“For shame,” Marianne spat. “Have you become such monsters that you can laugh at that?” The girls stared at her, not with shame or anger but with fear. And all around her Marianne felt the people draw close together, tightening their scarves and jackets, squaring their shoulders, fortifying themselves against her reproach.
A rumor had developed in Ehrenheim and elsewhere that the film was a piece of Allied propaganda and that the footage really showed German soldiers and collaborators killed and starved in Soviet gulags. In the last months of the war, the Americans had dropped leaflets with photos of concentration camp victims from airplanes and this was how Hitler had explained them. Being the sheep they were, the Ehrenheimers believed him. And they clung to this idea now—a thin protection between them and their own complicity.
It made Marianne livid with fury and shame.
Unlike Marianne, Benita did not go see the film. And she stopped listening to the news broadcasts with the von Lingenfelses.
“Ugh,” she said with a shudder on the third night when she joined them sitting around the radio. The subject was the liberation of Mauthausen, another concentration camp. “Do you really think the children should hear this?” Benita asked.
Marianne turned and stared at her. “Of course they should. They are Germans.”
The children fidgeted in their seats. Even Elisabeth knew better than to interject.
Cowed, Benita returned to her darning and listened to the rest of the broadcast in silence.
But the following night she begged off. She was too tired to listen and was going to bed. Marianne bit her tongue. Where was Benita’s sense of moral responsibility? Where was her compassion? She seemed to have no feeling of commitment to—or belonging in—the wider world. She was as bad as the citizens of Ehrenheim. Marianne’s anger rose as suddenly as a flock of startled birds. Connie had loved Benita, she reminded herself. She was the mother of Connie’s son. This was what mattered.
But it was so difficult not to judge! Some deep seed in Marianne’s being grew unstoppably toward fairness, pushing blindly through nuance and complication to extract a simple answer: wrong or right.
As a girl, roaming the Ostsee with Connie and Freddy and the other children of the Prussian aristocracy, she had been christened “The Judge.” In the anarchic atmosphere of the summer holidays, the children had turned to Marianne to sort out their quarrels and issues of fairness. She had loved the role. It made her feel distinguished and powerful. And it was because of this privileged place she held that she and Connie grew close. He was a leader of the group too, an inventor of the best games and most exciting adventures, a charismatic Pied Piper to the children of the Grand Hotel. In the absence of nannies and governesses, who were instructed by their parent overlords to let children return to nature on these holidays, Connie and Marianne reigned together—king and queen of the wild things—Connie full of mischief, and Marianne (at fourteen) full of wisdom.
But then her role became a prison as the age of flirtation descended and Marianne found herself locked out of its frivolities. Her reputation made her self-conscious. How could The Judge bat her eyelashes and giggle? How could she feign the silliness necessary to play such games? She was not well suited to flirtation in a physical sense, either. She was tall and dark and awkwardly proportioned, with coltish long limbs, a flat chest, and a somber face.
Even so, Marianne imagined that her connection to Connie was meant to transition into something more adult, more gendered. More romantic. What exactly that entailed, she did not consider, but she believed it was a given, as confusing as it was promising.
Then one night their little group went swimming in the moonlight. There was a ball at the hotel and all the adults were swept up in the excitement. It was a hot night and the ballroom was fetid with the stink of alcohol and perfume, waxy hothouse lilies and sweat. The children escaped to the beach, stripping their clothes as they went, giddy with the excitement of transgression. The sand was still warm from the sun, and the Baltic looked especially soft in the windless darkness, the waves barely lapping at their toes. One by one, they plunged into the water, laughing and calling out.
For most, the swim was quick. Despite the calm, they were frightened of the blackness, and they charged back up the dunes to pull on their dresses, shirts, and trousers, crouching and shrieking at the prospect of being seen naked. But Marianne and Connie remained. They swam as if it were a competition to see who would turn back first. When she finally stopped, her heart pounding, she became aware of her body, naked below the surface, suspended precariously over the depths. Connie noticed and turned and swam back to her, emerging nearby, shaking the water from his hair. Above them, stars twinkled through the haze, and in the distance, the hotel sparkled like a cruise ship. For a moment, Marianne was terrified. Of their distance from the shore and of the unknown deep, but also of Connie, her own nakedness, and her certainty that this was the moment that would change their relationship. Her whole body thrilled with anticipation.
But just as she began to swim in his direction, he dove under the water.
“I won,” he called when he surfaced, farther away. Then with confident, lazy strokes he started toward the shore.
One afternoon, Benita, Katarina, and Elisabeth returned from town, flush faced and laughing, their light moods discordant with Marianne’s.
“You have a note, from Herr Peterman,” Elisabeth exclaimed. She held out a thin envelope. “Maybe we’re invited to one of their parties!” Elisabeth was preoccupied with the thought of attending an American army event and dancing with a soldier. Where did she get these ideas? Benita? The doltish Ehrenheim girls she had recently met? She was only thirteen.
Marianne took the envelope and tore it open.
It was not an invitation, but something of far more import.
We have identified the wife of the late Pietre Grabarek, whose name is on your list. Her name is Ania Grabarek and she is accompanied by two sons. She is currently at the Tollingen Displaced Persons Camp.
The news was exciting but also puzzling. Grabarek was a Polish name, and one Marianne did not immediately recognize. But apparently she had given it to Peterman. She had lifted the names directly from Albrecht’s journal, and not all his associates and contacts were known to her. She felt a pang of disappointment that it was not someone she knew—Carlotta Biedermann, for example, whom she had always liked and had lost track of completely. But this was selfish. The list was not about providing her with friends. It was about finding the women she had sworn to help.
She read the note aloud.