The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

  She turned to her son. “Fritz, sit like a man and stop fidgeting.”

  “Did he kill many people in the war?” Katarina asked in a hushed voice. “Is that why he is a prisoner?”

  Marianne looked at this daughter: dark haired, plain faced, and thoughtful. Always slow and deliberate in her reactions. So much like Albrecht. “I don’t know, love.” She sighed. “Lots of people are prisoners. Even boys your own age who don’t know one end of a rifle from the other. I don’t know what Herr Muller did.”

  “Something bad anyway,” Elisabeth grumbled.

  “Oh, Elisabeth, really,” Marianne snapped. “I didn’t ask for his help. But now we have it. He will cut wood to help us get through the winter, and for that you should be thankful.”

  In the silence that followed, she mulled over her own words. Is that how it works? she could hear Albrecht asking. Personal gain trumps moral decision?

  Yes. No. What was the difference between the man working here at the castle or for the Americans? Either way he was a prisoner. Connie would have supported her view, wouldn’t he?

  She doled out the last of the soup.

  “Probably he had a Luger anyway,” Fritz offered. “Do you think he still has it?”

  “No,” Marianne said firmly. “No Germans can carry arms. Now, could we sit and eat our supper in peace?” She turned to Martin, who had remained quiet through all of this. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  After dinner, Marianne climbed the stairs to see Benita.

  She had moved her to a cot in the warren of servants’ rooms above the kitchen, where they all slept. These were the best rooms in the castle now. During the cold months, they would be warmed by the fire from the giant oven below. The formerly grand bedroom suites at the front of the castle were chilly and dim, littered with the hacked-up remains of ancient curtained beds. Marianne had been appalled to discover this when she arrived. Who would have chopped apart such antiques? In the great hall too the grand piano was mangled, its keyboard stripped of ivory, its wires splayed like a giant spider. Possibly the Nazis had done this; for a short time, before the end of the war, an SS unit had taken up residence in Burg Lingenfels. One corner of the courtyard was still stacked with their empty tins of meat and cherries and white asparagus. But it was also possible that the citizens of Ehrenheim were responsible for the destruction. In the last days of war, after the Nazis had left, many of the townspeople had holed up in the empty castle to hide from the approaching Americans, who they believed would rape and murder them. And Marianne would not put such destruction past the Ehrenheimers. They were an insular bunch, all married to one another’s cousins and uncles and brothers, and locked into the mind-set of medieval serfdom in which the castle folk were their oppressors. They had all been ardent Nazis, as far as she could tell. And to them, Marianne and her children were the family of a traitor, a man who had tried to kill their beloved Führer, in addition to being born von Lingenfels.

  Marianne paused and reached into her pocket for the letter she was delivering. It felt cool and soft with wear and sent a rush of adrenaline through her. She rapped lightly on Benita’s door.

  Lying in the narrow army cot Marianne had arranged, Benita no longer appeared the rosy German peasant Mädchen she had once been. Marianne had chopped her blond hair to help protect her from germs, and shorn like this Benita looked thin and world-weary—her full cheeks hollowed, the color of paper, and her eyes huge and dark. She was still beautiful, but now in a painful, trampled way.

  Marianne placed the tray of broth and water beside the bed, and Benita’s eyes fluttered open.

  “Is Martin all right?” she asked, and immediately began to cough.

  “Shh.” Marianne raised a finger to her lips. “He’s fine. He and Fritz have been up to all sorts of healthy little-boy things.”

  “He isn’t,” Benita began but was again interrupted by her cough. “He isn’t sick?”

  “Perfectly healthy,” Marianne said. She did not mention the fall.

  Benita nodded, but her eyes remained anxious.

  Before the war, Marianne had imagined that Benita would become mother to a horde of children, a robust and placid matriarch. Connie had always wanted a big family: five or six children at least, a different experience from his own as an only child. What had happened in the meantime? Miscarriages? Infertility? Connie had never confided in Marianne about his marriage, and she wasn’t close enough to Benita for her to do so. How ironic that she, bony, flat-chested Marianne, would be the more fertile of the two women.

  Marianne sat on the edge of the cot and lifted a spoonful of broth to Benita’s lips, the last of the bouillon they had smuggled out of Weisslau.

  Dutifully, Benita opened her mouth.

  As Marianne leaned in to spoon the soup, the letter crinkled. It was time, certainly, to give it to her. But it was so difficult to part with! Connie had left it with her the last time she saw him: To my wife, Benita Fledermann was written on the envelope in his long thin script, surprisingly elegant for a man’s. She was supposed to give it to Benita in the event of his death. And this time, when he’d enlisted her help, Marianne had not protested.

  But when the plot failed and Connie died, Marianne found she could not deliver the letter. It was too dangerous with Albrecht in prison. Six months passed between the assassination attempt and Albrecht’s trial and hanging. And Marianne had spent those months pleading for his release—visiting high-powered contacts, writing letters, and even, on three occasions, being interrogated by the Gestapo. Her possession of a letter from Connie Fledermann would not have helped matters. And then afterward, when Albrecht was dead, it was impossible to gain access to Benita, who was sequestered in a Nazi prison. So she had held on to the letter the entire journey back from Berlin, waiting for the right moment, which never seemed to come.

  “I have something for you,” she made herself say after Benita swallowed the last spoonful of broth.

  Benita lifted her eyes.

  Marianne pulled out the letter. It was dirty and crumpled. But it had survived—the Russians, the flight from Weisslau, the end of the war.

  To her surprise, Benita did not startle at the sight of her husband’s handwriting. She did not even move to take the letter from Marianne’s hand.

  “I’ve had this for too long,” Marianne began. “I’m sorry—I didn’t know how to get it to you, and when we were on our way from Berlin, it seemed so—it seemed that you should have a quiet place to read it.”

  Still Benita said nothing. From outside, Marianne could hear the sound of the children playing.

  “I didn’t even know, you know,” Benita said finally, looking up.

  “Know what?” Marianne asked.

  “What they were planning.”

  “They told almost no one.”

  “But they told you.” Benita’s tone was startlingly fierce.

  Marianne searched the girl’s pale face. It was both hard and hurt, tinged with petulance. For a moment, she felt the full weight of Connie’s words to her that night after the party. She is a simple girl and she won’t deserve whatever mess I might drag her into.

  “It was different.” Marianne sighed. “I was a part of their conversations. If I were a man . . . the Nazis would have hanged me, too.” She paused, considering. It was the first time she had spoken this aloud.

  Benita looked away.

  Between them the letter lay where Marianne had placed it. She felt its presence like a living thing. Like a child or an animal, waiting to be held.

  “How did you—” Benita began, and then dissolved into a fit of coughing. “How did you keep them from taking your children? And from sending you to prison?”

  “I don’t know,” Marianne said, though in truth she could guess. The Nazis had never liked Connie, whereas Albrecht had maintained the frustrated respect of a few among them until the very end—through his natural diplomacy, maybe. Or, more likely, on account of his deeper and more illustrious roots. Connie was from an old,
once-rich Junker family, but Albrecht was a von Lingenfels, descended from a long line of revered German generals, a vital “stem” of Hitler’s beloved master race. “We were lucky.”

  “Ah,” Benita said, “and we were not.” Finally she picked up the letter.

  But the look in her eyes was neither sad nor loving. She regarded the envelope in her hands like an object from outer space.

  “Here,” Marianne said, gathering the soup bowl and spoon. “I will leave you to read in peace.”

  Benita nodded.

  But as Marianne closed the door, she saw Benita set the letter down unopened and lie back, flat as a corpse.

  Marianne had spent a good amount of time considering Connie’s marriage. After his wedding, she had seen him together with Benita from time to time—at the Bemelmans’ Christmas party, at a few dinners she had hosted in Berlin, and once at a weekend gathering in Weisslau. It was a difficult match. The girl was quick to seem aggrieved (Connie had not fetched her from the station, or the baby was not sleeping, or no one had helped her with her suitcases on the train . . . ) and Connie was oversolicitous. But even though he was attentive, he remained somehow apart from his wife, disconnected from her in a way that seemed to encourage her complaints. Marianne did not understand what had drawn him to Benita to begin with. She did not normally consider such matters, but this was not just any marriage. Benita was Connie Fledermann’s wife. She was beautiful to be sure, but he had beautiful women all over Germany who fancied themselves in love with him. There was an innocence about her—an inherent lack of wit and sophistication that no amount of money or time in the city could transform, which was endearing in a certain way. But Marianne had never known Connie to be enthralled by this sort of simplicity. It was the Nazis who revered such quaint, unthinking volkishness, not forward-thinking men of the world like Connie. Yet Benita had captivated him.

  Marianne had come across them once, alone on the terrace of a mansion in Dahlem, at a party thrown by one of Albrecht’s colleagues. It was in the first years of the war, when there was still plenty of wine and gaiety to go around. She had hesitated in the doorway and something about their demeanor made her stop before calling out. Benita was smiling up at Connie coyly and was without little Martin, which was rare in those days. Connie’s back was to Marianne. As she watched, Benita said something that made him laugh—a real head-thrown-back burst of astonishment, and then he caught her around the waist and pulled her toward him with an intensity that made Marianne catch her breath. It was forceful, even aggressive—a side of Connie she had never seen. Benita returned his laughter and allowed herself to be wholly enveloped in his embrace with a kind of softness and subservience that Marianne couldn’t imagine emulating.

  This was the closest she had come to understanding Connie’s marriage: Benita made him a looser, more animal version of himself.

  Marianne had felt a stab of sadness at the realization and hastily retreated into the familiar comforts of the party, and the various like-minded people with whom she knew how to converse, but she was like a person masquerading at normalcy after receiving terrible news. And when Marianne found Albrecht, dear steady Albrecht with his soft eyes and stooped shoulders, his thoughtful, deliberate way of speaking, she felt lonely and irritated by the crumb caught on his cheek, the dandruff on his evening jacket. And the fact that he stepped back to make room for her rather than pulling her close.

  Chapter Five

  Weisslau, July 20, 1944

  For Marianne the twentieth of July had unfolded slowly.

  It was hot in Weisslau. The children mooned around in the late Grossmutter von Lingenfels’s parlor, a cave of faded tapestries and heavily shaded lamps. They loved to lounge on the horsehair sofa in their light summer clothes, sucking penny candies and leafing idly through the collection of ancient illustrated books: Greek myths, Bible stories, German folktales, and obscure scientific tomes. And Fritz spent an unseemly amount of time examining prudish drawings of the human body in a great Victorian medical encyclopedia. Grossmutter would have been appalled. Their activities in the parlor always struck Marianne as slothful, and vaguely debauched.

  On this day, the children were sorting a pile of scrap metal they had collected: valuables they planned to turn in to the local Nazi district head as their small contribution to the war effort. Marianne had no patience for such Nazi nonsense, especially when it involved turning her children into little warmongers. She had managed to keep them out of the youth groups despite Fritz’s wheedling (he hated to be excluded from the local Hitlerjugend Sunday hikes and football matches), but even so they were caught up in the obsessions of their peers. Collecting scrap metal seemed particularly idiotic to Marianne. And it always led to squabbles—who had found what and how much they would get in exchange. As if any of them really needed pocket money. They were lucky out here in Weisslau—on the land, with their own source of food and no bombs to worry about. This was the fifth year of the war, and in the cities it was ugly now. There, children needed all sorts of things (safety, a roof over their heads, enough to eat, and coal to burn in their furnaces through the winter). It had been nearly a year since the bombing of Hamburg, yet the stories and images of the aftermath were still grim. The newspapers ran tales of orphaned children living in the city’s remains, surviving on rats and fetid water; of people who had boiled to death in the canals as they tried to escape the firestorm. It was difficult, of course, to discern truth from propaganda, and Marianne trusted nothing the Nazi press printed. But still, the photographs were shocking—the inner city transformed into a gray and cratered landscape like the surface of the moon. And she had seen firsthand the faces of those who had fled to find work and housing in the south: they were blank with shock.

  On this particular afternoon, Marianne could not tolerate the children’s bickering. All night, all week really, she was held in suspense. Any day now “the plan” was to unfold. Uncle Ulrich will join us next weekend, Albrecht’s latest telegram from Berlin had read. Please prepare his favorite Semmelkuchen. They had decided on the code words together. Since then sleep had been a delicate web she was too big and too clumsy to be caught in—she clutched at strands of it like a falling woman . . .

  And despite the months and years of preparation, the arguments and discussions—What justifies a murder? Can right be achieved through wrong?—and despite the endless how and when and where and, most endlessly of all, What comes next?—it seemed incredible, impossible even, that their plot would unfold at last.

  Albrecht had not approved at first. Assassination. Murder. It was not the culmination he wanted for the resistance movement. In his estimation, injustice could be fought only with justice—he was a lawyer to the core. Murder was evil. This was an absolute. But if it would end the war and prevent the murder of thousands? Even millions? They had debated this often, deep into the night with him probing his own convictions and Marianne playing devil’s advocate. Although, in fact, she was not the devil’s advocate. She believed Connie and von Stauffenberg and the others were right. Hitler must be killed.

  For her, the case was sealed three years before, when Freddy Lederer returned from the east. He had stopped at Weisslau on his journey from the General Government zone of occupied Poland. And Freddy, an openhearted boy Marianne had known since childhood, always the first to jump off the dock at the lake and the last to come in for dinner at the Grand Hotel on the Ostsee, had been a gaunt shell of himself. He had recently returned from an intelligence trip for the Abwehr, and they had assigned him an SS escort, who had taken him to see an “action”—a “miracle of efficiency and dedication,” as this SS man described it. The “action” was being carried out by a unit of ordinary German reservists, older men for the most part, civilians with little or no training or military background. They had been instructed to “cleanse” the area south of Lublin. Lublin—Freddy had shuddered pronouncing the name—a kind of hell on earth. They were rounding up Jewish women, children, and old men and marching them into the f
orest to be shot.

  To be shot? Marianne repeated. Are you certain? She had heard rumors, of course, but had still believed (though not supported) the Nazis’ Madagascar plan. All Polish Jews would be shipped to that island to form their own homeland. Other, darker stories trickled back from the front, but she had dismissed them as rumor or exaggeration. This was different, though. This was straight from the mouth of Freddy Lederer.

  And he had seen it with his own eyes. German soldiers paired one-to-one: victims and their killers marched into the woods as partners. Children had been assigned their own executioners. He had watched one woman with three children—a little one, unable to walk yet, an older boy and a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old. The girl had refused to let go of her mother’s hand, so she had been allowed to walk together with her and the baby, a tiny thing wrapped carefully in blankets, looking around with wide eyes.

  “That one will make trouble,” Freddy’s escort had said with indifference. “Three shots for one soldier. It will slow the process down.”

  When Freddy finished speaking, silence welled up around them in the comfortable library of Weisslau with its roaring fire and plush furniture, its dog snoring lazily on the hearth. Marianne sat frozen with a kind of stillness that aimed to stop time, to go back, to untell Freddy’s story.

  For the longest time, Freddy said, I could not grasp what I was looking at. I saw it, but I couldn’t take it in. It was—he groped for an analogy, his pale face haggard with the effort—it was like one of those hidden pictures; you see a goblet not a face, a stairway not a flower, you can’t see it even when it’s right there in front of you. And then suddenly—he raised his eyes and looked directly at Marianne—you do.