Blood Ties Read online

  "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.

  CHAPTER 5

  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 ca
sualty 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 ti
me 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.

  "Princess Helga," the Baron said, smiling, bowing, the heels clicking. She hadn't thought it strange, enjoying the sight of the rich Baron fawning. Even now, she took satisfaction in that. Her mother had beamed at the sight. Her father had earlier departed for the beerhall, already beyond any familial interest. The uncle watched from the reception room, where a fire had been lit and a large bouquet assembled. Her mother had even dusted pictures of Hohenzollern ancestors that she had dragged up from the cellar and placed on the walls for the occasion.

  Recalling the experience now, she seemed to have floated out of the house on the arm of the tall Baron, whose monocled eye had lingered over her breasts, the extra lure that her mother had needlessly set if blood were not enough. Conscious of her exhilarating power, she had stepped into the glorious interior of the big limousine.