Chapter One
One day, she would return to her villa in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires, her mother said, speaking as much to a photograph on the wall in their Charlottenburg apartment as to Natalia. The photograph was printed on albumen paper. It was fragile, irreplaceable, and to her mother an object of veneration. Sometimes Natalia heard her speaking to it in Spanish, as if it had ears. The villa in the photograph had curved iron balconies, tall windows, and was set in a lush, subtropical garden with a marble fountain and peach trees espaliered against a stone wall. Although her mother hadn’t returned to Buenos Aires in something like twenty years, she had never sold the villa. She paid the taxes and the upkeep and the wages of a caretaker and his wife, who had the use of three rooms on the ground floor. On the globe in the living room, her mother traced a finger from the port of Hamburg across the Atlantic to the mouth of the Río de la Plata. In Buenos Aires, she said, she would walk to the Avenida de la Mayo and find a tram to Palermo, and she’d go in the door of her casa perdida, the lost house, and maybe she’d never leave again. What did Berlin hold for Beatriz Faber, a widow with no family to speak of? Not even her friends would notice she was gone. She gave the globe a push, setting it spinning crazily on its axis.
In this house, in Charlottenburg, it was a late summer’s evening; a fire crackled in the grate, and Hildegard, in the kitchen, was cooking dinner. The table was set with good china and crystal goblets. This is my home, Natalia thought, and I am happy here.
“Don’t look so sad, Liebchen,” her mother said, her silk dress rustling as she knelt beside Natalia. “I would never go anywhere without you. You know that, don’t you?”
* * *
In 1916, when she was six, Natalia began school at an Ursuline convent in Munich, where her mother said she’d be safer than in Berlin. But was anywhere safe, in a war? That summer, English and French planes dropped bombs on a circus tent in the town of Karlsruhe, killing seventy-one children as they innocently watched acrobats and lion tamers. In November, a French aviator bombed the Munich train station, damaging the stationhouse and a length of track, so that for weeks Natalia’s mother could not visit her at the convent. When the nuns told Natalia this, she was afraid it was a lie and that her mother had died in the war and was now a beautiful ghost in her stupid empty casa perdida. But her mother was well. She came to the convent and took Natalia home for Christmas. Natalia remembered lighting candles on the tree, going to Mass to pray for peace, and Hildegard cooking an enormous roast goose Natalia’s mother had procured on the black market.
At school she wore a dark blue tunic, a white blouse, itchy black stockings, black shoes, a double-breasted wool coat with brass buttons. There were eighty-seven pupils from the age of six to eighteen. That first year, Natalia was teased when she didn’t always understand the other girls’ Bavarian German, and someone stole her blue Teddy-Hermann bear from the pillow on her bed. Without him to comfort her, she couldn’t sleep at night or speak in class, which infuriated one of the nuns, who struck her across the knuckles with a ruler. A pair of gloves Hildegard had knitted for her disappeared, and outdoors, when playing in the snow, her hands turned blue with cold. A girl called Claudia lent her a pair of gloves lined with sheep’s wool. Natalia and Claudia became best friends, although the nuns decried their exclusivity and forbade them to sit together in class, where they had a lamentable tendency to giggle and whisper, Sister Johanna said, like chimpanzees.
Claudia’s mother was English; her father, a glassware merchant in Rothenburg, had gone to war with the Royal Bavarian Army. In October 1918 he fell in action in France. Claudia went home for the funeral and stayed with her mother and brother for two months, returning with a black mourning band on her coat sleeve and a cough that turned out to be the start of the Spanish influenza. The illness swept through the convent, afflicting the nuns and older girls first and working its way down to Natalia’s class. She was one of the last to become sick and was put to bed in the infirmary, where she heard a nursing sister say, This one is very ill. When the fever at last broke, she opened her eyes and saw her mother leaning over her with a glass of water. Just a sip, Natusya, she said, just a sip. Natusya was a pet name Natalia’s Papa, who had been half Russian, had given her.
Every morning her mother came to the convent from the Gasthaus where she’d rented a room. She carried trays of soup and dry toast from the kitchen up to the dormitories and the infirmary, changed bedsheets, administered alcohol baths to reduce fever, tenderly held girls racked by coughing. When the invalids began to recover, Natalia’s mother amused them by recounting the adventures of a girl whose name was Beatriz and who lived in Buenos Aires in a mansion with rose-colored walls and a southern aspect, near a park and a racetrack and a tennis court. This girl, Beatriz, had a governess, who often traveled with her by train to Montevideo or Rosario, where they had tea and went into shops, pretending to be locals. The governess, who came from Swabia, and was only a girl herself, liked to take long walks with Beatriz into the wilderness. They were not afraid of poisonous frogs or stinging insects or even of jaguars or of getting lost. The governess carried a pocket compass that indicated true north, even in the southern hemisphere, where the stars at night were not the stars of Europe. What happy times they had, those two, Natalia’s mother said, playing with a necklace of small blue beads around her throat. She sat up a little straighter in her chair and said that, sadly, an idyll cannot last. For some unspecified dereliction of her duties, Beatriz’s parents sent the governess home to Swabia, and those paradisiacal days came abruptly to an end.
The girls said: Is that all? Tell us more, Frau Faber.
They wanted to know: What happened to Beatriz? Where was Beatriz now?
In those days, her mother said, it was customary for Europeans living in Argentina to send their children home to be educated, and that was what Beatriz’s parents did. They sent her to her mother’s brother and his wife, in Berlin. Onkel Fritz and Tante Liesel, a childless couple in late middle age, adored Beatriz. They called her their Schatzi, their darling Mausbärchen, and showered her with gifts. They took her on vacations to the Côte d’Azur and Monte Carlo, to Vienna in winter, Paris or Budapest in spring. She learned to appreciate foreign travel, almost to crave it. But then, she told the girls, an exile was always searching for what had been lost.
Frau Faber had the face of an angel, the girls said to Natalia. The face of a Madonna. They asked Natalia: When is she coming to see us again? Never, Natalia said firmly. Why should she share her mother with these girls? It was true, her mother had the face of an angel. People on the street saw her beauty; they smiled, they stared after her. But Natalia thought some of the convent girls were mean and didn’t deserve to have her mother wiping their noses and feeding them from a tray. Besides, it seemed wrong to her that her mother was pretending to be two people at once, the real Beatriz and the one who lived in that country on the globe of the earth in a villa that no matter how glorious it had once been, was nothing special, just an old image, susceptible to damage, erosion.
* * *
In November 1918, the war ended. Germany was defeated, the Hohenzollern dynasty vanished, and Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and was granted asylum in the Netherlands. The Bavarian House of Wittelsbach and the Austrian House of Habsburg-Lorraine both collapsed—the latter like a house of cards, people said, and the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire simply ceased to exist. In the cities of Berlin, Hamburg, Weimar, and Munich, revolutionaries and paramilitaries battled in the streets. In Munich, the Bavarian prime minister, Kurt Eisner, was assassinated on a street not far from the convent. For a time, Munich became a Soviet Socialist Republic and took its orders from Moscow. The girls returning to the convent from visits home repeated what their parents had said. The British navy’s blockade of ships bringing food to German ports continued even months after the war ended. People were rioting in the streets over food shortages; children were dying of malnutrition. Then, in 1919, at Versailles, the Allied nations demanded Germany pay war reparations amounting to three billion gold marks a year. The Reichsbank was printing money like it was nothing, and it was nothing; three years after the war, the mark was worth less than zero. It was true, what their parents said, the girls all agreed: in Germany, the peace was worse than the war.