Vladimír had settled Trajan on a bed of clean straw. Rozalia knelt beside the horse. Trajan raised his head, straining to see her face, and at that Natalia turned away. She saw the vet filling a syringe and wanted to cry out: No, what if the countess is right and you’re making a mistake? She covered her eyes and then felt ashamed at her weakness. But she was not alone in her distress. Miklós walked out a moment after Mr. Petrus gave the injection and Trajan’s breathing became more labored. And then there was silence. The familiar smell of leather, straw, and oats, the slanted, heavy light, the stillness of the horse, his dignity and strength in surrender, brought tears to Natalia’s eyes. She and Vladimír helped Rozalia to her feet. The countess was controlled, dignified; she held herself stiffly and said Natalia should go to Ilka. “Horses sense these things. Let her know you are thinking of her.”
As soon as Natalia reached the paddock fence, Ilka trotted over and took a sugar cube from her hand. She stroked the mare’s nose and assured her that all was well, all would be well, and they would go for a ride soon. She loved Ilka, she thought, and was afraid she was going to cry for Trajan and that once the tears came, they would be unstoppable, not only because of the horse but because of everything. Miklós walked over and stood beside her. He was wearing a soft, much-laundered collarless shirt, and it was charming on him, that shirt. She stared at his hands on the fence rail.
“Before he was my mother’s horse, my brother rode him,” he said. “In the country, you see animals dying, it’s inevitable, but I hate it.”
“I know. The animals have a good life here, though.”
“Yes. My mother sees to it that even the cows and sheep are happy.”
“I have to go home,” she said.
“Let me take you,” he said.
“I’m not sure when I’m going, it will depend on the countess.”
“Natalia, I owe you an apology. I allowed myself to forget, for one thing, that you are our guest, and for another—I am almost old enough to be your father. I am, in any case, old enough to know better. I hope you can forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” she said.
They walked down to the castle and at the kitchen door met Guido, who was on his way to offer condolences to the countess. Magdolna made espresso and sliced the remains of the plum cake. Miklós poured cognac into glasses and offered Guido a cigarette. The countess returned from the stables. She sat at the table and said she would like a cigarette too; she felt the need of a stimulant. She said her horse had not succumbed to disease, as the vet said. Out of courtesy, Trajan had gone ahead of her to the next life, and he would wait for her there. “You get older, life gets smaller and smaller,” she said. “Any loss wears you out.” She looked at Guido, her eyes half-closed, holding the cigarette close to her face.
Miklós told Guido he had an appointment in a few days’ time in Rome to interview Mussolini. The Fascist leader had destroyed the free press in Italy but paradoxically courted the foreign press. “In return, he expects encomiums and favorable comparisons to Garibaldi, Napoleon, Bismarck. Which he can whistle for, as far as I’m concerned.” He asked Guido what his family in Italy thought of Mussolini. It went like this, Guido said: one-third of his family believed Mussolini to be a man of heroic dimensions, capable of restoring Italy’s economy and standing in the world; one-third detested Mussolini and called him a murderer and a phony; one-third never gave a thought to politics. Miklós asked in which third Guido placed himself. “Ah, that would be telling,” Guido said. He got up and pushed in his chair. “Again, my sincere condolences, dear lady,” he said, kissing Rozalia’s hand.
* * *
Before she left, Natalia gave Rozalia the small crystal horse she had bought at the arcade in Pest. Rozalia held it in the palm of her hand. It captured Trajan’s gallant and sprightly nature, particularly in his salad days, she said, and then gave Natalia a long look from beneath her waxen eyelids. “Why are you going, my dear child? Will you be back for the harvest? Promise me you’ll return in time for the opening of the school, or the children will think you don’t like them. What am I to do without you? I will be alone at night, and you know my heart can’t take it. If you stay, I’ll have the Green Room repainted. You can choose another color, anything you like. Is the bed too hard? I’ll replace it.”
Chapter Nine
As soon as she arrived home, Natalia saw that Zita not only had moved into the villa in Zehlendorf but also had commandeered almost every bit of space. Her books and papers littered every available surface and were piled on the floor beside her favorite chair in the living room. A photograph of her father had a prominent position on the mantelpiece, beside the ormolu clock, and her typewriter seemed a permanent fixture at one end of the dining room table, so that meals were often taken in its august presence. Worse, Benno now slept on Zita’s bed. “I enticed him, I’m afraid,” Zita said. “My feet get cold at night, a symptom of a vitamin deficiency, from Russia, in the revolution. And he is such a nice, plush cat, aren’t you, my darling?” She nestled her face in Benno’s fur and the cat purred. Traitor, Natalia thought. When she woke early in the morning, she went into Zita’s room and carried Benno back to her own bed. On many mornings, Zita was not in her bed at all, but had crossed the hall to Beatriz’s room, and the two of them were sitting up against the pillows and talking. Then Zita would exclaim that she was going to be late, and she’d rush around getting ready to catch the train to work.
In the evenings, Beatriz and Zita hired a taxi to Berlin, where they saw films at the cinema or had tickets to the Opernhaus or to the Philharmonie. They loved cabarets, singers, any form of entertainment, and liked to frequent a new transvestite bar that was all the rage. In the morning, they recalled gags they’d heard, repeated off-color jokes, and like wayward schoolgirls fell about in fits of giggles. On the last day of August, Natalia went with them to the opening night of The Threepenny Opera at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Zita bought the sheet music, and she and Natalia learned the lyrics to the Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill songs “Mack the Knife” and “Pirate Jenny.” Music to commit revolution by, Zita said.
And they’ll see me as I stand beside the window and
They’ll say: what has she got to smile about?
And a ship with eight sails and
All its fifty guns loaded
Will lay siege to the harbor.
Beatriz applauded. She said, “Natalia, listen to you, how you sing, and look at you dancing. I would never have guessed my quiet girl was such an actress.”
Beatriz gave dinner parties, inviting actors, filmmakers, writers, as well as her good friends Herr Saltzman, Sophie Brecht and her husband, Gustav, a professor of art history at the Berlin University. Everyone an authority, a connoisseur; everyone with an opinion. The conversation, generally lively and stimulating, could become contentious, as on the evening Zita emphatically denounced the disparity between rich and poor. Some of the guests agreed; others argued that society, any society, naturally evolved toward complexity, some won, some lost; how could it be otherwise? The utopian ideal did not exist; surely Zita would agree? No, she didn’t agree, Zita said. Like any machine, society required skilled engineering and oversight in order to work. It hurt her when, walking down any street in Berlin, she saw paupers on one side, tycoons on the other. “Inevitably there will be a crisis,” she said. “And when it comes, it will be cataclysmic. It will pull us all down.”
“A cataclysm? I hardly think it will come to that. Isn’t it the responsibility of those who have, to look after the less fortunate?” Sophie Brecht said, a chocolate bonbon halfway to her lips.
“Charity,” Zita said. “Charity is poison.”
“If everyone thought like that, we would indeed have a crisis. A moral crisis,” Sophie said.
“Hungry people need food, not sermons,” Zita said.
“Did I say anything about sermons?” Sophie ate the bonbon, wiped her mouth on a napkin.
“I’ll tell you what I
don’t like,” Beatriz interjected. “I don’t like that the central bank has raised interest rates to eight percent. I wrote to Hjalmar Schacht. I told him straight that tightening the money supply will have a disastrous effect on the country’s economy. I let him know I’d already pruned my German stock holdings to almost nothing. He might be the head of the Reichsbank, I said, but I could do a better job blindfolded.”
“Bravo!” Herr Saltzman cried. “Although I fear your intervention will get you precisely nowhere.” He smiled at Beatriz. Zita got up to refill Beatriz’s wineglass and offer her the silver tray of cheese and grapes. Beatriz took a grape. Zita murmured a few words in her ear. Beatriz laughed.
A day later a letter came for Natalia’s mother in an envelope bearing violet-colored República Argentina stamps. It was from the law firm that managed her legal affairs in Buenos Aires, informing her that the caretakers at her villa were retiring in October. A new caretaker would have to be hired. Her lawyers would be pleased to act on her behalf, or she could attend to the matter in person, if she preferred. Beatriz kept changing her mind: Was it worth the time and money to travel to Buenos Aires? She stared at the photograph of her childhood home and said, after twenty-two years she owed it a visit, didn’t she? One evening, she came into the living room, where Zita and Natalia were reading, and perched on the edge of a chair and announced that she had decided: they would all go. On the mantel above her the ormolu clock shone, as if emitting light, but Natalia thought it was Beatriz; she was the one shedding radiance, from her eyes, from the pores of her skin. “If we leave in late November,” she said, “we will arrive in Buenos Aires when the jacaranda trees are in bloom, the gardens in flower. Zita, you’ll love it.”
“I can’t afford to take six months away from work, Beatriz. I would lose my job. Besides, I get seasick, I’m not good around water.”
“Well, try not to fall overboard.”
The passenger lists on Hamburg-Süd’s new luxury liner, the Cap Arcona, reputed to be the fastest ship on the South Atlantic, were almost filled, Beatriz discovered. She wouldn’t contemplate sailing on any other ship and paid a deposit on the last two first-class tickets, which immediately created a predicament: Who would take the second ticket, Natalia or Zita?
“Natalia must go with you, Beatriz. She’s your daughter.”
“Yes,” Beatriz said.
“One day, I would like to see Buenos Aires,” Natalia said. However, she had been away, and now she would like to stay at home. Zita arranged to hand a project over to another editor. Her boss agreed to her going, if she took on the job of contacting an Argentine writer whose novels Ullstein Verlag wanted to publish in translation.
In November, Herr Saltzman drove Natalia and her mother and Zita to Hamburg. They all stayed overnight at a hotel, so that Herr Saltzman and Natalia could be at the pier as Beatriz and Zita, heads bent against the rain and wind, boarded the Cap Arcona. How seaworthy was this new Cap Arcona? How safe was Buenos Aires for two women alone? Herr Saltzman would like to know.
This, he said, was the leitmotif of his life. How many times had he said goodbye to Beatriz, not knowing when or if he would see her again? In the past, she had relied on his advice, his friendship; she had allowed him to believe their friendship would grow into something more. But he was tired of waiting; he could not endure it; he could not compete with Zita Kuznetsova, he said flatly. He gave Natalia his umbrella and walked bareheaded, rain pouring down his face, to his car.
Natalia invited Herr Saltzman to dinner on Christmas Eve. Hildegard prepared roast goose, sausages, potatoes with herbs, carrots in butter. They listened to Christmas music on the radio. At nine, Herr Saltzman had a long-distance operator place a call to Buenos Aires, where it was four o’clock in the afternoon. Beatriz came on the line, excitedly telling Natalia that nothing had changed in her villa. It was just as she remembered. Not a stick of furniture was out of place. She could walk through the rooms with her eyes closed and not bump into anything. She kept hearing her parents saying, “Mein Gott, what do we have here? Is this the little nuisance?”
Natalia passed the receiver to Herr Saltzman, and when the phone call ended, he beamed and said, “Doesn’t she sound well?”
* * *
Natalia and Margot Brückner made appointments at the beauty salon at Kaufhaus des Westens for manicures and haircuts. They walked along Tauentzienstrasse, looking in shop windows. A street photographer took a picture of Natalia and gave her his card. Margot said Natalia must go to his studio to buy the photograph—which she did, two weeks later, and it surprised her. Was this her? She saw a tallish girl, eyes shining, a slight smile on her lips. Her coat came to her knees and showed off her actually very nice legs.
“Look at you,” Margot said. “You’re beautiful.”
Natalia laughed, but the photograph gave her confidence, in a way. The confidence to go about alone, to do things on her own, whatever she pleased, because why should she care what anyone thought of her? She sat in a café on Potsdamer Platz nursing a cup of coffee and reading a book and writing replies to letters from her mother and Rozalia. In her letters Rozalia sounded despondent, querulous, saying the weather had kept her imprisoned without a soul to talk to except Katya and Magdolna, and many days they were late coming to light the kitchen stove in the morning. Late with breakfast and the cooking they were but very prompt in leaving. Many nights she had nearly frozen to death in her bed, but thanks be to God, she was alive. When are you coming to see me? Don’t leave it too long, will you? Katya is going to give the Green Room, now referred to as Natalia’s room, a good cleaning and airing in readiness. I await your reply, my dear girl.
Rozalia’s letters made her smile, whereas Beatriz’s letters often provoked her. Beatriz too complained of being confined indoors, in her case in her lawyer’s chambers, where she was signing endless papers finalizing the sale of properties, some of which she had not known she owned. My parents were compulsive investors, there was nothing they didn’t want to possess, it seems. Vast tracts of pampas and ranchland, wheat and sugarcane plantations, as well as commercial space in the city and warehouses near the river. Some properties generate an income it’s true, but expenditures have to be set against profits, and my time has value, as well.
Beatriz wrote that she and Zita had traveled on the charming British-owned Argentine Central Railway to Rosario, a beautiful city, with parks and wide avenues, familiar to her from those long-ago days with her governess. Rosario is more than ever a clean, orderly city. You could eat off the pavement, as Zita says. Neither of us is discounting a permanent move to Buenos Aires.
She folded her mother’s letter into its envelope and glanced around the café. This was the best part: watching people. A woman in a rose-colored slip of a dress, with her hair in kiss-curls across her forehead, gazed into the distance with a melancholy look, and then a man in plus fours joined her, and she began scolding him for keeping her waiting, and he responded by laughing uproariously, so that people turned to look. An elderly couple, both thin to the point of emaciation, as if they lived on nothing but air, cut iced cakes into small pieces and fed each other tastes on their forks. At another table two priests were drinking coffee and arguing, possibly over some doctrinal point.
Someone said her name. She looked up, and there was Herr Becker. She recognized him at once. He beamed at her. “Is this you?” he said. “Is this Fräulein Faber? But yes, it is you. I knew it, you look so like your mother.”
“Herr Becker,” Natalia said. “How good to see you.” He was about to grab lunch, a solitary lunch, and then get back to his office, he said. What could Natalia do but invite him to sit at her table? She moved aside her papers. He thanked her and sat down. He was now a junior member of a law firm with offices in Potsdam. He often thought of her and Frau Faber, he said, when she told him her mother was in Buenos Aires. He had wanted to get in touch with them, but always his natural reserve and respect for their privacy had held him back.
Was he still
reading Spengler? Natalia asked. It was Chekhov now. Chekhov was his inspiration and moral guide in art and in life. The practice of law involved defending sometimes quite odious individuals, and he devoted whatever free time he had to literature, music, family, and friends; but his friends were few, and he had no family in Berlin. He talked while eating pickled herring on rye bread and gulping hot coffee, and when he was finished he wiped his mouth on a napkin and said again what a pleasure to see her looking so well. Would she give him permission to telephone her at home? Yes, that would be nice, she said.
In January the River Spree froze, and Natalia went ice-skating with Herr Becker, who insisted on holding her hand so they wouldn’t get separated in the crowd. He skated with a fine, practiced efficiency, one hand in his coat pocket. The cold wind brought a high color to his cheeks. One day, after skating, Natalia invited him home for hot chocolate and a slice of Hildegard’s warm spice cake with whipped cream. Hildegard approved of Herr Becker and praised his good manners. Natalia had to agree; it was difficult to find fault with Herr Becker.
When the weather warmed, and the ice thinned, she and Herr Becker skated indoors at the Sportpalast. They visited the library, walked in parks, decided it would be appropriate to address one another with the familiar du and to use first names, a significant change in their friendship that merited a celebratory lunch at a café. Natalia introduced Martin to Margot Brückner and her brother, Hermann. All four of them went to see an avant-garde film called Ghosts before Breakfast. It was only ten minutes long but seemed longer, each scene bizarre, disorienting. Hats floated in space, clocks dissolved, a man’s head came off his shoulders and drifted around the screen. Natalia was enchanted and horrified, equally. “Mein Gott,” Martin said, laughing. Hermann said it was an insult to the intelligence. It was French, he added: What did one expect?
* * *
One afternoon in June, Miklós came to see her. He brought a basket of strawberries picked that morning by Katya, fragrant, warm from the journey, and nestled in a bed of straw. That morning Natalia had been sailing on the Wannsee with Margot and Hermann, and the bright sun or the wind, or both, had left her feeling languid, and she was unfazed about what he’d think of her sunburned nose or what she would say to him. He came in, and they sat talking in the living room. She asked how Rozalia was, and he said she’d been ill with a persistent summer cold but seemed to be on the mend. They went outside, so that she could show him the garden, and she invited him to stay to dinner. They had a simple meal of bread and cheese and cold cuts, and Hildegard served the strawberries with whipped cream in chilled cut-glass dishes. Miklós mentioned having received a postcard from Zita. Natalia said Zita was editing the German translation of a book by an Argentine writer.
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