Free The Life of Objects by Susanna Moore Page A

sheets did not qualify. As she wore black lace gloves at all times, I had never seen her bare hands, and I still didn’t see them.
    Kreck tended the door, although there were no longer many visitors, and saw to the general running of the house, as well as serving at table with Caspar’s assistance (Caspar, to Kreck’s begrudging admiration, was a flawless servant). I offered to polish the parquet floors, which seemed only to require me to skate soundlessly through the rooms, arms clasped behind my back, feet wrapped in pieces of old carpet, but Kreck refused my help, perhaps because he liked to skate himself.
    Kreck was also in charge of the ration books. Each citizen ofthe Reich was meant to receive seven ration cards a month, but the number of calories was continually reduced, the cards difficult to obtain and frequently unavailable. Blue was for meat; yellow for cheese, milk, and yoghurt; white for jam and sugar; green for eggs; orange for bread. Pink was for rice, cereal, flour, tea, and coffee substitutes. Purple was for sweets, nuts, and fruit. Seafood was impossible to find because of the mining of coastal waters and the war in the Atlantic. The coffee substitute, called nigger sweat, was made of roasted acorns, and we counted ourselves fortunate when Kreck could find it.
    On the tenth of May, the Germans violated the neutrality of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg in a surprise attack led by the Tank Corps, with a view to invading France at its weakest point. On the thirteenth, as anticipated, the German army crossed the Meuse and entered France. In June, we heard the news that Italy had joined the war on the side of the Axis, which confirmed to some, although not to Felix, that the rapid defeat of England and France was imminent. Thousands of Jews who had managed to leave Germany were arrested and sent to work camps.
    Not a week passed when something did not arrive from the Metzenburgs’ friends in Berlin for Felix to hide. Silver teapots and rolled canvases were easily managed, but chairs and tables—even an organ on a wagon drawn by two weary horses—were more difficult (Felix sent the organ back to Berlin with his regrets). Kreck, convinced that we were surrounded by enemies, refused to hire boys from the village, and Casparunloaded the treasure before wrapping it in canvas and packing it in metal-lined trunks. They were like actors on a stage, illuminated by lanterns, as Kreck would only allow Caspar to empty the wagons after dark, pacing and waving his arms (I once heard Kreck say, “This is a
very
inferior Rubens, my dear”). It soon became necessary for Felix to draw a map of the location of all the buried and hidden treasure, the Metzenburgs’ as well as that of their friends, which he kept in his waistcoat pocket.
    The summer was unusually hot, with frequent thunderstorms. Hundreds of redhead smews arrived on the river and I made sketches of them for Mr. Knox.
    When I could find the time, I worked in the library, packing books. Shortly before tea, Kreck would arrive to change the blotting paper on the desks. The mother of Frau Metzenburg had been exiled to Löwendorf in 1919, according to Kreck, thanks to a careless maid who’d forgotten to change the paper. Herr Schumacher had held the compromising blotter to a mirror in order to read the letter his wife had written that morning to her lover, and Kreck did not want it to happen again. His mustache made him look as if he were always smiling, a deception that fooled me for some time, and I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me.
    I’d discovered that before coming to Löwendorf, Herr Elias had been a teacher at the Youth Aliyah School in Berlin, where he had prepared Jewish children for emigration to Palestine, teaching Hebrew and Zionist history. After Kristallnacht,Felix, who’d met Herr Elias through a dealer in rare books, had arranged for him to leave Berlin to work in the library at Löwendorf. The village children, whose idea of a Jew was a man