Excerpt: The Life Of Objects
The smiling
brother and sister who were at Christmas lunch left for Spain at the end
of March, hoping to make their way to Algiers. Dorothea was angry when
she discovered that Felix had given them the exit visas, perhaps
imagining that they themselves might one day use them. It was the only
quarrel I ever knew them to have — whether to fly to safety or to stay
at Lowendorf. Once Felix gave away the passes, it would be difficult for
the Metzenburgs to leave the country. Kreck told me that Dorothea had
considered for a moment going to Copenhagen, where she had cousins, but
the Nazis invaded Denmark the first week of April, and she did not
mention it again.
When a family of smiling gypsies appeared in the stable yard, Frau Schmidt flung open a kitchen window and screamed, "
Raus, ihrSchweine, oderichlasseeuchverprugeln!"
Get out, you swine, or I'll have you thrashed. The gypsies did not
bother to answer or even to look at her, sauntering down the avenue,
followed by Felix's dogs.
When I saw
that one of the boys carried Bessie, Felix's favorite brown-and-white
spaniel, I put down my work and rushed after them. When the boy saw me,
he gave a loud laugh and threw Bessie high into the air. She fell on the
grass unharmed and I was able to grab her collar, but the other dogs
ran after the gypsies, ignoring my command to heel. When, a few minutes
later, the dogs came yelping into the yard, there were only two of them.
It was uncommon to see strangers at Lowendorf, but workers from Poland, many of them young and wearing the letter
P
on their clothes, had begun to appear in the village soon after the war
began, headed for Ludwigsfelde and other nearby cities. The conscripted
foreign workers, sent to work on the land when the farmers were
mobilized, were tormented by the farmers' children, and the farmers'
wives gave them only a portion of the meager rations allotted the
workers by the government. Some of them soon escaped to find their way
home, but others came to the Yellow Palace after dark for food. Felix
instructed Kreck to give them cheese, bread, and beer. Fortunately there
was enough for everyone. Cows had begun to disappear mysteriously from
the village, and it was growing hard to find good. When Caspar came upon
bits of hide from Felix's prize Friesians, he lost his head, running
across the park with the reeking skins in his hands. Alarmed by his
cries, we rushed into the stable yard. "People are hungry," Felix said
quietly as he led Casper to the pump to wash his hands.
Soon
after this, Felix asked Kreck how much food was held in reserve at
Lowendorf. Along with their treasure, the Metzenburgs had brought
champagne and wine, Turkish tobacco, gramophone records, and books from
Berlin, but not much food, relying on the countryside to supply the
needs of the estate. A levy of grain, meat, and poultry was by law sent
each month to the army, with rapid and dire punishment for hoarding,
resulting in a shortage of food, with inevitable speculation, even in a
small village like Lowendorf. The quality of food was beginning to
suffer (flour mixed with sawdust).
Kreck
reported that we had stores of rice, potatoes, salt, dried fruit,
cheese, flour, jam, and vegetables (not much coffee, sugar, or oil),
and, of course, the wine from the old baroness's cellar. There was
enough animal fodder, hay and oats to last to the next harvest.
***
The
village women engaged by Dorothea as maids stopped coming to the house
that spring, and the old men who worked as grooms and gardeners
disappeared. I began to help in the kitchen and in the laundry, and
Caspar and I worked in the garden. In Ballycarra, I'd swept the house,
washed dishes, and made beds, but I was not used to working outside. I
soon discovered that I preferred it to other work. As I bent to lift a
basket of potatoes or reached to hang sheets on the line, I could feel
the strength streaming through my arms and down my back, and it made me
happy.
A certain amount of time was
necessary to prepare dinner, given the numerous ways to cook and, what
was perhaps more important, to present root vegetables. I learned from
Schmidt six recipes for potatoes (which for an Irishwoman is something).
Caspar's ferret caught rabbits, and I learned to skin and clean them.
We bottled fruit from the orchard and hid the jars in the basement.
Roeder,
who'd made it clear that any responsibility other than caring for
Dorothea would be met with resentment, was soon worn down by the simple
fact that she, too, required nourishment — I noticed that she was
willing to perform any task deemed sufficiently refined for one in her
position. Shelling peas fell into this category, as did watering the
topiary on the terrace and making toast, although scouring pots,
cleaning the stove, or washing sheets did not qualify. As she wore black
lace gloves at all times, I had never seen her bare hands, and I still
didn't see them.
Kreck tended the door,
although there were no longer many visitors, and saw to the general
running of the house, as well as serving at table with Caspar's
assistance (Caspar, to Kreck's begrudging admiration, was a flawless
servant). I offered to polish the parquet floors, which seemed only to
require me to skate soundlessly through the rooms, arms clasped behind
my back, feet wrapped in pieces of old carpet, but Kreck refused my
help, perhaps because he liked to skate himself.
Kreck
was also in charge of the ration books. Each citizen of the Reich was
meant to receive seven ration cards a month, but the number of calories
was continually reduced, the cards difficult to obtain and frequently
unavailable. Blue was for meat; yellow for cheese, milk and yoghurt;
white for jam and sugar; green for eggs; orange for bread. Pink was for
rice, cereal, flour, tea, and coffee substitutes. Purple was for sweets,
nuts, and fruit. Seafood was impossible to find because of the mining
of coastal waters and the war in the Atlantic. The coffee substitute,
called nigger sweat, was made of roasted acorns, and we counted
ourselves fortunate when Kreck could find it.
***
On
the tenth day of May, the Germans violated the neutrality of Holland,
Belgium, and Luxembourg in a surprise attack led by the Tank Corps, with
a view to invading France at its weakest point. On the thirteenth, as
anticipated, the German army crossed the Meuse and entered France. In
June, we heard the news that Italy had joined the war on the side of the
Axis, which confirmed to some, although not to Felix, that the rapid
defeat of England and France was imminent. Thousands of Jews who had
managed to leave Germany were arrested and sent to work camps.
Not
a week passed when something did not arrive from the Metzenburgs'
friends in Berlin for Felix to hide. Silver teapots and rolled canvases
were easily managed, but chairs and tables — even an organ on a wagon
drawn by two weary horses — were more difficult (Felix sent the organ
back to Berlin with his regrets). Kreck, convinced that we were
surrounded by enemies, refused to hire boys from the village and Caspar
unloaded the treasure before wrapping it in canvas and packing it in
metal-lined trunks. They were like actors on a stage, illuminated by
lanterns, as Kreck would only allow Caspar to empty the wagons after
dark, pacing and waving his arms (I once heard Kreck say, "This is a
very inferior Reubens, my dear"). It soon became necessary for Felix to
draw a map of the location of all the buried and hidden treasure, the
Metzenburgs' as well as that of their friends, which he kept in his
waistcoat pocket.
***
The
summer was unusually hot, with frequent thunderstorms. Hundreds of
redhead smews arrived on the river and I made sketches of them for Mr.
Knox.
When I could find time, I worked
in the library, packing books. Shortly before tea, Kreck would arrive to
change the blotting paper on the desks. The mother of FrauMetzenburg
had been abruptly exiled to Lowendorf in 1919, according to Kreck,
thanks to a careless maid who'd forgotten to change the paper. Herr
Schumacher had held the compromising blotter to a mirror in order to
read the letter his wife had written that morning to her lover, and
Kreck did not want it to happen again. His moustache made him look as if
he were always smiling, a deception that fooled me for some time, and I
couldn't tell if he was teasing me.
I'd
discovered that before coming to Lowendorf, Herr Elias had been a
teacher at the Youth Aliyah School in Berlin, where he had prepared
Jewish children for emigration to Palestine, teaching Hebrew and Zionist
history. After Kristallnacht, Felix, who'd met Herr Elias through a
dealer in rare books, had arranged for him to leave Berlin to teach at
Lowendorf. The village children, whose idea of a Jew was a man with
horns, had quickly grown attached to Herr Elias, who lived in the
village, perhaps because he played music for them on his gramophone, and
fed them.
I was surprised one evening
by a small black bear in a ruffled skirt that had strolled away from
some Hungarians busy stealing fruit in the orchard. Fortunately, she was
tame, and when I turned to run, she did not chase me.
***
When
I spoke to the Metzenburgs, I addressed them as Herr Felix and Frau
Dorothea, but that summer they began to call me Maeve, rather than Miss
Palmer. Felix preferred the company of as many people as possible, and I
was occasionally asked to join them in the dining room. I wasn't asked
if guests were expected, but visitors had become rare at Lowendorf. The
Metzenburgs' isolation was difficult for Felix, accustomed as he was to
brilliant conversation (or so I imagined), if not the distraction of
sophisticated companions, but Dorothea did not seem to mind it at all. I
seldom saw her. During the day, she drove to the village to visit the
sick, taking them clothes and medicine, and to call on the old people
who'd been left behind, often without food or money, when their sons
were sent to the front. I'd noticed that a house, a dog, a child, or
even a crisis often enabled, if not compelled, people to remain
together. It gave them, among other things, a subject. I was not the
Metzenburgs' subject, but I provided an easy distraction for them while
they learned to be alone. It was not my conversation that was sought,
but my presence, which both inhibited and stimulated them.
I
was a bit stiff at first, and always five minutes too early in the
dining room, having raced to change my clothes after I helped Caspar and
Schmidt to prepare dinner (the first night, I caught Dorothea staring
at Inez's black dress, trying to remember where she'd seen it before).
It didn't take long to learn that it was considered bad luck to hand a
saltcellar to someone rather than to place it before him, and that one
did not say "God bless" at the start of a meal. If, for some reason, you
had to leave the table, you did not do so without first asking to be
excused. You did not drink tea with dinner, as did my mother. You did
not use your napkin to wipe anything other than your mouth, as did my
father. You did not eat with animals on your lap, as did some of the
Metzenburgs' friends (I didn't count Mr. Knox and his gull, who always
took tea with us).
The Metzenburgs kept
to their vow not to speak at night about the war, talking instead about
books and paintings, or the care of the estate — the weirs needed to be
cleaned and the fields planted (there was no seed and no one to plant
it), but most of the time they, too, were silent. When they spoke to
friends on the telephone, they used a code, grinning slyly, that seemed
alarmingly obvious to me — horses meant England, chickens meant Germany,
peacocks meant France, bears meant Russia — but fortunately there
seldom were telephone calls.
They often listened to the gramophone, perhaps a recording from 1936 of
Der Rosenkavalier, or Karajan conducting Straus. When Dorothea said that Strauss wrote
EinHeldenleben
(we were listening to it for the second night in a row) after a quarrel
with his wife, the jarring notes reminiscent of his wife's voice, Felix
asked her where in the world she heard such nonsense. He thought it
very romantic of her to countenance everything that she heard. As he
believed that things could be made perfect, which was to me the most
romantic idea of all, his condescension seemed unjust. I waited for
Dorothea's answer, but she was silent, bent over a book on Japanese moss
gardens. "It was Strauss," Felix said as an afterthought, "who
expressed his gratitude to the Führer for his interest in art." He
paused. "It presents a conflict, of course, but there are greater ones."
Most
nights, however, we listened to dance music. I looked forward to it,
the songs going through my head all the following day. I was fond of the
French heartthrob Jean Sablon, especially his song "Two Sleepy People."
And Lys Gauty, whose song "La Chaland qui passe" made me sad (Felix
noticed its effect on me and pointed out that it was a song about a
barge). Felix preferred Adam Aston, particularly when he sang "Cocktails
for Two" in Polish, and I wondered if it reminded him of a love affair,
or two. Once, while listening to
The Threepenny Opera, music banned by the Nazis, Felix and Dorothea rose with a smile at the start of "Wie Man SichBettet" and danced to it.
When it was time for the news, Dorothea preferred a program on Berlin radio called
Atlantis.
It was very popular, perhaps because it featured gossip about the
Nazis, and it left her less frightened than the other broadcasts. There
were frequent reports of Eva Braun's brother-in-law and of
Reichsmarschall Göring, who liked to entertain foreign diplomats while
wearing gold leather shorts, his toenails painted red. Felix said that
the program clearly had many informants, as the scandal was often only a
day or two old, and almost always accurate, which made me wonder how he
knew.
It was after an evening of
listening to music with Felix and Dorothea that I slipped the amber
cigarette holder, the silver dish, the gloves, and the pen that I'd
hidden in my room into a drawer of a desk in the library, keeping only
Felix's batiste handkerchief.
The author of the PEN/Faulkner award-winning War Dances
combines his classic short stories with new ones in an anthology that
features donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines and marriage.
