The Ambassador's Daughter (20 page)

“No. There’s a music store around the corner that lets me play theirs in exchange for giving the occasional lesson.”

“I like quiet,” she says, reading my thoughts. “You shouldn’t be afraid to be alone with your own thoughts.” She dims the lamp, then retreats to the loft bed in the corner of the flat without speaking further, as if to prove a point.

Surrounded by the soft downy bedding and Krysia’s lilac scent, I drift quickly to sleep. I dream that I am running down the street from our apartment to the hotel in Versailles, searching for something, perhaps the missing document. No, not something, I realize as I reach the hotel. Someone. I am late for work and I go into Georg’s hotel room but the bed is made, all of his personal effects gone, and it is as if he was never here at all. I turn and suddenly it is not his hotel room at all but our house back in Berlin and I reach for the doorknob but it will not open. I am trapped.

My eyes fly open. I blink in the darkness, confused. Krysia’s apartment, I remember, hearing her faint snore. I lay awake, shaken and trying to collect fragments of the dream as they scatter.

My thoughts turn to our earlier conversation, my revelation to Krysia that Stefan and I are already wed. What is marriage, anyway? It has been over four years since Stefan and I went to the Rathaus and came out with that piece of paper callings us man and wife, and yet I feel no closer to him than the stranger I pass on the street. Was it supposed to confer some new feeling, or simply recognize what is already there? But if it is no more than acknowledgment of the status quo, then why do we need it at all?

Sometimes it is as if I have two people inside me—the one that knows what is right and the one that does not care and only knows want, desire. She is the one who would cast off these skirts and run wild through the forest, who would hop a freighter for China. My gaze travels to the window and the thin strip of night sky above the roofs of the buildings. I could just leave. I’d head west, I decide, over the rolling hills until I reach the sea and a ship to take me away from it all. How would I survive? I’ve never had a job, do not have any skills, but I could find work as a governess or tutor. Something tells me I can manage hard work, am perhaps even suited to it. And my needs are simple, a place to rest, a bit of food. But I could not leave Papa any more than I could forsake myself.

“There are some doors,” Krysia told me once, “that are not meant to be opened.” At the time she was referring to her own situation, my suggestion that she try to talk to Emilie. But remembering the day I met her, the words also ring true. What if I had stopped at the gate of the Jardin des Tuileries that December afternoon, heeded my inner warning and not gone through? I would not have gone to the café and spoken carelessly in front of her artist friends and I would not be embroiled in this whole mess with Ignatz. But then I also would not have known Krysia and she is so embedded in my world I can scarcely imagine it without her. No, it is impossible to take one piece of the puzzle away and try to envision the rest whole.

My eyelids grow heavy and I allow myself to be lulled to sleep once more by a gentle breeze through the open window and the sounds of the street below.

Chapter 10

The next morning I awaken on the strange divan, still in my dress from the previous evening. My mouth is sour from the brandy. “Krysia?” The apartment is still, the sound of her snoring gone. On the table beside the couch sits a hastily scrawled note.

Had to run out on an errand. Meet me outside the station in Versailles today at noon.

—K

The note does not give the purpose of our meeting, nor does it contemplate the possibility of my being unavailable on such short notice.

Just before noon I stand at the entranceway to the Gare de Versailles-Chantiers, having returned home briefly to wash and change. The crowd at midday is a mix of locals making their way into the city. Suddenly I feel as if I am being watched. A chill creeps up my spine and I turn, scanning the travelers who move uneventfully from the ticket kiosk to the platform. It is paranoia, brought on by Ignatz and this spying business—the fear of getting caught, that he is somehow monitoring me all of the time.

In the distance, the cathedral clock begins to chime twelve. Perhaps Krysia isn’t going to show. A moment later, I hear the sound of a car engine behind me. Krysia appears, not from the train platform as I thought she might, but through the stillness of the fog, resplendent and surreal, driving a motorcar, a long black Citroën, up the wide thoroughfare that runs perpendicular to the station. She wears a broad-brimmed hat, held by sashes tied under the chin that match perfectly the blue of her cape.

She pulls up to the curb but does not switch off the engine. “Come,” she says, gesturing for me to get in the car.

“You can drive,” I marvel.

She nods, concentrating as she pulls from the curb. “I can try.”

“Where are we going?” She does not answer, but drives with both arms extended as though navigating a great ship as we follow the road that leads away from town. Soon the houses on the outskirts start to thin, giving way to the occasional farm. The fields, knee-high with too-dry crops and wildflowers, sway gently beneath the cloudless midday sky. “Beautiful,” I remark. “So peaceful.”

“So different now than during the war,” Krysia agrees. “There were raids almost every night. Once Marcin and I were out walking and we had to hide in an arch at the Louvre.” The war was so far away in London. It is hard to imagine being in the middle of it all.

We come to a roundabout and she follows it three-quarters
of the way around, turning onto the spur that indicates towns to the northeast, the road toward Belgium. Great rolling fields of poppies flank either side of the road, an endless carpet of red.

An hour later, Krysia turns onto a smaller road, not much more than a country lane. Through the now-faded black paint that was used to cover the signs during the war, I can make out that we are headed in the direction of Reims. On a hill in the distance stand the remnants of the once-grand Reims cathedral. Though the tallest of its pillars still stands, the stained-glass windows are now jagged shards and its roof is peeled back like an open can.

Krysia slows as we approach the town center. In contrast to Paris or Versailles, Reims is a ghost town. Ours is the only motorcar on the narrow cobblestone street, which is deserted, save for a cart pulled by a sorry, malnourished mare. From the sidewalk, pedestrians eye us with interest. Here one can see the closeness of the war. Buildings the entire length of the street were destroyed by the bombs and only the front walls remain standing, gaping craters behind the facades, which seem ready to topple at any second. The smell of gunpowder hangs in the air as though the destruction took place hours, and not months or years, ago.

But there are small signs of life. At the end of the block, two low garage walls remain, standing opposite one another like bookends. A makeshift roof of canvas and oil paper has been erected between them, and a woman sells bread and fruit on the ground beneath. Krysia pulls the car to the curb and steps out to buy food from her. She hands the woman a fistful of bills, suggesting a desire to help rather than genuine hunger. A moment later, she returns with several fresh young peaches.

She hands me one, then starts the car again. I bite into the soft flesh, blotting at the juice that dribbles down my chin with a handkerchief. On the next block not even the fronts of the buildings remain, just low piles of rubble.
Abri—40 personnes
is painted on the foundation of one of the decimated buildings, indicating that shelter from bombs could safely be taken there, a promise broken.

The road leads us out of Reims and I breathe the air deeply, eager to clear the devastation from my lungs. The sky has begun to cloud over, dampness and fog chilling the air. We cross a low bridge, children wading in the stream beneath. Overhead, birds call to one another in seeming cadence with the car engine.

Krysia pulls to the side of the road and turns off the ignition. As I step from the car, moisture from the ankle-high grass seeps through my stockings and the heels of my boots sink deeper into the sodden earth with every step. A wind begins to blow, sweeping away the fog. We are standing in a rolling field that stretches to the horizon like a great wave before disappearing. It is a battlefield, or was. Now it is a graveyard. Small crosses, some painted white and others crudely handmade from sticks, spring up around our ankles like dandelions among the lush clover. A faint halo of mist lingers inches above the earth.

I stop midstep. I had avoided coming here, and might have demurred if Krysia had told me in advance where we were going. For even as I wanted to know everything, part of me had long suspected that I could not bear the truth. But I am here now and have no choice but to see.

We reach a row of trees that have been sheared at the midpoint. Atop the amputated branches, new leaves have begun to sprout. Krysia unties her hat and removes it somberly. Her hair comes loose, billowing around her face as regal as a lion’s mane.

I take a step forward. Krysia grabs my arm and pulls me back as I nearly step on something hard that juts from the earth. “Oh!” I gasp at the sight of naked bone.

She begins to walk up the hill. At the top of the ridge, the terrain that had appeared endless breaks suddenly. The trenches. The long tube of hollowed-out earth is much deeper and wider than I’d imagined, a kind of subterranean city where the men had lived and died, rats in a maze. The smell of peat and earth and human waste wafts upward. About fifty meters to our right, the trench is bisected abruptly by a great crater, maybe ninety feet in diameter. Like the spot where Stefan had nearly died, only so much worse in reality.

My guilt rises up as I see the thousands of Stefans before me, the young men who were killed, or wounded and lay bleeding. Had he called for me? Krysia had brought me here, I suspect, to give me some perspective and show me that life is fleeting. To help me move forward. But, instead, all of the reasons I cannot leave loom larger than ever.

“Such destruction,” I lament, my words sounding tinny and inadequate.

“And not a drop of blood spilled on German soil,” she remarks, gazing off into the distance. It is not meant as an insult; she is merely stating a fact. Picturing Stefan, I want to tell her that we had suffered, too. “There was enough stupidity on all sides, enough blame to go around,” she adds as a concession, reading my thoughts. “But the victors will write history in their own way.” I nod—laid out in the panorama before us is the reason the Allies will not be lenient, why the ideals embodied in Wilson’s Fourteen Points will not be big enough to include the Germans. How can Georg not see that?

I’d been in the college library when one of the maids came to tell me about the armistice. A few days later, we assembled in the courtyard at Magdalen as the bell tolled, marking the official end to the war. We stood shoulder to shoulder—professors and students and porters and cooks, English and German alike. The war had changed so much—dukes and heirs had died alongside footmen and laborers. Women had worked as nurses and drivers and in the factories. Surely it all couldn’t be put together the way it once was, an eggshell cracked in a thousand different pieces.

“The next war, I fear, will be even worse.” Krysia’s voice pulls me from my thoughts.

I turn to her in disbelief. “The next? Surely you don’t think this will happen again.”

“Not the men who fought this war, of course. The strongest pacifists are those who have seen battle. But governments have had a taste of the bloodshed and the power—and the weaponry will only get better.”

My heart sinks as I realize she is right. They had called it the war to end all wars. But already there are whispers of newer, more sinister fears, gasses and other weapons that could take out the civilian populations of entire cities. Georg said militaries are needed in order to keep the peace. If we cannot end war, then his work to prevent it, what he is trying to achieve, seems more important than ever.

“Some say if women could have voted, the war never would have started,” I offer.

“Nonsense. Do you really believe those silly creatures who crow at the salons would have had any more sense than their husbands?” She is right. The war, more so than anything, had been about stupid pride, and the women, with their too-large hats and peacock feathers, had more than enough of that.

“At least one can speak openly of peace again,” she remarks. I nod. Throughout the war it was considered treasonous and cowardly to speak of anything other than military victory. Only during the waning months did the word begin to creep into conversation again, a tacit recognition of the weariness and yearning for the end of the fighting that we had all secretly shared but not dared to voice. It was as if no one knew how to behave in peacetime again.

“Marcin wants to return to Krakow.” She speaks into the air, not looking at me. “He can’t compose here, he says, with all of the noise. He’s begged me to come with him. But I can’t leave Emilie.” She has her own pain, I am reminded, of which she seldom speaks. I want to tell her to go with him, to leave the past behind. But who am I, childless and unable to escape my own past, to give her advice? I reach down and squeeze her hand gently.

“We should go,” she says, as the sky begins to deepen at the edges.

“Thank you for bringing me.”

“I’ve been meaning to come. And it can be helpful to step out of one’s own world, even for a bit, to gain some perspective.” It’s true. For a few hours, I’ve been able to escape all of my worries about the missing document, my questions of Georg and Stefan and the future. But as we wind through the hills and valleys, making our way back toward Paris, my heaviness grows once more.

“You’re thinking about Georg.” It is not a question and her voice sours as she says his name.