Juan Gomez-Jurado - The Traitor's emblem

A thin rectangle of light filtered through a little window just beneath the ceiling, the yellow echo of a streetlamp that melded with the flutter of the candle Paul always kept beside his bed, as he was terrified of the dark. The Reiners shared one of the smaller bedrooms, which contained only two beds, a wardrobe, and a table over which Paul’s homework was strewn.

Paul felt oppressed by the lack of space. It wasn’t as though there were a shortage of spare rooms. Even before the war, the baron’s fortune had begun to dwindle, and Paul had watched it melt away with the inevitability of a tin can rusting in the middle of a field. It was a process that happened over many years, but it was unstoppable.

The cards, the servants whispered, shaking their heads as though speaking of some contagious disease, it’s because of the cards. As a child, these comments terrified Paul to the point that, when a boy came to school with a French deck he’d found at home, Paul ran out of the class and locked himself in a bathroom. It was a while before he finally understood the extent of his uncle’s problem: a problem that was not contagious but deadly all the same.

When the servants’ unpaid wages began to mount up, they started to quit. Now, of the ten bedrooms in the servants’ quarters, only three were occupied: the maid’s, the cook’s, and the one Paul shared with his mother. The boy sometimes had trouble sleeping, because Ilse always got up an hour before dawn. Before the other servants had left, she had been only the housekeeper, tasked with ensuring that everything was in its place. Now she had had to take on their work too.

That life, his mother’s exhausting duties, and the tasks he’d carried out himself for as long as he could remember had seemed normal to Paul at first. But at school he discussed his situation with his classmates, and soon he began to draw comparisons, noticing what was going on around him, and realizing how strange it was that the sister of a baroness should sleep in the staff quarters.

Time and again he’d hear the same three words used to define his family, slipping by him as he passed between desks at school or slamming shut behind his back like a secret door.

Orphan.

Servant.

Deserter. That was the worst of them all, because it was aimed at his father. The person he’d never known, about whom his mother never spoke, and about whom Paul knew little more than his name. Hans Reiner.

And so it was through piecing together fragments of conversations that Paul overheard that he learned that his father had done something terrible (… over in the African colonies, they say…), that he had lost everything (… lost his shirt, ruined…), and that his mother lived on the charity of his aunt Brunhilda (… a skivvy in her own brother-in-law’s house-a baron, no less!-can you believe it?).

Which didn’t seem to be any more honorable for the fact that Ilse didn’t charge her a single mark for her work. Or that during the war she should have been obliged to work in a munitions factory “in order to contribute to supporting the household.” The factory was in Dachau, sixteen kilometers from Munich, and his mother had to wake two hours before sunrise, do her share of the household chores, and then take a train to her ten-hour shift.

It was just after she’d arrived back from the factory one day, her hair and fingers green with dust, her eyes dazed after a whole day of inhaling chemicals, that Paul asked his mother for the first time why they didn’t find somewhere else to live. A place where they weren’t both being constantly humiliated.

“You don’t understand, Paul.”

She had given him the same response many times, always looking away or leaving the room or rolling over to sleep, just as she had done a few minutes ago.

Paul watched his mother’s back for a few moments. She seemed to be breathing deeply and regularly, but the boy knew that she was only pretending to be asleep and wondered what ghosts would assail her in the middle of the night.

He looked away and fixed his gaze on the ceiling. If his eyes could have bored through the plaster, the square of ceiling immediately above Paul’s pillow would have caved in long ago. That was where he focused all his fantasies about his father on the nights when he had trouble reconciling himself to sleep. All Paul knew was that he’d been a captain in the Kaiser’s fleet and that he’d commanded a frigate in South-West Africa. He had died when Paul was two years old, and the only thing he had left of him was a faded photo of his father in uniform, with a large moustache, his dark eyes looking straight at the camera, proud.

Ilse tucked the photo under her pillow every night and the greatest anguish Paul had caused his mother wasn’t the day Jurgen pushed him down the stairs and broke his hand; it was the day he stole the photo, took it to school, and showed it to everyone who had called him an orphan behind his back. By the time he returned home, Ilse had turned the room upside down looking for it. When he took it out tentatively from between the pages of his math book, Ilse gave him a slap and then began to cry.

“It’s the only one I have. The only one.”

She hugged him, of course. But she grabbed the photograph back first.

Paul had tried to imagine what this impressive man must have been like. Under the grubby whiteness of the ceiling, by the light of the streetlamp, his mind’s eye conjured the outline of the Kiel, the frigate in which Hans Reiner had “sunk in the Atlantic along with all his crew.” He invented hundreds of possible scenarios to explain those nine words, the only information about his death that Ilse had given her son. Pirates, reefs, a mutiny… However it began, Paul’s fantasy always ended the same way, with Hans clinging to the rudder, waving good-bye as the waters closed over his head.

When he reached this point, Paul always fell asleep.

“Honestly, Otto, I can’t bear the Jew a moment longer. Just look at him, stuffing himself with Dampfnudeln. He’s got custard down the front of his shirt.”

“Please, Brunhilda, keep your voice down, and try to stay calm. You know as well as I do how much we need Tannenbaum. We’ve spend our last pfennig on this party. Which was your idea, by the way…”

“Jurgen deserves the best. You know how confused he’s been since his brother came back…”

“Then don’t complain about the Jew.”

“You have no idea what it’s like playing hostess to him, with his endless chatter, those ridiculous compliments, as if he doesn’t know he’s the one holding all the cards. A while ago he even had the cheek to suggest that his daughter and Jurgen should marry,” said Brunhilda, expecting a contemptuous response from Otto.

“It might put an end to all our problems.”

The tiniest crack opened in Brunhilda’s granite smile as she looked at the baron in shock.

They were standing at the entrance to the hall, their tense conversation muttered between clenched teeth, and interrupted only when they paused to receive guests. Brunhilda was about to respond but was forced instead to paint a grimace of welcome on her face once more:

“Good evening, Frau Gerngross, Frau Sagebiel! How good of you to come.”

“Sorry we’re late, Brunhilda, dear.”

“The bridges, oh, the bridges.”

“Yes, the traffic is just dreadful. Really, atrocious.”

“When are you going to give up this cold old mansion and come over to the east bank, my dear?”

The baroness smiled with pleasure at their darts of envy. Any one of the many nouveaux riches at the party would have killed for the class and power that exuded from her husband’s coat of arms.

“Do please help yourselves to a glass of punch. It’s delicious,” said Brunhilda, gesturing toward the center of the room, where an enormous table surrounded by people was overflowing with food and drink. An ice horse, a meter high, was poised over the punch bowl, and at the back of the room a string quartet added Bavarian popular songs to the general hubbub.