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 passes, 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 Löwendorf. 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, ihr Schweine, oder ich lasse euch verprügeln!” 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 excited dogs raced after the gypsies, ignoring my command to heel. When, a few minutes later, the dogs ran yelping into the yard, there were only two of them.
It was uncommon to see strangers at Löwendorf, 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 food. When Caspar came upon bits of hide from Felix’s two 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 Caspar to the pump to wash his hands.
Soon after this, Felix asked Kreck how much food was held in reserve at Löwendorf. 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 Löwendorf. 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 wine from the old baroness’s cellar. There was enough animal fodder, as well as 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 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 Rubens, 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 the 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 Frau Metzenburg had been exiled to Löwendorf 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 mustache 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 Löwendorf, 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 work in the library at Löwendorf. 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 Löwendorf. 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 and grandsons 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 Inéz’s black dress, trying to remember where she’d seen it before). It didn’t take long for me 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 Strauss. When Dorothea said that Strauss wrote Ein Heldenleben (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, they 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 Sich Bettet” 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.
Frau Schumacher had given Caspar a gift of an ordinary People’s Radio with both an AM and a shortwave band, which he kept on a special table of its own in his room over the stables. Although people in Ludwigsfelde had been arrested for listening to prohibited radio stations, he was defiant in his devotion to the illegal broadcasts, and he invited me to listen to what he called the real news (as opposed to gossip) on those nights when he was able to find a station.
People had also been arrested for spreading rumors, traveling without permission, and dancing. A young woman in Blankenfelde had been imprisoned for falling in love with a Czech. All the same, I knew that I, too, would dance and fall in love were I given the chance, and I would certainly listen to forbidden broadcasts.
The gun room, its glass cabinets lined with green baize, was next to Caspar’s room (the only guns were two antique rifles, their stocks inlaid with mother-of-pearl). Fishing gear was also kept in the room, and I often used the trout rods, their tips poking from monogrammed holland cases. Caspar found me there one night when he came to look for me—the broadcast from London had already begun—and as he closed the door behind us, said primly that women were customarily not allowed in the gun room.
It took several minutes for Caspar to arrange his room to his liking. He pulled a rush chair to the fire, then to the window, then back to the fire again. He placed a tray with a few walnuts and a pot of verbena tea next to the chair. On the nights when Herr Elias joined us, often arriving after midnight, there was wheat beer as well as tea. Herr Elias liked to sit on the narrow bed that once belonged to the footman. Caspar sprawled across his own bed, his long arms folded behind his head, his arms as white as milk where his sleeves fell away. I kept my eyes on the radio, but sometimes it was difficult. I’d been embarrassed at first to be alone with Caspar, having never before been alone with a man in his bedroom. Although the small room with its low ceiling seemed to encourage confidences, I could think of nothing to say. Soon enough, however, those things that had at first alarmed me—a chamber pot, only partially hidden under the bed, where he kept his slingshots and his collection of fossils, the bed itself, even his clogs—resumed their more prosaic significance, and I was able to listen to the news with composure. I could even have a conversation now and then.
There were many programs from which to choose, but Herr Elias preferred one called Weltchronik, broadcast from Switzerland every Friday by a Professor von Salis. One night as Caspar tirelessly manipulated the dials (the radio was old and often broke down, despite the short lengths of wire inserted through the back panel), he said that before his accident with the otter trap, his dream had been to be a fighter pilot. “Yes,” said Herr Elias, lighting a cigarette from a straw held to the fire. “The Luftwaffe holds the last vestige of élan for us.” At Caspar’s look of interest, he said, “A word we learned in the Great War.” Before Herr Elias could explain, the radio crackled into life, and we listened to a report of the bombing of London. I shakily poured them glasses of beer, but they did not want any. We listened late into the night, the men only leaving the room to visit the lavatory, which I, despite the tea, was still too embarrassed to do.
Sometimes I found Kreck in Caspar’s room, polishing boots while they listened to the radio. They had become friends. I knew that Kreck often saved an egg or a potato for him, and I once found him clutching a sweater that Caspar had left in the library.
Caspar said that the strict laws against the mixing of races had been devised, in part, because the government feared that there was insufficient hatred of the enemy. On the contrary, Kreck said, huffing and puffing, there are at least two kinds of hatred—the lower classes blame the war on rich English lords, and the rich quite rightly blame the peasants of Russia.
In early June, we heard a broadcast on BBC by Winston Churchill, which began with the terrible words “The news from France is very bad. What has happened in France makes no difference to our actions and purpose. We have become the sole champions now in arms to defend the world cause. We shall do our best to be worthy of this high honor.” I left my chair to sit with Caspar at the bottom of his bed, closer to the wireless. He was ashen, and Kreck had left the room.
A few days after Churchill’s speech, Dorothea invited me to swim with her in the river. As I couldn’t swim and didn’t own a bathing suit, I told her that I’d be happy to accompany her, but that I couldn’t go into the water, leading her to believe that I was menstruating, which was a little less shaming than not knowing how to swim.
As we walked across the park, she asked if I would make her an evening gown, perhaps in lace. I was surprised, as she had never shown an interest in lace, despite Inéz’s claim. Although I now and then looked at my books of patterns, I myself had less interest than I once had—what had been romantic in Ballycarra seemed fussy at Löwendorf. What had once beguiled the long days no longer served to distract me. She said that it had been years since she’d had a new dress and she admired the lace dress I’d made for myself. I said that I’d be happy to make it for her. I had wondered why she’d asked me to go with her to the river and I had my answer.
I sat on the bank as she took off her robe. Her body was pale and straight, the bones protruding from her back like bleached twigs. She tucked her hair into a white rubber cap and slipped without a sound into the cold water. With her sleek white cap, black swimming goggles, and black bathing suit, she looked like a spectacled eider—I thought of the noisy tumbling of the Irish girls as they splashed in the river in their summer dresses, the light cotton far more revealing than any swimming costume, and I felt homesick. As I watched her swim slowly across the river, her head turning stiffly from side to side, I heard someone call her name.
Roeder, out of breath, her hand on her heart, was stumbling across the park. She’d come to tell us that the Germans were in Paris.
Felix asked Caspar and Herr Elias if they would carry Frau Schumacher’s harpsichord from the music room to the cellar. Most of the furniture, as well as the paintings and porcelain, had already been removed and buried in the park or hidden. There’d been so much treasure that many things had to be carried across the park to the Pavilion.
While the men measured the doorjamb, I sat at the harpsichord to play the one song that I knew, an air composed by Carolan for my ancestor Frank Palmer. Felix, having returned at the sound of the first tentative notes, unnaturally loud in the empty room, waited politely out of sight until I’d finished. “Well, it isn’t Bach,” he said, not unkindly, as I jumped to my feet.
It was soon determined, to Caspar’s and Herr Elias’s relief, that the door to the cellar was too narrow for the harpsichord, and the men had a glass of schnapps. As I was leaving, Herr Elias stopped me on the stairs to ask if I would mind helping him in the library. A number of Italian quartos in Felix’s collection were going to the bank in Berlin, and he needed my help in packing them.
I followed him to the library, waiting as he removed the parchment folios from their calfskin folders. “I like it here,” I heard myself say. “I mean in this room. And the very idea that it will take me twenty years to read every book.” I realized that I sounded like Felix. It was the sort of thing that he might say. I would never read every book. I couldn’t even read the titles.
I noticed an ink stain on his cuff. He smelled like peaches (the schnapps). He said that one of the manuscripts was Lives of the Philosophers, and the other, its frontispiece an engraving of a swan, its neck tied in a knot, was the Decameron. I wondered if the brush of his fingers as he handed me the folios was accidental, and I felt my face grow warm. He said that he had known that Felix owned the manuscripts, but given the war, he had never dreamed that he would see them. He’d forgotten to turn off the gramophone, and the record went round and round with a faint scratching sound. “Do you dance?” he asked suddenly.
I’d seen Felix and Dorothea dance, although not the fox-trot (when I’d read about the fox-trot in Ballycarra, I’d imagined that it required dainty mincing steps, curled hands held chest high, wrists limp—another of the many things I had wrong). He went to the gramophone to fit the needle into a groove. It was a recording of “Body and Soul” by Benny Goodman. He held out his hand.
Wiping my damp palms against my sides, I stepped (daintily, but without the raised paws) into the center of the room. He placed my hand on his shoulder. He pressed his own hand against the small of my back and pulled me close.
I wasn’t sure that he was familiar with the fox-trot himself. Our faces were so close that it was a relief to be able to stare into the distance, giving me, I fear, an exceedingly dreamy look. I was dreaming! Nothing had prepared me—certainly not my mild fantasies about Felix, which required the Rolls, cigarettes, and a gardenia corsage, or the nagging, itching curiosity I’d felt about the Catholic boys—for the combination of calm and hysteria that overcame me. I was afraid that he could hear the beating of my heart. As he moved me tentatively around the room, now and then bumping into a table, I could feel the most intimate parts of his body, creating in me a strange sensation of protectiveness and desire. For a moment, his mouth rested against the side of my face.
The music would soon end, and I forced myself to look at him. I knew that it was important to remember everything. I’d memorized the shape of his brow and moved on to his mouth—there were traces of charcoal between his teeth (no toothpaste)—when there was a sharp rap at the door. He stopped dancing, but he did not release me. I pulled away and went to the door.
It was Caspar. He peered around the half-opened door. “Frau Metzenburg sent me,” he said.
Herr Elias appeared behind me. “Fräulein Palmer and I were dancing,” he said. For an instant his hand was on my back again. For all that I had stared at him, I saw that he remained hidden, would always remain hidden, and I stepped aside to let him pass. He bowed slightly, smiling gently at Caspar as he pushed past us into the room, looked around wildly, and then ran out. Herr Elias closed the door and played the song again.
A few days later, Caspar found me in the kitchen garden to tell me that Herr Elias lived with a woman in the village. I said nothing but continued with my weeding. He also told me that Germany had invaded Romania. He sat cross-legged on the sandy path and began to cry.
He said that his sister, who’d once been as fat as butter, had been arrested in May and taken to Sachsenhausen for the crime of racial defilement. As the lover of a Frenchman, she’d been sentenced to three years of hard labor. She’d been chosen at random to work in a dye factory, where the workers were suffering from chemical poisoning. She had already lost her sense of smell, and she had difficulty breathing. The dyers were like diseased birds, their eyes inflamed and their skin covered with scales.
I gave him my handkerchief. He wiped his face and then placed the handkerchief on his thigh, smoothing it with his hands. Some of the lace bridges had torn, and he pieced them together before folding it into a square. I reached to take it from him, but he slipped it into his pocket. I gave him a basket of tomatoes to take into the house and went back to my weeding.
British bombers on their way to Berlin flew over Löwendorf for the first time that summer. There were hundreds of them, and the steady drone of their engines shook the windows and doors of the Yellow Palace. As soon as one wave was gone, another would arrive—it sometimes took two hours until the last of the planes passed overhead.
One moonless night when Felix was in Berlin, the sound of the bombers so frightened me that I felt my way down the stairs and ran from the darkened house to the stables, where I knew Caspar would be calming the horses. Dorothea was there, too, standing next to her hunter, Cloonturk, her hand on his quivering neck.
There was a smell of dry sacking and liniment as Caspar walked a horse back and forth in the dark. “The English usually fly by day,” he said to the horse. “Their radar isn’t very good, as I’ve told you, although it hardly matters. Their pilots are kings.”
“They are on their way to Berlin,” Dorothea said to me.
“They prefer a summer night like this, when the days are long and the skies are clear. But summer is almost over,” Caspar said, sounding disappointed.
Dorothea and Caspar went from stall to stall, quieting the horses and the whining dogs, and I followed them. When Dorothea noticed that I was trembling, she put her scarf around my shoulders.
That Christmas, we heard the news that wild animals had escaped from the Berlin zoo during an RAF bombing. Crocodiles, snakes, and Siberian wolves were said to be hiding in every stairwell and hedge. A tiger strolled one morning into the Café Josty on Potsdamer Platz, where he devoured a Bienenstich cake and immediately died. One of the customers insinuated that it was the fault of the confectioner, and the café sued for slander. The court ordered that an autopsy be conducted. When pieces of glass were found in the tiger’s stomach, the case was dismissed. We believed these stories because they eased our terror.