“How did you—” Benita began, and then dissolved into a fit of coughing. “How did you keep them from taking your children? And from sending you to prison?”
“I don’t know,” Marianne said, though in truth she could guess. The Nazis had never liked Connie, whereas Albrecht had maintained the frustrated respect of a few among them until the very end—through his natural diplomacy, maybe. Or, more likely, on account of his deeper and more illustrious roots. Connie was from an old, once-rich Junker family, but Albrecht was a von Lingenfels, descended from a long line of revered German generals, a vital “stem” of Hitler’s beloved master race. “We were lucky.”
“Ah,” Benita said, “and we were not.” Finally she picked up the letter.
But the look in her eyes was neither sad nor loving. She regarded the envelope in her hands like an object from outer space.
“Here,” Marianne said, gathering the soup bowl and spoon. “I will leave you to read in peace.”
Benita nodded.
But as Marianne closed the door, she saw Benita set the letter down unopened and lie back, flat as a corpse.
Marianne had spent a good amount of time considering Connie’s marriage. After his wedding, she had seen him together with Benita from time to time—at the Bemelmans’ Christmas party, at a few dinners she had hosted in Berlin, and once at a weekend gathering in Weisslau. It was a difficult match. The girl was quick to seem aggrieved (Connie had not fetched her from the station, or the baby was not sleeping, or no one had helped her with her suitcases on the train . . . ) and Connie was oversolicitous. But even though he was attentive, he remained somehow apart from his wife, disconnected from her in a way that seemed to encourage her complaints. Marianne did not understand what had drawn him to Benita to begin with. She did not normally consider such matters, but this was not just any marriage. Benita was Connie Fledermann’s wife. She was beautiful to be sure, but he had beautiful women all over Germany who fancied themselves in love with him. There was an innocence about her—an inherent lack of wit and sophistication that no amount of money or time in the city could transform, which was endearing in a certain way. But Marianne had never known Connie to be enthralled by this sort of simplicity. It was the Nazis who revered such quaint, unthinking volkishness, not forward-thinking men of the world like Connie. Yet Benita had captivated him.
Marianne had come across them once, alone on the terrace of a mansion in Dahlem, at a party thrown by one of Albrecht’s colleagues. It was in the first years of the war, when there was still plenty of wine and gaiety to go around. She had hesitated in the doorway and something about their demeanor made her stop before calling out. Benita was smiling up at Connie coyly and was without little Martin, which was rare in those days. Connie’s back was to Marianne. As she watched, Benita said something that made him laugh—a real head-thrown-back burst of astonishment, and then he caught her around the waist and pulled her toward him with an intensity that made Marianne catch her breath. It was forceful, even aggressive—a side of Connie she had never seen. Benita returned his laughter and allowed herself to be wholly enveloped in his embrace with a kind of softness and subservience that Marianne couldn’t imagine emulating.
This was the closest she had come to understanding Connie’s marriage: Benita made him a looser, more animal version of himself.
Marianne had felt a stab of sadness at the realization and hastily retreated into the familiar comforts of the party, and the various like-minded people with whom she knew how to converse, but she was like a person masquerading at normalcy after receiving terrible news. And when Marianne found Albrecht, dear steady Albrecht with his soft eyes and stooped shoulders, his thoughtful, deliberate way of speaking, she felt lonely and irritated by the crumb caught on his cheek, the dandruff on his evening jacket. And the fact that he stepped back to make room for her rather than pulling her close.
Chapter Five
Weisslau, July 20, 1944
For Marianne the twentieth of July had unfolded slowly.
It was hot in Weisslau. The children mooned around in the late Grossmutter von Lingenfels’s parlor, a cave of faded tapestries and heavily shaded lamps. They loved to lounge on the horsehair sofa in their light summer clothes, sucking penny candies and leafing idly through the collection of ancient illustrated books: Greek myths, Bible stories, German folktales, and obscure scientific tomes. And Fritz spent an unseemly amount of time examining prudish drawings of the human body in a great Victorian medical encyclopedia. Grossmutter would have been appalled. Their activities in the parlor always struck Marianne as slothful, and vaguely debauched.
On this day, the children were sorting a pile of scrap metal they had collected: valuables they planned to turn in to the local Nazi district head as their small contribution to the war effort. Marianne had no patience for such Nazi nonsense, especially when it involved turning her children into little warmongers. She had managed to keep them out of the youth groups despite Fritz’s wheedling (he hated to be excluded from the local Hitlerjugend Sunday hikes and football matches), but even so they were caught up in the obsessions of their peers. Collecting scrap metal seemed particularly idiotic to Marianne. And it always led to squabbles—who had found what and how much they would get in exchange. As if any of them really needed pocket money. They were lucky out here in Weisslau—on the land, with their own source of food and no bombs to worry about. This was the fifth year of the war, and in the cities it was ugly now. There, children needed all sorts of things (safety, a roof over their heads, enough to eat, and coal to burn in their furnaces through the winter). It had been nearly a year since the bombing of Hamburg, yet the stories and images of the aftermath were still grim. The newspapers ran tales of orphaned children living in the city’s remains, surviving on rats and fetid water; of people who had boiled to death in the canals as they tried to escape the firestorm. It was difficult, of course, to discern truth from propaganda, and Marianne trusted nothing the Nazi press printed. But still, the photographs were shocking—the inner city transformed into a gray and cratered landscape like the surface of the moon. And she had seen firsthand the faces of those who had fled to find work and housing in the south: they were blank with shock.