The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

  Before she left home, Marianne prepared some funny anecdotes from her time in the resistance, a few cautionary parables, a recognition of contemporary resisters around the world. But now what she wrote seems grandiose, full of overblown rhetoric.

  She and Ania spent hours talking in the library last night. Ania’s life is three-dimensional now—no, not merely three-dimensional, but three faced. Ania Fortzmann, Ania Brandt, Ania Grabarek—why did Marianne never know of these? In her mind, these faces are no longer broken into good or bad, true or false. They have been laid bare, a collection of choices and circumstances.

  Why didn’t you try to tell me all this after Rainer died? Marianne asked her friend. Why didn’t you explain yourself?

  Because you wouldn’t have cared, Ania said. And you were right.

  Marianne did not protest. She saw herself that day in the castle, standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at Ania and the dying man. She had not been interested in knowledge. It was too close to the war, to Albrecht’s death, to all the deaths. Knowledge would have been too much to stomach.

  Benita’s life also has become more whole to Marianne on this trip. Spending time with Martin brings his mother back. He is compelling in the same way Benita was: not just his handsomeness, but something more intangible. His aura, the New Age word comes to Marianne’s mind. Marianne has always scoffed at the idea of such vagaries, but here, against the backdrop of this ancient castle, in this last chapter of her life, the idea of an “aura” or an “energy” feels true and important, as real as action, the gold standard around which she has built her life. This is why people were drawn to Benita, why Connie fell in love with her.

  There is a light knock on the door, and before she turns, a child rushes in, followed by her son, Fritz. “Omi!” the little girl calls, her curly hair flying behind her in a wild mop. Nicola, Fritz’s youngest—a little girl as exuberant and incautious as her father was as a child. Of all her grandchildren, Marianne loves her best.

  “Nicola,” Marianne exclaims, “what a nice surprise!”

  “I brought her with me. Angela is sick,” Fritz explains, crossing the room and bending to kiss his mother. “She promised to be quiet—isn’t that right?” He turns to his daughter. “Quiet as a mouse during Omi’s speech.”

  “Like a mouse,” Nicola proclaims, scrunching her face into an approximation of mouseness and tiptoeing delightedly around the room.

  “Oh, be however you want,” Marianne says, wishing there was no speech, and no party to attend.

  “Aha! Here it is!” Fritz exclaims, catching sight of the hardcover lying on the desk beside her. “Do I finally get a copy of the book about my famous mother?” He lifts it and begins reading the back, which is full of airy quotes from academics and journalists.

  For a moment, in his concentration, he reminds her of Albrecht. Tall, slightly stoop shouldered, holding the book at arm’s length.

  “Oh, Fritzl,” Marianne says, reverting to his childhood nickname. “I am your mother. You don’t need that book.”

  Marianne goes downstairs to the reception in a combination of panic and mental haze. The visit from Fritz and Nicola has kept her from any further preparing of what she would like to say. Though she suspects it was not going to come clear anyway.

  Despite Alice’s entreaties, Marianne has not changed her clothes. She wears her beige cardigan and pleated khakis, a pair of horrible, comfortable walking shoes. It doesn’t matter. Of this much she is certain, at least.

  When she enters the room, she is startled to see so many people. There must be two hundred in attendance, fellows, academics from Humboldt and the Free University, contacts of Claire’s and the director’s, and then—dear God, she has almost forgotten—those she invited herself: old Eberhardt von Strallen and his middle-aged daughter, Irmgard Teitelman, Mamie Kaltenbrunner, Peter Weber—they have come all the way from Hamburg!—old, long-lost friends. And is that one of the von Oberst children, now a middle-aged man? She recognizes the distinctive forward-jutting chin.

  “There you are!” Martin says, appearing beside her to take her elbow and steer her toward her seat. He does not seem fazed by her appearance. His aura may resemble his mother’s, but his manners and charm are all Connie Fledermann. Marianne reaches up and pats his hand.

  When she is settled, the director rises and moves to the podium. “I am so proud to be here, to be part of this celebration of an important book by a past fellow of the Falkenberg Institute. A book that examines the very essence of resistance and moral clarity. What does it take for a person to be able to recognize evil as it unfolds? To see with foresight and acuity . . .”

  Marianne listens uncomfortably.

  When he finishes, Claire rises and takes the stage. She looks more serious today, in a black dress and funny, dark-rimmed glasses, a string of bright red Chinese beads around her neck.

  “It has been my great good fortune to be a transcriber to this marvelous and heroic woman—a woman whose courage and moral backbone stayed stick straight in a time when most others bent, a woman in a world whose intellectual and political circles were dominated by men . . .”

  The words make Marianne squirm. She thinks of all those in the audience, whom she has known in so many different places and at so many different crossroads of her life. Certainly she has not always been so infallible.

  “I would like to invite Marianne forward to offer a few words,” Claire says. For a long moment, and with a sense of growing panic, Marianne remains frozen in her seat.

  But then Martin is standing before her, offering his arm. He has come all the way from America to Burg Lingenfels at her request. She allows him to lead her up to the podium.

  The audience looks at her expectantly.

  And as Marianne stares back, more faces become clear: a von Kreisberg cousin whose name she can’t remember, but whose mother hosted her and the children on their flight from Weisslau, and there, beside him, the kind librarian from the Document Center, and standing against the wall, two childhood girlfriends of Elisabeth’s.

  “When will she talk?” Nicola’s four-year-old voice says from the back of the room, where Fritz holds her in his arms. A few audience members laugh.

  Marianne takes a deep breath. She must say something. But an apology is all that comes to mind. She is not sure for what.

  “You would think . . .” she says finally, and her voice sounds foreign to her own ears. “You would think from this introduction that I must be a very wonderful person.” There is more laughter. The audience is relieved that she has opened her mouth. “And that I must have answers and secrets of how to be good and . . . how to see evil and resist it, and everything else Claire said.”

  Outside, a crow squawks from the parapet.

  “Instead,” Marianne continues, “I look out at you and I see so many familiar faces—so many people I have known and not known, so many people I have lost . . . And I see, most of all, my own blind spots.”

  The audience is very quiet. In the front row, Claire looks anxious.

  And as Marianne stands, gripping the podium, her eyes find Ania, sitting in the front row, between her daughter and Martin. She is so small—such a tiny person. How is it that in all those years Marianne never noticed this? And her face, her dear face, so deeply lined and etched with grooves and wrinkles, the bed of a violent river.

  Ania returns her gaze. And as the silence grows, she nods, ever so slightly, as if to say, Go on, continue. I am here, no matter what you say.

  A memory rises in Marianne’s mind: That night, so many years ago, when she and Ania waited together while the Russians feasted. The dark, uneasy quiet of the castle, the flickering shadows of the fire, and, outside, the suspended carcass of Gilda’s body. She can hear the crackle of sparks and the strange sounds of the men’s voices gathering into a low and otherworldly song. How grateful she had been to have Ania beside her—a fellow adult and human being, connected not through allegiance to any group or party or particular way of thinki
ng but through the reality of the moment, through their shared will to get through the next hours, the next day, and the one afterward, and through their shared determination to keep their children safe.

  It is the great regret of her life that she lost this—no, that she forsook it. And that she lost Benita, too—her sweet, flawed friend, fellow widow and human being, whom Marianne can see now that she, in her own way, betrayed.

  “I want to say,” she begins again, “I want to say that I have not always tried hard enough to know. That this ‘moral compass’ Claire talks about may not have been as helpful in my own personal life as it was in the wider political context. Sometimes it is easier to see clearly from a distance. And what is up close—what is up close”—she falters—“is harder to make out.”

  In the audience someone coughs.

  “There is so much gray between the black and the white . . . and this is where most of us live, trying—”

  Marianne loses her place. Trying what? Confusion presses in on her. Not just of the moment, the words, but the greater confusion of life itself—the whole murky, impulsive side of human interaction, the tangled knots of influence and emotion. A vast, primordial soup she has spent her life trying to negate.

  “—trying, but so often failing, to bend toward the light.”

  Marianne can feel her tongue dry in her mouth. The world grows dim, and there is an odd buzzing sound. She meets the eyes of the Chinese scholar she was introduced to last night. What does she know of him? Of his experience? The world is too vast to know in all its corners.

  Then, all at once, her knees give out.

  Her vision goes before her consciousness.

  But she can feel, suddenly, a strong pair of arms, catching her, holding her up. “I’m sorry,” she says, or tries to say.

  “Shhhh . . .” She recognizes Martin’s voice. “We need our heroes. No more apologies.”

  Then all is quiet.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Burg Lingenfels, October 1991

  Martin wakes in bed next to Mary. He can’t think of her as Marianne, which is what she would like to be called. Mary, it turns out, is a nickname she has always disliked.

  Last night, when Marianne revived, the castle was filled with jubilant relief. Thank God! Imagine if she had died, right there on the castle floor, killed by the effort of straying beyond the clarity that has defined her life. When her eyes opened, even stoic Ania wept with relief. And the party that followed was a real bash. The Sophie Scholl scholar played the fiddle, and a Russian philosopher taught a group of guests to dance the barynya. And the food was excellent: delicate white trout, new potatoes, and “homegrown” carrots from the castle kitchen garden, now a vast organic nursery. For dessert, Martin’s favorite: fluffy, shredded pancakes known as Kaiserschmarnn, a local specialty. And of course lots of champagne. Mary and Martin were among the last guests to depart.

  Mary is not the sort of woman Martin usually pursues. She is a little scattered and too modern, really. He is generally drawn to cool, steady women with unrufflable feathers. But there is, underneath her disorganized charm, a kind of emotional steadiness. And she has a good sense of humor, which is a surprise coming from the daughter of Ania and Carsten Kellerman, whom Martin remembers as a German version of American Gothic.

  Though apparently, what did he know?

  Mary shared her mother’s revelations with him last night. A secret past, a Nazi husband still alive when she married Carsten. It is to Marianne’s credit, Martin supposes, that she never told him any of this. It is possible that in his usual sidestepping way, he never really asked her why she and Ania fell so completely out of touch. Like many members of his generation, he has made a career of avoiding difficult questions.

  “Can you imagine?” Mary asked as they lay side by side. “My mother was nursing one husband by day and sleeping with another at night.”

  No, Martin agreed, he couldn’t. But this is at the bottom of the list of things he can’t imagine: Auschwitz, Treblinka, believing in Hitler, the mother of a fatherless boy committing suicide. And there are actually whole swaths of his own experience that he can’t imagine: living in an orphanage for children of traitors, spending nights in bomb shelters, reclaiming his mother from some rats’ nest of Russian soldiers . . .

  Anyway, he likes Mary, and he feels connected to her through this place. They are both products of the same mess.

  He runs a finger down her brow and nose, coming to rest on her lips.

  Her eyes fly open, and her look of surprise makes him laugh.

  “Oh my God,” she says, sitting bolt upright. “I hope my mother isn’t awake yet.”

  “You make me feel so young.” Martin laughs. “I haven’t worried about anyone’s mother since I was seventeen.”

  “Ha!” Mary fumbles with the sheet, tucking it awkwardly around her body, stripping it from him as she stands. “Sorry!” She blushes.

  But Martin is too old to be ashamed of his nakedness. “Here.” He hands her a pair of gold hoop earrings from beside the bed.

  “You look as though you do this every day,” she says. “Sleep with a weirdly connected stranger in a castle where you spent a traumatic childhood,” she clarifies.

  “Not every day.”

  “Every other,” Mary says, smiling.

  And looking at her—this middle-aged American daughter of Carsten and Ania’s, standing naked on the ancient stone floor of Burg Lingenfels—Martin is filled with an unfamiliar, buoyant happiness.

  There is a farewell breakfast this morning in the great hall, after which the guests will disperse: Mary to drive Ania the two hours back to her retirement home on Lake Constance (“Can you persuade her to move to America to live near me?” she had begged Martin last night); Marianne to the hospital in Munich for tests. The woman has the constitution of an ox, but her fainting spell should be fully evaluated, Fritz and Martin together insisted.

  Martin himself will go north. First to Frühlinghausen to visit his mother’s grave and his aunt Gertrud, the one member of Benita’s family with whom he is still in touch. After Frühlinghausen, he has one more stop: to visit Liesel “Falkman,” his long-lost friend. For years as a boy, he dreamed of her, though he never spoke of this. And then, before coming here, he tracked her down and wrote to her, and she wrote back. Of course she remembers him, although she tries not to think about that time much. She spent the rest of her childhood, such as it was, living with her aunt in the flat where he and Marianne had left her—in a part of Berlin that ended up behind the wall, in the east. Now that Germany is one again, she has moved to Hamburg. She is an accountant with two grown children, long ago divorced.

  At first he was dismayed by these details. What did this ordinary life have to do with the fierce, intelligent Liesel of his youth? But he has bucked his tendency to avoid possible disappointment and booked his return flight out of Hamburg. He has made a reservation at the Hotel Atlantic for them to have lunch.

  On his way down to the breakfast, Martin pauses on the landing. The Sophie Scholl scholar and Russian philosopher are listening to Claire, who is waving her arms, holding forth. And Mary, who has beaten him downstairs, sits with her mother, talking to Fritz. There is warmth between them, and Ania looks happy, or as happy as she can with her tragic face.

  Marianne presides from the wheelchair she has been relegated to while her granddaughter scrambles around on her lap. She looks smaller than usual, and tired: some spark of righteousness has been extinguished. But all the same, from her seat at the center she emanates Marianne-ness.

  The great hall itself is just as Martin remembers it from childhood—cavernous, dim, and chilly. And standing here, he feels the chafing layers of time, the inscrutable ghost of himself as a little boy colliding with the shifty construct of himself as a middle-aged man. And all around, he feels the press of other, lesser-known ghosts: Marianne as a young woman; his mother as a bride-to-be; the Nazi occupiers with their shiny leather boots; the harvest party’s il
l-fated Jewish guests; the frightened townspeople hiding from the Americans; centuries of gouty princes and counts and long-suffering servants. They all seem to be climbing these steps. And their movements have an urgent restlessness.

  Through this, Martin hears Marianne’s voice. “Here he is,” she is saying. “My favorite guest.”

  Martin looks around.

  “Martin Fledermann,” she says as if they are the only two people in the hall.

  He feels the force of her love for him and it makes him proud. Smiling back, he approaches, holding out his hand.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Burg Lingenfels, 1991

  Clotilde Muller likes to walk her dogs on the grounds of the Falkenberg Institute. Not only because it is beautiful but because it makes her feel close to her father now that he is dead. She can imagine him hacking away at the thicket of trees in the once unruly woods, now a carefully maintained park crisscrossed by well-signed gravel paths. She had been coming here for years before she learned of the time her father had spent at the castle chopping wood.

  To be fair, Clotilde did not ask him many questions. She is a woman of few words, and Franz Muller was a man of even fewer. All a question gets is an answer, and in her experience you don’t always want those. As a gardener, she knows that if you turn over a rock, you will find worms and potato bugs. Sometimes even a snake. And as a German, she knows that if you start poking through a shoebox of photographs, you’ll find Nazi uniforms and swastikas and children with their arms raised in Heil Hitler salutes.

  And then what? Does that help you love the cranky old father whose laundry and dentures and toilet bowl you have to clean? To treasure the grandparent whose dementia already tests your patience? Clotilde knows she was lucky in this regard. Her father was kind and mild-mannered and easy to get along with until the end. And his silence was a gift.