The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

  “Ah,” she said, beaming. “My swim escort.”

  “You really want to do this?” he asked, as lightly as possible, though in fact he felt vaguely panicked. He might be responsible for Marianne von Lingenfels’s drowning. People would shake their heads and wonder what sort of idiot had allowed an old woman to climb into the cold northern Atlantic Ocean.

  “Come,” Marianne said. “We will have an adventure.” She wrapped his hand under her arm and clutched it against her bony rib cage.

  From the porch, there was a dusty path and a set of wooden steps over the rocks, which led to the dock. His bare feet smarted against the rough dirt, and a rivulet of sweat trickled down through the thin patch of hair on his chest. It was still blazing hot in the direct sun, but he did not falter.

  And walking, he was struck suddenly by the memory of swimming in the small, gravel-shored German lake where they would picnic on Sundays after the war. “Schwimmen!” Marianne would bark at his mother and Ania and their children. “Nicht sitzen!” To Marianne, sitting and eating and skipping stones without first plunging in and swimming at least as far as the float was tantamount to sloth. She herself would swim all the way to the other side with her oddly effective head-above-the-water version of the crawl. She was so utterly German in those moments, so determined and so filled with the folksy belief in physical activity and the trappings of innocence, it was hard to separate her from the Teutonic forces she and Albrecht and Martin’s father had spent their lives conspiring against. And it was with simmering resentment that Martin would set out behind her, overtake her, and swim until his lungs almost burst.

  “So what now?” he asked when they reached the dock. Waves crashed against the rocks of the shore and sucked back out, leaving eddies scurrying in the crevices.

  “There is a ladder at the end,” Marianne said. “You should go in first”—she handed him the inner tube—“and hold this for me.”

  “All right.” Martin accepted the plastic ring. The metal planks whistled in the wind.

  Martin yelped when his bare feet came down on the dock’s gleaming surface. He ran forward and, with one ungraceful jump, dove into the water.

  A shock ran through his body at the cold. He swam out a few lengths and watched Marianne as she navigated her own cleverly aqua-sock-shod way along the dock, holding the rails on either side. At the end, she removed her glasses and looped them over the railing by their strap. Then she stood, squinting down at him.

  “It’s bracing!” Martin called, shielding his eyes with one hand. “Are you sure—?”

  By way of answer, Marianne began the serious business of lowering herself down the ladder. Her foot paddled the air once, twice, before finding purchase on the top rung, and in the bright sun, her pale, naked limbs shone like some dangerous evolutionary beacon, beckoning the darkest forces of the sea. The ropy veins on her legs seemed treacherous and parasitic—strangling her fragile limbs. But when her feet entered the cold water, she did not flinch.

  “Bring the donut here,” she directed. “You hold it steady while I sit.”

  Martin did as instructed.

  And then, with a surprisingly tremendous splash and a great bobbing jerk, she was in. Through the spray and the swelling waves, Martin held on. The water peeled away from his eyes, and there she was, in her donut, like some delicate hatchling in a postapocalyptic nest.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, tossing his hair from his eyes.

  “Yes,” Marianne said, adjusting herself. “Yes.” And as she repeated it, her look of discomfort disappeared. “This is lovely.”

  “It is,” Martin echoed, realizing it was true. His body tingled pleasantly in the cold. The water rising and falling around his neck was featherlight.

  “See?” Marianne said, smiling through the spray. “Now promise that you’ll come back to Burg Lingenfels with me.”

  And looking at her small, frail form, Martin felt all the resentment and resistance of the afternoon fall away. How could he refuse? She was Marianne von Lingenfels.

  “All right,” he said, taking hold of the string to her inner tube like some marine beast of burden and swimming out to sea.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 1991

  Ania Kellerman had flown 5,000 kilometers, taken the train another 120, filled extra heart and blood pressure prescriptions, suspended bread and milk delivery for three weeks, found, washed, and packed her old but still good trench coat, and filled half her suitcase with good German chocolate, in part so her daughter could show her the house that now stood before them. It was large and gray and beautiful, built in that graceful American style with wooden clapboards and columned porches Americans referred to as “Victorian” in a confusing homage to an empire they had overthrown. It was certainly unlike most of the houses in England. Or in Germany, for that matter, where homes were built of stone or stucco or brick—never something as precious and impermanent as wood.

  “Well?” Marianne—or “Mary,” as she was called here in America—asked.

  “Can we get out of the car?” Ania said, gazing up at the peaked roof.

  Mary frowned. It was a demonstrative look, meant to note this example of motherly hardness or wrongness or, at best, ineptitude. The people of today wanted delicate handling, Mary among them. Ania knew this, but she was too stubborn to comply—and anyway, she did not know how.

  Ania waited as Mary went around the car to open her door, an unnecessary rule her daughter had established following an incident in the airport parking lot in which, in Mary’s estimation, Ania had nearly been killed. This was not founded in reality: Ania had looked before opening her door and the minivan pulling into the next space had been at least half a meter away, but Mary had an overactive imagination, especially when it came to catastrophe. And Ania appreciated being cared for this way. When her daughter opened her door, she swung her feet out onto the curb and stood with relative ease. She was lucky to be so fit for an eighty-year-old woman.

  Ania used Carsten’s cane for support as she stood before the house. This was the place Mary intended to raise her children postdivorce. She had bought it herself. There were three floors, the uppermost under a steeply gabled roof. Tall, elegant black shutters framed the windows, and on the second floor, a cream-colored panel was carved with an overflowing bowl of fruit and above this, less successfully rendered, a flag inscribed with the date 1864.

  Ania regarded the clapboards, which were caked with layers of poorly scraped paint. The sill on the third-floor window was brown and rotten where it met the glass.

  “So?” Mary prodded. “You haven’t said a word!”

  “It is a beautiful house,” Ania said sadly.

  “So why the tragedy?”

  Ania shook her head. “It is too old.”

  Mary laughed. “That’s the best part! They don’t make houses like this anymore. I love its oldness.”

  Ania regarded her daughter, the young American she had become in the twenty years she had lived here. Mary honestly believed that you could update the electrical system, rebrick the chimney, brace the foundation, and cover over the past with a fine, clean coat of paint, and instead of a fragile, seam-filled heap of expired goods, you would have a fresh new house. She had become American enough to assign a moral value to the house’s age.

  At forty-one, Mary was a beautiful woman, with thick, honey-colored hair and a long, intelligent face. She was aging like an American, though: deep lines between her brows and along the sides of her mouth. Too much smiling. Too much emotion on parade. It was a young country. It mistook the theater of expression for honesty. If Mary had lived like a German, she would look ten years younger.

  “You really don’t like it?” Mary asked, growing more wrinkles by the minute, her face contorted into a tableau of surprise.

  “I like it,” Ania said.

  “Then what is it?”

  Ania shrugged. It was a useful gesture with her grown children—a sort of what-do-I-kn
ow disclaimer about her general lack of knowledge or understanding of the modern world.

  “It’s dead,” Ania said finally. “The things it is made of—they are past their time.”

  “Aha,” Mary said, bristling in earnest now. “So now things that aren’t alive can die, too. I see. How wonderful.”

  Ania could see her daughter’s vexation, all the layers of it: the history of disappointments her mother had doled out to her, all the ways Ania had rebuked and judged and misunderstood her, all the times her blunt and unromantic nature had quashed the joys of Mary’s young life. And then there were the surface layers of anxiety about the purchase, which was, in Mary’s own words, the biggest financial decision of her life. The sum she had paid struck Ania as exotically expensive, a sign of how discordant her own sense of value was—a language founded on different root words.

  Ania took a breath and thought about Jesus, whom she did not believe in but whose teachings, as she understood them from the Bible, seemed in her old age to provide a sound road map for life. She reached out and placed her hand on Mary’s cheek, which was soft and slightly creamy with moisturizer. “Child, it is a beautiful place. I am an old woman—don’t listen to me.”

  “Sure, sure, sure,” Mary said crossly, sounding more German now. “You’re only an old woman who happens to be my mother, why would I want your approval?”

  Ania looked back at her daughter. Lightness, lightness, she told herself. This was what such moments required. She bucked the urge to sigh, to shake her head, to honestly reflect the vast gulf between them, and laughed instead.

  “You have this,” she said. “You will always have my approval.”

  Later, when they were back in the car and Mary had found it in herself to speak to her mother again (a product of her talkative nature as well as her obsessive deliberating on the purchase), she began to lay out her plans.

  “I don’t have to fix everything at once. I’ll chip away at it, piece by piece. You know that from living on the farm. You and Father did it your whole life.”

  In Ania’s mind, she saw Carsten’s farm as it had been when she first arrived. The dark washroom with its always-chilly flagstone floor, the toilet at the end of the hall that dropped refuse down a long pipe into a pit.

  “If I could have lived somewhere else, I would have,” Ania said with a sigh. “If we had had the money to tear it down and build a new house, we would have. To me, old things are work. Not romance.”

  “Well, they’re not romance to me, either,” Mary said.

  Outside the window, American life flew by—the giant cars, the eclectic, colorful signs for gyms and clothing stores and fast-food restaurants, supermarkets and gas stations with inflatable balloon figures bobbing goofily in the wind. As well as the boarded-up concrete bunkers of obsolete supermarket chains, failed Chinese food shops and electronics outlets, left standing like rotten teeth in an otherwise healthy smile. It didn’t matter. There was room for everything. It was a free country. The past was nothing to be ashamed of here.

  In Germany, Ania lived in a retirement home, near Lake Constance. It was not far from Carsten’s farm or Burg Lingenfels—an hour by car, maybe—but she never went back. For ten years, after Carsten died, Wolfgang had worked the farm with minimal success. Their plot of land was too small to compete with the vast farming conglomerates Germany had established in the former east. Hitler’s Lebensraum aims achieved, this time in peace. So Wolfgang had sold the farm and moved north, near Lübeck, where he ran a farm equipment dealership.

  At the front door of the bland, modern condominium in Newton where Mary lived since her divorce, there was a large manila envelope.

  Mary glanced at the sender and tucked it under her arm as she turned her key. She looked discouraged. Ania felt a pang of guilt. She had hurt her daughter’s feelings. And over what? There was no purpose to this disagreement. She was an old woman. And her point of view was more dead, more irrelevant than the house.

  The door swung open and sounds of children’s exuberant playing came from upstairs. “Helloo-oo,” Mary called out, tossing the package on the front hall table.

  Martin Fledermann. Ania caught the name on the corner of the envelope and felt a rush of adrenaline.

  “You are in touch with Martin?” she asked.

  “It’s for you,” Mary said over her shoulder as she walked up the steps to the family room. “But don’t open it now—I want to show you.”

  Ania stared at the package, absorbing this development. A package for her from Martin Fledermann, the tall, handsome, successful man whose nose she had once wiped, whose brow she had mopped when he was sick, whose little pants and shirts and sweaters she had mended and hemmed and layered on his body to make sure he was warm enough for the long walk to school. He was now a university professor here in America.

  “Mama!” Mary’s six-year-old son, Gabriel, cried, flying across the floor and into his mother’s arms, wrapping his skinny, pajama-clad legs around hers, and burying his face in her belly. It was wonderful how free today’s children were, that a boy would offer such an affectionate, unregulated greeting.

  “Can I order a pizza?” Sarah, Gabriel’s more even-tempered nine-year-old sister, asked from around the corner.

  “Yes! Pizza, pizza, pizza!” Gabriel echoed, releasing his mother and bouncing in excitement. “I love pizza!”

  “Did you get the chance to defrost that soup?” Mary called to Perla, the young woman who picked the children up from school and spent the afternoon with them. Mary was a lawyer for some sort of American nonprofit devoted to protecting the rights of immigrants. The relevance of her work as the daughter of a Nazi was not lost on Ania. What an amazing country this was.

  “I make it in the freedgerator but eets not soft yet—” Perla replied, and her light, soft-voweled voice trilled on, accompanied by fervent, excited interruptions from Gabriel and dotted with questions from Mary’s lower, flatter tone.

  Ania’s eyes drifted back to the package. She had hoped Martin would drive down from New Hampshire to see her, but the “timing had not worked” for such a reunion, and she had tried to conceal her disappointment. He was the one person she had remained in touch with from the castle. But now here was this package—whatever it might be. It pleased her to think that he had made the effort to send her something, and that he and Mary had spoken about it. They were children from two different chapters of her life, in touch only because she had introduced them. By the time Mary was born, Martin was nearly a teenager, away at boarding school.

  “Hi, Omi,” Gabriel said from the top step, and Ania realized she had missed his greeting the first time. At his mother’s prodding, surely, from the way she stood beside him, one hand on his small shoulder.

  “Ah! Hello, my child!” Ania said in her brightest language-school English, clapping her hands together.

  “Hello.” Gabriel became suddenly shy, rolling his head against his mother’s hip, bending one leg so he could grab his ankle. He was an unfamiliar specimen to Ania—an exotic hothouse flower from this time of plenty. She found him both vexing and lovely.

  “Did you finish the puzzle?” she asked, selecting her words carefully. For many years now, she had squeezed into a tiny desk at the local elementary school for night classes in English so she might learn the language that would be her grandchildren’s. But now when she needed them, the words seemed buried in quicksand.

  Gabriel shook his head a little sadly. “It’s too hard for me.”

  “No,” Ania said. “That cannot be. Come show your omi.”

  The boy did not move from his mother’s side. He was a perceptive child and seemed to understand that he owed his grandmother some particular respect or delicacy. But he was not a natural pleaser. He lived in his own world with its own prescriptions and edicts, which he was not in the habit of amending. Ania could see this sort of thing now, in the luxury of her old age. How her own children had been, what they had loved and hated . . . there had been no time for such reflec
tions when they were young. It gave her a pang of sadness, looking at Gabriel here, and knowing him this well.

  “Go on,” his mother said, giving him a little push. “I bet Omi can help you.”

  And so Ania extended her hand and tried, with her smile, to show him she understood his reluctance and did not hold it against him, that she was not actually scary even though she was so old. But he did not look up at her. He took her cool fingers in his own warm hand and pulled her across the floor like a burden.

  Mary had been stubborn as a girl. Ania remembered this much. More nuance, more understanding she had not granted the child. She had been born in the beginning of the Wirtschaftswunder—that somnambulant time of sudden plenty that had swept Germany like a dream. They had been poor in comparison to Mary’s classmates in town, but compared to Anselm and Wolfgang, Mary was raised in the lap of luxury and good fortune, with milk and eggs and chocolate to eat, new shoes to wear, and even, when she turned five years old, a car to share with the Glebers. Unlike her half brothers, Mary had grown up without typhoid and diphtheria and rape. She had not been pressed into overcrowded trains and transport vehicles and fetid, swarming, waterless DP camps full of war-hardened souls. She had always had school, and clothing, and medicine, and a roof over her head.

  And most of all she never had to lie.

  Had Ania held this against her? Was this why, so many years later, when Mary was an ordinary eleven-year-old who wanted a pair of fine shoes for dancing class or complained about the slow bus ride home from school, Ania would rage about her spoiledness? Once, she had locked her daughter into the pitch-dark smokehouse for a whole afternoon among the gory, half-cured hams and sides of bacon hanging from the ceiling. Many times, she had shouted and threatened absurd punishments for minor infractions. It made Ania sick with regret to think back on those days. Her meanness haunted her in the soft, innocent faces of Mary’s children.