I hurt you.”
The oven was warm; we could hear wood crackling in the embers.
“Silence is worse.”
We sat awhile longer on the milking stools and looked into the flames of the oven, in which a bundt cake was baking for the next day, slowly browning, until the crust began to steam. I brought down the wooden oven peel from the wall, took the cake out and put it on the kitchen countertop.
“Thank you, my golden boy, it was about to go all wrong,” said the cook.
She hugged me. I pretended I didn’t see her tears.
Early in 1941, as German tanks rolled through Libya as part of Operation Sunflower, Mother put up a flag with a swastika on it on the tower of our house. It was the first time in my life that I heard Father raise his voice. Father calmly told one of the stable boys to please remove the flag from the pole, then he went into the greenhouse, shut the frosted-glass door, and let out the shout that announced the end of his marriage.
From the beginning of the war, Mother wore her riding boots more and more often and drank until she lost the power of speech. One morning she lay on the floor inside the door of the house and didn’t move. I called out to her, trying to wake her. She opened her eyes and looked at me; I wasn’t sure she recognized me.
“Do you still love me?” she asked.
Then she wrapped both arms around my head and held me so tightly to her throat that it was hard for me to breathe.
“I am so . . .” she said. “For everything here, for everything, I am so . . .”
It was so beautiful that I got lost on my way to school.
Sometimes I wished that during the day I could forget that Mother was at home sitting on the terrace and drinking arak.
But I knew that would mean that nobody was paying attention to her and that this was my responsibility. Secretly, I sometimes laid my head against her chest when she was lying on the floor, immobile. I was checking to see if she was still breathing.
Because of the new trade embargo, Father had problems with his velvet exports. He said he would go to Istanbul and ride out the war there, but he would keep the villa in Choulex. Mother wanted to move to Munich and live off Father’s money. I wanted to travel and see a little of the world. Father suggested Tehran, because there the war was far away.
During the summer I had heard stories from the stable boys about secret nightclubs in Berlin, about hustlers, cocaine, an ivory fountain in a grand hotel, and a singing Negress who rode in a coach drawn by an ostrich.
One of the stable boys had worked for a while as a horse dung collector in Berlin and said he had moved away because he couldn’t stand the Berlin dialect, the “Ah” instead of “I,” the “wut?” instead of “what?” It was obnoxious, he said. Even the hairdressers felt free to tell you what was on their mind.
“Is that true?” I asked.
“Everything’s idiotic there, the girls, too. No culture,” he said. That night was the first time I heard the rumor. In Berlin, the stable boy said, a moving truck drives into the Scheunenviertel at night and takes away the Jews. “They never come back,” he said.
“Is that true?” I asked.
“It’s just a rumor.”
“Where is the Scheunenviertel?”
Germany seemed like a land of conquerors. The Wehrmacht controlled Europe and loomed over Moscow. The British had stopped the air raids on Berlin. Berlin, in spite of everything, was really something. A place where even the hairdressers told you what was on their minds.
I asked Father about his trips to Berlin and he gave me Theodor Fontane to read. I read the novels that were in our library and Fontane’s correspondence, too. In a letter he wrote to the writer Paul Heyse in 1862, I read:
No matter how much we like to mock Berlin, and however gladly I concede that it occasionally deserves this mockery, it cannot be denied that what happens and doesn’t happen here is directly caught up in the great gear of world events. It has become a necessity to me to hear the whirring of that flywheel close by, even at the risk that it might turn into the proverbial grindstone.
At night I lay awake and thought about the word “flywheel” and about the rumor from the Scheunenviertel. In my head, the Germans were what I wanted to be. I had seen pictures of marching soldiers at the movie theater. I did not want to be a soldier, but maybe a little bit of their strength could pass to me. I asked Father about the furniture truck.
“It’s something I heard,” I said.
“Why are people spreading rumors?” Father’s voice sounded uneasy as he answered. “I don’t know, maybe it’s a gray area. There must also be good Germans. I think that the truth is never more in danger than in wartime.”
He turned and looked at me.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
I looked him directly in the face. He was trying to smile, as if it were nothing serious. I could tell he was afraid.
“Don’t do it,” Father said. “I beg you, not this time.”
A couple of days later, Father and Mother sat together in the library, although they had long since stopped listening to each other.
“I will begin my travels with a short trip to Berlin,” I said.
Mother laughed. “And what do you want to do there?”
“To see it.”
“See what?”
“And take some drawing lessons.”
Mother fell silent.
“You want to take drawing lessons during a war?” Father asked.
“Only for a few days.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Berlin is safe.”
“But there’s a war.”
“In the east. Not in Berlin. No bombs have fallen there for weeks.”
“It’s still too dangerous.”
“I’m going there, Father, I want to see it. This gray area.”
Father nodded and stroked his chin.
Somebody had to be able to distinguish between rumors and reality. Back then I thought I was brave.
“But it’s a city of Jews,” Mother said.
After Christmas, a dark-colored car with German license plates pulled to a stop on the gravel of our drive. A man in uniform stepped out. I hid in the hayloft and watched while he put his hand on Mother’s backside. Later the cook would tell me that Mother had introduced the man as her nephew.
She
