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