Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  It had a Deutsches Reich stamp.

  This was the invitation from Karin’s mother, Lady Maire, Baroness Weinbrenner.

  My mother was thrilled and relieved. Later, on our journey up the Rhine, there would be moments when exhaustion and trepidation nearly overcame her—but she never had forgotten the kindness Lady Maire showed her as a young girl out of Ireland. If there was anywhere in Germany we could find a home, Eilín believed it must be at Walden.

  And after he read Lady Maire’s letter, my father persuaded himself that the baron must be planning to order a brand-new racing yacht, a replacement for Hermione II, probably to be built in America. She would need a skipper, and my father was the man for the job.

  The Quakers would pay for our third-class tickets on the train to Hull and the steamer to Rotterdam. From there we would have to make our own way to Germany.

  During those last, disorienting days in London, while Eilín was settling bills and packing everything we owned into a single trunk, my father sustained us with a vision of himself at the helm of a sharp new Yankee-built schooner dashing across Narragansett Bay, the crest of a bow wave gleaming like a bone between her teeth.

  We should have been Americans.

  A very old Quaker lady brought us to King’s Cross in a horse cab. I stared out at traffic and whispered faux German under my breath. Ambulances were lined up outside the station, because weeks after the war ended they were still bringing home the worst cases from the military hospitals in France.

  Whenever the Quaker spoke to Buck in German, he replied in English. He knew exactly how vulnerable we were.

  “Auf Wiedersehen!” she cried as we were boarding the train, and I saw my mother flinch. The chilly, smoky concourse was crowded with Union Jacks and stretcher cases, and Germans were more hated than ever, I could feel it. I very nearly hated them myself.

  Deported. What could that mean?

  By then, I was accustomed to journeys. I felt safer traveling with both parents than with my mother alone. And my parents were safe as well, because we were all three together. All worry and strain, in fact, could rest with me. I would absorb all the things that threatened us, I would sop up the danger.

  From King’s Cross we traveled by train to Hull. January 1919. The Quaker lady had given Eilín a basket with potted-meat sandwiches, apples, hard-boiled eggs, chocolate, and a thermos flask of tea.

  Buck sat in a corner of the railway carriage, legs crossed, reading his carefully folded Times.

  There was a revolution on in Germany. Left-wing Spartacists were fighting it out with right-wing militia, the Freikorps. Street battles in Berlin, Munich, Bremen. Massacres.

  “The country’s in chaos,” Buck said.

  Chaos. A new word for me. Now I see that my notion of what was normal and ordinary included a strong measure of chaos, but no one had applied the word.

  We all three longed to reconnect ourselves as a family.

  From Hull we caught a little steamer, Jervaulx Abbey, across to Rotterdam, an overnight journey. Steerage passengers slept in berths stacked belowdecks, men separated from the women. Men’s berths were stacked three high. I lay a few inches above my father. Poor ventilation and groaning men, did it remind him of the Ally Pally? But Buck was a sailor. Maybe it reassured him to be at sea. I wasn’t a sailor and was horribly seasick. Everyone in steerage was, except my father. A stew of vomit slopped and slid on the steel deck. A couple of times Buck wrapped me up in both our overcoats and carried me up the companionway ladder and out onto the main deck.

  Our little steamer was bouncing and riding across North Sea swells, and it was too cold to stay out there for more than a fresh minute; the cold was like a toxin. But while we could stand it, it was better outside than down below. There was liveliness and ferocity in the air. The grease of sea salt on deck, lit windows on the bridge—I felt part of something. But soon enough the cold became unbearable, and we slipped below again, never mind how foul it was down there.

  He lifted me into my berth, but I couldn’t sleep. Then I was sick, and sick again, and again, until there was nothing left, only black dribble that might have been blood and looked like Irish porter. After a while Buck would wrap me up again and carry me up the companionway ladder again. He was strong enough, my father, though he had been living on rations of horsemeat, cabbage, and tea for four years and toward the end of his imprisonment had stopped eating anything except potatoes the internees raised in their plots and the cups of fresh milk they were given once or twice a week.

  I clung like a monkey to my father’s back while he climbed up the companionway. Out on the main deck I could stand only if he stood behind me, hands on my shoulders, steadying me. I’d have blown away without my father.

  In the murky dawn we steamed past concrete moles that smoothed the channel entrance to the harbor of Rotterdam, and the sea calmed, and I felt much better. Jervaulx Abbey pushed across the inner harbor and up to a quay. Lines were thrown, the whistle gave a hoot, and deckhands trundled out the gangway. I watched three Dutch customs men down on the quay, in white caps and gray uniforms, calmly puffing meerschaum pipes. After our febrile night at sea, I felt sharp and composed and wickedly hungry. Ready to absorb everything new while drawing as little attention to myself as possible.

  The customs men told Buck all trains into Germany were stopped by a general strike. But we couldn’t afford to stay on in Rotterdam, so he left us in a café near the Holland-America ticket bureau and went off to find a barge heading up the Waal for the Rhine with space for three passengers willing to travel rough.

  Wintry air on the quays stank of coal smoke and bilge. In a dockworkers’ canteen an enameled stove pumped out welcome heat, and my mother and I shared a bowl of coffee. The stevedores and waitresses were rosy and cheerful. We splurged, ate herrings and toasted rolls, and the waitress produced a blood orange for me, free of charge. My mother peeled it, and we saved a few sections for Buck, who was out prowling the quays and talking to the bargemen.

  He came into the café and told us he’d found room for us on a barge headed upriver. He quickly swallowed his coffee, and a boy with a handcart trundled our trunk to the quay where our barge, St. Antonius, was taking on a cargo of barrels, crates, and sixty Dutch bicycles being shipped to Koblenz. There were burlap sacks of coffee beans in the hold and wheels of Gouda cheese wrapped in wax and gauze.

  Kapitein van Plaas, the St. Antonius’s master, was a Dutchman with a blond beard. He and Vrouw van Plaas lived aboard with their black cat, Stocksi. He told us he was the son and grandson of barge captains and had been born on a barge on the Waal between Tiel and Nijmegen. We were given a snug little deck cabin. Eilín and Buck shared the narrow berth while I slept in a nest of empty burlap sacks, overcoats, and blankets on the floor.

  It took most of the morning to finish loading, and then we backed off the quay. As St. Antonius chugged across the harbor and started up the complex tributaries of the Rhine, Vrouw van Plaas fed us mushroom soup and mashed potatoes with bacon and red cabbage.

  The landscape of the Rhine delta is flat and wide, and the sky is larger than London’s. The light is gray but soft, and fields are sodden and fiercely green, and the daylight felt more generous than wartime England’s.

  But I didn’t spend a lot of time gazing at the Rembrandt sky. I ate delicious food, played with the barge’s cat, and barely noticed the Dutch fields slipping past. At Rossum, Kapitein van Plaas had to tie up for mechanical repairs, which my father, who knew his way around a marine engine, assisted with. Afterward, the two of them sat in the wheelhouse, sipping Geneva gin from delftware cups.

  When I was brought in to say good night, Buck put down his cup, held his arms open, then wrapped them around me and held me tightly so that I felt the rough graze of his cheeks, smelled fresh alcohol and the rich smoke of the kapitein’s pipe. I felt much safer on the St. Antonius than in London. I fell asleep quickly, lulled by the chug of the engine and the slap of current on the hull.

  Hea
ding up the Waal past Nijmegen we had driving sleet and mugs of hot cocoa, then skies cleared. We passed into Germany, and a band of soldiers boarded us at Duisburg. Stranded by the railway strike, they had commandeered a scow to bring them out on the river, and as soon as they came alongside St. Antonius they started scrambling aboard. Van Plaas didn’t try to stop them. Probably he thought it would be dangerous to try. They were friendly enough, and his wife offered them bread and soup. They had given up their rifles somewhere but kept their coal-scuttle helmets, which dangled from their packs. The field-gray uniforms were faded and frayed. The soldiers sat on the foredeck amid the crates, bicycles, and casks, drinking apple brandy and playing cards. Buck spoke to them.

  The soldiers told my father we were safer on the river than ashore. As St. Antonius was sliding past Köln, we heard peculiar stuttering noises. The soldiers said it was machine guns. Approaching the Hohenzollern Bridge, a sniper started firing at us. At first I thought the bullets snapping overhead were insects but there are no insects on the Rhine in winter. Buck quickly herded my mother and me down into the hold. The soldiers took cover behind barrels and crates and the stack of bicycles in the bow. A few moments later a soldier was shot in the brains—we heard the others yelling. Buck went up to see if he could help. As soon as we had passed Köln, the shooting ceased, and Eilín and I came topside. By then the other soldiers had laid out the dead man on deck, pushing aside barrels to make space. It wasn’t that my parents were keen for me to see a dead soldier, but they couldn’t prevent it; the barge was too small. The others had straightened his legs and placed his steel helmet on his head, covering the mortal wound. His field-gray overcoat was neatly buttoned, and his eyes were closed. His hands were demurely crossed. I saw that soldiers were accustomed to dealing quickly with their dead. A bloodstain had already seeped into the deck planks that Vrouw van Plaas was scrubbing with a holystone. At Koblenz the soldiers strapped their dead comrade onto a plank and carried him ashore, and more soldiers came aboard. They were unshaven and dirty and slept on the foredeck huddled in their overcoats or in the hold among sacks of Javanese coffee and wheels of cheese.

  I noticed the whole way up the river that my parents mostly kept apart from each other. The three of us slept in our tiny cabin, but during the day my father enjoyed conversation with the kapitein in the wheelhouse while Eilín studied a little handbook of German grammar that Lady Maire had presented her years before. Once I watched Buck pass her a folded sheet of paper, and the next morning I saw her slip a piece of paper underneath his mug of coffee in the deckhouse. They were passing notes back and forth like schoolchildren! It seems an odd form of communication for husband and wife, but it was what they were used to. Letters had been their principal medium for four years.

  When the river narrowed after Koblenz, its quickness reminded me of the Ballisodare, and I thought of poaching nights with Mick McClintock and missed him badly.

  We encountered other barges. If there were children they usually waved at me. I’d had minimal contact with other children since Ireland and wasn’t sure that I wanted any.

  The current was quicker, sleeker, above Koblenz. Mick McClintock might have rigged some tackle and trolled this stretch of the Rhine. To Mick any quick river, even our little Garavogue on its tumble from Lake Innisfree to the sea, was a rich ribbon, a streak of promise, where sea trout or salmon might be hooked, speared, netted, or caught with bare hands. Poaching was dangerous, but so were most things worth doing, according to Mick.

  I came on deck one morning, and there was a layer of white mist on the Rhine, very different than the dirty coal smoke at Düsseldorf and Köln. We were in a steep gorge, castle after castle looming over the river. Vrouw van Plaas wore a hooded red cloak and handed around cups of coffee, and Kapitein van Plaas offered my father the helm.

  There was Buck, a skipper once again, even in his overcoat and pale-gray homburg, smiling and holding the barge against the current, much fiercer here than in the sluggish lower Rhine.

  When we put in at Sankt Goar to discharge some cargo, a French officer trotted aboard with a squad of African troops, large men in blue greatcoats, legs wrapped in green puttees, rifles slung at their shoulders. The officer demanded certificates from Kapitein van Plaas, then tore them into shreds because they were not printed in French. The German soldiers, who had been playing cards in the hold, crowded up on deck and began to snarl at the African troops, who were ordered to fix bayonets, which they did very smartly. Eilín tried to pull me away, but I resisted; it was too interesting. Mist on the river was turning golden with the sun just peeking through. The German soldiers were prodded into the bow while a couple of Africans were sent below to search for contraband. The French officer examined Buck’s papers. Our trunk was hauled out from our cabin, and the French officer ordered my mother to unlock it, then began rifling the contents while everyone stared. The first layers were my mother’s white underwear—slips, camisoles, drawers—and he held up a pair of her silk drawers, intending, I suppose, to humiliate her in front of all the men. But she wasn’t having it. In her convent French—learned from the nuns at Rathfarnham—she said, “If you are looking for presents for your dear mother, mon capitaine, you may help yourself to anything of mine.”

  That wiped the leer off his face. He ordered a couple of Africans to carry the trunk ashore while we were held aboard under guard. That trunk contained everything we owned except the clothes on our backs. Fifteen minutes later a couple of African soldiers brought it back to the quay, and two young German soldiers leaped down and hoisted it aboard. Then we cast off, the soldiers helping haul in our dock lines as St. Antonius fell out into the current.

  My mother opened the trunk to see what had been stolen. A small chest of table silver, and an heirloom necklace and brooch Con gave my mother as a wedding present, had disappeared.

  There was nothing to be done about it. My parents had been resigned to being robbed somewhere along the way. We were refugees, and it came with the territory, or the lack of one.

  At Wiesbaden a few hours later we said goodbye to Kapitein van Plaas and his wife and disembarked.

  “Auf Wiedersehen!” the soldiers cried, and this time my parents replied, “Auf Wiedersehen!” because it wasn’t dangerous anymore to speak German.

  1938

  Karin rang me at the office after I’d just had a most unpleasant interview with a senior clerk at the IG Farben Pensionskasse. When I announced my intention to resign, he pretended at first not to understand. Impossible! Unthinkable! Dismaying! No one ever voluntarily left the IG.

  After that he treated me brusquely, even rudely.

  Good riddance to bad rubbish—he didn’t say it, but that was his attitude.

  “I know I’m not supposed to telephone you at work.” Karin’s warm-cool voice on the telephone line, this was something I was never able to get used to.

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’ve told my father.”

  “Yes?”

  “I described your epic plan. It felt as if I were describing for him a film scenario. Not quite real. Ah, Billy, I don’t know. Maybe I should be back in Berlin.”

  “Certainly not! This isn’t the cinema—it’s real. New York in three weeks. What does your father say?”

  “He asks you to come out to Walden.”

  I caught the tram across the river. I walked down the busy road from Niederrad village to Walden. The gate porter was long gone, but I dragged open one of the iron gates and slipped through.

  For years Walden had been neglected. When I walked down the avenue that afternoon, tall weeds were sprouting through the gravel. The gardens hadn’t been tended since 1936 and were a mess. The lawns had not been mown. A pad of leaves undulated in a foot or two of filthy water in the swimming pool, which had never been properly drained.

  Instead of heading straight for the main house, I wandered the grounds for what I figured might be the last time. In the deserted stables, I caught a scent of horse, of neat’s-fo
ot oil, saddle soap, grain feed.

  At least the hay had been cut recently. The meadow was clipped and sleek, the only section of the estate that still seemed to be managed, organized, cared for.

  Newport, the shingle-style guest cottage that had been our refuge in 1919 and our home for many years after, stood off by itself in the Walden woods, one shutter loose and banging at the window of my old bedroom.

  The baron’s ancient red Mercedes and Lady Maire’s black Ford were still parked inside the garage/coach house. A local Party boss had acquired title to the cars in 1936 but hadn’t bothered taking them away.

  A late-October afternoon in the flickering birch glades. Walden was a ghostland. I saw ghosts of beautiful horses, ghosts of my mother and father in their happiest days, even the ghost of my long-lost friend Mick asking questions, wanting to know all about the beautiful heiress Karin von.

  It didn’t matter whether or not she was emotionally prepared to leave Germany. It was time. And I would bring her to safety on the other side of the ocean. And we’d cross el llano to find our future on the other side.

  I was operating out of an indecipherable mixture of training and instinct, like a well-trained gun dog, a retriever, trembling with eagerness to fetch the downed bird and carry it in his mouth softly, tenderly, without doing the slightest damage. It’s his job. He’s born for it.

  Don’t get in his way.

  DON’T BE AFRAID

  Arten von Licht Buch [Kinds of Light Book], Karin v Weinbrenner. Unpaginated. In English and occ. German. Lange Family Archive, 12 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.