The Ambassador's Daughter (11 page)

He continues. “So I believe such an arrangement is possible. But we’ve got to make the case.” He is animated now, gesturing broadly with his hands to illustrate his point. “There’s a vast amount of correspondence about the role that naval fleets might play, drawn up before and during the war. Synthesizing it will give a sense of what the Big Four are thinking and help to frame any proposal. But we have to work quickly.”

I nod. The other nations have been meeting for close to six months, inviting the German delegation only at the final hour. Captain Richwalder’s idea makes sense, but the window for providing any sort of input and making a difference is slim. “I would have started earlier, of course, but I was given access to the materials just days before leaving Berlin,” he adds.

“Of course.”

“I’ve prioritized the documents most in need of translation.” He spreads the papers out on the desk before me. I would have expected the hands of a soldier, thick and crude. But his fingers are long, more artist than warrior, delicate half-moons at the cuticle.

He retreats to one of the chairs by the low table, which is piled high with papers, and I turn to the first document. It is a report on the structure of the smaller vessel fleets, and though once or twice I consult the dictionary I brought with me, to be certain of the exact words, it is not altogether difficult. My translation settles into an easy rhythm. Working alongside Captain Richwalder is not so different than reading in the study with Papa.

When I’ve finished the first page, I glance up, studying Captain Richwalder out of the corner of my eye. He is as imposing as he’d appeared at the arrival ceremony, with strong features seemingly etched from granite. But close up, there are little things I can see now—long eyelashes, almost impossibly so for a man, a bottom lip much fuller than the top. Faint, end-of-day stubble covers his cheeks.

He looks up unexpectedly. “Do you need something?”

“No.” Heat rises from my neck as I fumble to find an excuse for my staring. “I was just wondering, how are things in Berlin?”

“You’ve not been back?”

“Not since the start of the war. We were in England.”

“England?”

“Yes, Papa was on a teaching fellowship.” My own explanation sounds uneasy. At the time, our departure had been too rushed to ask. But afterward I had questioned it silently myself: Why had we gone to an enemy country right after the war broke out? Papa could have postponed the fellowship. But there had been an urgency to our leaving. Had he been worried for our safety? The war never reached German soil, and surely at Uncle Walter’s palatial mansion in the countryside we would have been fine. Had he been afraid of something else?

Captain Richwalder shakes his head. “Very bad, I’m afraid,” he says, returning to my original question. “The Social Democrats nominally hold power in Berlin, but the south, Bavaria especially, has become a hotbed of communist activity. There are rumors that the government may have to retake Munich by force to restore order.”

“That I’ve read in the press. But what is it like on the street?”

He pauses, struggling to fashion a description beyond the political. “Strikes, protests, rioting. Neighbors who lived in peace their whole lives taking sides and fighting one another. It’s anarchy. You will find the city much changed. Immigrants have poured in by the thousands from the east, living in these cramped apartments, entire families in a single room. And there’s no food, not for them and not for the people with money to buy it. The war is over, yet women and children continue to starve because of the blockade.” His tone is harsh.

“Oh!” I bring my hand to my mouth. I hadn’t understood it until then. Removed from the continent, safely tucked away in England, war seemed a remote thing, fought in the trenches by men who were strong enough to withstand it. Maybe that’s why Papa accepted the appointment in England. He must have sensed the horror of what was to come and wanted to spare me. While I was bemoaning the rainy British weather and lack of things to do, people back home were dying from hunger and cold. I shudder. “Your description of the chaos makes it sound like Russia.”

“Perhaps, but I don’t think it’s going to go that way. The SDP is so divided within that they can’t organize to get anything done, much less form an effective government. The right is taking advantage of that, capitalizing on all of the anger—they’ve managed to convince lots of people who weren’t there that the new government was responsible for our ultimate defeat in the war. It’s not true, of course, but people back home don’t know that and it makes for an attractive, simple story. So the right has some popular appeal but they don’t have the numbers. Things will settle somewhere in the middle. It’s terribly dissatisfying.”

“Maybe.” To me, there is a kind of comfort in the inertia, a safeguard against any one extreme taking too much.

He picks up one of the cups of tea from the low table and walks over. Our fingers brush as he hands it to me. “Forgive my bluntness. All of the time on the ship has made me forget how to speak to a lady properly.”

“Not at all. I much prefer plain speech.” I take a sip of tea, then set the cup down well away from the papers. “Captain Richwalder...”

“Georg,” he interjects. “If you don’t mind.”

“Georg,” I say, the name unfamiliar and awkward on my tongue. “What will you do after the conference?”

He retreats to his chair, stretches his legs out before him. “Return to the battleship, I suppose, or a different craft if that was needed.”

“You haven’t seen enough of war?”

“There is no peace without war,” Georg says. “There’s a concept in Asia called yin-yang, two opposite halves of the whole. War and peace are just that. And soldiers are needed. Without the military, there would be no order.”

I want to protest that man’s nature would allow him to coexist peacefully, but I know that he is right. “I mean, what would you do if you couldn’t go back to a battleship?” I ask, shifting topics slightly.

Georg cocks his head, as though he had not before contemplated the question. He had always assumed that there would be a navy and a place for him in it.

“Would you join the new government?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve got no patience for bureaucracy, and the capital makes me feel as though the walls and buildings are closing in around me. No, I’d probably return to Hamburg and oversee the family shipping business. If I can’t be on the sea, at least I could be near it.”

“Your family ships goods?”

“No, we build ships.” I had not realized until now that Georg is wealthy. I’ve always been oblivious to matters of money and class—too oblivious, Tante Celia remarked once. But with his uniform and haircut, it would have been impossible to tell. “There isn’t much of a ‘we’ anymore, unfortunately. My parents both died some time ago, and my brother Peter was killed at the Battle of Jutland.”

“How terrible.”

“He was on a ship not far from mine that was torpedoed. I saw him go down and I could do nothing to stop it.” His recounting is factual and precise, but his eyes cloud over at the memory. “Eight ships and nine thousand men at that battle alone. We joined the navy together, but it was really more his dream to be a great naval officer. I just went along.”

Now Georg had picked up the mantle, fulfilling the career his brother could never have. “Tell me more about Hamburg,” I say, trying to gently steer the subject away from war. The sadness on his normally strong face is somehow unbearable.

But he will not be dissuaded. “I think Peter wanted to escape to the sea. You see, our parents were terribly strict and they had such high expectations.”

“Yes, of course.” I nod.

“I have a sister, too. My parents had plans for her to marry someone rich and fairly dreadful, so she ran away to Austria. She lives in a cottage in the Obersalzberg with her husband, someone she actually wanted, cared for, and they have about a dozen children. I see her occasionally, send money. They have a modest lifestyle but it’s very happy.”

“And noisy, I’m sure, with all of those children,” I remark.

“I don’t mind,” he replies, surprising me. Quiet and order seem better suited to him. “I would have liked children.”

“You talk like you’re eighty!” I exclaim. “You can still have them.”

“I’m twenty-five,” Georg replies. “I will be twenty-six, tomorrow, in fact.” There is something grave and imposing about his demeanor that makes him appear more than just a few years older.

“There’s still plenty of time.” Though it is not at all hot in the room, my skin feels suddenly moist.

“I suppose. And you?”

“I do want children,” I reply with more certainty than I’d planned. It was not something I’d thought about on a conscious level until now.

“No, I was asking about your family. Are there many of you?”

“Oh.” For the second time in an hour, I feel myself blush. “A small family, also. Just Papa and me.” I do not count Tante Celia or our other extended relations. “My mother died of flu when I was younger.”

“I’m sorry.” His voice is full with the empathy of shared loss.

“Growing up an only child, Papa working all of the time, was sometimes a lonely existence. That’s why I’d like to have children. How many, I don’t know, but definitely more than one.” I feel myself talking too fast and saying too much. I have not felt this comfortable speaking with anyone since Krysia. “With siblings you always have each other...” I stop, realizing my error. Georg had his brother until he died at war, in front of his very eyes.

But he does not take offense. “I understand what you mean. My sister, Alice, is my dearest friend, though I don’t see her that often.”

“And you, do you get lonely?”

He shook his head. “There was a time when Peter was gone, and my parents, too, that I didn’t want to go on. But I’ve made my peace with it now.” Solitude had become his default state, such that he did not know how to be otherwise.

“There are so many things I want to do before having children.”

“Like what?”

“Well, travel mostly. Not just England and France, but the whole world. Africa, maybe. Or take that railway that’s been constructed to China.” I’d thought about it so often since my conversations with Krysia a few months earlier. Talking about it now with Georg, the fantasy journeys I’ve constructed in my head feel almost possible.

“The Trans-Siberian?” He chuckles as though the idea is far-fetched.

“No, really. I want to see the world, not just the cities, but the edges and frontiers before they are developed and changed into looking just like everywhere else.”

“Then you would have loved the navy. I’ve been to some of the places you mentioned—Japan, for one. But I’ve never been far from harbor to the really deep inland bits.” Georg has seen great swaths of the world but always from a great distance, just scratching the surface. But I want to delve deeply into such places—to see the children walking to school and the way the people eat, how they live. “There’s nothing better than standing on the deck of the ship as the coast disappears behind you, a clear horizon ahead.” A dreamy, faraway look comes into Georg’s eyes. “Do you enjoy the seaside?”

“No. I fear the water,” I confess. Growing up in landlocked Berlin, I had not seen the ocean until I was six, when we’d taken a holiday to the Dutch seaside during Papa’s visitorship at Leiden. I found the dark, murky waters and the rough, churning current unsettling. Since then, I’ve had terrible nightmares about it—a giant wave rising and swallowing me whole. On the ferry crossing I stayed inside the cabin, reading a book, pretending I was elsewhere and trying not to see the endless water that surrounded us on all sides. “It just feels so ominous.” I’m not sure why I’m sharing this confession with a man I barely know.

He looks puzzled, as if the idea of someone not liking the water is unfathomable. “Can you swim?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve never tried.”

“I could make you love the water.” An image flashes through my mind of Georg and I on a seaside promenade. The cool sea breeze and taste of salt air almost seem real. “Or at least not to be afraid. The thing is to understand that it is a different world—we are visitors in the ocean, not in charge of it. So you have to treat it with respect, come to learn the local customs, so to speak.” His words make sense. But I doubt that I could ever love it as he does, or even be comfortable.

“Of course, being on a sailboat is one thing. A naval fighting ship is quite another.” He cringes as the memories press over him. “You should give the ocean another chance. It’s the only place to really be free,” he adds.

“I don’t know about that. The mountains can be most liberating.” Papa and I have always taken our holidays in the Alps. We would pack simple cheese and fruit that would keep for a day, setting off into the woods as the sun broke. We might not speak for hours, each lost in our own thoughts as we wound between the trees. It was a kind of quiet meditation and a peace I’d not found elsewhere.

I’d suggested hiking when we were in England. “We could go north to the Lakes.” But Papa had shaken his head. “Two Germans disappearing into the middle of nowhere might provoke suspicion.” And anger. There were stories of a mob beating up a few German expatriates in Leeds just as the war had broken out. Papa insisted that we stay in the cities where help was available and we would not be isolated, protested every time I went out alone.

“Margot...” It is the first time Georg has used my name.

“Yes?”

But before he can continue, there is a creaking sound and the library door, already ajar, opens farther. Papa stands there in his overcoat. I look at the clock. It is nearly ten. Georg and I have talked for most of the time and I’ve scarcely done any work. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m headed home and I thought that perhaps I could escort you.” I smile inwardly. Papa is nowhere near finished work—midnight is only a starting point for him. But he was concerned enough about my being with Georg to break from what he was doing and come to check on me.

“I’m fine, Papa. Though...” I turn to Georg. “I’m afraid we didn’t get very far.”

Georg nods with recognition. “It’s no matter. We can resume tomorrow.”