In the new year, Dorothea engaged some women and old men from the village to work as laundresses, kitchen maids, and gardeners. I was put to work in the library, helping Herr Elias to separate those books collected by Dorothea’s mother from Herr Elias’s own rare and valuable books. There was a gramophone in the library as well as in the drawing room and in Felix’s dressing room, and Herr Elias played music as we worked, beginning the day with Dido and Aeneas and ending with Django Reinhardt.
Although I was sometimes asked to mend a torn curtain hem or one of Felix’s jackets (Caspar too busy dusting books), the making of lace was never mentioned. I’d once thought of nothing but lace (and of escape, the two linked in my mind). I’d seen patterns everywhere—in Mr. Knox’s handwriting, in nests, in the wings of a mayfly and the scales of a trout—and I felt uneasy without a piece of lace in my hands. I often dreamed that I had unraveled a piece of lace in the park, the white silk strung through the trees like a web. My hands, no longer sore and swollen, seemed to belong to a stranger.
Aside from the works of Karl May, many of Frau Schumacher’s books were about horses or missionaries, and many of them were in English. I sometimes took books to my room—Oil for the Lamps of China, The Painted Veil, and The Bridge of Desire—books that were a revelation after George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell. In an attempt to be friendly, I asked Roeder (she was on her way from church in the village and seemed slightly less disdainful than usual) if she’d like to read a book from the library, but she said that she found the Book of Life entirely sufficient for her needs. I disliked her intensely (I worried at first that she’d notice, until I realized that she didn’t care in the least). Kreck told me that she had inherited her position as lady’s maid from her own mother, who had served Dorothea’s mother for sixty years until her death. Her many fears were as real to her as the Almanach de Gotha. When she came upon a thorn bush in which the carcasses of small birds and frogs were impaled, she announced that a spell had been cast on the Yellow Palace, hinting that the foreign princess, as she called Inéz, had been practicing black magic again. She refused to believe me when I explained that the little corpses were merely the leftovers of the greedy shrike, kept for another day’s feast, and she took to wearing two gold crosses around her neck.
When Herr Elias asked me to tell him a story in German, Caspar, who somehow contrived to be in the library each afternoon during my lesson, noticed my reluctance and quickly offered to tell a story in my place. Herr Elias said that he would like to hear Caspar’s story, but he still expected me to take my turn. A grinning Caspar stood before us, hands clasped at his waist, and began to speak.
“I’ve been hunting in the Night Wood all my life, first using a slingshot made by my late beloved father and later a rifle given to him by Frau Schumacher in gratitude for saving one of her dogs from drowning. We weren’t starving—my father died from wounds suffered in the Great War when I was ten years old—but my mother relied on the rabbits and birds I brought home to feed us. Most of the game at Löwendorf had been killed off before I was born, and the one remaining gamekeeper spent his days sleeping in a forester’s hut. I went into the woods whenever I liked. When the coachman, who had quarreled with my father over politics, caught me one night with a bag of squirrels, I was sure I’d be beaten, but after only a few blows, he took me by the ear to Frau Schumacher, who then and there made me her new gamekeeper. It seems she had a madness for roast squirrel.”
“It’s the beginning of a fairy tale,” I said in German, with the help of a dictionary. To my relief, our time had come to an end. I could conjugate verbs and even recite some poetry, but I didn’t like to talk about myself—it was only thanks to Mr. Knox that I had conversation in English. As I hastily gathered my books, Herr Elias said to me, “Don’t think that you’ll escape every time, Fräulein,” and he and Caspar had a good laugh, irritating me, as I couldn’t imagine that Caspar had understood him.
The next day, Herr Elias lit a cigarette, and the two men (Caspar arriving just in time) settled themselves at the library table. Kreck brought a pot of black-currant tea and seed cake each afternoon, and Herr Elias poured himself a cup of tea.
I hadn’t slept, writing and then learning my speech by heart, and I was a bit shaky. I pushed back my chair and began. “I was taught to fish by Mr. Hugh Knox when I was a child, using my grandfather’s salmon flies, and his bamboo rod, which was nine feet long and too heavy for me. Mr. Knox would cast into the Ridge Pool and I would guide the line between my fingers as he slowly turned the reel. Later, he made a rod for me that was more suitable to my size and I began to catch small muddy trout of my own.” I paused for breath. Some of the vocabulary was difficult—Lachsfliegen, kleine schlammige Forellen, geeignet—and I was uncertain of my grammar, my Irish accent rendering some of the words incomprehensible, but both my tormentors looked pleased, even interested, and I continued. “My father and mother had no interest in the river. We lived in rooms above my father’s shop. My grandmother died of consumption when my mother was a girl, and she lived in fear of catching the disease. I wasn’t allowed to play with the Catholic children, and my only companion was Mr. Knox. My mother was relieved to have me taken off her hands, and I was grateful to be gone. When I returned from my walks with Mr. Knox, she would ask if I’d been near the village children, and I would say that I had not, even when I’d passed them in the road. I often imagined what it would be like if the germs killed my mother. I would live with Mr. Knox and I would be happy.”
Caspar and Herr Elias were no longer lounging in their chairs but sat with straight backs, staring at me with solemn faces. Herr Elias’s tea was untouched. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Herr Elias said, “Thank you, Fräulein. Sie überraschen mich immer wieder. You surprise me again and again.”
All that Caspar said was “Ich wusste nicht, dass Sie angeln Können.” I didn’t know you could fish.
My reading that summer, thanks to Herr Elias, who loaned me novels (I’d quickly grown bored with Frau Schumacher’s books), had grown to include stories that Mr. Knox would have considered very exotic. Other than the fairy tales, there’d been nothing but English and Irish books in Mr. Knox’s library, with few German characters.
I noticed that many of the young men in Herr Elias’s books begin their careers with love affairs with older women—Rousseau’s Confessions, The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma (his aunt!), and Lost Illusions, among others. When I asked Herr Elias about this, he said that it was what they did in France. When I reminded him that The Charterhouse of Parma is set in Italy, he said, “There, too.”
At his suggestion, I read Effie Briest (slowly and with his help), in hope of better acquainting myself with German literature. The book made me long for a lover of my own and, even more, I longed for the wiles I imagined necessary to hold such a lover. The story made me wish that I were beautiful. Herr Elias was often in my dreams (I no longer dreamed about lace), so you might say that we spent quite a bit of time together.
Like Felix, Herr Elias had a passion for music, and I began to make a tray cloth for him with a punto in aria pattern of musical instruments—it was the first lace I’d sewn in some time—but I had to put it aside when Dorothea asked me to make a pair of trousers for her. I knew little about sewing clothes, but I began by taking her measurements. I was unaccustomed to seeing women in their underwear (she stood calmly in her peach silk knickers). It wasn’t her lack of modesty that made me uncomfortable but her evident disdain. She seemed to be defying me to blush, and I’m pleased to say that while it was a struggle, I did not oblige her.
On the first day of September, a distraught Kreck rushed into the sewing room to tell me that Germany had invaded Poland. He said that Herr Felix was waiting to speak to us in the library. I rose immediately, my apron dotted with blood—I’d pricked myself when he told me the news—and followed him downstairs.
Herr Felix was at his desk. Dorothea was not there. Schmidt, Caspar, and Roeder stood together, and Kreck and I took our places beside them. Felix said that we were free, of course, to return to our homes now that Germany was at war. He understood that I might be particularly alarmed to find myself at Löwendorf at such a perilous moment. He was relieved that he and Frau Metzenburg had left Berlin, especially as some of their friends had begun to disappear simply because their names were in the wrong address books. Although his voice was calm, I noticed that his hands were shaking when he picked up a newspaper he’d been reading. There appears to be a new law, he said. “Forbidding Jews to own—” He stopped to read directly from the paper. “Radios and—”
Roeder interrupted him to say that her place was with Frau Metzenburg. Schmidt and Caspar also said that they did not wish to leave Löwendorf. Kreck, whose face was wet with tears, said nothing, and Felix turned to me.
Caspar, his blue eyes narrowed with expectation, nodded at me in encouragement, but Roeder had difficulty concealing the smirk of superiority that implied that she’d taken me for a bolter from the start. Schmidt seemed distracted, gazing in wonder at the row of Meissen pagodas. When I said that I, too, chose to remain at Löwendorf, Caspar dropped his head in relief. Felix, impassively prepared for a different answer, thanked me. He said that he would do all that he could to keep us safe. As we left the library, Kreck took me aside to say that Herr Metzenburg had many friends in the diplomatic corps and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that because of this, he knew things that the rest of us could not possibly know. He said that I should do whatever Herr Felix asked me to do, no matter how implausible.
Later, when I took up my sewing, my hands, too, were shaking, and I was unable to thread my needle. I understood nothing of Germany and the forces that had brought her to war. For the first time, I regretted the hours I’d spent reading French novels, rather than the newspaper. Although I sometimes read the paper from Hamburg (it was one of the German exercises given me by Herr Elias), I’d been more interested in the views of my companions than in news of the world. That Felix had declined the offer of an important post abroad seemed to indicate his opinion of the Reich. I knew that Kreck had been with Herr Felix since Felix was at university, and that he’d lost his eye in 1916 in service to the emperor (he’d said more than once that he had no intention of losing his other eye for his own or any other country). Fräulein Roeder, who’d tended Dorothea since she was sent as a girl to live with her grandfather in London, did not hesitate to express her admiration of Hitler’s frequent speeches, particularly the one in which the Führer said that the geniality, diligence, and steadfastness of the German people would be harnessed for works of peace and human culture, but Roeder did not exhibit any signs of the Führer lovesickness that I’d noticed in other German ladies (when she said that many Nazis were, in fact, practicing Christians, Felix closed his eyes, his hand on his forehead, and nodded). Her favorite nephew had been mobilized that winter, and she frequently sent him packages—I saw her in the village when I was posting my letters to Mr. Knox.
I doubted if Caspar supported the Nazis. He was infuriated by the stories he heard of Nazi brutality. His older brother was in the Wehrmacht. His younger brother had been arrested for distributing political pamphlets and taken to Plötzensee prison, and there had been no word of him for weeks. I was from a country that declared itself neutral, and my opinions were naturally of little interest to anyone. As for Dorothea, I had no idea what she thought.
My mother liked to claim that a gossip was merely someone who took a healthy and even gainful interest in life, which, of course, allowed her to say whatever she liked, but the gossip in my village was not like the gossip at Löwendorf. If a person managed to escape from Ballycarra, he fled to Philadelphia or London or Sydney, rarely to be seen again—it mattered little to him what people said about him. Few strangers stopped in Ballycarra—perhaps every generation, a wife or two was brought from a nearby town, but no more than that. Gossip tended to have some truth in it, as nothing could remain hidden for long. Mrs. Cumming’s husband beat her. The doctor was drinking himself to death. At Löwendorf, the opposite was true. Rumors were naturally concerned with matters far more grave than the increasing frequency of Dr. Fiske’s visits to the pub, and nothing could be known for certain.
Although Germany was at war, our life at Löwendorf continued in the same slow fashion. There were moments, however, when I was reminded that we were not as safe as we appeared to be. During a lesson, Herr Elias said that I might want to exercise a certain skepticism in regard to the German words that I was learning—I could begin with Vaterland. When I asked what he meant, he said, “Surely, meine liebe, you know that I am a Jew.” I blushed and said that I had not known that he was a Jew. He said nothing more, and I continued my translation of “Puss ’n Boots.”
It seemed to me that many people, including myself, didn’t know the first thing about Jews—what they believed or how they thought. I often heard women in the village frightening their children with the threat that the Jews would get them if they didn’t do as they were told. When I asked Caspar about this, he shrugged and said that German mothers had always been that way. When I pressed him further, he said that while he himself wouldn’t use such threats, he couldn’t vouch for the trustworthiness of all Jews. When I asked if he could vouch for the trustworthiness of all Germans, he didn’t answer me.
I understood that I lived in a house of spies (I heard Kreck say that it was nothing to him, as we lived in a country of spies), but I also knew that we did not spy for gain or even for our beliefs. We spied because it eased our fear—even though any secrets we might chance to discover were of a domestic nature, and of no possible interest to anyone but ourselves (and often not even then). Roeder told me that Herr Felix had refused to engage any new servants long before the start of the war, after he twice caught footmen listening at doors. They must have looked like kingfishers in their livery of blue tailcoats and gold waistcoats, bent at the waist, heads cocked as they peered through keyholes.
Schmidt watched Kreck. Kreck watched Caspar. Caspar watched me. Roeder watched Dorothea. Dorothea watched Felix. I watched all of them (I was sent one day to Felix’s dressing room when he forgot his riding gloves, and I held his enamel cufflinks, one of them depicting the night sky and its constellations, the other a miniature globe of the world, and slipped one of his batiste handkerchiefs into my pocket before grabbing the gloves and quickly closing the drawer, but I wouldn’t have called that spying). If Herr Felix watched anyone, he was good at concealing it.
When Roeder knocked on the door of the sewing room—I’d finished Dorothea’s trousers and was mending a cushion—I thought at first that she’d come to collect the cap she’d asked me to make for her niece’s baby, rather insultingly offering to pay me in buttons, an arrangement I had declined. She had then offered me cash money, an offer that she also expected me to decline, which I did. She knew that I would make the cap, given the intimacy of the household and our growing dependence on one another. The cap was easy enough to sew, taking me only a few evenings’ work, but I resented every stitch.
She was on her way to evensong at St. Adalbert’s (I could hear the bells). Her undersized black hat, two lace lappets hanging on either side of her whiskered face, turned her into an elderly black hare. She stood in the center of the room, her gloved hands folded across her little bulging belly, and said that she wished to be certain that I understood that Frau Metzenburg’s great-grandmother had not been a Jew, despite the lies spread by the wicked. The Schumachers, who were bankers, had been given a Certificate of True Belief when they converted to the Christian faith at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Frau Metzenburg’s great-grandfather, the old baron, had been financial adviser to Queen Victoria, and her grandmother was by birth a baroness. “There are rumors to this day,” said Roeder, working a loose hatpin into her head, “that Prince Albert himself was the unhappy result of a friendship between his mother and her Jewish chamberlain. A story that I have always refused to believe.” She made the small curtsy she executed whenever she mentioned the royal family of any country, lifting her black dress a few inches from the floor.
I gave her the little cap and she thanked me. She said that Frau Metzenburg was driving to Potsdam in the morning and would like me to accompany her. I was surprised, as Roeder often chose not to tell me when Dorothea asked for me, and I realized that she must had been scolded for her forgetfulness, which would not have improved her disposition.
Inéz stopped at Löwendorf that first Christmas of the war on her way to Munich, where she was hoping to collect her two children to take them to safety in Cairo. I was surprised to learn that she had children, as she had never mentioned them. Count Hartenfels was refusing to let the children leave Germany, and Inéz was dining with Reichsmarschall Göring to ask him to use his influence with her former husband. Felix thought there was a good chance that Göring would help her, as he’d once said that he found it unsportsmanlike to kill children.
As Inéz was superstitious, I was summoned at the last minute to join the Metzenburgs and their guests at Christmas lunch—there were to be fourteen, but a friend driving from Berlin had been delayed (“More like arrested,” Kreck whispered to me). I patted Hungarian water on my less-than-clean hair and put on my best skirt—not good enough, I knew, but I also knew that no one would look at me twice—and hurried to the winter dining room.
An expressionless Kreck, his hands shaking in his white cotton gloves, moved haltingly around the table as he slid plates past the gesticulating guests. Caspar, dressed by Kreck in the footman’s livery, filled glasses with champagne. We were having smoked trout, partridges, potatoes Anna, and brussels sprouts, with apple tart for dessert, everything grown or killed on the estate. In the center of the table, four porcelain pheasants and a large porcelain turkey cock sat in nests of holly. On a sideboard, a rhinoceros, a monkey, a ram, a fawn, and a lion, all in glazed bisque, stood around the tiny silver-and-velvet bed I’d packed in Berlin, patiently waiting for the Christ Child to arrive. On the walls, bunches of mistletoe and rowanberries were joined by swags of oak leaves. At the top of each plate was a small lapis bowl holding a pale green hellebore set in ice that had been shaved to resemble snow. Candles had been lit, as it would be dark by the middle of the afternoon.
I was seated next to Felix’s old tutor from Heidelberg, Herr Professor Sigmund Wasselmann, who shook with cold despite the heat from the enamel stove in the corner. He was so thin that his green jacket with horn buttons looked several sizes too large for him (unlike Caspar, whose chamois breeches were a size too small). Professor Wasselmann, who had stayed at Löwendorf that summer, glanced sternly around the room, his large hands folding and refolding a sheet of blue writing paper. He waited until all of the women were safely in their chairs, then sat down, tucking his large napkin into his collar. The woman on his right, whose name was Mary Barnard according to her place card, and who was dressed in a man’s tweed suit and striped tie, spoke to the professor in Latin.
Don Jaime, a son of the king of Spain, was on my left (Roeder had hurriedly whispered to me that Don Jaime would one day, as Henri VI, be heir to the throne of France, even though he could neither speak nor hear). Across from me was a handsome young man in the uniform of an army staff officer. I saw instantly that he was glamorous. His elegance of form and his nonchalant yet haughty assumption of masculine power were pleasantly disturbing, and I steeled myself to resist him.
Inéz, who was next to the young officer, had spent the night in Berlin. She looked particularly beautiful in a cream wool suit weighted with two large emerald clips. She gleamed across the table at me and said, “My dear, the city is overrun with fortune-tellers. It always happens. I’ve seen it before.” Despite all that Inéz had done for me and, I was sure, for others, I’d begun to feel a bit weary of her. She spoke and moved as if she meant to be admired (she was rarely disappointed), and I’d found myself refusing to attend to her during her brief visits (more like incarnations). I’d begun to wonder if I were envious of her—like most people with charm, she required an atmosphere of adoration to stimulate and satisfy her, and it could be tiring. Before I could answer her, she turned to the officer, her hand resting lightly on his wrist.
On Don Jaime’s other side was Maria Milde, who had arrived with the officer. I’d seen Maria Milde’s movie Winter Carousel in Berlin the year before, and although the story, a musical comedy, was sentimental, I admired Maria Milde very much. I knew that she lived at the Jagdschloss Glienicke near the bridge in Babelsberg because I’d read it in a film magazine (she was being groomed at Ufa Studios as the Reich’s answer to Greta Garbo), which, though censored, was still published for the good of our morale. There was something winning about her, in addition to her beauty—her pinched nostrils gave her a slight look of disgust—and I had to keep myself from staring (Caspar, who hovered behind us, not only did not look at Fräulein Milde, he did not, to my annoyance, look at me—I wasn’t seeking his admiration but his complicity). Her thin lips were the color of lavender—I’d learned from Inéz that lavender lips (she considered it her husband’s only physical flaw) were the sign of an opium addict. As I studied her hair, which was pulled into a silver snood at the nape of her neck, I heard her tell Don Jaime that she lived with ten other young actresses in the castle in Babelsberg. “I’ve decided to be a most unreasonable roommate,” she said with a sly smile, “so that when I am famous, they will already dislike me.” Undeterred by his silence, she said that her ermine stole had been a Christmas gift from the officer, turning to blow him a little kiss across the table, which he ignored. Don Jaime, increasingly agitated, seemed to be reaching a state of near exaltation, which confused me, given his condition.
On the other side of Fräulein Milde was Felix’s lawyer, Hans Koch, with whom Felix had been at school as a boy. I knew Herr Koch, as he came to the Yellow Palace every few weeks, when he and Felix would lock themselves in the library for the day. Herr Koch had difficulty getting Maria Milde’s attention, taken as she was with Don Jaime, and he soon turned to the dark-haired woman on his other side, a journalist named Hilde Meisel. Fraülein Meisel was wearing the chicest hat I’d ever seen—I could tell that even Inéz envied it from her expression when they were introduced. The hat of black tulle, raven feathers, and velvet pompoms did not accentuate her plainness, as sometimes happens, but turned her into a creature of enchantment.
At the end of the table were a husband and wife, Herr and Frau Prazan, cousins of Felix, who had arrived unexpectedly, and sat on either side of him. They were traveling from Hamburg to their estate near Prague and carried letters to Felix from his sister, who had left the country for Argentina. Their arrival made my presence no longer necessary, but no one seemed to notice.
I recognized Count von Arnstadt, who’d come frequently to Löwendorf that autumn. He worked for the Ministry of Information as editor of the Reich’s magazine Berlin-Rome-Tokio. Herr Elias had translated one of the count’s controversial articles for me, entitled “The Third World War,” in which he claimed that should the United States ever enter the war, it would emerge the most powerful nation in the world. He believed that the fury with which Russia and America were bound to clash would be far more threatening to peace than any conceivable conflict among England, the Continent, and Russia.
“Every few days,” I heard Arnstadt say to Dorothea, his face twitching with mischief, “I find myself in the cramped office of the Head of Section, where I am left to study in solitude the Little Friend, which is my name for the log of telephone conversations gathered each week by the Gestapo. Most of it I cannot repeat, as it consists of the highly indiscreet conversations of most of our friends and their lovers. Each Friday, after a most careful reading, I prepare a copy of the transcripts for the Führer—double spaced and in bold type—which is rushed by hand to the Chancellery. He can hardly wait to receive it.” The count seemed careful not to appear in earnest, causing me to wonder if that was why he was considered the most amusing man in Berlin. I thought that his mild mockery of the Gestapo and even the Führer was a sign that he trusted the Metzenburgs and their guests. I also wondered if it were a trap. It was exciting to think that anyone at the table (although perhaps not the professor) might be a spy.
Across from me, Inéz described the dinner that had been given in her honor the night before. Her friend Danielle Darrieux had been there, and they’d danced to Cuban music on the gramophone. Their host, the tireless Japanese ambassador Mr. Oshima, had arranged a shooting match with air guns, and Inéz had won second prize, which was a bottle of Chanel No. 5—Serge Lifar, another guest, had cheated, according to a still-angry Inéz, winning first prize of a bottle of perfume, a powder puff, and a pair of stockings. Later they’d gone to a nightclub in Kurfürstendamm. “A towering Negro woman, the last black left in Berlin, danced with a white horse,” said Inéz.
“I don’t think she means ‘danced,’ ” Herr Koch said mysteriously to Hilde Meisel.
As Inéz described the horse (she found the Negro woman a bit coarse), I felt something brush against my leg. I thought, given the circumstances, that someone might be trying to signal me, and I sneaked a glance under the tablecloth. A slender foot—the toenails painted crimson and encased in a pale silk stocking—darted from between Don Jaime’s shaking knees and disappeared.
Don Jaime, who had been following Inéz’s every gesture with a concentration so intense that I feared he might explode, tried with no success to catch her eye. As she was careful to beguile everyone in sight, I wondered if Spain had offended her by behaving badly to Cuba, then quickly dismissed the idea. Inéz did not take sides. Suddenly, Don Jaime thrust a hand in her direction, interrupting her and compelling her at last to look at him. She waited—we all waited—but Don Jaime was silent.
I’d noticed Professor Wasselmann eyeing Maria Milde’s plate of uneaten food for some time (he was a little drunk), and without thinking, perhaps because Don Jaime was making me nervous, I reached across him to exchange Fräulein Milde’s plate for the professor’s empty plate. To my relief, Fräulein Milde behaved as if it had been her idea, beaming with condescension as the professor whisked the last of her potatoes into his mouth.
The officer (Maria Milde, perhaps in explanation of his rudeness, had announced that he was a Battenberg prince) lit a cigarette with a silver field lighter. Smoke streaming from his mouth, he leaned across the table. “Our Führer,” he said in English, “does not take kindly to princes of the blood like myself in the field, and he would deny us our ancient and honored privilege of dying in battle. Sons of noble families are forbidden to serve at the front, but I have thought of nothing but war since I was a boy. I have been trained for nothing else. Dreamed of nothing else. The Führer has robbed my life of all meaning, while he talks aloud to the portrait of Frederick the Great he keeps at his side.” He pushed back his chair and strode from the table, Maria Milde following him anxiously with her eyes, as Caspar hurried to open the door for him. Don Jaime jumped to his feet and rushed around the table to take the officer’s empty chair, and Inéz, at last, turned to him with a smile, causing Don Jaime to fall back in his chair.
I knew that Felix did not like political talk at the table, but there was little he could do to prevent it. He looked ill at ease, which wasn’t like him. He was inclined to indulge the comfort of others, if only to alleviate his boredom. His politeness, I’d come to realize, served, among other things, to afford him the distance that he preferred and even required. As Kreck carried an apple tart to the table, a young, pleasant-looking couple who I assumed were newlyweds, so intent were they on each other, arrived with shy apologies and sat in two chairs alongside Dorothea. Kreck told me later that they were the children of Felix’s boyhood music teacher, who’d been arrested in Regensburg in November. Felix had arranged for them to travel to Algiers with the exit visas that his friend in the Foreign Office had obtained for him and Dorothea, should they ever need them.
Maria Milde leaned toward Don Jaime. “In my experience,” she said as if imparting a secret, “it is the Dutch and the Norwegians who hate us the most. The French, as I’m sure you know, like us the very best.”
To my relief, I heard Felix’s familiar cultivated voice. “In 1918, when I was twenty years old, I was so ashamed of our country that my father’s death at the Somme was in some ways a relief. If he had survived, I would have held him, along with my uncles and the rest of his generation, responsible for the horror of the war. In those days, we schoolboys no longer trusted our elders who, in any talk of the reasons for our country’s shame, always avoided the truth by claiming that there was nothing they could have done to stop it.” He paused. “When I was older, I realized that schoolboys in England and France and Turkey must have felt just as I did. Some now say that our friends in France yearn for a quick German victory simply because they cannot bear the responsibility of another million killed in battle. We are in the same position as those men we once blamed, only it is we who are at fault, we who are making the same mistakes as our fathers so that our country can bring about another fatal catastrophe. And what is one to do? To leave Germany is inconceivable. All we can know for certain is that the abyss awaits us.”
Even Kreck had stopped moving. No one spoke for a moment, and then I heard Maria Milde ask Don Jaime, “Am I dreaming, or was that potato pie we had for lunch?”
As I looked around the table, I reminded myself that on a dark winter’s day in Ballycarra, just such an afternoon, with film stars, champagne, and handsome princes, had been all that I desired.
After the guests at last left (they stayed for hours, Caspar making several trips to the Pavilion for more wine), I helped Kreck and Caspar to clear the table. I needed Caspar’s help to carry the turkey cock to the pantry where it was put away (Felix told Kreck that it would be the last lunch party at Löwendorf for some time), but I was able to do the rest myself. Under Professor Wasselmann’s immaculate plate, I found a small, folded sheet of blue writing paper. I opened it and read it. I could understand certain words—the words “tank,” “batallion,” and “munition” are the same in English—and I quickly put the note in my pocket. That there really had been a spy at Christmas lunch was exciting. That it was Professor Wasselmann was a shock.
Later that evening, I passed Felix on my way to the sewing room, having vowed at lunch to make a lace dinner dress for myself. When I stopped to thank him, he said, “You see what we do? We celebrate the low, and we long for the past. I’d hoped to be done with deception. My own as well as others.” He was very upset.
“Deception?” I asked.
“That everything will be well for us. That the old world will survive. That it deserves to survive.”
Before I could answer, not that I had an answer, he bid me good night and disappeared down the passage.
The next morning, Kreck brought me a long bundle wrapped in bleached muslin. There was a note tucked into the muslin. It was from Inéz, who had written under an engraved coronet, My dear, as I will be taking my children with me when I leave Munich, I have no room for these—might you not wear them for me? Inside the bundle were two blouses, one of natural raw silk with capped sleeves, the other with tiny pleats of Moroccan crepe, long sleeves, and round pearl buttons. There was a pair of lilac suede gloves, a black suit with a hint of a peplum, a gray pongee suit with a chinchilla collar, a black wool afternoon dress with a wide belt and white faille collar and cuffs, two pairs of stockings (pale, sheer), and a pair of black alligator pumps with rounded toes. Labels were sewn into the seams of the clothes—SCHIAPARELLI, DOUCET, LANVIN—with Inéz’s initials and the date that they had been made for her (I was the same size as Inéz, although smaller in the bust). I fell back on the bed, my new clothes clasped in my arms.
As I slipped on the shoes—they were too big, and I would have to stuff the toes with cotton—I promised never again to criticize her. As I tried on the black suit in the mirror, I swore that I would never again think ill of her or, for that matter, anyone. It was the first time in my life that I’d been given anything so beautiful. I didn’t for an instant believe that she hadn’t room in her luggage.