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"Stop this execution. "
"I fear it is too late, comrade. "
"You mean these men have already been shot?"
"Not quite. " Pinsky went to the window.
Grigori did the same. Konstantin and Magda stood beside him.
Down in the snow-covered courtyard, a firing squad had assembled in the clear early light. Opposite the soldiers, a dozen blindfolded men stood shivering in thin indoor clothes. A red flag flew above their heads.
As Grigori looked, the soldiers raised their rifles.
Grigori yelled: "Stop at once! Do not shoot!" But his voice was muffled by the window, and no one heard.
A moment later there was a crash of gunfire.
The condemned men fell to the ground. Grigori stared, aghast.
Around the slumped bodies, bloodstains appeared on the snow, bright red to match the flag flying above.
Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE - November 11-12, 1923
Maud slept in the day and got up in the middle of the afternoon, when Walter brought the children home from Sunday school. Eric was three and Heike was two, and they looked so sweet in their best clothes that Maud thought her heart would burst with love.
She had never known an emotion like this. Even her mad passion for Walter had not been so overwhelming. The children also made her feel desperately anxious. Would she be able to feed them and keep them warm, and protect them from riot and revolution?
She gave them hot bread-and-milk to warm them, then she began to prepare for the evening. She and Walter were throwing a small family party to celebrate the thirty-eighth birthday of Walter's cousin Robert von Ulrich.
Robert had not been killed in the war, contrary to Walter's parents' fears-or were they hopes? Either way, Walter had not become the Graf von Ulrich. Robert had been held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. When the Bolsheviks had made peace with Austria, Robert and his wartime comrade, Jorg, had set out to walk, hitchhike, and ride freight trains home. It had taken them a year, but they had made it, and when they returned Walter had found them an apartment in Berlin.
Maud put on her apron. In the tiny kitchen of her little house she made a soup out of cabbage, stale bread, and turnips. She also baked a small cake, although she had to eke out her ingredients with more turnips.
She had learned to cook and much else besides. A kindly neighbor, an older woman, had taken pity on the bewildered aristocrat and taught her how to make a bed, iron a shirt, and clean a bathtub. It had all come as something of a shock.
They lived in a middle-class town house. They had not been able to spend any money on it, nor could they afford the servants Maud had always been used to, and they had a lot of secondhand furniture that Maud secretly thought was dreadfully suburban.
They had looked forward to better times, but in fact things had got worse: Walter's career in the foreign ministry had been dead-ended by his marriage to an Englishwoman, and he would have moved on to something else, but in the economic chaos he was lucky to have any job at all. And Maud's early dissatisfactions seemed petty now, four years of poverty later. There was patched upholstery where the children had torn it, broken windows covered with cardboard, and paintwork peeling everywhere.
But Maud had no regrets. Any time she liked she could kiss Walter, slide her tongue into his mouth, unbutton his trousers, and lie with him on the bed or the couch or even the floor, and that made up for everything else.
Walter's parents came to the party bringing half a ham and two bottles of wine. Otto had lost his family estate, Zumwald, which was now in Poland. His savings had been reduced to nothing by inflation. However, the large garden of his Berlin house produced potatoes, and he still had a lot of prewar wine.
"How did you manage to find ham?" Walter said incredulously. Such things could normally be bought only with American dollars.
"I traded it for a bottle of vintage champagne," said Otto.
The grandparents put the children to bed. Otto told them a folktale. From what Maud could hear, it was about a queen who had her brother beheaded. She shuddered, but did not interfere. Afterward Susanne sang lullabies in a reedy voice and the children went to sleep, apparently none the worse for their grandfather's bloodthirsty story.
Robert and Jorg arrived, wearing identical red ties. Otto greeted them warmly. He seemed to have no idea of their relationship, apparently accepting that Jorg was simply Robert's flatmate. Indeed, that was how the men behaved when they were with older folk. Maud thought that Susanne probably guessed the truth. Women were harder to fool. Fortunately they were more accepting.
Robert and Jorg could be very different in liberal company. At parties in their own home they made no secret of their romantic love. Many of their friends were the same. Maud had been startled at first: she had never seen men kissing, admiring one another's outfits, and flirting like schoolgirls. But such behavior was no longer taboo, at least in Berlin. And Maud had read Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe, which seemed to suggest that this kind of thing had always gone on.
Tonight, however, Robert and Jorg were on their best behavior. Over dinner everyone talked about what was happening in Bavaria. On Thursday an association of paramilitary groups called the Kampf bund had declared a national revolution in a beer hall in Munich.
Maud could hardly bear to read the news these days. Workers went on strike, so right-wing bullyboys beat up the strikers. Housewives marched to protest against the shortage of provisions, and their protests turned into food riots. Everyone in Germany was angry about the Versailles Treaty, yet the Social Democratic government had accepted it in full. People believed reparations were crippling the economy, even though Germany had paid only a fraction of the amount and obviously had no intention of trying to clear the total.
