Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  The next day, while the younger ones were outside playing in a new fall of snow, and Johann had settled himself in his office to scale a mountain of neglected paperwork, I had begun to explore the house on my own. The eastern wing was my favorite. At the other end of the library was a pair of intimate rooms, connected by a door that could be left open or shut, where I could read quietly by myself, or practice the cello. The decoration was simpler, as if the old castoff furniture had traveled here to die in peace. Johann told me that his wife, Frieda, had spent much of her time there, too, and I had often wondered how much we were alike, and whether we would have liked each other.

  After Johann’s grand announcement at dinner, I didn’t return to the dining room, nor to the music room, where we usually spent the last of the evening. Johann found me around ten o’clock in the smaller of the two rooms, playing Schubert while the snow blew horizontally outside the window and the gusts of wind made the chimney whistle.

  “It was just a surprise, that’s all,” I said, without looking up from the music. “You should have told me.”

  “There wasn’t time.”

  “Of course there was time. But you wanted to tell me in front of the children, so I couldn’t contradict you.” I rested the cello against my knee and looked up.

  “But why would you want to contradict me?” He appeared genuinely bewildered. “It’s a great honor, this post. A tremendous advance for my career.”

  “Paris is my home.”

  “Annabelle, we are a family. You are German now.”

  I rose from the chair passionately. “I am not German! I won’t be German. Do you know what your daughter said today, when we were leaving Berlin? She said that we shouldn’t shop at Wertheim, because it’s owned by a Jew. She said the department stores are like leeches, sucking Germany dry.”

  He blinked his eyes. “What’s this?”

  “It’s true. That’s what they’re teaching her at school. And all over Berlin there are signs in the shops and restaurants, about Jews not being welcome. I don’t know much German, but I understood that. It’s disgusting, the bigotry. I won’t live in a city like that. I won’t allow my son to be poisoned like that.” I knelt and laid the cello in its case and picked up a cloth to wipe the resin from the strings.

  Johann stood silently in the center of the room. His hands were closed against his sides, flexing slightly. “He is our son,” he said quietly.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Go ahead and denounce it.”

  “Annabelle.”

  “Please denounce it, Johann. You can love Germany and still denounce this. If you do love Germany, you will.”

  “Of course it is distasteful,” he said.

  “Distasteful? Is that all?”

  “What do you want me to say, Annabelle? Of course I do not share this opinion.”

  “But you won’t do anything about it, will you? You’ll go on supporting these horrible men who stir up people’s lowest instincts just for their own gain. You’ll allow them to poison your own children instead of standing up for what’s right.”

  “That’s not fair, Annabelle. This . . . this thing, it is just a kind of sickness, a malady of spirit. It will pass. It will fade away, when times are better. It always does.”

  “But in the meantime, people will suffer. It isn’t right, Johann. I won’t live here. I won’t do it.”

  “You speak as if Germany is the only place where this happens, the only place where Jews are not welcome. Look at France, the Dreyfus affair. Look at the pogroms in Russia. Even in New York and London, Jews are not received in the clubs or the drawing rooms. It is simply how things are.” Johann’s face was turning red, right up to the roots of his hair, so that his pale blue eyes looked like chips of ice perched in a tomato aspic.

  I tilted up my chin to face his passion. “Don’t be disingenuous, Johann. You know what’s going on here.”

  “I am not. I admit it’s wrong. But this is not such a great matter as you say. It is just a yearning for racial separation, which is a primeval human instinct, and therefore difficult to control. We see it in all countries. I do not advocate it. I have nothing against the Jews. But I understand why these passions are stirred, and I understand there is nothing to be done. It must simply run its course.”

  “Run its course? Are you mad?” I stabbed my finger at his chest. “You’re a powerful man, an army general, a baron! You can do something! But you won’t, will you? You’re too scared of that stupid man. You’re scared they will call you a Jew lover, or say you’re un-German. You’re—”

  “You know nothing about this, Annabelle. Nothing. Don’t speak of things of which you are ignorant.”

  “Oh, of course. How stupid of me. My job is to lie on my back and spread my legs and make more babies, and to raise your children and adorn your house, not to have opinions and especially not to discuss them. I don’t know why I bother with this old thing anymore.” I kicked the cello case. “It’s not as if you’re going to let me out of the house with it, God forbid.”

  Johann’s face was aglow, his shoulders rigid. He turned and grasped the edge of the mantel with his right hand, so forcefully I thought it might splinter. The clock ticked endlessly next to his chest. “Forgive me,” he said at last. “I have made you unhappy.”

  “I am not unhappy. But I don’t want to move to Berlin.”

  “It is only temporary. Six months, or perhaps a year.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  He picked up the poker and nudged a charred log into place. “You have become a champion of some cause, it seems.”

  “I’m a champion of humanity. And it’s inhuman, what I saw in Berlin. What your own daughter said to me.”

  He went on poking needlessly at the simmering fire. He was still dressed in his dinner jacket, sharp and black against the pale blue walls and the creamy mantel. Sometimes I forgot how big he was, until his size rushed against me—like now, when I measured him and realized he took up half the wall. I wondered how we looked together, to an outsider: my delicate bones against his blunt ones. When I was wearing high evening shoes, the top of my head came to his collar. I must look like a child next to him.

  “I wonder,” he said, in the same soft voice, “whether it is really Berlin you object to.”

  “What else would it be?”

  He set the poker in the stand and turned to me with his bleak face. The blood had drained away from his skin, as if he had gained conscious control of his unruly circulation. Another gust hit the chimney, and the wind whistled down the column at a furious pitch. The sound made me shiver.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps you would like to tell me, Annabelle.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. I don’t understand.”

  “Marthe tells me you met a man named Stefan at the department store today.”

  I crossed my arms. “I saw someone on the stairs, in the crowd. I thought I recognized him, but I was wrong. It wasn’t him. Very silly.”

  “Did you want it to be this man? This Stefan?”

  “Of course not! He just looked familiar, that’s all. Is that what you’re so mournful about this evening?”

  Johann stepped away from the mantel and took my left hand in a sandwich between his. “I want to make you happy, Annabelle. I want to be a husband to you.”

  “You are my husband, Johann. I don’t understand.”

  “I mean the husband you want. The husband in your heart.”

  There was something so melancholy in his voice, as if his own heart lay in two pieces on the floor between us. I leaned forward and touched his cheek. “You are, Johann. Of course you are. You’re a wonderful husband, the most wonderful father to Florian.”

  “But you cannot follow me.”

  “I can’t go against my own conscience. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t want me to.”

&nbs
p; He sighed and released my hand. “Is it really your own conscience? Or is this only an excuse?”

  “Johann, wait. You’re turning everything upside down, you’re making it sound as if—”

  “I must go to bed now, meine Frau. I will be very busy over the next few weeks.” He turned and walked to the door. “I hope you will change your mind.”

  “Johann, stop.”

  But he didn’t turn back. His body swallowed the door like a blotch of deep black ink.

  Third Movement

  “Where there is marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.”

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

  Annabelle

  PARIS • 1937

  1.

  When I woke up on that hot July morning, seven months later, I had not the slightest intention of betraying my husband by the end of the evening.

  I had expected the usual day, the usual routine of caring for Florian and managing our small household, perhaps a walk to the park if it wasn’t too sultry, a visit to the nearby shops when Florian took his nap, reading and music in the evening. There was almost always a letter from Johann in the morning post, to which I replied by afternoon; sometimes Lady Alice would stop by to visit and gossip. In a few weeks, we would pack for a month in Westphalia, until the younger children went back to school and Frederick left for university. An entire month, in which to mend together the tattered ends of my marriage.

  You see? I still held out hope.

  At the end of the Christmas holidays, I had returned to Paris while Johann remained in Berlin. We had explained to our families that Johann’s post was only temporary, so we hadn’t wanted to upset our routine, or give up the Paris apartment, which was so desirable. Johann had arrived with me to help me with the luggage, and he had left by ten o’clock on the wagon-lit to Berlin, without staying a single night. He wrote faithfully every day, a single page describing his activities and the weather, ending each letter in a copperplate Yours always, Johann, and I replied faithfully to every one.

  In April he had come to Paris for a few days on business. I had met him in the morning at the Gare de Lyon in the Mercedes, and he had driven us back to the apartment and taken Florian in his arms and exclaimed over how well he had grown, what a fine boy he was. His stony face had softened with love. The two of them had spent the rest of the morning on the floor of the nursery, trying out one toy after another, while the delicate spring sunshine lit the windows.

  I had tried to make my husband welcome. I had kissed him and taken his arm, I had planned dinner and the theater to show him how wonderful things could be, safe in Paris with his son and his young French wife. I thought if we could just go to bed again, the way we had before Florian was born, we could find our way back. I would feel once more like Johann’s wife. I would absorb myself once again in the duties and pleasures of matrimony, and I would no longer see Stefan’s face in a department store crowd, or on the train, or in the park eating ice cream on a bench. Lady Alice had helped me pick out a gown for the evening. When we arrived back home, I asked him to help me with the zipper.

  He had gazed at me sadly for a moment, as if to say, Poor Annabelle, trying that old trick. He had walked around to my back and drawn down the zipper. Then he had excused himself and gone to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

  And out of nowhere came the prayer: Thank God.

  I suppressed it at once, of course. But the prayer couldn’t be un-prayed. God had heard me and knew that for that instant, I had been grateful my husband didn’t want me, after all.

  On the way to the Gare de l’Est a few days later, I said, “Your back doesn’t have to be so straight, Johann. You might try to understand.” He had occupied himself with the manic Paris traffic and hadn’t replied. Florian sat on my lap, playing with the buttons of my blouse. We pulled to the curb across from the terminus and Johann had got out of the car with his valise. I slid to the driver’s seat, put my hands on the wheel, and looked up expectantly for his farewell.

  Johann had gazed back down at me with his ice-chip eyes. “Frieda misses you. When she is home from school on the weekend, she hopes every time she will see you there.”

  I said I missed her, too.

  For a moment, he seemed to soften, and he touched my hair and said we would have time this summer to be a family again. He kissed Florian’s cheek, and then he turned away and picked up his valise and crossed the street. Florian stretched out his arms and started to cry.

  When I came back home to the vast and empty apartment, I put Florian down for his nap and wandered back to my own room to spread myself out on the bed I shared with Johann. I stared at the canopy overhead, which was not quite so monumental as the one at Schloss Kleist. It was a happy yellow silk instead of a twilight-blue velvet, and it made me think of the sun. It made me think, for a moment, what would happen if I did not go to Westphalia in August.

  If, instead, I put Florian in the Mercedes with me and drove down to the little sun-drenched villa by the sea in Monte Carlo.

  2.

  “It’s a great shame, of course,” said Lady Alice philosophically, that hot July morning, “but I suppose he’s served his purpose.”

  “What purpose is that?”

  “Why, saved you from infamy, of course. That is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “No. I wanted a father for my child. I wanted a partner to share my life with.”

  “Then I suppose the great shame is you forgot he was German.”

  “I don’t care that he’s German,” I said. “But I can’t live there. Not now.”

  She rolled her eyes and reached for the teapot. She was still living with my father, which was something of a miracle, and even more miraculously, they were quite happy together. Papa’s face glowed when she came into the room. She hardly ever went out at night, at least on her own, and she had even taken to wearing dresses that displayed no more than an inch or two of her breasts. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think they’ve managed to order things rather well, haven’t they? You should have seen Berlin five years ago. Absolutely ramshackle. Of course, it’s heaps more fun that way, but one’s got to be sensible and think about the economy from time to time.”

  “I don’t think you’ve thought about the economy in your life, Alice, and what’s all this about being sensible?”

  She set down the teapot and the strainer and sank her spoon into the sugar. “The thing is, I’m going to have a baby.”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t it charming? A bit of an accident, I’ll admit, but your father can’t contain his delight now that it’s done. You’d think he had impregnated an entire nunnery.”

  “My God.”

  “I think you’re supposed to congratulate me, darling.”

  I rose at once and kissed her cheek, and told her she could go through Florian’s things and have whatever she wanted. But what about your own babies? she asked, and I said there wasn’t much prospect of that at the moment, and she said, Nonsense, you have all August ahead of you, and how could Johann possibly resist? If that was what I wanted, of course. To have a nice conventional marriage and a belly fat with my husband’s child.

  At that moment, Florian wandered by—he had just begun to walk—and paused at my knee, looking up at me with his most hopeful expression, and I lifted him into my lap and buried my face in his sweet-smelling hair.

  3.

  When Lady Alice left, I found my hat and gloves and brought out Florian’s perambulator from the corner of the entryway. “I’m taking the baby for a walk,” I told the housekeeper, and just as I maneuvered the wheels into place and reached for my son, my brother Charles strolled through the door, whistling a jazz song.

  I nearly dropped the baby.

  “Charles!” I screamed.

  “Well, hello, sister dear.” He kissed my cheek as if we’d last seen each other a week ago. “I
s this the little tyke? My God, he looks like you.”

  That was what everyone said, that he looked like me, because he had my darker coloring instead of Johann’s. But that was the thing about coloring; it was the superficial detail that everyone noticed. If you looked more closely, you saw that Florian really had Stefan’s coloring, and Stefan’s eyes, and most certainly Stefan’s chin and jaw.

  But people saw what they expected to see.

  Florian looked into Charles’s face and burst into tears.

  “Now, now, darling,” I said. “This is your uncle Charlie.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Uncle Charlie. “I guess I am.”

  4.

  We struck off toward the Jardin des Tuileries, Florian’s favorite excursion. “I don’t suppose this means you’ve forgiven me,” I said.

  “Forgiven you for what? Marrying that old Nazi?”

  “He isn’t a Nazi.”

  “Beg to differ. By Christ, it’s hot. Do you want to get an ice cream?”

  “He isn’t a Nazi. He’s a member of the party, of course—he has to be. It doesn’t mean he shares their beliefs. Here, you take him,” I said, offering the handlebar to Charles.

  “What do I do?”

  “You push it, Charles. It’s not that hard.”

  Charles dropped his cigarette on the pavement and took up the handlebar. “Nice little machine,” he said. “Well sprung. Little guy seems to like it, at any rate.”

  “I wish you would tell me why you’re here. It’s making me nervous you’re going to tell me some awful news, that you’ve got cancer or liver cirrhosis.”

  “No, it’s not that. Actually, it’s Nick.”

  “Nick! Nick Greenwald? He’s got cancer?”

  “Calm down. No, he’s not sick. He’s going back to New York. His father went toes-up a month ago, and he’s got to take charge of the home office.”