The Life of Objects by Susanna Moore Read Free Book Online

happiness.

1939
    I n the new year, Dorothea engaged some women and old men from the village to work as laundresses, kitchen maids, and gardeners. I was put to work in the library, helping Herr Elias to separate those books collected by Dorothea’s mother from Herr Elias’s own rare and valuable books. There was a gramophone in the library as well as in the drawing room and in Felix’s dressing room, and Herr Elias played music as we worked, beginning the day with
Dido and Aeneas
and ending with Django Reinhardt.
    Although I was sometimes asked to mend a torn curtain hem or one of Felix’s jackets (Caspar too busy dusting books), the making of lace was never mentioned. I’d once thought ofnothing but lace (and of escape, the two linked in my mind). I’d seen patterns everywhere—in Mr. Knox’s handwriting, in nests, in the wings of a mayfly and the scales of a trout—and I felt uneasy without a piece of lace in my hands. I often dreamed that I had unraveled a piece of lace in the park, the white silk strung through the trees like a web. My hands, no longer sore and swollen, seemed to belong to a stranger.
    Aside from the works of Karl May, many of Frau Schumacher’s books were about horses or missionaries, and many of them were in English. I sometimes took books to my room—
Oil for the Lamps of China, The Painted Veil
, and
The Bridge of Desire
—books that were a revelation after George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell. In an attempt to be friendly, I asked Roeder (she was on her way from church in the village and seemed slightly less disdainful than usual) if she’d like to read a book from the library, but she said that she found the Book of Life entirely sufficient for her needs. I disliked her intensely (I worried at first that she’d notice, until I realized that she didn’t care in the least). Kreck told me that she had inherited her position as lady’s maid from her own mother, who had served Dorothea’s mother for sixty years until her death. Her many fears were as real to her as the
Almanach de Gotha
. When she came upon a thorn bush in which the carcasses of small birds and frogs were impaled, she announced that a spell had been cast on the Yellow Palace, hinting that the foreign princess, as she called Inéz, had been practicing black magic again. She refused to believe me when I explained that the little corpses were merely the leftovers of the greedy shrike, kept for another day’s feast, and she took to wearing two gold crosses around her neck.

    When Herr Elias asked me to tell him a story in German, Caspar, who somehow contrived to be in the library each afternoon during my lesson, noticed my reluctance and quickly offered to tell a story in my place. Herr Elias said that he would like to hear Caspar’s story, but he still expected me to take my turn. A grinning Caspar stood before us, hands clasped at his waist, and began to speak.
    “I’ve been hunting in the Night Wood all my life, first using a slingshot made by my late beloved father and later a rifle given to him by Frau Schumacher in gratitude for saving one of her dogs from drowning. We weren’t starving—my father died from wounds suffered in the Great War when I was ten years old—but my mother relied on the rabbits and birds I brought home to feed us. Most of the game at Löwendorf had been killed off before I was born, and the one remaining gamekeeper spent his days sleeping in a forester’s hut. I went into the woods whenever I liked. When the coachman, who had quarreled with my father over politics, caught me one night with a bag of squirrels, I was sure I’d be beaten, but after only a few blows, he took me by the ear to Frau Schumacher, who then and there made me her new gamekeeper. It seems she had a madness for roast squirrel.”
    “It’s the beginning of a fairy tale,” I said in German, with the help of a dictionary. To my relief, our time had come to an end. I could conjugate verbs and even recite some poetry, but I