“You have my word,” she said softly, and felt the full gravity of her promise well up around them.
And then, in a moment that Marianne would replay in her mind again and again, not just that night but over the years, long after Connie was dead, Albrecht was dead, Germany itself was dead, and half the people at the party were either killed, destroyed by shame, or somewhere between the two, he leaned forward and, with the same intensity he had used to extract her promise, kissed her. It was a kiss that dispensed with any trappings of romance or flirtation, that leapfrogged (and here was a question that would gnaw irritatingly, irrelevantly in her mind forever) maybe even over desire, straight into the sea of love and knowledge. Here were two people who understood each other. Here were two people aligned in something greater than themselves.
Who pulled away first? In all the replaying, this was never clear to Marianne. And had the moment lasted minutes? Seconds? It was both crystal clear and full of confusion. For days afterward she could feel the place where Connie’s hand had brushed the hair from her cheek. It shivered in memory, hot and cold at once.
“Connie,” she said when they were once again apart. He leaned forward and brought her hand to his lips. But before she could think what to say, what to ask, he rose and was gone.
Part I
Chapter One
Burg Lingenfels, June 1945
The entire cart ride from the train station to Burg Lingenfels, Benita lay on the musty hay bales in a half stupor, no longer caring what she looked like: a slut or a vagabond reclining in the open air, making her way across the country with all the dignity of a sack of potatoes. She was sick. Her stomach churned, and the sockets of her eyes ached. Possibly it was from the sausage Marianne had brought—rich, flavorful meat, the likes of which had not passed through Benita’s lips for years. She could not think of it now without retching.
The train trip from Berlin had taken them three days, including one night in a transit depot crowded with every wandering rape victim, bereft mother, and wounded soldier west of the Oder. Benita was sick to death of desperate people. Berlin was bad enough, with its carousing Russians and half-starved virgins hidden in cellars, its countless dead—some still buried in the mountains of rubble—and its stinking, overcrowded bomb-shelters-turned-refugee-camps. And the route west had been even worse, clogged with all manner of suffering and human detritus. It was as if the great continent of Europe had shrugged and sent everyone rolling. Benita had no illusions. She was an animal like the rest of them, no more concerned with their pain and suffering than they were with hers.
The cart bumped over the rutted hillside, and the clouds above bounced in time across the sky, round and friendly, as innocent as they had always been. They were the best thing she had seen in weeks. Her mind drifted in and out of exhausted slumber.
In Berlin, sleep had been rare. If it wasn’t the Russian captain barging into what was left of Benita’s bombed-out flat, it was some other bastard who didn’t yet understand that she belonged to the captain. That was how it worked in the half structure once known as 27 Meerstein Strasse. And then in the mornings, the Russian soldiers played boisterous card games at the kitchen table, and Frau Schiller, frightened old bag that she was, banged pots and pans, cooking the illicit goods the soldiers gave her to prepare for them. Benita hadn’t slept a full night since Berlin fell, which was a mercy, maybe. Because with sleep came dreams. And her dreams were a distillation of every horror from the past year.
When the cart stopped, Benita woke with a jolt. They had arrived at Burg Lingenfels. She scrambled to sit, and spots swam before her eyes. When they subsided, there it was: the castle, exactly the same and totally different from how she remembered it. Rough stones, deep-set leaded-glass windows, and giant, intimidating oak front door. The building itself was untouched—what was another war to this ancient fortress? But it possessed none of the grandness that had so overwhelmed her when she’d first seen it at the countess’s party. All the candles and music and pretty dresses, the fancy cars parked helter-skelter along the hillside . . . it was hard to believe that was only seven years ago. It seemed to belong to another lifetime. Now the aristocrats and artists and intellectuals who had so intimidated her were dead, broken, or irrevocably guilty. And no better off than she.
“You remember it?” Marianne was saying, lifting Martin down from the wagon—sweet Martin, Benita’s precious boy, love of her life, the child she had thought she would never see again.
She nodded and tried to climb out of the cart.
“Let me help,” Marianne said. “You are exhausted.”
Benita willed herself to step over the side and drop to the ground. She would walk with her son. But Martin was already ahead of her, following Marianne’s eight-year-old boy, Fritz.
“What a healthy child. That is a blessing,” Marianne said, taking Benita’s elbow.
And despite the many years since Benita had seen her, despite the fact that she had never even known Marianne, really, that she had—if anything—been irritated by the older woman’s surety and quick tongue, she allowed herself to be guided.
When Benita woke the next morning, the sun was rising, pink behind the black outline of the chestnut tree, the stable, the crow perched on the roof. The scene reminded her of the silhouette cutouts she’d cherished as a girl: quaint two-dimensional forms of children frolicking, dirndl-clad maidens dancing, steepled churches rising over sleeping towns. She had always stopped before the artists’ stall in the Saturday market and admired these black-and-white visions of an uncomplicated life.
She rolled over and surveyed her surroundings. The room had once been used as a pantry—the walls were lined with empty shelves and an ancient butter churn sat in the corner. It smelled of damp stone and, faintly, of pickling vinegar and Christmas spices. Old smells, baked into the walls.
Martin lay curled beside her on the thin mattress, his blond hair spread fanlike on the pillow, his sweet, perfectly formed features made fragile by sleep. He was such a handsome boy—beautiful, really. Even more so than Connie had been. And seeing him there, under the blanket (and to have not one but two blankets and two mattresses), Benita was seized with an urge to gather him up and press her face into the soft skin of his neck, to breathe in the smell of boy and youth and sleep. She wanted, almost, to consume him—this best, most perfect piece of herself. She wanted to become him and in so doing become herself again. Benita Gruber, town beauty, innocent nineteen-year-old, a girl out of a silhouette.
But she let him sleep. His breath stirred the fuzzy threads of the blanket. He shuddered as she watched. What haunted his dreams? The blare of bomb sirens and the screech of planes over Berlin? The dead bodies they had stepped over in the rubble? Or God knows what from the “Children’s Home” the Gestapo had sent him to after Benita was imprisoned. She had never seen it. It was Marianne who had—miraculously—found Martin when Benita had given him up for dead. It was a typical Nazi establishment, Marianne had said of the home, lots of marching and no learning. Being Marianne, she focused on the ideology and not the creature comforts of the place. Was there enough to eat? Were the caretakers kind? Had there been time to play? These questions remained unanswered. But Marianne had found Martin and returned him to Benita, and for that Benita owed her everything.
She must have drifted off again because when she next opened her eyes, the room was empty. Benita sat with a start. Where was Martin? The blood raced to her head and then away. Surely he was all right. The war was over. They were not in Berlin anymore, they were at Burg Lingenfels, in the American zone, and it was safe here. They were under Marianne’s care.
But still, he had been taken from her once. She couldn’t survive it again.
Benita pulled a skirt over her nightgown and raced down the dark stone hall. Breathlessly, she found her way to the kitchen. It was empty. No sign of Martin, or anyone. Then she spotted movement outside the window. Two little figures—Fritz, Marianne’s boy, and Martin, crouched in the courtyard,
poking sticks into a puddle. Relief flooded through her.
Thank you, thank you, dear God, for protecting my son . . . the prayer was involuntary, a nervous remnant of her Catholic upbringing. The religious pleas of her youth had returned to her in prison and served as an anchor in the endless sea of silence. Without them, she was sure her mind would have drifted away. She did not believe in them, but still, they had saved her—not God, just the words.
She knew she was lucky to have been sent to prison and not a concentration camp after Connie was executed for his role in the assassination plot. Ultimately, this was how all her yearning for nobility and a good marriage had paid off: as the wife of a traitor with a noble Prussian bloodline, she had received solitary confinement rather than death. She could recognize, if not yet laugh at, the grim humor of this. But the blankness that had entered her during that time lingered. She had spent too many hours staring at the ceiling, the backs of her hands, the corner of her cell where the paint was chipped. It was only for Martin’s sake that she now tried to overcome this.
As Benita stood watching the boys, Marianne banged into the kitchen, pulling a small cart of carrots and cabbages and even raspberries, which Benita had not seen in years. “God bless Herr Kellerman for keeping up the garden,” Marianne exclaimed. “There are not many men who were seeding potatoes and carrots last spring—and certainly not on someone else’s property.” She was flushed, and her hair formed a frizzy halo around her head. “Benita! How did you sleep, my poor dear? Have a bowl of porridge.” She gestured at a pot on the stove.
“Thank you,” Benita said.
Marianne was already removing a bowl from the cupboard—fine china, blue-and-white Meissen. “I can’t say it’s tasty, but it’s edible.” She plopped a helping into the bowl and set it on the table. “Sit. You are meant to eat and rest.”
So Benita sat.
She watched Marianne empty the cart, a whirlwind of vigorous, chaotic activity. The war had not changed her as much as it had everyone else. She was still an enigma to Benita, a woman capable of tracking Martin to some obscure Nazi hideaway but incapable of managing her own hair. When Benita first married Connie, she had marveled at the woman’s paradoxes. Marianne loved to entertain but cared nothing about food or fashion. She would slave away preparing the house for a fabulous party only to come down wearing last year’s dowdy dress. She would invite the most distinguished members of the Foreign Office and intelligence corps to dinner and then serve her cook’s homely Sauerbraten and Wildschweingulasch. She was an abstracted, disorganized mother to her children but an organized and efficient manager of adults.
She was not a beauty with her strong, almost mannish features and high cheekbones (a falcon face, Benita had once said to Connie and been thoroughly scolded). But she was compelling, and in moments, her face achieved a kind of graceful symmetry that was striking. It was a face you could not easily forget.
At the salons and weekend parties Marianne and Albrecht hosted in the beginning of the war, Benita had watched the handsome barons and counts and noble youths of Germany’s most aristocratic families hang on Marianne’s every word. They had jousted playfully in a style of speaking that made Benita feel stupid. Were they joking or serious? Teasing her or mocking one another? In the presence of Connie’s fancy friends, Benita had found language an obstacle rather than a bridge to connection, but for Marianne it seemed a smooth and direct road that always rose to meet her feet.
“Why, you’re still in your nightclothes!” Marianne exclaimed, glancing up from the vegetables she was unloading. “Did you find the clothing I left in your room?”
Benita blushed. She had risen in such haste and completely forgotten to dress. “I’m sorry—I was rushing.”
“Sorry! Posh. Nothing to be sorry for. It just doesn’t seem like you. But then of course no one can be expected to be like themselves anymore, can they?” Marianne lifted the cart by its handles and pushed it back out the kitchen door. “As long as you have what you need.”
At that moment, Marianne’s two daughters appeared in the doorway, carrying a bucket between them.
“Just in time,” Marianne cried. “We have milk for you, Tante Benita!”
Benita was not sure which surprised her more—the presence of milk or the title Tante, “aunt.” Somehow lowly Benita Gruber, last of a long line of toiling Westphalian peasants, had become Tante to the von Lingenfels girls.
“Say hello, girls, and introduce yourselves,” Marianne instructed.
The girls approached—dark haired and tall, maybe ten and twelve. Katarina and Elisabeth. And Benita remembered their two little heads peering down at the guests from the landing on the stairs at the countess’s party. She had wished so fervently to have a daughter like them, a sweet girl to dress in dirndls and christen in delicate, frothy white. It seemed quaint now—an innocent dream. Who would want to introduce a girl to this world? Thank God Martin was a boy.
“Here,” said Katarina, the younger of the two, as she dipped a cup into the bucket and extended it to Benita. “It’s delicious.” She had a sweet, shy manner about her, with long, thick eyelashes and awkward coltish limbs.
“Where is Martin?” the older girl, Elisabeth, asked. She was the sharper of the two in both look and tone.
“Out in the courtyard—you didn’t see him?” Benita sprang up to look. The puddle was now abandoned. “He was with Fritz, playing—”
She started toward the door but was stopped by Marianne.
“Let him be,” Marianne commanded. “It’s good for a boy to be free.” Taking in Benita’s face, she softened her voice. “All is very safe here, Benita. Really.”
In her room, Benita pulled on the battered brassiere and the vest that she had washed and worn so many times its seams were nearly gone, the drops of blood across the belly now faded to innocent-looking brown splotches. She found a washbasin and a pitcher of water on an otherwise empty shelf. She splashed some on her face and pulled back her poor brittle hair, knotting it at the nape of her neck.
There was a loud rap on the door. “I’m leaving shoes here for you,” Marianne’s voice said. “See if they fit.”
Benita’s own were a badly worn pair of boots she had stolen from a bombed-out flat that she had joined the women of her building in combing through. No one asked what had become of its inhabitants—lying dead under the rubble of the bombing or safe in the countryside or killed in a concentration camp. The shoes had been cheap to begin with and were now nearly worn through.
Benita waited until Marianne’s footsteps receded to retrieve the new boots. They were certainly the finest she had ever come into contact with: dark green, barely worn, with an elegant, distinguished heel. The leather was soft and smooth, and against it, her finger felt monstrously chapped. They were too fine for a woman with such hands, the kind of boots she had once dreamed of wearing. It seemed a cruel joke that this would be that day. Be careful what you wish for, they seemed to taunt. She could not put them on.
When she emerged, dressed, Martin sat at the kitchen table between Elisabeth and Katarina. His mouth was stained with raspberry juice, his eyes round at the sight of so much food.
“Ah, that’s better!” Marianne said of the clean white shirt and wool skirt Benita now wore. “The shoes didn’t fit?”
“No,” Benita lied.
Suddenly there was a gurgling sound from Martin, and the little boy’s face turned red.
On either side of him the girls blanched.
“Oh!” Benita exclaimed, feeling his shame as if it were her own. Of course his poor belly was not used to all this fruit. He had probably eaten God knows how many bowls of porridge, and now the berries, and whatever else. The stink was putrid—full of the bile of a dysfunctional gut.
“Poor boy,” Marianne said. “We should not have fed you so much!” She held out a hand to him, taking charge in her usual calm, competent way. “We will have to find you a new pair of pants.”
Slowly, humiliatingly, Martin rose, th
e back of his pants stained and the stench growing worse.
“Come.” Marianne nicked her head. “I know just the thing.
“Benita,” she added over her shoulder, “would you give that pot a stir?”
Benita nodded and watched as Marianne disappeared with her son.
Chapter Two
Thuringia, Late May 1945
In the Children’s Home, Martin Constantine Fledermann was not Martin’s name. He was Martin Schmidt, just as Berthold von Stauffenberg was Berthold Meister and Liesel Stravitsky was Liesel Falkman, and so on. All the children were given good, ordinary German names. And the shameful thing was that Martin had almost forgotten he was a Fledermann.
There were many things he had forgotten in the Children’s Home. His father, for example: the shadowy figure Marianne later referred to as a hero and his mother never mentioned. And life before the war, before air-raid sirens and nights spent in the cellar, before the deafening roar of low-flying bomber planes.
But there were things he remembered in the home, too. How he’d arrived, for instance. A long train trip on a military transport, the pockmarked face of his SS chaperone, and the salty, tangy taste of dried meat on his tongue—it was the first time he had ever tasted such a thing, warm and a little gritty from its home in the SS man’s pocket. He had thrown up afterward, holding his head out the window of the moving train so that the vomit spewed back in his face.
He also remembered the sunny flat in Berlin, air thick with dust motes, and the view over shady, elegant Meerstein Strasse, with its pale stucco buildings and café on the corner. And the warmth of his mother’s body curled against his at night in bed. The cameo pendant that hung in the hollow of her throat. The words of the song she would sing to him—Kommt ein Vogel geflogen, setzt sich nieder auf mein’ Fuss, hat ein Zettel im Schnabel von der Mutter ein’ Gruss. “A little bird comes flying, sits down on my foot, has a letter in its beak, from my mother a kiss.” But at the Children’s Home there was no bird, no letter, and no kiss.
The Women in the Castle Page 3