Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susanna Moore is the author of the novels The Big Girls, One Last Look, In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, The Whiteness of Bones, and My Old Sweetheart, and two books of nonfiction, Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai’i and I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai’i. She lives in New York City.

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The Life of Objects

By Susanna Moore

Knopf

Copyright © 2012 Susanna Moore
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780307268433
 
The smiling brother and sister who were at Christmas lunch left for Spain at the end of March, hoping to make their way to Algiers. Dorothea was angry when she discovered that Felix had given them the exit visas, perhaps imagining that they themselves might one day use them. It was the only quarrel I ever knew them to have --- whether to fly to safety or to stay at Löwendorf. Once Felix gave away the passes, it would be difficult for the Metzenburgs to leave the country. Kreck told me that Dorothea had considered for a moment going to Copenhagen, where she had cousins, but the Nazis invaded Denmark the first week of April, and she did not mention it again.
 

When a family of smiling gypsies appeared in the stable yard, Frau Schmidt flung open a kitchen window and screamed, “Raus, ihr Schweine, oder ich lasse euch verprugeln!” Get out, you swine, or I’ll have you thrashed. The gypsies did not bother to answer or even to look at her, sauntering down the avenue, followed by Felix’s dogs.

When I saw that one of the boys carried Bessie, Felix’s favorite brown-and-white spaniel, I put down my work and rushed after them. When the boy saw me, he gave a loud laugh and threw Bessie high into the air. She fell on the grass unharmed and I was able to grab her collar, but the other dogs ran after the gypsies, ignoring my command to heel. When, a few minutes later, the dogs came yelping into the yard, there were only two of them.

It was uncommon to see strangers at Löwendorf, but workers from Poland, many of them young and wearing the letter P on their clothes, had begun to appear in the village soon after the war began, headed for Ludwigsfelde and other nearby cities. The conscripted foreign workers, sent to work on the land when the farmers were mobilized, were tormented by the farmers’ children, and the farmers’ wives gave them only a portion of the meager rations allotted the workers by the government. Some of them soon escaped to find their way home, but others came to the Yellow Palace after dark for food. Felix instructed Kreck to give them cheese, bread, and beer. Fortunately there was enough for everyone. Cows had begun to disappear mysteriously from the village, and it was growing hard to find good. When Caspar came upon bits of hide from Felix’s prize Friesians, he lost his head, running across the park with the reeking skins in his hands. Alarmed by his cries, we rushed into the stable yard. “People are hungry,” Felix said quietly as he led Casper to the pump to wash his hands.

Soon after this, Felix asked Kreck how much food was held in reserve at Löwendorf. Along with their treasure, the Metzenburgs had brought champagne and wine, Turkish tobacco, gramophone records, and books from Berlin, but not much food, relying on the countryside to supply the needs of the estate.  A levy of grain, meat, and poultry was by law sent each month to the army, with rapid and dire punishment for hoarding, resulting in a shortage of food, with inevitable speculation, even in a small village like Löwendorf. The quality of food was beginning to suffer (flour mixed with sawdust).

Kreck reported that we had stores of rice, potatoes, salt, dried fruit, cheese, flour, jam, and vegetables (not much coffee, sugar, or oil), and, of course, the wine from the old baroness’s cellar. There was enough animal fodder, hay and oats to last to the next harvest.

 
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The village women engaged by Dorothea as maids stopped coming to the house that spring, and the old men who worked as grooms and gardeners disappeared. I began to help in the kitchen and in the laundry, and Caspar and I worked in the garden. In Ballycarra, I’d swept the house, washed dishes, and made beds, but I was not used to working outside. I soon discovered that I preferred it to other work. As I bent to lift a basket of potatoes or reached to hang sheets on the line, I could feel the strength streaming through my arms and down my back, and it made me happy.

A certain amount of time was necessary to prepare dinner, given the numerous ways to cook and, what was perhaps more important, to present root vegetables. I learned from Schmidt six recipes for potatoes (which for an Irishwoman is something). Caspar’s ferret caught rabbits, and I learned to skin and clean them. We bottled fruit from the orchard and hid the jars in the basement.

            Roeder, who’d made it clear that any responsibility other than caring for Dorothea would be met with resentment, was soon worn down by the simple fact that she, too, required nourishment–I noticed that she was willing to perform any task deemed sufficiently refined for one in her position. Shelling peas fell into this category, as did watering the topiary on the terrace and making toast, although scouring pots, cleaning the stove, or washing 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 of the 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.
                       

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On the tenth day 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...