Chapter 4

A couple of days later, he went back to Munich, and I told a few people about the visit and my discovery of his lineage. Somehow, it got around to the girl at work whom I had replaced and whom I vaguely suspected of being intimidated by me. I heard footsteps coming down the hall towards my office, and she stopped in the doorway.

"I hate you," she said.

I looked up from my computer.

"Good morning," I replied.

She looked a little chastened.

"Only you would meet a baron in an airport," she said by way of explanation.

I laughed. "I talk to strangers," I said, shrugging.



I made plans to visit him in Munich. He wanted me to meet his mother and sister in Austria, whom he had apparently talked to about me. I pictured a formal afternoon tea, where he might be grilled about "settling down."

"My sister says I should have children with you," he said, the only thing he mentioned about their conversation.

"Did she say how many we are supposed to have?" I asked sardonically.

I marvelled that people actually had conversations of the sort where sisters decided with whom their brothers should procreate.

"She knows that I want children very much," he said, "and she says you are the right age."

I vaguely felt like a race horse or a pure bred show dog. I pictured sitting in a formal salon with my legs daintily crossed at the ankles, being asked to open my mouth and show my teeth.

"How much influence does she have over you?" I asked.

"Not too much," he assured me, laughing.

For a moment, I actually pictured myself being the mother of his children. What on earth are the children of a baron called? I wondered.

For days leading up to the trip, I frantically searched the internet for etiquette tips on how to address a baroness. As far as I could figure, I was about to meet two of them. Your Ladyship? Does one curtsy, or is a handshake acceptable? I found a French site on modern noble families, and emailed my questions. I received a bemused reply from a certain Madame Blanche de Kersaint, saying,

"Nobility no longer has any importance, my dear!"

I found this an amusing reply from someone who apparently founded a website purely dedicated to tracking the marriages and births of the modern vestiges of the French aristocracy.

I bought some German language CDs, determined to address his mother and sister in their native tongue. Listening to them in the car, I couldn't stop myself from sticking my chest out and straightening my back as I exaggeratedly repeated phrases like,

"Das ist ein huntewetter!"

Normally a pretty good mimic, there were many sentences I could not even begin to repeat or remember in time. I couldn't distinguish the words from each other, and as soon as I said them, I forgot what they meant. Oh no, I thought, I'm going to want to say 'Nice to meet you' and end up asking for a double room with a shower instead. The formal way of saying "Nice to meet you" was breathtakingly long, and I could only retain the last part, ending in something like "Sie kennen zu lerhnen." All that repetition for a little end of a phrase.

I could remember phrases in Czech I learned 14 years before better. Perhaps because at the time, it was so exciting to be in Prague right after the Velvet Revolution, or perhaps because I was ready to weep with gratitude at the end of a long hot day wandering the streets when the phrase, "Dva bile vino prosim vas" actually produced two glasses of white wine, please.

Guenter had told me he lived and worked in Munich, and had talked a lot about his "castle" in the country, and how he would most often fly his plane there and back. He had flown several trips back and forth from Munich since our first meeting, and I had always been a bit anxious until I heard from him again that the flight had turned out fine and he was safely back on the ground.

I arrived at the commercial airport a bit disappointed he had not been able to fly me in his plane to Munich - I would have liked to have watched him at the controls. I came out into the arrivals area, but he was nowhere in sight. I went to the windows to see if I could see him coming from the parking lot. I watched BMWs and Audis and Lexuses drive up and glint in the mornng sun. I wondered what kind of car he would have. A baron, with his kind of pride and arrow straight back, his discerning gaze, would surely drive a classy car. Maybe a Jaguar? I had always liked the look of a Jaguar.

Slowly, a candy yellow Renault 5 pulled up to the kerb, and Guenter emerged from it, the car wobbling to and fro from the force of the door being shut being him. As he walked toward the entrance, a smile on his face, I began to realize that Blanche de Kersaint might prove to be right after all.


I threw my things in the back seat, and peered into the front of the car. A ratty quilt was laid out across the passenger seat, covering what I could only assume was completely worn through upholstery. The floor board had a few holes in it, through which I could clearly see the pavement underneath. I had never seen an interior so basic, so little between the road and the people inside as the sheet of metal that made up the hood. When I got in, I didn't shut the door correctly, but couldn't find the handle to open it again. The car was so primitive, so rudimentary in its fittings, that I assumed the inside handle had fallen off and not been replaced. There was even a hole where it should have been. Rather than point this out, I rolled down the window to open the door from the outside. He laughed when he saw what I was doing, and pointed to the hole on the inside of the door.

"That's how you open it," he said, smiling.

"But there's nothing there but a hole," I said.

"Stick your hand in it," he coached.

I was dubious, but stuck my hand in the hole. Lo and behold, I felt a latch, that when squeezed, opened the door. There isn't even a handle, and there isn't supposed to be, I thought.

He strapped himself in, pulled two earplugs out of the glove compartment, and merrily fitted them in his ears. I half expected him to unearth a leather flying cap and goggles from the back. He shouted to me that his doctor had noticed his loss of hearing from driving the Renault 5 on long road trips, and had admonished him to start wearing the plugs. There was only one pair.

We drove into town, the noise of the engine, the rattling of the metal and the vibration of the wind almost too much to bear. He was gesturing with his hands to make himself understood over the din, occasionally slapping the steering wheel enthusiastically with both palms as if it were a horse's rear and exclaiming with a wide grin,

"I luff this car!"

Shortly, we came upon a huge walled-in complex, and he pointed across the street to indicate where his office was. I looked at the wall on the opposite side. With a chill down my spine, I realized what it was: the Dachau concentration camp.

"You actually work across the street from the Dachau concentration camp?" I asked incredulously.

I made him pull over. I couldn't simply drive by it. I had to go inside. I had told him of my Jewish ancestry. I remembered my father telling me about them when I was a little girl. I was sitting on his lap, listening to him describe his grandmother whom he had been afraid of as a little boy because she spoke only Russian and Yiddish in a loud raspy voice, pinched his cheeks until they burned, and smoked cigars. He told me of growing up with the feeling that something else besides his Russian-ness separated his father and his family from others, something that was always left unsaid. Something that remained unspoken until the day his father's father died; the calvaryman who had brought his family over from Saint Petersburg, the one of whom a single black and white photograph in calvary uniform remains. That day, the unsaid broke through the lips of my father's father for seven days straight in a torrent of Hebrew words of mourning. My father, a boy of ten, suddenly understood that his father, sitting on the floor repeating strange words in a strange language, the mirrors in the house eerily covered, a single candle burning continuously, belonged to a secret world of rituals and customs. As I sat on my father's lap, imagining these long ago people, he told me that this meant I came from a line of Jews, and that if I had been the same little girl in Europe in the 30s and 40s, I would have been killed. One Jewish grandparent was all it took. I remember feeling suddenly cold, and wondering why the words uttered so many years before by a grandfather I barely knew would have marked me for death.

I opened the lemon yellow car door from the hole inside and walked up to the gravel entrance, barely noticing Guenter walking slowly behind me. He came with me as far as the single reconstructed barrack, but chose to wait for me outside as I went in.

The signs and photograph captions were only in German, and I was mildly relieved not to understand the words. The bunks were made of wood and I wandered past them in a daze, barely looking at the black and white images on the walls, afraid of what I would see. It all led to a small tiled room I realized was a gas chamber. I stared at the drain in the middle of the floor. It was all so spartan and simple. I was struck most by how innocuous it all seemed. How non-threatening. Stripped of the victims and the surrounding barracks, which had all been torn down long ago, it vaguely reminded me of a Red Cross camp I had attended as a child, when I had been forced to gather around the leader's bunk bed to listen to the rest of the kids share stories of how prayer had changed their lives. I had tried to get out of it politely, saying I preferred to read my Nancy Drew mystery novel, but it was made clear to me non participation was not an option. Bunk beds had always made me uncomfortable, making me feel packed in, forced into proximity with people I could not relate to and who could not relate to me. They were always in dark places in the country, far away from my parents. They evoked scratchy wool blankets and forced exile disguised as character building.

Standing in the dark barrack and unable to move, people slowly shuffling past me, I suddenly understood how it might have been possible to walk past this place every day, open your windows across the street, go about your daily business, without noticing what was going on in front of you. Just as I could have been one of those to suffer and die here, I could also have been one of those on the outside, just beyond the walls, who every day saw but did not choose to see.

I stepped out and found Guenter sitting on the a bench in the sunshine. They installed benches outside, I thought. For those who could not bear to go inside, or for those who were waiting on the ones who could not bear not to?

Back in the car, he did not speak or ask me any questions. I fervently hoped the sightseeing would improve from there.

We decided to drive straight through to Coburg, to his castle in the country, and spend the night there before going on to Austria the next day. I was excited to see it, and a little apprehensive, as this was where he had lived with Regina and her daughter. He had told me wistfully how he would drive to Munich on Mondays and work there the whole week, returnng to the country on Fridays to spend the weekend with them. The castle was now mostly empty, he explained, the majority of the furniture having gone to her family or having been moved to his place in Munich. I pictured a grey, damp neglected castle, its walls still vibrating with the memory of her.

We drove noisily and bumpily for a few hours, not talking over the roar of the wind and the whine of the engine, and finally arrived in Coburg. We decided to get a bite to eat in town before going to the castle, which was on the outskirts of town. I was beginning to understand that when he said "Munich" he did not mean "Munich", so "Coburg" did not mean "Coburg." Whether this was to make it easier or harder for me to get my bearings, I was not entirely sure.

The town was picturesque and well preserved, with winding cobblestone streets and a pretty little square with a large statue of Prince Albert who, he explained, married Queen Victoria, linking the two royal houses, though this would later be hushed over after the two World Wars. The buildings were painted in surprisingly warm colors, yellows and rusts, instead of the blues and grays I had imagined.

We found a modern little restaurant called - much to our amusement - "Brazil", and decided it was meant to be. The waitress, a pretty but unsmiling young woman, looked at me harshly as soon as I walked in the door. Her eyes took me in in the matter of seconds before she looked quickly away again in dismissal. I had to rely on him to translate the menu and order for me. I silently cursed myself for not having enrolled in German classes at the Goethe Institut back home before coming. When the waitress came back to take our order, she addressed him solely, holding the menus up as if to block her view of me or my view of her as she leaned provocatively over towards him, making sure he could see straight down her shirt, as she slowly wrote down the order. When she walked away, I leaned over to him and breathily asked what Freiherr von F... desired, describing the scrumptious special of the day, mockingly squeezing my breasts together.