The Traitor's Emblem (5 page)

Paul snorted loudly but said nothing. This was typical of his mother. Whenever he had a problem, she would try to find a way to make it his fault.

“Best go to sleep, Paul. We have a big day tomorrow.”

“Ah, yes, Jürgen’s birthday . . .”

“There will be cakes.”

“That other people will eat.”

“I don’t know why you always have to react like this.”

Paul thought it was outrageous that a hundred people should celebrate a party on the ground floor while Eduard—whom he hadn’t yet been allowed to see—languished on the fourth, but he kept this to himself.

“There will be a lot of work tomorrow,” Ilse concluded, turning over.

The boy watched his mother’s back for some time. The bedrooms in the service wing were at the rear of the house, down in a sort of basement. Living there instead of in the family quarters didn’t bother Paul that much, because he’d never known any other home. Ever since he was born, he’d accepted as normal the strange sight of watching Ilse wash her sister Brunhilda’s dishes.

A thin rectangle of light filtered through a little window just beneath the ceiling, the yellow echo of a streetlamp that melded with the flutter of the candle Paul always kept beside his bed, as he was terrified of the dark. The Reiners shared one of the smaller bedrooms, which contained only two beds, a wardrobe, and a table over which Paul’s homework was strewn.

Paul felt oppressed by the lack of space. It wasn’t as though there were a shortage of spare rooms. Even before the war, the baron’s fortune had begun to dwindle, and Paul had watched it melt away with the inevitability of a tin can rusting in the middle of a field. It was a process that happened over many years, but it was unstoppable.

The cards, the servants whispered, shaking their heads as though speaking of some contagious disease, it’s because of the cards. As a child, these comments terrified Paul to the point that, when a boy came to school with a French deck he’d found at home, Paul ran out of the class and locked himself in a bathroom. It was a while before he finally understood the extent of his uncle’s problem: a problem that was not contagious but deadly all the same.

When the servants’ unpaid wages began to mount up, they started to quit. Now, of the ten bedrooms in the servants’ quarters, only three were occupied: the maid’s, the cook’s, and the one Paul shared with his mother. The boy sometimes had trouble sleeping, because Ilse always got up an hour before dawn. Before the other servants had left, she had been only the housekeeper, tasked with ensuring that everything was in its place. Now she had had to take on their work too.

That life, his mother’s exhausting duties, and the tasks he’d carried out himself for as long as he could remember had seemed normal to Paul at first. But at school he discussed his situation with his classmates, and soon he began to draw comparisons, noticing what was going on around him, and realizing how strange it was that the sister of a baroness should sleep in the staff quarters.

Time and again he’d hear the same three words used to define his family, slipping by him as he passed between desks at school or slamming shut behind his back like a secret door.

Orphan.

Servant.

Deserter. That was the worst of them all, because it was aimed at his father. The person he’d never known, about whom his mother never spoke, and about whom Paul knew little more than his name. Hans Reiner.

And so it was through piecing together fragments of conversations that Paul overheard that he learned that his father had done something terrible (. . . over in the African colonies, they say . . .), that he had lost everything (. . . lost his shirt, ruined . . .), and that his mother lived on the charity of his aunt Brunhilda (. . . a skivvy in her own brother-in-law’s house—a baron, no less!—can you believe it?).

Which didn’t seem to be any more honorable for the fact that Ilse didn’t charge her a single mark for her work. Or that during the war she should have been obliged to work in a munitions factory “in order to contribute to supporting the household.” The factory was in Dachau, sixteen kilometers from Munich, and his mother had to wake two hours before sunrise, do her share of the household chores, and then take a train to her ten-hour shift.

It was just after she’d arrived back from the factory one day, her hair and fingers green with dust, her eyes dazed after a whole day of inhaling chemicals, that Paul asked his mother for the first time why they didn’t find somewhere else to live. A place where they weren’t both being constantly humiliated.

“You don’t understand, Paul.”

She had given him the same response many times, always looking away or leaving the room or rolling over to sleep, just as she had done a few minutes ago.

Paul watched his mother’s back for a few moments. She seemed to be breathing deeply and regularly, but the boy knew that she was only pretending to be asleep and wondered what ghosts would assail her in the middle of the night.

He looked away and fixed his gaze on the ceiling. If his eyes could have bored through the plaster, the square of ceiling immediately above Paul’s pillow would have caved in long ago. That was where he focused all his fantasies about his father on the nights when he had trouble reconciling himself to sleep. All Paul knew was that he’d been a captain in the Kaiser’s fleet and that he’d commanded a frigate in South-West Africa. He had died when Paul was two years old, and the only thing he had left of him was a faded photo of his father in uniform, with a large moustache, his dark eyes looking straight at the camera, proud.

Ilse tucked the photo under her pillow every night and the greatest anguish Paul had caused his mother wasn’t the day Jürgen pushed him down the stairs and broke his hand; it was the day he stole the photo, took it to school, and showed it to everyone who had called him an orphan behind his back. By the time he returned home, Ilse had turned the room upside down looking for it. When he took it out tentatively from between the pages of his math book, Ilse gave him a slap and then began to cry.

“It’s the only one I have. The only one.”

She hugged him, of course. But she grabbed the photograph back first.

Paul had tried to imagine what this impressive man must have been like. Under the grubby whiteness of the ceiling, by the light of the streetlamp, his mind’s eye conjured the outline of the Kiel, the frigate in which Hans Reiner had “sunk in the Atlantic along with all his crew.” He invented hundreds of possible scenarios to explain those nine words, the only information about his death that Ilse had given her son. Pirates, reefs, a mutiny . . . However it began, Paul’s fantasy always ended the same way, with Hans clinging to the rudder, waving good-bye as the waters closed over his head.

When he reached this point, Paul always fell asleep.

4

“Honestly, Otto, I can’t bear the Jew a moment longer. Just look at him, stuffing himself with Dampfnudeln. He’s got custard down the front of his shirt.”

“Please, Brunhilda, keep your voice down, and try to stay calm. You know as well as I do how much we need Tannenbaum. We’ve spend our last pfennig on this party. Which was your idea, by the way . . .”

“Jürgen deserves the best. You know how confused he’s been since his brother came back . . .”

“Then don’t complain about the Jew.”

“You have no idea what it’s like playing hostess to him, with his endless chatter, those ridiculous compliments, as if he doesn’t know he’s the one holding all the cards. A while ago he even had the cheek to suggest that his daughter and Jürgen should marry,” said Brunhilda, expecting a contemptuous response from Otto.

“It might put an end to all our problems.”

The tiniest crack opened in Brunhilda’s granite smile as she looked at the baron in shock.

They were standing at the entrance to the hall, their tense conversation muttered between clenched teeth, and interrupted only when they paused to receive guests. Brunhilda was about to respond but was forced instead to paint a grimace of welcome on her face once more:

“Good evening, Frau Gerngross, Frau Sagebiel! How good of you to come.”

“Sorry we’re late, Brunhilda, dear.”

“The bridges, oh, the bridges.”

“Yes, the traffic is just dreadful. Really, atrocious.”

“When are you going to give up this cold old mansion and come over to the east bank, my dear?”

The baroness smiled with pleasure at their darts of envy. Any one of the many nouveaux riches at the party would have killed for the class and power that exuded from her husband’s coat of arms.

“Do please help yourselves to a glass of punch. It’s delicious,” said Brunhilda, gesturing toward the center of the room, where an enormous table surrounded by people was overflowing with food and drink. An ice horse, a meter high, was poised over the punch bowl, and at the back of the room a string quartet added Bavarian popular songs to the general hubbub.

When she was sure that the new arrivals were out of earshot, the countess turned toward Otto and said in a steely tone that very few ladies of Munich’s high society would have deemed acceptable:

“You’ve done a deal on our daughter’s wedding without even telling me, Otto? Over my dead body.”

The baron didn’t blink. A quarter of a century of marriage had taught him how his wife would react when she felt undermined. But on this occasion she would have to yield, because there was much more at stake than her foolish pride.

“Brunhilda, dear, don’t tell me you didn’t see this Jew coming from the very beginning. With his supposedly elegant suits, going to the same church as us every Sunday, pretending that he doesn’t hear every time he’s called ‘the convert,’ sidling up toward our seats . . .”

“Of course I’ve noticed. I’m not stupid.”

“Of course you aren’t, Baroness. You’re perfectly capable of putting two and two together. And we don’t have a penny to our name. The bank accounts are completely empty.”

The color drained from Brunhilda’s cheeks. She had to reach out to the alabaster wall moldings to stop herself falling.

“Damn you, Otto.”

“That red dress you’re wearing . . . The dressmaker insisted on being paid for it in cash. The word is out, and when rumors start, there’s no stopping them until you find yourself in the gutter.”

“You think I don’t know that? You think I haven’t noticed the way they look at us, the way they take little nibbles from their cakes and smirk at each other when they realize they aren’t from Casa Popp? I can hear what those old ladies are muttering about as clearly as if they were shouting in my ear, Otto. But to go from that to allowing my son, my Jürgen, to marry a dirty Jew . . .”

“There’s no other solution. All we have left is the house and our land, which I put in Eduard’s name the day he was born. If I can’t get Tannenbaum to lend me the capital to set up a factory on that land, we might as well give up. One morning the police will come for me, and then I’ll have to act like a good Christian gentleman and blow my brains out. And you’ll end up like your sister, doing someone else’s sewing. Is that what you want?”

Brunhilda removed her hand from the wall. She took advantage of the pause necessitated by the arrival of new guests to gather her rage and then hurl it at Otto like a stone.

“You and your gambling are what got us into this mess, what devastated the family fortune. Sort it out, Otto, the same way you sorted things out with Hans fourteen years ago.”

The baron took a step back, shocked.

“Don’t you dare mention that name again!”

“You were the one who dared to do something back then. And what good did it do us? I’ve had to put up with my sister living in this house for fourteen years.”

“I still haven’t found the letter. And the boy’s growing up. Perhaps now . . .”

Brunhilda leaned in toward him. Otto was almost a head taller, but he still looked small standing next to his wife.

“There’s a limit to my patience.”

With an elegant wave, Brunhilda dived into the throng of guests, leaving the baron with a smile frozen on his face, struggling not to scream.

*   *   *

On the other side of the room, Jürgen von Schroeder set aside his third glass of champagne to open the present one of his friends was holding out to him.

“I didn’t want to put it with the others,” the boy said, pointing behind him to a table stacked with brightly colored packages. “This one’s special.”

“What do you say, lads? Shall I open Krohn’s present first?”

Half a dozen adolescents huddled around him, all of them dressed in the stylish blue blazers that bore the crest of Metzingen Academy. They all came from good German families, and were all uglier than Jürgen and shorter than Jürgen and laughed at every single joke Jürgen made. The baron’s young son had a gift for surrounding himself with people who wouldn’t overshadow him, and in front of whom he could show off.

“Open it, but only if you then open mine too!”

“And mine!” chorused the others.

They’re fighting for me to open their presents, thought Jürgen. They worship me.

“Now, don’t worry,” he said, raising his hands in what he thought was a gesture of impartiality. “We’ll depart from tradition and I’ll open your presents first, then those from the rest of the guests after the toasts.”

“Excellent idea, Jürgen!”

“Well, then, whatever could this be, Krohn?” he continued, opening the small box and lifting its contents to eye level.

In his fingers Jürgen held a gold chain with a strange cross, the bent arms of which formed a pattern that was almost a square. He stared at it, mesmerized.

“It’s a swastika. An anti-Semitic symbol. My father says they’re in fashion.”

“You’re mistaken, my friend,” said Jürgen, putting it around his neck. “Now they are. Here’s hoping we’ll be seeing a lot of these.”

“Definitely!”

“Here, Jürgen, open mine. Though best not show this one off in public . . .”

Jürgen unwrapped a parcel about the size of a packet of tobacco, and found himself looking at a small leather box. He opened it with a flourish. His chorus of admirers laughed nervously when they saw what was inside: a sort of cylindrical hood of vulcanized rubber.