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“That isn’t the same.”
“I know.” I turn to gaze out the window at the courtyard below. “I feel so differently now.”
“Or maybe you feel the same, but you’ve changed and so those feelings are no longer enough.”
I consider this. Part of me has always sensed that there were differences. I recall a conversation Stefan and I had once about my mother. I’d found an old playbill from a show she’d done in Morocco and shown it to him. “How exciting,” I remarked, “to have traveled the world.”
But Stefan had looked at me blankly. With everything he wanted right here in Berlin—his family and me—he had no desire to leave. “It must have been terribly difficult,” he replied, “not to mention dangerous.”
I could see it in his eyes, too, the day he left for the army. “You’ll get to go so many places,” I’d offered as we stood on the platform and said goodbye, trying to force optimism into my voice. “Belgium, Holland, maybe even France.” But Stefan had never wanted to leave in the first place, whereas I could not wait to go. No, the differences were there even before the war, but it had taken the years apart to make me perceive them clearly. Now they are magnified, not just by time, but the ways in which I had changed, as well.
“Maybe,” I reply to Krysia. “We were so young and four years apart feels like a lifetime. Sometimes he seems more like an idea than a person. I hate feeling this way. And he needs me.”
“A sense of obligation is no way to start a life,” she presses.
“Loyalty is important.” My voice sounds tinny and weak.
“So is happiness. Would you want someone to marry you for such a reason?”
“No, of course not.” But I am not lying wounded in a hospital bed, with no prospect of a future. I am suddenly annoyed. I barely know Krysia. Why is she asking me such things? “I should go.” I stand and put on my coat. “Thank you for the coffee.”
I half wish she will try to stop me, but she nods, rising. “Thank you for calling. I hope to see you again soon.”
Outside it is warmer now, the late-morning sun taking away some of the chill. The sidewalks are now lively with pedestrians, merchants and deliverymen unloading crates from lorries. As I make my way toward the metro, Krysia’s questions about Stefan prickle at me. I hear her voice, exhorting me to see the world now, while I still can. A thousand objections roar through my brain: I can’t leave Papa. I can’t travel alone.
Nothing has changed—my problems loom as large as ever. But despite my earlier annoyance, it felt good to share my fears about Stefan and a life together with Krysia, to verbalize to somebody the thoughts and feelings I’d barely dared to acknowledge to myself for so long. And Krysia confiding her story of Emilie helped, as well. Learning that someone as strong and self-assured as Krysia also wrestles with the past and the right thing to do makes me feel somehow less alone. She seems to enjoy my company, though perhaps I am simply a proxy for the daughter she so desperately wants to know but cannot. Squaring my shoulders, I start down the street with a lighter gait than I’ve had since before the war.
Forty minutes later, I reach our suite at the hotel. I open the door and stop. The curtains are drawn and only faint daylight filters in. A rustling noise at the desk startles me and I jump. Papa is here, hunched over the desk in the darkness, when he should have been at the ministry. “Papa?” Alarmed, I rush forward. He does not move. I put my hand on his shoulder, fearful that it is his heart and the worst has happened. “Papa, are you well?”
He straightens but his expression is dazed as though he does not see or recognize me. Before him on the desk sits a newspaper. “There’s been an attempt on Clemenceau’s life.” I pick up the paper. My breath catches as I take in the photograph of the would-be assassin. The dark-eyed boy from the La Closerie des Lilas stares back at me.
“The attacker possessed information from the conference that was not public, information that prompted him to act.” Papa drops his head to his hands once more. “And I’m afraid they’re going to blame it on me.”
PART TWO Versailles, April 1919
4
I peer out the window down the road at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. The six-story building, with its aged yellow facade and arched doorway, stands behind hastily erected barbed wire, giving it the feel of a fortress or prison, depending upon whether one is to be kept in or out. Either way, it looks as if the German delegation is to be quarantined, defeat a virus that no one wants to catch. Apple blossoms frame the hotel in a defiant lush pink.
The road leading to the guarded hotel gate is lined three deep with onlookers, reporters and photographers and townspeople and those who had packed the trains down from the city. There is no official party as there had been when Wilson arrived, no military band or other pageantry to herald the Germans’ arrival—just hordes of the genuinely curious, waiting to see those who are to be held responsible for the world’s suffering.
I turn back into the room where Papa sits working at his desk, oblivious to the spectacle taking place across the road. Our apartment in Versailles is located not in a hotel, but a tall row house that has been converted into apartments to accommodate the sudden influx. It is laid out much like our previous quarters in the city, two bedrooms adjoined by a common space. Everything, from Papa’s piles of books to the photograph of my mother on the mantelpiece, is in the same location as in Paris. It is as if we travel in a shell, I’d decided when we first settled in, re-creating the identical living environment for ourselves in each city. But the rooms here are smaller and oddly shaped, the parlor something of a trapezoid, walls with faded flowered paper slanting inward from the windows.
“They should be here soon,” I say. Papa does not answer. He had not wanted to be here today—or at all for that matter. He had tried to lure me away with an excursion to Paris. But I had insisted that we stay, despite his derisiveness of what he called the “circus of shame.” He does not stand at the window himself, but busies himself at the desk. How can he not look?
The topic had come up at a dinner party three weeks earlier when it was announced that the Germans had finally been summoned to the conference. “You’ll move over to Versailles now, of course, and stay with the delegation?” someone asked Papa. Until that point we had enjoyed our neutral status, not being identified too closely with any one camp, including the defeated. But when a telegram came from the head of the delegation inviting us to relocate, Papa could avoid it no longer. So we left the city for this dreary little suburb of Versailles, though he still commutes almost daily to the conference proceedings at the ministry in Paris.
Our apartment is just across the road and down a bit from the hotel. The location, close by the German residence but not within, reflects the delicate role Papa must play. The conference does not trust him because he is German. The German delegation will surely not accept Papa because he has been part of the conference. We are an island.
“I’m going to market,” I say, unable to stand the confinement of the apartment any longer and eager to get a closer view. Unlike the hotel in Paris, there’s no kitchen to deliver our meals and the town’s few remaining restaurants are dismal affairs, so it falls to me to procure what we need.
I hold my breath, waiting for Papa to see through my excuse—the shops are likely to be closed now with the arrival. But he does not. Papa has been more preoccupied than ever these past few months since the attempt on Clemenceau’s life. Though the French prime minister recovered quickly and the story faded from the newspapers, it continued to hang over Papa and me, a silent dagger.
I almost told Papa that night that it was my fault. “Quite a shock,” he’d remarked. “Clemenceau will be fine, even joked as they were taking him to the hospital about the madman’s poor marksmanship. But it is a sobering reminder to us all that even while we are here working toward the new world, there are those who would derail it.” His brow furrowed.
“What is it? Is there something more?”
“Not at all.”
“You don’t need to shield me. I’m not a child.”
He smiled. “No, of course not. I never like to trouble you and give pause to your beautiful smile, even for a moment. It’s just that this may cause trouble for me. Cottin—the would-be assassin—was upset about French opposition to the Pan-Slavic state. We had been trying to keep it a secret so the media controversy would not keep us from getting the matter done. The assassination attempt, the timing of it, gives rise to suspicions that someone had leaked information about the vote.”
“But surely no one could think that you had a role.”
Papa, the only German detailed to the conference, not to mention a Jew, feared himself a likely scapegoat. I watched his face, wondering if he suspected me, or was perhaps even hinting. But he could not imagine that I would have betrayed him in such a fashion. “I appreciate your outrage on my behalf. It will be fine.”
Though the accusations had never become overt, there had been a quiet distancing between Papa and some of the other conference advisors that made our sojourn to Versailles almost a relief.
Studying Papa now, my guilt rises anew. Only I know the truth—that it was my careless remark, overheard at the bar, which gave Cottin the information to act. I have never been good at keeping secrets from Papa and I have struggled for months not to blurt out what I had done, to seek his forgiveness. But he has enough to deal with right now and I won’t strain his health further.
Down on the street, the morning air is warming and a bit stale with gutter stench. Across the road the hulking Versailles palace sits with its endless fountains and gardens, swallowing the tiny town below.
I walk around the side of the apartment building to the garden I planted. When we’d arrived, the dirt patch had been overrun by weeds. “I could tend to it,” I suggested. “Make the place come back to life a little.”
“A fine idea,” Papa said quickly. Gardening, if done properly without too much strain, is an acceptable avocation for women. “Though we’re hardly likely to be here long enough to see things grow.”
“Then it will be here for others,” I replied stubbornly. I’d planted flowers, tulips and other perennials that I hoped would blossom for years even after we were gone, something beautiful to leave behind. One of the plants has fallen, I notice. I dig my hands deep into the soil, savoring the buried warmth. Then I stand too quickly, my hands creating a smear of dirt across my dress.
I make my way down the cobblestone lane in the opposite direction from the crowds at the hotel, in case Papa is watching out the window. I head toward the market, skirting the edge of the park that sits at the end of the street. I have come to know the quiet rhythm of this part of the town through my days here—the old woman who sits at the corner with her poodle as if waiting for a bus that will not come, the two men who appear every morning at seven to slip schnapps into their coffees and sit wordlessly for twenty minutes before getting up and going in opposite directions. Are they brothers, cousins, friends? Was their routine always like this or was it disrupted during the war?
Gazing down the path into the park, I am reminded of Krysia. I’ve not seen her since we came out here. Versailles is at least twenty-five kilometers away from Paris, too far for an impromptu excursion into the city.
Stopping short of the market, where most of the stalls are indeed closed, I double back around the block to the hotel. The crowd has thickened now, a low murmur of expectancy crackling through the onlookers. Moments later, three buses appear on the road, old coaches belching smoke and making such noise that it seems questionable whether they will make the last ten meters of the trip. A truck rides ahead of the buses. It lurches to a stop then dumps a bunch of boxes in the hotel courtyard as unceremoniously as though they are garbage. Studying closer, I can see that it is luggage, once-fine suitcases now covered with dust and grime.
The bus doors open and the German delegation begins to emerge. They are bureaucrats, stooped older men, thin and paunched, bald and bearded, indistinguishable from the other nations’ delegates, but for their low shoulders and downcast eyes. They shuffle forward to face the indignity of sorting through the luggage, each to find and carry his own.
A boy lets forth a jeer. I brace myself for the rest of the onlookers to join him. Instead, the crowd is silent, their eyes boring into the Germans with pure hatred. Insults would have almost been better. This is why Papa sits at his desk, why he cannot bear to watch. This is not peace or even armistice, but rather the thinnest of truces, scarcely concealing the hatred of the war still bubbling beneath the surface.
A man steps from the last coach behind the others. He is younger, I can tell, even beneath the cloak of his naval coat and hat. Papa had mentioned someone military. My first impression is of a hawk. Steely blue eyes take in the crowd. I’m reminded of the soldiers I saw so often on the Paris streets. Even out of uniform I can spot it—the anxiousness, searching the corners for a cellar or other hiding place, as though the air before him might at any moment explode with grenades and mustard gas.
He starts forward, walking with his shoulders squared, seeming to clear the path ahead of him as he goes. Then his head lifts slightly and his eyes flick in my direction and I can swear, though I am one in a crowd of hundreds, he is looking directly at me.
My breath catches. I step back and, as I do, my scarf drops. Suddenly the German breaks from the procession. He steps toward the crowd, which parts. Then he bends down and picks up my scarf and holds it out to me.
I recoil. There is something chilling about him, militaristic and terrifying. Stefan is a soldier, too, I remind myself. But that is different—Stefan is an ordinary man, called into war by circumstances and patriotism. This man is a high-ranking officer, a soldier by nature. I look down, suddenly conscious of the garden dirt on the sleeve of my everyday blouse.
The people around me glare with accusing eyes as if my receipt of this act of kindness somehow makes me complicit. I tilt my head upward but the soldier does not meet my eyes. Should I thank him in German or French? I take the scarf but before I can say anything, the man has rejoined the procession and is gone.
I can hear the party before I can see it, laugher spilling forth down the streets of Neuilly-sur-Seine. We turn the corner and a house in the middle of the street stands as a beacon, light beaming from within. It is not the largest on the block of this affluent Parisian neighborhood, but it gives the impression of being the most grand—flower boxes overflow with blooms too early in the season to be native and great ribbons of silk batting adorn the balconies, as though Armistice Day was last week and not months ago.
I stop midstreet, drawing my flimsy shawl against the evening, which is pleasant but chilly enough to remind me that it is not summer yet. Normally I would have dreaded such an affair. But after weeks locked away in dreary Versailles, I somehow welcome the return to the city and its bustle, even with Tante Celia as my host. There is no room in Versailles for Celia, a woman without official status, so she has remained behind in Paris. Papa is lonely for her, I can tell, by his quieter than usual demeanor, the excuses he has found to stay over in the city after dinners.
Celia touches my elbow as we climb the stairs. “You’ve heard of Elsa Maxwell, n’est-ce pas?” She jumps indiscriminately between German and French.
“Of course.” I reply in German, not bothering to lower my voice. It’s not as if anybody will be fooled into believing we are someone else. Elsa Maxwell is ubiquitous. A reporter in the softest sense of the word, she is in fact a social doyenne whose real fame came from hosting soirees such as this. “She threw parties in London during the war.” I neglect to mention that I had not been to any of them.
Inside, the house is hot as August, too many bodies pressed close, trying to move in all directions. The party has been going on for hours, the festive atmosphere a train we had missed. A far cry from the stuffy receptions I had attended with Papa, there is no pretense of restraint. The men have loosened or in some cases removed their ties. The women have kicked off their shoes and those who have not bobbed their hair have let it loose from its pins. The women who had come to Paris were of an unusual sort—would-be writers and entertainers and journalists whose free-spirited nature surely gave consternation to the wives who had been left at home. Their dresses are the latest fashions, Oriental-themed shifts, Bohemian frocks without any pretense of a corset. I feel positively frumpy in my staid rose party dress, though not as much so as Celia, who with her high collar and crinolines stands out like a peacock, or a jester in an Elizabethan play.
Bodies fill the makeshift dance floor in the center of the great room, moving in strange new ways to the lively jazz music that blares from a gramophone. Two women dance as though one was a man, pressed close together. A strange scent, something strong like burning flowers, mixes with the faint odor of sweat in the air. There is a kind of desperation to the revelry, especially among the women. It is more than just the wiping away of cobwebs and sorrow of a world struggling to live again. The chance for a normal life with a husband and children has been denied to so many, a generation of would-be suitors gone to the trenches. The men who were left were the oddities, those who had escaped the military for some sort of infirmity, and those like Stefan who came back broken.
“All of this immorality,” Celia remarks in French, “Everyone’s roles confused, the lines between men and women gone, brought about by women going into work.”
“You really think that’s the cause of all of this?” My voice is incredulous. “There are so many other reasons. What about the desperation of the war, not to mention the influx of large numbers of soldiers now with too much time on their hands, so far from home?” Celia sniffs, unpersuaded.
“It’s a sight, isn’t it?” a woman next to me remarks idly. I nod, my eyes traveling toward the dance floor where the two women are locked together now, nearly kissing. There is something about being in Paris here, away from familial and societal expectations back home, that has given people license to act this way. “Austrians at the party, as if they were our friends,” she adds. I step back, stung. The woman had not been referring to the outlandish behavior at all, but was incensed by our kind being here, the enemy treated as equals.
“Come.” I follow Celia through the packed room. She disappears into the crowd ahead of me and, after searching above the sea of heads in vain, I give up trying to keep up and instead make my way to one of the open windows. The cold, crisp air is a welcome relief against my face, a reprieve from the swaths of perfumed smoke.
Outside a woman in a tattered work dress picks through the rubbish in the alley adjacent to the house. Though the homeless have become an increasingly common sight in Paris, I am taken aback by the woman, not much older than myself, searching the garbage for food. What does she think of us being here with all of our parties and revelry and noise? I imagine a husband taken at the front, hungry children back home. Sensing me, she looks up and her eyes widen with alarm, fearful that I will reproach or report her for being there. Desperately I reach into my purse and fling coins through the window, ashamed by the callousness of the gesture, as well as the inadequacy of my aid.
Celia is at my arm again, this time with our hostess, a buxom woman with short brown hair and a broad smile I recognize from the society pages of the newspaper. “Elsa, you remember …” I hold my breath, waiting for the woman to deny our having met in London.
But Elsa Maxwell, accustomed to traveling in wide circles and knowing people less often than she is known, sweeps me into a firm hug that has none of the airiness of the kisses so often exchanged here. “Darling!” Celia watches, eyes wide, apparently having bought the subterfuge. Elsa releases me. “If you’ll excuse me, I must get everyone started on the game.”
“Game?” But she has already moved on, leaving a burst of Chanel in her wake.
A moment later a bell rings and Elsa appears on the landing of the broad staircase in the middle of the foyer, commanding a presence well beyond what her rather plain appearance suggests. The din in the room instantly dulls, but there is still too much noise for me to hear well. She makes an announcement, holding up papers of some sort. A whisper of excitement blows through the crowd. Then she throws the papers into the air with a flourish and they scatter like confetti.
I turn to Tante Celia, confused. “A scavenger game,” she exclaims excitedly, scrambling to grab one of the sheets. “It’s a treasure hunt,” she explains, placing great importance on each syllable.
She scans the paper, then passes it to me. It is a shopping list of the oddest sort: a pair of opera glasses, a man’s swimming costume. Some of the items are phrased in riddle. “I don’t understand. How are we to buy these things if the shops are closed?”
She titters with superiority, staring toward the door. “We don’t buy them. We find them,” she replies, gaily as a child. Are we seriously to run around the streets hunting in the darkness?
“I don’t …” I start to beg off, following her outside. But Celia has already formed a foursome with two Swedes and together they set off toward the dense trees of the Bois de Boulogne.
As I start toward the massive park, my ankle twists, a sharp but fleeting pain. Celia turns back impatiently. The heel of my shoe, which caught the cobblestone, is cracked and, sensing my moment, I pull intentionally until the heel snaps. “It’s broken,” I lament, trying to fill my voice with disappointment. “You go on.”
Celia hesitates. “If you’re sure you’ll be fine.” Not waiting for my response, she follows the Swedes, who have already run off into the night, intent on the errand of finding a newspaper that is more than a month old. As she disappears into the trees, I sigh. I do not begrudge her excitement when she has so little to call her own. And she would not have left me if I was in real distress.
I limp back toward the house. The party has faded, the salon empty except for a rowdy group of men in the smoking room, a couple kissing shamelessly on one of the settees. I find the butler and ask him to call a taxi.
It is nearly midnight when the cab reaches Versailles. I pay the driver and step out, then peer across the road toward the Hôtel des Réservoirs, where lights still burn on the ground floor despite the late hour. Curious, I walk down the street. In a first-floor library, a man works intensely behind a desk, head low, bathed in yellow light. It is the German naval officer who picked up my scarf. I watch him, transfixed. He looks to be about thirty. He lifts his head and catches my eye, holding my glance for a second longer than he had earlier at the arrival. Then he stands and walks from the room. I step back into the shadows. How rude of me. He obviously minded the intrusion. But then the front door to the hotel opens and I see him silhouetted against the light.
“Can I help you, mademoiselle? We are not a zoo.”
I flush, seized with the urge to run. “No, of course not.” Then I take a step forward, out of the shadows. “It’s fraulein, actually.” I am quick to identify myself as a German out of the earshot of others, as if our kindred citizenship might excuse my watching him. I shift my weight awkwardly to my right foot. “I mean, Margot. Margot Rosenthal.”
“The professor’s daughter?” I nod. “I’m Georg Richwalder. I’m the military attaché to the delegation.”
“I’m sorry if I disturbed you. I broke my heel and was just pausing.” I hold up the shoe as evidence, take a step through the gate. He walks down the steps toward me. He is taller than I thought and I crane my neck upward to meet his eyes rather than stare at his chest as we speak.
“May I?”
I hand the shoe to him.
“I can fix this, I think.”
I eye him skeptically.
“You learn to be handy in a great many ways when you’re at sea. Would you like to come in for some tea while I try?”
I hesitate. The library behind him looks warm and inviting, the quiet and solitude a welcome contrast to the Maxwell party. But it wouldn’t be proper. “No, thank you. I’ll just be on my way.”
“Wait here,” he instructs firmly, a man who is used to giving orders. I shiver at his commanding tone. “I’ll bring the tools—and some tea—outside.”
I sit down on the step. A few minutes later he emerges with two cups of tea and a small kit. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” I say.
“Not at all.” He smiles and in that instant seems not at all the terrifying soldier I’d glimpsed during the delegation’s arrival. A chink in the armor. “After so much time on the train, the fresh air is refreshing. The trip was exceedingly long. We sat at one point for eighteen hours for some reason known only to the French.” He is wearing the same dark blue uniform as earlier today, but the jacket is unbuttoned, the shirt loosened at the collar.
I run my hand along the step, the stone hard and rough beneath my fingertips. “And the hotel … is it quite dreadful?”
“It’s not bad, really. I mean in its heyday I’m sure it was quite grand. But I spent the better part of the four years on a ship, so I may not be the best judge of comfort.”
“You were in the navy, weren’t you?”
“I was on the SMS König, the crown jewel of His Majesty’s High Seas Fleet.” The pride in his voice is reminiscent of the prewar days, taking me back to the parades down the Unter den Linden, young girls pressing sandwiches and sweets into the hands of newly minted soldiers as they made their way to the station. “Even as a senior officer, my quarters were no bigger than a closet. The hotel has reasonably clean linen and fresh water and I’m not awakened to the sound of gunfire each morning.” He smiles. “It’s paradise. And the library is wonderful. I shall enjoy working there at night after the rest of the delegation has retired. They’re mostly older, and we don’t have much in common. But it’s not a social occasion.”
“And your family—did they mind being left back home?” The question comes out more prying than I intended. “I mean only that I’ve heard some of the men lamenting that their families couldn’t enjoy Paris.”
“No.” An image pops into my mind of a Frau Richwalder, elegant and well coiffed, keeping the house running back in Germany. “That is, there’s no one. I’m not married. Not so much to enjoy here these days, anyway.”
“I suppose not.” The German delegation was almost entirely confined to the hotel except for sanctioned meetings and a lone excursion.
“There.” He hands me my shoe, neatly fixed.
“It’s good as new. Danke.” He watches me, as though lost in thought. Between my mud-streaked dress earlier and broken shoe now, he must think me a wreck.
“Aren’t you cold?”
I shake my head stubbornly.
“That’s hardly a suitable coat.”
“It’s the fashion.” I struggle to keep the sarcasm from my voice.
“Well, no one is here to see.” He takes his coat and puts it around my shoulders in a strange, too-familiar gesture.
