The Ambassador's Daughter (30 page)

My heels echo against the marble floor of the high-ceilinged foyer. The house is quiet as I climb the steps beneath the somber oil portraits of our ancestors, set against dark wood paneling, and walk to our apartment. These had been my mother’s rooms as a child, a cavernous space occupied by her and a governess, though the girlish pink decor has been repainted a suitable beige and the furniture replaced. The ivory lace wedding gown hangs on the armoire, having arrived from Paris two weeks earlier. Looking at it now, my stomach sinks.

I drop onto one of the velvet-covered divans in the sitting room, still seething from my encounter with Uncle Walter. More so than his conservative politics, it is his constant obsession with assimilation that infuriates me. It is as if he would like us to forget we are Jews entirely in order to fit in. My mind reels back to a Friday afternoon shortly after our return from Paris. I’d come downstairs to the dining room, expecting to see the usual Sabbath preparations, the table set with a fresh white cloth, candlesticks polished. But the air was dry, the smell of freshly baked challah conspicuously absent. I’d made my way into the kitchen. “Elsa...”

“Ja, fraulein.”
The sallow-skinned maid did not smile. There had been a thinly veiled resentment among the household staff since our return, I assumed. Was it because we had not been here during the war and did not share in the suffering?

“What time is Sabbath dinner? I thought it used to be at seven...”

But Elsa shook her head slightly. “I’ll have a tray sent up to the apartment of anything you would like. But Herr Rappaport is away in the city for meetings.” Meetings. On a Friday night, that hardly seemed plausible. “There hasn’t been a proper Friday dinner in over a year,” Elsa added, her voice a note lower. Sabbath dinner at Uncle Walter’s had never been a particularly religious affair, a quick lighting of the candles and blessing over the wine and challah before sitting down to a sumptuous roast turkey repast. Afterward, there were glasses of schnapps and conversation long into the night. He used to say it was a break from all of the noise of the week. “It’s like that all over the place,” the maid added, forgetting to guard her speech. “My brother says it’s because of the war, the Jews being ashamed at their part, not fighting.”

My anger burned white-hot and I wanted to tell her then about Stefan and the terrible price he paid fighting for Germany. But there was no conviction in her words; she was simply parroting what she heard elsewhere.

“Not anymore,” Papa replied when I ran to tell him about the lack of a Sabbath dinner. “Jews like Uncle Walter just want to fit in, to have people forget. They consider themselves Germans first and Jews a distant second.”

Are you German or Jew?
Krysia’s words haunted me. There was an otherness now to our lives in Berlin, in the way people looked at us, that made me understand what she was talking about. We were somehow being asked to choose.

“Surely you don’t feel that way?”

He pressed his lips together. “No, but everything has changed. Jews here seem to be either Orthodox, more separate than ever, or assimilationist, like your uncle. There’s no middle anymore.” He brought his fingers to his chin, deeply troubled. “I just don’t know what our future looks like here. I’m too old of a man to relocate permanently. Of course, if you and Stefan want to go to Israel or even America...” I heard the conflict in his voice as it trails off.

“No,” I said quickly. I could not leave Papa and I felt no connection to those distant lands. But his question nagged. What would my life be like if I stayed here?

“Would dinner with me suffice?” he asked with a half smile. He was chiding me, reminding me in not so many words of a time when I detested Sabbath at Uncle Walter’s, the long trek out to Grunewald, the formality and stiffness a sharp contrast to our quiet dinners in our house. But it was a part of our old world, the one that seems to have disappeared with the war, and I was digging through the sand, searching for any shred of that old life to cling to, a time before Paris when I didn’t know enough to be unhappy.

My eyes travel now to the fern from my garden in Versailles, which sits potted on the vast expanse of windowsill. Despite my care, it struggles to survive its transplant to strange surroundings. I water the plant, then walk to the table by the door and riffle through yesterday’s post. I have only heard from Krysia once since our return, a hastily scrawled postcard indicating that she and Marcin had reached Krakow safely. I sent her an invitation to the wedding but, given the unreliability of the post, have no real hopes of receiving a response.

My thoughts turn to Georg and I see his face as I have so often since leaving Paris. Each day I check the mail as though there might be a letter from him, though, of course, it would not be proper for him to write or call. I have thought about writing to him, but to say what exactly? I cannot stop thinking of the hurt expression on his face when he saw Stefan and realized the truth.

What would have happened if Stefan had not come to Paris? Would the few happy days Georg and I shared have stretched endlessly? At some point the conference would have ended and we would have had to leave. No, the Fates were decided before we ever met, and those few weeks were a respite, an exception that could not bend the rule.

Of course, it might have never happened at all. If I hadn’t broken the heel of my shoe and come home early from the party that night, I would not have spoken with Georg. It all seems so random now—a turn to the right instead of the left at an intersection and lives are different than they might once have been.

Georg would have retreated from Paris now, ostensibly to his family home in Hamburg. I imagine him somewhere close to the water, staring out at the North Sea. He said he would never return to the navy. But perhaps he’s fulfilled his dream to leave and not look back. Does he think of me, and if so, is it with longing or hate? He had looked so sad and disbelieving as he realized I had lied to him. Would he even still want me now if I was free?

There is a knock at the door. “Darling?” Stefan pushes it open and limps through, now using just one cane. I study his face. His eyes are still hollow with the things he has seen, ringed with dark circles from the nightmares that deny him sleep. No group has been more ostracized than the Jewish soldiers, branded traitors who had somehow stabbed their Gentile brethren in the back by not fighting hard enough. I wonder if he minded all of the war talk at lunch, and whether the constant references to suffering and loss were too painful for him to bear. “I wanted to come and see you before I head back to the city, to make sure you aren’t too upset. I just have a moment before the car comes. Your aunt has arranged another fitting for my tuxedo.”

I smile weakly at him. “Tante Celia has become consumed with the wedding, I’m afraid. You don’t mind, do you?”

He shakes his head. “Not at all. It is good to give people something to celebrate again. I only wish that I could properly walk down the aisle with you.” He is self-conscious about his limp, but prepared to withstand the scrutiny of our friends and family for the privilege of marrying me publicly.

I take a deep breath. “But maybe we are rushing things? We could wait until you are stronger. And I was thinking about taking a course in the meantime...”

He blinks twice. “Here, you mean? Or did you want to leave again?” His voice trembles.

“No, of course not.” I feel the shackles begin to tighten. “I just thought that some more time for you to get stronger...”

“Being with you will make me strong. I will be standing for our vows,” he promises, his eyes wide with determination.

“Of course you will.” I manage to sound convinced.

“You have the marriage certificate?” Stefan asks, dropping his voice as though we are not alone. “Perhaps we should go to get another just so the dates match up.”

Guilt rises in me as I remember throwing our certificate in the fireplace when I believed Stefan had been killed, watching the corners curl under glowing embers. I hadn’t known. But what kind of unfeeling woman would do such a thing just after learning that her husband had died? I should have kept it, treasuring the fact that we had been connected in such a way—as I had with Georg’s bracelet.

“I—I don’t know where it is,” I lie. “With all of the moving around, it must have become misplaced among my things.”

A look of consternation crosses his face. “Not to worry,” he replies brightly. “We can get a duplicate.”

“But the fire...” Six weeks earlier, rioters had set fire to the Rathaus and many records had been destroyed.

“Then we shall just get a new one. I would love to marry you again. Unless you don’t want...” Suddenly we are talking about something larger than the certificate. “You can go,” he says with difficulty. He is releasing me from the promise of a life together, setting me free. “I would understand.”

In my mind’s eye I can see the door he’s opened and I imagine walking through it, making a life for myself and perhaps even finding Georg on the other side.

But then my vision clears. Stefan’s eyes are inches from mine, the clearest I have seen them since his return. He is quite literally holding his breath, waiting for my response. The door closes quietly with a click. I take his hand reassuringly. “Of course not.”

“I’m going to make you happy,” Stefan says, a note of desperation in his voice. He is squeezing my fingers with more strength than I thought he could muster.

“Shh, don’t be silly, you already do.”

But he shakes his head. “It won’t always be like this.” I sense his helplessness these past months, his awareness on some level that things between us have irreversibly changed. But it isn’t his broken body or spirit that is the problem. It is me.

“Oh, darling.” I reach to embrace him.

There is a ringing at the door then. “That must be my car.” He kisses me lightly, then stands with effort.

Watching him leave, I am filled with sadness. Stefan and I were friends and easy companions once, but without spark or passion. Had I not met Georg, that might have been enough. I might have accepted that romance fades and peaceful coexistence is as much as two people can expect through the years. But now I understand the difference and it makes this stifling and insufferable.

My eyes travel to the photograph of my mother that still sits above the mantelpiece, Papa’s reverence for her unchanged by all that has happened. Her ashes were returned to us from London, placed in the Berlin grave that had been made for her years ago with a small ceremony I had attended reluctantly to support Papa. He had not cried, and I thought perhaps as he joined the rabbi in saying Kaddish with a quiet, raspy voice that he might not take it so badly because he had in fact grieved her years earlier when she left. But later that night I heard him sobbing through the closed door to his room. Though she had been gone for over a decade, my mother’s death was now real. He mourned, too, the loss of his fast-held, improbable dream that she might change her mind and return to us.

There is a shuffling at the door and I look up. Had Stefan forgotten something? But it is the maid, Elsa. “May I?” She slips in and begins to freshen the sheets without speaking. The intrusion of the household staff is just one of the things to which we’ve had to become reaccustomed at the villa.

Not wanting to remain in the apartment with Elsa, I walk down the steps and out the back terrace to the path around the lake. From this vantage point I can see that the dining room has cleared. Papa must have gone to his study, without checking on me as he surely would have in the past. There is a quiet tension between us that is worse than our fight in Paris. Papa had kept the truth about my mother from me. I had lied to him about Georg. How had we gotten to this place?

The good thing—if there is to be one—from our return to Berlin is that I have gotten out from under Ignatz and his threats. I imagine his anger at discovering I have escaped his grasp.

I gaze out across the lake to where swans glide across the surface of the water. My days revolve around walks such as this and visits to the massive library on the first floor with shelves so high a wheeled ladder is needed to reach the upper shelves. I imagine my mother walking this path as I do. The villa is luxurious in every sense of the world, but to a young woman wanting to see the word, the quiet lifestyle, with its rigid expectations of marriage and family, must have seemed stifling. Suddenly it is as if we are one person. The desire to leave—whether it is mine or hers I do not know—looms inside me, larger than ever.

I consider a bicycle ride into town, something to break free of the smothering quiet of the villa. But clouds are beginning to gather to the west and a mist begins to pool over the lake, signaling a strong likelihood of rain. I start back toward the house.

Inside, I pass by Uncle Walter’s office. Hearing several voices, I stop. It is unusual for Uncle Walter, who keeps a strict office schedule, to have business visitors to the villa, much less on a Sunday. Amid the muffled conversation, a foreign accent emerges. Russian, I realize. I shiver, reminded of Ignatz by the strange inflection.

Then I hear another man speaking, German this time, deep and familiar. I freeze.

The voice is unmistakably Georg’s.

Chapter 17

The door to the study begins to open. Panicking, I turn in the opposite direction and run down the hallway, fleeing to the terrace once more. Outside I stop, trembling for several seconds in the now-dense fog.
Georg’s voice
. It cannot be!

A minute later, the terrace doors creak. “Margot.” Georg, who must have broken abruptly from the gathering, steps from the mist and crosses the patio in long strides. He halts before me, tall and magnificent, the shock on his face mirroring my own. It was not a dream. Our eyes meet and hold.

I freeze, barely able to breathe. What on earth is he doing here? Georg was the last person I’d expected to see again, much less in this house. Excitement and dread and terror and joy rip through me as I drink him in, pulling me in a thousand different directions at once. For a fleeting second, I wonder if he has come for me. But I can tell from his puzzled expression that he is surprised, too. In the hallway behind him there is a gathering of suited men. Georg is here for a meeting. Of course, it makes sense that Uncle Walter in industry and Georg’s family in shipping might have business together.