The Life of Objects (6 page)

The next day, Herr Elias lit a cigarette, and the two men (Caspar arriving just in time) settled themselves at the library table. Kreck brought a pot of black-currant tea and seed cake each afternoon, and Herr Elias poured himself a cup of tea.

I hadn’t slept, writing and then learning my speech by heart, and I was a bit shaky. I pushed back my chair and began. “I was taught to fish by Mr. Hugh Knox when I was a child, using my grandfather’s salmon flies, and his bamboo rod, which was nine feet long and too heavy for me. Mr. Knox would cast into the Ridge Pool and I would guide the line between my fingers as he slowly turned the reel. Later, he made a rod for me that was more suitable to my size and I began to catch small muddy trout of my own.” I paused for breath. Some of the vocabulary was difficult—
Lachsfliegen, kleine schlammige Forellen, geeignet
—and I was uncertain of my grammar, my Irish accent rendering some of the words incomprehensible, but both my tormentors looked pleased, even interested, and I continued. “My father and mother had no interest in the river. We lived in rooms above my father’s shop. My grandmother died of consumption when my mother was a girl, and she lived in fear of catching the disease. I wasn’t allowed to play with the Catholic children, and my only companion was Mr. Knox. My mother was relieved to have me taken off her hands, and I was grateful to be gone. When I returned from my walks with Mr. Knox, she would ask if I’d been near the village children, and I would say that I had not, even when I’d passed them in the road. I often
imagined what it would be like if the germs killed my mother. I would live with Mr. Knox and I would be happy.”

Caspar and Herr Elias were no longer lounging in their chairs but sat with straight backs, staring at me with solemn faces. Herr Elias’s tea was untouched. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Herr Elias said, “Thank you, Fräulein.
Sie überraschen mich immer wieder
. You surprise me again and again.”

All that Caspar said was “
Ich wusste nicht, dass Sie angeln Können
.” I didn’t know you could fish.

My reading that summer, thanks to Herr Elias, who loaned me novels (I’d quickly grown bored with Frau Schumacher’s books), had grown to include stories that Mr. Knox would have considered very exotic. Other than the fairy tales, there’d been nothing but English and Irish books in Mr. Knox’s library, with few German characters.

I noticed that many of the young men in Herr Elias’s books begin their careers with love affairs with older women—Rousseau’s
Confessions, The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma
(his aunt!), and
Lost Illusions
, among others. When I asked Herr Elias about this, he said that it was what they did in France. When I reminded him that
The Charterhouse of Parma
is set in Italy, he said, “There, too.”

At his suggestion, I read
Effie Briest
(slowly and with his help), in hope of better acquainting myself with German literature. The book made me long for a lover of my own and, even more, I longed for the wiles I imagined necessary to hold such
a lover. The story made me wish that I were beautiful. Herr Elias was often in my dreams (I no longer dreamed about lace), so you might say that we spent quite a bit of time together.

Like Felix, Herr Elias had a passion for music, and I began to make a tray cloth for him with a
punto in aria
pattern of musical instruments—it was the first lace I’d sewn in some time—but I had to put it aside when Dorothea asked me to make a pair of trousers for her. I knew little about sewing clothes, but I began by taking her measurements. I was unaccustomed to seeing women in their underwear (she stood calmly in her peach silk knickers). It wasn’t her lack of modesty that made me uncomfortable but her evident disdain. She seemed to be defying me to blush, and I’m pleased to say that while it was a struggle, I did not oblige her.

On the first day of September, a distraught Kreck rushed into the sewing room to tell me that Germany had invaded Poland. He said that Herr Felix was waiting to speak to us in the library. I rose immediately, my apron dotted with blood—I’d pricked myself when he told me the news—and followed him downstairs.

Herr Felix was at his desk. Dorothea was not there. Schmidt, Caspar, and Roeder stood together, and Kreck and I took our places beside them. Felix said that we were free, of course, to return to our homes now that Germany was at war. He understood that I might be particularly alarmed to find myself at Löwendorf at such a perilous moment. He was relieved that he and Frau Metzenburg had left Berlin, especially as some
of their friends had begun to disappear simply because their names were in the wrong address books. Although his voice was calm, I noticed that his hands were shaking when he picked up a newspaper he’d been reading. There appears to be a new law, he said. “Forbidding Jews to own—” He stopped to read directly from the paper. “Radios and—”

Roeder interrupted him to say that her place was with Frau Metzenburg. Schmidt and Caspar also said that they did not wish to leave Löwendorf. Kreck, whose face was wet with tears, said nothing, and Felix turned to me.

Caspar, his blue eyes narrowed with expectation, nodded at me in encouragement, but Roeder had difficulty concealing the smirk of superiority that implied that she’d taken me for a bolter from the start. Schmidt seemed distracted, gazing in wonder at the row of Meissen pagodas. When I said that I, too, chose to remain at Löwendorf, Caspar dropped his head in relief. Felix, impassively prepared for a different answer, thanked me. He said that he would do all that he could to keep us safe. As we left the library, Kreck took me aside to say that Herr Metzenburg had many friends in the diplomatic corps and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that because of this, he knew things that the rest of us could not possibly know. He said that I should do whatever Herr Felix asked me to do, no matter how implausible.

Later, when I took up my sewing, my hands, too, were shaking, and I was unable to thread my needle. I understood nothing of Germany and the forces that had brought her to war. For the first time, I regretted the hours I’d spent reading French novels, rather than the newspaper. Although I sometimes read
the paper from Hamburg (it was one of the German exercises given me by Herr Elias), I’d been more interested in the views of my companions than in news of the world. That Felix had declined the offer of an important post abroad seemed to indicate his opinion of the Reich. I knew that Kreck had been with Herr Felix since Felix was at university, and that he’d lost his eye in 1916 in service to the emperor (he’d said more than once that he had no intention of losing his other eye for his own or any other country). Fräulein Roeder, who’d tended Dorothea since she was sent as a girl to live with her grandfather in London, did not hesitate to express her admiration of Hitler’s frequent speeches, particularly the one in which the Führer said that the geniality, diligence, and steadfastness of the German people would be harnessed for works of peace and human culture, but Roeder did not exhibit any signs of the Führer lovesickness that I’d noticed in other German ladies (when she said that many Nazis were, in fact, practicing Christians, Felix closed his eyes, his hand on his forehead, and nodded). Her favorite nephew had been mobilized that winter, and she frequently sent him packages—I saw her in the village when I was posting my letters to Mr. Knox.

I doubted if Caspar supported the Nazis. He was infuriated by the stories he heard of Nazi brutality. His older brother was in the Wehrmacht. His younger brother had been arrested for distributing political pamphlets and taken to Plötzensee prison, and there had been no word of him for weeks. I was from a country that declared itself neutral, and my opinions were naturally of little interest to anyone. As for Dorothea, I had no idea what she thought.

My mother liked to claim that a gossip was merely someone who took a healthy and even gainful interest in life, which, of course, allowed her to say whatever she liked, but the gossip in my village was not like the gossip at Löwendorf. If a person managed to escape from Ballycarra, he fled to Philadelphia or London or Sydney, rarely to be seen again—it mattered little to him what people said about him. Few strangers stopped in Ballycarra—perhaps every generation, a wife or two was brought from a nearby town, but no more than that. Gossip tended to have some truth in it, as nothing could remain hidden for long. Mrs. Cumming’s husband beat her. The doctor was drinking himself to death. At Löwendorf, the opposite was true. Rumors were naturally concerned with matters far more grave than the increasing frequency of Dr. Fiske’s visits to the pub, and nothing could be known for certain.

Although Germany was at war, our life at Löwendorf continued in the same slow fashion. There were moments, however, when I was reminded that we were not as safe as we appeared to be. During a lesson, Herr Elias said that I might want to exercise a certain skepticism in regard to the German words that I was learning—I could begin with
Vaterland
. When I asked what he meant, he said, “Surely,
meine liebe
, you know that I am a Jew.” I blushed and said that I had not known that he was a Jew. He said nothing more, and I continued my translation of “Puss ’n Boots.”

It seemed to me that many people, including myself, didn’t know the first thing about Jews—what they believed or how
they thought. I often heard women in the village frightening their children with the threat that the Jews would get them if they didn’t do as they were told. When I asked Caspar about this, he shrugged and said that German mothers had always been that way. When I pressed him further, he said that while he himself wouldn’t use such threats, he couldn’t vouch for the trustworthiness of all Jews. When I asked if he could vouch for the trustworthiness of all Germans, he didn’t answer me.

I understood that I lived in a house of spies (I heard Kreck say that it was nothing to him, as we lived in a country of spies), but I also knew that we did not spy for gain or even for our beliefs. We spied because it eased our fear—even though any secrets we might chance to discover were of a domestic nature, and of no possible interest to anyone but ourselves (and often not even then). Roeder told me that Herr Felix had refused to engage any new servants long before the start of the war, after he twice caught footmen listening at doors. They must have looked like kingfishers in their livery of blue tailcoats and gold waistcoats, bent at the waist, heads cocked as they peered through keyholes.

Schmidt watched Kreck. Kreck watched Caspar. Caspar watched me. Roeder watched Dorothea. Dorothea watched Felix. I watched all of them (I was sent one day to Felix’s dressing room when he forgot his riding gloves, and I held his enamel cufflinks, one of them depicting the night sky and its constellations, the other a miniature globe of the world, and slipped one of his batiste handkerchiefs into my pocket before grabbing the gloves and quickly closing the drawer, but
I wouldn’t have called that spying). If Herr Felix watched anyone, he was good at concealing it.

When Roeder knocked on the door of the sewing room—I’d finished Dorothea’s trousers and was mending a cushion—I thought at first that she’d come to collect the cap she’d asked me to make for her niece’s baby, rather insultingly offering to pay me in buttons, an arrangement I had declined. She had then offered me cash money, an offer that she also expected me to decline, which I did. She knew that I would make the cap, given the intimacy of the household and our growing dependence on one another. The cap was easy enough to sew, taking me only a few evenings’ work, but I resented every stitch.

She was on her way to evensong at St. Adalbert’s (I could hear the bells). Her undersized black hat, two lace lappets hanging on either side of her whiskered face, turned her into an elderly black hare. She stood in the center of the room, her gloved hands folded across her little bulging belly, and said that she wished to be certain that I understood that
Frau Metzenburg’s great-grandmother had not been a Jew, despite the lies spread by the wicked. The Schumachers, who were bankers, had been given a Certificate of True Belief when they converted to the Christian faith at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Frau Metzenburg’s great-grandfather, the old baron, had been financial adviser to Queen Victoria, and her grandmother was by birth a baroness. “There are rumors to this day,” said Roeder, working a loose hatpin into her head, “that
Prince Albert himself was the unhappy result of a friendship between his mother and her Jewish chamberlain. A story that I have always refused to believe.” She made the small curtsy she executed whenever she mentioned the royal family of any country, lifting her black dress a few inches from the floor.

I gave her the little cap and she thanked me. She said that Frau Metzenburg was driving to Potsdam in the morning and would like me to accompany her. I was surprised, as Roeder often chose not to tell me when Dorothea asked for me, and I realized that she must had been scolded for her forgetfulness, which would not have improved her disposition.

Inéz stopped at Löwendorf that first Christmas of the war on her way to Munich, where she was hoping to collect her two children to take them to safety in Cairo. I was surprised to learn that she had children, as she had never mentioned them. Count Hartenfels was refusing to let the children leave Germany, and Inéz was dining with Reichsmarschall Göring to ask him to use his influence with her former husband. Felix thought there was a good chance that Göring would help her, as he’d once said that he found it unsportsmanlike to kill children.

As Inéz was superstitious, I was summoned at the last minute to join the Metzenburgs and their guests at Christmas lunch—there were to be fourteen, but a friend driving from Berlin had been delayed (“More like arrested,” Kreck whispered to me). I patted Hungarian water on my less-than-clean
hair and put on my best skirt—not good enough, I knew, but I also knew that no one would look at me twice—and hurried to the winter dining room.

An expressionless Kreck, his hands shaking in his white cotton gloves, moved haltingly around the table as he slid plates past the gesticulating guests. Caspar, dressed by Kreck in the footman’s livery, filled glasses with champagne. We were having smoked trout, partridges, potatoes Anna, and brussels sprouts, with apple tart for dessert, everything grown or killed on the estate. In the center of the table, four porcelain pheasants and a large porcelain turkey cock sat in nests of holly. On a sideboard, a rhinoceros, a monkey, a ram, a fawn, and a lion, all in glazed bisque, stood around the tiny silver-and-velvet bed I’d packed in Berlin, patiently waiting for the Christ Child to arrive. On the walls, bunches of mistletoe and rowanberries were joined by swags of oak leaves. At the top of each plate was a small lapis bowl holding a pale green hellebore set in ice that had been shaved to resemble snow. Candles had been lit, as it would be dark by the middle of the afternoon.