Along the Infinite Sea (25 page)

Johann patted my back and said, “Ah, don't fret so, Annabelle. It's just a plaster cast, not a real dog. Nothing to cry over.” After a moment, he took my hand and we moved on to inspect a collection of gold bracelets in the shape of coiled snakes.

The pottery shard had traveled quietly that day in the pocket of my skirt, and I kept it now in the bottom of my drawer, beneath my underwear, where Johann would never dream of looking.

4.

I rose from the floor of the nursery, where I was inspecting fabric samples. I had brought the phonograph into the room, and the room was full of Puccini. “You're home early,” I said to my husband.

Johann walked to the phonograph and lifted the needle away. The music stopped in mid-phrase, with a tiny scratch. He caught my hands and helped me up just as I found my feet. “Yes, it was rather a trying day, and I decided that there was no point in being such an important man if I could not leave my work to others and join my bride when she is expecting our baby.”

“Not for another ten weeks.”

He bent down and kissed me. “It cannot be soon enough for me. Are these for the nursery?”

“Yes. The curtains. What do you think?”

“Make sure they are good and thick. A well-darkened room is necessary for good napping.”

I looked again at the samples. “Oh, of course. I didn't think of that.”

“That's why it's useful to marry a man who has had children already. You see what a clever girl you are?”

I sank back to my knees on the rug and picked up two swatches, one in each hand, and I hated them both. “Yes, a very clever girl.”

Johann crouched next to me. “Annabelle. Look at me.”

I looked up.

“You have been crying, haven't you? Are you well?”

“I'm quite well, it's just these stupid swatches the draper gives me. None of them are right, and it will still take weeks to have them made, and the baby will be here soon, and I don't know what to do—”

He drew me against his woolen chest. “Shh. Calm down. It is nothing, Annabelle. It doesn't matter, the color of the curtains. The baby will not even notice, I promise you.”

The wool scratched my forehead. I heard Nick's voice:
I thought he was going to shoot himself.

The parting began again in my ribs. I took Johann's lapels in my fists and forced Nick's voice away. I forced away the image of Stefan on the telephone, fresh from the prison where they had sent him after he crossed the border into Germany on the twenty-ninth of August, listening to Nick Greenwald explain that Annabelle de Créouville was not waiting faithfully for him in Paris, but instead had married a Prussian baron and was pregnant with his child. I pictured Stefan's shocked dark eyes, his gaunt face.

“Annabelle,” Johann said gently. “You are distressed.”

I looked up and thought, It's not his fault, it's my fault. What had Stefan said?
We are in God's hands now.
I remembered feeling a warm glow when he said those words, because in my innocence I thought they meant that God had brought us together, that we were intended for each other, and God would solve all our difficulties and bring us together.

But, as usual, I had misunderstood. It seemed God had not intended me for Stefan, after all. He had intended me for Johann von Kleist, who had lost so much in his thirty-eight years, and needed a fresh young wife to comfort him.

The thing was done.

There was a brief knock, and the nursery door burst open. It was Frieda, telling me that Lady Alice was on the telephone for me.

5.

“Darling, I had no idea,” Lady Alice said. “It's not the sort of gossip that spreads easily. If she'd been somebody important, of course, I might have heard about it.”

I glanced out the tiny round window into the courtyard. Johann hated the telephone, and we had only one in the apartment, relegated to a closet off the library. I wondered if she was telling the truth, and whether it mattered.

“Anyway,” she went on blithely, “the fact remains, he never told you about her, or the daughter. That's not fair play, is it?”

“No.”

“So it makes no difference, really.”

“Yes, it does. If I'd known she'd left him, I might have waited for an explanation, at least.” I spoke in a hushed whisper.

“But he still would have been caught at the border and thrown in prison, wouldn't he? So there's no telling how everything might have worked out. And think of poor Johann. Aren't the two of you just appallingly happy these days?”

“Yes, we're very happy.”

“So there's no use thinking about it, is there? What's done is done. You're far better off with your lovely loyal old hound of a Prussian, the one you're married to. Put the whole matter out of your head. I assure you, Stefan will have no trouble finding another pretty young thing to lick his wounds for him. And whatever else needs licking.”

She made perfect sense. Stefan would surely be back to his old ways in no time, and I had faithful Johann and the baby, who needed me. There was only Nick Greenwald's voice at the back of my head—
I thought he was going to shoot himself,
and sometimes
He seemed to think the baby might be his
—and Nick's voice was easily silenced, if I concentrated hard enough, if I drowned it out with other things.

“All right,” I said. “I suppose so, when you put it that way. I was just feeling low, and a little guilty.”

She laughed right into the receiver, crackling the hairs of my ears. “Oh, for heaven's sake, darling, don't do
that
. Life is far too short to look back.”

6.

That night, Johann made respectable married love to me in our bed, turning me on my side and entering me from behind so the baby would not be crushed between us, a position we had adopted a month or two ago.

When we had both caught our breath, he cupped his hand around my heavy womb and said, “Annabelle, I will be very busy in the next few days. I may have to go away.”

“Where to?”

“Perhaps to Berlin. Perhaps to a few other places.” He paused. “There is nothing to worry about.”

“Should I be worried?”

“I have just told you, there is nothing. But if I send word that you are to join me somewhere, to leave Paris at once, you will do so, won't you?”

“Why, Johann? What's going on?”

“You know I cannot say.”

My heart thudded in its empty cavity. I thought, What if we go to Germany? Stefan is in Germany. I said, “You can't even hint? Don't you trust me?”

“It isn't a matter of trust,
meine Frau
. It is a matter of honor. But you will do as I ask, won't you? You will come to me at once, if I send for you?”

The baby stirred under his hand. I laid my fingers over his and said, “Can you feel him?”

“Yes, of course. The tiny foot, right there. But you have not answered my question, Annabelle,
Liebling
.”

“Yes, Johann,” I said, staring at the wall. “Of course I will come to you.”

He let out a sigh onto the top of my head. “Good. Because there is one thing I cannot bear, and that is the absence of my Annabelle. And of our little child, it is unthinkable.”

“You should never worry about that. I'm yours now.”

“Yes, I know that. I know your noble heart. It is what I prize most in you.” He kissed me tenderly. “I have always loved this part, when my wife is round and beautiful, and we lie here in our bed and wonder what our child will be like when he is born.”

“Yes.” The tears fell silently into the pillow. “I love this, too.”

7.

At dawn the next morning, nineteen German infantry battalions entered the Rhineland, on the eastern border between France and Germany, in violation of some treaty, I forget which, made in the previous decade, which had guaranteed its permanent demilitarization.

I learned all this from the housekeeper, because Johann had already left the apartment. For the next several days, I did not see my husband, who worked and slept at the German embassy, waiting for the French response. He later told me that if the French had mobilized, if the French had offered even a hint of military opposition, they would have had to retire at once, the defeat would have been total.

But the French did not mobilize, and Johann returned home nine days later, after a further trip back to Berlin for debriefing, heavy-eyed and triumphant.

When we were alone in our bedroom, he sank to his knees before me and lifted my dress to kiss my swollen skin. “Now our child will be
born into a safe, strong Fatherland,” he said, “with nothing more to fear.”

8.

I went into labor twelve weeks later, on the ninth of June—
first babies are always late,
said Dr. Périgault, shaking his head as if the babies were somehow willfully to blame—and gave birth early the next morning to a boy, eight pounds thirteen ounces, bearing a shock of black hair and a pair of lungs like an army sergeant.

“He has his mother's coloring,” said the nurse, handing the army sergeant to his father for the first time, later that afternoon.

“Thank God for that,” Johann replied. He looked into the baby's squashed red face with the same rare rapture as he had regarded me on our wedding night, and touched his cheek with a most delicate finger. The squalls faded into gasps, and then silence.

The nurse smiled beatifically. “Have you decided on a name?”

“Yes,” I said, exhausted and entranced, from the nest of white pillows on my hospital bed. (His wife, Frieda, had hemorrhaged to death at home before the doctor could arrive, and Johann refused to take any chances with me.) I watched Johann straighten the swaddling into a more expert tuck. The baby looked tiny and safe and quiet in his enormous arms, and the breath fell from my lungs.

I turned my face to the nurse. “His name is Florian, for his
grandfather.”

June suns, you cannot store them

To warm the winter's cold

A. E.
H
OUSMAN

GERMANY
•
1936

1.

It was three days before Christmas, and the girls and I had motored into Berlin to shop, leaving Florian at home with his father and brothers.

We traveled not in Johann's black Mercedes, which we left in Paris, but in the massive Daimler Johann kept here in Germany, driven by a chauffeur in a field-gray uniform. The trip took two and a half hours along a highway of rich new asphalt, and Frieda did most of the talking.

“He has a new tooth coming in, the one on the right side,” she said. “Did you see it?”

“I didn't need to
see
it. I've felt it the past few days,” I said, and I laughed to cover the ripping sound in my chest, because I hated leaving my son even for an hour, let alone for an entire day of shopping in Berlin.
The Baroness von Kleist, she is such a devoted mother,
they said in Paris, bewildered, where mothers of a certain class happily handed off the baby to the nursemaid after a friendly morning cuddle, but the
truth was far more elemental than that, a chemical intensity of emotion that had begun its slow combustion about the third or fourth day after Florian's birth, in some tranquil hour before dawn, when he was suckling at my breast and his eyes wandered up to mine in such a perfect representation of Stefan that I felt the universe move in my marrow, as if I had fastened all my ideas of the infinite upon a single black eyelash. The sensation might possibly be described in music or in mathematical equations or in geometric designs, but not in words.

Johann had been the one to suggest, two nights ago, that I leave Florian at home and go into Berlin for the day. We had converted a box room adjacent to our bedroom into a small nursery, and I was there in my dressing gown, nursing Florian inside a pink haze of bliss. I had looked up, bewildered, and said, “Go into Berlin? But what about the baby?”

“He will be looked after well. The housekeeper knows what to do. He has a father who adores him, and brothers who tolerate him without too much complaint.”

“But his milk!”

“We have some bottles. And he is eating now.” He knelt down next to the chair and touched my hand. “Annabelle,
Liebling
, you are a wonderful and devoted mother, but you must learn to leave him a little, too. He is six months old. The doctor says you should not even be nursing him still, or he will get a complex.”

“That's nonsense. You and Lady Alice and your complexes. I know my son far better than old Périgault. Look at him, he's perfectly healthy.”

“It is not a question of physical health. It is his attachment to you. We do not want our fine strapping son to become a mama's boy, do we?”

Yes, we do, I thought passionately. I gazed down at Florian's working mouth, his inquisitive dark eyes, and my arms ached around him.

Johann went on. “The two of you, you are like a closed link, and nobody else comes inside. But we all need you,
meine Frau
. Our girls need you, and our boys. And you know how desperately
I
need you, your poor lonely husband.”

He had chosen his tactics well, like the general he was, and he knew I couldn't resist an appeal like that. So here I sat in the monumental Daimler, rushing into the center of Berlin, heart bleeding out into the seats, discussing Florian's new tooth with my stepdaughters.

“Does it hurt?” Marthe asked practically. “The tooth, I mean, when you feed him.”

“Not really. He's very good.”

Frieda said, “He is. He is the most darling baby. I can't wait until you have another.”

I laughed again. We were just turning the corner of Leipziger Platz, and the crowds thickened at once, a mass of woolen coats and hats, the steady buzz of humanity. “One baby at a time, sweetheart. Look, we're almost there. Where shall we start?”

“Wertheim, of course!” Frieda said.

Marthe frowned and looked out the window.

Berlin's largest department store was predictably packed, from its ground floor overflowing with hats and scarves and haberdashery to its monumental staircases like the channels of an ant farm. We shouldered through the entrance into a warm draft of perfume-scented air. Frieda exclaimed with joy at every display. Though she lived in Paris, in the heart of the fashionable district, we hardly ever went shopping. I was too occupied with Florian, and Johann disliked the idea of letting her roam free among the shops and streets.
It is nothing but material excess,
he said,
nothing but decadence.

Marthe seemed to share her father's opinion. She trailed behind us with her arms folded across the chest of her red woolen coat. She was a beautiful girl, almost a young lady, who (like Frieda) wore her spun-gold hair in a thick braid around her head like a crown, a few shades richer than her father's. Her large blue eyes were set in a perfect oval face that Johann said was an exact replica of her mother's, down to the picturesque freckles on her nose. Her school reports were uniformly excellent; Johann was immensely proud of her. Of the two sisters, she was the more reserved, although she had a lovely singing voice and
often joined me in the evenings, after dinner, when Johann encouraged his wife and children to come together and play Christmas hymns. Just now, however, her pink mouth was turned down at the corners and tight in the middle, not festive at all.

I fell back and took her arm. “Is something the matter, darling?”

She pulled the arm away. “No, Mother.”

Frieda picked out a cashmere scarf for her father and leather gloves for the older boys. We went upstairs to the children's department, where she found a pretty blue woolen hat for Florian. She paid for everything herself from a carefully husbanded allowance, and watched with a radiant face as the little packages were wrapped in paper.

Marthe's arms were still folded. She tapped her toe against the floorboards and stared somewhere above us, to the tops of the polished shelves.

A woman passed by, pushing a baby in a perambulator. The baby was about Florian's age, maybe a month or two younger, propped up against his white bedding—it was a boy, wrapped in a pale blue knitted sweater and matching cap—and his curious eyes caught mine. I put my hand against the counter to support myself and thought, Johann is right, it's healthy to be away for a bit, but I didn't feel healthy at all. My breasts hurt, my nipples smarted. I felt the milk leak eagerly into my brassiere and was glad for my thick coat, my tweed jacket beneath it, the practical cotton shirt from which such stains could easily be washed.

The packages were wrapped and bound in string for a delighted Frieda. We edged our way through the hot crowd to the stairs. “Are you all right, Mother?” asked Frieda, slipping her hand into mine, and I said of course I was all right, I just needed a bit of air; it was so warm in here with all the people.

We started down the stairs. Marthe trailed a step or two behind. Ahead of us in the crowd was a man wearing a navy blue hat above a neat navy blue suit; a line of dark curling hair showed below the brim of the hat, against a strong white neck.

There was something so familiar about that neck, that hair. The carriage of his head.

No, it's impossible, I thought. Of course it was impossible. Germany was a very large country, and Stefan was supposed to be in Frankfurt; he was in Frankfurt when he spoke to Nick Greenwald.

But I could not look away from that dark hair. I thought I could discern every strand. I stretched my neck in an effort to catch the man's profile, the line of his jaw, the shape of his nose. My heartbeat thudded in my neck and fingertips. The hat disappeared for an instant, and I sidled past a pair of women, pulling Frieda along with me, wheeling around the corner for the next flight. “Wait, Mother!” Frieda said, and I stumbled downward, running my eyes feverishly over the mass of identical hats seething before me.

“Mother!” called Marthe from behind, and at the same second her voice reached my ears, I caught sight once more of the familiar neck, the familiar dark hair, and I darted down, feet flying, fingertips thudding, like a woman holding a single ticket in a sweepstakes, who knows the odds are impossibly against her, who didn't until this moment realize that she wanted so badly to win, who knows in her heart that she
can't
win. But she still thinks, as the number is drawn among millions, that it will be hers.

I let go of Frieda's hand to take the man's navy wool elbow, and I shouted,
Stefan!

I realized, as I turned, that the man was at least two inches too short. My cheeks already burned by the time I saw the shape of his nose (too large) and the line of his jaw (too narrow).

“Es tut mir leid, es muss ein Irrtum sein,”
he said. There must be some mistake. The girls assembled at my elbows. Frieda had dropped her packages on the stairs. The man helped her pick them up, while the other shoppers flowed around us, grumbling, like a river parting around an unwelcome obstruction.

Marthe turned to me, still frowning. “Who is Stefan?” she said.

2.

We had lunch in a small restaurant nearby: tea and sandwiches and hot cabbage soup. I wasn't very hungry. “Mother, it is so hot in here. Why don't you take off your coat?” asked Frieda, and I opened the top two buttons and said I would be fine. My hands were still clumsy as I operated my spoon. I set my teacup carefully in its saucer so it wouldn't shake.

We talked very little. I paid the bill and walked out the door behind the girls, and as I turned to close the door behind us I noticed a sign in the window I hadn't seen on the way in:

JUDEN NICHT WILKOMMEN

3.

We visited a few more shops and found the chauffeur parked on the corner of Wilhelmstrasse, as we had arranged, at three o'clock. The light was already starting to fade. Marthe was still quiet as we started off through the streets of Berlin. She kept her arms folded across her chest and looked out the window, at the passing buildings, while Frieda exclaimed about all the goods in the shops.

“And that hat for Florian,” she said, turning to me. “Won't he look just sweet wearing that hat?”

I opened my mouth to say, Yes, of course, we would take a photograph of him wearing it on Christmas morning.

Marthe's head turned. “It's un-German,” she said.

“What's that?”

“The
Warenhausen
, they're un-German. We should not have gone there, to Wertheim.”

“Un-German?” I said, astonished. “How could Wertheim possibly be any
more
German?”

“They are owned by the Jews, these department stores. Good German businesses suffer because of them.” Her mouth compressed in a belligerent line.

“But that's nonsense. Who told you this?”

“It's not nonsense. We have been learning it all at school. The
Warenhausen
are like great leeches set on the cities. They sell cheap goods, and all the money goes to make the Jews richer. Wertheim is the worst of all.”

Frieda was quiet, her lips parted in a small round hole of astonishment. I stared at Marthe's profile, stern and blond. Through the window, I saw a few flakes of snow shooting behind her, like distant meteors.

I said quietly, “Have you talked to your father about this?”

“He feels the same way.”

“I find it difficult to believe that the man I married is a bigot,” I said, “and I am disappointed beyond words to find this true of my daughter.”

She turned to the window and muttered something in German. I couldn't quite pick out the words—I was still learning the language—but Frieda gasped and looked at me. I took her hand and shook my head.

Frieda leaned toward Marthe and whispered in her ear. Marthe went on staring at the shooting snowflakes, the bleak brown winter suburbs, and didn't reply.

I leaned my head back against the cloth seat. Under my skin, in the cavity around my heart, I could still feel the splinters of shock from my flight down the stairs. If I closed my eyes, I could still see that line of dark hair against a white neck, and it really did belong to Stefan, even though it hadn't; I thought I could feel him move in my head and lay a soothing hand on my splintering skin. I thought,
What should I say, Stefan? What do I say to her? What do I do?

And he said back,
You know what to do, Annabelle.

Frieda's body was warm and lithe next to mine, new and untried.
I drew her against me and put my arm around her shoulders. “It was lovely shopping with you today, girls, but I confess I can't wait to be back in our nice warm house with your father and the boys.”

4.

Before we even entered the house, I could hear Florian's cries. “He wouldn't take the bottle,” Johann said, haggard, almost tossing the baby into my arms.

“Thank God,” I muttered, because I was ready to burst. I collapsed into the chair and ripped open my blouse. He nursed furiously for half an hour before falling unconscious against my skin, trailing a thin line of contented milk from the corner of his mouth, and I kissed the top of his dark head and promised him I wouldn't go away like that again.

“Perhaps we should consider weaning him,” said Johann. He stood at the window, watching the lines of snow cross the glass and disappear into the black night.

I moved Florian carefully to my shoulder. “Not yet.”

“But soon, perhaps,” said Johann, so softly that I looked up in surprise. His face was dark against the window, and golden with lamplight on the other side. One pale eye regarded us. He let the curtain fall back and said, “I would like to have more children.”

“Of course we'll have more children. But he's still a baby, and there's plenty of time.”

“I will be forty years old next month.”

I smiled. “But I'm only just twenty-one. Anyway, you've got plenty of children to occupy you for now. How many does one man need, really?”

“I miss you.”