Grant Richard - Cave Dwellers

BERLIN, FASANENSTRASSE: NOVEMBER 1937

The tall east-facing windows would have given a splendid view of sunrise over the Tiergarten were it not for a drapery of fringed and weighted damask, drawn over them one morning in the spring of 1933 and never opened since. The Baroness missed the sunrise. But not so much as she loathed the other lights that now regularly played there. Torches, borne in endless columns by grown men in short leather pants and foolish hats like drunken farmers on holiday. Bonfires, encircled by boys with their hair cropped as if they were little soldiers, voices raised in shrill vlkisch anthems or pitched too low for their throats and impossibly solemn, chanting oaths to the Fatherland, to the Leader, to the sacred brotherhood born of blood and soil. Hand-held lanterns, bobbing and swaying in the sweaty grip of policemen. Or maybe not policemen; they sometimes wore long leather coats or uniforms the Baroness didnt recognizewho knew what anybody was anymore? And once, before her own eyes, a light she could not have mistaken: the muzzle flash of a rifle, like the momentary striking of a match, burning a hole in her memory.

And so the Baroness had withdrawn behind her curtains, ceding to the ruling mob its claim on the streets and the Pltze. Shake your heads, believers in the magic of open views and the fortifying properties of sunlight. The Baroness in her long life had collected enough views to fill a vast private gallery. As for sunlight, wellit fades the chintz and causes wrinkles anddont you agree, mein Herr?those things we can achieve without solar assistance.

A newcomer to the von F circle was advised, at such a moment, to neither demur nor agree but rather, in the old-fashioned style, to bow from the waist while holding the Baronesss gazea token of mute admiration, as it were. One might smile. One might, if an officer in uniform or a bona fide member of the aristocracy, clap ones heels. Above all, one would do well to hold ones tongue. Conversation with the Baroness had been likened by an old brigadier to advancing into unmapped territory held by Cossacks or Tatars. You just didnt know what sort of thing might come jumping out at you.

Fresh air was a different matter. The Baroness would not be denied her just portion of the famous Berliner Luft. And so each morning, even on a day like this when early snow threatened, an aged house girl, whose service to the von F family predated the doorbell, was sent tunneling through chinks in the damask to throw open the heavy sashes and so admit the sounds and smells of the great, ugly, beloved city. Drapery puffed in and out, as if the old apartment were laboring for breath. A wood fire swelled in its finely carved, Gothically arched marble surround. Fine ash floated everywhere, and the so-called girl gave chase with a molting feather duster.

The Baroness had grown accustomed to moping in her boudoir until midafternoon, calling for the newspapers and then throwing them angrily to the floor, soaking for an hour in a hideous bathtub her late husband had dragged back from some chteau where his staff had wintered in 1916. She permitted herself three cigarettes a day. If the first came earlier than three p.m., the girl took this as an ill harbinger and sought refuge among the linens on the upper story.

Pnktlich at six, Sundays and Thursdays, the Baroness would appear, her wraithlike body lent substance by several yards of Parisian couture, in the archway of a long, dark and tomblike chamber she alone called the Grand Salon, and ceremoniously declare, Je suis la maison, as though she quite expected the door to burst open with the press of friends and admirers and social comers and unappreciated artists and doe-eyed ingnues and musicians lugging battered instrument cases and banned novelists making straight for the bar, along with the customary handful of handsome Wehrmacht officers and discreetly murmuring diplomats and perhaps a strange boy with a doomed, Young Werther look, clutching the balcony rail as though debating whether to hurl himself over or wait and see if the music would be any good.

The amazing thing was, the Baroness was rightthats just what would happen, and soon. Exactly that sort of crowd flocked to her large, gloomy flat two evenings every week, come snow or rain or wrinkle-inducing sunshine. And the Baroness would breathe a deep sigh, nodding in the melancholy assurance that while that wretched Austrian cur might be dirtying the name of Germany among the nations of the world, he hadnt succeedednot yetin destroying the Berlin shed always known, nor in driving all the interesting people into exile. If anything, the parties were better than ever.

Would you permit me, Baroness, murmured a bent old gentleman at her elbowhe used to be something in the Bendlerstrasse, she thoughtto present my young friend

She would not remember the boys name five minutes hence. But she raised her gloved hand to be kissed; it was vital for the sake of old and young alike that the forms be preserved. Let the heathens rage, loose the dogs of war, set truth and beauty to the torch