The butcher in the village disappeared that winter with his wife and twin sons, and yet I was sure that I saw him at the mill in March. An object left momentarily on a table—an inkwell or a branch of witch hazel carried from the woods—was gone when I returned for it, and an apple or a dish of almonds disappeared even if I hadn’t left the room.
One night a month after Herr Elias’s disappearance, I thought that I could hear thunder, but I decided that it was only the hundreds of military transports on their way to the Eastern Front. When the rumbling sound grew louder and the earth began to shake, I knew that it wasn’t the lorries but the hum of hundreds of planes.
A piercing, high-pitched sound like a scream grew louder and louder, and there was the flash and bellow of an explosion. The Yellow Palace shuddered violently twice, and across the park, smoke began to rise from the Pavilion. The oaks marking the path to the stables burst into flames. The temple with the striped awning had disappeared. I thought how strange it was that only moments before I’d been listening in the dark to the applause of a concert audience as The Magic Flute came to an end.
Dorothea lay facedown in the stable yard, her hands over her head as the dogs swarmed over her back and legs, barking and nipping in excitement. I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. We ran across the yard to the root cellar that Caspar had made into a bomb shelter, the dogs chasing us in frenzied dashes.
It was dark in the root cellar, despite the lantern in Kreck’s hand. The air was thick with the smell of loam (the smell of the grave, Kreck shouted). He sat with Roeder on one of the benches of cracked green leather that Caspar had taken from the baroness’s carriages. Dorothea found a place between them, sitting in silence as she stared at her bare feet. I realized from her expression that she’d lost her hearing in the explosion. Caspar was not there. Felix gave Dorothea his jacket and stood on the stairs, where he watched the Yellow Palace burn to the ground. I whispered to myself the Evening Prayer I’d learned as a child. Lighten our darkness, O Lord, we pray and in your great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night, for the love of your only Son. After two hours, the last of the planes, undisturbed by German fighters, swung north for the short trip to Berlin, and Dorothea, her hearing restored, rose like a tram passenger whose stop had at last arrived.
Across the park, smoke rose in billows. The statues bought by the Schumachers on their honeymoon in Naples lay across the terrace in a tumble of arms and heads. The Yellow Palace was in ashes. All of the ravishing objects that Felix had been unable to live without and the many objects essential to everyday life were gone. The garage and the stables had not been bombed, but it was still too hot for us to approach the Yellow Palace, and we walked across the park to the Pavilion.
Although there was smoke in some of the rooms, only the nursery and the conservatory were damaged. In the pantry, dozens of jars of preserves had exploded, and Dorothea said that we could lick the walls when we were hungry. We sat in the kitchen instead and drank two bottles of Mondeuse Blanche and ate the smoked oysters that Roeder had been saving for her nephew’s wedding (she’d kept the tins in the Pavilion so that she wouldn’t be tempted to eat them). We talked in loud voices, gesturing wildly, perhaps because of the wine, but more likely because we were alive.
It was light when we finally went to bed. Roeder, Schmidt, and I took three rooms on the second floor. Dorothea and Felix were in her parents’ old bedrooms. Kreck and Caspar slept on field cots in the hall, the better to keep watch. Cranes divide the night into sentry-duty and they make up the sequence of the watches by order of rank, holding little stones in their claws to ward off sleep. When there is danger they make a loud cry.
Two of the Albanian workers who’d been assigned to labor in the village came to the Pavilion the following afternoon. The men had been sappers in the Resistance, and they offered to defuse an unexploded bomb lodged at the foot of a mulberry tree. Earlier in the year, Felix had noticed that the Albanians looked ill and hungry, and he’d arranged for them to take their meals at the village inn at his expense. The men were devoted to him.
After hours of combing the ruins with a garden rake, Roeder found a jewelry case with the bracelet and earrings that Felix had given Dorothea on their tenth wedding anniversary. Felix found a trunk with more jewels embedded in the lining, some melted gold coins, and several first editions—Ernest Hemingway and the Fables of La Fontaine—as well as a rolled-up Picasso that a friend had asked Felix to hide and that Felix had forgotten. I found a small metal casket with an ivory chess set and a drawing in brown ink of a nude woman and a peacock. That first day we found earthenware kegs of Kirschwasser, four large iron kettles, the concentric rings of the Schinkel chandelier, andirons, boot scrapers, a zinc bathtub, a steel trunk containing the baroness’s Christmas ornaments, the metal spines of shoe trees, two large cured hams (they smelled delicious), and ceramic jars of pickled herring. When I showed Dorothea the drawing I’d found, she looked at it for a moment and said, “My father gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday. You must have it now.” Before I could refuse, she turned to help Caspar drag pieces of a shattered urn onto the scorched lawn.
Later, we sat with the Albanians in the stables and ate ham and warm herring and drank more of Felix’s wine as we listened to the wireless. Caspar, who’d taken shelter in the icehouse during the bombing, after returning to the stables for his radio, could find only German stations, each of them broadcasting a concert by Heinrich Schlusnus singing Schubert’s “An Sylvia.” Caspar, whose ferret had died of shock, said that the bombers that destroyed the Yellow Palace had been looking for the Daimler factory thirty miles west of Löwendorf, which they’d missed, perhaps because it was draped in netting sewn with half a million brown canvas rocks. In order to confuse the bombers further, clusters of red and green glowing balloons, called Christmas trees by the local people, were released nightly over the countryside, and many villages had been destroyed. The ruby and emerald stars that I saw in the sky over the Yellow Palace had led the bombers to Löwendorf.
As all of our belongings had been lost, we were allowed to choose articles of clothing from the trunks stored in the cellar of the Pavilion (we looked through them as carefully as if we were shopping at Wertheim’s). As we sorted through the trunks, selecting things for ourselves and laying them aside, already covetous and possessive, Kreck pointed to his black monocle and whispered that Hitler had ordered the call-up of all German men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, regardless of illness or injury. When I said that Felix would never allow them to take him or Caspar, he gave me a weary smile.
I chose three summer cardigans, tweed trousers, three skirts, a pair of boots, a Victorian nightgown, wool ski socks, Felix’s tennis flannels, and a necktie to use as a belt. Kreck dressed himself in a linen suit jacket and dress shirt, the arms too long, with tweed plus fours and gaiters. Roeder, wearing one of Felix’s gray school blazers and a paisley shawl for a skirt, looked the oddest of all, perhaps because we were accustomed to her long black dress.
Two young women from the village who once worked in the Yellow Palace as laundresses, Frau Hoffeldt and Frau Bodenschatz, arrived at the Pavilion with their two girls and three boys, carrying what little bedding and clothing they’d managed to save from their houses. Their husbands had been taken prisoner at Kharkov that winter, and the bombing had left them without shelter or food. Twelve people in the village had been killed, and houses and farms destroyed. The women and their children moved into empty rooms above the stables, next to Caspar, where they were joined later in the week by a group of five foreign women, one of whom was pregnant, six children of different ages, and three men, who claimed to have walked from Odessa, eight hundred miles away. The weary but surprisingly healthy women told Felix, who spoke Russian, that it had taken them four months to reach Berlin, sleeping in abandoned houses by day and traveling at night. They’d bartered what little they had for milk and vegetables, and when they had no more to trade, they had, they were ashamed to say, resorted to theft. The men were escaped French slave workers, who’d fallen in with the women near Budapest, and to whom the women were indebted. There were many times, the women said, when the Frenchmen had to pretend that they were their husbands, and they had never abused their roles. When one of the women, Madame Tkvarcheli, released the hand of her pretty sixteen-year-old daughter, Bresla, having held it, according to one of the Frenchman, for the entire journey, there was soft applause.
The Russian Orthodox Easter was celebrated at the end of April, and Madame Tkvarcheli and the women insisted on making us a feast in the stables. We had roast squirrel, homemade vodka, mint tea, and black-currant jam. The children painted ducks’ eggs with Dorothea’s French watercolors (to their disappointment, we immediately ate the eggs). One of the women had a mouth organ and the children danced to a folk song called “Kalinka.” Felix explained that the song compares the beloved to a snowberry, a raspberry, and a pine tree, which I thought was very apt.
In November, Felix asked if I would accompany Dorothea to Berlin, as she needed to see her doctor, Herr Professor Müller, whose clinic was in the north of the city. She’d not been able to reach him on the telephone, and she required his care. As Dieter had been hoarding petrol for just such an emergency, he would drive us to Professor Müller’s clinic and wait for us before driving back to Löwendorf.
I hadn’t been to the city since my afternoon with Felix at the Adlon, and I dreaded the trip. It wasn’t the bombing that I feared (there’d been only nine raids in Berlin that year), but the SS and the Gestapo. Sensing my reluctance—as if I had the choice of remaining behind—he apologized that he was unable to go with us, as he had important business in Ludwigsfelde. Although I was frightened, I told him that I would be happy to accompany Dorothea to Berlin. Foreigners and even Germans who looked prosperous were often attacked (we would be riding in the Rolls-Royce, driven by a chauffeur in livery), and Caspar wanted me to carry his revolver, which I refused. Dorothea dressed me in some of her clothes, salvaged from trunks in the Pavilion—a brown Chanel coat, organdy skirt, Nordic ski sweater, and a pair of leather boots (they fit perfectly)—and we left for Berlin.
At first, the countryside seemed deceptively the same, although loose cattle and horses plunged back and forth across the roads, forcing Dieter (dressed, to my relief, in a sweater and trousers) to swerve out of their path. As we passed the Potsdam lake, beams of light were reflected from what looked like a row of submerged crucifixes. Dieter explained that the metal crosses had been placed just beneath the surface of the water to bounce back the radar signals of the Allied bombers. In October, the RAF had dropped hundreds of flares over Hannover, tricking German defenses, and then, without releasing a single bomb, had flown to Kassel, where they then dropped everything they had—a wicked ploy that could never happen in Potsdam, thanks to the crosses in the lake.
As we reached Schöneberg, a young man running alongside the car said there’d been an air raid in Berlin the previous night. A long convoy of lorries on its way to the Eastern Front moved slowly toward us, horns blaring to scatter the growing number of frightened people in the road, and Dieter had to pull into a field until it passed. It was thanks only to his persistence, which at times seemed deranged, that we were able to enter the city.
We were still some distance from Professor Müller’s clinic when Dorothea told Dieter to take us instead to the gallery of her friend Hans Kreutzer. It was already late afternoon. If the bombers returned—they arrived promptly at seven o’clock, Dieter said—we would spend the night at the small flat she kept in Goethestrasse. If the flat had been bombed, Dieter would take us to her father’s villa in Dahlem. If that, too, had been bombed, we’d have no choice but to return to Löwendorf.
Men and women climbed over the smoking piles of brick and rubble. Children sat in the ruins, their faces burned black. Streams of refugees wandered past, then wandered back again. Even though the windows were closed, there was a sharp smell of burning rubber and petrol. I heard sirens, but there were no fire engines or ambulances. When I asked Dorothea if we shouldn’t return immediately to Löwendorf, she didn’t answer. When I asked again, she shook her head, turning to stare into the street.
I knew that Herr Kreutzer sold books, many of them by writers banned by the party, as well as the occasional illuminated manuscript or painting taken as a favor on consignment. Herr Kreutzer sometimes even gave exhibitions. In a show of classical sculpture at the start of the war, a statue of a slender nude boy had been removed by the Gestapo, who found it suggestive of hunger, while a sculpture of a woman with large breasts and thighs had been permitted to remain as an example of contented maternity. Every few months, Herr Kreutzer packed his books and pictures, assisted by a young Polish prisoner of war he’d found hiding in his shop, and moved to a new address.
The gallery was in one of two buildings left standing on Hardenbergstrasse. Dorothea recognized it as the former salon of her couturière, who had disappeared that summer. The rooms were littered with bricks, wet bolts of cloth, and broken champagne bottles. Dressmaker forms lay across the floor like headless, armless torsos, the names barely visible—KRONPRINZESSIN CECILIE, FRÄULEIN KITTY, MLLE. LIDA BAAROVA.
Herr Kreutzer’s books and gramophone records were in cardboard boxes on four rickety gilt tables. He was not there, but a young man, presumably the Pole, sat on a mound of bricks, a notebook and pencil in his hand.
“Yes?” he asked coolly as we stepped around a shattered mirror.
Dorothea said that we were there to buy books, which she wished to be sent to friends in prison. “To everyone’s continued amazement,” she said, “including the Nazis themselves, the Gestapo still allows prisoners to receive parcels and letters.” She looked through the boxes, making two piles of books, and gave the young man the names of twelve people and the prisons where the books were to be sent. When she finished, I asked if we could send some books to Herr Elias.
“But we don’t know where they’ve taken him,” she said quietly. At my expression, she said, “Yes, please do find some books for him.”
I chose a collection of short stories by Thomas Mann, a biography of Duke Ellington, and a novel by Joseph Roth as the man repeated the names and addresses to Dorothea. She corrected one or two spellings (paying with an emerald brooch), and we left the shop, taking Herr Elias’s books with us. As we stepped into the street, there was a loud undulating wail—I’d never heard anything like it, and I was frightened. Dieter had disappeared, but we weren’t far from the Zoo Station, and we joined the crowd hurrying there.
Inside the flak tower, we stood with ten thousand people in two cavernous rooms. I could feel Dorothea trembling beside me, and I remembered that she was fearful in crowds (“Claustrophobia has me by the neck,” she once whispered in a rural train station in which there were two other people). The crowd, groaning and swaying around us, emitted a smell of camphor, old sweat, and wet wool. A young woman standing next to me suddenly disappeared—as it was impossible to fall in any direction, she had simply folded into herself and sunk to the floor. In the effort first to find her and then to lift her, I lost Herr Elias’s books.
The flat monotone of a woman’s voice on the loudspeaker made it difficult to talk: “Five hundred B-17 and two hundred B-24 bombers are now overhead, accompanied by five hundred seventy-five fighters of the Royal Air Force. Seventeen British bombers in the first wave have been shot down, and several parachutists have been spotted over the southern suburbs.” I added the numbers quickly—more than twelve hundred planes! I felt very proud, forgetting for a moment that the planes were dropping their bombs on me. I wondered if Mr. Knox’s cousin was in one of the squadrons. The irony, as Felix might have said, was compelling.
Although we were in near darkness, Dorothea was sure that she saw Princess Dadiani, the companion of the French ambassador Monsieur Scapini. Dorothea called out to her, but her voice could not be heard over the loudspeaker and the moaning of the crowd. She shouted in my ear that Scapini had once told her that Africa would be extremely useful in any negotiations after the war, as Africa belonged to Europe.
We were released after two hours, but it took another hour to get out of the tower, directed by coldly inefficient twelve-year-old girls from the Bund Deutscher Mädel. In the street, the thick smoke made it difficult to see. We pushed our way through the crowd, our eyes burning. Broken glass splintered under our feet like ice. Ragtag groups of the Home Guard appeared suddenly out of the smoke, then ran away. When we at last reached Goethestrasse, we saw to our relief that the building where Dorothea had a flat was unharmed.
Her rooms were on the ground floor of a former royal villa that had been a gift from the last emperor to his favorite mistress. A garden ran along one side of the house, with four Japanese maples, their bark bright pink in the fading light. There was a kitchen and a bathroom, and a sitting room that also served as the bedroom, with French doors leading to the garden. The walls were bare. On either side of the fireplace were pale squares where there’d once been portraits of two royal jesters by Velázquez. “They’re in the bank,” she said when she saw me looking at the wall.
There was no heat or electricity, no lamp oil or firewood. I found two candelabra and lit the candles. We were filthy with soot and ash, but there was no water, and we were too cold to undress. She pushed the books and papers from a large bed onto the floor and lay down in her coat, placing one arm over her eyes. I was uncertain what to do.
“Come lie down,” she called from the bed. “Felix prefers it here at night.” She uncovered her eyes. “In candlelight. Just like this.”
I found myself wondering if a life devoted to achieving perfection might not be somewhat trying. I’d learned to distinguish one thing from another (I knew that her chairs were Louis Seize), but the compulsion to limit the world to the exquisite seemed an increasingly meaningless affectation (as opposed to my affectation of courage). The water lilies rushed from the Buckow lake half an hour before the arrival of guests and placed among porcelain water lilies so that no one could tell the difference, the table set with Catherine the Great’s swan dinner service, Felix’s amber birdcages filled with live lovebirds and Xing dynasty enamel parrots (I’d described the lovebirds in one of my letters to Mr. Knox, but he had never referred to them and I realized belatedly that birds caged for effect would not have appealed to him).
“That world no longer exists,” Dorothea said as if she could read my mind. “Its disappearance is of less significance than you like to think. Even beauty is of less importance now. Besides, Felix was always more interested in intelligence and wit. And style, of course.” She smiled. “Although anyone extremely rich was allowed to be stupid.”
I looked at the chairs, wondering if they were witty.
“It was difficult at first,” she said, raising herself to lean against the pillows. “I was eighteen when we married. Four years younger than you are now. He had never been married, had no children, had grown up indulged and adored with only a younger sister to torment. His father had died in the Great War, and he lived in Paris with his mother and her lover.
“I was sent to live with my grandfather in London after my father exiled my mother to Löwendorf. My great-grandfather had been banker to Queen Victoria, and she had appointed him honorary consul in gratitude. I first met Felix at one of my grandfather’s dinner parties. He came with his mistress, an older American woman who was a photographer. It was the first time I’d seen a woman other than an army nurse in khaki. They’d come from Nepal, where the American had been taking pictures of snow leopards. I fell in love with Felix that night, as did several other women in the room. He was taking the photographer the next day to see the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar. They were staying near Baden in a monastery where the monks wear white cassocks and black opera hats. No one seemed to think these things exceptional—white leopards, American mistresses in khaki, monks in silk opera hats—and I learned to accept such things as commonplace.” She rested her head on the pillows.
As I watched her, I realized that I, too, had come to view certain things as commonplace—adulterous countesses, impotent Egyptian princes, movie stars in ermine stoles. Nothing as exotic as white leopards, perhaps, but once shocking to a girl from Ballycarra.
She lit a cigarette with one of the candles. “I convinced my perfectly healthy grandfather that he was in need of taking the waters, and three days later, we happened to meet Felix and his friend sitting before Grünewald’s green Christ. I was furious that he took no notice of me and I announced that I wasn’t at all sure that I liked the altarpiece, one of the most beautiful things in the world. A trick that I would have thought rather obvious, but it worked. He suggested that I read Rousseau, who despised Gothic art—it would help to sharpen my desires. Despite my obvious fascination, he treated me like the child that I was, aside from the reference to desires in need of sharpening (something which, I might add, he never mentioned again). It was only when we saw each other a year later in Paris, a meeting I also contrived, that he spoke to me as if no one else were present, although only to ask if I was familiar with the memoirs of Saint-Simon. I was fifteen years old, and I knew that if he did not love me, I would die.” She paused. “Fortunately, my inclination to indolence kept me from further rashness. Although I did read Saint-Simon.”
“And here you are.”
“Yes,” she said, looking around the room. “Here I am.”
“And you didn’t die.”
“Whether Felix loves me or not remains a mystery. A mystery I hope never to solve.”
I sat in one of the chairs. I’d never known Dorothea to be melodramatic, and it disappointed me. It was the most she had said to me in five years, and she wasn’t finished.
“His life was a torment of interests—an excursion to Mesopotamia to look for artifacts was as intensely experienced as the season’s new melons. He had ideas about everything. How something should look or taste or smell. How a person should behave. For someone who mistrusted opinions, he had more rules than anyone I’d ever known. He would have said that these views were only his own, but I had to learn his rules very fast. I disappointed him our first night together by wearing a blue dressing gown in a gray-and-red bedroom.”
“What color should you have worn?”
“Black. Red.”
I was silent, thinking about the shades of color suitable for a dressing gown in a gray-and-red bedroom. Felix’s exaggerated manner, no matter how refined—perhaps because of its refinement—would have seemed artificial and even forced had it not been for Dorothea. She was no less refined, no less complicit than Felix. She just wasn’t adamant about it.
“I discovered to my surprise that taste can be very inconsistent. Someone may be impeccable about food, but not dress well. Someone’s rooms might be charming, but you dread dining at home with him, and know not to ask what he is reading. But Felix was really rather perfect. His great flaw—his sister liked to say it was his only flaw—was his endless capacity for boredom. I could recognize the moment, and unfortunately it came rather soon, when he began to lose interest—there was a change in the color of his eyes. That is when I would remind him that boredom is really one of the least terrible things in the world.” She paused. “I speak of him in the past tense because he has changed.”
I wondered if he was ever bored with me. I wouldn’t have been able to bear it if he was tired of me. “Why have you kept me?” I asked.
“Felix says that you are ready to steal horses with us.” At my look of surprise, she said, “It’s a German expression. It’s not that we’ve kept you. You’ve kept us. We sometimes wonder why. You’re an Irish citizen. There’s nothing to stop you from leaving.”
“It’s too late.”
“At the start of the war, when Felix refused the posting in Madrid, people said that he was frivolous. He would once again be in a position of power and, most important of all, we would be out of the country. Even our friends were mystified.
“People think he’s a spy.”
Her face, naturally very pale, was gray with strain. “The truth is that Ribbentrop told Felix that he would have to divorce me if he accepted a post.” There was the sudden moan of sirens, and she jumped from the bed. “What would Felix have us do?” she asked, her voice rising. “The most he does is ask Kreck to close the shutters. It is a relief that they’ve come. It will only last an hour. They won’t come twice. Surely.”
She’d heard that there was a private air-raid shelter at the Spanish embassy across the square, and we decided to go there. We quickly put on our hats, and I blew out the candles. There were few people in the street, and I wondered if perhaps we’d left it a bit late. There was a loud droning hum that could only signal the approach of hundreds of planes. My mouth was dry, and my eyes burned. She took hold of my sleeve and found my hand. “Are you afraid?” she asked. “I am a bit. The only dangerous animal to have escaped from the zoo was a terrified gray wolf, not a tiger, and he was found last week hiding in a bush behind the Opera, extremely relieved to be captured.”
We crossed the square and ran up the steps of the embassy. The heavy front gate was unlocked, and we pushed our way inside, stumbling over furniture as we ran through a number of large rooms. I was sure that I touched something alive in the third room, perhaps a cat, and I lit the candle I’d put in my pocket when we left the flat.
To our surprise, sitting on a sofa in front of us was an elderly man in a wool dressing gown and carpet slippers. He berated us for disturbing him but stopped when he recognized Dorothea. It was the ambassador. “Fool!” he shouted at me. “Put out that candle.”
The droning sound had increased to a roar, and the walls began to shake. There was the piercing whine of falling bombs. I blew out the candle, and we threw ourselves onto the sofa, my head wedged beneath Dorothea’s arm, our legs entwined. The ambassador, smelling of brandy and singed wool, seemed to be breathing with difficulty, perhaps because we were on top of him, and we moved so as not to suffocate him. I’d wet myself, and there was a smell of urine—for a moment I dreaded the smell more than I did the bombs.
As the first wave of bombers passed overhead, a second wave could be heard approaching. The raid lasted for more than an hour, the nearby flak tower at Zoo firing its antiaircraft guns without cease. The tower was several streets away, but it sounded as if the guns were on the roof of the embassy. When it was at last silent, the ambassador kicked us in the ribs, knocking us to the floor.
I was shaking with cold, thanks in part to my wet skirt and stockings, and I struggled to my feet to light the candle as Dorothea searched for our hats. Gathering his dressing gown around his bare legs, the ambassador reached under the sofa for a bottle and took a long drink. Holding the brandy tightly by the neck, he said that as he hadn’t expected us, he had no glasses. No food, either, he added quickly. “And there’s no private shelter. It’s a canard started by that pig, the Japanese ambassador.” He struggled irritably to his feet to kiss Dorothea’s hand. We said good night and found our way to the street.
It seemed as if all of Berlin was burning. Some buildings were still standing, while alongside them others had vanished. Burned cars and lorries lay twisted in the street. A lone Hitler Youth stood on a corner, screaming over and over again that the Charlottenburg Palace was on fire. The row of embassies on the north side of the square had disappeared, and a dense cloud of dust had settled in the few trees that remained. We could hear the cries of people trapped in buildings. Old men and women and children, pale with ash, emerged from shelters as if walking in their sleep. Figures stood in silhouette before the burning buildings, looking like devils in a morality play. There was a danger, I knew, of the concussion of air that occurs after a bombing, and I walked with my hands over my mouth, as if that would save me.
It took us several hours to cross the square, stopping every few steps to help the injured and the dying, and it was near daybreak when we at last crept into the flat, ashamed that it was unharmed, ashamed that we were unharmed, but grateful, too. We stood in the center of the room, shaking with cold. Dorothea found blankets, three jars of potted shrimp, and two bottles of champagne. We sat in silence on the bed, the blankets around our shoulders, and ate the shrimp and drank champagne, our hands marked with dried blood. When we’d eaten all of the shrimp, we crawled under the blankets. Dorothea fell into a heavy sleep, but I lay there until dawn, convinced that I’d lost something of great importance, something that would cause our deaths if I did not find it, when I at last fell asleep.
We awoke in the early afternoon, drank the second bottle of champagne, and went into the street. Children, many of them burned, wandered through the smoke and dust, and injured men and women lay by the side of the road. There was no color except for the red of the fires.
It was a sign of our shock that we felt no surprise to find Dieter waiting at the end of the street. He’d spent the night in a shelter, afraid that he would not make it to Berlin if he returned to Löwendorf. Seeing that we were safe, he allowed himself a burst of temper. “It’s a miracle you’re alive,” he shouted in fury. “And the villa still standing!”
“I’ll never see it again,” Dorothea said quietly to me.
The windows of the car had been shattered, but the motor turned over when he started it, and we climbed into the backseat. We stopped to pick up a family with four children, taking them as far as the road to Zurich. Dorothea gave them what money she had, and her own as well as my coat and gloves. Afraid that she would give them the boots, I sat with my legs hidden beneath me, but it was of no use. The woman left wearing Dorothea’s lovely boots.
That night, at last safe in my bed in the Pavilion—the American bombers passed overhead for two hours on their way to Berlin—I wondered where I would go if I were to leave Löwendorf. I didn’t have relatives in Zurich who would help me, even if I could make my way five hundred miles to the border. When I left Ireland, I’d felt, for all the recklessness of my flight, that I’d at last pushed off—I’d been set in motion, and I would find the world I so greedily sought, but I saw that night that the world had found me.