The Life of Objects (13 page)

“Some people believe that a government that forbids certain of its citizens to possess toasters, irons, bicycles, or even a dog must feel unsure of its power, and this makes them careless,” Dorothea said, her voice strained, but everyone ignored her.

The laws of the Reich forbade Jews to wear wool. They could not ride on trains or go to the theater, libraries, zoos, and parks. In Berlin, Jews could shop only between four and five in the afternoon, and they could not enter the district known as Judenbannbizirke, which stretched from Wilhelmstrasse to Unter den Linden. They were forbidden to drive or to use public telephones. They were not allowed in air-raid shelters. Herr Elias, despite wearing his star and giving up his bicycle,
was breaking the law—his tweed jacket, his ginger cat, his gramophone.

We had a feast of wild asparagus, trout, warm potato salad, honey with the dried figs and dates brought by Inéz from Cairo, and many bottles of wine. When Felix apologized that there was no gefilte fish—he’d considered asking Schmidt to make it, but as it had never been served at Löwendorf and we were lacking many of the ingredients, he hadn’t been confident of success—Inéz asked, “Gefilte fish?
Qu’est-ce que le poisson gefilte?
” I noticed that Herr Elias and Felix looked at each other for a moment, Herr Elias smiling slightly.

“
Mousse de poisson
,” said Princess Bibesco.

“Ah,” said Inéz.
“Comme une quenelle.”

Inéz found me in the kitchen after lunch. “Do keep an eye on my friend, won’t you? Only a child would refuse to save himself.” I was cutting the figs to make jam, and she ate one, wiping her fingers on my apron. “And all because he cannot bear to leave his house or his Rembrandts.”

“I don’t believe he owns any Rembrandts,” I said, offended on Felix’s part.

“Don’t be so sure,” she said, turning to dazzle Schmidt with a smile. Frau Schmidt, unaccustomed to the presence of a princess in her kitchen, was rendered speechless, which was the point. “Remember, my dear,” Inéz said to me, handing the last two bottles of Felix’s Cheval Blanc to Frau Schmidt, who understood that she was to wrap them for the princess’s journey, “that I myself am a
very
good example that there is always more treasure to be found.” She took my passport from her
handbag and dropped it into my pocket. “Let me know everything. The Egyptian ambassador will know where to find me.” She did not tell me how I was to find the ambassador.

Dieter, the son of the innkeeper in the village, who drove Dorothea when she needed to go to Potsdam or Berlin, was taking the two princesses to the train station in one of Felix’s cars. Dieter had not been mobilized thanks to a boating accident, but despite having only one arm, he was a good driver and mechanic. As he brought round the car, there was the sound of tires on gravel, and I heard Inéz say to Princess Bibesco, “Proper gravel at
last
.”

Later when I took the dogs to the stables, I heard what sounded like weeping. Felix was sitting on the terrace, his face wet with tears.
“Quenelle!”
he said when he saw me. “Her mother is a Jew.” When he began to laugh, I realized that he wasn’t offended by Inéz’s pretense but admiring of her practicality and her audacity. He wiped his face with his handkerchief and gestured to me to sit with him. A smell of damp rose from the ground. He asked if I was chilly. He lit a cigarette.

I’d recently discovered (spying again) that he occasionally attended the secret meetings of an Italian Jesuit named Father Guardini, who lectured on philosophy. That spring, the priest had been discussing the
Duino Elegies
. I’d found a book of Rilke’s poetry in the library at Löwendorf in which I came across the line
Poverty is a great radiance from within
, causing me to put aside the book.

Earlier that week, I’d followed Felix to the well where I knew he liked to hide treasure, watching from behind a wall as he
pulled several packets from between the mossy stones, cursing in anger when he dropped one of them into the well. Two days later, three pots of honey, ten sacks of carrots, and a dozen baskets of potatoes mysteriously appeared in the Pavilion kitchen.

He put out his cigarette and said that he’d received an anonymous letter that his friend Bernhard Lichtenberg, the rector of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin, had been arrested for leading his congregation in prayers on behalf of the Jews and other prisoners in concentration camps. He’d learned, too, that a former neighbor in Fasanenstrasse, Frau von Schoon, had been sent to Ravensbrück with her two children. She’d been reported by an old servant for hiding the children’s tutor, who was not only her lover, but Jewish. The tutor had been sent to Auschwitz. “At Ravensbrück,” Felix said, “SS men in doctors’ uniforms await new prisoners in the infirmary, where they are executed by a shot to the back of the neck as their height is measured. A recording of Richard Tauber singing ‘Deis ist mein ganzes Herz’ is played to cover the noise of the gunshots.”

When we at last went inside, I found that Herr Elias had left me his copy of St. Augustine’s
Confessions
with a note.
If you agree with Augustine that memory creates the self, then this is a book that will interest you, meine leibe—if, when this war is over, there remains a self to be created
. I’d told him, I’m afraid, that the German novels I’d been reading gave me unsettling dreams. I was a bit disappointed that his answer was to give me the book of an ascetic. That Augustine happened to ask God to defer his chastity to a later time was scant consolation.

The weather was mild through the spring, and Caspar was able to leave the window in his room open when we listened to the wireless. The sun, setting behind the park, gave the room a faint pink cast, and I often asked him to wait to the last moment before hanging the leather aprons he used as blackout curtains. The sky was filled with migrating geese—I thought I recognized the lesser white-fronted goose, but I couldn’t be certain (Mr. Knox had taught me to be fastidious about identification). I no longer minded when my stomach made loud noises, and I regularly excused myself to go to the bathroom.

Caspar fussed with the wireless, using the two fingers of his right hand, while I mended a basket of Felix’s hose. I had yet to finish Dorothea’s evening gown. Although I took pleasure and even pride in my mending, I sometimes missed the sight of a
point de Venise
slowly taking shape in my hands.

We liked listening to Hilde Monte, who despised the Nazis and broadcast at great risk to herself, but one night, we heard instead the friendly voice of the American woman named Midge as she cheerfully reminded Allied soldiers that their wives and sweethearts were in bed with dirty Jews and Communists. Caspar, embarrassed, turned the dial to static. When I asked him about Midge, he said that the men in the village listened to her to keep Herr Pflüger from questioning their loyalty. When Reichsprotektor Heydrich was assassinated in Czechoslovakia, Herr Pflüger, the blacksmith’s father and a party member, had felt it his responsibility to report those villagers he deemed insufficiently committed to Nazi ideals, and a guileless woman who worked as scullery maid at the inn had
been taken away. Caspar was both impressed by Herr Pflüger and frightened by him. He said that until the end of the Great War, it had been impossible for a poor man to gain wealth and power in Germany, but with the rise of the Reich and the new opportunities for profit, it had become easier for men like Herr Pflüger to make their way. He said that someday those men would take over the world, and I wondered if he wished to be one of them.

After several minutes, he found a BBC report of the sinking of a German ship. He pared an apple as we listened, dropping pieces into my palm. Sometimes he lifted a slice to his mouth, holding it against the blade of the knife with his thumb. It was a relief to hear the educated English voice of the BBC broadcaster: “One by one, the Lancasters rolled in for the attack, the large ship easily visible on the clear, still water of the fjord. Accompanied by swift Soviet fighters, the bombers of the Royal Air Force deftly evaded the heavy armament bursting around them. The aerial assault was over in a matter of minutes. The Russian and English pilots watched in pride as the big ship capsized and disappeared into the black, icy water. More than twelve hundred Germans went down, singing ‘Deutschland über alles.’ ” How the pilots knew that the sailors were singing troubled me, but I said nothing.

On a new station called the Calais Soldiers Broadcast, which was on the same wavelength as Radio Deutschland, we heard a report that rumors that the Nazis were murdering Jews in the camps might be true. The announcer (we’d grown adept at interpreting language and even the pronunciation and inflection of certain words) sounded as if he continued to find it
incomprehensible, but Caspar believed the rumors. He said that some of the men in the village who were home on leave had been at Kiev, where they claimed to have seen and done terrible things. They had confided in their fathers and brothers, and the stories had been repeated in the village. “The truth,” Caspar said, “will be worse than what we hear on the wireless. The truth will be worse than anything.”

It was unusually hot that summer, and I spent as much time as possible on the river, even though Caspar scolded that it was no longer safe. He checked on me throughout the day and accompanied me to the bottom of the stairs when I went upstairs each night, waiting until Felix and Dorothea decided that it was time for bed.

He showed me a pistol and a box of shells he’d hidden in the gun room, giving me a quick lesson on how to load and fire it. As he returned the gun to its hiding place, he said that Kreck had recently traded a pair of silver brushes on Felix’s behalf for tickets to a Furtwängler concert given by the Crown Princess Cecilie in Potsdam. “Not to be repeated,” he said, “as Karajan and Furtwängler are enemies. Kreck says that if Maestro Karajan finds out, he will never speak to Herr Felix again.” I promised not to tell a soul.

One morning in September, Roeder rushed into the sewing room to tell me that Herr Elias had been arrested, along with the miller and two foreign workers. I’d been sewing but had
put my work aside to soak my hands in the tincture of raw alcohol and pine needles I used to ease the swelling in my fingers. To my dismay, my hands had begun to curl, as if I were hiding something in them.

I rode my bicycle to Herr Elias’s house in the village, taking a shortcut through the fields. The door was open, and I ran inside. I’d often tried to imagine his rooms, and they were much as I’d pictured them. There was a gramophone and records and books, of course, and his typewriter, but also a pair of leather boxing gloves and a brown velvet dressing gown with a fringed sash. The drawers of his desk were open, but nothing seemed to have been touched. There were letters, and for a moment I was tempted to read them. Under the letters was his yellow star, the word
JUDE
smudged with ink. I found an embroidered handkerchief under a table, but there were no signs that a woman lived there, and I realized that Caspar had lied to me. I walked home, pushing my bicycle before me, stopping twice to sit by the side of the road until I was able to continue.

Felix left immediately for Berlin upon hearing the news and returned three days later in despair. He’d discovered nothing, except that many of his old friends were no longer willing or able to help him. Dorothea remained in her room for several days.

It took me a week to make a list of camps, people not wanting to talk about them, or even to admit that they existed. My plan was to send letters to Herr Elias at two different camps each month—Budzyn, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Soldau, Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, Minsk, Riga, Westerbork, Dachau, Ravensbrück,
Zimony, Sobibor, Theresienstadt (where privileged Jews and former members of the military were kept), Fuhlsbüttel, Treblinka, and Chelmno. When I reached the end of the list, I would start again.

Caspar found the body of Herr Elias’s ginger cat in the woods, its fur stripped from its back and tail. When Dorothea at last left her room, I returned her embroidered handkerchief to her. She looked at me for a moment, then turned away, her hand over her mouth.

T
he butcher in the village disappeared that winter with his wife and twin sons, and yet I was sure that I saw him at the mill in March. An object left momentarily on a table—an inkwell or a branch of witch hazel carried from the woods—was gone when I returned for it, and an apple or a dish of almonds disappeared even if I hadn’t left the room.

One night a month after Herr Elias’s disappearance, I thought that I could hear thunder, but I decided that it was only the hundreds of military transports on their way to the Eastern Front. When the rumbling sound grew louder and the earth began to shake, I knew that it wasn’t the lorries but the hum of hundreds of planes.

A piercing, high-pitched sound like a scream grew louder and louder, and there was the flash and bellow of an explosion. The Yellow Palace shuddered violently twice, and across the park, smoke began to rise from the Pavilion. The oaks marking the path to the stables burst into flames. The temple with the striped awning had disappeared. I thought how strange it was that only moments before I’d been listening in the dark to the applause of a concert audience as
The Magic Flute
came to an end.