The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

  Marianne did not venture far into the room. What had once been a sanctuary had been perverted.

  “Thank you, Marianne,” Ania said in an unfamiliar, penitent way, her eyes downcast. “He has been screaming . . .” Her voice trailed off. With her words, the threat of discovery hung over them both.

  “Doktor Schaeffer said four drops mixed with water in the morning,” Marianne said. “Again in the middle of the day and then in the evening. And, if necessary, in the middle of the night. Not to be exceeded,” Marianne continued. “He was very strong on this.”

  Ania lifted her eyes.

  Not to be exceeded. In that instant, Marianne understood. She felt a rush of cold and then hot. How had she not grasped Ania’s intention from the start?

  From the mattress the man hacked a horrible, airless cough.

  She could feel Ania’s eyes, begging her for something—permission? Forgiveness? Marianne’s whole body recoiled at the thought.

  “Marianne,” Ania finally said, “you are a good woman.”

  Marianne did not respond.

  But all the way down the hill her friend’s words repeated themselves in her head, not as a statement, but as a question.

  And the following day, Rainer was dead.

  It is not difficult for Marianne and Ania to extract themselves from the party. Claire is preoccupied with making connections. And when you are old, you can get away with anything.

  Martin and Mary, their twin tugboats, guide them out of the throng and settle them in the library like children, with plates of snacks and glasses of water. Through the glass doors, Marianne sees them talking. Is Mary married? Divorced? She can’t remember. Mary throws her head back and laughs, dangly earrings swinging at her neck. Martin lounges against the exposed stone with his hands thrust into his pockets and his face downturned, smiling the bemused smile that has always made women want to please him. Gray hair aside, he looks like the teenage boy Marianne remembers. His father flashes before her eyes: the same stance, same smile, same way of looking—as Martin does now, with eyebrows raised—disarmingly incredulous. A bright flash of sun.

  Soon the party will move to the music room for a concert. But Marianne and Ania will remain. This is the heart of what Marianne came here for, after all—this chance to talk with Ania, to set straight the past.

  “Tell me about Anselm,” Marianne says.

  “He is a pharmacist. But not happy.” Ania shakes her head.

  “Why?”

  Ania shrugs. It is an old Ania gesture—self-deprecating rather than indifferent. “I don’t think he can be. I never taught him how.”

  “You gave him a good life,” Marianne says.

  The real subject lurks between them—all the questions Marianne never asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ania says. “I did what I thought was right. But I don’t think I’m a good judge of that.”

  “Ha!” Marianne says. “Our whole generation, no?”

  Ania shakes her head with this new air of tragedy that she has adopted in old age. She is too serious to laugh.

  Slowly, they make their way backward through time.

  Wolfgang lives in the north of Germany and has no children, only a stern and unfriendly wife. Anselm is married with two daughters and works in a pharmacy, rather than as the chemist he once dreamed of becoming. Fritz lives in Berlin and is as good-humored as always, with three children, a dog, and a pretty, artistic wife fifteen years younger than he is. Katarina, in Denver, teaching, Elisabeth, with her speeches . . . Marianne rattles through the information.

  “Did you ever tell your children about Rainer?” Ania asks, finally diving in.

  Marianne looks at her friend. “I never told anyone.”

  For a moment they are silent. The sound of the party in the next room floats through the French doors.

  Ania shakes her head, looks across the room at the fireplace—the one, it strikes Marianne for the first time, that she sat in front of with Connie after the countess’s last party. A memory rises of that long-ago kiss. She can still feel its surprise and thrill.

  “I’m sorry,” Ania says. “I’m sorry I was not honest with you from the beginning.”

  “Ach.” Marianne waves this away. She did not come here for apologies. “We are beyond that.” She leans forward. “But now I want to know everything I did not want to know then.”

  “About Rainer?” Ania asks doubtfully.

  “About you,” Marianne says. “Ania Brandt. Not Ania Kellerman or Ania Grabarek.”

  Ania sighs. From the other room, Marianne can hear Claire’s loud, bubbling laugh. The fire sparks and pops.

  “All right,” Ania says, taking a deep breath.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Burg Lingenfels, October 1991

  Ania does not believe in heaven. She does not even believe in God.

  It is a funny thing, though. When she looks back over the snaking trail of her life, the rises and falls and hairpin turns, the muddy sloughs where the path becomes almost invisible, she feels an urgent need to judge. To weigh the good against the evil in a manner that is, at heart, religious—to examine the small and large choices she has made that amount to her complete mark on the world.

  There are actions that tilt her toward heaven: her work at the DP camp, her patience as Carsten’s wife, her various small acts of kindness on the journey west. Then there are those that tilt her toward hell: the lies she has told and perpetuated, the sacrifices she asked of her boys, the fact that she was a Nazi, not only in name but in lived reality. And in these times of moral calculation—usually at two or three a.m., lying in bed—it is those babies that tilt her into the abyss. The fact that she stood there and let them go.

  There is nothing she can do about this now. Your actions are your actions. At the end of your life you have done what you have done. This is what she tried to impress upon her own children. Although probably she did not impress this on them at all. After all, actions speak louder than words.

  Her boys, Anselm and Wolfgang, always knew she was pragmatic rather than good. And now that Mary has been to Burg Lingenfels, she knows this as well.

  You let Frau von Lingenfels believe you were someone else? Would you ever have confessed if your husband had not shown up? Mary had been worse than angry. She had been horrified. On her last visit to the U.S., Ania had confessed all to her daughter, who had only known pieces: That Ania was married before Carsten, yes. That this first husband was still alive when she remarried, no. That she had run a year-on-the-land program, yes. That she had let her best friends believe she was someone else, no. Her mother, about whom she had, as a schoolgirl, once written an essay entitled “My Hero,” was not only a Nazi but a liar! And worse than a liar, a fake! She railed at her and Ania bore it. Mary was right. She did not try to defend herself. There was no defense. Should I leave tomorrow? she had asked.

  That’s not the point! Mary had said. As if there actually were a point.

  They had not spoken for days.

  Then slowly, somehow, Mary forgave her. You did what you had to do to survive. Somehow, Ania still has her daughter’s love if not her respect. There is a new distance between them, which makes her sad. But it is, after all, less punishment than she deserves.

  Burg Lingenfels is smaller than Ania remembers it. In her mind, it has become giant, a castle fit for Sleeping Beauty with great forbidding halls and acres of freezing, closed-off rooms.

  Ania wakes early, before breakfast is served, according to the small leather-bound handbook beside her bed. A guide to help visitors navigate was how the guest-and-fellow coordinator phrased it, as if she and Mary were ships charting their way across an unfamiliar sea. It irritated her, this way of speaking. She is a true farmwife in the end. So many years of living with Carsten made her wary of fancy talk. Or maybe it is her experience as a Nazi that made her suspicious of metaphor, euphemism, and figures of speech.

  On the bed beside hers Mary is asleep, snoring gently, her dark hair a mess on t
he pillow. Ania feels a swell of tenderness for her tired daughter. This is meant to be a vacation for her, not all tending to her mother’s needs. The poor girl (she will always be a girl to Ania) deserves rest—all that endless child care after long days at the office. All that keeping up with schedules, lessons, and appointments, the self-imposed stresses of modern life.

  Ania swings her legs off the bed and reaches for her cane. With effort, she rises and makes her way to the bathroom, where her face in the mirror is, even now, after so many years, a surprise. When she thinks of herself, she doesn’t think of all these wrinkles, all this gray. Never mind. She splashes water on her face and neck and combs her hair. Then, careful to be quiet, she reenters the bedroom and fumbles over the clothing draped on the chair.

  “Mother?” Mary’s sleepy voice comes from the other bed.

  “Shhhh,” Ania says. “It’s early. Go back to sleep.”

  “Do you need help?” Mary asks, sitting.

  “No, no,” Ania says, more crossly than she intends. “What do you think I do at home?”

  “All right,” Mary mumbles, and lies back down.

  Outside, the sky is turning pink. Long, wavy arms of sunlight reach across the hillside, which is more naked than it used to be. All farmland now, where before it was forest. Germany has become the agricultural wonder Hitler always imagined, every meter planted with crops or windmills or endless flats of solar panels that stretch out alongside the highways. No scrap of wasted space. Even the patches of woods serve as sound barriers to shield towns against the roar of the autobahn, or screens to mask gravel mines or irrigation.

  Ania lets herself out through the new, elegant front door and starts down the smoothly paved drive.

  The closest section of forest behind the castle remains. Spiky peaks of the pines rise like a mountain range at the edge of the meadow. From here it looks just as it always did. Ania would like to cross the uneven grass and enter, but she doesn’t trust her footing on the rutted earth, so she sits on the stone wall beside the road and remembers.

  These woods are where she and her boys buried Rainer. They wrapped his wasted body in a sheet and carried it from the castle, light as a child’s. Ania felt nothing but relief. He was no longer her husband but her secret, a man who had made the wrong choice at every turn. And she had made her own bad choice in him. He was the second great mistake of her life. Her first was believing in Hitler. And in the awkward, distinctly human weight of Rainer’s body—the cold, lifeless shoulder bumping against her leg with every step—she felt the extremity of her bad judgment.

  The grave was shallow, the earth was nearly frozen, and when Rainer’s body lay at the bottom, Ania and her boys paused by unspoken agreement. She did not pray: What would she have prayed for? And from whom? A God she was certain did not exist? If there was a hell, Rainer was bound for it.

  But as she stood, she willed herself to remember the boy she had befriended so many years ago in her father’s waiting room. The boy who had walked his own sickly father to Doktor Fortzmann’s once a week for treatment, who had allowed the old man to lean heavily on his narrow shoulders, offering him sips of water from a canteen he had thought to pack. He was a good son. And in the beginning, he had been a good husband: considerate, enthusiastic, dutiful. He had been steady in his love—so utterly convinced from an early age that she was meant to be his wife.

  And as they stood above his lifeless body, it occurred to Ania that the darkness in him was her fault. She had never returned his passion. She had never loved him enough. Maybe his sins as well as her own rested on her back.

  Beside her, Wolfgang toed the earth sullenly. Anselm was more inscrutable, face bowed, hands deep in his pockets. She could not ask him what he was thinking; there was too much water under the bridge. But still there was a solace in their togetherness. If she had taught her boys one thing, it was silence—they could navigate its shoals and currents like born sailors. And in its open waters, they met one another—three ships blinking their lights across the darkness, communicating without language, enough to say, I know you, we come from the same country.

  It was two weeks later that Ania learned of Benita’s death.

  And with this death, she was alone in her mourning. Her sons had always kept their distance from the beautiful young mother in their midst. And Marianne, who surely shared her grief, would never speak to her again.

  Ania learned of her friend’s death from Martin. He sent a brief note stating the time and place of the funeral, which, by the time she received the information, had already passed.

  Sitting in the parlor of the drafty old farmhouse with Carsten, Ania dropped the letter to her lap.

  “Eh?” Carsten asked from his chair, startled by the abruptness of her movement.

  The fire glowed in the coal stove, the baby purred, asleep in Ania’s arms. “Benita is dead,” she managed to say.

  Her husband’s eyes widened. “How?”

  Ania shook her head. Her body felt light with shock.

  “She was a fine one,” Carsten said, shaking his own head. And the pronouncement seemed not so much an observation as an analysis. A fine one. Too fine for this time of rough, animal realities and ugliness.

  Dear Benita, whose dreaminess and impracticality had been a reminder of all that was beautiful and light. She had always made Ania laugh. Was it the end of her affair with Herr Muller that had killed her? She had seemed so distraught on that day in the hospital . . . It would be like Benita to die for love. But Ania had no one to ask.

  In her solitary sadness, she hung pine branches and oranges pierced with cloves across their foyer the way Benita had taught her. They lent the house an air of spicy sweetness. And when Ania walked beneath them with the baby, little Mary craned her neck to see these ordinary objects that bobbed and glimmered in the dark, made beautiful by their suspension.

  This morning, as Ania sits on the stone wall, the castle begins to stir with life. A man opens red sun umbrellas on a new, attractive rooftop terrace. Someone tugs back curtains across the plate glass windows on the first floor. It is good to see the castle in its new life; it has become such a useful, democratic place, housing all these well-meaning people from every corner of the world. They are trying to understand all sorts of complicated things: what makes humans cruel or kind, and how we might all live together in peace. Ania appreciates their efforts, although she is skeptical that they will ever find an answer. Hitler always said there were too many people on earth. Too many people in Germany—such a small country, so many people . . . But then of course it turned out his answer to this was not a solution, but a symptom of the disease. He was the rat in the maze that begins to eat the others.

  Ania is about to rise and head back toward the castle when she sees a form approaching. A woman, her hair blowing upward in the wind. Mary.

  Ania lifts her arms in a wave. Mary’s hands are shoved deep inside the pockets of her jacket—stiff looking with a collar and a waxy, rubberized sheen. An odd garment, designed for some specific circumstance but worn generally—like those pants with all the pockets and loops and strings attached, or the slick clothes Ania always associated with gymnastics that are now worn for anything that involves movement—grown men ride bicycles in slippery, skintight garments. Ania is too old to understand such things.

  “Couldn’t go back to sleep,” Mary says when she is closer. “I miss the kids.”

  The children—the idea of them belongs to another world, another life. It takes Ania a moment to register her daughter’s meaning.

  “They will survive,” she says. “But of course you do.”

  Mary sighs and sits on the wall beside her mother.

  “It’s a beautiful view,” she says. “I forgot how beautiful it is here, in this part of the world.”

  Ania too has forgotten. Impulsively, she links her arm through Mary’s. It is the sort of gesture she has not made since their fight.

  To her relief, Mary gives it a squeeze. It brings tears to her eye
s.

  “I don’t deserve you,” Ania says. “I did so many things wrong. I lived my life wrong.”

  “But you know now—” Mary says, turning to her. “You take responsibility for your mistakes. You ask for forgiveness—”

  Ania starts in such a way that she nearly falls. “Forgiveness! God forbid!” She crosses herself, the gesture coming to her across the years. “I would never ask for that.”

  Mary is quiet. “You admit,” she says finally. “That counts for something.”

  “Does it?” Ania asks.

  “I think so,” Mary says.

  Ania would like to ask: In what sort of calculation? She can see it is important to Mary to believe this. She is an American after all; she has been swept up in the culture of talk—of belief in psychotherapy and confession, of television shows in which people reclaim their innocence through voicing their regrets.

  In Ania’s view, no talk in the world can change the past.

  If Mary knew about those babies, she would know that taking responsibility doesn’t matter. It can’t bring them back. It can’t return them to their lives, to their parents. And there is no atonement for all the lies Ania told herself instead of acting—that the babies were going to an orphanage, or foster families, or God knows what other acceptable end, even as she hung her head over the latrine and threw up. This is what Ania will pay for: not only her inaction, but her self-deception, for narrating away evil while staring it in the face. How can she tell her daughter this?

  Instead she squeezes Mary’s arm and appreciates her kindness. Her understanding. This is why people have children, even when they believe the world is going to hell, even when life is nothing but uncertainty. In hopes of being understood.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Burg Lingenfels, October 1991

  Marianne sits at the desk in the strange visiting-dignitary bedroom she has been assigned and tries to prepare her speech. Not a “speech,” just “remarks,” Claire corrected her. Nothing too complicated. She wonders whether Claire is nervous about what she will say. After all, the book is Claire’s narrative, but the life is still hers.