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