She ran a comb through her hair and shook off Frau Gruber’s offers to plait and wrap it around her head in her usual Sunday style and instead pinned it into a more modern, American fashion with three rolls at the base of her skull. Benita’s younger brother made a racket knocking on the bedroom door and singing old love ballads in a falsetto.
When eight o’clock finally arrived, Benita wore her finest dress—a blue-and-red-flowered dirndl that had originally belonged to her sister—and her too-small Sunday shoes. She sat pretending to be engrossed in her needlepointing as her mother arranged a plate of cookies and uncorked the plum schnapps in an embarrassing display of ingratiation. By a quarter past the hour, when Staff Officer Martin Constantine Fledermann finally knocked, Benita had already experienced and overcome her nervousness, and she greeted him coolly.
“Staff Officer Fledermann,” she said, glancing at the clock. “I wondered if you’d been caught by one of Herr Schulte’s dogs.” Frau Gruber’s mouth dropped open at her impertinence.
“They tried,” he replied with a smile, “but I was too quick. Call me Connie, please.”
With no further back-and-forth, and certainly without partaking in pleasantries, cookies, or schnapps, Benita and Connie took their leave.
Outside the cottage the moon was bright and Connie’s Horch sport car gleamed like an object from another world. She detected the strong smell of winter thaw—the hay that had covered the vegetable garden all season was thick with mildew and hoarfrost, a trace of dead animal. But over this the fresh, clean spring fragrance of the early blooming bloodroot and snow roses. And stepping through the door that Connie held open for her, Benita could barely believe her good fortune.
“To the Golden Onion?” he asked in a way that mocked the place and all its provincial pretensions even as he suggested it.
“Of course.” She smiled, in keeping with his tone, as if they were not two strangers pursuing some staid courtship ritual in a small town in an obscure corner of the Reich, but rather sophisticated, worldly lovers, known intimately to each other already and playing a game of pretend: Pretend we are two rubes in the backwaters of the empire, meeting for the first time. Pretend we know nothing of who we are or where we are headed. Pretend the conclusion of this chance encounter has not already been foretold.
Why had this faux familiarity been the starting point for them? It confused and flustered Benita, but at the same time seemed essential—vital to the excitement. She would wonder about it later, when the time to wonder about such things returned. By then Connie and old Frau Gruber were dead, and her brothers had been killed on the front. And there was no one left with any insight.
At the Golden Onion, Benita and Connie sat beside a pleasantly flickering fire, and Connie ordered them each a glass of the local cider and a schnitzel. It struck Benita as comical—a fancy staff officer from Berlin, ordering this. “So tell me,” he asked when their cider was before them and the Jägerschnitzel steamed greasily on its plate. “What do you really think of all this marching and saluting and repatriating the German peoples of Europe?”
Benita was shocked at his question—the implication and glib tone. It was, maybe, a trick, she thought. After all, had he not said he was here on some official business?
“I think it is a kindness by our Führer to bring them back into their motherland. And also the German people need more room and space,” she parroted Fräulein Brebel in a confused rush.
“Who told you that?” Connie asked, laughing.
“No one—it’s what I think,” Benita said, drawing herself up straight.
“And what of all the opponents and Communists and Jews who’ve been arrested?”
Benita stared at him in disbelief. It was a traitorous line of questioning. And the basis for the question was fuzzy in her mind—certainly in Frühlinghausen no great number of people had been arrested. She stared down at her hands and could feel the blood racing to her cheeks.
“Oh no! I have upset you! My dear maiden,” Connie said, again using his cheerful playacting voice. “Don’t let my talk confuse you. Here—we will talk about Frühlinghausen’s famous cider. Is it really as good as your arrogant distillers boast?” He took a swig and made a comically evaluative face. “Do they put socks in every barrel?”
“Only in the barrels they save for visitors like you!” Benita recovered and was delighted to hear him laugh.
“Well, it’s delicious,” he pronounced, setting his glass on the table. “In Berlin we have only beer.” He made a face.
“And champagne,” she said. “Isn’t it so? There are bars in Berlin where they serve nothing but champagne?”
“Absolutely.” Connie leaned forward and took her hand. A thrill raced through her at the touch. “Will you come to one with me, Mademoiselle Gruber?”
“You are an odd one!” Benita could not help exclaiming, and for a moment she worried that she had ruined their game. Connie threw back his head and laughed.
“I am sure you are right, fräulein. And you must promise to remind me of that whenever I am being a boor.”
The rest of the evening passed pleasantly. There was no further talk of politics, and Connie seemed truly interested in learning all about her. Benita had never been asked so many questions—about her family, her childhood, her town, and Fräulein Brebel’s BDM group, about which Connie was remarkably curious. The cider made her feel free and light. And through Connie’s eyes, she saw herself anew. Not only was she beautiful and young, a future bearer of bold and strong Aryan children, but she was also a woman who could tell funny stories. And her life—the boring, small-town monotony of Frühlinghausen—had become a subject worthy of this man’s attention: the carnival at which she was crowned queen last year, the crabby town butcher who mixed up everyone’s orders, the time Frau Meltzer’s pigs escaped onto the mental hospital grounds. Connie had a seemingly bottomless appetite for her tales. And every time his knee grazed hers, she felt a jolt of electricity.
When they reached 7 Krensig, the windows were dark. Frau Gruber was not one to stay awake past ten, even on such an occasion. Connie ran around to Benita’s side of the car and held her door as she climbed out. Then, as she stood there against the still-warm body of his car, he leaned down and kissed her—lightly and skillfully, one hand tilting her chin. It was entirely different from Herbert Schmidt’s rough advances or Torsten Finkenberg’s awkward kisses, and she felt her whole body thrill at the feel of his smooth-shaven chin and the height from which he approached. She leaned into the spicy clove scent of his aftershave and the pressed wool of his suit.
“Can I see you again?” he asked. “I leave tomorrow, but if you say yes, I will come back in two weeks.”
“Yes,” she said, leaving aside strategy and coyness.
“Then it is decided,” he said, “and I will wait until you are safely inside.”
With that, Benita made her way up the narrow path and into the ugly, comfortable squalor of her childhood home, forever changed. She was a maiden who had met her prince.
Chapter Four
Burg Lingenfels, June 1945
The little boy sitting on the counter in front of Marianne was a miniature version of his father. Same startling blue eyes, high cheekbones, and straight, elegant features. His demeanor was different, though, certainly from that of his father as a man, but also from what he had been like as a boy. This Martin was solemn, impassive, and self-controlled where that Martin had been exuberant, bright, and spontaneous. This Martin’s face was a closed door. God knows it had good reason to be—Marianne would never forget her first sight of him, peering, wan faced, out the window of that awful Nazi orphanage.
“Does this hurt?” Marianne asked as she straightened the battered leg they had come inside to repair.
No, he shook his head.
“Or this?”
He shook his head again. But this time he flinched.
“Well, then, we will wash and bandage it, and it will be good as new.”
Marianne dipped a rag into a bowl of water and then pressed it against the bloody gash. She could feel the grit in his broken flesh. But the boy did not cry.
It was a bad fall. He and Fritz had been playing some sort of game in the rafters of the old horse stable. Fritz’s idea, of course. Her son could not stay out of trouble. It was as if all the hasty actions, zany ideas, and ill-considered nonsense he’d suppressed during their stressful journey west from Weisslau had returned to him doubled. Where had he come by his incautious streak? Neither she nor Albrecht had been impulsive or disorganized as a child. Even Elisabeth, for all her willfulness, was at least careful.
Luckily the floor of the stable was still the original packed earth. And Martin had landed like a cat. He seemed to have inherited the gift of luck from his father, who’d always had it in spades . . . until he didn’t.
“You know not to play on those beams now,” Marianne said. “I think we need not concern your mother with this so long as you promise to be more careful. And”—she raised her eyebrows—“promise not to let Fritz get you into trouble—he can be a real gypsy.”
“I won’t,” Martin said, his voice earnest and childlike. She forgot just how young he was sometimes. “I promise.”
Martin was not easily brought to tears. She had seen this much when he said good-bye to the little girl from the Children’s Home: Liesel Stravitsky. It was obvious he had loved her. But when they found her family, such as it was—a beleaguered aunt with three small children, her father dead, her mother last known to be in Auschwitz—Marianne’s own eyes had not stayed dry. The poor girl had thrown her arms around Martin and bawled as if her little heart would break, but he had remained stoic.
Marianne tied the last strip of silk around the cut. “Why don’t you sit in the kitchen and help Elisabeth and Katarina shell the peas?”
Martin opened his mouth as if to speak.
“What is it?” she asked, placing a hand on his other, unhurt and chasteningly bony knee.
“When will I be able to see her?” he asked. “My mother?”
“Soon,” Marianne said. “I promise.”
Benita had fallen sick with diphtheria a week after arriving at Burg Lingenfels. They said this was what happened sometimes: as soon as one made it to safety, illness set in. Marianne and her children had been inoculated at the English hospital in Braunschweig. As the wife and children of Albrecht von Lingenfels, they were classified as Opfer des Faschismus—“Victims of Fascism”—and treated well by the British authorities, who had waved their cart past the long line of fellow refugees queued at the border between zones. They were a wretched lot, mostly old people, women, and children fleeing from the east. It made Marianne feel guilty. What right to special treatment did she and her children have? They were lucky enough to have a wagon and a horse to pull it.
Benita, on the other hand, had received none of these advantages. She had not advocated for herself as the widow of Connie Fledermann, an active resister and a man executed by the Nazis. Though to be fair, it was different in Russian-occupied Berlin. A German was a German to most Russians. So she was simply a German widow, and a beautiful one at that, which had not worked to her benefit. Marianne would never forget the leering soldiers around the table in the flat on Meerstein Strasse or the horrible little bedroom with the closed windows and stink of sex. She had arrived too late. She had promised Connie that she would protect his wife and child, and she had failed.
Once Martin was safely settled in the kitchen, Marianne washed the bloodied rags that had once been Elisabeth’s Communion dress. This had arrived last week in a giant sea trunk that was delivered, improbably, on the back of an American army mail truck. Her heart twisted when she saw the trunk. Albrecht had insisted, years ago, that they pack it up and send it to his cousins in Geneva for safekeeping—a gift from a foresighted dead man.
We live in the middle of nowhere, Albrecht! Marianne had complained when he suggested packing up their prized possessions. It’s not as if any army will bother with Weisslau.
But Albrecht was right. The Russians had marched right through the town, determined to avenge their losses, taking everything from bicycles to grandfather clocks to Grossmutter von Lingenfels’s maudlin needlepoints. Collateral for the toll the war had exacted—as if loot could bring back their dead.
You finally have your way with it all, Fräulein Communist, Marianne imagined Albrecht saying at the sight of the shredded Communion dress. It was their little joke. She had liked to proclaim fancy clothing and fine table settings bourgeois banalities—distractions from the real fineries of human life: music and poetry, theater and art . . .
Which was itself a foolish, bourgeois statement. The war had made this clear. Music, poetry, and art were luxuries, too. Everything was a distraction from the basic struggle between life and death.
What Albrecht had not understood, though, when he packed their trunk, was that the culture that had given birth to these precious objects and endowed them with value would be so thoroughly self-immolated that its assignations were no longer valid. What was the point of a Chinese silk pinafore sewn by Weisslau’s finest tailor when you didn’t even have a pair of shoes? Or a Meissen china tea service, transported without so much as one chipped plate, when there was no tea, no bread, no table to eat at? He had anticipated disaster but not lived to see its depths.
“Mama!” The washroom door flew open and Katarina appeared. “The American leader is here.”
“The American leader” was how the children referred to Lieutenant Peterman, the man in charge of rebuilding Ehrenheim and its surrounding area. He had been kind to the von Lingenfelses since their arrival, and he treated Marianne with a certain nervous respect based on his belief that she was descended from royalty (she was not) and that her husband had been a friend of the American general Patton (a vast exaggeration, as Albrecht had never even met the man). Marianne had not planted either of these ideas, but she didn’t go out of her way to correct them. Peterman was a useful ally. She had enlisted his help in her search for fellow widows of resisters, the women and children she had sworn so passionately to protect at the countess’s long-ago harvest party. The commander of wives and children, Connie had called her. The words had seemed demeaning to her at the time—an exclusion from the real business of conspiring, a reminder that she was, in the end, a woman, and therefore relegated to the work of picking up the pieces. But in the years since, she had come to understand his words differently: she was the last man standing, the decoy left holding the key.
Though what she was supposed to do with it remained opaque.
At the very least she could honor her promise and do her best to look out for the wives of the men present in the room that night.
“Frau von Lingenfels,” Peterman barked in his jocular way. On his lips von Lingenfels always sounded comical to her ears, the g hard and the syllables flat.
“Lieutenant,” Marianne replied.
Behind Peterman, she noticed another man—tall, thin, and wearing a ragged Wehrmacht uniform with the insignias removed. He stared down at his boots. A German prisoner of war. There were thousands of these in the British and American internment camps. “Have you found one of my fraus?” Marianne asked Peterman lightly. It was the same joke he had made when she gave him her list of names. So look for any of these names with Frau in front? he’d asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Peterman said. A shadow swept over his face. Clearly he had not given the list a thought. “But I’ve brought you someone to help out around the castle.”
Marianne looked from Peterman to the other man, who met her eyes for an instant. His own were a pale, almost transparent shade of blue, and he had a broad, unexpectedly handsome face. “Herr Muller is one of the detainees from our camp. And I figure you could probably use an extra set of hands around here. Muller is handy. Worked on a farm before the war, right?” he asked, turning to the man. “Bauernhof?”
The man looked from Peterman to Marianne questioningly.
/> He was not a farmer, Marianne understood.
“That’s all right.” She frowned. Marianne did not like the idea of relying on an ex-Nazi prisoner of the Americans for help. God knows what sort of person he was, what sort of soldier he had been. And on top of this, he was her countryman. “We don’t need any help.”
“I beg your pardon, Frau von Lingenfels, but—” Peterman stepped back and surveyed the castle edifice. “You have broken windows up there and missing slates. And”—he looked at her—“winter is coming. You’ll need wood.”
Peterman turned to the man again and pantomimed an ax. “You can chop wood—Holz. Right?”
The man nodded in assent.
“So?” Peterman asked, squinting at Marianne. “Will that suit? I’d hate to have you freeze up here, especially with so many trees around.”
Marianne sighed. “You make it hard to say no.”
“All right,” Peterman said. “Next Thursday then. You have an ax?”
Dinner that night was their usual nearly unpalatable meal of soup. Marianne had never learned to cook. As a girl, she had been spoiled—the bright and favorite daughter of a wealthy widower who believed in women’s education over domesticity. She had read Goethe and Schopenhauer and Schiller, rather than cookbooks.
“We are going to have a slave here? In our house? Once a week?” Elisabeth demanded.
“Oh, stop it. Certainly not a slave,” Marianne snapped. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“Well, he is.” Elisabeth harrumphed. “That’s what prisoners of war are. I heard Herr Koffel say so. Slave labor. Against international regulations. How is that different from what we did when we were in charge?”
“‘We’?” Marianne echoed, appalled. “We were never Nazis. Don’t forget that.”
Elisabeth shrugged. “Still. He won’t be getting paid for his work.”
“Right now, if you hadn’t noticed,” Marianne said, “no one is getting paid for their work. And certainly coming here to cut down trees once a week will be a pleasant relief from the internment camp, which seems to be an impossible place.” There were rumors of men dying in such installations, barren fields with no shelter and no shade from the sun, of men sleeping in holes they dug out. Though Marianne did not trust most rumors the Ehrenheimers circulated.
The Women in the Castle Page 6