Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  remembered light of wartime: Walden (1914–19)

  the colors very STRONG: black/white/dark-spruce-green/plenty of field gray uniforms/Red is bloody bandages. Our food is gray in war. Turnips, potatoes, porridge. All birds are killed for eating: sparrows, finches larks black crows with black feet. The officers with muddy yellow faces—have been gassed. Some wounds are purple. The nursing sister Zukermann wears pink says it is the most sensible shade, hides bloodstain scarlet would be better but—nursing sisters cannot wear scarlet!

  —Father’s Eisernem Kreuz, “W,” black with silver edges, and ribbon white-red-black. Father’s uniform: scarlet piping on field gray—he says to the tailor “Zu eng! Zu eng! Can’t breathe!”

  —It snows a great deal in the war.

  —I lie on pillows on the rug in the library with tea reading “Sons of the Bear-Hunter” and “The Treasure of Silver Lake,” thanks to the little Oberleutnant. After the war he says he will travel to the Llano for healing in the light. But—one of the graves they are digging—to be prepared, before the ground freezes too hard—will be, yes, for him.

  —The little Oberleutnant’s beautiful horse boots. Black, quality leather, supple, hardly worn. What is to be done?—polish them! polish them—he will wear them in seinem Grab!

  Holograph letter. Signed K. v. Weinbrenner, addressed Master Billy Lange Walden 60528 Frankfurt am Main Germany, postmarked Sherborne Dorset, 12 Nov. 1920. Lange Family Archive, 12 C-11-1920. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  SHERBORNE GIRLS SCHOOL

  Sherborne, Dorset

  11th November Armistice Day 1920

  My dear young sir,

  If you truly are able to hit rabbit on the run then you are a bowman as good as any apache of your age. Of course only children hunt rabbits…when you are of an age—buffalo. Still I am quite pleased with you. English boy at Walden with his quite charmant parents & I at school with 209 unpleasant English girls & neither of us quite “at home.” There are 17 girls in this House. One Irish. You would not like them. The stocky pink creature called Belinda Morgan-Grenville, remarkably dreadful, big teeth, no poise, knocked my shins with her hockey stick—twice. The second time I flue at her. Oh terrible! Beastly foreigner bloody hun, “poor sport”! The Head Girl of the School Rita Vanderheuven decides my punishment. Part-Hollander, Vanderheuven she is not bad. Her I admire actually. But now I am forbidden to leave school grounds—no walks to the village shops—for 2 weeks. We walk to the vill. to buy sweets, some…Zigaretten! Just before 11 o’clock the bells ring out—Two Minutes Silence. Is it possible to remember a german soldier here in english. Yes—it is. Leutnant Fröhlisch.

  It is terrible how loud the Eng. girls are. Amusing sometimes. Read, read young sir. How does Winnetou? You may write me only in good german please.

  Your sporting old friend,

  K. v. Weinbrenner

  Holograph letter. Signed K. v. W, addressed Herr B. Lange Walden 60528 Frankfurt am Main Germany, postmarked Lausanne 11 Gare Exp, 11.11. 1925. Lange Family Archive, 12 C-11-1925. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  INSTITUT CHATEAU MONT-CHOISI

  Lausanne Suisse

  11ième Novembre 1925

  Guillaume, mon frère

  Positively gray skies EN SUISSE. mais dans mon rêve: EL LLANO ESTACADO. Would it not be grand, mon frère. Wouldn’t it. These days suisse organized sombre orderly ne plus ultra. Why if my petit père were Madame Directrice he couldn’t manage this establishment any more to his liking. Finishing School! We sleep on ironed sheets, we are exercised, nous sommes nourris, we study temperament, manners, pliér, household management of silver and linens. La révérence. No breeding done: otherwise the school operates like an excellent stable. Girls know the men they’ll marry. I shall marry no one. The Hon. Jane Pitney has invited me to England at Christmas. If my Hon. Mother agrees I shall hunt with the Hon. Cottesmore in Jan.

  Finishing School! Indeed! I shan’t be finished, my Billy! After this swiss convent, or coven (not so bad really, but not so good either) I shall go and live in Berlin. I shall take a flat in Berlin. I shall be…unanswerable. Not finished either. Rather I shall begin.

  Thurs. last slipped away—to the Kino in town—Fantôme de l’Opéra, American, superb, what a grip, watching such a picture is like having an enormous dream—Alpträume—one staggers into the street reeling, shaken, extraordinary sensations. Nothing like the pictures, is there.

  TODAY=Day of the dead. No 2 minutes silence in Lausanne but this morning at 1100 all English girls stood completely still. They froze like the upright dead.

  Your only sister,

  KvW

  Arten von Licht Buch [Kinds of Light Book], Karin v Weinbrenner. Unpaginated. In English and German. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  A nocturnal ride across the desert which stretches itself out in the moonlight! How much I wish my dear readers could feel the majestic sensations which allow the human heart to swell higher and higher. However, the heart must be free from worry and from all that could oppress and constrain it…If only someone could give me a quill from which the right words would flow to describe the impression which such a nocturnal desert ride brings forth from a devout human heart!

  Der Geist des Llano Estacado Karl May

  —my transl!! kvw

  Hollow cheeks, thin lips, gray clothes—the Germans resembled wolves, I thought, as our little suburban train puffed strenuously into Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. A pair of beggars in ragged field-gray uniforms—one missing a leg—hectored a well-dressed couple stepping from a first-class compartment on our train. The gentleman was portly and wore a white silk scarf and a camel-hair overcoat draped nattily across his shoulders. The woman with him was much younger, slender, beautiful. I did not have enough German to interpret what the beggars were screaming, but from their twisted faces and the spit flying from their teeth the invective must have been passionate and foul, and the first-class couple scurried past them.

  A porter wearing a blue smock and a row of medals was eager to hoist our trunk onto his barrow. Buck suddenly put out an arm to stop him and said to my mother, “My cigarette lighter! Did you see it? Have they stolen my lighter as well?”

  I saw my mother was puzzled. Our table silver and an heirloom Irish necklace had been stolen from the trunk; why fuss over a lighter?

  Buck opened the trunk and started digging frantically through layers of clothes, exposing everything, right there on the station platform. He was breathing in hoarse gasps. It scared me, because we were in Germany, land of the Hun.

  “It doesn’t matter!” my mother whispered through clenched teeth. Was Germany casting a spell over us? Would things only get more difficult from now on?

  “Buck, Buck, forget the lighter, please, leave it for now, we mustn’t delay.”

  He didn’t respond. He was on his knees pawing through our mess of clothes. Germans hurrying for trains hurtled past. Young soldiers stared at us from under steel helmets. Crying whistles, hissing of air brakes, conductors yelping, the raw jabber of the German language—train stations were stews of anxiety as far as I was concerned; all train journeys had been versions of exile. I watched helplessly as my sweet father dug through layers of clothes like a dog after a bone. Eilín had packed everything so neatly; disorder frightened and dismayed her. The French inspectors at Sankt Goar had already smashed the lock and rifled through, and now Buck was tearing into it all over again. We’d been on German soil only a couple of hours, and already things were coming apart.

  The porter, watching my father panting and scrabbling, kept shifting his expression between a grin and a disapproving scowl.

  “Let it be, man!” Eilín whispered. “Buck, dear Buck, only let’s get ourselves out of this place! We must, we must! Don’t do this now—”

  “Ah, so! Here it is! One thing they didn’t steal!”

  He’d come across
his little lighter. It glinted in his hand. A slender, silver thing—I still have it. There’s an inscription.

  HERMIONE II

  First Place

  Round the Island

  1913

  All around us people were calling “Auf Wiedersehen!”—the first German phrase I grasped the meaning of and would remember. How many million Auf Wiedersehens had been bawled and sobbed in Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof? The coal-smoky air was choked with Auf Wiedersehen, the impressive ironwork painted with it, the vaulting glass roof lacquered and smeared not only with pigeon shit but also with Auf Wiedersehen.

  Buck flourished his lighter at us, snapped a small flame, then dropped it into his coat pocket. He didn’t have any cigarettes left; he’d smoked his last English Player’s aboard St. Antonius with van Plaas.

  Eilín hastily repacked our trunk, and the porter heaved it onto his barrow and trundled off so fast we had to hurry to keep up with him. I was famished and shivering with cold. Germany seemed wide-awake, ferocious, the Hauptbahnhof was festooned with steam and shot with shafts of daylight that made my eyes tear. The people looked like beggars.

  If there is a place on earth where I have felt most alive and also most stringently aware of death’s certainty, it is on the platforms of Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. My dreams are often set there. I’m dashing to catch a fast express to Berlin—an FD—or I’m waiting for a train to Utrecht and Rotterdam. I’m always alone. Even the pigeons murmur Auf Wiedersehen, auf Wiedersehen while I loiter on the platform, unsure of the schedule, unsure my information is correct, waiting without being certain there’s anything worth waiting for.

  A big red Mercedes 28/95 stood fuming for us outside the Hauptbahnhof. The brilliant car seemed impatient and slightly terrifying—my first taste of life as it was lived anywhere near the Weinbrenners. A surly, one-eyed chauffeur strapped our trunk onto a running board, then sped us across a bridge over the river Main and through a run-down district called Sachsenhausen and another even-grittier suburb, Niederrad. Boys on the street had pinched faces and close-cropped hair, even shaved heads. Some of the girls, too, had heads shaved. Everyone I saw was spectrally thin, and the cart horses were bones and joints, with stringy manes. Solomon Dietz, the baron’s chauffeur, wore a leather patch over his left eye and a front soldier’s cap. He interrogated my father and blasted his horn at carts and wagons and any pedestrians who dared cross our path. They flinched and scuttled clear. My mother and I didn’t understand a word, but the chauffeur’s vehemence seemed to amuse my father.

  Afterward he told us Solomon had demanded to know whether he was a socialist “because anyone who isn’t has their head up their ass!”

  A couple of miles south of the river, the Mercedes pulled up before an iron gate bearing the Walden crest. A porter dragged the gates open and saluted, and the big car thrust its way in. Gravel crunched and crackled under our tires. The avenue was flanked by what seemed to be a forest of spruce and birches, then by open meadows with paddocks and white rail fences. We passed a very large, very forbidding house and were brought straight to a wooden house, also large but much friendlier looking. Solomon cut the engine, jerked the hand brake, and cried, “Newport!”

  We climbed out of the aggressive old Mercedes, all red paintwork and polished brass. The front door of the house was unlocked. The chauffeur and my father carried our trunk inside. Then Solomon shook hands with each of us, and I watched him crank-start the Mercedes. When it fired up, he gave me a clenched-fist salute, then climbed in and thundered away.

  Newport was an eccentric, shingle-style New England “summer cottage” planted in the middle of a forest in Hesse. It had towers and cupolas and bay windows in a riot of planned spontaneity. It could have been in Northeast Harbor or Kennebunkport. In Germany, it was a displaced house for displaced persons, and its odd exuberance irritated certain people, Longo, for example, Karin’s beau, who once remarked that Newport seemed a “flimsy” house. He preferred the stolid hunting-lodge atmosphere of the main house, though he also told Karin how “Jewish” it was of her grandfather, the dyestuff king from Breslau, to have built a hunting lodge in suburban countryside where there was nothing to shoot but rabbits.

  Newport’s American architect, Mr. Bailey Wemyss, was a young friend of Henry James. The baron had met Henry James taking a kur at Bad Homburg. The author introduced his architect friend, and the baron commissioned Newport soon after.

  Buck liked Newport right away. Its Americanness was familiar and welcoming—he’d just about been born at San Francisco, after all. Eilín was delighted. Newport was airier, brighter, and far cleaner than anyplace we had lived since Sanssouci. As a guest cottage, closed up most of the year, it had been only lightly lived in. Everything seemed fresh and new. Rooms were paneled with cedar and other light woods, and in the afternoon sunlight they shone almost golden.

  While Buck made his way to the main house for his interview with the baron, my mother began unpacking, and I explored. I was thinking about the Weinbrenners’ son, Hermann, whom I’d been told was buried somewhere in the Walden forest. I’d been Hermann once, so long ago I could scarcely remember.

  On the little train groaning up from Wiesbaden to Frankfurt—there’d been barely enough coal to get up steam—I’d asked my mother if I was to be Hermann ever again. She looked at my father, who said he thought one name change was enough.

  “ ‘Billy’ is your name from now on, I should say.”

  My mother remarked that the baron would be disappointed. I’d originally been named for him, after all.

  “Weinbrenner can call the boy Hermann if he chooses to,” Buck replied. “But his name is Billy.”

  On the train from Wiesbaden my father had spoken English without seeming to care if anyone overheard. I think he felt at liberty for the first time in nearly five years and had decided he wasn’t going to be interned inside or outside anyone’s language. My German name, Hermann, was gone forever, like the things that disappeared from our trunk, or the white foam in the wake of a steamer crossing the North Sea.

  I discovered a shed packed with firewood and helped my mother get a blaze going in the kitchen range, another in the library, and a third in the large bathroom upstairs. As we warmed the house, it seemed to creak and groan with satisfaction. The pantry drawers were crammed with monogrammed silverware, cupboards held stacks of dinner plates decorated with shamrocks and cornflowers. There were eiderdowns in the cedar closets, soft woolen blankets, and linen sheets.

  It was not so large as my grandmother’s house, but most of Wychwood had been falling down, and horses and pigs lived in some of it. At Newport, everything was swept, bright, shipshape, scented by balsam fir. When I ventured outside, the forest air carried a pungent evergreen fragrance. I wanted to scout the surroundings, orient myself. Footpaths and bridle paths were carpeted with pine needles.

  I didn’t see Karin at first. She wasn’t hiding, exactly, only standing immobile in a stand of bare birches: “in plain sight” but absolutely still, so I didn’t see her.

  The quiet and the specter of those cold woods of Walden were exciting. Frankfurt’s distant hum made the quiet seem a presence rather than an absence. I was stumbling along, eagerly and aimlessly, when something cut through the air a few inches in front of my eyebrows and smacked itself into a birch tree. The zing-smack was echoed by a hum, a vibration, as if the air, disturbed, required a moment to regain its composure.

  I stared at the red-and-black shaft of an arrow at least twelve inches long, its point buried in the trunk of the birch tree. Black and white tail feathers. The shaft was still quivering.

  “Guten Tag.”

  A girl stepped out onto the path.

  Maybe if I’d been paying attention I’d have caught her scent sooner, but I was no woodsman, she was wrapped in wool, and the scent of winter woolens was so ordinary, so much the vernacular of daily existence, that it didn’t stand out as a scent, even in those sharp woods. Everything in my life smelled of woolens: mittens, sweate
r, hat, coat, underclothes.

  She stood in the path holding her beautiful (Apache) bow, made of mulberry wood, strung with sinew. A girl with brown hair in braids and pink cheeks. She wore a sailor’s pea jacket, a skirt, woolen stockings, red boots, and a quiver of arrows slung at her shoulder on a rawhide string.

  “You’re the boy—Hermann.” She eyed me. “Only that isn’t your name anymore. You’ve caught another name, have you not? Something quite English, isn’t it? George? Is it a George you’ve become, English boy?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Alfred?”

  “No.”

  “Tom?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well?”

  I didn’t want to give my name to her.

  “Can’t you manage it, boy? Introduce yourself properly. What a clumsy thing. Have you left your manners in the trenches?”

  “I wasn’t in the trenches.”

  “You weren’t a front soldier?”

  She was teasing me. I didn’t like it. I held my tongue.

  “Do you remember me at all?” she asked.

  “I know who you are.”

  “Who, then?”

  “The baron’s daughter. Karin. We were born in the same room.”

  “Were we? Indeed. I’d quite forgotten. I am going away to school.” Her voice was suddenly warmer, more humane. “To a boarding school of English girls, how do you like it?”

  Her English was fluent but had a foreign ring, as though her thoughts had been framed in German before she nailed down English words to cover them.

  They shan’t much like you in England, I thought.

  “They’ll hate me for a Hun, I expect. Do you read? Have you read Winnetou?”

  “I’ve read The Jungle Book. By Rudyard Kipling.”

  “Ah, so.” She nodded. “Well, this is not bad. What do you know of Indians? Not Kipling’s. The other sort, American Indians. Winnetou is chief of the Mescalero Apache. I think you might be a Red Indian. Do you know why?”