The Oriental Wife (2 page)

When a pint of milk was fifty million marks, and the papers no longer reported the suicides in the city, Louisa’s father began taking her with him on those trips to the countryside where he bartered the contents of her mother’s trousseau for food. It was her mother’s idea that Franz should bring
Louisa with him: she had called Louisa into the living room and yanked up her blouse to show him Louisa’s ribs jutting out through her flesh. Louisa grabbed the hem and tried to tug it down, but Jeannette slapped her hand away. “Look at that, Franz, look at her. And her legs are like sticks. Somebody will take pity on her. Nobody is going to pity you.” It was true that Franz had not had much luck so far, though he had worn his colonel’s uniform, with the Iron Cross on the breast pocket. But there were too many others making the same journey. Half the burghers of Nuremberg, it seemed, were emptying their china cupboards and their wives’ closets and going in search of bacon and turnips. The farmers’ wives appeared in town in velvet dresses, with garnets dangling from their ears.

It was wrong, what she was suggesting, Franz said: he couldn’t use his own daughter like that. Jeannette flew at him, hissing. “Then we must all starve, your daughter too. You will kill her with your principles.” So he took her along, holding her hand as they walked together out of the city.

The farmers had high, hard bellies and leathery hands. Some of them called Louisa over in their guttural German while her father was talking to them. Sometimes they said, “The poor child,” which was a good sign. With her father tensing beside her, they pinched her thin cheeks or stroked her long hair. She could not tell if the painful, churning feeling she had then was because she liked it or because she was frightened. Certainly she did not like their smell, or the calluses on their fingers. She stared at the flowers growing around the steps of their houses and wondered if people ever ate them. Mrs. Müller, the cook, who stayed with them despite being paid in useless money—for Louisa’s sake, she
said—boiled dandelions for breakfast when there was nothing else.

Then the bargaining began: so many cabbages, so many moldy potatoes, for the Meissen serving platter with the latticed border; a chicken and a bunch of beetroot for the pale pink tureen with the gold handles. Once a farmer’s wife, a black shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders, came out of the shed with a jug of milk still warm from the cow, which she handed silently to Louisa. Another time, a harelipped boy who had been watching from the kitchen window came hobbling down the steps to present Louisa with an egg. When she got home, Mrs. Müller took it from her reverently, in both hands, and boiled it for Louisa’s supper.

By the time the Ruhr war was over and the New Mark could be counted on to keep its value, the boys’ voices had deepened; the toy soldiers they had played with when the war began—Louisa had made them swords out of darning needles swaddled in silver paper—lay discarded in the attic, gathering dust. With the return of prosperity, Rolf became football-mad, even forgetting about America, and Louisa was sent to dancing classes presided over by a humpbacked Frenchwoman. Then she graduated to tea dances at the homes of her classmates. The dressmaker made her a floaty green chiffon dress with a silk underskirt that rustled against her legs as she moved. Some of the boys she danced with also wanted to stroke her hair—it was a deep chestnut color—but now it was up to her whether to let them or not. She could duck away if she wanted, or slap their hands, or laugh in their faces; she watched their cheeks turn red and noted the sudden stammer in their voices.

A sort of dizziness seized her at those moments, a heady sense of power that she could not allow herself to name. Sometimes she let them kiss her in the street as they walked her home, to see how it would feel; sometimes she gave them a push and walked ahead, waiting for them to catch up. Once one of the braver ones grazed her breasts with his hands, and a little shock went through her, not pleasure exactly but an inkling of what pleasure might feel like some day.

Meanwhile Jeannette was spending more and more time in the blue sitting room at the front of the house, reading the letters her brother had written from the University of Freiburg. His name was Adolf; he had shot himself, aged twenty, after failing an exam in his second year. (It was a time when many young men, brought up on legends of burning lakes and swords, were firing pistols through their temples. Those Jews who prided themselves so on their Germanness were not immune.) For as long as Louisa could remember, his portrait had hung over the marble fireplace in the little parlor; his desk was there too, with his letters tied with ribbon and propped up in the cubbyholes; his leather-bound books were neatly arranged in a locked mahogany bookcase with doors of etched glass. In the year that Louisa turned nineteen, Jeannette had the portrait cleaned and reframed; she unlocked the bookcase and seemed to be working her way through the volumes it contained, though often, when Louisa passed the door, her mother was simply sitting there, twisting her hands in her lap, the book she had been reading open on the sofa beside her.

At the sound of Louisa’s footsteps in the hall, her mother would get up and slam the door, or rush out of the room to
accost her. Where was she going, where had she been, didn’t she know what those boys really wanted? She was heartless, a hussy, she had always been an unnatural child. Trapped in the narrow vestibule by the front door, watching her mother’s lips move, Louisa conjured up the image of the green velvet beret in the window of Bamberger’s department store, or a three-legged dog she’d seen on the street. Sometimes Franz emerged from his study, if he was at home, and told Jeannette sharply to leave the child alone, while Louisa escaped out the door or up to her room. “My mother hates me,” she told a boy who had brought her a plate of supper at a dance, and laughed.

“I don’t believe that,” he said. “Nobody could hate you. You’re so beautiful.” But in the dark it was her mother’s words she remembered, not the boy’s.

One Sunday morning her father summoned her into his study and announced that he was sending her to a ladies’ academy in Switzerland for a year. It wasn’t just her mother’s nerves, he said—Jeannette’s condition was always referred to as nerves—though perhaps it would be best for everyone if Louisa got out of the house for a while. But he hoped too that she would apply herself to her language studies; languages, he said, clearing his throat, would be useful if she ever wanted to live abroad.

For several years, gangs of Brownshirts had been roaming the streets of the city, shouting of the great cleansing that was to come. The men who came to sit with Franz in his study—members of the veterans’ committees and the board of the charity homes—told each other that soon those young men would settle down; the worst of the hard times was over; unemployment was down; there would be decent jobs for them
all, and then they would come to their senses. They recognized, among the marchers, the man who delivered beer from house to house, the man who cleaned the chimneys, the boy who swept up in the Frauenplatz on market day. They were good fellows, they said, ordinary fellows, they only needed to be given a chance. Otto’s mother told Louisa how she made a point of speaking to them kindly when she saw them on their own—the delivery man, for example; she always gave him an extra tip, she said, and had bought a gift for his baby daughter.

Only Jeannette insisted shrilly that this was just the beginning. The country was going mad, one day those men would be shooting them in broad daylight, and nobody would lift a finger. She could see it in people’s eyes, she told Franz as he peeled the figs Mrs. Müller had brought for his
Nachtisch:
the eyes of the laundress who came and hung out the sheets in the attic, and the dressmaker’s, and the maid’s, and Mrs. Müller’s too. “All the women are in love with the little corporal.” Nonsense, Franz told her, with unaccustomed firmness. She should be ashamed even to suggest such a thing. He leaned across and patted Louisa’s hand. “A nation that gave birth to the Enlightenment will never consent to be ruled by a gang of thugs.”

Louisa never told them, but she had a Nazi admirer—a skinny, rawboned Brownshirt who had materialized on the street one night when she was walking home alone and asked if he could escort her. She remembered him from the marketplace, where his cart had tipped over; apples were rolling everywhere, and she helped him pick them up. The next week, when she was alone again, he appeared in the same place, stepping out of the shadows as she passed. His face,
illuminated by the streetlamps, was pale and splotchy, with one tuft of hair protruding from the cleft in his chin; his walk was stiff and shambling, but something about him impressed her, a painful dignity lacking in her dancing partners. Mostly, on those nights they walked together, he was silent, but sometimes, with a kind of clumsy grandeur, he pointed out Orion or the Great Bear. “Imagine how far it is, in what pure air it lives. Up there you have the one true greatness.” “I would have liked to be an astronomer, but it was not possible for me,” he said once. “My parents are very simple people. Good folk, but ignorant. They have no sense of any higher destiny. So I have had to make my own way.”

Another time, as they turned into her street, she asked, “Did you know that I am Jewish?” and felt him grow wary.

Yes, he said, he knew it.

“So aren’t you supposed to hate me?”

He stopped walking. “All that is foolishness. I have no hatred for anyone, I only want to see my country restored to its honor. To take its rightful place among the great nations.”

After that they did not speak again until they arrived at her door, when he took her hand and kissed it, like an old-style knight. He was the only National Socialist she had met, and she could not imagine him shooting her in broad daylight. She felt embarrassed, for his sake, about the things her mother said; she knew he would feel hurt, he would flush bright red if he could hear.

A
t the school in Lausanne, the Italian boarders wore silk underwear and high-heeled sandals, and painted each other’s toenails after tea, but they crossed themselves a lot and were strict about their purity. They were saving themselves for the men they would marry. The English, they said, rolling their eyes, had no morals whatsoever. “Is due to their climate. Everybody go to bed with everybody there to become warm.”

But Louisa did not believe that. The English girls, with their light scornful voices and careless grace, were so clearly a higher order of being than anyone else. At dinner they commandeered the best table, as though by right, and afterward took possession of the red parlor next door, where there was a fire laid every night, and a vase of silk peonies was reflected in an ornate gilt mirror. If a Greek or German or Italian wandered in to retrieve a book or a handkerchief left behind during the day, the English girls would fall silent, watching her through narrowed eyes, until she retreated again. Everyone grumbled about them behind their backs—it was a bond among all the other nations—but was nonetheless anxious to curry favor. The Swiss girls seemed grateful to be asked about local dressmakers or the best cafés; the French girls, approached to explain the rules of the subjunctive in their language, were almost pitifully eager to oblige.

The most glittering of the English boarders was Celia, who could often be heard on the telephone under the stairs, expressing disdain: “Tell me you didn’t. You really are too ridiculous … surely not, poppet … not even the Caitfords are that stupid.” She had once stopped Louisa on the landing and asked her if she happened to have seen a pink kid glove anywhere. Louisa wished passionately that she could produce it, but she couldn’t, and Celia carried on up the stairs.

Apart from that, there had been no contact between them until the morning she came bursting into the common room, where Louisa, in preparation for her English class, was going over “The Highwayman” with a girl from Stuttgart. Something too horrible had happened, Celia said, brandishing one of the yellow slips the secretary left in their cubbyholes when they got a phone call. Her fiend of a brother was stopping off that afternoon on his way from Zermatt, having given her no warning, just when she had a date with the most divine creature, who happened, only happened, to be the ninth richest man in Switzerland. Or at least his father was. Not that it even mattered. He was so dishy that money was beside the point. But her English chums had absconded to Geneva for the day, to visit some doddering governess person, which meant there was no one to entertain Julian for her until she got back.

“It’s too shattering.” She looked assessingly at the two Germans and then seized on Louisa. “I don’t suppose you’d be a brick and keep him occupied for me for a couple of hours.”

“I cannot,” Louisa said in alarm. “My English is never yet good enough. It could not be understood to him.”

“What nonsense! You speak marvelous English … Anyway, you can always take him for a walk if you can’t understand each other. Maybe tell him I had to visit an old friend with TB. He can’t be cross if I’m off comforting the sick.” And then, when Louisa expressed doubt, “Honestly, what’s an hour or two in a person’s life? Nothing to make a fuss about really.” So Louisa capitulated, and Celia called her a perfect angel. “I should warn you, petal,” she said briskly, as she was leaving, “he can be a bit difficult … Actually, he’s a perfect brute. But I’m sure you’ll manage him beautifully.”

By four o’clock, Louisa had washed her hair and changed into her new, square-necked green dress with the scalloped hem; she waited on the sofa in the red parlor, rehearsing to herself the explanation about the ill friend she had composed with the help of a German–English dictionary. But the brother, when the maid showed him in, interrupted her just as she was beginning. “Oh, Christ,” he said savagely. “She’s ditched me for some bloke.”

“No, no,” Louisa protested, as he stomped the snow from his shoes and blew into his hands. “Your sister is so much looking forward to again seeing you. She will as soon as possible come back.”

“Well, it’s damned inconsiderate of her, is all I can say. To you too. How did she bribe you into it?” He blew noisily into his very large hands. His hair was the same honey blond as Celia’s, and like her he had an air of commanding deference, but his air of dissatisfaction—and in this too he was not unlike his sister—seemed pervasive, more than the mood of an hour. There was a sense that the world had failed to arrange itself for his convenience.