Free An Infinity of Mirrors by Richard Condon Page B

hands were certainly tied, and the Communists were trying to “eat the very heart out of our country.” The essential opposition, of course, had made him proud as a soldier, but most of all it had dispersed the terrible alarm he had first felt that she might be frightened at the threat of what might have seemed like danger. He would be home soon and hold her in his arms.
    Paule had two servants. One, who had come as a present from Gisele, seemed to know how to cook everything everyone in the combined Rhode family liked to eat, from Westfälisches Gaenschenschwarzsuer to Crambamboli . The other, a charwoman who came in twice a week, Gretel had found. Paule concentrated on her house, on becoming a good German wife, and on learning to think and feel like a German. She read the Nibelungenlied because Gretel told her that it had influenced the attitudes of the German Army. She read Kudrun because Gisele had said it was her favorite story of the North Sea coasts. She read sixteenth-century Jesuit dramas from which German opera had evolved. She read the works of Christian Weisse, which advocated rational behavior and the art of getting on in a realistically apprehended world; and her mind tottered forward with a small cry of gratitude when Klopstock enforced his credo that feeling must dominate reason; she went on into the rococo abandon of Wieland, turned to the common sense of Lessing as an antidote, then backtracked to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister . She avoided Heine because he had been a Jew. The point of her search was to seek the keys to people who not only were not Jews, but who seemed to be able to blind themselves to all of the sensitive things in Jews which Heine represented. She could not make her way through the dialect literature of Hebel, Groth, and Reuter. She had already read Neitzsche and it had made her giggle, but she reread him with the memory of the storm troopers at earnest work all around the army staff car. She felt at home with Stefan George and von Hofmannstahl, though George’s work had been used recently to make the Nazis more palatable in German intellectual circles. She would not read Kafka, the Czech whom the Germans adored; she could not afford hopelessness.
    The music library of Paule’s landlord had every opera known to man, and while she knitted she listened to Beethoven, Gluck, Brahms, Mozart, and Wagner. Abjuring Bach, she played Brahms and Wagner and Wagner and Brahms over and over again until finally she told Veelee that Wagner surely must have been commissioned to provide recruiting music for the Nazi party. But Veelee did not seem to want to understand.
    After Paule had studied German culture for seventeen months she was more French than she had been before, and she fancied she could hear her father’s raucous laughter roaring at her from a ribald heaven.
    From the second day of their arrival in Germany, they had received invitations from the aristocratic society of Berlin and Potsdam for every sort of event: lunches, teas, dinners, balls, hunts, cocktails, and Kaffeetafeln . Many of the invitations came from the wives of cavalry officers with whom Veelee had served in the Royal Prussian Army. But Paule’s closest friends were Veelee’s sisters and their husbands. These warm and loving people had made her a part of the family instantly and, though she was never aware of it, defied any member of German society to consider her in any other light. Gretel was the most intelligent of the von Rhodes, and she had insight and a deft intuition as well. Gisele, forged in the cold furnace of Foreign Office society, was a social automaton who could talk about anything without being indiscreet but could hardly utter a sentence of substance. Still, she had a loving heart and was a generous, pretty woman. Gretel’s husband, Generalleutnant Franz Heller, was called Hansel (by the family only) because of his wife’s name. He was a bulky, witty man who, whenever he was