The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

  Marianne looked back down at the letter as if hoping for some other indication, before she led Martin and Liesel toward the remnants of number 27.

  “Building is full,” a Russian soldier barked as they approached. “Move on.”

  To Martin’s surprise, Marianne answered in Russian. A wide smile spread across the soldier’s face. “Ty govorish’ po-Russki?” he asked.

  More Russian issued from Marianne’s lips and the soldier bounced on his heels like a delighted child. “Jiri,” he called, and soon they stood at the center of a small group of Russians, all grinning and slapping Marianne on the back.

  Benita Fledermann—Martin distinguished his mother’s name.

  “Ah.” The man nodded, his face sobering. More Russian.

  “This is where you lived?” Liesel whispered. She too seemed impressed with Marianne’s Russian.

  Martin shook his head. Where he lived was not like this.

  The Russian gestured for them to follow.

  What had once been a courtyard was now piled high with rubble and crisscrossed by narrow footpaths. “Don’t fall,” Marianne said as they walked. She was stern again; the freedom that had come over her on the train was gone.

  They followed the man through a doorway, down a black hall, and up a staircase, climbing blindly. It smelled of mold and cabbage and human shit. Marianne’s dry hand gripped Martin’s hard enough to hurt. He was thankful for the pain; without it his body might disappear in the dark.

  Then there was light. A man sat outside a closed door beside an electric lantern. He was terrifyingly ugly: swarthy and scarred and low-browed, wearing the uniform of a Red Army soldier. At their approach, he pulled a rifle across his lap. He and the man they followed exchanged words, and with a terse nod to Marianne, their escort departed.

  The man outside the door was not moved by Marianne’s Russian. He answered her in a short guttural grunt that did not sound like any language Martin had ever heard.

  From behind him, a rich and salty smell of bacon wafted from the flat; also the sharp scent of alcohol.

  The man rapped on the door, entered, closed it behind him, and then reemerged, opening the door for them. Inside, men clustered around a table, playing cards. Martin did not need to speak their language to understand that they were amused.

  Was this where his mother lived? With all these men? Martin was confused. One wall was entirely gone, revealing the beams and brick and pipes, and old bits of newspaper insulation. Water dripped from a corner of the ceiling into a tub. But the smells—bacon, and onions, maybe even butter frying—were of delicacies he had not eaten in years. His mouth watered. Tins of beans and fruit lined the countertop.

  But where was his mother in all this? A dreadful feeling grew inside him. Smells of the devil, Frau Vortmuller would have said. There was an old woman at the stove, and a girl with bright painted lips and cheeks stood beside her, wearing only a grubby silk robe that revealed her scrawny chest, the breastbones like a chicken’s.

  “Where is Frau Fledermann?” Marianne addressed the old woman, whose expression shifted from hostility to surprise.

  “Dear God!” she exclaimed, looking at the children and crossing herself.

  On the stove the potatoes began to smoke.

  “I’ll get her,” the woman in the robe said. She stabbed her cigarette out on a plate. As she passed, one of the Russians grabbed her wrist and said something that made her laugh.

  Marianne was not amused. “I will come, too,” she announced, shooing Martin and Liesel out into the hall.

  Back in the darkness, beside the frightening man with the gun, even Liesel did not speak. The electric lamp cast long, spooky shadows.

  Finally the door of the flat opened again. The woman who emerged after Marianne was almost unrecognizable to Martin: glassy eyed and thin and smelling strongly of perfume and sweat. She looked panicked and her hands—long, white, and trembling—reached for Martin, fluttering over his face and hair and shoulders, like a blind woman’s.

  “My boy! Oh, my boy!” she said, dropping to her knees. “My sweet child!”

  Martin wanted to speak—to reassure her, but he couldn’t think how.

  “Oh, my boy,” the woman, his mother, repeated, pulling him against her chest.

  And Martin could only stand, stiff as a board, trying to keep them both upright.

  Chapter Three

  Frühlinghausen, March 12, 1938

  The day Benita met Martin Constantine Fledermann was unusually warm for March. It was as though they were in Italy or Greece, she kept saying, hoping it made her sound worldly, like someone who had actually traveled to such places, experienced such heat, although of course everyone knew she hadn’t, and they certainly hadn’t been anywhere so exotic themselves, Frühlinghausen being what it was.

  It was the day of the Anschluss. Five hundred kilometers south, Hitler had personally driven to his birthplace, the little border town of Braunau am Inn in Austria, to announce the country’s “return to the Reich.” The radio was filled with tales of cheering crowds, waving flags, and throwing flowers, of people dancing in the streets. Frühlinghausen officials, eager to capture a little gaiety for the town, organized an impromptu celebration—a rally to be led by their own mayor and a local band. Who wouldn’t want to celebrate the union of two populations of German speakers? This was a great theme for Hitler, and therefore for Frühlinghausen, which was thoroughly in support of the man and his party: the quest to unify all ethnic Germans across the continent under one flag.

  Benita Gruber was nineteen years old and dressed in her finest Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform, a dark blue wool skirt and white blouse she’d saved her own money to buy—no longer the makeshift blue-and-white ensemble she’d worn for the first years of her membership, but the real thing, printed with the BDM monogram. She had braided her thick hair in two artful plaits and knew that she looked beautiful and healthy, the very picture of the celebrated Jungfrau, or German maiden. It was young women like her who had inspired Hitler’s vision of the master race. She was meant to become round with child, again and again, to populate the motherland with Aryan babies who would grow to be happy, healthy Germans, capable of hard work and loyal to their homeland. At least this was the idea propagated by Fräulein Brebel, the dour leader of Benita’s BDM group, who had no children herself.

  And so, after coffee, Benita arrived at the town square along with her troop of wide-eyed Mädels. The mayor of Frühlinghausen was a rising star in the local Nazi Party and was considered quite a catch. On that afternoon, at least among the girls of the BDM, there was a sense of Cinderella-at-the-ball anticipation as they took their places before the podium.

  For all his promise, though, the mayor was neither handsome nor charismatic. His face was blubbery and wide, and as he spoke, rivulets of sweat dripped down his cheeks and hiccupped over his moles. But he was full of conviction.

  “Today we usher in a new and important era . . .” He used an approximation of Hitler’s own staccato, his words half lost in the wind, half swallowed by the stone walls of the seven-hundred-year-old church behind him. “Today we embark on the road to a once again powerful and united Germandom . . .”

  Benita was bored. She had no doubt she could attract this trundlehead’s attention. But what was the point? The very idea of standing beside him, let alone kissing him, was unpleasant. She imagined he smelled like sweat and mildewed wool and, beneath this, the pigsty. Like so many of the town’s young men, he lived with his family on the farm they had operated with minimal success for the last however many hundreds of years. During the harvest season, he would be out in the fields alongside everyone else, pitching hay and sweating like a pig.

  Benita backed away through the small crowd, careful not to draw Fräulein Brebel’s attention. Once free, she ducked down the little pedestrian allée that led to the old millpond and Beiderman’s Apotheke, where she could buy a bottle of the hand cream that promised to set her apart from all the other wash-powder-chappe
d girls of Frühlinghausen. For what? Who knew. For whom? Another good question. But the questions themselves excited Benita. She was destined for something better than Frühlinghausen.

  Then suddenly, rounding the corner, Benita was confronted by the most handsome, most sophisticated man she had ever seen. He leaned against the wall of the millpond, lighting a cigarette and wearing a good suit. Benita recognized this immediately—it was made of some kind of English wool, and the shoes beneath it were of shiny oxblood leather. He was tall and slim and unmistakably aristocratic.

  “Sorry,” he said, straightening and looking over his shoulder, as if to see whether he blocked her path. “Am I—?”

  Benita blushed. “Oh no, I just wasn’t expecting to see anyone.”

  “Because they’re all so engrossed in the mayor’s brilliant oration?”

  She laughed in surprise. His accent was refined, high German, and his sarcasm was as un-Frühlinghausen as his appearance.

  “You were listening?”

  The man shrugged and took a thoughtful drag of the cigarette he’d finally managed to light. “I was present.”

  They were both silent for a moment. Benita felt the urge to smooth her skirt, straighten the little neckerchief that had probably blown askew—but she stopped herself and stood still, staring back at him. “It’s boring,” she said, and her heartbeat quickened at her own recklessness.

  The man smiled. “The speech or the Anschluss?”

  “Both.” Benita shrugged, feigning a sort of jaded sophistication. The man laughed. A jolt of fear snapped through her: Had she said something stupid?

  “The Anschluss,” he said, pushing himself off the wall he leaned against, “is not boring.”

  He extended his hand. “Connie Fledermann,” he said. “May I buy you a coffee somewhere and we can debate this?”

  The touch of his hand was warm and dry and sent splinters of excitement through Benita’s veins. And his eyes were an almost eerie shade of blue—not pale like her own, but intense—the blue of the North Sea in the sun or of the tiny flowers that took over Frühlinghausen for a few magnificent days each spring.

  But how could she say yes? She was bound by her own lack of imagination. Fräulein Brebel and the other girls would be looking for her. It was Heimatabend, and they were to go directly to Olga Meisner’s parlor for a piano concert following the mayor’s speech.

  “I can’t,” Benita said formally and with genuine sorrow, “but thank you for the invitation.”

  “Why not?” he pressed. “You must get back to that bore?”

  “No.” Benita blushed. “To my group.”

  “Your group—aha!” He narrowed his eyes and gave her an assessing look. “Aren’t you too old for Hitler Youth?”

  “Oh, it isn’t that—it’s Bund Deutscher Mädel,” she said, surprised at his mistake.

  The man shrugged. “Any of these—groups.” He said the word with obvious disdain, and she blushed more deeply, feeling the full depth of the divide between them.

  “Good-bye,” she managed.

  “Wait—have I upset you?” he said. “I meant no offense—it’s just my own—well, never mind.” He bowed theatrically and doffed an imaginary hat. “It was lovely to have met you, fair maiden.”

  That night, Benita tossed and turned as she lay in the dingy bedroom she shared with her two brothers under the eaves of the moldering thatched roof of Gruber cottage, replaying her missed opportunity and the tantalizing possibility the man had presented. How had she let Fräulein Brebel’s Heimatabend hold her back? This had been her moment, the chance fate had offered, and she had said no! In the face of this dreadful awareness, her family’s cottage seemed particularly moldy and damp, the blankets on the bed disgustingly pilly, and the snores of her brothers as low and dumb as the grunts of sleeping swine.

  For the next few days Benita sulked, spending hours on the weedy patch of grass behind the cottage, staring at the sky instead of helping her mother with the wash she took in.

  Even by Frühlinghausen standards the Grubers were poor. Benita’s father, long dead, had been a mason like his father and his father before him, primarily employed by the town’s mental hospital—a dank, rambling establishment housed in a building that had once been a monastery and was in constant need of ramification. Their home was one of seven that lined the north wall of its grounds like a row of grubby barnacles. On quiet summer nights the Grubers fell asleep to the moans and cries of the disturbed inmates.

  Of the three children still at home, Benita was the only one not gainfully employed. Her two brothers had found work in road construction through Hitler’s Four-Year Plan, and they were always quick to point out that Benita could find work through it as well. There was work for women. But Benita chose to assist her mother with the mending and washing instead. She did not want to commit to anything that might bind her to Frühlinghausen. Because for her real life, her real future, she would go to Berlin and find work as a typist or some such, she was sure of it, though she had never even handled a typewriter.

  And Frau Gruber indulged Benita’s dream, much to her other children’s irritation. Benita was her mother’s favorite—the fifth of six and the prettiest of the girls by far. Among her siblings she was famously incompetent and lazy. Faulpelz was what her oldest sister, Lotte, called her, meaning “lazybones,” and it was not intended fondly.

  The older children had each been sent to work at the age of fourteen and raised on spotty potatoes and dandelion-weed soup. Those were the desperate days, during and after the war. They begrudged Benita’s privileged status as a member of Hitler’s generation, a cohort filled with pride and idealism and, most of all, with excitement about the future.

  Benita had little interest in politics, but she had absorbed the sense of possibility the new regime offered. And Frau Gruber, after so many years of hard and unemotive realism, seemed to have found in Benita’s daydreams her own trampled capacity for yearning. She tolerated in her youngest daughter all the impractical nonsense she would have beaten out of her older children.

  So it was fitting, in a sense, that Frau Gruber herself played a role in Benita’s second encounter with Connie Fledermann. It was Saturday, market day, and Benita rose from bed with a grumbling commitment to help her mother buy and carry home their food for the week. Still in a sulk, she put on an old gray skirt and blouse and barely combed her hair. Who would she see, anyway? Ulrich Heschel? Mannfred Becker? In the wake of her meeting with Connie Fledermann, the voice in her head had taken on a sarcastic ring. She trudged along beside her mother, whose stoic German peasant silence seemed to Benita a hallmark of everything dull and cold and lacking in her life.

  At the market, Benita dawdled, mooning over Frau Mullman’s flowers and the artist’s stall, until Frau Gruber returned, pulled at her sleeve, and reminded her that she was there to carry the wursts and flour and side of Salzfleisch.

  So when, rounding the corner of the cheese maker’s stall, Benita was suddenly confronted with the sight of Connie Fledermann, this time in full, handsome military garb, she was mortified rather than delighted. The horror of being seen so—in these awful clothes, carrying a bulging sack of smoked meats, and followed by her fruit-pinching, sniffing, hunchbacked mother!

  He, however, broke into a wide smile. “Fräulein of the Anschluss!” he said loudly, causing a few of the passersby to turn and stare. Benita’s face went from cool and white to purple. “I wondered if I would see you again.”

  Then he turned with an air of great respect and formality to Frau Gruber. “May I introduce myself? Staff Officer Martin Constantine Fledermann. I met your daughter here the other day and we discussed the recent event of the Anschluss.”

  Frau Gruber bobbed her head repeatedly, like a deaf-mute.

  Benita, still distracted by the bulging sack in her arms and the particularly ugly shape of her blouse, slowly registered the presence of two other men, both of whom appeared small and dull beside Staff Officer Martin Constantine Fledermann.
In the focused light of his attention, all else seemed obscured in shadow. But she thought she caught them rolling their eyes.

  “This evening perhaps? Can I take you to dinner?”

  Benita stared.

  “No?” His eyes twinkled.

  “Yes,” Benita said.

  “Yes?” he said, turning to Frau Gruber.

  “Yah, sicher. Yes, of course,” Frau Gruber said when she finally found her tongue, and her response was so unquestioning—so utterly lacking in parental restraint—that something in Benita snapped to. From that moment on, a subtle but profound shift occurred in her relationship with this man who was to become her husband. In the face of her mother’s mute, girlish awe, Benita realized she would have to act as her own parental figure—creating the barriers and slips that made the game of courtship alluring. It was something she had never even thought of with the various boys of Frühlinghausen who had made their interest known: there had been no game with them, no need for a game, she had taken none of them seriously, had no interest in more than the affirmation their interest provided.

  “Then I will pick you up at half eight,” he said. “At—?”

  “Seven Krensig,” she said, cringing at the thought of him seeing the Gruber cottage. “But eight o’clock would be better,” she added, beginning her new strategy as obstacle maker.

  “Aha!” He looked satisfyingly surprised.

  Benita stood a little straighter and held the bag with less of an apologetic tilt to her shoulders.

  “Eight o’clock then,” he said with a bow.

  That evening, in preparation for dinner, Benita luxuriated in a hot bath. The Grubers still relied on the old-fashioned assemblage of water heated on the stove and schlepped across the kitchen to a tub that sat behind a makeshift screen. Frau Gruber, as excited as Benita herself, had suggested the bath and put aside her own work to prepare it. Her mother was, in fact, gripped by such nervous energy that it calmed Benita.