Behind her, in the square, the Wild Boar began setting its outdoor tables. Mothers pulled their children home to supper, shop workers closed shutters, lovers strolled hand in hand. And there were men on the streets again, smoking cigarettes and hurrying home to their families, happily returned to everyday life. She felt a pang of sadness for Albrecht, for Connie, for all those who had not lived to see this new life.
She could not go upstairs to the kitchen she had once shared with Benita and make herself a lonely egg and toast. She could not sit in the twilit parlor and sort through Albrecht’s papers. She could not pass by all those empty rooms—Benita’s, Martin’s, her own children’s. And she could not go visit Ania, sit in her warm kitchen, remember Benita together, and be comforted.
Marianne left her bag behind the stairs in the foyer and walked toward the river at the edge of town. At least she could sit here and mourn, among the bones of all the poor souls who had died on its banks. She could lie on the grass and look at the stars and be lulled by the rush of the river’s poisons. But as she neared the riverbank, she realized she was not alone. A figure, half obscured by shadow, stood with his back to the water, swaying a little on his toes. His lips moved slightly, and she could hear his low, murmuring voice, speaking a language she did not understand. Eventually his words came to an end.
“Excuse me,” she said as he turned and took in her presence.
He was a young man, maybe twenty-five, even if his face was much older. He wore a black hat and his hair in long curls: a Jewish DP from one of the few remaining camps.
“It’s allowed,” he said. Marianne stared at him, confused. “It’s allowed to pray here,” he clarified.
“Of course.” She stepped back, startled that he thought she would question this. “Did you know someone? Among the dead?”
The man scowled and then squinted at her as if trying to read her intent.
“I knew them all,” he said. The words hung between them.
“I also came here to pray,” Marianne said, realizing as she spoke that this was true.
Above them, the first stars of evening were suddenly visible, like holes in a thin cloth, revealing a great light behind the darkness. The river shone a pale and otherworldly violet.
The man regarded her intently, and Marianne found herself awaiting some sort of verdict.
Finally, he ducked his head.
“Well, go on then,” he said. “You can be here forever with that task.” He turned to go.
“And you?” Marianne said.
He looked back at her. “I leave tomorrow for America.”
And looking at him, this young stranger with an old face, Marianne felt the truth of his words and his weariness. But through this, she heard the word America, as if for the first time. Not as the name of an enemy nation or as an Ally. Not as the originator of bombs and oranges and chocolate or as the creator of all the paperwork she had so tirelessly filled out for so many refugees. She heard it as the name of a place where a person could begin again.
Long after the man had departed, the word blew around in her mind, like a scrap of paper, alluring and brightly colored, hinting at another life.
Part IV
Chapter Thirty-Two
Deer Isle, Maine, July 1991
The road to Marianne’s home on the coast of Maine was as winding and lovely as the name von Lingenfels, which Martin had always thought beautiful, though it lost some of its lightness on the American tongue. But Martin was not an American, even after so many years living in New England. He was a German, as this visit reminded him. A German who was more than an hour late, which was not a promising start.
His tardiness was fitting, though. As a boy he had always been late. He could feel the old pattern of behavior rising, his tendency to fulfill other people’s narratives, usually at a cost to himself. So he was to be the hapless teenager, Marianne the overbearing parent, picking up his mother’s slack. Never mind that he was now in his fifties and she was eighty-three, and he had not seen her for God knows how long. She had written him to say she had a proposal. And while he wasn’t generally up for proposals since his most recent divorce, he could not refuse Marianne. It had always been that way.
The turn off Route 114 onto Marianne’s little clamshell strewn “Way” was marked by a profusion of beach plum blossoms, which she had not mentioned in her directions. Possibly because at her age she did not venture far enough to have seen them, but more likely because a thicket of flowers and shiny purple berries was not the sort of thing Marianne made note of, while the sturdy aluminum mailbox, now all but obscured by the bushes, was.
Her house was the last of the seven or eight that lined the road, and when Martin pulled around the corner, he was struck not only by its loveliness—a little gray shingled cottage, with a peaked roof and wraparound porch—but by its utter Americanness. It was rough-hewn and impermanent looking. Its wide sliding glass doors lent it a quality of carefree openness. Such a great contrast to Burg Lingenfels. Americans can face the world with open arms, Marianne had once said, because the world hasn’t yet come to knock it down.
Before he could climb out of the car, the front door opened and there she was: Marianne von Lingenfels—at once totally recognizable and completely changed. She walked with a cane and wore a pair of thick, squarish glasses, but her gray hair was pulled back from her face in the same practical manner it had always been, with a clip on each side, just above her ears. And her voice, barking his name, rang straight from his past.
“Marianne,” Martin said, slamming the car door behind him. A broad, pure smile spread across her wrinkled face. Here she was, unmoored from the circumstances that for him had always defined her—in America, in Maine, for Christ’s sake. Yet unlike Martin, who was a chameleon, an adapter to even the strangest situations, Marianne remained completely herself.
From the shore came the sound of the surf, and overhead the seagulls screeched. The front door of the house swung open again and a mournful-faced black woman with her hair braided close against her skull emerged. “You all right, Marianne?” she asked softly.
“Oh, yes,” Marianne said, keeping her eyes on Martin. Her smile remained fixed—an outpouring of happiness. “Alice, this is my dear friend Martin.”
Martin climbed the steps and extended his hand, which Alice accepted shyly. Then he turned to Marianne, grasped her gnarled fingers between his, and kissed her delicate shriveled cheeks.
“Ach, Martin,” she said, clinging to his hands. “Du bist das Ebenbild deines Vaters.” You are the picture of your father.
Martin continued to smile, but the words resurrected the old, familiar dismay. His father the resister, the great man, the almost-liberator of Germany and almost-saver of so many millions of lives. Marianne had always shone a bright light on the chasm between Martin and this man.
“Come, have a cup of coffee. Or maybe you would like something stronger—a glass of schnapps after your journey,” Marianne said, speaking in English now.
“Coffee would be fine,” Martin replied.
“Sit,” Marianne commanded when they had reached the covered part of the porch where a set of mildewy wicker furniture was grouped like so many pigeons, facing the sea. “Alice will bring it.”
Martin complied. From here, one could see down to a short, T-shaped dock, sticking like a cross into the water. The sun on the rocks was strong and bright.
Marianne lowered herself into the armchair opposite Martin, which looked as uncomfortable as his. Comfort, it seemed, was no more relevant to Marianne now than it had been when she was young.
“So how are you, Marianne?” Martin said, trying to strike a jovial tone.
“Oh, Martin,” she said, sighing. “As well as possible for a person of my age. I am a lucky woman.”
“Not old at all,” Martin responded, aware as soon as he said it that she would find the statement ridiculous. “You look marvelous.”
“Thank you.” Marianne bobbed her head patiently. “And what
of you, Martin Fledermann?” She smiled. “It was New York, I think, where I saw you last, no?”
“Yes, it was,” Martin said, the day coming clear in his own head with her prompting. He had gone to see her in some big, featureless building on the Upper East Side where she had been living at the time. They drank tea and ate buttered Pfefferkuchen and looked out over the city through a drafty picture window, surrounded by all the old things—dark Biedermeier armoires and claw-footed tables, thick white embroidered curtains, and the dusty needlepoint portrait of Grossmutter von Lingenfels. Martin had just divorced his second wife, a subject he had been preoccupied with not discussing and that now loomed over the memory as if in fact she had been there—a lovely, sorrowful presence, full of reproach. The rest of the visit, what he and Marianne had discussed, how she had looked, was obliterated from his mind.
“You were working on something—a book—I can’t remember the subject now.”
“Ah yes, right.” Martin nodded. “I’m still working on it.”
“Still?” Marianne raised her eyebrows. “The same book?”
“The same book,” Martin tried to say with self-deprecating humor, but it came out sounding bitter. The truth was that the book had become the bane of his existence. He had begun his career as a professor with a burst of glory—a lauded first book about postwar anti-Fascist architecture, various academic prizes, and tenure at a well-regarded American university. But then he was gripped by a crippling stiflement. He was meant to write a book that came to terms with something larger than the architecture of renewal. He was meant to write a book that would, in some way, relate to his father, the hero and resister. But that book refused to come.
He leaned back and was rewarded with a stab of broken wicker into his spine.
“That is a long time.” Marianne frowned, studying him.
A probing silence threatened.
“How did you come to this place?” Martin asked. “It’s so . . .” He searched for the word—primal presented itself, but Marianne was too German—he was too German—to use the word without discomfort. “Obscure,” he filled in.
Marianne laughed. “It was difficult for you to find, I think.”
“No, no.” Martin tamped down his instinct to bristle. “I mean, just this corner of the country—it’s not anywhere Elisabeth and Katarina come, is it?”
Elisabeth and Katarina, those dark-haired girls he had spent so much time with as a boy, now lived unfathomable lives in the brash, historyless American west. They too had been drawn here, to this continent of new beginnings, fellow children of Burg Lingenfels. Of the von Lingenfels family, only Fritz, a copyright lawyer at an international law firm, remained in Germany.
“No, no, Katarina vacations in Mexico—or the Caribbean.” Marianne waved his question away. “And Elisabeth doesn’t vacation.”
“Well, it’s a long way from Burg Lingenfels.”
“Ha! I should say so.” Marianne laughed. “And you are in New Hampshire still, I understand from Irena—she is in better touch with me than you are! She sends a Christmas card at least.”
“Does she? Irena?” Martin was startled. He tried to imagine his daughter, the inscrutable suburban schoolteacher she had become, writing to Marianne.
“Every year, last year with a picture of her babies—those sweet little things. To think you are a grandfather, Martin!”
Martin shook his head. It was incredible, actually. He was only fifty-two. Irena was a child of his youth. He had been too young, only twenty-four when he had her, and now she was a mother herself—also too young, in his estimation. Fatherhood had slipped between his fingers, and time hiccupped forward. Now here he was a grandparent. Too late! Too late! Grandparenthood taunted him. You can’t go back and be a father now.
“I’m not a very good one, I’m afraid,” Martin said.
“Ach.” Marianne waved this away too. “I’m sure you are.”
Martin said nothing. Sitting here, on this weather-beaten porch, with its brittle railings and the dull pounding of the sea below, he felt a gray bloom of failure. This was why it had been so long since he had last seen Marianne. She was the gardener of this ugly flower. She knew just how to turn its face to the sun.
He was relieved to hear Alice opening the screen door, bearing a tray with Marianne’s good coffeepot (pale blue with tiny white flowers, how familiar it still was), a carton of half-and-half, and two practical white mugs that had replaced the Meissen china of the old days.
“Have we no pitcher for the cream?” Marianne frowned. “This looks not fine.”
“No, ma’am,” Alice murmured. “No pitcher.”
“Ach, well. So it is.” Marianne sighed. “But surely there is a sugar bowl.”
Alice nodded and returned to search for one.
“She is Rwandan,” Marianne asserted when she had left. “Her husband was killed in the civil war there. And her son.”
“My God. How terrible.”
“She is very good. Very honest.”
Martin nodded. Marianne had always been comfortable with such sweeping moral pronouncements.
“You see,” Marianne said, smiling, “I like always to surround myself with widows.”
“I suppose so.” Martin tried to smile back.
“I miss your mother, you know,” Marianne said. “She was not one for a houseful of widows.”
The comment jarred him. He was so rarely around anyone who spoke of his mother.
“But she lived in one,” Martin said.
“I think of that man she saw,” Marianne continued, fixing her gaze on the dock. “After the war. The ex-Nazi.”
“Herr Muller,” Martin offered, though his own memory of the man was hazy at best. He had been astonished when Marianne told him of his mother’s affair, so many years ago. But he had not been alarmed. His own memories of the man were positive. He had shared his Christmas chocolate with him on that long-ago day.
“I was very hard on her about him,” Marianne continued. “I think, if she loved him and he loved her . . .” She shook her head. “This is the main thing, isn’t it?”
At that moment, Alice reappeared, carrying a cereal bowl half filled with sugar.
“Aha, well,” Marianne said, breaking the somber mood, “we live in elegance here, don’t we, Alice?”
“Maybe so.” Alice smiled shyly. She had a scar on her neck, Martin noticed, a thin white line that snaked down from her ear.
“Love is the thing, we agree, is it not?” Marianne asked.
Alice looked from Marianne to Martin. “Yes, ma’am,” she said when it became clear that Marianne was addressing her. “Love is great.”
“You see?” Marianne said to Martin. “This is what I mean to say: love is great.”
Martin felt suddenly consumingly tired. The heaviness of the exchange, the awkwardness of the moment—what had he expected?
“Would you like anything else?” Alice asked in her soft, pleasantly accented voice.
“No, no—except a schnapps for Martin. He needs one, I think.”
It was maybe an hour or two later, with the sun softening to forgiving afternoon ripeness, that Marianne posed the question. It wasn’t a question, actually.
She placed a card in front of him—thick white stationery like a wedding invitation. The return address caught his eye: Burg Lingenfels.
Inside was a postcard with a black-and-white photograph of a woman squinting at the camera, shielding her eyes against the sun, one rubber booted foot propped on a low wall. Marianne, at the cistern.
marianne von lingenfels: moral compass of the resistance was printed underneath.
Martin looked up at her, surprised.
“Yes, it’s me. A biography.” Marianne made a gesture of dismissal.
“That’s wonderful,” Martin said, turning the card over. “A remarkable story of a woman at the heart of one of the most courageous stands against evil in our time . . .” he began to read.
“Oh, it’s a little much,” Mar
ianne said, though she could not fully conceal her pride. “But that’s not the point. There is a party. This fall. At Burg Lingenfels.”
Martin sat back. “A weekend of talks, discussions, and meditations on the subject of resistance,” he read aloud.
“Martin,” Marianne said, leaning forward, “I want you to take me there. And I want to find Ania and bring her, too. I want to invite you both—as my guests.”
Martin sighed. “I would love to, Marianne, but I don’t know—”
“Stop.” She lifted a hand. “Don’t say no. I won’t let you say no. Think about it first. It is the wish of an old woman. Think of it, if you want, as my last wish.”
Martin looked at her: the thin gray hair, the fragile, papery skin of her face. “Why do you want me to come with you?”
Marianne cocked her head to the side. “Why do you think, Martin Fledermann?”
“Because I am my father’s son.” He sighed.
“No,” Marianne said, knitting her brows. “Because you are your mother’s son.”
It was not decided in that moment.
The sun sank lower in the sky, and at Marianne’s formidable insistence, Martin took her for a swim.
“Swim where?” he asked when she proposed the idea.
“Where?” Marianne laughed. “Look around you, Martin Fledermann. The sea.”
The swim trunks she provided were folded dustily on the top shelf of the towel closet: a voluminous pair of brightly flowered shorts—a style Martin dimly recalled from his early days in America as “jams.” Her son-in-law’s, apparently. Martin was a good swimmer, albeit out of practice. As a boy, he had been the star of the Salem swim team. But it was years since he had swum in the ocean, and never with an eighty-three-year-old.
Marianne wore a blue-skirted suit with violent splotches of purple. Against this, her skin was a pale greenish-gray, finely webbed with wrinkles. Her arm was looped through a bright pink inner tube.
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