Page 2 of Hell to Pay
“Come on,” my father says, coughing on the words, his lungs scarred by the fire that seared his face and chest and arm when his plane was shot down in that other war, the Great War. The War to End All Wars.
“You need to go back inside,” I say, pulling on his good arm. Across the way, theHofkirche,the Catholic church of the princes, stands oddly misshapen, and it takes me a moment to realize that one of the towers is missing. A jolt of pure fear as I look behind me. All those flames—surely part of the palace is alight. “Why are there no firemen?” I ask my father. “Where are the engines? The soldiers?”
“There’s no fighting this much fire,” he says. “Come. We must see what’s happening.”
Around theHofkircheto the right, the cobblestones uncomfortably warm underfoot, toward Brühl’s Terrace, crowded with people. Across the river, the grassy meadows packed with more people and, somehow, horses, gleaming white in the night. The Sarrasani Circus must have been hit, then. The elephants—where are the elephants? On our bank, more figures hurrying to the left, in the direction of the Semperoper, the opera house. And everywhere, flames. Smoke rising, ash falling, the stone walls radiating heat like an oven.
“Why are they going to the Opera?” I have to shout it, for the roaring has become louder, and a curious, swirling wind has sprung up, blowing hard and hot, carrying little glowworms on it, curlicues of fire. The ash stings the eyes and seems to lodge in the chest, as if I were swallowing glass. How bad is this for Father’s poor lungs?
“The Great Garden,” my father shouts back, then pauses tocough some more. “As good a place as any, if their cellars no longer hold. We’ll have to wait it out for now. Back to the palace. In the morning, we’ll do what we can.”
An hour, then, maybe two, working as I’ve never worked before. My mother and the servants and I all rushing through the few rooms out of five hundred where we now live our diminished lives, packing up clothing, blankets, feather beds, and precious family photos as the heat and noise grow, as if our belongings matter when Father has been ordered to report to the Gestapo. The unreality of this terrible moment, and the abyss that awaits.
The wail of Helga, one of the housemaids, at the news that the upper stairs are alight, that the attics have already gone, along with the ribbon-tied bundle of letters from her sweetheart, Franck, who hasn’t been heard from for too long. Captured or killed, who knows? And worse—captured by the Russians, for Franck was sent to the Eastern Front. The wrongness of not defending the palace from the fire, the horror of imagining the painted ceiling of the Audience Chamber falling, the golden throne within being consumed by flames … Is it all lost, then? I know it’s selfish to rest my mind on such trivial things for one second, but I think them anyway.
In the kitchens, Frau Heffinger, the cook, and Lotte, the little scullery maid, toss bread and butter and cheese and bacon, potatoes and turnips and carrots, into pillowcases willy-nilly, wrapping the precious few remaining eggs in tea towels and setting them on top. Lotte cradles the bottle of buttermilk in her arms like a baby, and Frau Heffinger hesitates, then reaches for her prized knives, wrapped in their leather roll. “In case,” she tells me. “Lucky the wine is in the cellar, eh, and most of the beer as well.” As steady and practical as ever as the heat grows. As the night glows ever brighter. As the fire roars like a dragon let loose on the city,and none of us understand what is yet to come. Except, possibly, my father, who always sees more than anyone else, maybe because he refuses to look away.
I’ve thought about that night so many times. I’ve tried to forget it more times than that, but there’s no wiping away things buried that deep. Buried like they are all buried, now, though I don’t know where.
It can be hard to die, I know. But, oh, the pain it can be to survive.
2
OAT HANGOVER
“How are you feeling, Oma?” my granddaughter Alix asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just as I was fine thirty minutes ago, and when we boarded the train at Frankfurt. When I’m not fine, I’ll tell you.”
“Awesome answer,” Ben said. Ben is the nephew of Alix’s fiancé, Sebastian Robillard, and lives with him and Alix in Portland. Sebastian, I was in perfect charity with. Sebastian, with Ben’s help, had carted bags between car and airport, plane and hotel, hotel and train and off again, with a welcome lack of fuss, and had fetched everything that needed fetching. Beyond that? He’d letmeaskhimfor help, if I needed it.
Growing old is odd, perhaps odder because I never saw my parents grow old or heard how they felt about it. They quite likely wouldn’t have said—complaining is not something a Saxon royal is permitted—but I’d have sensed it in them, perhaps seen my mother sigh as she plucked a chin hair. Facial hair, I’ve always thought, is God’s joke on elderly women. Just when your skin is losing its elasticity and your face its bloom—and just when you can’t see well enough tospot all of them—those wiry, stubborn hairs appear out of nowhere, springing up overnight like mushrooms to add their final insult. One may as well be a farmer, so much cultivation is required.
Inside, I still feel—not twenty-one, perhaps. Thirty-five is more accurate. Settled in myself, the silly anxieties of my twenties gone. My mind seems no different to me otherwise, which sometimes makes the reality of being ninety-four appear a cruel joke. Two weeks ago, I’d been in my favorite shop in Palo Alto, buying new trousers and shoes for this trip—isn’t it a blessing that women can wear trousers now? Trousers that don’t need ironing, too.Knitwear. Perma-pressed.How those words had made my heart sing, back when there weren’t enough hours in the day.
Wait, I was thinking about the shop. One’s mind does wander, although that may have been because I wasn’t ready to take in Dresden yet, and because of the enormity of what I’d come here to do. So. The shop. I’d been at the sale rack, examining my choices—saving money still delights me, like anypetit bourgeois; my mother would be horrified—when I’d caught movement out of the corner of my eye. An ancient woman dressed in black, her back beginning to hump a bit, looking like a Greek widow. I’d thought,I’m glad I still have my posture.That was the moment I realized that, first, it was a mirror, and second, the Greek widow with the dowager’s hump was me.
I suppose there are actually two alternate “me’s” in my mind. That thirty-five-year-old career woman, wife, and mother, running all the aspects of her family’s life with competence and, I like to think, grace, and the sixty-five-year-old one, her hair turned to silver but her complexion still surprisingly smooth, her body still surprisingly energetic, working in the garden, then dressing for an evening at the San Francisco Opera, the Ballet, the Symphony, anywhere Joeand I can slake our thirst for music. Still able, with enough of that cultivation, to look beautiful in an austere sort of way, at least to a husband with imperfect vision.
Ah, those evenings, especially when they were playing Mozart or Pachelbel. Mozart, because the sun seemed to shine from his music, or perhaps it was thejoie de vivreof Vienna, that most civilized of capitals. And Pachelbel because to me, Pachelbel would always be Nuremberg. Pachelbel’s home, and the city where I’d first heard Joe play theCanon and Fugue in D Majoron a battered cello that had come through the war the way so many of us had—worse for wear, but still standing. Wagner, with his hysterical romanticism and the brutalist mythology so beloved of Hitler? No, I’d had enough of Wagner; and Beethoven, too, was at times too martial for my taste. It wasThe Magic FluteI loved best and theRingseriesthat I let pass me by, and it was Bach I drifted off to sleep with these days, Bach who kept me company most during the long days alone. Baroque like Dresden. Clever, intellectual, restrained, the emotion controlled but there for those who chose to listen. Like, perhaps, Joe, and also me.
I’d drifted again. I was standing in the main hall of the DresdenHauptbahnhof,the main railway station, which looked completely different after nearly eighty years and yet much the same. My mind was still trying to escape, but minds tend to need a bit of time to get used to a new reality. Today, there were no three hundred thousand hungry, desperate refugees packed into the tunnels and caverns below, no hurrying, threadbare civilians looking away from the plain-clothes Gestapo, recognizable for being better fed than anyone else, and from the SS, with their terrifying black uniforms and the lightning bolts on their lapels. The SS and Gestapo never looked away. Theylooked.
Today, there were no police in sight, and the floor was as sparklingly clean as it had been when I was a little girl, beforeit all went wrong. Not American clean, but GermanHausfrauclean, in a country where not washing your front steps might as well still be a crime, if only a social one these days. The vast glass dome soared intact once more, its delicate metal tracery making the structure look fine as gossamer. The outer walls, when I could see them, would still be sandstone, darkened by time and weathering.
All of it the same, as if none of it had happened, and yet so different.
Sebastian said, “Ben and I will take the bags and pick up the rental car, and Alix can stay with you, Marguerite. You should sit and have a coffee, if you like.Kaffee und Kuchenin the afternoon,right?”
I do love a masterful man. I’m sure that shows my age and my upbringing, but a woman can’t change her nature. I said, “Thank you; that will be fine.”
Ben said, “How about if I stay with you instead, Tante Marguerite? I’m saying that because Alix looks like she’s about to burst out with something like, ‘I’ve been doing these online German lessons for months, though! I want to pick up the car! Saying, “Ein Kaffee, bitte,” isn’t going to get me any further along at all.’” He added, of course, “Plus, I’m hungry. That curry sausage thing on the train was pretty good, but that was hours ago.”
“It wastwohours ago,” Sebastian said.
“Like I said,” Ben said. “Hours. You can leave some of the bags, though, and I’ll bring them out.”
“No worries,” Alix said. “We’ve got the trolley. All right. I’ll text you when we’ve got the car and are heading over. It looks like we can pick you up outside the main entrance, if you go outside and turn right. There’ll be red lines on the pavement marking the pickup area, and the sign will say something likeAnstehen.If you get confused, you can ask a porter, or you can?—”
