The Traitor's Emblem Read Online Free PDF Page B

though speaking of some contagious disease, it’s because of the cards. As a child, these comments terrified Paul to the point that, when a boy came to school with a French deck he’d found at home, Paul ran out of the class and locked himself in a bathroom. It was a while before he finally understood the extent of his uncle’s problem: a problem that was not contagious but deadly all the same.
    When the servants’ unpaid wages began to mount up, they started to quit. Now, of the ten bedrooms in the servants’ quarters, only three were occupied: the maid’s, the cook’s, and the one Paul shared with his mother. The boy sometimes had trouble sleeping, because Ilse always got up an hour before dawn. Before the other servants had left, she had been only the housekeeper, tasked with ensuring that everything was in its place. Now she had had to take on their work too.
    That life, his mother’s exhausting duties, and the tasks he’d carried out himself for as long as he could remember had seemed normal to Paul at first. But at school he discussed his situation with his classmates, and soon he began to draw comparisons, noticing what was going on around him, and realizing how strange it was that the sister of a baroness should sleep in the staff quarters.
    Time and again he’d hear the same three words used to define his family, slipping by him as he passed between desks at school or slamming shut behind his back like a secret door.
    Orphan.
    Servant.
    Deserter. That was the worst of them all, because it was aimed at his father. The person he’d never known, about whom his mother never spoke, and about whom Paul knew little more than his name. Hans Reiner.
    And so it was through piecing together fragments of conversations that Paul overheard that he learned that his father had done something terrible (. . . over in the African colonies, they say . . .), that he had lost everything (. . . lost his shirt, ruined . . .), and that his mother lived on the charity of his aunt Brunhilda (. . . a skivvy in her own brother-in-law’s house—a baron, no less!—can you believe it?).
    Which didn’t seem to be any more honorable for the fact that Ilse didn’t charge her a single mark for her work. Or that during the war she should have been obliged to work in a munitions factory “in order to contribute to supporting the household.” The factory was in Dachau, sixteen kilometers from Munich, and his mother had to wake two hours before sunrise, do her share of the household chores, and then take a train to her ten-hour shift.
    It was just after she’d arrived back from the factory one day, her hair and fingers green with dust, her eyes dazed after a whole day of inhaling chemicals, that Paul asked his mother for the first time why they didn’t find somewhere else to live. A place where they weren’t both being constantly humiliated.
    “You don’t understand, Paul.”
    She had given him the same response many times, always looking away or leaving the room or rolling over to sleep, just as she had done a few minutes ago.
    Paul watched his mother’s back for a few moments. She seemed to be breathing deeply and regularly, but the boy knew that she was only pretending to be asleep and wondered what ghosts would assail her in the middle of the night.
    He looked away and fixed his gaze on the ceiling. If his eyes could have bored through the plaster, the square of ceiling immediately above Paul’s pillow would have caved in long ago. That was where he focused all his fantasies about his father on the nights when he had trouble reconciling himself to sleep. All Paul knew was that he’d been a captain in the Kaiser’s fleet and that he’d commanded a frigate in South-West Africa. He had died when Paul was two years old, and the only thing he had left of him was a faded photo of his father in uniform, with a large moustache, his dark eyes looking straight at the camera, proud.
    Ilse tucked the photo under her pillow every night