The Life of Objects Read Online Free PDF Page B

drawing room were in tall blue-and-white vases ringed with what looked like the bars of a cage. Meissen, said Kreck when he saw me looking at them, but I didn’t understand him.
    Herr Metzenburg watched while we packed the carved panels of saints and a tiny velvet bed with silver Gothic spires, embroidered with seed pearls and emeralds. A bed for the Christ Child, Kreck said. I’d asked him if the Metzenburgs were Roman Catholic, but he hadn’t answered me.
    Several pieces were too large to manage on our own, and Herr Metzenburg hired porters from an auction house to help us. He watched apprehensively as the men moved a melancholy barefoot Christ, the size of a child, sitting on the back of an equally downcast donkey. It was called a
Palmesel
—there is no word for it in English, he said—and it depicted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. His expression as he watched the men pull it across the room—it sat on a wooden platform with four small wheels—was both rapt and anxious, his hand reaching to steady it. “The donkey would have had a leather bridle, which Our Lord held in his right hand.” He said that almost all
Palmesel
had been made in the fifteenth century by local craftsmen. “Do you see how subtle it is, despite itsapparent crudeness? The plump, perhaps even overfed donkey, Christ’s scarred hands, the cracked hooves?” A special packing crate had been built to carry the statue, but it was too large to bring into the house. Herr Metzenburg led the procession as we solemnly escorted Christ and the donkey to the street where their crate awaited them. “There is a
Palmesel
in Verona I’ve been trying to get my hands on for years,” Herr Metzenburg said with a smile. “It is said to contain the bones of the donkey that Christ rode into Jerusalem.”
    With the gradual disappearance each day of the Metzenburgs’ belongings, the rooms grew larger and the ceilings higher. Although my experience of valuable objects had been limited to commemorative pickle forks (our dinner plates at home were called delft), I believed Kreck when he said that Herr Felix’s taste was
vorzügliche
. Exquisite. My first German word.
    One afternoon, I slipped a small silver dish into the pocket of my apron and a pen and an amber cigarette holder that Frau Metzenburg had left in an ashtray, and later I arranged them on a table in my room as if they were my own. I threw away my old Ballycarra list and made a new one. I wanted a navy wool coat with a gray fox collar, a good haircut, a silver brush and comb engraved with the letter
M
(for “Maeve”), and a few of what Kreck called
einige schöne Dinge
—perhaps a blue enamel desk set to match the pen, and an ivory sewing box.
    I now and then caught sight of Frau Metzenburg as she glided from room to room, repeating her husband’s lengthy and preciseorders as she cajoled the hired men and calmed Kreck’s nerves. If she bothered to acknowledge me, I blushed.
    As there was no one left to do errands and Herr Metzenburg no longer wanted delivery boys coming to the house, Kreck had to shop each day, a task that made him so irritable that I offered to help him. Herr Metzenburg, who saw us one afternoon as we returned to the house with our parcels, thanked me for helping, but told me that he did not wish me to walk alone in the city, although a stroll in the nearby Tiergarten would be safe. There had been acts of violence that summer against Jewish shopkeepers, and I noticed that many windows and doors in the shopping district were marked with crude drawings and inscriptions.
    Kreck, despite Herr Metzenburg’s warning, began to send me on errands alone, and I soon learned my way along the streets and alleys. Although I was frightened at first, especially on the streets that had been looted, and worried that I would be lost or stopped by the gangs of men I saw in the street, I felt useful and efficient, checking off the errands on my list as I proudly instructed the