The Women in the Castle
Page 33
Even when he broke this, it was not to unburden himself. It was to provide her with the facts. Which, after all their years living together, she never knew. Because she never asked.
So.
He had been drafted into the reserve police and sent to the east late in the war, assigned to load Jews and Slavs and other “undesirables” onto Treblinka-bound trucks. Did you know where they were going? Clotilde asked. He hesitated. Not in the beginning, but then, yes.
And once he knew, he asked to be transferred to another “less intensive” detail, and they granted his request. He became, instead, a courier of documents, shuttling sealed envelopes between army groups.
It was that easy? Clotilde asked. You just had to ask to be transferred and they did it?
He was silent for some time, his meaty hands spread on top of the hospital sheet. Yes, he said finally, at least in my case.
But he felt, at the time, that he had been selfish asking for this special treatment. That it meant someone else in his unit had to do the job of sending women and children to their deaths. So his resistance was not out of moral clarity, but out of a selfish cowardice.
What nonsense, Clotilde said. You did the right thing! The question is why didn’t everyone else? Don’t belittle it.
But her father did not concede.
He looked out the hospital window and, after that day, they never spoke of it.
There was a time when Clotilde imagined a different life for herself, one with a husband and children and her own home, maybe somewhere else. But her father was an easy man to live with, and a surprisingly good cook. She has a job she loves as a gardener in the town park. And she has her dogs. And based on what she understands of history and sees of the present, dogs are a superior species.
Clotilde remembers Burg Lingenfels as it was when she was a teenager: abandoned, graffitied, its windows broken and weeds pushing through its ancient stones. Frau von Lingenfels, the woman who owned it, had moved to the United States. And in her absence, it became a haven for vagrants and local teenagers up to no good. Clotilde was lured there one night by a migrant farm worker for an experience she doesn’t care to remember, certainly nothing the castle hadn’t seen before. After that she stayed away.
But now the castle is grand once again, inhabited by intellectuals from all over the world. The Falkenberg Institute proclaims itself to be “a site of moral inquiry.” Fellows come here to ask questions. Well, leave them to it.
Clotilde comes here not to inquire, but to follow her father’s wishes.
There is a grave in the forest behind the castle that he asked her to visit. A body he buried with his own hands. Franz Muller didn’t know much about the man—he was a Russian prisoner, released from the local stalag after the war. He had arrived at Burg Lingenfels with a band of fellow former prisoners: all hungry, weak, and diseased. And in these woods, he had come across her father. There was an altercation. And there was a woman present, a woman with whom her father had been in love. This is the difficult part, because Clotilde remembers this woman. She was beautiful, with light eyes and pale hair. She was introduced to Clotilde as her father’s future bride, and Clotilde, as an eleven-year-old, had concocted a wealth of lovely fantasies around her: this woman would become her mother and teach her to sew and buy underwear and other embarrassing girl items, maybe even give her a little brother or sister so she would no longer be alone. But then poof, the woman disappeared. No marriage, no courtship, no further mention of her. It was one of the great disappointments of Clotilde’s young life.
Anyway, this woman, Benita Fledermann was her name, somehow came across Clotilde’s father and this Russian. And something happened: the man attacked her or she attacked him, and the man was killed. You killed him? Clotilde had asked her father, who nodded solemnly. But he had never been a good liar. Or she killed him? Clotilde had pressed. It doesn’t matter, he answered. We killed him.
This was a crime punishable by death—the murder of a former enemy combatant, a violation of the cease-fire. So Franz buried the man. And the time being what it was, no one came looking. No one even noticed he was gone.
But the man lay on Franz Muller’s conscience, as much as any of the victims he felt responsible for in the east. He had carved a small cross on the tree above the grave, and he visited once a month. He cleared the nastiest weeds and brought flowers and, most of all, stood there and listened to the forest and tried to show respect.
At some point, her father had researched the man at the local archive and discovered an article in the town paper from around that time, more of a newsletter really, released by the occupying Americans, naming a Fyodor Ivanov, former inmate of Stalag VIIA, missing, last seen outside of Ehrenheim with his former stalag comrades. It was one of many such listings—missing persons took up a whole page. And Franz had not known how to pursue it further. He had only a grade-school education. He was not a researcher. And Ivanov was a common Russian name.
Some years ago, another body was discovered in these same woods. This was right before Franz Muller died, and he had followed the story with interest. The bones were entered into an official process run by the German Office, the state agency responsible for such findings. They were analyzed and bundled into black plastic, stored temporarily in the town’s morgue. DNA testing revealed they belonged to a German male, approximately thirty-eight years old, with evidence of combat injuries and death from a wasting sickness. No definitive identity was established. The bones were reinterred in a cardboard box in the Ehrenheim cemetery.
Were the bones of that man, whoever he was, any better off now than they were before they were found? This was the question Franz Muller asked. He honestly didn’t know. Clotilde could decide, once he was gone, what she should do. Her father’s secret is now her responsibility.
She is still undecided. Maybe someday she will go to the authorities and set the official exhuming process in motion. Maybe they will dig up the bones and discover enough information to separate this specific Fyodor Ivanov from all the others declared dead or missing at the time. Maybe his family will be tracked to some corner of what is now Belarus and contacted by a tireless employee of the German Office whose job it is to conduct this sort of postmortem search. And maybe this will bring someone closure, or stir their anger, or reopen wounds. But it won’t bring back the man.
For now, Clotilde maintains her father’s tradition. She visits the grave and ensures it is not entirely overgrown. She brings flowers from her garden or sometimes a special stone she has found on a trip. The original cross Franz Muller carved into the trunk has grown up out of sight, and there is a new one, a stripe he gouged into the bark maybe fifteen years ago, which itself has moved up. Any passersby who might stumble upon the site would probably imagine it an animal’s grave or a child’s fairy house. Maybe they would stop and wonder for a moment. But most probably not.
When she visits, Clotilde follows her father’s instructions. In the dappled light beneath the tall pine, she tries to think of the varied beauties of life: the watchful way her dogs look on as she stands in silence; the sight of crocus heads pushing through the melting snow; the fact that human beings are compelled to construct cathedrals and sing lullabies and create art; that they devote themselves to obscure causes and esoteric fields of knowledge; that the world population grows by eighty million people each year.
She conjures these things in her mind and hopes they have meaning.
And she doesn’t say a word.
Acknowledgments
This book took me seven years to write, so first of all I would like to thank my family—my children, Tilde, Helen, and William, for hanging in there through the ups and downs of writing and long hours in the library; and my husband, Preble, for his patience and kindness, his first readings, and his belief in me.
I couldn’t have written this book without the many hours of interviews I conducted with my grandmother, and without the stories my mother told me when I was a girl and that my aunt, Annegre
t Falter, continued telling me after my mother died.
This book also would not exist without the recollections and insights many others shared with me. First and foremost, I’d like to thank Dorothea von Haeften for sharing her own mother’s story and memoir, and for generally introducing me to the story of the courageous men and women of the German Resistance. And Annegret Falter, for not only telling me stories but answering a million questions, tracking down facts, and helping connect the pieces. Friedrich-Christoph von Saldern and Ellen von Winterfeld, Mechtilt Reike, Heidewig Ellerman, and Constanze von Salmuth (through her film) all offered their memories to me. My father, John, believed in this book from the beginning and provided acute insights as a reader and sounding board. Petra and Jürgen Schrewe have always generously opened their home to me.
I am indebted to a great many histories, films, and memoirs as well. Frauen by Alison Owings, Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, Black Earth by Timothy Snyder, DP: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 by Mark Wyman, everything by Gitta Sereny, Victor Klemperer’s diaries, The Past Is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg, Memories of Kreisau and the German Resistance by Freya von Moltke, Battleground Berlin by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, On Hitler’s Mountain by Irmgard Hunt, Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS by Gerhard Rempel, Courageous Hearts by Dorothee von Meding, Backing Hitler by Robert Gellately, The German War by Nicholas Stargardt, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood by Joachim Fest, A Woman in Berlin, and Hava Kohav Beller’s moving film The Restless Conscience, among many others.
Also to my readers Karen Schwartz, Risa Miller, Dehn Gilmore, and Anjali Singh for their invaluable help at various stages of the process. My amazing agent Eric Simonoff and his colleague Raffaella de Angelis. My fierce and energetic editor, Jessica Williams, who has put blood, sweat, and tears into this book, and been a real partner in bringing it out into the world. Laura Cherkas, who went through it with a fine-tooth comb. The whole team at William Morrow—Kelly Rudolph, Liate Stehlik, Lynn Grady, Katherine Turro, and Doug Jones—for all their enthusiasm and hard work.
I’m also forever grateful to Alexandra Fernholz, Leonie Goetzens, Judith Hintner, Sofia Folkesson, and Hanna Ahlin for their kindness and support. And to the MacDowell Colony and the Public Library of Brookline for offering me a quiet place to write.
About the Author
JESSICA SHATTUCK is the award-winning author of The Hazards of Good Breeding, which was a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, Wired, and The Believer, among other publications. A graduate of Harvard University, she received her MFA from Columbia University. She lives with her husband and three children in Brookline, Massachusetts.
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Also by Jessica Shattuck
Perfect Life
The Hazards of Good Breeding
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the women in the castle. Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Shattuck. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
first edition
Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai
Cover photographs: © Ingrid Michel/Plainpicture (castle; © Getty Images (clouds and airplane); © Shutterstock (texture)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shattuck, Jessica, author.
Title: The women in the castle : a novel / Jessica Shattuck.
Description: First edition. | New York : William Morrow, an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016023355 (print) | LCCN 2016029873 (ebook) | ISBN
9780062563668 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062563675 (softcover) | ISBN
9780062563682 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062644190 (large print)
Subjects: LCSH: Germany—History—1945-1955—Fiction. |
Castles—Germany—Bavaria—Fiction. | Interpersonal relations—Fiction. |
Widows—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Historical. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.H357 W66 2017 (print) | LCC PS3619.H357 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023355
Digital Edition MARCH 2017 9780062563682
Print ISBN: 9780062563668
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