The Life of Objects (20 page)

The soldier dragged an armchair to the fireplace, where he sat himself with a contented grunt, grinning in amazement at his good fortune. He gestured to Bresla to come to him, and when she did not move, he squinted one eye and playfully
aimed his gun at her. She cursed and ducked behind a table, which seemed only to increase his good humor. He called to his friend, who was in the dining room loading his pockets with silver, and the man peeked around the door to shout his encouragement.

Madame Tkvarcheli, pale with fear, fell to her knees to beg the soldier’s forgiveness. I could hear Felix’s voice over the curses and pleas of Bresla and her mother. Dorothea slipped off her watch and offered it to the soldier, her hand shaking. The Russian sighed in exasperation and rose from his chair. As he reached to grab Bresla, I stepped between them. The soldier, pleasantly surprised, looked at me appraisingly, then, with a satisfied smile, raised the gun to my mouth, grabbed Dorothea’s watch, and, to the delight of his friend, pushed me into the dining room.

The shutters had been drawn, and the room was dark. The carpet was strewn with the contents of the silver drawers, and the soldier cursed as he tripped over a champagne bucket. I was wearing four sweaters and a wool skirt over my trousers and, to their frustration, it took some time to strip away my clothes. They smelled of alcohol, and the fingernails of the younger man were ragged and sharp. As they pushed me back and forth between them, pulling my trousers to my ankles, my mind began to wander. As a child, I’d been told by my mother that a girl would die instantly if she had sexual intercourse before her first period, and I wondered if you would also die if you no longer menstruated. For a moment, I was able to conjure the face of Mr. Knox (and quickly erased it, not wanting him to see me).

When I began to cry, the old man punched me in the face, ordering me to shut my Hun mouth. It did not take very long, once they realized that I was a virgin and used one of Frau Schumacher’s forks to pierce me. When they finished, they wiped themselves on the tablecloth and left through the kitchen, taking as much silver as they could carry and my shoes and clothes. I tried to stand, but my legs would not hold me. I crawled to the door, rising to my knees to draw the bolt. The door swung open, and I fell into the room.

The women cleaned me as best they could, as ceremonious as the handmaidens of a bride, and dressed me in pieces of their clothing. Dorothea removed her sweater and pulled my arms through its sleeves. Madame Tkvarcheli gave me her shawl, and Bresla tied her apron around my waist. They carried me from the house. The Russians watched us, some of them laughing. The two drunken soldiers were at the pump, arguing over a soup tureen and one of my sweaters. Felix took me from the women and lifted me shakily onto one of the wagons as it began to rain. I remembered that first day in Berlin when he’d warned me that he could not offer me his protection, and I wondered if he remembered it, too.

The refugees followed the wagons, pushing wheelbarrows and pulling carts laden with blankets and pots. A silver sled, once used by Dorothea and her governess, was loaded with children, and the Frenchmen dragged it after them, the bells on the sled ringing gaily. As we crossed the park, more people began to appear—escaped prisoners of war, Polish and Belgian and Dutch slave workers, farmers from the burned towns nearby, city people, and German soldiers. When we reached
the edge of the wood, the men unloaded the wagons and sled, people carrying whatever they could bear. A man hoisted me onto his back, and Dorothea led us into the forest.

It was not easy, moving along the dark and overgrown path. The excited dogs lunged back and forth, causing the children to cry, and the burdens were cumbersome and heavy. My head hurt. I wondered if I’d been turned into a parrot. I wondered if I’d been beaten with an iron rod for refusing to speak.

It was two days before I was myself again. Dorothea said that she had feared for my life, if not my mind. I had persisted, she said, in claiming that I’d hidden my lover, an American, in the Night Wood. I’d also told her that I was a parrot whose name was Beatrice.

“There is an American in the woods,” I said. “And my name is Beatrice.” My head throbbed, and there was a burning between my legs. I watched as Roeder soaked herbs in a dish of water, pulling the leaves apart with her hands. It was the first time I’d seen her bare hands, and they were white and slender. Dorothea, who had torn her polka-dot shirt to make bandages, gestured to me to turn on my side. “That your cuts are not more infected is thanks to Roeder,” she said. When I apologized for the stench of my body, she looked irritated. “You can’t smell,” she said, looking at Roeder, who shook her head. “Your nose is broken.”

Any delicacy that once served to safeguard our modesty had vanished, and they worked efficiently and without embarrassment. I, too, a virginal girl, at least in spirit, was without
shame, at least in those first days, perhaps because I felt nothing at all. The bitter medicine made from willow bark seemed to calm me, the pain no longer so piercing.

I lay on a blanket on the ground, listening to the sound of the fire as it gained and lost strength, the flames bright against the dark forest. The quiet talk of the women, speaking in many languages, was soothing, as were the cries of the birds, also in many languages. I did not mention the American dying in the woods—it angered Dorothea if I spoke of him. One night, I managed to crawl a few yards from my blanket before Bessie heard me and began to bark, alerting Felix, who sent me back to bed with a scolding.

On the third day, Dorothea allowed me to go to the latrine on my own. It was painful to walk and I made several wrong turnings before I found him. He lay facedown in the leaves, not far from where I’d left him. My flannel slip was wrapped around his neck. His blackened thigh, swarming with maggots, was swollen to twice its size, and his feet and arms were marked with the bites and scratches of animals. One of his ears had been eaten away.

I knelt beside him and put my fingers on his neck. As I opened his mouth to breathe into it, I heard someone call my name.

Caspar, thin and pale, a ragged blanket around his shoulders, stepped from behind a tree. His face was both swollen and withered, and his sparse growth of blond beard made him
look older. He glanced at my legs, streaked with blood, and at my broken nose, and gave me his hand, pulling me to my feet. He drank the water I’d brought, and we folded his blanket into a sling and gently rolled the American to the center of it.

Caspar, walking backward, made an opening in the briar, the dry branches snapping noisily around us. I needed to rest, and I gestured to him to stop. When I leaned over the American to wipe his face, I heard shouting. Men were running on the path. Caspar looked around in alarm, and I felt the full weight of the blanket. I reached for him, but I was blinded by the gunfire, and I could not find him.

They washed and wrapped his body, and Felix and the Frenchmen carried the American into the woods, where he was buried, I was told, in a grave lined with moss and ferns. My delirium had returned, and I was not allowed to go with them.

Caspar slept next to me on the ground, his arm and chest bandaged in what was left of Dorothea’s polka-dot shirt. The Polish surgeon who’d examined him said that the bullet had only grazed his shoulder. He would soon be well again—ready to kill some Russians, the doctor said. He’d been shot by men looking for the half ton of gold Felix was said to have brought from Löwendorf.

He told me that he’d been with a small company of men determined to fight the Russians. They’d been betrayed, and
he’d escaped with a friend, but they’d been separated. He was on his way to meet his friend when he came upon me in the woods. He’d heard rumors of a camp in the clearing. He’d also heard that the Russians had taken me away with them.

I apologized to him for my smell, and he said, “You smell like pine trees.” When I was silent, he said, “I know. Kreck told me.” He turned so that he was resting on his good side. It had rained that day, and his shoulder ached. “It doesn’t make any difference. What happened in the Pavilion.” He stretched alongside me, our heads on one blanket.

I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t considered that what had happened to me would make a difference to anyone but myself. My own revulsion was quite sufficient.

“I wish we were fishing,” he said. “I don’t know how you do it. Maybe you are a trout yourself. When this is over, I want you to teach me. Other things, too. How to speak English. How to dance.”

“I don’t know how to dance,” I said. I thought of Herr Elias and the way that his body had felt, pressed against mine, and I thought of the Russian soldiers, and I began to cry.

Caspar held his mouth to my ear, whispering that he was going to fight the Russians with tricks only a poacher would know. He said that his sister, dyed as red as a macaw, had been killed at Sachsenhausen. One of his brothers had died at Danzig, and the other, the Communist, had died in Buchenwald. I held his hands and kissed them. Sometime in the middle of the night, I fell asleep in his arms. When I awoke in the morning, he was gone.

My body began to heal, as bodies tend to do, whether you want them to or not. In a week’s time, I could urinate without too much pain, although I still could not breathe through my nose. At night, Roeder sang the songs she remembered from her youth with unexpected tenderness and even longing (“When We Are Married” was a favorite). It had never occurred to me that Roeder could sing, and I wondered what else I had missed. Hearing her voice, the refugees sometimes sang songs of their own, songs from Hungary, Latvia, and Moldavia. Although I didn’t understand the words, I knew that the songs were always about love or berries. Sometimes both.

One of the women had hidden a pregnant cat in a basket, and others had carried their canaries. A few of the men had been followed by their dogs, and the dogs, which had been scavenging on the roads for corpses, looked happy and full. Felix had brought the sack of Ethiopian coffee and a coffee mill, along with two tins of biscuits and the last case of sardines in tomato sauce. After careful calculation, he concluded that there was sufficient coffee (half a cup) for each person, including the children, for sixteen days. With the arrival each day, however, of more refugees and travelers, he was constantly obliged to redo his figures (as people arrived in the clearing, others disappeared), and these calculations gave him many hours of distraction. He divided the coffee with the same care he’d once taken with his treasure map.

I knew that I was succumbing to the sin of pride to imagine that I was to blame for the American’s death. If I’d been able
to return to the Night Wood as I’d promised, if I had told Felix and Dorothea, rather than holding my secret close to me, if I had confided in Caspar that night when we drank champagne in the drawing room, if I had not cherished my girlish dreams of love and romance, if I had not read and, what is worse, believed all of those novels, if I had stayed in Ballycarra, if I had never taught myself to make lace. My list—no longer ivory boxes and fox collars—was endless.

I was given charge of the noisy band of children, partly to keep them from tormenting Kreck (he’d lost his monocle, and his puckered eye socket provoked the children to screams of terror) and also, I suspected, to keep me busy. I took them into the forest for a few hours each day, Maxime and Bertrand accompanying us for safety, where we collected roots and herbs. We stripped the bark from the Wych elms for the women to grind into powder (it didn’t taste too bad, although my bowels turned to water), and we picked licorice fern and the delicious Queen Anne’s lace.

Mr. Knox particularly admired the book
At Swim-Two-Birds
, and I thought of it as we walked along.
The lamenting of a wounded otter in a black hole, sweeter than harpstrings that. There is no torture so narrow as to be bound and beset in a dark cavern without food or music, without the bestowing of gold on bards. To be chained by night in a dark pit without company of chessmen—evil destiny!
The words went pleasantly, ceaselessly, through my head as I led the children through the woods. Despite my dislike of catching birds, I taught them to make Caspar’s ingenious bird
trap, which provided us with an occasional treat. We roasted the birds on spits as soon as we caught them, happily complicit in our desire not to share the birds with the others.

At night, when the news and rumors of the day had at last been exhausted, and the women had soothed the hungry children, and Dorothea had fallen asleep in the straw garden chair, a book open on her chest, I struggled to understand all that had happened. Not simply what had happened to me, but what had happened to all of us. I knew what others had suffered.

Kreck estimated that the camp’s supplies, even with the food contributed by newcomers, would not last more than six days. The impassioned talk about the future soon lost its immediacy once we finished the last of the potatoes, burning the stalks and roasting them in the fire. The newcomers shared what they had—a duck, or a bottle of schnapps made from beech leaves, or a small piece of meat (I’d grown to like horse meat)—but there was not enough food to feed everyone. There had been forty of us that first night in the rain, but the camp had grown to almost a hundred people.