The Life of Objects by Susanna Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

taking her measurements. I was unaccustomed to seeing women in their underwear (she stood calmly in her peach silk knickers). It wasn’t her lack of modesty that made me uncomfortable but her evident disdain. She seemed to be defying me to blush, and I’m pleased to say that while it was a struggle, I did not oblige her.
    On the first day of September, a distraught Kreck rushed into the sewing room to tell me that Germany had invaded Poland. He said that Herr Felix was waiting to speak to us in the library. I rose immediately, my apron dotted with blood—I’d pricked myself when he told me the news—and followed him downstairs.
    Herr Felix was at his desk. Dorothea was not there. Schmidt, Caspar, and Roeder stood together, and Kreck and I took our places beside them. Felix said that we were free, of course, to return to our homes now that Germany was at war. He understood that I might be particularly alarmed to find myself at Löwendorf at such a perilous moment. He was relieved that he and Frau Metzenburg had left Berlin, especially as someof their friends had begun to disappear simply because their names were in the wrong address books. Although his voice was calm, I noticed that his hands were shaking when he picked up a newspaper he’d been reading. There appears to be a new law, he said. “Forbidding Jews to own—” He stopped to read directly from the paper. “Radios and—”
    Roeder interrupted him to say that her place was with Frau Metzenburg. Schmidt and Caspar also said that they did not wish to leave Löwendorf. Kreck, whose face was wet with tears, said nothing, and Felix turned to me.
    Caspar, his blue eyes narrowed with expectation, nodded at me in encouragement, but Roeder had difficulty concealing the smirk of superiority that implied that she’d taken me for a bolter from the start. Schmidt seemed distracted, gazing in wonder at the row of Meissen pagodas. When I said that I, too, chose to remain at Löwendorf, Caspar dropped his head in relief. Felix, impassively prepared for a different answer, thanked me. He said that he would do all that he could to keep us safe. As we left the library, Kreck took me aside to say that Herr Metzenburg had many friends in the diplomatic corps and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that because of this, he knew things that the rest of us could not possibly know. He said that I should do whatever Herr Felix asked me to do, no matter how implausible.
    Later, when I took up my sewing, my hands, too, were shaking, and I was unable to thread my needle. I understood nothing of Germany and the forces that had brought her to war. For the first time, I regretted the hours I’d spent reading French novels, rather than the newspaper. Although I sometimes readthe paper from Hamburg (it was one of the German exercises given me by Herr Elias), I’d been more interested in the views of my companions than in news of the world. That Felix had declined the offer of an important post abroad seemed to indicate his opinion of the Reich. I knew that Kreck had been with Herr Felix since Felix was at university, and that he’d lost his eye in 1916 in service to the emperor (he’d said more than once that he had no intention of losing his other eye for his own or any other country). Fräulein Roeder, who’d tended Dorothea since she was sent as a girl to live with her grandfather in London, did not hesitate to express her admiration of Hitler’s frequent speeches, particularly the one in which the Führer said that the geniality, diligence, and steadfastness of the German people would be harnessed for works of peace and human culture, but Roeder did not exhibit any signs of the Führer lovesickness that I’d noticed in other German ladies (when she said that many Nazis were, in fact, practicing Christians, Felix closed his eyes, his hand on his forehead, and nodded). Her favorite nephew had been mobilized that winter, and she frequently sent him packages—I saw her in the