The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

  “For shame,” Marianne spat. “Have you become such monsters that you can laugh at that?” The girls stared at her, not with shame or anger but with fear. And all around her Marianne felt the people draw close together, tightening their scarves and jackets, squaring their shoulders, fortifying themselves against her reproach.

  A rumor had developed in Ehrenheim and elsewhere that the film was a piece of Allied propaganda and that the footage really showed German soldiers and collaborators killed and starved in Soviet gulags. In the last months of the war, the Americans had dropped leaflets with photos of concentration camp victims from airplanes and this was how Hitler had explained them. Being the sheep they were, the Ehrenheimers believed him. And they clung to this idea now—a thin protection between them and their own complicity.

  It made Marianne livid with fury and shame.

  Unlike Marianne, Benita did not go see the film. And she stopped listening to the news broadcasts with the von Lingenfelses.

  “Ugh,” she said with a shudder on the third night when she joined them sitting around the radio. The subject was the liberation of Mauthausen, another concentration camp. “Do you really think the children should hear this?” Benita asked.

  Marianne turned and stared at her. “Of course they should. They are Germans.”

  The children fidgeted in their seats. Even Elisabeth knew better than to interject.

  Cowed, Benita returned to her darning and listened to the rest of the broadcast in silence.

  But the following night she begged off. She was too tired to listen and was going to bed. Marianne bit her tongue. Where was Benita’s sense of moral responsibility? Where was her compassion? She seemed to have no feeling of commitment to—or belonging in—the wider world. She was as bad as the citizens of Ehrenheim. Marianne’s anger rose as suddenly as a flock of startled birds. Connie had loved Benita, she reminded herself. She was the mother of Connie’s son. This was what mattered.

  But it was so difficult not to judge! Some deep seed in Marianne’s being grew unstoppably toward fairness, pushing blindly through nuance and complication to extract a simple answer: wrong or right.

  As a girl, roaming the Ostsee with Connie and Freddy and the other children of the Prussian aristocracy, she had been christened “The Judge.” In the anarchic atmosphere of the summer holidays, the children had turned to Marianne to sort out their quarrels and issues of fairness. She had loved the role. It made her feel distinguished and powerful. And it was because of this privileged place she held that she and Connie grew close. He was a leader of the group too, an inventor of the best games and most exciting adventures, a charismatic Pied Piper to the children of the Grand Hotel. In the absence of nannies and governesses, who were instructed by their parent overlords to let children return to nature on these holidays, Connie and Marianne reigned together—king and queen of the wild things—Connie full of mischief, and Marianne (at fourteen) full of wisdom.

  But then her role became a prison as the age of flirtation descended and Marianne found herself locked out of its frivolities. Her reputation made her self-conscious. How could The Judge bat her eyelashes and giggle? How could she feign the silliness necessary to play such games? She was not well suited to flirtation in a physical sense, either. She was tall and dark and awkwardly proportioned, with coltish long limbs, a flat chest, and a somber face.

  Even so, Marianne imagined that her connection to Connie was meant to transition into something more adult, more gendered. More romantic. What exactly that entailed, she did not consider, but she believed it was a given, as confusing as it was promising.

  Then one night their little group went swimming in the moonlight. There was a ball at the hotel and all the adults were swept up in the excitement. It was a hot night and the ballroom was fetid with the stink of alcohol and perfume, waxy hothouse lilies and sweat. The children escaped to the beach, stripping their clothes as they went, giddy with the excitement of transgression. The sand was still warm from the sun, and the Baltic looked especially soft in the windless darkness, the waves barely lapping at their toes. One by one, they plunged into the water, laughing and calling out.

  For most, the swim was quick. Despite the calm, they were frightened of the blackness, and they charged back up the dunes to pull on their dresses, shirts, and trousers, crouching and shrieking at the prospect of being seen naked. But Marianne and Connie remained. They swam as if it were a competition to see who would turn back first. When she finally stopped, her heart pounding, she became aware of her body, naked below the surface, suspended precariously over the depths. Connie noticed and turned and swam back to her, emerging nearby, shaking the water from his hair. Above them, stars twinkled through the haze, and in the distance, the hotel sparkled like a cruise ship. For a moment, Marianne was terrified. Of their distance from the shore and of the unknown deep, but also of Connie, her own nakedness, and her certainty that this was the moment that would change their relationship. Her whole body thrilled with anticipation.

  But just as she began to swim in his direction, he dove under the water.

  “I won,” he called when he surfaced, farther away. Then with confident, lazy strokes he started toward the shore.

  One afternoon, Benita, Katarina, and Elisabeth returned from town, flush faced and laughing, their light moods discordant with Marianne’s.

  “You have a note, from Herr Peterman,” Elisabeth exclaimed. She held out a thin envelope. “Maybe we’re invited to one of their parties!” Elisabeth was preoccupied with the thought of attending an American army event and dancing with a soldier. Where did she get these ideas? Benita? The doltish Ehrenheim girls she had recently met? She was only thirteen.

  Marianne took the envelope and tore it open.

  It was not an invitation, but something of far more import.

  We have identified the wife of the late Pietre Grabarek, whose name is on your list. Her name is Ania Grabarek and she is accompanied by two sons. She is currently at the Tollingen Displaced Persons Camp.

  The news was exciting but also puzzling. Grabarek was a Polish name, and one Marianne did not immediately recognize. But apparently she had given it to Peterman. She had lifted the names directly from Albrecht’s journal, and not all his associates and contacts were known to her. She felt a pang of disappointment that it was not someone she knew—Carlotta Biedermann, for example, whom she had always liked and had lost track of completely. But this was selfish. The list was not about providing her with friends. It was about finding the women she had sworn to help.

  She read the note aloud.

  “Oh.” Elisabeth harrumphed in disappointment. “I thought it was an invitation.”

  The children did not understand their mother’s quest. They were, in fact, discomfited by it. Now that school had begun, such as it was, taught by the sorriest lot of old maids and barely literate numbskulls (all the old teachers had been defrocked as fervent Nazis, this being Ehrenheim), they were surrounded by people who mourned Hitler in secret and viewed Albrecht as a traitor. The children craved distance from their father’s reputation.

  “Who is Ania Grabarek?” Katarina asked politely.

  “I don’t know,” Marianne confessed. “Do you remember him, Benita? Pietre Grabarek? ”

  Benita shook her head with disinterest. Of course Benita didn’t remember. The girl had no interest in politics.

  “The wife of Pietre Grabarek,” Marianne mused aloud.

  Suddenly an image came to her: a short man, dark haired, bearing urgent news. He had brought word of Kristallnacht as it was unfolding across Germany. A Polish envoy, or some sort of diplomat. An associate of Connie’s rather than Albrecht’s.

  “I think maybe I do remember,” Marianne said. “He came late—straight from Munich.”

  Benita shrugged and kept her eyes on the buttons she was counting. “Could be.”

  “He was a particular friend of Connie’s,” Marianne persisted.

  “That doesn’t mean I would know him,”
Benita said.

  “No.” Marianne looked down. “Well, we will find out who she is soon enough.”

  Chapter Eight

  Burg Lingenfels, August 1945

  To Ania Grabarek, it was clear that the woman leading them out of the Tollingen Displaced Persons Camp was accustomed to giving orders. She had a wide, confident stride and the sort of commanding tone Ania was not used to hearing from members of her own sex. Even her name conveyed forcefulness: Marianne Falkenberg von Lingenfels.

  “Your father was a brave man,” the woman said over her shoulder to Ania’s boys. “It is my honor to host his family.”

  Ania glanced at her sons with their pale, thin faces. They looked stricken. Fear and confusion had rendered them mute. Poor Anselm had barely spoken since Dresden, and Wolfgang—Wolfgang, her baby, her fierce one—had fallen into the sullen glower of a trapped animal.

  Frau von Lingenfels moved on to the next subject. Then suddenly she stopped. “What’s this?” They were passing a low building from which people emerged like ghosts, covered in acrid-smelling gray chemical dust: the camp’s delousing hall.

  “Decontamination,” Ania answered.

  “Horrible!” Frau von Lingenfels exclaimed. “There must be a more humane way!” She was clearly a do-gooder, an advocate. It made Ania wary.

  At the gate, a young man in a UNRRA badge waved them past. This was the agency in charge of Europe’s DP camps—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration: it seemed to Ania a miracle that such an agency could exist. The line of new entries waiting to be processed stretched down the road. Every day more people arrived from the east: ethnic Germans expelled from territories annexed by Russia and Poland, some who had settled there at Hitler’s urging, some whose families had lived there for centuries; Russian Cossacks who had fought alongside the Nazis; Ukrainian nationalists who had fought against the Russians; and anyone else fearing Stalin’s wrath. Last month the camp had run out of beds. Now, new arrivals waited to be assigned local “hosts,” who would provide them a place to sleep under their own roofs. Usually, these hosts were reluctant at best. But not Marianne von Lingenfels. She had volunteered to host the Grabareks. In fact, she had sought them out. They were meant to be grateful, Ania understood. But she wasn’t. She preferred the anonymity of the camp.

  “You speak without an accent,” Frau von Lingenfels said as they started in the opposite direction of the waiting people. “Are you originally German?”

  Ania nodded.

  “Ahhh,” the woman said. “But your husband was Polish?”

  Ania nodded again.

  “And you speak German, too?” Frau von Lingenfels continued, turning to the boys. “What are your names?”

  The boys remained silent. Anselm sent an anxious look in his mother’s direction, Wolfgang glared at the ground.

  “This is Anselm and this is Wolfgang,” Ania supplied.

  The woman remained oblivious.

  “Well, you will meet two other young men about your ages at our castle: my boy, Fritz, who is eight, and his friend Martin, who is six—another child of a resister. I am sure you will become great friends.

  “Burg Lingenfels is not a castle as you might imagine,” she continued cheerfully. “It’s not grand. We live in the kitchen, really, because the rest of the place is empty and damp. And there’s no more fine furniture—no one has lived in it for ages. But it has its advantages. A roof, for instance!” She laughed. “And a great big oven we can light when it’s cold. And there were once little princes and princesses living in it. Learning to joust and eating off golden plates and whatnot. Or anyway, my children like this idea . . .”

  Ania let the woman’s words roll over her. They were going to a castle, to live with a “widow of the resistance,” as Marianne von Lingenfels referred to herself. Thrushes sang from the grass. Poppies bloomed in the field. There was no checkpoint, no scrape of strafers, no tromp of boots. This was the important thing.

  “Before the war, the castle belonged to my husband’s great-aunt,” Frau von Lingenfels continued. “She didn’t live in it, but she organized parties there, and picnics. She was something of an eccentric. Your father met her once—he was there for one of her parties.” She grew serious. “That was the only time I met him. Did he tell you anything about it? Countess von Lingenfels? Albrecht, my husband? Or Connie Fledermann?”

  “No.” Ania shook her head.

  “Your husband was in the Polish Foreign Office before the war?”

  “He was in the military.”

  “Ahhh.” Frau von Lingenfels nodded. “And then in the Home Army?”

  Ania nodded.

  “Was he arrested by the Nazis or killed in the fighting?”

  “He was sent to a camp.”

  A look of remorse, even pity, crossed the woman’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Albrecht always felt guilty that we were not able to do more to support the Home Army, that he was imprisoned before the uprising.”

  Ania was silent. No checkpoints, no strafers, no stomping boots, she reminded herself.

  Dinner consisted of potatoes, cabbage, and mushrooms the children had gathered in the forest, and, luxury of luxuries, three boiled eggs. At the camp, the Grabareks had eaten thin gruel and spinach soup every day. This was a more lavish meal than they had seen in half a year. The eggs, apparently, were a gift from the farmer at the base of the hill, a man named Herr Kellerman, whom Frau von Lingenfels referred to as “our hero” with a glibness Ania understood was meant to be kind.

  “But the eggs should be for you, not us,” Ania said stiffly, dredging up a trace of manners she had learned in another life. Anselm and Wolfgang looked alarmed.

  “Nonsense,” Marianne said. “You need them. We take turns.”

  Besides Frau von Lingenfels, there were her two daughters—one dark and solemn, the other lighter haired, tall, and skeptical. And her son, a sturdy boy of about Wolfgang’s age who would not sit still, and another woman and her son. The last two were confusing to her. Benita and Martin Fledermann. They too were refugees, Ania understood. Their husband and father had also been executed by Hitler for his role in the July 20 conspiracy. The rest of the connection was lost: Frau von Lingenfels had grown up with him, or her husband had grown up with Frau Fledermann, or someone had known someone as a child.

  The von Lingenfels children spoke too fast. Frau von Lingenfels assumed too much. Their words raced over Ania like water from a hose. They too had come from the east, from Silesia. First, they had gone to Berlin. There had been an illness. There was a list of widows. Other wives of resisters. She, Ania Grabarek, was the second one they had found. The first was Frau Fledermann.

  Anselm and Wolfgang kept their eyes down. Ania nodded and ate.

  Frau Fledermann and her son were also silent. Both were pale and blond and beautiful—she in the fragile way of an injured bird, and he like a blinking, quietly startled fawn. They were not at ease here either. This made Ania like them.

  When the von Lingenfelses were done telling, they began with the questions.

  “Were you taken to a Children’s Home, like Martin?” Fritz asked Anselm. “Were you in a KZ?”

  Anselm shook his head no.

  “Were you in Warsaw when it was bombed? Was it worse than Berlin? Were the Russian soldiers as cruel as everyone says?”

  Anselm and Wolfgang shook their heads, focused on their eggs. No, no, and a shrug.

  They fielded the questions with one-word answers, shoveling food into their mouths. In the last months, they had become animals, used to sleeping in the open, foraging for sustenance, guarding against predators.

  Ania felt exhaustion settle over her. If she closed her eyes for even a moment, she was certain she would fall asleep.

  “Enough,” Frau von Lingenfels announced, pushing back her chair. “We are overwhelming our guests. Elisabeth and Katarina, wash up. Fritz and Martin, bring in water. Grabareks, go to bed.”

  With relief, Ania led her boys upstair
s to the small room they had been assigned above the kitchen. In the middle, two mattresses were covered with sheets and two blankets each. When was the last time Ania and her boys had slept on sheets? The beauty of it, this simple sign of order and cleanliness, tightened her throat. She remembered learning to fold sheets as a girl, to wrap them around the mattress, pulling the corners just so—a realm of knowledge rendered meaningless over the previous months.

  “Mama . . .” Anselm’s voice floated out of the darkness. Disconnected from his body, which had grown tall and wiry, it sounded childish: a reminder that he was only nine. “Are you going to tell them . . . ?”

  Ania jolted awake.

  “Tell them what?” Wolfgang demanded before she could speak. “That you don’t want to stay here? That you want to go back to the camp?” His voice was surprisingly harsh. Of the two, he was the leader despite the fact that he was younger.

  “No,” Anselm said meekly. And then: “Mama?”

  Ania was silent. Through the dark she could feel both boys waiting for her to respond.

  Outside, an owl hooted in the dark. “Hush,” she said finally. “Time to sleep.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Warthegau, January 1945

  In sleep, Ania returns to the march. Not so much in her dreams as in her memory. It waits there for her to relive—a weird middle point, the journey from one life to another, her personal metamorphosis.

  The road to Breslau teems with refugees. Mothers, children, old people, sisters . . . all flee before the advancing Red Army. Some are from as far away as the Black Sea and have been on the road for months. There are few men among them—only the crippled, sick, and elderly. The war is not over yet and the rest of the men are fighting—for the Germans, the Russians, the local partisans, or whoever is the most expedient to fight for. Even more of them are dead.