3

“Are you asleep?”

Ilse Reiner turned over on the mattress.

“Not anymore. What is it, Paul?”

“I was wondering what we’re going to do.”

“It’s half past eleven. How about getting some sleep?”

“I was talking about the future.”

“The future,” his mother repeated, almost spitting out the word.

“I mean, it’s not as if you really have to work here at Aunt Brunhilda’s, do you, Mama?”

“In the future I see you going to university, which happens to be just around the corner, and coming home to eat the tasty food I have prepared for you. Now, good night.”

“This isn’t our home.”

“We live here, we work here, and we thank heaven for it.”

“As if we should . . .” whispered Paul.

“I heard that, young man.”

“Sorry, Mama.”

“What’s up with you? Have you had another fight with Jürgen? Is that why you came back all wet today?”

“It wasn’t a fight. He and two of his friends followed me to the Englischer Garten.”

“They were just playing.”

“They threw my trousers in the lake, Mama.”

“And you hadn’t done anything to upset them?”

Paul snorted loudly but said nothing. This was typical of his mother. Whenever he had a problem, she would try to find a way to make it his fault.

“Best go to sleep, Paul. We have a big day tomorrow.”

“Ah, yes, Jürgen’s birthday . . .”

“There will be cakes.”

“That other people will eat.”

“I don’t know why you always have to react like this.”

Paul thought it was outrageous that a hundred people should celebrate a party on the ground floor while Eduard—whom he hadn’t yet been allowed to see—languished on the fourth, but he kept this to himself.

“There will be a lot of work tomorrow,” Ilse concluded, turning over.

The boy watched his mother’s back for some time. The bedrooms in the service wing were at the rear of the house, down in a sort of basement. Living there instead of in the family quarters didn’t bother Paul that much, because he’d never known any other home. Ever since he was born, he’d accepted as normal the strange sight of watching Ilse wash her sister Brunhilda’s dishes.

A thin rectangle of light filtered through a little window just beneath the ceiling, the yellow echo of a streetlamp that melded with the flutter of the candle Paul always kept beside his bed, as he was terrified of the dark. The Reiners shared one of the smaller bedrooms, which contained only two beds, a wardrobe, and a table over which Paul’s homework was strewn.

Paul felt oppressed by the lack of space. It wasn’t as though there were a shortage of spare rooms. Even before the war, the baron’s fortune had begun to dwindle, and Paul had watched it melt away with the inevitability of a tin can rusting in the middle of a field. It was a process that happened over many years, but it was unstoppable.

The cards, the servants whispered, shaking their heads as though speaking of some contagious disease, it’s because of the cards. As a child, these comments terrified Paul to the point that, when a boy came to school with a French deck he’d found at home, Paul ran out of the class and locked himself in a bathroom. It was a while before he finally understood the extent of his uncle’s problem: a problem that was not contagious but deadly all the same.

When the servants’ unpaid wages began to mount up, they started to quit. Now, of the ten bedrooms in the servants’ quarters, only three were occupied: the maid’s, the cook’s, and the one Paul shared with his mother. The boy sometimes had trouble sleeping, because Ilse always got up an hour before dawn. Before the other servants had left, she had been only the housekeeper, tasked with ensuring that everything was in its place. Now she had had to take on their work too.

That life, his mother’s exhausting duties, and the tasks he’d carried out himself for as long as he could remember had seemed normal to Paul at first. But at school he discussed his situation with his classmates, and soon he began to draw comparisons, noticing what was going on around him, and realizing how strange it was that the sister of a baroness should sleep in the staff quarters.

Time and again he’d hear the same three words used to define his family, slipping by him as he passed between desks at school or slamming shut behind his back like a secret door.

Orphan.

Servant.

Deserter. That was the worst of them all, because it was aimed at his father. The person he’d never known, about whom his mother never spoke, and about whom Paul knew little more than his name. Hans Reiner.

And so it was through piecing together fragments of conversations that Paul overheard that he learned that his father had done something terrible (. . . over in the African colonies, they say . . .), that he had lost everything (. . . lost his shirt, ruined . . .), and that his mother lived on the charity of his aunt Brunhilda (. . . a skivvy in her own brother-in-law’s house—a baron, no less!—can you believe it?).

Which didn’t seem to be any more honorable for the fact that Ilse didn’t charge her a single mark for her work. Or that during the war she should have been obliged to work in a munitions factory “in order to contribute to supporting the household.” The factory was in Dachau, sixteen kilometers from Munich, and his mother had to wake two hours before sunrise, do her share of the household chores, and then take a train to her ten-hour shift.

It was just after she’d arrived back from the factory one day, her hair and fingers green with dust, her eyes dazed after a whole day of inhaling chemicals, that Paul asked his mother for the first time why they didn’t find somewhere else to live. A place where they weren’t both being constantly humiliated.

“You don’t understand, Paul.”

She had given him the same response many times, always looking away or leaving the room or rolling over to sleep, just as she had done a few minutes ago.

Paul watched his mother’s back for a few moments. She seemed to be breathing deeply and regularly, but the boy knew that she was only pretending to be asleep and wondered what ghosts would assail her in the middle of the night.

He looked away and fixed his gaze on the ceiling. If his eyes could have bored through the plaster, the square of ceiling immediately above Paul’s pillow would have caved in long ago. That was where he focused all his fantasies about his father on the nights when he had trouble reconciling himself to sleep. All Paul knew was that he’d been a captain in the Kaiser’s fleet and that he’d commanded a frigate in South-West Africa. He had died when Paul was two years old, and the only thing he had left of him was a faded photo of his father in uniform, with a large moustache, his dark eyes looking straight at the camera, proud.

Ilse tucked the photo under her pillow every night and the greatest anguish Paul had caused his mother wasn’t the day Jürgen pushed him down the stairs and broke his hand; it was the day he stole the photo, took it to school, and showed it to everyone who had called him an orphan behind his back. By the time he returned home, Ilse had turned the room upside down looking for it. When he took it out tentatively from between the pages of his math book, Ilse gave him a slap and then began to cry.

“It’s the only one I have. The only one.”

She hugged him, of course. But she grabbed the photograph back first.

Paul had tried to imagine what this impressive man must have been like. Under the grubby whiteness of the ceiling, by the light of the streetlamp, his mind’s eye conjured the outline of the Kiel, the frigate in which Hans Reiner had “sunk in the Atlantic along with all his crew.” He invented hundreds of possible scenarios to explain those nine words, the only information about his death that Ilse had given her son. Pirates, reefs, a mutiny . . . However it began, Paul’s fantasy always ended the same way, with Hans clinging to the rudder, waving good-bye as the waters closed over his head.

When he reached this point, Paul always fell asleep.