“Who is responsible for this?”
“A mortar shell, madam.”
“I know that much already. I’m asking why you’ve brought my son to me only now, and in this state. It has been seven months since the war ended, and not a word of news. Do you know who his father is?”
“Yes, he’s a baron. And Ludwig here is a bricklayer, and I’m a grocer’s assistant. But shrapnel has no respect for titles, madam. And the road from Turkey was a long one. You’re lucky he’s back at all; my brother won’t be coming back.”
Brunhilda’s face turned livid.
“Get out!” she hissed.
“That’s nice, madam. We return your son to you and you throw us out into the street without so much as a glass of beer.”
A glimmer of remorse might perhaps have crossed Brunhilda’s face, but it was overshadowed by rage. Speechless, she raised a trembling finger and pointed toward the door.
“Piece of aristo shit,” said one of the soldiers, spitting on the carpet.
Reluctantly they turned to leave, their heads down. Their sunken eyes filled with weariness and disgust, but not surprise. There was nothing, thought Paul, that could shock these men now. And when the two men in large gray greatcoats moved out of the way, Paul finally understood the scene.
Eduard, Baron von Schroeder’s firstborn son, was lying unconscious on the sofa at an odd angle. His left arm was propped up on some cushions. Where his right should have been, there was only a badly sewn fold in his jacket. Where he should have had legs, there were two stumps covered in dirty bandages, one of which was seeping blood. The surgeon had not cut them in the same place: the left was severed above the knee, the right just below.
Asymmetric mutilation, thought Paul, remembering that morning’s art history class, and his teacher discussing the Venus de Milo. He realized he was crying.
When she heard the sobbing, Brunhilda raised her head and hurled herself toward Paul. The look of contempt and disdain she usually reserved for him had been replaced by one of hatred and shame. For a moment Paul thought she was going to strike him and jumped away, falling backward and covering his face with his arms. There was a tremendous crash.
The doors to the hall had been slammed shut.
2
Eduard von Schroeder was not the only child to return home that day, a week after the government had declared the city of Munich secure and begun to bury the more than twelve hundred Communist dead.
But unlike that of Eduard von Schroeder, this homecoming had been prepared for in minute detail. For Alys and Manfred Tannenbaum, the return journey had begun on the Macedonia, from New Jersey to Hamburg. It continued in a luxurious first-class compartment on a train to Berlin, where they found a telegram from their father ordering them to take up residence at the Esplanade until they received further instructions. This, for Manfred, was the happiest coincidence of the ten years of his life, because Charlie Chaplin happened to be staying in the room next door. The actor gave the boy one of his famous bamboo canes, and even accompanied him and his sister to the taxi the day they’d finally received the telegram saying it was now safe to undertake the last leg of their journey.
So it was that on May 13, 1919, more than five years after their father had sent them off to the United States to escape the impending war, the children of Germany’s most important Jewish industrialist set foot on platform 3 of the Hauptbahnhof station.
Even then, Alys knew that things were not going to end well.
“Hurry up with that, will you, Doris? Oh, just leave it, I’ll take it myself,” she said, snatching the hatbox from the hands of the servant her father had sent to meet them and placing it on top of the trolley. This she had commandeered from one of the young station assistants who buzzed around her like flies, trying to take charge of the luggage. Alys shooed them all away. She couldn’t bear people trying to control her or, even worse, treating her as if she were incapable.
“I’ll race you, Alys!” said Manfred, breaking into a run. The boy didn’t share his sister’s concerns, and worried only about clinging on to his precious walkingstick.
“Just you wait, you little squirt!” shouted Alys, launching the trolley in front of her. “Don’t get left behind, Doris.”
“Miss, your father wouldn’t approve of you carrying your own luggage. Please…” begged the servant, trying unsuccessfully to keep up with the girl while glaring at the young men who were nudging each other mischievously and pointing at Alys.
It was precisely the problem Alys had with her father: he programmed every aspect of her life. Although Josef Tannenbaum was a man of flesh and bone, Alys’s mother had always maintained that he had gears and springs instead of organs.
“You could set your watch by your father, my dear,” she’d whisper in her daughter’s ear, and the two of them would laugh-quietly, because Mr. Tannenbaum didn’t like jokes.
Then, in December 1913, influenza took her mother. Alys did not emerge from her shock and sadness until she and her brother were on their way to Columbus, Ohio, four months later. They lodged with the Bushes, an upper-middle-class Episcopalian family. The patriarch, Samuel, was director-general of Buckeye Steel Castings, an establishment with which Josef Tannenbaum had many lucrative contracts. In 1914, Samuel Bush became the government official in charge of arms and munitions, and the products he acquired from Alys’s father began to take a different form. To be precise, they took the form of millions of bullets that traveled across the Atlantic. They traveled westward in crates while the United States was still supposedly neutral, then in the cartridge belts of the soldiers traveling east in 1917, when President Wilson decided to spread democracy across Europe.
In 1918, Bush and Tannenbaum exchanged friendly letters, bemoaning the fact that “owing to political inconveniences” their dealings would have to be suspended temporarily. Trade resumed fifteen months later, coinciding with the return of the young Tannenbaums to Germany.
The day the letter arrived in which Josef reclaimed his children, Alys thought she would die. Only a girl of fifteen who is secretly in love with one of the sons of her host family, and who discovers that she will have to leave forever, can be so fully convinced that her life is coming to an end.
Prescott, she wept in her cabin as she headed home. If only I’d spoken to him more… If I’d made more of a fuss of him when he came back from Yale for his birthday, instead of showing off like all the other girls at the party…
Despite her own prognosis, Alys did in fact survive, and she swore into the drenched pillows of her cabin that she would never again allow a man to make her suffer. From that moment she would make all the decisions in her life, no matter what anyone said. Least of all her father.
I’ll find work. No, Papa will never allow it. It would be better if I asked him to give me a job at one of his factories until I’ve saved up enough for a ticket back to the United States. And when I set foot in Ohio again, I’ll grab Prescott by the throat and squeeze him until he asks me to marry him. That’s what I’ll do, and no one can stop me.
However, by the time the Mercedes had come to a stop on Prinzregentenplatz, Alys’s resolve had deflated like a cheap balloon. She was finding it difficult to breathe, and her brother was jumping about nervously on his seat. It seemed extraordinary that she’d carried her decision with her over four thousand kilometers-halfway across the Atlantic-only to see it fall apart during the four-thousand-meter journey from the station to this luxurious building. A porter in uniform opened the car door for her, and before Alys knew it they were on their way up in the elevator.
“Do you think Papa has arranged a party, Alys? I’m starving!”
“Your father has been very busy, young Master Manfred. But I took it upon myself to buy cream buns for tea.”
“Thank you, Doris,” mumbled Alys as the elevator stopped with a metallic crunch.
