returned to the time of the Great Migrations. All of Europe is in motion. Everything we learned to take for granted is no longer certain—the preservation of knowledge and life without constant fear of death. We’ll live like medieval monks, modest and humble in our diligence. That might suit us, darling,” he said.

“Suit you, perhaps,” she said quietly.

He looked at her in disappointment but said nothing. The possibility that Felix might be wrong was so new to me, so subversive a thought, that I felt myself blush in apology.

Later when she couldn’t sleep, Dorothea lit a candle and asked if she could read to me—first in French and then translating the words into English.
That melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal
.

Felix, who we thought was asleep, asked what she was reading. She said that she’d been rereading parts of Proust, having found some torn pages of
Sodom and Gomorrah
, which she’d laboriously pieced together.

He was silent for a moment and then lifted his head. “You must never say that you are ‘rereading’ Proust, darling. Any knowledgeable person, hearing that you are reading Proust at your age, will know that it is not for the first time.” His head fell back on the pillow.

“So much for the monastery,” she whispered to me.

Roeder, suffering from a complaint that often left her unable to walk, asked Dorothea if she might return to her own village of Mittelbach, sixty miles from Löwendorf. Her nephew had been killed in the Ardennes, but her brother, a miller, and his wife had survived the war, and he’d sent word that he would welcome her in their home. At the last minute, she didn’t want to go, clinging to Dorothea’s knees like a child, convinced that Dorothea would die without her. Dorothea told her that she didn’t have to go, that she would look after her, and that she had always assumed that they would be old women together.

Wiping her wrinkled face, Roeder looked slowly around the filthy yard, and at the ruins of the Yellow Palace and the looted Pavilion and at Dorothea in her mended men’s trousers and matted hair, and started down the avenue. We waved until she was out of sight.

It was quiet at the Pavilion once the refugees and their children were gone. The village women brought us schnapps and more seeds in exchange for vegetables and fruit, and sometimes they brought eggs and even a chicken, enabling us to start a henhouse of our own. There were mushrooms in the forest and watercress in the river. I made coffee from dandelions, putting the leaves to dry in the sun before baking the roots in the brick oven Bresla built in the yard. Madame Tkvarcheli taught me to make schnapps, using beech leaves and wild buckthorn. Many nights, we had mushroom soup, pickled walnuts, watercress, plums, raspberry tea, and schnapps for supper, and we found ourselves wondering why we hadn’t eaten like that every night of our lives.

The Russians forbade the reading of any newspaper but their own, which was written in German and distributed weekly. We no longer had a wireless, but friends from neighboring villages, having learned of our survival, walked for miles to bring us news, and perhaps a gift of a sausage or three trembling doves gathered in a handkerchief, and we gave the visitors our own news and fruit from the orchard. The Russians had ordered the towns in their sector to close all bakeries, arranging
for the distribution of small amounts of mealy flour so that women would be forced to make their own bread. I asked the baker’s wife to teach me how to bake in exchange for fruit. I took to it very naturally, baking the bread in old garden pots. “It’s your peasant blood,” Kreck said, trying to swallow a piece of my first loaf.

I wrote again to my mother and father, reminded of them by Kreck’s remark, which would have incensed my mother (I was going to tell her if I ever saw her again), to let them know that I was well. I wrote to Mr. Knox, enclosing a record I’d begun to keep of the birds I saw at Löwendorf, some of which had not been seen in years. I wondered if the birds had fled the war and only recently had felt it safe to return, but I didn’t mention my theory to my old teacher. As there were no stamps and no one I could ask to carry them, I kept the two letters under my mat until I found a reliable courier.

Our new garden provided enough vegetables for our small household and for the women who helped us (levies of produce, grain, and meat were sent each month to the army, only now it was the Russian army). Every town and village had been required to accept a certain number of displaced persons, and Löwendorf had been told to take ninety of them. It would double the number of residents, and rooms and clothes and food had yet to be found for all of them. The country people were enraged to have to share their meager supplies with strangers who, they complained, did not even speak German. Every egg, every spoon of jam was begrudged the foreigners, who were viewed with mistrust and even revulsion, as it was conveniently
said that they were to blame for the war. Even the Germans expelled from the Sudetenland were not spared the contempt of the villagers.

Frau Kronkeit, the widow of a farmer who’d been killed at Sevastopol, stopped me one day as I returned from a lesson in baking to complain that life had been far better under Hitler than under the Russians. She must have sensed my disgust, for she shouted after me, “
Nun bist du doch ebenso arm wie wir
.” Now, at last, you are as poor as we are.

The new mayor of Löwendorf, Herr Pflüger, sent word to Felix that as the schoolmaster was presumed dead, the village would be in need of a schoolteacher. As Herr Pflüger now had a say in the matter, he wished to discuss the appointment of the new master (the Metzenburgs traditionally paid the schoolmaster’s salary and provided the schoolhouse with wood). I was in the room when the boy delivered the mayor’s message—as there was no paper, the boy had memorized the words and recited them in a rush so as not to forget them.

I often wondered if my letters had reached Herr Elias (I liked to imagine him reading them). I regretted that I had no souvenirs of him—not my German dictionary or the Fontane novels or the tray cloth I’d made for him. That afternoon, I walked to his house in the village, but Russian soldiers were living there, and I turned around and walked home.

Later, as I worked with Dorothea in the garden—it was light until nine o’clock—I heard the song of a marsh warbler and stopped to listen to it, wondering dreamily if it had flown
over the women on their long walk home to the Black Sea. Dorothea, who was watching me, said, “Don’t sentimentalize things. Not now.” When I asked what she meant, she said, “The marsh warbler imitates to perfection more than seventy-five birds. There’s no knowing who he is tonight.”

There is no knowing who
you
are, I thought. I had no idea that Dorothea knew about birds. I did not tell her about the soldiers living in Herr Elias’s house.

As soon as Felix was strong enough, I walked with him to the village to apply for the certificate that would declare him a
Kleinbauer
, or small farmer. While waiting our turn, I noticed a man nervously explaining to Herr Pflüger his need for transit papers. Felix thought that the man must be a survivor of a camp because of his emaciation, as well as his expression of worn derangement, and he invited him to share our small lunch—Dorothea, fearful that the wait might be long in our newly socialist village, had given us buckthorn jam with a loaf of my gummy black bread. The man, whose name was Daniel Vrooman, was grateful for the food, and Felix told him that should he be unsuccessful in his efforts, he was welcome to stop at the Pavilion.

When Herr Pflüger caught sight of Felix among the supplicants, he beckoned him quickly into the small sitting room that served as his office. Still possessed of his unsettling combination of obsequy and contempt, he made me a mocking bow. “Comrade Palmer,” he said.