Blood Ties (7 page)

"Yes." She laughed.

Moving slowly, he turned, saw Siegfried caressing Dawn's
bare back as they danced.

"Well, what do you think of this jolly group?"
Albert asked.

"I'm not sure," she said.

"What did my uncle tell you about us?"

"A great deal."

"Within the family, he was rarely mentioned. Except in
some unfavorable context. It was a bit of a shock ... his surfacing after so
many years. Surely you must know how the Baron feels about the Russians."

"Wolfgang made it quite clear."

He felt the warmth of her cheek against his, the electric
reaction of his own body as he moved with her.

"And what do you think of us now?" he asked,
determined to mask his excitement.

"It is too early to tell." She hesitated, then
searched his face. "I am still observing everyone through Wolfgang's eyes.
I am still fitting personalities into the myth. He could not get the family out
of his mind."

"After all those years?"

"That was the curious part. He railed and ranted about
them. Sometimes I felt that was the only thing on his mind. To sustain such
fervor! That was quite something...."

Her voice diminished as they moved past the musicians. He
could not decipher whether or not she was being sarcastic.

"And your family?" he asked.

"Gone. All dead."

"Then we are your only family," he said stupidly.

She did not respond. He wondered whether he had implied
something offensive to her. Damned von Kassel trait, he thought, labeling
people with motives.

"You have every right being here, you know," he
said when the silence became burdensome. There was a momentary break in the
rhythm of her steps.

"I never questioned that," she said, showing her
sensitivity. "Your aunt's welcome has been almost affectionate, especially
to Aleksandr."

"That's surprising," he said lightly. Beyond the
levity was a tug of suspicion. Being affectionate was not his aunt's normal
guise.

"Why so?" He had piqued her curiosity.

Remaining silent, he ignored the question. She did not
press him, and they continued to dance. But the unanswered questions remained
and multiplied. He felt comforted by the contrived embrace of the dance and
disappointed by the musicians' pause as the piece they were playing ended.

"We must talk further," he said, leading her back
to her place.

"Yes. We must."

Back in his own seat, he watched the tangled little dramas
at the other side of the table. Dawn, her giggle now high pitched, continued to
slosh wine. The waiters were attentive. Every sip was quickly replaced. Heather
glared malignantly at Siegfried, whose interest in Dawn was now obvious to her.
Albert observed it with wry amusement.

"You cannot say I didn't warn you," Mimi said
without subtlety.

He wanted to insult her, but checked himself. Mimi was
volatile, a scenemaker. He preferred to ignore her instead. No one had, as yet,
asked her to dance and Rudi was now being attentive to Dawn, much to Mimi's
further chagrin. On his other side sat a little creature who was Wilhelm's
wife, as gnomelike as her husband. He turned to her for a moment. But she was
so shy he could see she preferred to be ignored.

The waiters cleared the table of the meat and vegetable
dishes and produced gleaming metal finger bowls and large long-stemmed glasses
in which they poured champagne from magnums of Dom Perignon. Again he looked
toward Olga and her eyes met his. He had dismissed Mimi's implication, but he
felt another kind of danger.

How many dinners like this had he attended, Albert
wondered, searching his memory? Undoubtedly the ritual had its origins in some
feast of the Knights of the Order; they had probably broken bread together and
pledged everlasting fidelity in some remote castle on the edge of the Ostland.
If this elaborate charade was not taken seriously by the assembled group—except
his father—one would never know it. It was Karla who tapped the glass for
silence. The Baron waited until the lingering din subsided and the waiters had
disappeared. Even Hans had quietly faded from sight. Only the von Kassels were
present now. The family.

The old man rose unsteadily. The color seemed to rise in
his cheeks, blending now with the patches of rouge with which Karla had
obviously tried to conceal his ebbing vitality. But standing now in the midst
of his progeny apparently gave him strength. He certainly seemed closer to his
prime now, more in keeping with the old memory of him as a pillar of strength,
burning with the zeal of his obsession. The von Kassels had not reached the
pinnacle of international power by accident. The Baron had breathed new life
into the shell of past glories, had reestablished the power of the family,
despite the loss of their lands, of their place in the Estonian firmament,
where wily Teutonic ingenuity had assured their survival through nearly eight
blood-soaked centuries. The von Kassels had always known that the land itself,
a sense of place, was not the only measure of power. The warehouses of the von
Kassels had always been stocked with arms and armor, the meat of other men's
folly.

The Baron stood silently for a few moments. His sense of
drama was always instinctive and Albert had tried from his earliest days to
observe and emulate this quality. Command did not come only from within. One
had to project command through illusion, through the transmission of a
mystique. The rising tide of his old anxiety, which Albert had managed to
contain up to now, returned again. He could feel the pressure. He had
postponed, by will power and self-delusion, the consequences of what could be
coming in a moment. Watching his father, observing the feverish obsessive look
of the zealot, frightened him. Was he about to be called, he wondered, to
assume the role for which he had been groomed from childhood? It was the one
terror of his life.

Not now, Father, he screamed within himself. I am not
ready. You know that.

Across the table, Rudi, his fat face layered with shining
moisture, watched the old man. Rudi would accept the role without question. He
had coveted it. Even Siegfried, the rightful heir to this spiritual mace, might
be persuaded to accept it, if only to mock it by cynicism and ridicule. Albert
had few illusions of this life-long terror. It had nothing to do with the
business; he was ruthless about that. It was the secret fear that he could not
sustain the idea of the von Kassels, the sanctity of blood, the continuum of
genetic time. Could his father sense this failing in him, he wondered,
observing the old man's eyes search the faces of those around him, lingering it
seemed on each face, inspecting, perhaps assuring himself that the von Kassels
were prepared to go the next eight centuries without him.

Surely everyone in the room knew that the old man was
dying. And all knew that he, Albert, would be anointed to replace the Baron, as
he had done in a business sense before he was thirty. It was as ordained as
night follows day. Would he choose this moment? Albert felt the pounding in his
chest. I can't do it, he wanted to shout. It doesn't matter as much to me. He had
faced that truth years ago, but he could not confront his father with it. Not
yet. Please, he pleaded silently, his eyes drifting toward Olga. She returned
his gaze and he felt the strength of her response. What did she see? The
Baron's voice crackled, searching for strength.

"My body is dying," he began, finding the old
timbre. The words had the effect of an acoustical blanket thrown over the
group. Albert felt as if his bodily functions had frozen, leaving him
temporarily suspended in limbo. The silence was total.

"I will not fear it if our house is in order. I know I
have done my duty. That is what our von Kassel ancestors expect of us, to move
the river of blood along its endless course. That is our only mission, our only
destiny. Let other men grind out their lives in the pursuit of transitory
riches or honors. Let other men spend their strength on the petty joys of the
moment. Let other men pollute their genes with the weak gruel of lesser blood.
God meant us to enrich our strength and substance so as to survive the final
cataclysmic Armageddon, beyond even His control. This is the final manifest
destiny of the von Kassels, to continue the flow of the endless river. Nothing
must interfere with the gravity of its perpetual movement. Von Kassels do not
die in the sense that death is an end. That is why I have no fear of
that."

The Baron's eyes washed solemnly over the group, lingering
briefly on Albert.

"We are not our brother's keeper. We do not have
brothers. We have only ourselves. We deal in weapons because they, as our
ancestors knew, were man's only enduring commodity beyond the basics of
sustenance. Men will need weapons as long as they exist.

"If I have any fear it is only that you who come after
will not be worthy of those who came before. That is why there is much still to
be resolved during this time we will have together, which will be the last
reunion that I will attend. We have prospered in the last three decades, beyond
even the wildest dreams of our forebears. Now we must prepare for the legacy of
tomorrow, without which all the treasure of the von Kassels, all the
accumulated wealth, and the future, will be worthless. There is, as we all
know, the legacy of paper, the passage of property from generation to
generation. That has been adequately arranged. But the legacy of the spirit.
That is quite another thing. We cannot leave these ancient walls without the
resolution of that spirit. Nor can we falter in our understanding of why we are
on this earth. To endure. Only that. The family. The von Kassels." Again
the Baron paused. His eyes had begun to shine. He seemed to have husbanded his
strength for this moment.

"To be a von Kassel is the only glory, the only
destiny, the only legacy," the old man said, his voice suddenly booming
and echoing in the vaults of the ancient ceiling.

"It is beyond governments, beyond political or
geographical conditions, beyond wars, or plagues, beyond destruction, beyond
death. One von Kassel passes the flame of his destiny to another, from
generation to generation. It is beyond even God or the Devil."

The Baron reached out for the glass of champagne, the
fingers steady and sure as they gripped the stem. Gone were the tremors Albert
had observed in them earlier. The old man raised his glass, the once heavily
biceped arm strong again. The group, mesmerized, reached for their own glasses
and rose, as one.

"We raise our glasses to our destiny. Before we depart
this castle, built with the muscle and sinew of our ancestors, we must be
certain that we have purified ourselves, have put aside all diversions, have
renewed our spirit for the great task that our blood commands." He raised
his eyes. They seemed to glow like coals, whipped from ash into fire, as they
searched each face. Then the voice, summoning its final strength from some
special reservoir, boomed out into the room, and all glasses but that of the
Baron seemed to tremble.

"This is not the blood of Christ we drink. This is the
blood of the von Kassels." He drank his glass in one gulp and flung it
over his shoulder, where it smashed to bits on the stone floor, followed by a
crescendo of glass shattering as the others aped his action. He sat down, his
color faded, face white as death, his strength sapped as if from a punctured
balloon.

The group continued to stand in silent awe of this
performance, unexpected in its intensity. So he had not passed the mantle,
Albert thought when he had gathered his senses. He is holding back. He
suspects.

The music, muffled by its journey through the thick stone
wall, reached her ears, faint but distinctive. She lay on the soft, much
maligned mattress in the tiny room watching the ceiling, stained by moisture
and time. Had she expected anything more than this? A much disused room above
the kitchen, the clang of dishes and pots interspersed with the familiar notes
of the orchestra.

She had long since passed beyond illusion. Self-sacrifice
had lost its romantic glitter. The thirty-five-year hegira was over. Despite
the musty smell, which had already begun to seep into her clothing, or was it
her own body's odor, the lumpy bed and the small dark room, she found comfort
in the idea of her own courage. It was far different from her departure, when
she had been a beaten, abject figure, dazed and tear-stained, turning for one
last look at the darkened house in which her three babies slept.

"You will leave this house." She could resummon
the words, once blocked from her consciousness, with perfect fidelity, the
cruelty, the controlled anger, the unmistakable note of hatred. She had not looked
at him. Her face was turned toward the fire and she recalled how she had envied
the burning logs, expiring on the grate's pyre, wishing she could transform
herself into the combustion.

She had not responded. Begging mercy from the merciless
would be futile. They had pulled them apart like a meat cleaver separating the
flesh from the bone.

Charles' face lingered in the shadows as bull-sized figures
with their black swastikas and heavy faces dug their knuckles into the soft
tissue of her and Konrad's throats. They had pressed her windpipe almost to the
breaking point, deliberately turning her so that Charles might revel in her
agony. They had pinioned Konrad to the wall and were systematically beating him
with truncheons, the purple welts growing on his face, the flesh pulping as the
wounds opened and the blood obscured his features. He had tried to speak, but
they had bludgeoned his mouth until even his words came out as an
unintelligible bleat.

"Jew bastard," one of the men screamed as they
dragged him away. Jew! How was it possible?

To the household, he was Konrad the gardener, and he had
lived in a tiny one-room stone house on the edge of their property. Karla, who
ran the household, hired him when the old gardener had died. She had considered
it a stroke of luck, since he was still comparatively young, in the early
thirties, and most men that age had been taken for military service.

"A bad heart," she explained. "Poor fellow.
A risk for the Army, but quite enough strength for gardening."

Actually, he looked quite healthy, with a shock of black
hair, deep penetrating eyes that always struck her, despite all efforts to
conceal the look, as sad and brooding. His body was tight and muscular. He
spoke little, and when he did his sentences were clipped and concise, as if he
were afraid to reveal the active intelligence within. Because she had only
sensed that, she had always felt that inside of himself was a concealed iceberg
and all she knew was what he had deliberately revealed. Even when she loved him
finally, she always imagined that there were whole parts of him missing from
her view.

In these last years, she had actually had difficulty
summoning up Konrad's face in her mind, but by then a million other events had
intruded and she had no photographs to remind her, only the pain. She had
slipped away that night without a word, abandoning her children, hanging on to
the hope that this act would save her lover's life. That thought had given her
the only twinge of solace on that rain-swept night.

She could, of course, remember how it had all begun. Being
a genuine Hohenzollern caught in the backwaters of Baden-Baden's wartime
society now that that comical little beast had emerged as a Germanic warlord
was little comfort for even a third cousin of the Kaiser, her father's only
claim to anything. He was by then a drunken sot, cadging drinks in beerhalls
from red-faced sausage stuffed soldiers, generous with boozy patriotic pride.
Actually, it was only the uniforms and all those swastikas that hung from
buildings, lampposts, and wrapped the arms of beefy men and small boys and
girls that even hinted that some glorious undertaking was happening. The
casualty lists had not yet come.

She was pretty then, with eyes like a tropical sky. Her
mother assured her of this. She was inclined to a voluptuous chubbiness. At
that age it could already be observed in her breasts, which stood out on her
chest like prize melons, assets which her mother's homemade dresses sought to
feature. Unlike Helga's other memories, her mother's face had never lost its
detail, the ringed hollow eyes, saddened for all time by the debacle of 1918,
which converted her handsome Prince to merely a wonderfully resplendent uniform
stuffed with straw. It was her mother's own side, a great uncle in the bakery
business, that took them in finally and although the mother worked long hours
supervising the manufacture of commercial loaves, she steadfastly kept her
precious Helga from even the slightest hint of this enterprise.

"She is a Hohenzollern, a descendent of kings. If you
put her to work in the business, we'll be making a sow's ear out of a silk
purse," her mother had insisted to her uncle, who could not understand the
child's pampering.

But, there seemed even then something far more subtle in
the discussion, which always preceded an odd episode in which she was given
some money and asked to buy some candy whether she liked it or not.

"But I don't wish candy, Mama," she had
occasionally protested.

"Unfortunately, we do not command all our
wishes," her mother would sigh.

Her father remained in a perpetual alcoholic fog, content
to remain in the beerhalls on his wife's dole while the woman labored to keep
her daughter's status intact. This dawning on Helga was not something so
shrouded in subtlety that it came as a sudden shock to the young girl whose
apple cheeks and full figure did not compensate for any lack of intelligence.
She had, after all, good genes, her mother had also assured her. The
Hohenzollerns were brilliant, crafty, clever. Her father's disease was
environmental not hereditary. As for her mother's side, they were successful
merchants and manufacturers and her own parents, who died young, had left her
an ample inheritance which her husband and inflation had subsequently
demolished.

Even in her long journey of loneliness and heartache, Helga
had felt her mother's will inside of her, commanding her to survive at all
costs, as she had done. Once she had been disgusted by what her mother was
doing, although the reprimand was silent and internal. In those days they all
lived by appearances. Baden-Baden was small. People watched one another. Even
the drunken father maintained a remarkable dignity as he moved steadily from
house to beerhall with a sure step, maintaining the illusion that he was
quietly reading the paper in a corner of the beerhall as he chased his schnapps
with heavy dark beer while the words swam meaninglessly in the alcoholic mist.
The uncle, too, widowed before their arrival, maintained the outer dignity of
his person as a solid German bourgeois. He was in his late fifties at the time
Helga's knowledge of what her mother was doing with him was confirmed and,
although the young girl told herself she was disgusted, she was not without
curiosity. It did not temper her humiliation, although she knew exactly why her
mother was doing this. And not once, ever, did she confront her with anything
but silent admonishment. For all she knew, her mother never knew she knew. It
was all part of the game of appearances.

She had seen them together in this way only once, although
she always knew when it would occur, even when she had outgrown the candy ruse.
Other excuses were found to lure her from the house. Luckily, she had her
school and some friends and would not have to endure the awkwardness of finding
ways to get out of sight. But the ways of such attractions were subject to, as
she learned later, odd whims, and the one time she was an observer she had gone
to the spare room where, from some private adolescent reason, she had taken to
sit within the curtained dormer and stare out at the misty hills. It must have
been a quirk that seized her on rainy days. And it was the first time she
realized the true use of the spare room.

The rain obviously had an odd effect on their uncle and she
heard whispered voices and the fumbling of clothing snaps and buttons, sounds
which seemed fainter than the decibels of her own fluttering heart, which she
felt certain they were bound to hear. But their mutterings assured her that
their interests were elsewhere and one blue eye blinked through a separation in
the dormer curtain, then stopped blinking for what might have been a full five
minutes as she saw the huge white belly of her uncle, below which hung two
massive wrinkled bags and something stiff, blunt and wizened. The thing,
reddish and, to her unaccustomed eye, muscular and savage looking, was pushing
against her mother's fat thighs, pink like baby's skin, which hung over the
side of the high bed. They were not naked. Both were dressed above the waist,
her mother in a modest white shirtwaist, partially hidden by her upturned
skirts.

Their eyes were closed and they grunted and growled like
tortured beasts and she could see the two big bags jangling like red Japanese
lanterns on a windy night. The uncle had turned a crimson face in her direction
and the eye had blinked the opening shut and in a little while, after more
primeval sounds, the heavier movements ceased. There was not a single word of
conversation that she could decipher and soon the room was quiet again. The image,
like her mother's tired face, was another preserved mental photograph, studied
often in her mind as she moved from curiosity to disgust, to humiliation, to
tolerance and finally to understanding. If there was harm in it, it was not
deliberate. Later, she also realized her mother took pleasure in it and even
the physical grotesqueness of her uncle lost its beastliness with the years. At
least they gave pleasure to each other. There was little enough of that around.

But, miraculously, they all kept up appearances and did
actually "appear" respectable in the late summer of 1941 when the
Count Wilhelm von Berghoff's brother-in-law, the dashing Baron von Kassel, had
clipped his card to an invitation to the young Helga to attend a garden party at
the Count's estate. To her mother, the invitation justified her lifelong policy
of maintaining her daughter's image of royalty for the neighborhood. It was
precisely the miracle that she had hungered for and all the humiliations that
she might have thought she endured now seemed merely steps along the way to
assure her daughter's escape to a better life. Somewhere, she knew, there was
someone who lusted after royal blood. Hadn't she, as every girl in her
generation, done the same? And wasn't she the rage of her set when she captured
the golden Prince?

To Helga, the dashing Baron von Kassel, whom she had
glimpsed in the street from that same dormer where she had observed another
facet of her life, was an imposing figure, awesome to a girl of eighteen, whose
romantic daydreams were confined to men twenty years his junior. He was tall,
on the verge of forty, with signs of gray in his stiff brushcut. His face was
boned, angular, with a long nose against which comfortably rested a monocle,
falling stylishly from its perch at the raise of a sculpted eyebrow.

Nothing except his appearance could be confirmed, even by
her curious mother, but there was plenty left to be imagined. It was known that
he and his sister, the Countess von Berghoff, had left Estonia in the twenties where the family had lived for some eight hundred years, where they
had enjoyed vast lands and enterprises. The Baron, who was said to be a
widower, another unconfirmed bit of fact, was reputed to be involved with
munitions and was constantly traveling, and the garden party was actually to
mark one of the Baron's frequent returns.

"What do you think?" her mother had asked when
the invitation had arrived.

"He's old," Helga had replied. She had assessed
him in her mother's terms, as a future husband, since that was the way her
mother had steered her life.

"He's rich," her mother had said. Appreciation
for lavish material things had always been a not-so-subtle intrusion on her
education. Rich implied all those things which had, for them, been a
deprivation—cars, jewels, servants, land, garden parties.

"In the end, that's all that counts," her mother
had said, emphasizing the strength of her conviction by unstitching the bodice
of the dress her daughter was modeling for the garden party, revealing a
greater mound of pink skin.

"He's not exactly Prince Charming."

"There'll be plenty of time for Prince
Charmings," her mother had replied. First, there was this battle to be
won. Helga felt herself being prepared as a snare. A Hohenzollern must aim
high, her mother had intoned. Hadn't she assured her that destiny had great
things in store for her because of her good bloodlines? Why waste the breeding,
she had once overheard her mother say to her uncle.

The Baron von Kassel had come for her in a chauffered
limousine which she watched arrive from the window of her room. The liveried
chauffeur had used the time of waiting to polish the black sleek body and
chrome which glistened in the mid-afternoon sun like a shimmering jewel. The
Baron appeared in immaculate black, monocle clapped to his eye, stiff and
determined as he proceeded up the stoned path of her great uncle's house.

"He's come," her mother had called, rushing in
with the finished dress that she had fussed over to the very last moment, now
molding her daughter into it, transforming her into a fetching pink virgin in
gossamer, an apparition designed to inspire, if all else failed, at least lust.
What neither of them knew was that the die had already been cast; that the
Baron did indeed lust but the virgin within the gossamer was merely incidental.
The craving was for something else.