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fortunate to have escaped Ballycarra that I would have endured anything.
    At night when the house was quiet, I would arrange the silver dish and the gold pen and the cigarette holder, as well as a pair of doeskin gloves I’d found drying in the laundry, around my room. (As I didn’t intend to keep the lovely objects, I didn’t consider myself a thief.) My rash decision to accompany Countess Inéz to Berlin had been made in ignorance, I knew, but I did not regret it. The disturbing restlessness of my girlhood was gone, my longing replaced by the sense that a world in which anything might happen had opened to me and, evenmore astonishing, that I’d been allowed to enter it. It cannot be chance that my favorite book that winter was
All This, and Heaven Too
, in which a French nobleman murders his wife in order to marry the governess.
    As I didn’t speak German, Herr Felix arranged for me to spend an hour each afternoon with Herr Elias, whom Felix had recently brought from Berlin when the Ministry of Information drafted his secretary. I found Caspar lurking in the library when I arrived for my first lesson, dusting books as he sang a ditty in German. He grinned when he saw me and sang the verse again. When Herr Elias came into the library a few minutes later, Caspar abruptly stopped singing, although apparently not soon enough. Herr Elias said something to him, and Caspar lowered his head and went back to work.
    Kreck had told me that Herr Elias’s father was Italian, which explained his dark eyes and thick black hair, but he put me more in mind of the Saracen warrior Saladin, whose adventures I’d followed in Mr. Knox’s book about the Crusades. Although Herr Elias did not have the easy elegance of Herr Felix, there was a manliness about him that I found most engaging.
    Kreck also said that Herr Elias was fortunate to be alive. In early November, a Jew had been accused of murdering a German diplomat in Paris, and Nazi storm troopers, assisted by enraged citizens, had looted and set fire to many Jewish shops and houses in Berlin. A synagogue on Fasanenstrasse had been burned to the ground, and another in Savignyplatz.Women had roamed the streets with empty prams, the better to load them with looted goods. Thousands of Jews had been arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen prison in the north of the city. “You’re not a Jehovah’s Witness, are you?” Kreck asked, peering at me. He made me think that I could end up in Sachsenhausen—that we all could end up in Sachsenhausen.
    Dorothea’s grandmother had liked to mark the year with saints’ feast days and festivals, and on Christmas Eve, the villagers had visited the Yellow Palace to drink
Weihnachtspunsch
and to sing carols. As Dorothea wished to continue the tradition, a big spruce was cut in the Night Wood on the second Sunday of Advent. Roeder and I decorated the tree with the baroness’s collection of Neapolitan ornaments, and Kreck prepared baskets of ham and schnapps for the families of the workers on the estate. As I hung branches of holly in the dining room, I had a sudden longing for home. Although I didn’t miss the gray winters of Ballycarra or the cold pews in Mr. Knox’s stone church or the awkward exchange of practical presents Christmas morning (with the special treat of a glass of sherry and an orange), I felt sad at the thought of my mother and father.
    It was very cold that first winter at Löwendorf. It snowed for weeks, softening all sound but for the constant roar of the wind from the east. The river was frozen, and in the park, the trees splintered and cracked in two. Caspar and I trudged through the fresh snow with long poles to knock the snow from thebranches of the fruit trees. As we swung our poles, the snow flying through the cold air, the crows lifted themselves noisily into the sky. The boys from the village sometimes followed us, unable to resist pelting us with snow, and we chased them across the frozen meadow, shouting with