“The Oakes murder? What’s that got to do with Benedict?”
“You’ve heard about it?”
“Heard about it? It was all over the newspapers. Such as they are, with paper rationed.” She twitches the cigarette with her thumb. A strand of hair has come loose from the knot at her neck. She pushes it back over her ear. “Didn’t they arrest somebody? Some French chap, I believe. There was a trial. A sensational trial.”
“Not French,” I say. “Mauritian.”
“Oh, of course.”
“Yes. The evidence was fabricated. It was all a giant cover-up. Not to cover up who committed the murder, mind you. Everybody in Nassau knows who killed Harry Oakes. Who had him killed, anyway.”
“Then what were they trying to cover up?”
“Why,” I tell her. “Why he was murdered.”
“Oh, naturally. The why is always more complicated than the who or the how. More interesting and especially more dangerous.”
“In this case, especially.”
“And did Benedict know why?”
“Yes.”
Tuxedo, having softened up my legs to his satisfaction, now settles in the center of my lap and purrs like a motorcycle. I stroke the fur behind his ears, beneath his chin. He seems to be smiling, though his eyes are shut. Margaret smokes her cigarette and stares at the photographs on the mantel, the images of which I can’t make out.
“I should have known, I suppose,” she says. “He told me he was just going to look after the duke, a sort of liaison officer. I should have known it was something more.”
“Oh, I think you knew. Didn’t you?”
Margaret rises from the chair and settles the collar of her dressing gown more snugly around her slender neck. Tuxedo lifts his head and blinks at her as she moves to the fireplace and brushes the frame of one of the photographs with her thumb. If I squint my eyes, I can just perceive a pair of monochrome figures set against the outdoors, drenched in sunshine. I ask if those are her parents.
“No. It’s Benedict. Benedict and me. In Germany one summer, before the war.” She drags on the cigarette. “Our mother was German.”
“Yes, I know.”
She lifts the photograph and strokes the picture’s edge, as if she’s rubbing something away. “We loved it there so much, like it was home. Isn’t that strange? But we always visited in summer, when the sun was shining, unlike Scotland. Benedict loved to go hunting for new plants. That was his obsession, even then.”
“Botany,” I say.
“Yes. He was always outdoors. There was this lake at the edge of the garden. I taught him to swim there. He was six.”
“Isn’t that a little old to start swimming?”
“My grandmother wouldn’t let him near the water.”
“Really? Why not?”
She flicks ash into the fireplace and replaces the photograph on the mantel. The metal makes a decisive noise as it strikes the marble. She turns to me and folds her arms. “Grandmothers have their reasons. You haven’t eaten, have you?”
“Not since lunch.”
“Then I suppose we’d better make dinner.”
Dinner is brown bread, margarine, pea soup with tiny pieces of ham, washed down with weak tea. I ask her about Thorpe as a boy, about summers in Germany, about this grandmother of theirs, but she doesn’t want to answer me. Instead she asks me about my own childhood, about America, about my parents, and she listens earnestly to my replies. “How queer,” she says, over and over, as if America is something exotic, as if my father and mother are a species of animal you find in a zoo.
We wash the dishes. She shows me to the lavatory and finds me a toothbrush. She shows me to my room—Thorpe’s room—and only at the last second, as we exchange awkward good nights at the door, do I summon the resolve to press her again about her past.
“Do you miss it? Germany, I mean. Could you ever go back?”
“Go to Germany? Are you mad?”
I shrug one shoulder, like a question. Margaret bends down and lifts Tuxedo from the floor, where he’s been winding around my legs, making suggestive noises. She strokes the fur between his ears. When she speaks, she addresses herself to the cat, not to me.
“I’m afraid there are certain places to which you can never return.”
Elfriede
October 1900
(Germany)
On the canopied bed where Gerhard von Kleist consummated his marriage by the light of two dozen beeswax candles—Schloss Kleist was not then electrified—he now lies in darkness, attended by a doctor brought in from hated Berlin, a Jew, the foremost expert in infectious disease, who once raised the Kaiser’s own son almost from the dead.
Gerhard has typhoid. It’s not hopeless, everyone insists, as they go about the corridors in dark clothes, mute voices, furrowed brows. Not hopeless at all. He’s such a strong, big fellow. How could a puny germ conquer Baron von Kleist?
Elfriede knows how. It’s five o’clock in the morning and she sits by the bed, reading aloud from Faust—naturally, Gerhard worships Goethe—but she doesn’t hear her own words. Inside her head, she’s begging God to let her husband live, not to punish Gerhard because Elfriede has fallen in love with another man and committed adultery in her heart. That last conversation with Wilfred, she hears every word echoing against her skull: If something were to happen to my husband. And: It would be like wishing he were dead. Almost as if she knew, as if she obtained some subconscious knowledge of what was happening in Westphalia while she sat on her mountaintop with her lover, speaking of Gerhard in the past tense. He loved me so much.
Everyone’s asleep except Elfriede and, possibly, Gerhard, who exists in a febrile state of half slumber. When she first took her seat and began reading, he became calm, as if the sound of her voice gave him rest. But now he’s twitching again. Tosses his head from side to side. Mumbles words. Twice Elfriede’s bathed him with a sponge and a basin of lavender water, yesterday morning and yesterday evening, and still he carries that awful smell of sickness, that putrescent sourness. Now she breaks off her reading and touches his dry, warm, pale cheek. How devoted he was. A perfect husband. Never raised a finger against her, let alone his voice. She could have had no complaints, it was all her doing. Even when she told him she couldn’t face the idea of having another baby—enduring that awful blackness again, that certainty of something deeply wrong at her core—he never objected. He moved his sleeping accommodation into the anteroom, now occupied by Dr. Rosenblatt. Only his eyes reproached her. Poor Gerhard. Now he suffers all over again, because of her. And her face is like an angel’s.
Elfriede lifts the linen cloth that lies across the bowl of lavender water, sitting atop the nightstand. She wets its, wrings it, lays it along the beam of Gerhard’s forehead. A paraffin lamp glows at the window. Just enough to see by. Under the coolness of the cloth, Gerhard goes still. A word sighs out between his lips, and after a moment Elfriede recognizes the syllables: her name.
She sets aside the book and walks to the window. Not the one with the lamp, the dark one, though her mind craves something light, something coppery and joyful. Craves Wilfred. His absurd figure. Big, plain, bony, ginger head atop long, spindly, freckled limbs. Laugh like sunshine. She’s drawn to the thought of him like birds are drawn to the sky. But no. No sky for her. No sunshine. The hateful gazes of her sisters-in-law, blaming her for this catastrophe, for all catastrophes: that’s what she deserves.
Elfriede lifts the curtain and stares through the glass. The peculiar darkness before dawn, the coldest time of day. Naturally the master’s bedroom occupies a favored position at the back of Schloss Kleist, overlooking the formal gardens and the lake beyond, on which Gerhard used to take her rowing. A deep, pure lake, stocked with fish. On the opposite shore begins the woods, thickening eventually into acres of untouched forest, where Gerhard sometimes went hunting for boar. Altogether the estate is from another age, a feudal age. You might be gazing five hundred years into the past, gazing out this window
. Except, at this hour, you can’t see anything at all.
And yet. And yet.
There it is again. A tiny flash of white. On the ground below, the terrace, reflecting the light from the paraffin lamp in the other window.
A strange fear grips Elfriede’s heart. Now her eyes adjust. The flash becomes an object, bobbing against the shadows. Elfriede turns and runs out of the room and down the corridor, down the back staircase, out the French door to the terrace. (Noting that the door was ajar.)
By the time Elfriede returned to Schloss Kleist from the hospital outside Berlin, the stitches in her wrists had been removed, the scars were fresh and pink, and she was—according to the doctors—healing nicely. Her baby had turned six months old and changed beyond recognition. He was enormous and round-cheeked, a roly-poly darling who sat up and ate pap and tried mightily to crawl. On his formerly bald head, a fine down of hair now grew, so pale it was almost white. They would not leave her alone with him, of course. The nurse remained in the room, within arm’s reach. She was maybe thirty years old, blond and sturdy, and had been advertised for the instant Elfriede was whisked away to the hospital. Wanted, nurse for infant, three months of age. Mother of recently deceased infant preferred. Female of good character only. References required. Wages 5 marks weekly. The aunts desired a bereaved mother because they thought she would devote herself wholly to Johann, and this proved to be the case. Her gaze, pained and possessive, never strayed from Johann’s white head. She regarded Elfriede with a suspicion bordering on hatred. Elfriede, cradling Johann to her chest, playing helplessly at peekaboo, felt like an intruder. When the baby cried for food, Charlotte snatched him back and assumed an air of command as she unbuttoned her bodice and produced a large, blue-veined breast for him to suckle. Which he did, eagerly. Closing his eyes in bliss. His tiny, beautiful fists clutching at Charlotte’s skin. Elfriede watched those fingers knead and felt them ripping her flesh from her own chest, sucking her blood from her own heart. She had nothing to give him.
I have lost him, Elfriede thought. And then:
He was never mine.
But she carried the image of that round, fragrant white head to Switzerland with her. She carried it on the armchair in Herr Doktor Hermann’s office, carried it on the bench in the courtyard, carried it along the narrow goat paths that crisscrossed the mountain, carried it in bed and at the table and buried in the meadow grass with Wilfred.
She carries it now as she darts across the cold terrace stone and calls his name.
Johann.
Johann.
Little white-haired boy, where are you?
She isn’t allowed to see him. The germs, you know. Johann and Nurse sleep upstairs in the nursery wing and take their meals in the nursery kitchen, from food carried there directly from town. Herr Doktor Rosenblatt is specific in these points. Had, in fact, wanted Johann and Nurse to remove from Schloss Kleist altogether, except there’s nowhere to send them except Elfriede’s family, and that’s out of the question, apparently. So Elfriede hasn’t seen Johann once during the three days since her return to Westphalia. She’s looked from the bedroom window, from the hallway, hoping to steal some glimpse of him, but her luck has turned, it seems. Or else luck has nothing to do with it. Maybe Nurse confines Johann strictly outside the potential arc of Elfriede’s gaze, on her own initiative or someone else’s. The aunts. Elfriede’s sisters-in-law, Ulrika, who’s married to the owner of a neighboring estate, and Helga, who still lives under her brother’s roof, a maiden.
Still, her son’s heart beats in her chest. She carries his image inside her skin. She calls his name now, stepping off the terrace to the darkened paths of the formal gardens, the parterres, the silent fountain, the alleys of linden and so on, searching each shadow for a flash of white, reflecting the half-moon. Listening for any rustle of fine gravel, any crackle of fallen leaves, any panting young breath. Anything she can hear above the thunder of her own terrified heart, that is. Surely he could not have gone so far as the lake.
Though she hasn’t yet noticed the chill, this October morning is brittle with it. Spreading from the northeast, from the Baltic, from the Russian plains where the weather has already turned to autumn. Elfriede’s hands and cheeks, if she cares to touch them, will prove icy. But she doesn’t care. She has room in her head for only one thought. Only one sensation. Not fear, or terror or even panic—none of those words quite describes her state of mind, when she considers the possibility of Johann losing his way and wandering into the dark woods, or trundling down the dock to fall into the lake, even merely tripping on a stone and cutting his fat knee. The idea of his blood, she cannot fathom it. She cannot bear it.
Johann.
Johann.
Where are you?
In the cold air she doesn’t notice, her words carry far and clear. After each call, she cants her head and sharpens her ears and listens, listens. But there’s no answer, no small voice in the void. That half-moon sits behind a cloud now. It doesn’t reveal much, just silvers the leaves and the stones, lightens the shadows from black to charcoal, so you see an obstacle in the instant before you run into it. Elfriede reaches the stone steps that end in the lake. In summer, a flat-bottomed boat would be tied to the mooring at the bottom of these steps, where the water’s shallow. In summer, you could also stroll along the lake’s edge where the water is deeper, where the bank’s made of civilized cut stone, and you could sit on this stone and dangle your legs into the lake to cool them. Or maybe fish, if you brought your pole. Picnic. Gerhard enjoyed swimming. He’d dive in and stroke all the way across to the opposite bank and back again, to maintain a healthy physical fitness. But summer’s gone, autumn has arrived, the sun’s busy warming some southern part of the globe. The half-moon drizzles a little light on the lake’s surface, and that’s all there is to tell you a lake exists there at all. If you weren’t expecting water, you might not even notice. Might simply walk off the edge, into the cold, black nothing.
Elfriede steps off the last stair and strides out into the shallows. She cups her hands around her mouth.
Johann.
Johann, please!
It’s your mother, Johann.
It’s Mama.
Where
are
you?
An echo floats back to her. Elfriede’s own words, turned against her. Now she discovers the cold and starts to shiver. She thinks, maybe he went back to the house already, maybe he wasn’t outside to begin with. Maybe I imagined him in the moonlight, in the lamplight from the window. Maybe it was a ghost, a little boy who died a hundred years ago, a wee unfortunate von Kleist who caught typhoid or something.
Elfriede tells herself to be sensible. There would be ripples, surely, there would be some natural commotion. A sturdy little boy could not just fall into a lake without a fuss.
You have imagined all this.
You haven’t slept, you’re exhausted, your mind is playing tricks.
You’re made of nerves right now.
You’re a fool.
What the hell does it matter, you don’t even know him. He doesn’t know you. He probably thinks Nurse is his mother. Probably calls her mama. Probably—
A tiny sob.
Elfriede whips around and listens. Made of nerves. No, not nerves: one giant nerve, quivering, straining for sensation.
The wavelets trickle behind her. She’s afraid to move, afraid to breathe, afraid of missing some vibration in the atmosphere. Her heart is too loud, her damned heart, getting in the way of everything. Why doesn’t it just stop. Elfriede shuts her eyes. In the space between heartbeats, she strains, she reaches.
Sob.
To the right, to the right. Elfriede remembers in a flash, the summerhouse.
It’s possible that Johann was conceived in the summerhouse. There are other candidates, of course, but that’s the interesting one. A hot, dreamlike afternoon at the end of August. Elfriede, by now accustomed to her husband, watches him hoist himself ashore after making h
is daily swim across the lake. Briefly, he looks like a god. The sun shines on his hair, his thick muscles run with water. (Of course he swims naked, he’s a Romantic.) He catches her gaze. Drops his towel, clasps her, carries her into the summerhouse, and makes love to her twice in the suffocating heat. Twice. The perspiring Elfriede, fastened to some cushions by a hundred and twenty kilos of heroic bone and muscle, gazes through the blurred, sultry windowpanes toward the sky. A dream world, long ago.
A month or so later, she realized her courses were late. So throughout the rest of her pregnancy, whenever she and Gerhard walked past the summerhouse, arm in arm, he smiled and said, Look, that’s where we made our son, my dearest love, my Liebling, don’t you remember? Elfriede merely ducked her head and neither agreed nor disagreed. After all, she and Gerhard had frequent intercourse throughout the end of August, and only once—well, twice—on the chaise longue in the summerhouse. Also, what if the baby was a girl?
On the other hand, Gerhard was right about the baby being a boy. So maybe he was right about its place of conception, as well. Anyway, it’s a good story.
This is not August. It’s October, and Gerhard lies dying in his bed upstairs, and nothing is a dream anymore, it is all reality. This son she scarcely knows, this child conceived in sunshine, now weeps in the nearby darkness, and Elfriede’s arms and face and feet are numb with cold. She makes for the summerhouse. She can’t hear the sounds of weeping anymore, but maybe she never did. Maybe the sounds originated in her own mind, because her mind needed to hear them. Maybe she doesn’t expect to find anything in the summerhouse except some old cushions, some old dreams.
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