Free The Life of Objects by Susanna Moore Page B

with horns, had quickly grown attached to Herr Elias, who lived in the village, perhaps because he played music for them on his gramophone and fed them.
    I was surprised one evening by a small black bear in a ruffled skirt that had strolled away from some Hungarians busy stealing fruit in the orchard. Fortunately, she was tame, and when I turned to run, she did not chase me.
    When I spoke to the Metzenburgs, I addressed them as Herr Felix and Frau Dorothea, but that summer they began to call me Maeve, rather than Miss Palmer. Felix preferred the company of as many people as possible, and I was occasionally asked to join them in the dining room. I wasn’t asked if guests were expected, but visitors had become rare at Löwendorf. The Metzenburgs’ isolation was difficult for Felix, accustomed as he was to brilliant conversation (or so I imagined), if not the distraction of sophisticated companions, but Dorothea did not seem to mind it at all. I seldom saw her. During the day, she drove to the village to visit the sick, taking them clothes and medicine, and to call on the old people who’d been left behind, often without food or money, when their sons and grandsons were sent to the front. I’d noticed that a house, a dog, a child, or even a crisis often enabled, if not compelled, people to remain together. It gave them, among other things, a subject. I was not the Metzenburgs’ subject, but I provided aneasy distraction for them while they learned to be alone. It was not my conversation that was sought, but my presence, which both inhibited and stimulated them.
    I was a bit stiff at first, and always five minutes too early in the dining room, having raced to change my clothes after I helped Caspar and Schmidt to prepare dinner (the first night, I caught Dorothea staring at Inéz’s black dress, trying to remember where she’d seen it before). It didn’t take long for me to learn that it was considered bad luck to hand a saltcellar to someone rather than to place it before him, and that one did not say “God bless” at the start of a meal. If, for some reason, you had to leave the table, you did not do so without first asking to be excused. You did not drink tea with dinner, as did my mother. You did not use your napkin to wipe anything other than your mouth, as did my father. You did not eat with animals on your lap, as did some of the Metzenburgs’ friends (I didn’t count Mr. Knox and his gull, who always took tea with us).
    The Metzenburgs kept to their vow not to speak at night about the war, talking instead about books and paintings, or the care of the estate—the weirs needed to be cleaned and the fields planted (there was no seed and no one to plant it), but most of the time they, too, were silent. When they spoke to friends on the telephone, they used a code, grinning slyly, that seemed alarmingly obvious to me—horses meant England, chickens meant Germany, peacocks meant France, bears meant Russia—but fortunately there seldom were telephone calls.
    They often listened to the gramophone, perhaps a recording from 1936 of
Der Rosenkavalier
, or Karajan conducting Strauss.When Dorothea said that Strauss wrote
Ein Heldenleben
(we were listening to it for the second night in a row) after a quarrel with his wife, the jarring notes reminiscent of his wife’s voice, Felix asked her where in the world she heard such nonsense. He thought it very romantic of her to countenance everything that she heard. As he believed that things could be made perfect, which was to me the most romantic idea of all, his condescension seemed unjust. I waited for Dorothea’s answer, but she was silent, bent over a book on Japanese moss gardens. “It was Strauss,” Felix said as an afterthought, “who expressed his gratitude to the Führer for his interest in art.” He paused. “It presents a conflict, of course, but there are greater ones.”
    Most nights, however, they listened to dance music. I looked forward to it, the songs