My thoughts were exceptional, real marvels: of abyss, wolf, murderous bishops, troll country and of the Sound abruptly drowning islands, towns, estates, so that Rising Tide became code for my sudden change of mood, dismissed by mother as sulks, until I overheard the Herr General state that ‘sulkiness’ was deployed by those of too little imagination against those with too much.
Rising Tide could be dispelled by a smile, rush of sunlight through thick winterset, fiery cloud over the Lake. Or deep, tolling words from Pastor Ulrich in his small, wooden church, ‘In Heaven ye shall have Peace, in the World, Tribulation, but be of Good Cheer, for I have overcome the World.’ Heavy, black-bearded, he had probably done so, like Tsar Peter, and Friedrich der Grosse, Old Fritz, mighty Prussian, though no Knight of Germania like Lohengrin, Parsifal, Siegfried, Charlemagne, Barbarossa and Conradin, last of the stupendous Hohenstaufen, his young, naked limbs, a block, a reeking neck.
The Manor had remote, dusty attics, darkened stairs, winding passages tinged with mothballs, polish, camphor, gun-oil, dog, often so oppressive that I sniffed ghosts. In the kitchen they spoke of house-spirits, their cordiality unreliable, their anger perilous, hiding in cupboards, scuttles, lofts. A derelict cowshed sheltered a red-eyed imp so that, even at nine, I avoided it when shadows were dense and hungry.
One room, black-panelled, was sunk in gloom; another, with frayed crimson hangings, smelt of hay, with a mirror so blotched that, gazing, I saw someone else. The Rose Room, boudoir, first line of a story, was never used and seemed forbidden. To my questions the servants, though I believed they loved me, affected deafness. I would cautiously open the door to see whether anything had been changed, perhaps by spirits, but it was always newly dusted, with fresh flowers, the lumpily framed portraits of High Folk bravely watching. The curved, padded chairs, tapestries of hunts and moonlit woods, were unaltered, the Rose Room another adult secret.
On all levels the past intruded. An old laundry-woman possessed a copper bowl in which, she asserted, dwelt an ancestral frog. I wanted to put it in a stove, then await a flash, then mist, black or bloody.
The kitchen nourished imagination with its tales and gossip, its hams, pungent herrings, strings of onions hanging from smoke-grimed rafters, the great stove patterned with swans, leaves, reeds. One scullery maid each morning greeted every utensil by name, wishing them fortune. For her, a plate, cup, bucket had a human face.
Everywhere portraits hung, ranged between stuffed heads of wolf and elk, the top right-hand corner of a wall always covered, for there demons hid. Portraits described eras – of Wallenstein, star-crazed warrior; of Old Fritz, frozen in triumphs – faces spectral and narrow under helmets or wigs, hands with pistols or tasselled swords. Armour gleamed beneath starred cloaks, a watch dangled from a neck seemingly blue with cold, spectacles disfigured a slender girl holding a rose, some Winter Queen in purple cap rimmed with gold. I would stand at attention beneath one portrait: powdered hair, calm, reflective face, high collar and stock, grey coat sprayed with medals, a locket on silver chain, holding what Father called an Icelandic gyrfalcon. An ancestor, a sort of knight, Count von der Pahlen, inspirer of the murder of Paul, mad Tsar, son of Catherine the Great and father of Alexander, who had defeated Napoleon in the snow. I would have liked sharing a name with Pahlen, who could thus have still lived somewhere within me.
On Great Family occasions, past faces reappeared: one day my own must join them, hard behind their joviality. Did people follow their faces or create them, as if with modelling clay, some very carelessly? Could the Rose Room be haunted by Count Pahlen, patriot or traitor?
History lingered like dust. In mother’s books were the Black Prince encased in shadow, Queen Victoria in diamonds, her Empire straddling the globe with turbaned soldiers and huge grey ships, the House of Lords retained – the Herr General considered – by the English spirit of fun. He used the English word, which I could not quite understand. Edward, the boy king, dwindled to a white, despairing face at a Tower window.
In the hushed library, amid dim, magical volumes, was suspended a curled headpiece with runic signs, cut from a bear’s skull and reputed to make heroes invisible; for a coward it was too large. Testing this, I was almost smothered.
Books were not imprisoned but lay everywhere, in neglected alcoves, on antique tables, in scented bedrooms, oaken bible-boxes and elaborately gilded cabinets and in what Herr Estate Manager Bruest called the first place of general interest on leaving the hall. Father would select a book and shyly offer it or leave it beside my plate like a password. His books were mostly German but with some French. Adult books I seldom read in full, usually opening them at random to read a few fragments, enticing, if incomprehensible, then feeling gifted with superior knowledge. One book had the magnetic powers of a riddle:
I saw the Pharaohs gazing through millennia
With eyes of stone, by tears of ours burdened,
By dreams of ours weighed.
Words were skates, speeding me to horizons where dwelt Pharaohs, Pahlens, Cyclops scared of green, trolls that burst if they saw sunrise. They were almost visible in dusky corridors where antlered heads seemed to thrust through woodwork, binding me to Forest, where winter sky was scattered, handfuls of milk frozen between black branches.
My insights ceased to be unique when, confiding some to the Herr General, I learnt they were common to young adults, a phrase comforting distress that had reduced me lower than Hegel. I continued to collect phrases like birds’ eggs, pocketknives, pens, songs. ‘Rounder than a grouse egg.’ ‘Larger than an ox-eye flower.’ ‘Lower than a daughter-in-law’s spirit.’ These I gathered from our dependants, die Eibleute. Stable jokes and rhymes were darker, the tales more menacing. Lost children were, in fact, betrayed by the hungry witch. ‘They tasted delicious.’ Less exciting was that tiny Estonia had been sired by Kalev, son of divine Kaara, who rode the North on an eagle, and whose other son ruled the Underworld. From Mother’s English stories I learnt the danger of fingerprints and of leaving footprints in mud.
Wind carried more stories. Starkad was approaching, valorous, treacherous, famed, ridiculed, mighty singer forgetting his songs, protected by one god, cursed by another, incurably wounded but indomitable slayer of monsters, avenger of wrongs but jealous and thieving. An apt symbol of Estonia, the Herr General thought.
That Wotan was lord, not only of war but of music, poetry, prophecy and ‘the depths’, was all-powerful but had hung nine days on a tree puzzled me until Father suggested that, too often, music and wickedness were identical, so were power and powerlessness, like Germans in Estonia. Like Starkad? He smiled, as if at a joke, small, not very funny.
Father told few stories. The Herr General’s were not of Baldur but often of Loki, slippery and clever. The Teutonic, Baltic and Slavonic supernatural appeared a single mess of realistic enchantment, struggles against fate, through which stalked Hrolf, Kraki, Swipdagere, Svendal the Stranger, Frodi the Unthinking, Thorkill Red-Beard. Behind them, harvesters still shouted Svendal, Frodi, without knowing why, threw corn-cobs into the last sheaf before lighting it, watching rodents flee, spirits of the field. Flames ‘grew up’ in efforts to reach the sky. In November, Dead Month, servants were allowed a night’s freedom for orgiastic village celebrations of St Catherine, protector of cattle, and for the annual return of ancestors. Could Pahlen ever come? Apparently not. A scarecrow, Old Mart, earlier St Martin, originally, perhaps Mars, was periodically stuffed with wool, dyed green. And at midsummer God walked the grain fields and children dared each other to touch old Mother Stick’s hump for good luck. This I never risked, fearing a red curse or explosion.
Village children had two birthdays, one solemn, celebrated in church, the other rowdy, in the communal sauna. Conceivably, they aged at twice my own speed, and their early stoops and wrinkles supported this.
Vernacular phrases continued to illuminate. ‘Dark as the cuckoo’s shadow on a cemetery gate’, though to utter them would risk courteous derision. From the Turret
nothing changed. Seagulls flashed silver, in the margin of stories. The Lake now glittered, now sank into mist. The sun was low on one horizon, the moon high above another. In a velvet-covered notebook – Father’s gift – I wrote, very proudly: ‘I will never permit myself to become another.’ Mysteriously, I later found beneath this, in handwriting almost, but not quite my own: ‘Use your eyes, but first keep them on yourself.’
Through summers I gazed down on expensive adults, die erste Gesellschaft, chattering on lawns, lighting cigars, standing in straw hats or under dainty parasols. Or, half seen through tall, clipped hedges, playing tennis, older folk clustered by rose-trees, drinking tea in deckchairs by the old summer-house, wheeled to face the sun, while children played in shrubberies, darted between trees, quarrelled. When possible I hid from them. Most were adept at games, brutally eager to win, and I disliked their taunts – ‘Book Lover’, ‘Clumsy Boots’, ‘Stump Head’ – ceasing only when the Herr General discovered my talent for tennis, for which I was winning small silver cups, not of the finest quality.
When Gulf breezes quickened and leaves staled, the men moved towards Forest with guns slanted, followed by bearers in green jackets with brass badges, carrying game-bags, dogs frisking around them.
As if both inside and outside the countryside was the girl who ran. She daily sped past our gates, resolute, absorbed in the way ahead. None of us knew her name, she might descend from Margarita-Who-Grieves or Marie-Filled-with-Woes. She might be pursued by the Seventy-Seven Devils of the Sound, for ever fleeing down dirt roads through woods, across fields. Once she paused to fasten a shoe and I dared, in German, to ask her name. Her black eyes were incredulous and at once she was gone. She, too, must know things. Servants shook their heads but said nothing until finally she never reappeared, a scullion gibing that she had tripped over the edge of the world. At sight of an animal wounded, or ostracized by the herd, I remembered the girl who ran.
3
Father was respected by our staff, as ‘Buckle-breasted’, Mother as ‘Brooch-breasted’ and was less popular. The Herr General was ‘Elk-Victor’, an outdoor strider, which my parents were not. From him I learnt to identify footprints, claw-marks, wing-patterns, the habits of crane and lark, fox and seal. Also Teutonic epics, Livonian hunting rituals, with their placatory invocations to the victims.
Mother was soft-spoken, vivacious, even coquettish, proud that the British had helped Germans and Balts evict the Reds at Narvik, 1919. I loved, without much liking her – feelings I traced, surely inaccurately, to her maid’s belief that the third finger of a woman’s left hand contained a spirit that only a gold ring could awake. Mother’s finger shone golden and was thus endowed with power splendid but unendearing.
She was small, fair, careless, with white, slender hands lying for display on her lap, on the table, rings removed only at the piano, when playing brilliant, jazzy rhythms, incongruous in the vaulted, raftered music-room. Her manner, in retrospect, suggested an unwalled Englischer Garten, bright in its very defencelessness.
Father, scholarly, reserved, finely boned, somewhat dry, tired around mouth and eyes, grey hair scrupulously tidy, and with his High Folk beard, came from long generations of Baltic barons, Volksgruppe. He had rather melancholy eyes, dignified regard for Haydn, Mozart, Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, Turgenev’s novels, though reticent about Pahlen, the regicide. His forebears had emigrated from Westphalia to join the Teutonic Knights, brutal overlords, ‘Wolf People’, though protective against the hated Muscovites. Peter, Bronze Horseman, and Catherine, ‘Frau Potemkin’, were remembered as dragons. For his underlings, Herr Max, German and bullying as Bismarck, was always ‘the Tsar’ or ‘Hetman’. From some book I never forgot an engraving of a bearded face under a peaked, jewelled cap, eyes wide, staring, and an inscription: Thou has shed the blood of righteous men, O Tsar. Behind us all, defence against Untermenschen, was the Herr General.
Tall, broad as a door, brown hair cut close, firmly carved face unlined, florid, clean-shaven, he had eyes deeply blue beneath heavy lids, reflecting moods seldom precisely ascertainable, though doubtless shrewd and appearing older than his agility. Related to the still influential Benkendorffs, Tiesenhausens, Meyendorffs, he was wealthy, with an estate larger than ours. He was restless, roaming across rooms rather than merely crossing them and often abroad on what I assumed to be adventures. In 1937 he was over thirty, for, after training at the Imperial Staff College in St Petersburg, he had commanded a German White Russian force after the 1917 Revolution. Years afterwards I understood that he had helped establish a complex of arms foundries, airfields and training bases in Soviet Russia to help Germany circumvent the Versailles Treaty. Of Estonians, he told me that they all hoped their neighbour’s cow would die and assured Mother that a German Republic was not paradox but contradiction. ‘The Reich has iron heart and a lonely spendthrift soul.’ Of the Führer, no glamorous Hohenstaufen, he said that he had heard him declare that no truth existed, scientific or moral.
He was often with us, dancing, playing tennis, advising Herr Breust, reading in the library.With Mother at the piano, he would, though as if joking, sing the Teutonic Knight’s anthem, ‘Nach dem Osten Woll’n wir Reiten’.
From him I gathered yet more stories. He had seen a live tortoise once touched by Goethe, who knew himself to be very great and had been on bad terms with no less than Hegel. Now a civilian but always ‘Herr General’, he had large interests in Germany, Sweden, Poland, with people always, as he put it, badgering him to be of service. Occasionally, perhaps inadvertently, he referred to Germany as ‘Home’. Unmarried, he treated us all with equal affability, though on terms very much his own. His photograph frequently appeared in newspapers, uniformed at a reunion, tail-coated at the Opera or racecourse, riding with the Swedish King’s nephew, Count Folke Bernadotte, conferring with rich Germans with names Father considered unwholesome – Stinnes, Thyssen, Hugenburg, Ribbentrop, the last always pronounced by the Herr General himself with such vehemence that I long thought this a swear word.
For Mother, I was a toy to be fondled but easily removed and, despite my accumulation of birthdays, never ageing, always ‘My Pet’. Father behaved as if I were a friend of longish standing, not intimate but well worth consideration. The Herr General, easily imaginable as grandson of an oak, would address me like an elder brother, more experienced but sharing some disdain for the worthy but slow-witted, the stolid-tongued, drinking punctilious toasts, laughs like the squashing of giant toads, all in a game with rules not yet entirely comprehensible.
‘You and I, Erich …’ he would begin, before seeking my help in inspecting a horse, proposing a tennis knock-up or a quick walk in Forest. He was generous to servants, gave balls at his Schloss, presented me with a folio of bird paintings, a sporting gun, a racquet, each string a different colour, given him by Mr Vines, American champion. His humour was more finely edged than his imposing demeanour, which, if not stagy, must sometimes have been carefully staged. I also believed, without evidence, that his pocket often contained a pistol.
Altogether, he was a figure more of dimly seen Germania than of the strident, go-ahead Third Reich. Once, in Forest, he halted, as if to confide a secret perhaps dangerous, even produce the pistol. ‘If you glance into a pheasant’s cold, still eye, you’ll realize that, whatever you admire about the bird, you will never love it.’ Hitherto, I had cherished pheasants but suddenly hated them.
At German monarchist celebrations he was very prominent, medalled, belted, sworded, his uniform strictly cut for his upright form as he hastened between groups, assured, friendly, while I coveted his black cane with jewelled knob. Outside, he need never call for Caspar, his elk-hound, for his eyes could summon, quell, excite animals as he must have done his soldiers.
‘Always remember, Erich, that languages, certain tunes, conquer space more rapidly than Führers or commissars, any Madam Chiang or Mrs Eleanor, certainly any general.’ His thick, straw-coloured brows contracted. ‘Here’s a trick. Close your e
yes, imagine masts, then follow your thoughts. They may try for the world’s end, like Alexander. You may conclude that leadership in our motley Europe is a lyric for some, an accusation for others, and for many …’ his cigar swooped dismissively, ‘nothing at all.’ He did not confide his own disposition, his crisp, solid head gleamed above his fur collar, and, without knowing why, I felt grateful.
His smile was never a grin but a serious token of intimacy, and he finished with what sounded like a warning, ‘Of great and ruined Rome, the world-wooed dream’, which I was to discover from Father’s favourite poet, Stefan George.
At meals, on Mother’s right, the Herr General was outsize: seldom loud but powerful, as if from energies explosive and irresistible. His shirt glistened, his glass was obsequiously refilled, his opinions were undisputed and his anecdotes, lightly told, almost offhand, placed me in history.
‘Kaiser Franz-Josef. The Old Gentleman. His state banquets were always twelve courses, but he was indifferent to food and loathed banquets. Protocol demanded that, when he had disposed of his own dish, all plates were instantly whisked away, even of guests who had not started. The meal might thus be completed within the hour, many dishes undelivered, the high and mighty departing virtually unfed.’
Secret Protocols Page 2
