The Life of Objects (19 page)

I forced myself to look at his leg. The rag, soaked with pus and blood, was stuck to the wound. I thought that I might be
sick. I wanted him to think that I knew what I was doing. I didn’t want him to know that I was afraid, and I took a quick drink of water. “I’ll have to clean it,” I said briskly. “I’ve brought something for it.” I pulled the stopper from the bottle of alcohol. There was a strong smell of raw spirits. I placed my hand over his groin and tipped the bottle over his leg. He didn’t scream, but his body convulsed with such agony that I was thrown across his chest, spilling what remained in the bottle.

For a moment, the smell of spirits was stronger than the reek of rotting flesh. I righted myself and, taking a breath, slowly peeled the rag from his leg. I cleaned the wound, using all of the cotton wool, then stood and pulled down my flannel slip and used that, too. I poured the Saint-John’s-wort oil over his thigh and wrapped his leg in six linen dish towels bearing the small red monogram F
V
M. I covered him with the blanket.

“If that doesn’t do it,” he at last said.

I had the sudden fear that he would try to escape if I left him. “I can’t leave you here,” I said. I crawled behind him and hooked my forearms under his armpits and tried to raise him. I could smell his skin and his rotting flesh and the urine, and it made me happy. How strange, I thought. How bold and brazen of me. I gave another tug, and he sat up for a moment before tumbling onto his side, taking me with him.

“That’s all right,” I whispered, my arm caught beneath him. “We’ll find a way.”

He rolled into my arms. “Who are you?” he asked, not without humor. “You speak English.”

“I’m Irish,” I said. “I wondered if you might be, too. I can’t tell.”

He touched his head. “How would you know? No hair, no nothing.” He smiled. “I’m from the U.S. of A. A wop from Rhode Island.” At my look of confusion, he said, “Italian. Catholic, like you.”

I told him that my name was Beatrice. He said that Beatrice didn’t sound like an Irish name, and I agreed. He asked if I had a cigarette. I told him I’d bring some the next day. He put his arms around me. I could feel his breath on my face. His mouth did not smell of death, but the sweet smell of resin, and I wondered if he’d been eating pine needles. There was the sound of gunfire nearby. The horizon, I knew, would be blazing with fire. I kissed him.

“Did I tell you our nickname for them was the Goons?” he asked after a while. “They were mostly old men. They wore big straw shoes that stuck out from under their pants. It was the funniest thing I ever saw. I figured it had to be for warmth—who’d wear straw duck’s feet if he didn’t have to? You could tell their uniforms were stolen from dead Russians—even old men Germans are taller than Russians.

“The camp was for Allied pilots. The Goons thought the pilots were gods. To tell you the truth, we all did. The Goons assigned us to the pilots as orderlies—nothing too personal or too un-American, just cleaning latrines and some light sweeping. A little cooking. We’d been captured near Salerno and shipped across the border in cattle cars. All any of us wanted, even the pilots, was water and salt. Not smokes, but salt. And we wanted to escape. In the beginning, it’s all we thought about. It kept us busy day and night, thinking about salt and planning our escape.”

He began to cry, and I held him closer.

“Every week, we had a different talk—one of the pilots was from Scotland Yard and another was a history teacher at a big university. The talks were pretty interesting, especially the one on Richard the Lionheart. And the Croydon Airport robbery. It made me think about what I’ll do when the war is over—I mean other than putting my nose to work. I figure maybe I’ll go back to school.”

I waited for him to continue, not wanting him to stop. I thought of the number of times I’d been held in my life. Once or twice by my father. Never by my mother. Herr Elias when we danced in the library. Once by Caspar when I fell on the ice. “What happened then?” I asked.

“We found watchmaking tools in one of the Red Cross boxes. Just what we needed. But it turned out Jimmy’s old man was a clock maker, and he knew all about watches. The commandant heard about it and brought him his nice Swiss watch to fix, and soon the guards asked him to fix other things, too. That got us a little extra food.”

He drifted in and out of consciousness. Once he began to shout, and I rocked him gently until he stopped. He shifted his body to ease the pain, his head against my breast. “It won’t be long now,” he whispered. “Don’t forget me.”

“Never,” I said.

We were warm in our little bower, nestled in the leaves. A red fox stopped to stare at us over its shoulder, perhaps drawn by the smell of blood, then turned disdainfully and disappeared in the brush. An owl settled on a branch, ruffling its wings impatiently as it found its perch. A blind vole scuttled
past my feet. The whole forest seemed to be moving, not only foxes (there were no rabbits left in Germany), but high above us, even the sky swayed and burned. I sang to him one of the songs that Felix liked to play on the gramophone while he dressed until I, too, fell asleep.

It was near dawn when his voice woke me, and I wondered if he’d been talking all night. “It was the start of spring,” he said. “It wasn’t so damn cold anymore. We were shaken the hell out of our bunks. The Reds were only a day’s march away, and the camp was shutting down. We started walking, even though it was the middle of the night, stopping only when the Goons couldn’t take another step, giving them, God help us, a chance to rest. There were five hundred of us and twenty of them, but when one of the boys tried to sneak away, a guard shot him dead.”

He motioned for some water, and I held his head so he could drink. He said that he had no feeling in his leg, and the pain was a little better. “We found some half rations left in a church by the Red Cross, most of them rotten, but we ate them anyway. Some of the men were puking and crapping in the snow, and I felt sorry for them—they couldn’t help it if they ate everything at once. One of the English pilots said he could see the fires in Berlin, but he was only imagining it—he’d already spotted Hitler twice that morning.

“The first night, about thirty of us slept in a shed in the middle of a field—the others squeezed into a deserted farmhouse and some barns. There was nothing in the shed, not even windows, only a few cow bones and an empty water trough. In the morning when we went outside, everyone was gone. We
couldn’t believe it! We celebrated with instant iced coffee, made with a couple of coffee crystals one of the officers had hidden in his pocket. When we calmed down, we realized we had no place to go—we didn’t even know where we were—and we hurried down the road after them. Now and then we’d pass a burning house, and we’d stand close to the fire for a few minutes to get warm. We figured thirty of us could move faster than hundreds of them, and once in a while we saw traces of them—a canteen with my friend’s name and some RAF flight maps the pilots had saved—but we couldn’t catch up with them, and we wondered if maybe they’d turned off the road. We could hear explosions and tank fire, and sometimes even shouting, and from then on we stuck to cattle trails. Sometimes we saw a group of men hurrying through the woods, or a family with their animals, but we all acted as if we were invisible, even the cows. When we stopped that night, I just kept going. No one even noticed, but no one would’ve cared, either. Who was going to stop me?

“After walking for about an hour, I saw a high stone wall with a pair of fancy iron gates hanging from their hinges. The sound of gunfire was louder, and I could tell there was a road nearby. I could hear people shouting and running. I ducked inside the gates. Trees were planted in two long rows with a sandy road in the middle, and I knew there’d be a nice house at the end of it. I could smell stewed fruit, maybe apricots, which made me worry for a minute maybe I was hallucinating, like the English pilot. My nose again!

“I saw the burned walls of what must’ve been a big mansion once. There were some other buildings nearby and a yard with
a clock tower, but no people. No lights. I was figuring what to do next when there was a flash and then a rifle shot. I knew I was hit, even though I’d heard stories about being shot and not realizing it ’til your boot was full of blood. I heard a low whistle, and suddenly men were coming through the trees. I started to run. It wasn’t easy. I’d been shot in the leg, and I had to keep stopping.” He smiled. “The next thing I knew, a girl was trying to bury me.”

It was early morning when I left him. Smoke drifted through the woods, and I could hear heavy artillery fire (Caspar had taught me the difference between the sound of a howitzer and that of an antitank gun). As I turned into the park, I smelled gasoline.

Two tanks were rolling across the lawn. Naked men were in the river, splashing and shouting. A Russian lorry was parked in the yard. Soldiers were in the kitchen garden, kicking through the dirt as they searched for roots to eat. Some of them wore women’s hats and shawls, and one held a parasol over his head.

There was an explosion—the retreating German army blowing up a bridge, perhaps—and although the explosion must have been a quarter of a mile away, I threw myself to the ground. I lay there, hands over my head, waiting for the next explosion, but none came. The soldiers standing around the lorry laughed and waved as I got to my feet.

Felix was in front of the Pavilion with a Russian officer and his men. Although Felix spoke Russian, he listened patiently,
leaning on a stick, as a smiling man in the striped jacket of a prisoner of war translated for the Russians. The officer, discerning from Felix’s expression that he understood Russian, turned aside the translator and apologized to Felix, speaking to him directly as he folded the Albanians’ letter attesting to Felix’s goodwill and buttoned it inside his breast pocket.

Dorothea and Kreck stood in the doorway of the stables with the Black Sea women and children, some refugees I’d never seen before, and the Frenchmen. The interpreter waved to the children gaily, calling in German, then in Polish, but they did not move or change expression.

Felix went into the house with the officer. When they returned, the officer saluted Felix, and he and his men climbed into the lorry. The tanks had uprooted many of the elms in the avenue, and the lorry appeared intermittently in the gaps between the trees. In the park, the soldiers who’d been left behind dried themselves after their bath, gesturing to the women and waving cigarettes, but the women refused to look at them. Felix explained that the Russians had come to requisition the house for one of their generals. As there was no armistice yet, the tanks and the soldiers would remain in the park, where the trees would conceal them until the war had officially ended. He said that the general and his staff would be at the Pavilion in an hour.

I followed Dorothea into the house, where Roeder was already packing. Dorothea, indecisive before a journey, put on three sweaters, then pulled them impatiently over her head. She put on the trousers I’d made for her, a polka-dot shirt, and a tweed hacking jacket. I ran to empty my workbasket, throwing
two sweaters into a suitcase, along with a shawl, Felix’s flannel trousers, a pencil, and my journal. When I returned to Dorothea’s room, Felix, his arms full of books, stood watching as Dorothea, wearing a black Persian-lamb bolero made for her by Schiaparelli, studied herself in a mirror.

“I don’t believe you’ll need that, darling,” he said smoothly.

She looked at him.

“Charming as it is.”

“I’m preparing for all seasons,” she said with a giddy smile as he helped Roeder to fit some bath soap and Dorothea’s gold brushes into a bag.

“By the way,” he asked, “where are we going?”

“To the forest,” Dorothea said, surprised that he should wonder. “To the Night Wood. There’s no other place for us. We’ll hide in Grandfather’s clearing.” There was something bright and brittle about her that alarmed me, and I saw that Felix, too, was concerned. He kissed her, and I realized that it was the first time I’d seen them kiss.

We carried our suitcases into the yard. There were even more strangers, and I wondered how their number had grown so quickly in the few minutes we’d been in the Pavilion. Convinced that they could use the old carriages, even though there were no horses, the men had pulled an old victoria into the yard and had begun loading it. When it was at last admitted that they could not possibly pull the heavy carriage, the bedding and sacks and children and old women were lifted down from the carriage and passed by hand to small carts and wagons.

Roeder, most practical of all, grabbed cooking pots and whatever food was left in the cellar, and with the help of Lazare
and Maxime loaded them onto a cart. Felix asked Kreck to see that two straw chairs from the kitchen garden were not forgotten (“That way, we won’t have to sit on the wet ground”), and the chairs sat precariously atop a mound of disordered bundles. The refugees ran in and out of the stables, brushing past the curious Russian soldiers, many of whom wore five and six wristwatches, some of them women’s watches. A young soldier opened one of Dorothea’s bags to rummage through it, slowly selecting objects that caught his fancy and putting them in his pockets—a cigarette case, the gold brushes, a pair of sunglasses, a dog collar. He wrapped a silk scarf around his neck.

When I noticed that Felix had stopped to watch the soldier, I took him by the arm, suggesting that we look one last time in the house—we might have forgotten something. He turned to me with a knowing smile, and we walked to the house with Dorothea, Bresla, and Madame Tkvarcheli. As we stood in the drawing room, a soldier who’d been roaming through the house came unsteadily through the door, a revolver in one hand and a bottle of schnapps in the other. Another soldier, an older man, wandered into the room after him. As we turned to leave, the first soldier, swaying back and forth, gestured at Felix. “No men!” he shouted in German.
“Keine Männer!”
When Felix did not move, the soldier grabbed him by the collar and shoved him roughly into the hall, locking the door behind him.