Perhaps if I had been able to put things in plain language, it might have made plain that things between us were so damnably unequal, that I loved her as I would never love anyone else and that she loved me as a young woman might love a devoted brother, a trusted bodyguard, or a horse that never stumbles, never shies, but takes all fences willingly, and carries her safely across.Carry Me: A Novel might correctly be called a love story, but this isn't “just” a romance. And as it spans the two World Wars, it might correctly be called historical fiction, but this isn't “just” a gratuitous retread of what I could catch any evening on the History Channel. As I closed the covers of this book, tears streaming down my cheeks – not because of a melodramatic ending but because I had been profoundly touched – I could only conclude that this was a story of humanity, and as is true of all great literature, I felt connected to that humanity; this was the story of us all; the story of me.
But in the beginning, this is the story of Karin Weinbrenner. As the narrator Hermann "Billy" Lange opens with: Her story is not mine, but sometimes her story feels like the armature my life has wound itself around. I am telling it, so this story is also about me. After briefly sketching out his early relationship to Karin – they were born a year apart on the Isle of Wight, where Billy's father acted as the captain of the racing yacht belonging to Karin's father (a German-Jewish aristocrat, the Baron von Weinbrenner) – the next chapter skips to 1938, with Karin summoning Billy to Berlin. And this is the structure of the entire book: Going back to the beginning and quickly sketching along the years in which Karin was the spoiled but largely ignored daughter in the big house and Billy was the beloved son in servants' quarters, intertwined with 1938 and Billy's efforts to get Karin out of an increasingly antisemitic Germany. What's incredible is the tension that author Peter Behrens is able to achieve with this format: despite the present day Billy (who makes reference to the Iron Curtain, so he's writing post-WWII, pre-fall of the Berlin Wall) often telling the reader what is going to happen before it does in the flashback sections, hardships and dangers are palpable and real. Also intriguing are the frequent inclusions of letters and diary extracts that are currently being held in the Archives at the University of McGill: not only are these interesting (and often plot spoilers before events happen) in their own right, but they beg the question, “Who in this narrative is eventually going to do something worthy of being archived at McGill?” The writing that pulls off this tricky tension is masterful without seeming so; such a deft skill.
Although Billy understands that his full story might not have universal appeal (I don't want to lose you over tedious genealogy and history that must be very dim to you), the peculiar genealogy of these characters is what argues for their universality. The Baron von Weinbrenner, while a nonpractising Jew, is German to his bones; a loyal subject of the Kaiser and a decorated war hero. He married an aristocratic Irishwoman (Northern Ireland, her family holds a seat in the House of Lords), and since Karin was born on the Isle of Wight, she has a British passport. Billy's father, Buck, was born a thousand miles off the coast of San Francisco to a German sea captain who had married an Irishwoman (Buck's birth was registered in the US as a German citizen), and Buck himself married an Irishwoman who had been hired on at the baronial estate, Walden, outside Frankfurt. When Buck and Eilín married, von Weinbrenner offered them the position of caretakers of the summer home on the Isle of Wight, their only real duties coming into play for the month of August when the Weinbrenners would be in residence and Buck would be expected to race the baron's yacht. This makes for an idyllic childhood for Billy until the outbreak of WWI, when Buck is arrested as a potential German spy and sent to a loathsome detention center in London for the duration of the war. Eventually, Billy and his mother move to the Irish town of Sligo – where both Eilín's father and Buck's mother live – and while Billy (despite his Irish mother and British passport) is tormented as “Herm the Germ”, his grandfather gets tangled up in the prevailing winds of Irish nationalism. This question of nationality and nationalism – can a person be reduced to what it says on their passport, or is that trumped by their actions or their beliefs or their nominal religion or residence – is returned to over and over again, and if this question wasn't at the heart of tens of millions of deaths throughout the twentieth century, it might seem farcical to keep returning to it. When armistice arrives and Buck is finally freed, when Billy's family finds themselves to be homeless and penniless deportees, they accept the baron's offer to make their home at Walden.
Burning aviators, clots of fire. The reeking night jar in our bedroom in Muswell Hill. Children skipping round me in the school yard, shouting taunts. My ship Lilith. London's winter cold and dark. The smell of ground sliced open in Regent's Park, my father's pale prisoner's face, his white hands on a table in the visiting hall. There it is. That was my war.The interwar years (once Billy, recently ostracised as too German, can overcome being considered too British) are happy ones, with increasing prosperity and pride for the German people. Karin and Billy's paths only cross about once a year – which seems ironic considering how close the reader knows they will be in the future – but they always share in-jokes about their mutual love of the adventure writer Karl May and his tales of the high plains of western Texas and New Mexico, known as “El Llano Estacado”; the desert heat and light contrasting nicely with their forest setting, cold and dark. When the streets of Frankfurt start filling with brownshirts and Billy's coworkers begin showing up in SS uniforms – even after Billy and Karin are dismayed by a rally where they heard Die Donaustaaten Kuriosität storm and splutter – the baron refused to believe that he was personally in danger, and the reader understands where it all will end.
This all happened before I or anyone else had watched half a century's worth of films about secret police and Nazis and the brutality of ordinary “decent” men in uniforms, so I didn't recognize the situation, I didn't know the story line. I couldn't put it together fast enough to tell myself what was happening. What had started as an ordinary day kept getting darker and crazier. I was reeling.I appreciate the time-frame that Behrens chose for his book: by having the “future” sections in 1938, he's capturing the last possible moment that the people of Germany could convince themselves that everything was normal. He is able to demonstrate how essentially “good” people could be inflamed by nationalism and prejudice to do terrible things (or, by trying to protect themselves, to turn a blind eye to terrible things). Several scenes are haunting my memory (perhaps, primarily, every time that Billy literally carried Karin) and I found the writing to be simply exquisite. But most of all, I simply believed this story – there's truth here and it touched me, and I couldn't ask for more from a book.
I'll leave you here, beside a highway in Texas, just come up on el llano. It's not where our story ends, but it's where I'll leave you, your right hand shading your eyes as you watch those antelope flicker across a yellow field – alert, sensitive, tuned to one another, moving in unison, like a dart of flocking birds.
Why, you've done it Billy Lange. You've brought her to the open country.
That's what I was thinking.
It's rare to recognize happiness for what it is, but I did then. It was like that morning on Eschenheimer Anlage, your pied-à-terre – French doors flung open, rain just past, and the fragrance of trees floating from the palm garden across the road. I held it in my hands, I knew it for what it was.
Is it too early to be talking awards season? The Giller? The G-G?
