The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

  One day, Marianne came to visit with a basket of fine rolls from Bemmelman’s. It was still strange to receive her as Frau Kellerman, farm mistress rather than tenant. Ania was embarrassed at the disorder of the kitchen and her own rumpled dress. As she looked at her familiar friend’s face, she was oppressed by her own secrets. Dear, difficult Marianne, who had been so generous and optimistic from the start. She had taken in Ania and her boys without hesitation, without question, and never looked back. This blessing had turned into a burden. At any moment, it would blow up in Ania’s face.

  Awkwardness made Ania formal. She pulled out Carsten’s precious supply of tinned cookies and arranged them prettily on a plate.

  “Don’t make me feel a visitor,” Marianne said, waving them away. She seemed distracted herself. “I have to ask you something,” she blurted, and Ania’s heart raced.

  “Have you ever known me to be cruel?”

  Ania almost laughed. “Never.”

  Marianne sighed.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Marianne turned from the window she had been staring out. “Did you know Benita stayed in touch with Herr Muller? The prisoner? Do you remember him?”

  Herr Muller. In Ania’s mind, an image presented itself. A tall man, square jawed, pale eyed. She saw him as he had been the morning of the Russians, carrying Benita: a man with a guarded, uncertain face. A fellow keeper of secrets.

  Marianne waited.

  “I remember him. Why?” she asked, glancing out the window. The barnyard was empty. Her constant checking had become a nervous tic.

  “Apparently she has been seeing him. All this time—writing letters and visiting—he lives nearby—in Momsen! And she imagines she loves him!” Marianne stopped. “I never even heard a word about it. All this time.”

  Ania poured a cup of coffee and set it before Marianne. She was surprised but not shocked. She had wondered whether there was something between them at the time. But she had not imagined that their affair would have continued from that life into this. Benita, unlike the prisoner, was no keeper of secrets.

  “When did she tell you this?” she asked.

  “Just this week. As if I would be happy!” Marianne stared down into her coffee and then up at Ania. “She never told you either?”

  Ania shook her head.

  “All this time she was lying!”

  Ania hesitated. “She didn’t lie,” she said. “She just didn’t share the truth with us.”

  Marianne frowned. “She concealed what she was doing. What’s the difference?”

  Ania busied herself with drying dishes, feigning nonchalance. “It could be like a photograph with the faces blacked out. What you see is true; it’s just incomplete.”

  “But who are people without their faces?” Marianne was impatient. “How could you know a man if you can’t see his face?”

  When Rainer finally came, it was mid-July, and the weather was hot. Ania sat in the shade under the chestnut tree shelling peas. Sweat dripped down her sides and made her thighs sticky. Heat rose from the limestone of the barnyard in slippery, distorting waves.

  He was halfway across before Ania saw him. She had imagined this moment so many times that the reality was strangely flat. A single burst of adrenaline shot through her, followed by something like relief.

  It was clear that he was unwell. He was thinner than ever and walked with a limp. His face was waxy, and there were dark hollows beneath his eyes. His breathing was labored.

  At about four meters away, he stopped.

  Staring at him, Ania saw a stranger. Not someone she loved, not someone she hated. Just someone she no longer knew. It was frightening but uncomplicated.

  For a long time neither of them spoke. There was the sound of his breathing, the buzz of bees in the branches, and the mild rustle of leaves.

  Rainer stared at her round belly. She placed a hand over it.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  Removing a dirty cloth from the pocket of his even dirtier jacket—much too hot for this weather—Rainer wiped his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut. He looked like a man who needed to lie down. He looked like a man who was dying.

  And suddenly, after all the time she had spent dreading this moment, Ania knew what to do.

  He opened his eyes again and regarded her. “Am I speaking to Ania Kellerman or Ania Brandt?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Momsen, July 1950

  Before Benita awoke, Marianne rose and took the train to Momsen to see Franz Muller.

  No matter how many times she made this trip, the landscape remained foreign. The craggy mountains and flat green valleys dotted with cows, the patches of woods and hay huts were like something out of a fairy tale—complex, shadowy, and intricate. So unlike the wide open farmland of Weisslau. How she still missed it. Nothing could hide on the flat plain of northern Silesia—armies, visitors, weather, all were apparent from kilometers away. And Marianne felt at home with this transparence.

  For a brief stretch, the Isar River ran alongside the tracks. It came down from the high mountains, fast and pale, full of some mineral that turned it a livid, almost unnatural whitish green. To Marianne, it reeked of menace. The ashes of Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Frick—those architects of Nazi horror—had been scattered along its banks. By whose decision? The random assignment of some government automaton? Or by their own wishes? Was there some symbiotic energy these men had felt? On the far side rose the jagged mountain peaks.

  When Marianne had first arrived in this area at the end of the war, a freshly mounded pile of earth ran alongside this river. As she rode into Momsen with Carsten Kellerman for the first time, she saw men and women scrabbling around on its banks, digging.

  What are they doing? she had asked.

  Looking for their people, he had answered, his eyes inscrutable.

  This was the grave of hundreds of marchers, he explained, the end point for those wretched collections of prisoners driven west from concentration camps. Why? For what reasons were they marched? At that point, the war was as good as over. Everyone knew. But still the SS had marched those prisoners until they dropped from exhaustion and then shot them when they fell. So the dead had lain here until the townspeople buried them, under this pile of earth. And after capitulation, some small number of brothers and fathers and friends and cousins returned to look for their loved ones. Marianne would never forget that.

  But the townspeople went about their business as if it had never happened. They fished and washed in the river and walked alongside it in the evenings. No one spoke of the prisoners they had watched stumble and die along its banks. No one erected a marker over their bones.

  At Momsen station, Marianne got off. She had steeled herself for the encounter, but now that she was actually here, her hands were cold and clammy and her face felt hot. Better to be quick and done with it. The children would wonder where she was and, left to their own devices, they would certainly forget their studies. Fritz would get into trouble . . . Benita was as good as another child when it came to discipline.

  Marianne had intended to confide her plan to Ania, but something had stopped her. Ania had seemed surprised to learn of Benita’s affair, but not shocked. It was clear she did not share Marianne’s moral outrage—and why should she? She had never known Connie. And from what Marianne could discern, her own husband’s life as a resister remained opaque. Ania was deeply silent on the subject. Marianne suspected marital tragedies that went beyond the man’s death. And it was her philosophy not to disturb them—what good was opening a wound that had sealed itself shut? So she let it be, though deep down, she was disappointed by Ania’s indifference. Marriage to Kellerman had put distance between them. But, unlike Franz Muller, Carsten Kellerman was a good man, at least.

  In the month since Benita had announced her engagement, a stilted, awkward air had settled over their flat. Marianne and Benita skirted each other and exchanged cool, polite conversation only when necessary. Fortunately, the ch
ildren were too absorbed in their own activities to notice the chill. Martin and Fritz would soon depart for the boarding school Katarina and Elisabeth attended, and they were busy roaming the hills and fields around Tollingen, enjoying their summer holiday.

  But this silence in their flat could not go on forever. Even in her anger, Marianne loved her friend. Benita needed protection. She was easy prey—so fragile and romantic and readily swayed. For all Marianne knew, Muller might harbor a false sense of her fortune and believe her to be rich. After all, when he’d met her, she’d lived in a castle. And who knew what his debts were, or his prospects?

  It was easy to find the shop where Herr Muller worked. There was only one coffin maker in Momsen. It sat on the first floor of a hulking, coal-smoke-stained building, still pocked with bullet holes. In the final days of the war, the local Hitler Youth and Home Guard had put up a fierce, irrational fight, losing countless lives, destroying buildings and bridges. And the mad captain in charge of this motley group was now a town councilman. Momsen was as bad as Ehrenheim, in Marianne’s view.

  To the left of the shop, Marianne found a doorway with a list of names. muller, one read. So he lived here, too. Marianne could not imagine Benita calling this home. She was a woman who lived for creature comforts and pretty dresses. It bolstered Marianne’s sense of rightness to think that she was sparing her friend from such a fate.

  A little girl opened the door when Marianne knocked: pale, dark haired, and unusually slim with wide, wary eyes.

  “Can I help you?” the girl asked.

  “Is this the shop of Franz Muller?” Marianne asked.

  The girl nodded. She looked about Martin’s age. “Would you like to come in?” she asked. “Papa!” she called into the shop.

  Marianne was taken aback. So the man had a daughter. It rendered him less monstrous.

  The door opened into a gloomy alcove and from somewhere inside, she heard the grating of a saw, which at this moment knocked off. “Clotilde?” came a man’s voice, and heavy footfalls across the floor.

  And then Franz Muller stood at the entrance. In the flesh, his face looked dismayingly ordinary, free of the darkness Marianne had attached to it in her mind’s eye.

  “You can invite our visitor in—” he began, and then broke off, recognizing Marianne.

  “Frau von Lingenfels,” he said in surprise. “Come in.” He held open the door. “Can I offer you something—we don’t have much here—but a cup of tea? Some biscuits?”

  “That’s all right,” Marianne said. “Just a moment of your time.”

  “Ah.” He nodded. “Clotilde, will you leave us? You can go upstairs and see if Grosspapa needs help.”

  The girl’s dark eyes passed from her father to Marianne with curiosity. Then she grabbed her coat off a hook. “When shall I come back?”

  “I will come get you,” Franz said. “Go on—but say good-bye to Frau von Lingenfels first.”

  “Good-bye,” the girl said. “Please come again.”

  It seemed such a curious thing to say—come again to a coffin shop? Did they have many repeat visitors? Or had she mistaken Marianne for a friend? The girl’s innocence was disarming. Marianne watched as her narrow back disappeared.

  Marianne followed Herr Muller into the shop. It was a long, narrow place, with coffins lining one wall, and the planks and boards they were made of stacked high on the other—so much wood and so many supplies for preserving the dead. It was an ugly business. In the corner was a modest table and four chairs. Perhaps this was where Herr Muller sat to sell his wares to vulnerable, grief-stricken clients. This too shored up her resolve.

  He pulled a chair out for her and sat down.

  “Herr Muller,” Marianne began. “I won’t waste your time—you are a busy man, I can see. I wanted, however, to tell you that Benita has informed me of your plans.” She made an effort not to look away. In all the hopeless meetings with Nazi officials that she had conducted when Albrecht was in prison, she had learned how to return a gaze.

  “Our plan . . . ?” he asked.

  “Your plan to marry.” She let the word sit between them. “And I would like you to know that I am against it.”

  “Ah.” The man looked stricken.

  “Benita’s first husband was my good friend,” she continued. “A very dear friend, and a man of great character. He gave his life fighting against Hitler and the Nazis, and I don’t believe it is right that his widow, and more importantly, his son, be joined”—she hesitated, gathering courage—“to a man with your past.”

  Outside, a wagon clattered down the street. But in the room full of coffins, Herr Muller mounted no defense. He had shockingly blue eyes. Marianne had forgotten this.

  “Does Benita know you’re here?” he asked finally.

  “No.” Marianne swallowed.

  “Ah.” He nodded.

  Marianne waited for an outburst of indignation. She had prepared for this. But still he said nothing.

  “I hope to keep this conversation between us,” she said into the silence. “I promised her husband before he died that I would look out for her. And that I would look out for his son.”

  “I understand.” Herr Muller nodded.

  “You understand?” Marianne repeated.

  The man lifted his eyes.

  “I love Benita,” he said. “She is a good woman and she deserves a good life. And I . . .” He paused. “I wish it were different. I wish my life had not been as it was.” His blue eyes flashed at hers. “And I am deeply sorry for the loss of your husband and hers. They were brave men.”

  Marianne stared at him. To her horror, she felt that she was going to cry. Or worse—that she was about to snort and sob and explode with all the ungraceful, unholy sadness that she had locked up inside her. And once she started she would never stop.

  She could not let this happen. So she sat straight as an arrow and focused on the coffins—the dark knots of pine and the stippling of oak, the gleam of the hinges. Silence welled around them, this time not awkward but necessary, like a cocoon. From upstairs came the sounds of footsteps, muffled voices—the sweet chirp of the girl and the lower, grumpier tone of the grandfather, whoever he was. Marianne held on to these like a lifeline, trying to make out the words of their conversation. The effort calmed her. The hard knot in her throat dissipated.

  With as much dignity as possible, she rose.

  Herr Muller followed, jumping to pull back her chair. When they arrived at the threshold, he bowed. “I will consider your words,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Marianne managed, ducking her head.

  When she was around the corner she stopped, her chest heaving. She had intended to mention the Russian, Muller’s time in the east, and the fact of Benita’s innocence, her trust, her naïveté. What had happened? Somehow Muller’s lack of argument had rendered her preparations irrelevant. She had gotten what she wanted.

  Albrecht, she called out in her mind, I did what was right, didn’t I? But it was almost as if she were talking to herself.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Tollingen, July 1950

  Benita was meeting Franz to talk about the future. She had not seen him since their engagement—first Clotilde had been sick, then his father, and then work had been too busy (too many dead people, Benita joked in a moment of lightness). But she had finally managed to corral him. Their marriage plans would need to be accelerated. Marianne’s response to their news was even worse than Benita had imagined, and she hated living with her in this new, uncomfortable silence. Every day was like a punishment—and for what? Loving a man Marianne did not approve of? It was insulting, and worse, condescending. As if she had no right to her own future. Benita owed Marianne gratitude for finding Martin when she had given him up for dead, and for that she would be forever grateful. But she did not owe Marianne the rest of her life. She waited for Franz at Bemmelman’s Café in a state of agitation, clinking the spoon in her cup of coffee.

  Usually Bemmelman’s made Benit
a happy. It was new, for one thing, and she liked new. She liked the high, gleaming windows and chic metal tabletops. She liked the sweetened cream and the selection of modern tortes with their bright out-of-season fruits and glossy layers of gelatin.

  Benita held no reverence for anything old or historic. History was horrible, a long, sloppy tail of grief. It swished destructively behind the present, toppling everyone’s own personal understanding of the past. It was, in part, why she felt such an urgent need to remarry. For Marianne, history came above all else; for Benita, it was death.

  From the moment Franz walked in, though, Benita knew something was not right. His usually calm, placid face was edged with worry. And he looked as though he had not slept in weeks.

  “Franzl,” she said, wrinkling her brow. “What is it? You look like a man who has swallowed a monster.”

  He shook his head and sat across from her. “It isn’t right” were the first words from his mouth. Not Hello or How are you or You look beautiful. The rudeness was utterly unlike him.

  “What isn’t?” she asked.

  Franz looked out the window at the drizzle. “I can’t marry you, Benita.”

  Benita pretended that she had not heard him.

  “You can’t what?” she asked.

  On the street, a group of jabbering teenage girls scuttled past.

  “I can’t marry you, Benita. It wouldn’t be right.”

  For Benita, the whole world lurched.

  “Right?” she managed to ask. “For who?”

  “For you.” Franz sighed. “For Martin. You deserve better.”

  “Better than what? Is this about the flat?” The thought flooded her with relief, and she grasped it like a life raft. “I don’t care about the flat—we will move someday, and in the meantime, we can find a place for your father—a room in the house on the corner, maybe, or—”