Marianne was not amused. “I will come, too,” she announced, shooing Martin and Liesel out into the hall.
Back in the darkness, beside the frightening man with the gun, even Liesel did not speak. The electric lamp cast long, spooky shadows.
Finally the door of the flat opened again. The woman who emerged after Marianne was almost unrecognizable to Martin: glassy eyed and thin and smelling strongly of perfume and sweat. She looked panicked and her hands—long, white, and trembling—reached for Martin, fluttering over his face and hair and shoulders, like a blind woman’s.
“My boy! Oh, my boy!” she said, dropping to her knees. “My sweet child!”
Martin wanted to speak—to reassure her, but he couldn’t think how.
“Oh, my boy,” the woman, his mother, repeated, pulling him against her chest.
And Martin could only stand, stiff as a board, trying to keep them both upright.
Chapter Three
Frühlinghausen, March 12, 1938
The day Benita met Martin Constantine Fledermann was unusually warm for March. It was as though they were in Italy or Greece, she kept saying, hoping it made her sound worldly, like someone who had actually traveled to such places, experienced such heat, although of course everyone knew she hadn’t, and they certainly hadn’t been anywhere so exotic themselves, Frühlinghausen being what it was.
It was the day of the Anschluss. Five hundred kilometers south, Hitler had personally driven to his birthplace, the little border town of Braunau am Inn in Austria, to announce the country’s “return to the Reich.” The radio was filled with tales of cheering crowds, waving flags, and throwing flowers, of people dancing in the streets. Frühlinghausen officials, eager to capture a little gaiety for the town, organized an impromptu celebration—a rally to be led by their own mayor and a local band. Who wouldn’t want to celebrate the union of two populations of German speakers? This was a great theme for Hitler, and therefore for Frühlinghausen, which was thoroughly in support of the man and his party: the quest to unify all ethnic Germans across the continent under one flag.
Benita Gruber was nineteen years old and dressed in her finest Bund Deutscher M?del uniform, a dark blue wool skirt and white blouse she’d saved her own money to buy—no longer the makeshift blue-and-white ensemble she’d worn for the first years of her membership, but the real thing, printed with the BDM monogram. She had braided her thick hair in two artful plaits and knew that she looked beautiful and healthy, the very picture of the celebrated Jungfrau, or German maiden. It was young women like her who had inspired Hitler’s vision of the master race. She was meant to become round with child, again and again, to populate the motherland with Aryan babies who would grow to be happy, healthy Germans, capable of hard work and loyal to their homeland. At least this was the idea propagated by Fr?ulein Brebel, the dour leader of Benita’s BDM group, who had no children herself.
And so, after coffee, Benita arrived at the town square along with her troop of wide-eyed M?dels. The mayor of Frühlinghausen was a rising star in the local Nazi Party and was considered quite a catch. On that afternoon, at least among the girls of the BDM, there was a sense of Cinderella-at-the-ball anticipation as they took their places before the podium.
For all his promise, though, the mayor was neither handsome nor charismatic. His face was blubbery and wide, and as he spoke, rivulets of sweat dripped down his cheeks and hiccupped over his moles. But he was full of conviction.
“Today we usher in a new and important era . . .” He used an approximation of Hitler’s own staccato, his words half lost in the wind, half swallowed by the stone walls of the seven-hundred-year-old church behind him. “Today we embark on the road to a once again powerful and united Germandom . . .”
Benita was bored. She had no doubt she could attract this trundlehead’s attention. But what was the point? The very idea of standing beside him, let alone kissing him, was unpleasant. She imagined he smelled like sweat and mildewed wool and, beneath this, the pigsty. Like so many of the town’s young men, he lived with his family on the farm they had operated with minimal success for the last however many hundreds of years. During the harvest season, he would be out in the fields alongside everyone else, pitching hay and sweating like a pig.
Benita backed away through the small crowd, careful not to draw Fr?ulein Brebel’s attention. Once free, she ducked down the little pedestrian allée that led to the old millpond and Beiderman’s Apotheke, where she could buy a bottle of the hand cream that promised to set her apart from all the other wash-powder-chapped girls of Frühlinghausen. For what? Who knew. For whom? Another good question. But the questions themselves excited Benita. She was destined for something better than Frühlinghausen.
Then suddenly, rounding the corner, Benita was confronted by the most handsome, most sophisticated man she had ever seen. He leaned against the wall of the millpond, lighting a cigarette and wearing a good suit. Benita recognized this immediately—it was made of some kind of English wool, and the shoes beneath it were of shiny oxblood leather. He was tall and slim and unmistakably aristocratic.
“Sorry,” he said, straightening and looking over his shoulder, as if to see whether he blocked her path. “Am I—?”
Benita blushed. “Oh no, I just wasn’t expecting to see anyone.”
“Because they’re all so engrossed in the mayor’s brilliant oration?”
She laughed in surprise. His accent was refined, high German, and his sarcasm was as un-Frühlinghausen as his appearance.
“You were listening?”
The man shrugged and took a thoughtful drag of the cigarette he’d finally managed to light. “I was present.”
They were both silent for a moment. Benita felt the urge to smooth her skirt, straighten the little neckerchief that had probably blown askew—but she stopped herself and stood still, staring back at him. “It’s boring,” she said, and her heartbeat quickened at her own recklessness.
The man smiled. “The speech or the Anschluss?”
“Both.” Benita shrugged, feigning a sort of jaded sophistication. The man laughed. A jolt of fear snapped through her: Had she said something stupid?
“The Anschluss,” he said, pushing himself off the wall he leaned against, “is not boring.”
He extended his hand. “Connie Fledermann,” he said. “May I buy you a coffee somewhere and we can debate this?”
The touch of his hand was warm and dry and sent splinters of excitement through Benita’s veins. And his eyes were an almost eerie shade of blue—not pale like her own, but intense—the blue of the North Sea in the sun or of the tiny flowers that took over Frühlinghausen for a few magnificent days each spring.