The Life of Objects (26 page)

Dorothea continued to visit the headquarters of the Americans each morning, reasoning that if she made a pest of herself she might have a chance of getting their attention. The crooked lawyer’s office was closed—even the angry clerk had fled. Dorothea saw those of Felix’s old friends and colleagues who had survived, coming away astonished that they had returned so quickly to their former lives as great men of the nineteenth century, talking about ententes, embassy postings, restaurants, and women.

She gave me the money she received for the Dürer goblets, and I walked each day to the market run by the Americans and then to the black market. The relief that we felt to be under the protection of the Americans both soothed us and filled us with dread. It was temporary, we knew.

I brought home the newspaper of the American army, and I studied the mysterious cartoons and read the dispatches from
the Pacific. I read the paper aloud to her each evening, and we discussed the liberation of the Philippines and the sinking of the
Indianapolis
until we were exhausted by emotion. We shared a pack of cigarettes a day, even though they made us sick. We consumed so much chocolate and tinned sardines and Nescafé with powdered milk that we sometimes spoke wistfully of our suppers of wild mushrooms and watercress. I bought a bolt of navy-blue silk and thread and needles on the black market to make us each a fall suit, and when I took our measurements, using my fingers as a guide, we were astonished at the weight we’d gained.

Our days had moments when we were lighthearted, and even girlish. There were no air raids. No sirens and searchlights. No fires or corpses. No arrests or executions. The war was over, and we, at least, were alive.

I liked to sit on the terrace each afternoon when the day had increased in warmth, in the hope that the sun would heal some of my more superficial ailments. One day, I saw a woman in a heavy coat standing next to the Breker sculpture of the man. When she did not leave, I walked across the dry grass and asked her into the house. I offered to take her coat, given the heat, but she shook her head. Dorothea, who was making a new list of American diplomats in Berlin, rose from her chair and insisted that the woman, who seemed ill, sit in it.

The hair at the woman’s temples was dark with perspiration, and she found it difficult to look at us, snapping and unsnapping
her worn handbag. I brought her a glass of water, and we waited patiently as she calmed herself, taking a big draft of air and holding it in her lungs before expelling it with a moan.

The woman, whose name was Frau Dremmler, was the wife of a doctor who’d been arrested by the Russians in May. He had refused throughout the war to join the Nazi Party, despite relentless pressure and threats. Most of his patients had dropped away in fear of the Gestapo, but he had continued to treat Jews, Communists, and even homosexuals. Against all logic, the Nazis had left him alone, their power maintained in part by the arbitrariness of their persecution. At the end of the war, the Russians, needing doctors for their many camps holding political prisoners, arrested him and sent him to Sachsenhausen, where they had recently replaced the Nazis as jailers. With her husband in the camp were Red Army deserters, Trotskyites, partisans from Eastern Europe, German officers, soldiers with venereal disease, White Russian officers and anyone else suspected of being an enemy of communism. A prisoner who’d recently been released had been asked by the doctor to tell his wife that he was alive. Once her husband had realized that the Russians had no intention of freeing him, the population of the camp increasing daily, he had abandoned all personal concerns and devoted himself to his fellow prisoners. One of whom was Felix Metzenburg.

Dorothea walked to the window.

Frau Dremmler paused. “Some of the prisoners are let go for no reason at all, and some are kept.”

“And my husband?” Dorothea asked, her back to us.

The woman exhaled slowly and somewhat unwillingly. “Your husband was taken to Sachsenhausen the night of his arrest.” She took a handkerchief from her bag and wiped her face. “He died of starvation ten days ago. He was buried by my husband at the edge of the camp, along with several other men.”

Dorothea was silent. I asked Frau Dremmler if I could bring her another glass of water, but she waved her hand nervously. Now that she’d brought her news, she wanted to leave as quickly as possible. I saw that she could not bear much more sorrow, and I helped her to her feet—she was not old, but she moved as if she were crippled with age. She assured me that she knew her way home.

Dorothea was still at the window when I returned from seeing Frau Dremmler to the street. When she turned to me, I saw that her eyes were dry. “What would Felix do?” she asked.

To my surprise, Dieter was at the front door the next morning when I left the house. He’d gained weight, too, perhaps because he’d spent the last years of the war near the Danish border, hiding on his wife’s family’s dairy farm, where they’d survived on milk, cheese, meat, and butter, selling what they didn’t eat for exorbitant prices on the black market. He’d been able to buy a small piece of land near his father-in-law’s farm. “How nice,” I said, mostly happy for him.

He had an artificial arm attached to his shoulder with a new leather strap. He’d finagled himself a job as guide to an American colonel whose military driver had yet to master the chaos
of the city—there were no street signs, and many of the streets and squares had disappeared altogether. He smiled mysteriously and said that the colonel’s driver was in his debt—Dieter was able to use the jeep whenever the colonel left the country, which was as often as twice a month.

I told him that Felix and Herr Elias were dead and that Caspar had disappeared. He pulled his American cap from his head and said that he was very sorry to hear it. I asked him to return in the morning, when perhaps Frau Metzenburg would see him.

He arrived with a loaf of sliced white bread, a jar of Nescafé, powdered eggs, and three bars of Palmolive soap from the American PX. I boiled coffee on a little stove I’d made with bricks and a piece of iron railing. Dorothea was in the garden. He asked about Löwendorf, and I told him of Herr Pflüger’s success. He invited me to visit him in Schleswig-Holstein—he was only in Berlin long enough to earn the money he needed to buy some milk cows, his father-in-law’s herd having been poisoned by their Danish neighbors as soon as the war ended.

As he was leaving, I took him into the garden, and he shook hands with Dorothea. I told her about the food, and she thanked him. We walked with him to the street, and I asked if he could use the colonel’s jeep to drive to Rotterdam—I’d estimated that he could drive there and back in three days’ time. He said that the colonel was scheduled to leave Berlin the following week for a meeting in Brussels, when he would be able to drive wherever he liked. Provided, of course, that the car was
returned in time. Which rules out Shanghai, he said with a nervous laugh.

“I hadn’t realized that you were thinking of traveling,” Dorothea said when we returned to the house. She opened my passport, which I’d left on the windowsill. “You name really is Beatrice,” she said in surprise.

“I’m hoping that you will come with me.” I waited for her answer, but she was silent.

That night, she removed what was left of the treasure—Houdon’s dead thrush, two diamond bracelets, the Hilliard miniature she’d given to Felix for his birthday, a goblet, two gold clips in the shape of question marks, and a sapphire brooch. “Do you think that Dieter would be happy with a brooch?” she asked.

I said that I thought he would be happy, and his wife very happy. As I wrapped the brooch in newspaper, she asked, “Will you go without me?”

I tied a piece of string around the package. “Yes,” I said.

Word came at the end of the week from Madame Tkvarcheli that Kreck had succumbed without pain to his lingering afflictions, chief among them old age. Bresla was with him when he died.

Dorothea washed her face and combed her hair and went to her father’s lawyer. Despite his disapproval (mainly because they were Russian, but also because of the old distinctions), she gave Madame Tkvarcheli the use of the Pavilion, kitchen
garden, and stables for her lifetime, retaining the land, including the Night Wood. She arranged to send the women some money, with the understanding that she would send more. When I asked what would become of the Pavilion once Madame Tkvarcheli was dead, Dorothea said, “It goes to you, of course.” At my look of surprise, she said, “I never want to see Löwendorf again, but you may.”

I packed some food, although not my new suit, which I draped over the back of the chair to keep it from wrinkling. My shoes were in shreds, but there was nothing I could do about that. I rolled the Veronese very thin and sewed it into the hem of the jacket—there was a surfeit of art and jewelry in Berlin, and I was waiting until I reached Holland to sell it. I didn’t have a plan, but the lack of one, or even a final destination, was appealing to me. Having grown accustomed to uncertainty, I was uneasy and suspicious without it.

Despite the many invitations that Dorothea had received—Inéz in Bath, friends in New York and Capetown, and Felix’s sister in Buenos Aires—she said that she wasn’t ready to see them. The Red Cross had forwarded a letter from my father to Herr Abbing, and he had given it to Dorothea that morning—he’d had it for a week, he said, but had forgotten it. My father wrote that Mr. Knox had spent a week that spring in Dublin at a gathering of ornithologists. Lady Vaughan’s eldest son had been killed in North Africa. The byre where the Catholic girls used to sew had been struck by lightning. Business at the shop, now that the war was over and people could at last get on with their lives, was somewhat better. He wrote that he and
my mother would be happy to see me should I ever find myself in Ireland.

I read the letter to Dorothea as she put on her suit. It looked well on her—on both of us—perhaps because we’d gained even more weight.

“It’s a relief not to be expected,” I said, and she smiled.

I began to think about writing
The Life of Objects
in 2006, during my five months in Berlin as a fellow at the American Academy. Without the gift of that fellowship, I would not have read the hundreds of journals and memoirs written about the war, and in particular Lali Horstmann’s
Nothing for Tears
and Hans-Georg von Studnitz’s
While Berlin Burns
, that served to awaken my curiosity and, in time, to lead me to my story. I am indebted to Gary Smith for inviting me to the American Academy, and for his care and advice.

I began to write the book at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Ireland, where I was grateful to have the friendship of Úna Forde, Christine Tighe, Brian and Sheila Polke, and Heather Bourke.

I wish to thank Sabine Russ in New York and Miranda Robbins and Françoise von Roy in Berlin for their fastidious reading of the manuscript, and their astute, subtle (and imaginative) attempts to keep me, as much as is possible, from error.

Susanna Moore is the author of the novels
The Big Girls, One Last Look, In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, The Whiteness of Bones
, and
My Old Sweetheart
and two books of nonfiction,
Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai’i
and
I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai’i
. She lives in New York City.

Susanna Moore

Reading Group Guide

About the Guide

The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested further reading that follow are designed to enliven your group’s discussion of Susanna Moore’s elegant, haunting new novel,
The Life of Objects
.

About the Book

The award-winning novelist Susanna Moore captures the impact of war on individual lives in a rich and moving novel that moves from the prelude to World War II in Germany to the terrible devastation of the war years.

Beatrice Palmer, the only child of shopkeepers in a small Irish village, escapes the dreariness of everyday life by reading about the pleasures and misfortunes of great literary heroines and whiles away time in her parents’ shop perfecting her skill as a lace maker. The appearance of a beautiful countess presents Beatrice with an opportunity greater than anything she could have imagined: impressed with Beatrice’s elegant handiwork, the countess invites Beatrice to accompany her to Berlin to stay with Felix and Dorothea Metzenburg, an aristocratic couple known for their extraordinary collections of rare lace and other precious treasures. When they reach Berlin, however, they find a nation preparing for war. The Nazi government has requisitioned the Metzenburgs’ home, forcing the family to flee to their country estate south of the city. Within months of their arrival, the threat of war has become grim reality, with waves of refugees seeking food and shelter and bearing horrific tales about the murders of Jews. As Allied bombing raids escalate and the brutal Red Army advances into Germany, Beatrice finds herself ineradicably bound to the Metzenburgs and a patchwork, polyglot community struggling to survive forces far beyond their control.

The Life of Objects
is the story of a young woman’s journey through the nightmare of war. It is a haunting portrait of sacrifice and suffering, and of the courage, love, and loyalty the most dire of circumstances can sometimes inspire.

Questions for Discussion