Benita looked at her. Her face was the embodiment of Frühlinghausen, all the meanness and small-mindedness Benita had always despised—only transformed from an indifferent force to a specific, ugly power, a highly evolved venom to which she was uniquely susceptible. “No,” Benita said with as much dignity as she could summon, and gathered her bag and hat. “I know you have none of that.”
She walked through the town like a blind woman. And in her humiliation, she did not notice the telltale signs that Gephardt had returned—the hat and boots in the doorway vestibule, the dirty plate and napkin on the table. She made her way upstairs without even removing her coat.
In her small room under the eaves she was greeted by a surprise: an unfamiliar steamer trunk, an old suitcase, and a carpetbag she recognized.
The sight jolted Benita, momentarily, from her misery. Her belongings. She had asked Marianne to pack them for Gephardt to retrieve; his mother lived not far from Tollingen. Marianne had objected. Wouldn’t Benita come herself so they could have a chance to visit? But Benita had remained steadfast. And Gephardt, for all his usual crankiness, was oddly amenable to playing porter. Maybe he was curious to see where Benita had been living, or to meet this “Countess Marianne” (a meeting that was at once comical and horrifying for Benita to imagine).
In any case, he had obviously returned. And with him, her old life.
Benita stood in the middle of the room and listened, but the house was silent. Her possessions, piled on the small rug, seemed utterly unassimilable. The fine porcelain jewelry box Marianne had given her, the pretty scarves, the high-heeled shoes she had bought in Munich last year, her favorite dresses. The idea of these treasures here, in this house, in Frühlinghausen, depressed her. Who was there to look pretty for? Even if there were someone, she wouldn’t want him. She missed Franz with a physical ache. He had known her—really known her, the best and the worst parts. He was the narrow bridge that connected the two.
A step sounded in the hall outside her room.
“I nearly broke my back carrying all that upstairs,” Gephardt grumbled from the doorway. He was a glowering, unpleasant man, once a catch by Frühlinghausen standards, but he had thickened and calcified over time. Now he had a gut like a pregnant woman’s belly and restive eyes that made Benita shudder—God knows what he had done during his time in the SS.
“I’m sorry.” Benita sighed. “Thank you.” She looked down, feeling the sting of her own dependence. Trude Weseman was right—she was a charity case.
Gephardt did not move from the doorway.
When Benita lifted her eyes, he was staring at her with a scornful, evaluative expression, one arm braced across the door, blocking the exit. It gave her a start.
“Where is Lotte?” she asked.
He made a choked snort. “Where’s Lotte?” he repeated, still staring. With a chill, she recognized this look, with its particular mix of anger and lust.
Benita drew herself up. “Come now,” she said. “There’s no need to be childish.”
“Childish?” he repeated, taking a step toward her, breathing fast.
Mercifully, from downstairs came the sound of the front door opening.
“Lotte?” Benita called in a falsely light tone. “Is that you?”
“Who else?” Lotte snapped.
Gephardt glared at Benita.
“Gephardt?” Lotte exclaimed, apparently noting the signs of his return that Benita had missed. “Are you back?!”
For a moment he didn’t speak. Benita returned his glare. “I’m here,” he answered finally, turning on his heel.
After he left, Benita shut the door behind him and leaned against it for what seemed like an eternity.
That evening, she feigned a headache and did not go downstairs to dinner. Instead she stayed in her room and opened the chest. She did so with a sense of duty rather than pleasure. First there were the creams and perfumes she had collected over the past year, as the stores again began to stock such items. Then the combs for her hair, the scarves, the brooch Franz had given her.
And beneath these, papers—the forms Marianne had helped her fill out as an Opfer, Martin’s notes from school, her marriage license, written in stark indecipherable Nazi script she shuddered to look at. She had half a mind to burn it. And then the shoebox of Franz’s letters, tied prettily with a red-and-white ribbon. She had knotted the packet herself and imagined rereading the letters together with Franz, one day when they were old. She could barely look at them now. But as she moved to replace the lid, she caught sight of something else. A longer, thinner envelope much handled and slightly yellowed.
To my wife, Benita Fledermann was written across the front in a familiar, elegant script. The blood rushed to her head and away, leaving her faint. Here was Connie’s letter. The one Marianne had given her so many years ago. The one she had never opened. She had entirely forgotten that it existed.
From downstairs Benita could hear Lotte and Gephardt’s conversation, the shrill warble of her sister’s voice and her husband’s low, insolent grunts. Raindrops pattered on the sloped roof. She lifted the letter gingerly, half expecting it to disappear at her touch.
How could she have forgotten?
The fact was preposterous. What kind of woman would forget a letter from her dead husband? Why had she never read it? In the beginning, she had been too angry. This was true. But afterward . . . afterward she had simply let it slip. It filled her with shame.
Benita opened the envelope. The letter was not long. But at first, her eyes refused to make sense of the words, which swam and jostled on the page. Gradually, though, they fell into place.
My dearest Benita, it read. She could hear Connie’s voice. It had been so many years since she had heard it. If you are reading this, it means the plot I have given my life for has failed. That Hitler is still in power and I am dead.
She felt that time rise up around her—the flat in Berlin, Martin playing marbles on the floor. The restless loneliness and anger. The shriek of the air-raid siren.
I am sorry then that I put this spike between us for nothing. That is what I most regret.
I never meant to keep secrets from you, my love. I only wanted to protect you. The less you knew, the safer you would be. I could not let you bear responsibility for my actions. And I don’t even know if you agree with them. Our love is not a part of world events and politics. Our love has always been its own country.
Benita, I am so sorry for the ways I have hurt you. I know I have not been the husband you dreamed of. I have been foolish. I have been selfish. I have acted sometimes with my own interests, and our country’s interests, at heart. But I have always believed our future as individuals is fused with Germany’s. If I, as a human being, don’t act against Hitler, I cannot live with myself. If we Germans don’t put out our own demon, he will never be exorcised.
My dearest, I write this by way of explanation, if you should want one.
But what I most want to say is that I loved you from the moment I saw you on the day of the Anschluss, by the millpond, in your solemn little uniform. And I never stopped. Even now, as you read this. Be happy. Care for our son. Raise him to know happiness as you do. And I will be with you.
Yours always,
Connie
Benita set the letter down. Connie—her dear Connie, whom she had never even said good-bye to. Whom she had hated—really hated—for so long. But he had always been strong. He had lived his life on a plane of grand ideals and all-encompassing rights and wrongs. His view had been much longer than the trappings of his own life. And she had been the little mouse who could see no farther than her own nose, stumbling over roots and stones, oblivious to the oncoming storm.
She sat for a long time. Night deepened outside. The rain passed and stars shone. A sliver of a moon rose, shedding no light.
Her collection of objects lay in heaps, no more substantial than the scraps of leaves and paper a bird might use to shore up her nest. Somewhere, out in the world, Franz
Muller moved through life, serving dinner to Clotilde and his father on the yellow tablecloth, or working late in his coffin shop. And somewhere Marianne was doing . . . God knows what: writing, organizing, dining with friends—Marianne never just sat. And Martin, her own son—Benita imagined him in his room at Salem, head bent over his books, improving his life.
There was a purpose to each of their lives. Even Franz was responsible for old Herr Muller and Clotilde. Only Benita had no purpose. She had already raised her son. All she could do now was hold him back. She was a woman built for love. But love was dead—at least to her and to her generation. There was no place left for it in this world. And yet, she had never wanted anything else.
In the dark, she removed her dress and jewelry and lay down on the bed. She took one of the pills Lotte’s doctor had prescribed to help her sleep. And as the warm, floating feeling of a dream came on, she shook another pill into her hand. She saw Connie’s face as it was when he had come to her that last night, and it felt almost possible to go back, to turn to him and say Good-bye and Good luck. To give him her blessing. And she saw Martin in her arms, as a baby, his sweet, innocent face lighting up when she bent toward him. To this too she could return.
She took a few more pills, and then the rest, swallowed them with one gulp. And then she lay back down.
Chapter Thirty-One
Frühlinghausen, December 1950
The train ride from Tollingen to Frühlinghausen was long and full of transfers. Three minutes to change trains in Frankfurt, seven in Kassel, twenty in Göttingen . . . everything was once again on time. In the cities, bombed-out remains of buildings had been oddly integrated into the general forward motion of life—like assimilated amputations, noticeable only to strangers, such as those passing through on trains.
Marianne and Martin managed, for the last leg of their journey, to find an empty compartment. It was not a busy travel time: midday, midweek, children at school, adults at work. Everyone was caught up in the reassuring web of industry. Only the travelers had come unstuck.
“When the war ended, why did my mother go to you instead of her family?” Martin asked, startling Marianne. She had almost forgotten he was sitting across from her, wrapped in his own cloak of grief. He had grown tall in the last months at school, and his legs sprawled across the aisle, his shoulders hunched forward like folded wings.
“It made sense at the time,” Marianne said. “Everything was mixed up. No one was where they started. And I don’t think—” She stopped herself. She was unsure what Benita had relayed to Martin about her family.
“What?” Martin pressed.
Marianne sighed. “I don’t think she was close to her family.”
Martin turned to stare back out the window. One after another poor, dilapidated farm flew past—prosperity had returned to Germany but not to this corner of the country. Martin did not ask the obvious question: Why, then, had Benita gone back to Frühlinghausen in September? His mother must have offered him some sort of explanation. And whatever it was, it had not turned him against Marianne. For that she was grateful. Benita had “died in her sleep,” according to the telegram. But Marianne had understood. It was her fault Benita was dead. Her meddling had killed her. She would never outlive this.
What Martin understood of his mother’s death remained unclear.
He was an inscrutable boy. Not just now, in his grief, but always. Unlike Fritz, no matter where Martin went, he was well liked. He was popular with his peers and with his teachers, the kind of boy parents were happy to invite to their homes. He was agreeable and excelled in school, but what he cared about, what he felt passion for, remained mysterious. He had inherited his father’s likability without his streak of rebellion and strong-mindedness.
“Will you recognize your aunts?” she asked him.
“Lotte and Gertrud?” Martin looked worried. He had met them only a few times.
“Never mind,” Marianne said. “We’ll find them together.”
Martin did recognize them, though, thank God, because Marianne never would have identified the two drab, middle-aged ladies waiting on the platform as Benita’s sisters. One was tall and square jawed and wore incongruously peaky cat-eye glasses. Her graying hair was tucked into several neat but unartful rolls. The other was medium height and softer in appearance, with a wide, doughy face and bright blue eyes. Neither looked anything like Benita. Where had she come from?
“Tante Lotte? Tante Gertrud?” Martin asked, approaching the women with childish uncertainty. The taller of the two nodded. But she offered no smile, no warm greeting, no expression of condolence—only a grim nod and a handshake—one for Martin and one for Marianne. At least the dough-faced sister, who introduced herself as Gertrud, gave Martin an awkward pat on the shoulder. Marianne felt sorrow for her dead friend—how could a woman who had so loved beauty and fine things have lived here with these stark sisters, in this ugly place?
A memory rose to the surface: a day in the early summer, shortly before they had moved from Burg Lingenfels. She and Benita and Ania and all the children had taken a picnic out to the hillside—an old tablecloth from Weisslau, embroidered by Albrecht’s grandmother, a basket of cold meatballs and potato salad, pickles, fresh plums, a thermos of coffee, and Ania’s butter cake with raisins. The hayfield buzzed with insects and meadowlarks and smelled of hot grass and flowering nettles. Below them a field of rapeseed bloomed a brilliant, otherworldly yellow. The air above shimmered with heat. Marianne had brought a camera, the first one she had ever owned, and snapped pictures of the children running helter-skelter. This is what we live for, isn’t it? Benita had said, her face flushed with happiness.
On this cold December day, Frühlinghausen was the opposite of this. From the train station, Lotte and Gertrud took them directly to the cemetery. They wanted to show Martin his mother’s plot before the service and the burial, scheduled for the following day. Probably because he was expected to pay for it was Marianne’s uncharitable thought.
Should she be buried here in Frühlinghausen? Lotte had asked Marianne during their one telephone conversation. Where else? Not beside Connie, whose remains had been disposed of as a traitor’s—buried in some pit or burned in a Nazi crematory. No one had ever been told exactly where. Marianne felt revulsion toward the whole endeavor of burial. Bodies, so precious in life, then suddenly in death so awkward and full of horror. She would be cremated and have her ashes scattered at the castle. None of this delicate balance between earthly preservation and rot.
The sisters had hired a local farmer with a wagon to take them to the graveyard, and they rode in silence. Marianne squeezed Martin’s hand as the horse jerked over the cobblestones.
The cemetery was a humble place at the very edge of town, enclosed by an ugly new cement wall. At one end, it was bordered by fields, plowed and turned, nothing but dirt clods at this time of year, stretching toward the horizon. At the other sat the last of a row of grubby brick cottages. Two boys kicked a soccer ball in the backyard, bouncing it off the cemetery wall. Otherwise there was only the sound of wind blowing across the fields and the caw of a raven from above. The wagon driver grinned and nodded as they climbed down as if they were off to a party.
The graves were elevated in the traditional way—small, coffin-sized plots bordered by stone, planted with flowers, all scraggly and dead. Lotte led them to the spot already dug out for Benita, beside her mother: ilse gruber, 1880–1940. Marianne blinked tears back fiercely. This was not the time and place to cry. She was aware of Martin, standing still as a statue beside her.
“It’s a nice place,” Lotte asserted crisply. “People take care of the graves. Gertrud and I come once a week to visit Mother and our brothers, so we will be here often. This is a yellow rosebush.” She pointed at a trimmed stalk, tied up for winter. “And here we plant pansies and lavender; the ivy is good too because it covers so much . . .” The subject of the flowers made her talkative, but Marianne only half listened. This was where Benita would lie,
returned to the roots she had tried so hard to leave behind, and a part of her life that Marianne had never known. But what had she known? Very little, maybe. Not of Benita and her love affair, or of Ania, who was not Ania, and with whom she had not spoken since that day in the castle. Standing at the grave, Marianne was suddenly aware of her own blindness; her dearest friends were like dreams she had woken from. How had she missed so much?
“What’s that?” Martin asked, bringing her back to the present moment. He pointed at a small cart beside a pile of dirt.
“Turnover,” Lotte said, following his hand. “Every thirty years they dig up the graves to make room for new ones.”
“Oh.” Martin nodded, but his eyes looked shocked.
“If there is a marker, they will preserve it, of course,” Lotte continued in her matter-of-fact way. “But often with the old graves there is none.” She sniffed. “It keeps the cemetery”—she searched for the word—“fresh; no grave is forgotten, because no one here has been dead for more than thirty years.”
Marianne stared. She thought of her own family plot in Pomerania with its ancient graves—her grandparents and great-grandparents and their parents before them, in the shade of a giant chestnut tree, and of the von Lingenfels cemetery in Weisslau, with its plots dating back to the eighteenth century. Certainly there was no one left to tend these. Did the Poles, who had taken their land, roll the graveyard right into the wheat field beside it? Apparently, this was the new way—a rapid turnover of bodies.
“And after thirty years?” Marianne asked. “No one is remembered?”
Lotte stared at her with a blank expression. “Remembered, maybe, but not tended. Not maintained.”
Later, after the funeral and after Marianne had brought Martin back to school, she returned to Tollingen. No one was there to greet her. She walked from the train station to the town square and stared up at her flat. Its windows looked dark and sad in the shadow of evening, and she could not bring herself to go inside.
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