The doors to the hall had been slammed shut.
2
Eduard von Schroeder was not the only child to return home that day, a week after the government had declared the city of Munich secure and begun to bury the more than twelve hundred Communist dead.
But unlike that of Eduard von Schroeder, this homecoming had been prepared for in minute detail. For Alys and Manfred Tannenbaum, the return journey had begun on the Macedonia, from New Jersey to Hamburg. It continued in a luxurious first-class compartment on a train to Berlin, where they found a telegram from their father ordering them to take up residence at the Esplanade until they received further instructions. This, for Manfred, was the happiest coincidence of the ten years of his life, because Charlie Chaplin happened to be staying in the room next door. The actor gave the boy one of his famous bamboo canes, and even accompanied him and his sister to the taxi the day they’d finally received the telegram saying it was now safe to undertake the last leg of their journey.
So it was that on May 13, 1919, more than five years after their father had sent them off to the United States to escape the impending war, the children of Germany’s most important Jewish industrialist set foot on platform 3 of the Hauptbahnhof station.
Even then, Alys knew that things were not going to end well.
“Hurry up with that, will you, Doris? Oh, just leave it, I’ll take it myself,” she said, snatching the hatbox from the hands of the servant her father had sent to meet them and placing it on top of the trolley. This she had commandeered from one of the young station assistants who buzzed around her like flies, trying to take charge of the luggage. Alys shooed them all away. She couldn’t bear people trying to control her or, even worse, treating her as if she were incapable.
“I’ll race you, Alys!” said Manfred, breaking into a run. The boy didn’t share his sister’s concerns, and worried only about clinging on to his precious walkingstick.
“Just you wait, you little squirt!” shouted Alys, launching the trolley in front of her. “Don’t get left behind, Doris.”
“Miss, your father wouldn’t approve of you carrying your own luggage. Please . . .” begged the servant, trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the girl while glaring at the young men who were nudging each other mischievously and pointing at Alys.
It was precisely the problem Alys had with her father: he programmed every aspect of her life. Although Josef Tannenbaum was a man of flesh and bone, Alys’s mother had always maintained that he had gears and springs instead of organs.
“You could set your watch by your father, my dear,” she’d whisper in her daughter’s ear, and the two of them would laugh—quietly, because Mr. Tannenbaum didn’t like jokes.
Then, in December 1913, influenza took her mother. Alys did not emerge from her shock and sadness until she and her brother were on their way to Columbus, Ohio, four months later. They lodged with the Bushes, an upper-middle-class Episcopalian family. The patriarch, Samuel, was director-general of Buckeye Steel Castings, an establishment with which Josef Tannenbaum had many lucrative contracts. In 1914, Samuel Bush became the government official in charge of arms and munitions, and the products he acquired from Alys’s father began to take a different form. To be precise, they took the form of millions of bullets that traveled across the Atlantic. They traveled westward in crates while the United States was still supposedly neutral, then in the cartridge belts of the soldiers traveling east in 1917, when President Wilson decided to spread democracy across Europe.
In 1918, Bush and Tannenbaum exchanged friendly letters, bemoaning the fact that “owing to political inconveniences” their dealings would have to be suspended temporarily. Trade resumed fifteen months later, coinciding with the return of the young Tannenbaums to Germany.
The day the letter arrived in which Josef reclaimed his children, Alys thought she would die. Only a girl of fifteen who is secretly in love with one of the sons of her host family, and who discovers that she will have to leave forever, can be so fully convinced that her life is coming to an end.
Prescott, she wept in her cabin as she headed home. If only I’d spoken to him more . . . If I’d made more of a fuss of him when he came back from Yale for his birthday, instead of showing off like all the other girls at the party . . .
Despite her own prognosis, Alys did in fact survive, and she swore into the drenched pillows of her cabin that she would never again allow a man to make her suffer. From that moment she would make all the decisions in her life, no matter what anyone said. Least of all her father.
I’ll find work. No, Papa will never allow it. It would be better if I asked him to give me a job at one of his factories until I’ve saved up enough for a ticket back to the United States. And when I set foot in Ohio again, I’ll grab Prescott by the throat and squeeze him until he asks me to marry him. That’s what I’ll do, and no one can stop me.
However, by the time the Mercedes had come to a stop on Prinzregentenplatz, Alys’s resolve had deflated like a cheap balloon. She was finding it difficult to breathe, and her brother was jumping about nervously on his seat. It seemed extraordinary that she’d carried her decision with her over four thousand kilometers—halfway across the Atlantic—only to see it fall apart during the four-thousand-meter journey from the station to this luxurious building. A porter in uniform opened the car door for her, and before Alys knew it they were on their way up in the elevator.
“Do you think Papa has arranged a party, Alys? I’m starving!”
“Your father has been very busy, young Master Manfred. But I took it upon myself to buy cream buns for tea.”
“Thank you, Doris,” mumbled Alys as the elevator stopped with a metallic crunch.
“It’s going to be strange living in an apartment after the big house in Columbus. I hope no one’s touched my things,” said Manfred.
“Well, if they have, you’re not likely to remember, shrimp,” replied his sister, momentarily forgetting her fear of seeing her father and ruffling Manfred’s hair.
“Don’t call me that. I remember everything!”
“Everything?”
“That’s what I said. The wall had blue boats painted on it. And there was a chimpanzee playing cymbals at the end of the bed. Papa wouldn’t let me take it with me because he said it would drive Mr. Bush mad. I’ll go and get it!” he shouted, slipping between the legs of the butler as he opened the door.
“Wait, Master Manfred!” shouted Doris, to no effect. The boy was already running up the hallway.
The Tannenbaums’ residence occupied the top floor of the building, a nine-room apartment of more than three hundred and twenty square meters that was tiny in comparison to the house in which the brother and sister had lived in America. To Alys, the dimensions seemed to have changed completely. She hadn’t been much older than Manfred was now when she’d left in 1914, and somehow she was seeing it all from that perspective, as though she had shrunk thirty centimeters.
“. . . Fräulein?”
“Sorry, Doris. What were you saying?”
“The master will receive you in his study. He did have a visitor with him, but I think he’s leaving.”
Someone was coming down the hallway toward them. A tall, solid man wrapped in an elegant black frock coat. Alys did not recognize him, but behind him was Herr Tannenbaum. When they reached the entrance, the man in the frock coat stopped—so abruptly that Alys’s father almost bumped into him—and stood staring at her through a monocle on a gold chain.
“Ah, and here’s my daughter! What perfect timing!” said Tannenbaum, giving his companion a complicit glance. “Herr Baron, allow me to introduce to you my daughter, Alys, who has just arrived with her brother from America. Alys, this is Baron von Schroeder.”
“A pleasure,” said Alys coldly. She neglected to give the polite curtsey that was almost compulsory when faced with members of the nobility. She didn’t like the baron’s haughty bearing.
“A very pretty girl. Though I fear she may have caught
some of the American manners.”
Tannenbaum shot his daughter a look of outrage. The girl was sad to see that her father had barely changed in five years. Physically he was still thickset and short-legged, with hair in conspicuous retreat. And in his manner he remained as obliging toward those in power as he was firm with those under him.
“You can’t imagine how much I regret that. Her mother died very young, and she has not had much of a social life. I’m sure you understand. If only she could spend some time in the company of people her own age, well-bred people . . .”
The baron gave a resigned sigh.
“Why don’t you and your daughter join us at our house on Tuesday around six? We’ll be celebrating my son Jürgen’s birthday.”
From the knowing look the men exchanged, Alys got the sense that this had all been arranged in advance.
“By all means, Your Excellency. It’s such a lovely gesture on your part to invite us. Allow me to accompany you to the door.”
“But how could you be so inconsiderate?”
“I’m sorry, Papa.”
They were sitting in his study. One wall was covered with bookcases that Tannenbaum had filled with books bought by the yard, based on the color of their bindings.
“You’re sorry? A ‘sorry’ doesn’t fix anything, Alys. You need to understand I’m doing some very important business with Baron Schroeder.”
“Steel and metals?” she asked, using her mother’s old trick of taking an interest in Josef’s business whenever he flew into one of his rages. If he started talking about money he could go on for hours, and by the time he had finished he’d have forgotten why he’d been angry in the first place. But this time it didn’t work.
“No, land. Land . . . and other things. You’ll find out when the time is right. Anyway, I hope you have a pretty dress for the party.”
“I’ve only just arrived, Papa. I don’t really feel like going to a party where I don’t know anyone.”
“Don’t feel like it? For the love of God, it’s a party at the house of Baron von Schroeder!”
When she heard him say that, Alys flinched slightly. It wasn’t normal for a Jew to take the name of God in vain. Then she remembered a small detail she had not registered when she came in. There was no mezuzah on the door. She looked around her, surprised, and saw a crucifix hanging on the wall, beside a picture of her mother. She was struck dumb. She wasn’t particularly religious—she was going through that stage of adolescence in which she sometimes questioned the existence of a divinity—but her mother had been. Alys saw that cross beside her picture as an unbearable insult to her memory.
Josef followed the direction of her gaze and momentarily had the decency to look embarrassed.
“It’s the times we live in, Alys. It’s hard to do business with the Christians if you’re not one of them.”
“You were doing enough business before, Papa. And I think you were doing well,” she said, gesturing to the room.
“Things have turned ugly for our people while you’ve been away. And they’ll get worse, you’ll see.”
“So bad that you’d give up everything, Father? Converted for . . . for money?”
“It’s not about money, you insolent child!” said Tannenbaum, no longer sounding ashamed and thumping his fist on the desk. “A man in my position has responsibilities. You know how many workers I’m in charge of? These idiotic wretches who sign up to ridiculous Communist unions and think Moscow is heaven on earth! Every day I have to tie myself in knots to pay their wages, and all they can do is complain. So don’t even think about throwing in my face all the things I do to keep a roof over your head.”
Alys took a deep breath and again succumbed to her favorite fault: saying exactly what she thought at the most inopportune moment.
“You needn’t worry about that, Papa. I mean to leave very soon. I want to return to America and make my life there.”
When he heard this, Tannenbaum’s face turned scarlet. He waved a chubby finger under Alys’s nose.
“Don’t you dare say that, you hear me? You’ll go to this party and you’ll behave like a polite young lady, okay? I have plans for you, and I won’t have them ruined by the whims of a badly behaved girl. You hear me?”
“I hate you,” said Alys, looking straight at him.
Her father’s expression didn’t change.
“That doesn’t bother me, as long as you do what I say.”
Alys ran out of the study, tears welling in her eyes.
We’ll see about that. Oh, yes, we’ll see.
3
“Are you asleep?”
Ilse Reiner turned over on the mattress.
“Not anymore. What is it, Paul?”
“I was wondering what we’re going to do.”
“It’s half past eleven. How about getting some sleep?”
“I was talking about the future.”
“The future,” his mother repeated, almost spitting out the word.
“I mean, it’s not as if you really have to work here at Aunt Brunhilda’s, do you, Mama?”
“In the future I see you going to university, which happens to be just around the corner, and coming home to eat the tasty food I have prepared for you. Now, good night.”
“This isn’t our home.”
“We live here, we work here, and we thank heaven for it.”
“As if we should . . .” whispered Paul.
“I heard that, young man.”
“Sorry, Mama.”
“What’s up with you? Have you had another fight with Jürgen? Is that why you came back all wet today?”
“It wasn’t a fight. He and two of his friends followed me to the Englischer Garten.”
“They were just playing.”
“They threw my trousers in the lake, Mama.”
“And you hadn’t done anything to upset them?”
Paul snorted loudly but said nothing. This was typical of his mother. Whenever he had a problem, she would try to find a way to make it his fault.
“Best go to sleep, Paul. We have a big day tomorrow.”
“Ah, yes, Jürgen’s birthday . . .”
“There will be cakes.”
“That other people will eat.”
“I don’t know why you always have to react like this.”
Paul thought it was outrageous that a hundred people should celebrate a party on the ground floor while Eduard—whom he hadn’t yet been allowed to see—languished on the fourth, but he kept this to himself.
“There will be a lot of work tomorrow,” Ilse concluded, turning over.
The boy watched his mother’s back for some time. The bedrooms in the service wing were at the rear of the house, down in a sort of basement. Living there instead of in the family quarters didn’t bother Paul that much, because he’d never known any other home. Ever since he was born, he’d accepted as normal the strange sight of watching Ilse wash her sister Brunhilda’s dishes.
A thin rectangle of light filtered through a little window just beneath the ceiling, the yellow echo of a streetlamp that melded with the flutter of the candle Paul always kept beside his bed, as he was terrified of the dark. The Reiners shared one of the smaller bedrooms, which contained only two beds, a wardrobe, and a table over which Paul’s homework was strewn.
Paul felt oppressed by the lack of space. It wasn’t as though there were a shortage of spare rooms. Even before the war, the baron’s fortune had begun to dwindle, and Paul had watched it melt away with the inevitability of a tin can rusting in the middle of a field. It was a process that happened over many years, but it was unstoppable.
The cards, the servants whispered, shaking their heads as though speaking of some contagious disease, it’s because of the cards. As a child, these comments terrified Paul to the point that, when a boy came to school with a French deck he’d found at home, Paul ran out of the class and locked himself in a bathroom. It was a while before he finally understood the extent of his uncle’s problem: a pro
blem that was not contagious but deadly all the same.
When the servants’ unpaid wages began to mount up, they started to quit. Now, of the ten bedrooms in the servants’ quarters, only three were occupied: the maid’s, the cook’s, and the one Paul shared with his mother. The boy sometimes had trouble sleeping, because Ilse always got up an hour before dawn. Before the other servants had left, she had been only the housekeeper, tasked with ensuring that everything was in its place. Now she had had to take on their work too.
That life, his mother’s exhausting duties, and the tasks he’d carried out himself for as long as he could remember had seemed normal to Paul at first. But at school he discussed his situation with his classmates, and soon he began to draw comparisons, noticing what was going on around him, and realizing how strange it was that the sister of a baroness should sleep in the staff quarters.
Time and again he’d hear the same three words used to define his family, slipping by him as he passed between desks at school or slamming shut behind his back like a secret door.
Orphan.
Servant.
Deserter. That was the worst of them all, because it was aimed at his father. The person he’d never known, about whom his mother never spoke, and about whom Paul knew little more than his name. Hans Reiner.
And so it was through piecing together fragments of conversations that Paul overheard that he learned that his father had done something terrible (. . . over in the African colonies, they say . . .), that he had lost everything (. . . lost his shirt, ruined . . .), and that his mother lived on the charity of his aunt Brunhilda (. . . a skivvy in her own brother-in-law’s house—a baron, no less!—can you believe it?).
Which didn’t seem to be any more honorable for the fact that Ilse didn’t charge her a single mark for her work. Or that during the war she should have been obliged to work in a munitions factory “in order to contribute to supporting the household.” The factory was in Dachau, sixteen kilometers from Munich, and his mother had to wake two hours before sunrise, do her share of the household chores, and then take a train to her ten-hour shift.