The rest of the evening passed pleasantly. There was no further talk of politics, and Connie seemed truly interested in learning all about her. Benita had never been asked so many questions—about her family, her childhood, her town, and Fr?ulein Brebel’s BDM group, about which Connie was remarkably curious. The cider made her feel free and light. And through Connie’s eyes, she saw herself anew. Not only was she beautiful and young, a future bearer of bold and strong Aryan children, but she was also a woman who could tell funny stories. And her life—the boring, small-town monotony of Frühlinghausen—had become a subject worthy of this man’s attention: the carnival at which she was crowned queen last year, the crabby town butcher who mixed up everyone’s orders, the time Frau Meltzer’s pigs escaped onto the mental hospital grounds. Connie had a seemingly bottomless appetite for her tales. And every time his knee grazed hers, she felt a jolt of electricity.
When they reached 7 Krensig, the windows were dark. Frau Gruber was not one to stay awake past ten, even on such an occasion. Connie ran around to Benita’s side of the car and held her door as she climbed out. Then, as she stood there against the still-warm body of his car, he leaned down and kissed her—lightly and skillfully, one hand tilting her chin. It was entirely different from Herbert Schmidt’s rough advances or Torsten Finkenberg’s awkward kisses, and she felt her whole body thrill at the feel of his smooth-shaven chin and the height from which he approached. She leaned into the spicy clove scent of his aftershave and the pressed wool of his suit.
“Can I see you again?” he asked. “I leave tomorrow, but if you say yes, I will come back in two weeks.”
“Yes,” she said, leaving aside strategy and coyness.
“Then it is decided,” he said, “and I will wait until you are safely inside.”
With that, Benita made her way up the narrow path and into the ugly, comfortable squalor of her childhood home, forever changed. She was a maiden who had met her prince.
Chapter Four
Burg Lingenfels, June 1945
The little boy sitting on the counter in front of Marianne was a miniature version of his father. Same startling blue eyes, high cheekbones, and straight, elegant features. His demeanor was different, though, certainly from that of his father as a man, but also from what he had been like as a boy. This Martin was solemn, impassive, and self-controlled where that Martin had been exuberant, bright, and spontaneous. This Martin’s face was a closed door. God knows it had good reason to be—Marianne would never forget her first sight of him, peering, wan faced, out the window of that awful Nazi orphanage.
“Does this hurt?” Marianne asked as she straightened the battered leg they had come inside to repair.
No, he shook his head.
“Or this?”
He shook his head again. But this time he flinched.
“Well, then, we will wash and bandage it, and it will be good as new.”
Marianne dipped a rag into a bowl of water and then pressed it against the bloody gash. She could feel the grit in his broken flesh. But the boy did not cry.
It was a bad fall. He and Fritz had been playing some sort of game in the rafters of the old horse stable. Fritz’s idea, of course. Her son could not stay out of trouble. It was as if all the hasty actions, zany ideas, and ill-considered nonsense he’d suppressed during their stressful journey west from Weisslau had returned to him doubled. Where had he come by his incautious streak? Neither she nor Albrecht had been impulsive or disorganized as a child. Even Elisabeth, for all her willfulness, was at least careful.
Luckily the floor of the stable was still the original packed earth. And Martin had landed like a cat. He seemed to have inherited the gift of luck from his father, who’d always had it in spades . . . until he didn’t.
“You know not to play on those beams now,” Marianne said. “I think we need not concern your mother with this so long as you promise to be more careful. And”—she raised her eyebrows—“promise not to let Fritz get you into trouble—he can be a real gypsy.”
“I won’t,” Martin said, his voice earnest and childlike. She forgot just how young he was sometimes. “I promise.”
Martin was not easily brought to tears. She had seen this much when he said good-bye to the little girl from the Children’s Home: Liesel Stravitsky. It was obvious he had loved her. But when they found her family, such as it was—a beleaguered aunt with three small children, her father dead, her mother last known to be in Auschwitz—Marianne’s own eyes had not stayed dry. The poor girl had thrown her arms around Martin and bawled as if her little heart would break, but he had remained stoic.
Marianne tied the last strip of silk around the cut. “Why don’t you sit in the kitchen and help Elisabeth and Katarina shell the peas?”
Martin opened his mouth as if to speak.
“What is it?” she asked, placing a hand on his other, unhurt and chasteningly bony knee.
“When will I be able to see her?” he asked. “My mother?”
“Soon,” Marianne said. “I promise.”
Benita had fallen sick with diphtheria a week after arriving at Burg Lingenfels. They said this was what happened sometimes: as soon as one made it to safety, illness set in. Marianne and her children had been inoculated at the English hospital in Braunschweig. As the wife and children of Albrecht von Lingenfels, they were classified as Opfer des Faschismus—“Victims of Fascism”—and treated well by the British authorities, who had waved their cart past the long line of fellow refugees queued at the border between zones. They were a wretched lot, mostly old people, women, and children fleeing from the east. It made Marianne feel guilty. What right to special treatment did she and her children have? They were lucky enough to have a wagon and a horse to pull it.
Benita, on the other hand, had received none of these advantages. She had not advocated for herself as the widow of Connie Fledermann, an active resister and a man executed by the Nazis. Though to be fair, it was different in Russian-occupied Berlin. A German was a German to most Russians. So she was simply a German widow, and a beautiful one at that, which had not worked to her benefit. Marianne would never forget the leering soldiers around the table in the flat on Meerstein Strasse or the horrible little bedroom with the closed windows and stink of sex. She had arrived too late. She had promised Connie that she would protect his wife and child, and she had failed.
Once Martin was safely settled in the kitchen, Marianne washed the bloodied rags that had once been Elisabeth’s Communion dress. This had arrived last week in a giant sea trunk that was delivered, improbably, on the back of an American army mail truck. Her heart twisted when she saw the trunk. Albrecht had insisted, years ago, that they pack it up and send it to his cousins in Geneva for safekeeping—a gift from a foresighted dead man.
We live in the middle of nowhere, Albrecht! Marianne had complained when he suggested packing up their prized possessions. It’s not as if any army will bother with Weisslau.
But Albrecht was right. The Russians had marched right through the town, determined to avenge their losses, taking everything from bicycles to grandfather clocks to Grossmutter von Lingenfels’s maudlin needlepoints. Collateral for the toll the war had exacted—as if loot could bring back their dead.