“Destroying property?” someone asked. “At random?”
“Jewish property,” Mimi asserted with chilling crispness. “Only Jewish properties.” She turned to Marianne. “Isn’t that what you said?”
Marianne stared at her. “I don’t know.” She drew herself up. “Does it matter? Our government is unleashing bands of thugs.”
“It is the beginning of the end,” the countess pronounced dramatically when she heard of the destruction that would later be referred to as Kristallnacht. “That Austrian will ruin this country.”
With that, she went up to bed.
Marianne envied her freedom. She herself would have to shepherd this party to its bitter end.
As the news spread, guests with government roles or substantial properties in nearby cities took off down the hill, speeding drunkenly around curves, honking and flashing their headlights. They were followed, more soberly, by the few Jewish guests. A few voyeuristic idiots drove to the neighboring town of Ehrenheim to see how far the rioting had spread.
By the champagne fountain, Gerhardt Friedlander argued with the Stollmeyers, a set of drunken, ruddy-faced twins who were devoted Nazis. The crowd cleared a nervous circle around them.
“The conspiracy of world Jewry will not stop at murdering vom Rath,” one of the Stollmeyers ranted. “We must take action against them—”
“Don’t be a fool,” Gerhardt spat. “Vom Rath was killed by a deranged seventeen-year-old, not a conspiracy.”
“A deranged seventeen-year-old who was a Jew and a Bolshevik,” his opponent argued, “who wanted to destroy the pride and unity of the German Volk . . .”
Marianne could not listen. This absurd Nazi blather was everywhere, ripe for adoption by the likes of the simpleminded Stollmeyers. How had those two ever made the guest list? Thank God Gerhardt was there to put them in their place.
In the great room, the jazz trio had disappeared (back to the Berlin? had they been paid?), and some dolt tried to play a Nazi marching record on the Victrola only to be pelted with a round of hot Frikadellen from the chef’s latest offering. The gawkers who had driven to Ehrenheim returned and seemed almost disappointed to report that no, nothing was afoot. What did they expect? The town was thoroughly and pigheadedly Bavarian Catholic. It had no Jewish inhabitants or businesses.
Undaunted by the news or the departures, the cook continued to offer delicacies: a new round of pork roasts, apple tortes, a Frankfurter Kranz. And the bartender poured drinks.
Marianne wished the remaining guests would leave. They were all self-absorbed, and frivolous. But still the party limped along toward a slow death.
Around midnight, she allowed herself a moment of privacy in an empty trophy room decorated by some von Lingenfels hunter of yore. Its walls were bedecked with pale, delicate skulls of deer and moldering taxidermies of boar, bears, even a wolf. A cruel room, but it would do. She would rest for five minutes. Any longer and she would never return. As she sat, the expression fell from her face and the slackness that replaced it made her feel old, a mother of small children in a suddenly savage land.
“Aha!” A voice came from behind, and two hands fell on her shoulders before she had the chance to turn: Connie. She had thought him long gone—either back to Berlin to repair the damage or off to bed with his fiancée, a changed man with a new set of habits. But here he was. His intransigence reassured her.
“Caught you,” he chided.
“Oh, Connie,” she said, turning. “Should I tell them all to go home? It’s so strange to have this party when beyond it, God knows—”
“Let them stay.” Connie sank into the chair opposite her own. “They’re too drunk to leave anyway.”
“I suppose.” Marianne sighed. “What’s happening out there?”
“Well,” Connie said, leaning back. “Greta von Viersdahl is impersonating a goose on the dance floor, old Herr Frickle has found a new strumpet to sit on his lap, and someone I don’t know is vomiting into the moat.”
“Oh dear.” Marianne smiled.
How many parties had they attended together? Too many to count since their days as children. And Connie was always an entertaining reporter—an interested observer of the human animal. It was what had forged their friendship: the aptness of his perceptions, and her own appreciation for these as a person less gifted with insight.
“And Benita?” she could not resist asking. “Is she sleeping?”
“She’s a good girl,” Connie answered, stretching out his legs, the firelight creating comically long shadows of his shoes. His handsome face looked tired. There were circles beneath his eyes.
“Does that make it easier or harder for her to go to sleep?”
Connie shrugged. “She was exhausted.”
Marianne pulled herself more upright in the chair and stared quizzically at her friend. “What does she think? About this rioting and thuggery, about what’s happening in the world?”
Connie rolled his head over the back of his chair to look up at her. Even exhausted, his face was strikingly handsome: the fine, clear features that had made him beautiful as a boy had never thickened or dulled. Instead they’d become sharper, and straighter—still capable of startling her with their symmetry.
“You don’t approve of Benita,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t.”
“That’s not fair, Connie—why would you think—?”
“I know you,” he said.
“What—am I not an open-minded, accepting person who is happy to see her friend in love?”
Connie narrowed his eyes. “Open-minded, yes. Accepting, no. You are exacting.”
Marianne frowned. “Well, she is young.”
Connie laughed.
“Will she be a partner to you? In all you do?”
Connie sat up suddenly, and for a moment Marianne was afraid she had gone too far. But he did not storm off. He turned his chair to face her and leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “Not like you and Albrecht, no,” he said. “But there are other kinds of unions. And I love her.”
She was surprised by the intensity of his declaration. Was there, in his assertion, an implicit criticism of her own marriage?
“You must promise me something,” Connie said.
“What is it?” Marianne frowned.
He reached forward to take her hand and a shock raced through Marianne at his touch.
“If things go wrong—and they may go wrong—you must help her. She is a simple girl and she won’t deserve whatever mess I might drag her into.” An uncharacteristically diffident, almost boyish look passed over his face. “And you must help her raise my child.”
“Your—?” Marianne began, astonished. “She is—?”
Connie nodded. “Will you promise me this?”
“Connie, of course I will, you know I will, but—”
“Is that your word?”
Marianne studied his face, as serious as she had ever seen it, and felt a chill of premonition.