The Life of Objects (18 page)

“There were hundreds of gases, and we had to learn each one of them. Mustard gas smells like geraniums. Sarge said after the war is over I can use my natural instinct for smells to make good money. That’s what he called it. My natural instinct for smells. Good money! Like there’s bad money.”

“I’ll come for you tomorrow,” I said again.

“What I’m really good at,” he said, “is mortars. Almost as good as I am with gas. A mortar could clean every tree from this forest. I could clear out this whole goddamn forest.” He glanced to either side, suddenly agitated. He curled one shoulder into his chest, wincing with pain as he tried to rise, and the leaves and pine needles I’d piled on his chest slid to the side. “My heart,” he said. “It’s loud in my throat.”

Placing the matches and candle where he could reach them, I told him that I would bring someone in the morning, and we would carry him to a house where he’d be safe. He closed his eyes. His silence was a relief—I’d worried that he would talk through the night. I took off my coat and covered him with it.

Despite a yellow moon, the path was barely visible, and I twice took the wrong turning. My mind was racing even faster than my heart. There was no medicine at Löwendorf, no hospitals nearby, no doctors. Furze tea is good for scarlet fever, and monkshood in water, but I couldn’t remember how many drops, and too much monkshood brings on a fatal freezing of the heart. Marsh pennywort grew by the river—a leaf applied to a cut stops bleeding—but there would be no leaves for
months. Caspar would help me, but Kreck was too old and Felix too frail. There was Dorothea, but the two of us weren’t strong enough to carry a wounded man as far as the Pavilion.

I suddenly wondered if he was real. My eyesight was cloudy, which is a symptom of starvation, and objects sometimes appeared blurred. For a moment, it was a relief to think that I’d imagined him.

As I turned into the stable yard, I saw the headlights of a car parked in front of the Pavilion. Felix was standing in the window of the drawing room, next to a man in a uniform and boots.

I went into the house. The officer had been at school with Felix in Heidelberg. He was on his way to Switzerland, where he would try to cross the border. I immediately thought of giving him my letters to Herr Elias to mail, and ran to find them. The officer, implicated in the plot against Hitler, had abandoned his command. He said that the roads were crowded with deserters and refugees. The Führer was refusing to admit defeat. Berlin was defended by twelve-year-old boys and old men.

The officer at last drove away with my letters and a bottle of schnapps. I began to tell Felix about the man in the Night Wood, but he stopped me to call Kreck into the room. He told Kreck to bring a bottle of champagne and to ask Roeder and Caspar to come to the drawing room. I went to the fire to warm myself. “Where have you been?” Dorothea asked with a frown. “And what have you done with your coat?”

Kreck returned with the champagne, followed by Roeder and Caspar, and I heard him whisper to Felix,
“Dies ist die letzte Flasche.”
This is the last bottle. He placed two glasses on a tray.
Felix made a rapid encircling gesture with his hand, and Kreck went to the sideboard, moving like a dog that has been trained to walk upright, where he poured six glasses of champagne, emptying the bottle. He gave a glass to Dorothea and to Felix, and then one to Caspar, Roeder, and myself. Kreck, with his turned-up Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, his eye singed from his head in service to the emperor, took, with a little soundless meeting of his slippered heels, the sixth glass for himself.

Later, I went to Dorothea’s room to tell her about the American. Her room was cold, and I lit a fire. She was standing at the doors that led to the terrace, her arms folded tightly across her chest. She said that she’d learned that afternoon that her friend Sophia Plessen had been arrested and taken to Plötzensee prison, where she’d been executed. She said that she could no longer live in such a country. She no longer cared what Felix thought, or whether or not she left without him. Whether or not she died without him. She’d wanted to go ever since the disappearance of Herr Elias. I was welcome to go with her. She would never see Berlin again. The entire country disgusted her.

“There’s a man in the woods,” I said.

She began to pace. “There are hundreds of men in the woods,” she said impatiently. “Thousands.”

“An American.”

She opened a dresser drawer, looked into it for several minutes, and closed it. She went to her writing desk, found her diary, and dropped it into a wastepaper basket. When she began to pull the blankets and sheets from her bed, I asked what she was doing.

“We’ll want bedding, but nothing more.” She attempted to fold an eiderdown into a square, then dropped it on the floor. “Won’t you help?” she asked in irritation. When I didn’t move, she said, “It’s not even your country. What are you doing here?”

I led her to the bed. She lay on her side, suddenly quiet, and I covered her with the quilt. “Stay with me,” she said. She began to hum, her hands over her ears. I climbed onto the bed and put my arm around her.

I was awakened by cries in the yard. Dorothea was not there, and I ran outside. It was already late morning. The Albanians stood in front of the house with two young priests who’d walked from Genoa with a group of sick and exhausted Italian prisoners. The Albanians had found them in the meadow when the priests stopped to say Mass. The Italians said that the Red Army was a day’s march from Löwendorf. Gangs of citizens were in the nearby towns, looking for Americans and Englishmen who’d escaped from prison camps. An RAF pilot who’d parachuted from his burning plane had been beaten to death in a nearby field, and two Löwendorf men were wearing the pilot’s leather jacket, fleece cap, and boots.

When the Italians left, Felix asked me to walk to the gates to determine if it was safe to use the road. I looked for Caspar, but couldn’t find him—no one had seen him since the previous evening. I wondered if he’d gone to the village to find his mother. Felix had told him to bring her to the Pavilion for safety. As I hurried down the avenue, I could already hear the high-pitched screams of women and children and the moans
of frightened animals. I knew from the wireless that hundreds of thousands of refugees and soldiers were on the roads, but I was not prepared for what I saw—nothing could have prepared me.

A man carrying a dead dog shouted as he ran past that enemy tanks were at the crossroad. German soldiers, many of them wounded and without their guns, pushed their way through the crowd, kicking and punching. Lost and abandoned children ran screaming back and forth. Women with suitcases strapped to their backs pushed handcarts heavy with children and small animals. Drunken men and women sang and danced. A horse fell dead in its traces, and three men surrounded it and hacked it to pieces, the crowd fighting over the meat. Young men with bayonets robbed those few refugees who looked as if they might have something to steal. Belongings no longer of value to anyone—a birdcage, a pram missing its wheels—were kicked up and down the road. I searched the crowd for Herr Elias, but it was impossible to make out faces. The hedgerows were white with dust, and it was difficult to breathe.

A line of emaciated men and women, walking two abreast, passed in front of me, prodded by a handful of nervous guards. Many of the prisoners, wearing the remnants of yellow stars on their rags, could barely walk. Two women staggered past the gate, their skeletal arms hanging at their sides. One of them turned toward me, her face absolved of all thought—to my confusion, I felt an overwhelming revulsion—and a guard kicked her to hurry her along. When she stumbled, he raised his rifle and shot her. I took a step toward her, and the guard
swung around to point his rifle at me. The others kept walking, their expressions unchanged as the guard stepped over the woman’s body and came toward me.

I turned and ran up the drive, stopping when I reached the pump in the yard to pour a bucket of water over my head, and then another, the water running into my eyes and mouth and down my neck. When I at last opened my eyes, I saw Felix, standing with some men I recognized as German soldiers. They were tall, and they wore boots, jodhpurs, and long underwear, having thrown away their weapons and the rest of their uniforms. Felix had given them what clothes he could find, and they politely waited in line to shake his hand before hurrying across the park—they knew not to use the roads—carrying fishing hats, quilted shooting vests, and the striped silk waistcoats Felix liked to wear to weddings.

The villagers did not know whether to stay in their houses or to run away (for the first time in years they greeted me with calls of
“Guten tag, Fräulein,”
rather than the Nazi salute). As it was too late to escape, surrounded as we were on all sides, Felix tried to calm them. They would do whatever Felix told them to do. Intimidated by years of propaganda and the threat of punishment, it was the first time they’d allowed themselves to consider that the war was lost and that their lives were in danger. Felix told them that he would not abandon them. He said that the rumor that Red Army soldiers raped women was undoubtedly exaggerated, and he asked them to return to their homes. He, at least, hoped to finish his breakfast before the Russians arrived, as he assumed they would be hungry. Yes, yes, the men said, you’re right, Herr Metzenburg, there is nothing
to do. The men gathered their families and went home, knowing that the end of the world was upon them.

The Albanians had brought with them a letter they’d written in Russian, attesting that Felix had been like a father to them and humbly beseeching the Russians to grant him and the village every consideration. They asked Felix to attach it to the front of the Pavilion, and together they solemnly nailed the letter to the door, the rest of us watching in silence. The Albanians were leaving immediately for their country. They said that with the victory of Russia, the Resistance would be busier than ever. They had a last drink with Felix and asked for his blessing. Their departure frightened me more than the news that the Russians would soon be in Löwendorf.

Dorothea’s lament about dread and remorse was always in my mind, and I hurried to Caspar’s room, fighting my way past the refugees, who were running in and out of the stables. The footman’s doeskin breeches that he’d worn to serve at Christmas lunch that first winter of the war were hanging on the back of the door with his ice skates. I sat on his bed. I was wet from my dousing at the pump, and water dripped onto the floor and bare mattress. His radio was gone. I wondered if he’d fled in the certainty that the advancing Russians would take him prisoner—they wouldn’t believe that he wasn’t a soldier, even with his maimed hand, and perhaps because of it. I lowered my head to his pillow, but it was filled with straw and made me sneeze. I wiped my face and hurried back to the yard.

Despite Felix’s reassurances, the refugees in the stables had succumbed to panic. The small planes, which were Russian scouts, buzzed overhead, children screamed, dogs howled,
men quarreled. And in the distance, there was the low and unfamiliar bark of the approaching tanks.

I gathered the few pieces of food that I could find. I looked for the smoked jerky that a farmer had traded us for a tire—I suspected that it was donkey meat and wouldn’t touch it at first, until I was finally defeated by hunger, even if it was Zara that I was eating—but it was gone. Dorothea’s chest of medicines was empty, but I found a small bottle of comfrey tincture, a jar of Saint-John’s-wort oil, and some aspirin. I still had half a bottle of the pine needles in alcohol that I used on my hands. I put the knife that Caspar had given me for my birthday in a rucksack, along with a blanket, dish towels, and some cotton wool. I thought about asking Dorothea to help me, but she seemed to be verging on madness. Kreck wasn’t able to carry an injured man from the Night Wood, and Roeder was too weak. There was only Felix, who was sickly. I couldn’t ask him to abandon the cares of the village to tend to one American soldier. Besides, I reasoned, the man was my own secret. My own treasure. Perhaps I was verging on madness, too.

It took me some time to reach the wood, shivering in my damp clothes, worried that one of the Russian scouts in the observer planes would see me—Dorothea swore that one of them had smiled and tipped his hand to her as he flew back and forth over the park. I rode past the
Fasanerie
where Dorothea’s mother had once kept golden pheasants, long overgrown with brambles and weeds. It would make a good hiding place for Werewolves, and I increased my speed. Flashes of gunfire were visible in the trees across the river, and I could hear the hollow boom of distant explosions. I hid the bicycle in the
withies once used by the women to make baskets and entered the forest, moving quietly so as not to be seen by anyone lurking in the woods.

“I told you I’d come,” I whispered when I as last reached him.

He opened his eyes. There was a smell of urine over the damp smell of earth and pine tar and decaying leaves. “Did you?” His voice was low, and I had to lean close in order to hear him. His forehead was wet with perspiration. “I don’t remember that. Can you get me out of this?” He smiled in embarrassment.

The coat was heavy with blood and urine, and I threw it into the bushes. He said that his arm was numb, and I rubbed it. Animals had eaten the candle and the matches, and my little knife was gone. I found the bottle of water in my sack and held his head so that he could drink. “I want to clean your wound.”

He shook his head.

“I have a carrot for you. I don’t think you have any idea what it is worth.”

He smiled as if he knew exactly what it was worth. “Maybe in a minute,” he said.

I took out the food I’d brought—a boiled duck’s egg, two prunes, the carrot. He ate only a few bites of the egg, and when he’d had enough, turned his head to the side, his lips closed tight, like a child. Perhaps it was the smell of his leg, but he had no interest in food, and I put it aside. I held four aspirin in my palm, and he licked them from my hand, his tongue dry on my skin.