“So what should I do? Drive a tractor maybe.”
Alex smiled, imagining her up on the high seat, her hair a braided crown, like the model worker in a Russian poster. Women with wrenches, rolling up their sleeves. Not languidly painting her toenails, as she had been doing earlier, each stroke a kind of invitation, looking up and meeting his eyes, even the nail polish now part of the secret between them.
That had been the summer of sex, hanging thick in the air like pollen. The first time, every guy feels like a conqueror, a producer in California had once told him, but that hadn’t been how it had felt. A buoyant giddiness he was afraid would show on his face, a heat rising off his skin, like sunburn, flushed with it. The furtive pleasure of being let in on a secret no one else seemed to know. People just kept doing what they’d been doing before. As if nothing had changed.
No one suspected. Not Erich, not old Fritz, not even Elsbeth, usually aware of the slightest change in Irene’s moods. The risk of being caught became part of the sex. Her room at night, trying not to make a sound, gasps in his ear. On the stairs, a maid’s footsteps overhead. An outbuilding on the farm, smelling of must, the hay scratchy. Behind the dunes, naked to the sharp air, with Erich only a few yards away, at the water’s edge, the wind in his ears so that he couldn’t hear Irene panting, her release. Every part of her body open to him, his mouth all over her, and still he couldn’t get enough. Not that summer, when they were drunk with sex.
“Do? You can marry Karl Stolberg. That would be doing something. The Stolbergs have a hundred thousand acres. At least a hundred thousand.”
“Oh, then why not a von Armin? They have even more. Twice that.”
“There’s no von Armin the right age,” Fritz said, not rising to the tease.
“Then I’ll wait,” Irene said.
Fritz snorted. “You think a girl has forever to decide this?”
“Anyway, who needs more land? Why don’t you auction me off? Get some cash. Good Pomeranian stock. Untouched.” She looked over at Alex, a sly smile. “How much for a bridal night?”
“Irene, how can you talk like this?” Elsbeth said, her mouth narrowing. “To father.”
But it was Elsbeth, prim and conventional, who was offended, not Fritz, who enjoyed jousting with Irene, a daughter cut from the same rough cloth.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t ask for proof,” Fritz said. “Untouched.”
“Papa,” Elsbeth said.
“Well, it’d be worth the wait. For a von Armin,” Irene said, enjoying herself. “But then—I don’t know—maybe not. The von Bernuths only marry for love. Isn’t that right? Just like you and Mama.”
“That was different.”
“Yes? How many acres did she bring?”
“Don’t make fun of your mother.”
A woman Alex remembered always in the same full skirt, piled hair held by a tortoise comb, a Wilhelmine figure who spent her days running the house—the long, rich meals, the polishing and dusting—as if nothing had changed outside the heavy front doors, the kaiser still in place, the angry noises in the street better ignored, a time before politics.
“I can also run a trace through CROWCASS,” Campbell had said.
“What’s that?”
“Registry of war criminals. Convicted. Suspected.”
“No. They weren’t like that.”
“If you say so. Nobody was, not now. Just ask them.”
Alex shook his head. “You didn’t know them. They were in their own world. Fritz—I don’t think he ever had an idea in his head. Just shooting birds and chasing the maids.”
“Shooting birds?”
“Game birds. And deer. Hunting. It’s a big thing in that part of the world. Was, anyway.”
The house parties, long cold days in the fields, beaters up ahead, then a rush of birds up through the trees, yellow birch against the dark green firs. Lined up for pictures with the day’s kill laid out in front, bonfires, bottles of Sekt, dinners that went on all evening. Sometimes an invitation farther east, the thick forests of East Prussia, wild boar.
“I thought you said they were broke.”
“It doesn’t cost anything to be a guest—they were one of the old families. Anyway, they had enough for that.” He looked at Don. “He didn’t care about Hitler, any of that. They never talked about politics.”
Until it was all they talked about, the unavoidable poisoned air everyone breathed, even the dinner table under siege.
“I won’t have it in this house,” Fritz said. “All this talk. Bolsheviks.”
“Bolsheviks,” Erich said, dismissive, his father’s bluster by now a familiar joke. “It’s not Russia here.”
“So what, then? Hooligans? Maybe you prefer hooligans. Otto Wolff and the rest of your gang. Socialists. What does it even mean, ‘Socialists’? Kurt Engel. A Jew—” Catching himself, aware of Alex down the table. “Fighting in the streets. We had enough of that after the war. Spartakists. That woman Luxemburg. Of course dead. How else would she end up?”
“We’re not fighting in the streets,” Erich said, an exaggerated patience. “The Nazis are fighting.”
“And cracking skulls. Yours, if you’re not careful, and then what? Politics.” Almost spitting it out. “I don’t want trouble. Not in this house.” What he wanted was his wife, with the tortoise comb, the boiled beef with horseradish sauce, and Kaiserschmarren for dessert, life the way it had been. He looked at Erich. “You have responsibilities.”
“So go stick my head in the sand. How much room is left down there, where you stick yours?”
“Bolsheviks. And how do you think that’s going to end? No property rights, that’s how.”
“Don’t worry,” Irene said, “by that time we won’t have any property left, so what’s the difference?”
“Quatsch,” Fritz said, genuinely angry.