Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  We’re asked to join the Weinbrenners at breakfast. My mother and Lady Maire are walking up the gravel avenue, arm in arm. My father and the baron compare notes on their young horses. And I’m enjoying the crisp crackle of my boot soles on gravel, while eavesdropping on a quarrel between Karin and her mother, who’s insisting that Karin change out of riding clothes before joining us at breakfast.

  “But I don’t want to change, why must I? Billy isn’t changing.”

  “Go and do as I say. And brush your hair and for once remember to wash your hands.”

  Karin ran ahead.

  I loved my riding clothes. The feel of well-made horse boots on the leg was like nothing else. I felt lithe and powerful.

  “More willful than ever!” I heard Lady Maire tell my mother. “I wonder if a French convent school might not be the best thing. During the war things were awkward here, such horrors, and I never could get a proper English governess, only a Viennese poppet who flirted with the officers. Karin’s schooling has been irregular. I blame myself.”

  “She’ll come round,” my mother said.

  “It’s the Jewish blood. She’s awfully like her father.”

  In the breakfast room we helped ourselves to eggs, ham, jellied meat. There were cheeses, basket of fresh rolls, silver pots of marmalade, and delicious strawberry jam. Coffee in a silver pitcher, fresh cream, cold milk. Champagne for the grown-ups. The breakfast room at Walden had more light, gleam, and spirit than anyplace else in the house except the library.

  I was greedily stuffing down rolls slathered with strawberry jam when Karin slipped in and began helping herself from the buffet. She wore dowdy English schoolgirl clothes: a middy blouse, navy-blue skirt, red leather summer sandals. Her hair was an unkempt mop, chestnut with streaks of strawberry blonde.

  The grown-ups were discussing which horse belonging to whom would take that year’s Grand International d’Ostend. I saw Lady Maire throw an exasperated glance at her daughter. Karin ignored her mother and sat down and ate with gusto. The grown-ups were still talking racing when she finished and got up without saying a word and left.

  Even for me it’s hard to believe a person such as Lady Maire existed in my lifetime. Karin’s mother’s aristocratic chill, her stiff sense of duty, and her awesome reserve seem as historically remote as one of the carved saints she gathered, with my mother’s help, from every corner of Europe.

  Yet she was a real person. Her interests were Catholicism, though she had been raised an Irish Protestant; medieval art; and horses. She was much easier with horses than people. She knew how to handle horses, she was able to sense their moods, she always knew what they needed.

  When Karin was small, she was desperate for physical contact with her mother. She told me it was like a terrible thirst, driving and intense, with an edge of panic. In the stables she used to watch her mother currying her old hunter Paddy with tender and meticulous care. Later, in the drawing room—the baroness rarely visited the nursery—she’d crawl into her mother’s lap and plead to have her hair brushed. Lady Maire would dutifully start brushing, but Karin always could sense her distaste for such an intimate act. It was as if she had used up her affection on the son who had died and there was nothing left for Karin.

  Her mother quickly tired of hair-brushing and would push her away. “There you are. Very pretty. Go and have Nanny tie you a ribbon.”

  And she’d use that same hairbrush to spank Karin when she was naughty.

  She spoke softly to horses, but I can still hear her Anglo-Irish voice braying across the lawns, admonishing Karin for one infraction or another. A tonal blend of Wilhelmine-era Hochdeutsch with the innate bossiness of Anglo-Ireland, her voice rubbed practically everyone the wrong way.

  “My mother is afraid no one will listen to her,” Karin once remarked. “She believes it. So it becomes true.”

  One afternoon I watched Karin ferociously sweep snow from her brother’s headstone. She used a broom made of twigs bunched and bound to a stick.

  Her little brother had died in his first winter.

  “So typical that my parents couldn’t keep their damned great house warm enough for a little boy.”

  Karin could sound very bitter.

  Lady Maire’s tomb is in a little neighborhood church she endowed in a working-class section of Niederrad. The last time I visited, the whole structure seemed to cower under the screams of jets taking off and landing at Frankfurt Airport. All that survives of her art collection are a crucifix and altarpiece in the Niederrad chapel, both Istrian, fifteenth century; a half-dozen pieces at the Cloisters; the Stations of the Cross at the Getty in Los Angeles; and some chalices and chasubles at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. It’s likely there are more pieces in private collections whose owners don’t know their provenance or don’t wish to acknowledge it.

  Karin’s mother could ride just about anything, or that’s how it seemed to me, as an observant youngster around the stables. She communicated easily with horses and stayed out of touch with her daughter.

  Karin was an accomplished rider, but Lady Maire was a superb horsewoman. There is something infuriating about a parent who can’t be surpassed, but Karin kept trying. She was sixteen the first time she broke her shoulder, hunting in Shropshire with the Ludlow, a notoriously difficult country. Later that winter she was up and hunting again—she always would have something to prove.

  Lady Maire had spent her childhood in ice-cold big houses in northwest Ireland. “If you wish to understand my mother’s character,” Karin once remarked, “you want to know that she comes from the hills. From the away of the away. They left her alone in one beastly damp house or another. Her only friends were housemaids and horses.”

  When Karin was in Berlin she used to insist she’d never for a second felt at home at Walden. “Impossible there, Billy. Too much money, too many ghosts, too much gloom.”

  “Wonderful horses, though.”

  “Yes,” she’d agreed, “such wonderful horses, and one always dreamed to gallop away.”

  If you don’t count the afternoon she set off swimming for America, Karin ran away for the first time during the war, when she was nine: creeping into the stables at dawn, saddling her favorite pony, and cantering off for the Taunus hills, where she hoped to persuade a peasant family to adopt her. Her mother dispatched little Oberleutnant Fröhlisch to bring her back. He caught up with her on the Sachsenhausen road and led her home. He told her he was sorry to do it—and she believed him. He said all persons ought to have the right to run away.

  August 1920. Summer of the first Walden-bred racehorses. A few hours after that breakfast.

  Solid heat of early afternoon. White sky. Humid.

  Karin and I are standing at her brother’s grave. All around us, the Walden woods, bleating and snapping with insect life.

  Under what pretext had we come there? Can’t remember. Maybe I’d encountered her on the bridle path, collecting berries. She could always get me to follow her.

  I’m still wearing my riding habit. I didn’t want to take those clothes off. My beautiful boots.

  She’s in her dowdy English-schoolgirl outfit.

  Kicking off her red English sandals, she pulls off her schoolgirl straw hat with its striped ribbon, drops it on the grass. Then she starts pulling her white middy blouse over her head.

  “Fürchte dich nicht.” Don’t be afraid. Her voice muffled as she struggles with her blouse.

  She keeps dropping her things on the grass. Undershirt. Navy-blue skirt. Bloomers.

  “Nehmen Sie Ihre vlothes, Billy, bitte.” Take off your clothes, please.

  I stand frozen.

  Lying down on the grass, she stretches out, naked, eyes squeezed shut, her body narrow and white as a freshly peeled stick. I watch her fingers digging into the turf, as if the world is spinning like a centrifuge, and she has to hold on tight or be spun off.

  The cemetery is the only grassy opening on the Walden estate that’s not meadow or paddock or pasture.


  “Du musst keine Angst haben, Billy.” Don’t be afraid.

  I feel torpid, mentally slow. I pull off my boots and start unbuttoning my blue shirt. This is no game, but the most serious thing I’ve ever contemplated or been asked to do. Drowning Albert Willspeed in the Hampstead ponds might have been as serious, but I’d been too fearful of the consequences to try, and anyway the opportunity had never presented itself.

  I pull off my blue shirt, vest, breeches, and drawers and lie next to her on the prickly August grass. She reaches for my hand and gives it a squeeze. The sun’s light and heat is spinning me, disordering my thoughts, and I feel the ground ripple and heave. I keep my eyes shut.

  The experience is tantalizing, thrilling, and upsetting, without being exactly sexual.

  After a while I can hear her breathing deeply. Has she fallen asleep?

  Suddenly she sits up.

  “I’m losing my head,” she says.

  I open my eyes. She scrambles to her feet. So I do as well.

  “Aha! Schau dich mal an, Billy.” Look at you.

  I was a skinny kid. I was self-conscious about it but there was nothing to do about it, I couldn’t possibly eat more than I already did.

  “You’re taller since last year,” she says. “You’ll be a tall one like your beautiful father. Who wants to be small like my little pa? He’d rather have been grenadier than Uhlan, but you need to stand over six feet in socks to be accepted into that regiment. Bist du stark, Billy?”

  Are you strong?

  I knew boys stronger. But I was stronger than some.

  “I am.”

  “Enough to carry me? Come. Versuchen wir es.” Let’s try it. “I wish you to carry me around this place one time.”

  “What for?”

  She touches my shoulder, like an experienced rider touching the horse before throwing her leg over.

  “I just want you to.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Come, I’m not so much to carry. Come.” Then she gives a little skip, and I catch her legs, and suddenly she’s in my arms.

  “Carry me. Just carry me. Carry me like I’m your child.”

  “Where?”

  She doesn’t answer. So I carry her around the perimeter of the grassy cemetery, neither of us saying a word.

  Weird scene, I agree. Inchoate desire, at least on my part. That doesn’t mean not real.

  Prickly grass underfoot, both of us naked. Don’t ask where I got the strength. But from that time forward I would be her faithful steed. Her warhorse.

  “That’s enough. Now please to put me down.”

  As soon as I do so, she turns her back, starts pulling on her clothes. She seems embarrassed all of a sudden.

  “You don’t have to look at me. Get dressed, Billy. Hurry! Before someone comes along.”

  And I am embarrassed, too, and hurriedly begin to dress.

  “You won’t tell anyone.” She sounds anxious. “You won’t tell my mother, yes? Promise you will not.”

  “Yes. No. I promise.”

  “Swear it on the heart.”

  “I swear it.”

  “Not a word to anyone, Billy.”

  “Not a word.”

  We walk up the bridle path without speaking until we come to the cross where our paths part.

  “I know you I can trust. Goodbye, Billy.” She offers her hand and looks me in the eye as we shake. Her eyes pale gray.

  She returned to England a few days later, and I don’t believe I saw her again until the following summer.

  In 1922, right-wing nationalists assassinated Germany’s foreign minister, Walter Rathenau, while he was being driven to work. He was a Jew. On his visits to Walden Lady Maire always tried in vain to get him up on a horse. Rathenau had recruited the baron to the committee negotiating war reparations with the Allies, a dangerous assignment for Weinbrenner, because it made him, too, a target. All Germany hated reparations.

  One bitter-cold morning in the autumn after the Rathenau assassination, we boys were standing on the steps at school waiting for the doors to open when Günter Krebs announced that Germany had lost the war because of a bet the Frankfurt Jews made with the Jews of London.

  We were stamping our feet against the cold, impatient for the bell to ring and the doors to swing open so we could shove our way inside.

  “You see, fellows, they each wagered on the other country to win. Each tribe figured they could fix the fight! Yids are utterly ruthless.”

  Günter’s father was a lawyer who became an important city official after the NSDAP took power.

  It wasn’t much warmer inside our school than out. Strikes and political demonstrations against the French occupation of the Ruhr meant frequent shortages of coal. On days when the furnace wasn’t being fed we were permitted to wear overcoats and scarves in the classroom, even gloves and hats.

  “Our tribe of Jews caused the defeat of Germany and collected millions of pounds in reward. They were able to stab in the back the best army the world had ever seen.”

  “That’s a load of trash!” Kracauer, one of three Jews in our class, spoke up. “My old man served at the front. All he collected was a packet of metal in his legs. You’re a Pappnase, Krebs.”

  False nose, liar.

  Kracauer was smaller than Günter Krebs and, at that time, considerably more popular. He was a good athlete. His parents owned a shop that sold handsome leather luggage. Most of us carried our schoolbooks slung on a strap but Kracauer had a smart leather briefcase with brass fittings.

  “One of the tribe,” Günter jeered. “A Yid is hardly likely to bleat the truth.”

  Günter was tall for his age, but, like many children who’d survived near-famine during the last months of the war, he was quite scrawny. His teeth were crooked and brown.

  “And you’ve the brains of a headless chicken!” Kracauer replied.

  The doors swung open. We stampeded inside and that was the end of that particular debate.

  We used to play football in the road after school. The ball belonged to Weinberg, richest boy in the school. Footballs were expensive. Weinberg was chauffeured to school every morning in his father’s red Mercedes.

  One afternoon—it was raining, rain was freezing on the road, but we were still playing—Kracauer gave Weinberg’s leather ball a good hard kick and smacked Günter Krebs in the head so hard that he sat down in the middle of the road and began weeping, a stream of snot flowing from his nose.

  Kracauer had been trying to boot in a goal; he hadn’t meant to knock Günter for a loop. We were embarrassed by Krebs’s display, which seemed babyish to us. A couple of boys began helping him to his feet. Then all of a sudden Günter, windmilling his fists, launched at Kracauer. “Yid! Yid! Bloody cheater!”

  Streaming snot and tears, swinging wildly, Günter obviously wasn’t much of brawler.

  Kracauer backed away, laughing, refusing to engage. Then a horn sounded—Weinberg’s limousine pulled up. Weinberg grabbed his football, and he and his pals, including Kracauer, piled into the red limo and drove off, and Krebs was left there, sobbing and coughing. A couple of boys stood with him, but I started for home. This vulnerability of his embarrassed me. I always wanted to get away.

  Then there was the famous upset in the river.

  Rowing was a German-schoolboy passion. Many of us already belonged to junior clubs. Rowing sweeps on the river Main on a cold May afternoon, Günter got his oar tangled with some others, which upset his boat’s rhythm, and a moment later it turned into the current and spilled, dumping the crew into the river.

  The current wasn’t much—the boys swam ashore pushing their boat—but they were soaked and furious and blamed Günter for the upset. When he began hoisting himself onto the float, his crewmates kept pushing him back into the water. They wouldn’t let him climb out. He panicked and began shouting for help.

  I thought it pretty cruel, but it wasn’t my boat, or my crew.

  A policeman looking down from
the bridge blew his whistle, and the boys finally let Günter drag himself out. He must have swallowed a good deal of water, and he missed school for a week.

  It was after that that Kracauer, in English class, first started calling Günter Krebs “Ducky.” The name stuck, perhaps because Günter had such a distinctive gait, walking with his toes pointed out. Like a duck, he waddled.

  Years later in the Translation Department at IG Farben, men were still calling him Ducky.

  Three Jews in our class: Kracauer, Weinberg, and Koch. Koch was a Hungarian, timid, bespectacled, and brilliant at math, who never said a word to anyone. He was murdered at Auschwitz. Weinberg’s father owned one of the department stores. Weinberg fils was generous and not at all stuck up. If he saw classmates walking to school in the morning, or waiting for trams, he always had the chauffeur pull over and gave them a lift. At school there’d be a dozen boys packed into the Mercedes, shouting and wrestling as they piled out, an uproarious mob. Even Günter Krebs accepted lifts in Weinberg’s Mercedes.

  Karin came home for a few weeks every summer. In 1923 the baron had a swimming pool and tennis court built for her at Walden, and I was enlisted as her tennis partner. Lady Maire had my mother order tennis flannels for me, and Karin told her which racket to buy.

  Karin preferred to play very early in the morning, before the day got too hot. My father would rouse me, I’d pull on my whites, stumble out of the house, grab my bicycle from the shed, and pedal hard to the tennis court. She was always there first, impatiently banging balls off the backboard. “What is the matter with you, Billy Lange, can’t you ever get here on time?”

  After tennis we would go swimming and lie in the sun discussing Karl May or other writers, if she felt like talking.

  No one at her boarding school cared for Winnetou. The English girls preferred reading magazines about American film stars.