When We Danced on Water (18 page)

Freddy pointed to one canvas standing nearby. “That Soutine,” he said, breaking the silence. “I'm sure I saw it at the firefighters' headquarters before the war, when they burned all those priceless works of ‘degenerate' art. You managed to salvage it,” he said with awe.

Halberstadt nodded. Then he turned toward Teo and raised his hand feebly in the general direction of the crowded room. “My life's work,” he said with a sigh.

“Your obsession,” Freddy said offhandedly.

“My passion,” Ernst corrected him.

Freddy shrugged. “What's the difference?”

“Oh,” Ernst said, turning to face him, “the ancient Romans could tell you. Passion means suffering, the suffering of intense desire that remains unfulfilled. So Toulouse-Lautrec had an insatiable passion for shady women that never dissipated. Gustav Mahler for Alma, Kafka for Milená Jesenská; how about our own marvelous Else Lasker-Schüler, with her poems full of strange, protean passions? I could name scores of the greatest artists and writers and composers, all of whom were driven by this wonderful, terrible, consuming passion that, in the best of cases, erupts like lava into the most beautiful works man has ever created, or for the less artistically inclined among us, into new inventions, the massing of wealth or technology.”

Freddy smiled broadly. “Then I am a man of passion.”

Ernst seemed to weigh his words before letting them out. “I hope for your sake it's passion and not obsession. Passion creates, but obsession destroys. Your Mr. Hitler, for example, has his obsessions and I am about to pay for them with my own life's passion, these most astonishing works of beauty.”

“You shall be reunited with them after the war, I'm certain of it,” said Freddy.

“Which will you be taking with you?” Ernst asked.

“Well, first we need to work from your catalogue. You do, I assume, have a complete catalogue?”

Ernst nodded.

“From that we'll create a new catalogue for my department. Teo here has a lovely handwriting, we'll ask him to record our selections. That's what I'll be working from when I come with my team to remove them. As for my own selections, I have a few ideas, but let's get to work and make those decisions later.”

For hours the three of them created a new catalogue and hauled each selected artwork upstairs to what had been the library. Ernst seemed to mourn each selection, though some caused him more grief than others. When they had finished, the library was filled with twenty-two paintings and six sculptures. The secret room underneath the house still contained at least eighty paintings as far as Teo could tell, and perhaps two dozen sculptures.

On their last trip downstairs Freddy stood looking at the remaining works and, hands on hips, said, “Ernst, you know my tastes. I can't leave without that exquisite Monet and the boy dancer by Degas. I thought he'd only sculpted girls.”

“That's the only one,” Ernst said evenly.

“Now I know I should be happy with those two, but, well, there's just one more I'd like, and I know it's being selfish but I can't resist.”

“She'll bring you trouble,” Ernst said.

“I know. The best things always do.”

“Leave her here Freddy, come visit. She'll be safer at Himmel-an-der-Havel than in the middle of Berlin.”

“I can't Ernst, I have to have her. I've always wanted her, you know that.”

Ernst sighed heavily. “You haven't changed, young Baron von Edelwald. You are talented and clever, but you let your obsessions blind you, you do not know when to stop.”

Teo expected him to take offense, but Freddy laughed loud and hard. “Right you are!” he said cheerfully. “You know my motto, Ernst:
Ad astra.
There's no stopping until you've gone all the way to the stars.” He pushed past them to the back of the deep room, returning a moment later with a smallish portrait, one that Teo had not noticed before. He placed it on an easel and flicked on an overhead lamp. The three men stood in front of the painting, silent.

It was, Teo could see for himself instantly, glorious. A pale young woman in a butter-yellow ermine-trimmed cloak, her gathered hair the color of sun-baked wheat, stands fiddling with a pearl necklace around her neck. She is gazing at herself in a small mirror on the wall, or perhaps she is enraptured by whatever is taking place outside the window next to the mirror.

Teo was intrigued by the bland nonchalance of her expression, the simplicity of her gaze. She seemed completely self-absorbed, clearly unaware of the attention she was drawing. In fact, he suddenly realized, she reminded him of Sofie Sonnenfeld. He quietly revisited their pas de deux late that one afternoon in Copenhagen, and he wondered what had become of her and her family. Did she think of him sometimes, or did she presume him dead?

“She's more than two hundred and fifty years old, but she's sweet and pure as a fresh-cut flower,” Freddy said with hushed passion. Teo turned to look briefly into Freddy's face; this was a voice he had heard Freddy use only when ardor and desire had taken over his senses.

“Look here, Teo,” Freddy said, without taking his gaze from the painting. “Vermeer was a genius with light. Look how the room is flooded with it from the little window here, next to the mirror. Look how the light is refracted in the curtains, in the wall, and especially in her robe.”

Teo, too, was captivated. Freddy instructed him, “Now tell Herr Halberstadt where the vanishing point of the painting is.”

“Just above the tabletop,” he answered dutifully.

“And what do you think this chair is doing in the foreground?”

“Perhaps it has something to do with depth? The chair seems to add space between the girl and us.”

“Well said,” Ernst remarked. Freddy beamed.

“And why do we think Mr. Vermeer chose to put pearls on his model?”

Teo thought for a moment. He could not recall any paintings with pearls in his apprenticeship with Freddy, or having learned anything about them. “Purity?” he ventured. “Perfection?” Teo glanced from Freddy to Ernst.

“In fact,” Ernst answered, “we cannot truly know. To some painters pearls did symbolize virginity and purity. To others, pearls were a symbol of womanhood, or motherhood. And indeed, Vermeer's young lady, who may in fact be his niece, looks as though she might have been pregnant. Mostly, however, pearls were a symbol of vanity, and this was certainly an accepted theme among Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. The mirror, too, may be there to remind us of the worthlessness and transience of all things worldly.” Ernst nodded to himself, and glanced around at the room still full of art.

“She is exquisite, one of a kind, Ernst,” Freddy exclaimed, ignoring his quiet reverie. “You were a genius for getting her away from the Pergamon.”

“Oh, but of course I had nothing to do with that. These are strange times, who better than you would know that, my friend. Everything is in flux. I was simply clever enough to recognize her when she was made available, and rich enough to give her a good home.”

“But Ernst, I feel certain you will agree with me that there is still one work of art in this room even more beautiful than our exquisite
Frau mit Perlen
.”

Ernst raised his eyebrows in surprise but said nothing. Freddy turned to Teo and kissed him full on the mouth. “This young man, of the mismatched eyes, is more perfect and quite a bit more responsive than anything here.” To Teo he said, “Don't look so shocked. Ernst is a fellow connoisseur.”

He hit Teo squarely on the bum and shepherded him up the stairs, his treasures in tow.

At the front door Freddy removed a small box and an envelope from his work bag and placed them in Ernst's hand. “The documentation and tickets should get you safely to Switzerland, where I suggest you wait until this madness is over.” He opened the box for Ernst, and poked his finger into the contents. “You've got some larger ones and some smaller ones, should fetch almost one hundred thousand francs from the right people. This one little blue diamond is apparently worth half that alone.” He plucked the stone from its bed with his thumb and forefinger, held it to the light and passed it to Teo. After inspecting it carefully, Teo offered it to Ernst, who declined. He laid it in the box next to the others, and Freddy replaced the lid.

“I hope you know something about sewing, you'll really have to hide those things carefully. But keep one or two for bribes if necessary. There's some cash, too, in the envelope,” he said as he let himself out the front door and made his way to the car. He opened the door for Teo, then bounded back up the stairs.

“Good luck, old friend,” he said with emotion as he embraced Ernst Halberstadt and raced back down the steps to the car. He did not look back as they sped out through the park, toward Berlin.

Freddy was brimming with excitement on the trip home. He turned his head frequently to catch a glimpse of the Vermeer on the back seat, and chatted loquaciously. “If I am correct, even our wise friend Ernst does not know how valuable this painting really is. I believe that the
Woman with a Pearl Necklace
is the first in a series of five canvases Vermeer painted in this same room, this same corner, with the same young lady, most often in her glorious gold robe. The action from picture to picture tells a story, for sure, but on a deeper level may even hint at political and social developments in Holland at the time. I'm working on a theory right now.”

The car was waved through a roadblock and Freddy continued.

“In the other paintings, our lady is involved in seemingly domestic occupations. But in ours she is preoccupied, not really paying attention to the necklace at her throat. It's the window that draws our attention, and hers, especially the light from outside. In fact, King Louis XIV of France had at that very time marched on Spanish Holland and the country was in turmoil. The letters our lady is seen writing in the other paintings may well have something to do with that, some sort of espionage. And in our painting there is no map on the wall. In
Woman Playing a Lute Near a Window
, for example, that same wall holds a huge map of Western Europe.

“Look at these,” he said, fishing several sheets of folded paper from his breast pocket, reproductions of paintings. He tossed them onto Teo's lap. “
Woman Playing a Lute Near a Window
,
Lady Writing a Letter
,
Lady with Her Maidservant
,
The Guitar Player
. And now our lady of the pearl necklace. How grand to have found the fifth and last, or rather first, in the set. Do you see, Teo, do you see?”

Teo scrutinized them, then looked to Freddy's new painting on the back seat for some clues.

It was the same woman in each, indeed, in the same buttery cloak. Sometimes she wore her hair in ribbons, sometimes in long curls. Mostly she looked to the left—out a window, at her maid, at someone outside the frame of the painting—but once, taking a break from writing, she gazed directly at the painter with a small smile of recognition. Maybe even complicity.

Teo, however, was not interested in Freddy's theory. In fact, since leaving Halberstadt, only one question had been on his mind. So when, on a particularly dangerous curve that shut Freddy up for a moment and forced him to drive with caution—more for Messieurs Vermeer, Degas and Monet than for their own safety, he knew—Teo turned in his seat to face Freddy and asked, “Were those diamonds real?”

Freddy frowned, and Teo noticed his knuckles, strained and white, on the steering wheel. Then suddenly a pleasant smile spread across his face and he reached to stroke Teo's cheek. Teo turned his head before Freddy's hand could touch him, swinging around in his seat to face the side window.

Later that evening, as Freddy lay deeply sleeping and Teo sat up in bed watching the pearl lady on her easel, Ernst Halberstadt, age fifty-six, art collector and lifelong bachelor, last in a line of four hundred years of German Jews, including a brother killed in the Emperor's service in the Great War, was stopped at Eisleben, not one hundred kilometers from his home on the Havel, and was divested of his diamonds, his tickets, his documents, his hat, his shoes and his clothes, then shot in the back of the head and hurled into a shallow grave with four other hapless travelers.

Chapter 29

A
garbage truck lumbers by. Though the sky is still black she realizes that a new day will be starting soon. The sun will rise again, miraculous and defiant. Pincho has not returned home.

Her body feels violated. Her knees are pressed together, an afghan from the back of the couch is wrapped round her and still she feels defiled. He has not stirred, not so much as crossed one leg over the other. At one point while he was talking she leaned toward him, removed the full glass of water from his cupped hands and placed it in front of him on the table.

She stands, stretches, moves to the window. Cool air enters her in shallow breaths and she wishes she were still smoking. Everything down in the street is as it was yesterday, and the day before.

He picks up his story before she has returned to her place on the sofa.

Chapter 30

M
onths passed, and years, and in spite of the escalating chaos of the world around him Teo's cloistered life was constant and unchanging. He grew accustomed to bombs that fell nightly, as close as Charlottenburg, rattling dishes and glasses and occasionally knocking a painting to the floor. Sometimes he dreamt of, and even prayed for, a bomb in Grunewald, one that would blast away the tall gate holding him captive. He would run down Erbacherstrasse to the Grunewald train station, but there the dream always ended; he had no papers, no money, and he knew his freedom was not good for more than a few hundred meters.

With the decreasing variety and quantity of food, he had less to prepare and with Freddy's more frequent absences, he had less housekeeping to account for. Freddy denied him access to the radio, he was forbidden contact with every human being and had to stay away from windows at all times. Sometimes, deep in the house where he could be certain no one would hear, he would put Lena Horne on the gramophone to recall what it was like to feel something, feel anything:

Alone from night to night, you'll find me,

Too weak to break the chains that bind me,

I need no shades to remind me,

I'm just a prisoner of love.

For one command I stand in wait now,

From one who's master of my fate now,

I can't escape, it's much too late now,

I'm just a prisoner of love.

He was to leave no trace of his presence at any time, lest an impromptu search be conducted. He returned books to their places on the shelf even if he was only walking down the hall to the kitchen for a few minutes. He shared a single toothbrush with Freddy, he dried droplets in the sink and hid the moistened hand towel from view. On one frightening occasion he had heard Freddy making a commotion at the front gate and looked out in time to see him entering noisily in the company of two uniformed officers. Freddy had fumbled long enough with the lock in the front door to enable Teo to shimmy into a tiny space behind the pantry, his appointed hiding place. The men stayed for an hour, in spite of Freddy's mixture of reassurances and outraged ranting, finding not a single clue that Freddy lived anything but the life of a faithful husband forced away from his family and castle.

Teo began to fancy himself a ghost. Where once his physical presence, his dancer's physique, had been the focus of his world, now he paid no attention to his body at all. His solid muscles slackened, his pliancy waned. He glided lightly from room to room, even dust lay undisturbed in his wake. He spoke rarely, either to himself or to Freddy, when he was around. He no longer fantasized or dreamed, elaborate plans to murder Freddy and escape the house in disguise drifted away like so much smoke. His expression carried the look of a man once stunned, now jaded.

For he was now, indeed, a man. He had passed eighteen, nineteen, twenty in this secluded villa in Berlin. Had Freddy not insisted, Teo would have let his hair grow long and unkempt, would not have bothered to shave the new whiskers that crowded his narrowing face. He was maturing, no longer the fawnlike boy who had come from Copenhagen to dance for the Führer. He was taller now, fully as tall as Freddy. Hair sprouted on his chest, but this, too, Freddy demanded he remove.

His twenty-first birthday passed but he could not recall ever having reached twenty. He barely remembered his family, now so many years distant though really, he hoped, still only a pleasant day's drive over the wheat plains of northern Central Europe. The Sonnenfeld family had scattered from his mind like so much ash, though he could still picture Sofie's tapered fingers. His own fingers twitched as he imagined lifting her in the air, her thighs soft and buttery, her skirt fluttering in his face.

Never, ever, did he revisit the Berlin Staatsoper or his dance these days. He would have been unmoved to know that the theater, only a few kilometers to the east of him, was now an annex of Nazi headquarters or that the stage on which he had danced the dance that had changed his life now held a printing press that printed many of the millions of flyers and manifestos that fluttered from German airplanes and rained down upon Paris, Prague, his own Warsaw. It wasn't that he had forgotten, it was that for Teo that evening, that theater, that dance no longer existed. Their memory had been expunged. Where once he had dreamt of escape, had imagined daily the scaling of the gate of his prison, the cool unobtrusive walk through the streets of Berlin, the slow hay wagons that would convey him to Warsaw or Copenhagen, now his imagination prevented him even from passing through the locked front door of this villa.

On his twenty-second birthday, a cold gray morning in the month of February 1944, in a small window of time between massive British air raids and massive American air raids on Berlin, Teo prized open the French doors to the small verandah over the front entrance to the house. He could smell Freddy on him, smeared across his skin like an ointment. Teo had not recognized the date until Freddy presented him with a tiny packet of chocolates wrapped in green tissue paper and tied with a bow, all hard to come by in Berlin, and a risk: what would Oberstleutnant von Edelwald, whose wife was a world away in the mountains near Salzburg, need with a sentimental packet of sweets?

Teo held the packet of chocolates in his hand as he stepped onto the verandah in the cold daylight, dressed only in trousers and shirtsleeves. He unraveled the satin bow, let the tissue paper flutter in the wind, watched the leaf-green sheet lift high into the trees and catch on a thin twig. He lifted the lid of the box, selected a chocolate and sent it soaring over the gate into the street. Two boys running by noticed the chocolate as it landed, pounced to pick it up. “Idiot, you've smashed it,” said one to the other. Teo threw another, which hit one of the boys on the side of his head. He stooped to retrieve the chocolate. Both boys looked up at Teo standing on the verandah.

He stared down at them, wordless. He threw another chocolate, then another, and several more boys appeared. By the time two more chocolates rained down on them, general mayhem had broken out, five boys were swinging fists at one another. A whistle sounded from up the street and two Freikorps officers appeared. They pulled the boys apart. They asked no questions, but the evidence of Teo's presence was long gone, the chocolates either consumed and digested or smashed into the sidewalk. The Freikorps men did not look up to discover Teo in his perch, but one of the boys peered at him over his shoulder as he was being dragged off.

Teo sat waiting all afternoon for a knock at his gate. He listened, that evening, for a pounding at the door. None came.

Freddy spoke rarely to Teo of the war; Teo was left to gather scattered crumbs of his conversation, collect hints dropped on the pillow as Freddy drifted off to troubled slumber. Sometimes he would tiptoe down the stairs once Freddy was sleeping soundly, on the off chance that Freddy had left a communiqué or even a newspaper on his desk. The war had been raging for so long that sometimes Teo could not remember what peacetime was like, what it meant to cross a street or sip hot chocolate in a café. It seemed as though the war would last forever.

In bed one late August morning that year, nearly five years to the day since Teo had arrived in Berlin, Freddy told him that the German army had been forced out of Paris by the English and the Americans. “It's the beginning of the end,” he said. He told him how Rome was now in Allied hands, how the Russians were advancing from the east, how Hitler had nearly been killed in an assassination attempt just one month earlier. “That may have sped up the inevitable.” In a whisper he added, “It would have been a blessing. How could he think he could fight the whole world and carry out this ridiculous Final Solution at the same time? There simply aren't enough resources for everything all at once.”

Teo turned on his side to face Freddy. “Final solution to what?” he asked.

Freddy tried to pull him in close, to gather him to his chest, but Teo resisted. “Final solution to what?” he asked again.

At first it seemed to Teo that Freddy was in pain; he had never seen his face contort in such a way. Then Freddy began to sob heavily, burying his face in Teo's neck. He cried and cried, his heaving body disconsolate. Teo lay still until the sobbing ended and Freddy was breathing normally.

“Final solution to what?” he said quietly to the ceiling.

Freddy lifted himself on one elbow in order to look into his face. “Teo, my teddy, my lovely boy. Tell me just once you love me. Tell me that when this awful, awful war has ended you will forgive me, tell me you won't leave me. I need you, Teo, I need you beside me. I can't imagine …” He began to cry again, collapsing onto Teo. Teo let him spend his crying, then slipped out from under Freddy and away from him, as far away inside the house as he could possibly get.

After that, Teo was hungry for news and took every measure to wrest it away from Freddy. Once or twice he was raped for his efforts, but far more often he played on Freddy's fatigue and his desperate obsession and was successful at trading secrets for sex. That was how in September he learned of the liberation of Brussels, in October the Allied occupation of Athens, in November, the sinking of the
Tirpitz
, Germany's only surviving forty-two-thousand-ton battleship, which the Allies had been after continuously for eighteen months. He enjoyed this new power, felt good about being reciprocated for what he had been forced to give away for so long. He enjoyed, too, Freddy's self-loathing at paying for favors and his constant, painful turmoil.

Less than two weeks into 1945, Freddy came home early, just after dark, ripping off his uniform on the stairs as he sped Teo up to the bedroom. “You're mine tonight, my love. The Russians have captured Warsaw.”

Teo stopped. “Warszawa?” he asked in Polish.

“Yes, yes, your Warsaw,” Freddy said, now rapidly stripping to his underwear. “The Warsaw where you lost your first tooth and where you began to dance and where your body blossomed into ravishing adolescence.” They tussled briefly as Teo resisted, but Freddy was aflame, strong and alert as he had not been in months. He twisted Teo's arm behind his back and pressed him roughly to the wall. “You wanted to play it this way, now pay up.”

Teo reached blindly behind him, grabbed Freddy's flesh where he could and squeezed hard. “This may be your last chance,” Teo spat through clenched teeth.

Teo saw little of Freddy after that. With constant bombing in Berlin and frontline officers falling regularly and being replaced by others, Freddy was promoted to more serious intelligence work, rapidly rising from Oberstleutnant to Oberst, Generalmajor and finally Generalleutnant in the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence. He was meant to sleep at headquarters but would bribe the guards, taking advantage of the general chaos that was descending on them all, and straggle into bed next to Teo at two or three in the morning, only to leave again before dawn. He no longer begged for sex, he just lay next to Teo and held him, wrapped himself around and over the young man as if trying to absorb him into his every pore. Sometimes Teo would awaken to the light of a lantern and find Freddy staring at him, not touching him at all. Freddy's eyes, full of tears, would plead with him then, but Teo would turn over and feign sleep. Once he heard Freddy singing, weakly, to himself: “
Who'll take my place in your heart when I'm gone? … There is no one who will love you like I do.
” Teo no longer worried that Freddy might harm him.

In mid-April Freddy wandered in late one evening looking dazed. He'd attended a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic playing Bruckner's Fourth Symphony. At the exits, members of the Hitlerjugend had handed out free cyanide capsules. “It's all so surreal,” he told Teo, incredulous. “The Russians are closing in on Berlin, but my job now is to organize a wonderful party for the Führer's fifty-sixth birthday.” He gazed at Teo wildly but did not seem to see him. “A party. With champagne and a cake. Hah! A celebration! And music! But who will play for us? All the best musicians were Jewish, but there are no Jews in Berlin anymore, no Jews in Germany.” Now he was looking at Teo, seeing him. “You, my friend, may be the last one for all we know. You've made it, you know, because I've kept you here safe with me. You can't ever forget that.”

“I won't,” said Teo coldly. “Ever.”

On the day following Hitler's birthday, Berlin lost its gas and electricity. Freddy was only home for an hour or two each day. And then, on the night of April 25, Freddy did not come home at all. He flew into the house late the next morning, a warm and sunny Thursday, his shirttails loose and flapping from his trousers. “The Americans and the Russians have met, they're one hundred twenty kilometers south of here, at Torgau.” He ran about the house collecting papers. “I'll be back for you in a few hours, we'll make a break for the north, try our chances outside Berlin. In the meantime, take as much of the art down to the room underneath the garden shed as you can. Just try to put the paintings on furniture, keep them off the ground.” He was out the door before Teo could respond, then a second later barged back in. “Keep the Degas dancing boy and the Vermeer up here, we'll take them with us.” He tossed the keys to the shed to Teo and was gone.

Teo spent several hours hauling and arranging the works of art, and his shoulders were sore from the effort. He packed what few clothes he owned and set his suitcase beside the door, but years of keeping himself hidden took their toll and he stashed the suitcase in a closet. He could hear commotion in the street, and sometimes passersby would shake the sturdy iron garden gates, but mostly Teo sat immobile, staring at the small statue of a boy dancing.

Teo awoke in his chair in the middle of the night, the house completely dark. He lit a lantern and walked from room to room. There was no sign that Freddy had been there. The noise in the streets grew louder the next day, and still Freddy failed to return. By Sunday Teo knew Freddy would not be coming back. As the afternoon sun fell in the sky, Teo toured the perimeter of the house and scouted the garden shed for any implements that could help him. Back inside, waiting for dark, he collected portable valuables—Freddy's monogrammed cuff links, a gold cigarette lighter, a fountain pen, and on an impulse, his Bournonville ballet slippers; he did not look for money or his real documents, knowing he would find neither—then as soon as the city had sunk into darkness he dragged a stepladder, several planks and a thick rope out to the tall chestnut tree at the front corner of the garden, nearest the gate, and set to work. From the top of the stepladder he threw the rope over the lowest, sturdiest branch he could reach, then descended and moved the ladder up close to the gate and positioned a plank where he would be able to reach it when he swung from the tree; the idea was to lay the plank over the spearlike tips of the garden gate that would otherwise impale him. Even with occasional pauses as military vehicles lumbered past, the whole operation did not take long to arrange thanks to the extinguished streetlamps, but the execution was considerably more difficult. Teo spent hours swinging on the rope. His hands were raw from the rough hemp, he smashed himself repeatedly into the gate and was bruised on the right and left, and several times, after successfully scaling the top, setting the plank in place and attempting to climb onto it, the plank slipped and he caught the tip of the spear. At one o'clock he went back into the house to rest, since his arms were shaking so that he could no longer hold the rope. He did not awaken until after dawn and was forced to postpone his escape until that evening.