For weeks in Ehrenheim, there had been talk of roving bands of ex-prisoners, released from one of the Nazi stalags. Nearly seventy thousand prisoners of war had been held by the Nazis in the camp at Moosburg alone: some French, some British, Dutch, and even American, but most were from the Red Army. Not only Russians, also Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, and other Baltic peoples, first conscripted by the Russians, then captured by the Germans. Many of these men were afraid to return home to lands now subsumed by Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Hausfraus of Ehrenheim were convinced they were all rapists, murderers, and degenerates—and that they were after revenge. No one talked about why.
Total hogwash, they’re men like any others, just hungry and mistreated, Marianne had said when her daughters returned from town with their heads full of such talk. The people of Ehrenheim know nothing about Russians.
The Russians had arrived in Weisslau in January and made themselves at home. Unlike many of her neighbors, Marianne had not fled. It would take more than a few drunken soldiers to make her leave the home she had been so happy in, the land that connected her to Albrecht. For the most part, the rumors of the horrors the Russians would inflict proved false. Yes, they came banging on doors at night, looking for schnapps and women, but Marianne found them easy enough to dissuade. You had to push back. Show them you were not afraid. Once she had come to the door in her bathrobe brandishing a frying pan, and how the Russians had laughed. But they had not barged past. They were thieves, of course, but who could blame them? The Germans had killed twenty million of their countrymen. So they took everything from bicycles to kitchen kettles to feather pillows, and, most prized of all, any kind of radio. But they were not monsters. Marianne had not fled until it became clear that they would also take her estate.
But now, watching these men climb the hill to the castle, she felt a prickle of fear. They did not look like the Russian soldiers she remembered from Weisslau.
“Will they kill us?!” Elisabeth asked. “There are so many of them.”
Next to her, Katarina began to cry.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Marianne snapped. “They’re just hungry.”
Behind the girls, Benita had gone pale. Marianne thought of the apartment in Berlin where she had found her: the hideous man with the Kalashnikov guarding the door. The poor girl had her own experience of Russians. Marianne felt a pang of guilt. Benita was right to be petrified.
“You go down to the cellar,” Marianne said to her daughters. “I will greet them when they arrive.
“Go on,” she added, more kindly, to Benita. “You take care of the children.”
Wordlessly, Benita followed the girls.
“We will stay,” Frau Grabarek said. Marianne had almost forgotten she was there. In the week since she had arrived, she and her boys had barely spoken. Who knew what traumas they had endured? For the most part, Marianne just let them be.
“That’s all right—” Marianne began to protest, but stopped. It might be useful to have the boys here. And Frau Grabarek herself had a quiet, determined strength to be reckoned with.
“Thank you,” Marianne said, surprised at her own relief.
And so they waited. It was a curiously intimate thing. They did not speak, but there was solidarity in their silence. Until this moment, Marianne had felt only a sense of unease about the Grabarek boys. Their reticence made them seem shifty. They were so unlike the boys she was familiar with—the bright, boisterous children of the German aristocracy. Despite Fritz’s best efforts, Anselm and Wolfgang did not play. Instead, they followed their mother like silent, restive Dobermans.
The knock, when it came, was firm but not belligerent. They were only men, only Russians, Marianne reminded herself, as she had reminded her girls. Human beings, wronged by the same regime that murdered Albrecht and Connie.
She wrestled the heavy front door open, and two men stood before her. One was tall with skin stretched over his cheekbones like the thin layer of fat on the surface of boiled milk, the other short and healthier, with a beard and bright uneasy eyes. The tall one had a blanket over his shoulders, despite the warmth of the day.
“We need food,” he said, in a rough approximation of German, his voice much lower than seemed possible from a man so thin. His pants were too short, and beneath them his bare feet were caked with dirt. “And water,” he added. Behind him, the rest of the men assembled at the mouth of the bridge over the moat. At the front of the line were the more robust-looking prisoners, and behind, still arriving, a collection of sorrier souls, emaciated and close shorn, with wide, haunted eyes. A mix of newer arrivals and those who had been held in the stalag by the Nazis for God knows how long. There were maybe fifty in total, all silent, and all staring at her.
“I speak Russian,” Marianne said in Russian. “You are Russians, no?”
The tall man looked at her without blinking. Neither he nor his partner evidenced the surprise or enthusiasm that usually greeted this announcement. “Most of us,” the man said, speaking Russian now. “We need food and water and a place to rest.”
“I will bring it to you,” she said. “And there is space and straw in the stable for you to rest.”
The shorter man nicked his head toward the castle and spoke in a low, guttural dialect. The tall man translated. “How many people live here?”
“The beds are full,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “But the stable has room. We will bring you food.”
“And water,” the tall man said.
“And water,” Marianne repeated.
Only after she shut the door did she realize her hands were trembling.
In the kitchen, Ania and her boys had already begun paring potatoes. “We can cook these together with the barley and carrots,” Ania said. “It will thicken with a handful of bread.”
Marianne nodded, grateful for the woman’s calm. And the fact that she actually knew how to cook. In the week since she had come, the castle had already benefited from her competence. She knew how to grind spoonfuls of rapeseed into oil, darn stockings, pickle the vegetables to last through winter, and preserve fruit. And she had taken over meal preparation, to Marianne’s relief. It had been so long since she had shared responsibility. Benita had been sick and had never seemed a real grown-up anyway. And it had been ages—a lifetime—since Marianne shared a household with Frau Gerstler in Weisslau.
While Frau Grabarek—Ania, as Marianne had begun to think of her—chopped and cooked, Marianne filled buckets and pots with water from the cistern, which was troublingly low. Once a week, Herr Kellerman filled his “water wagon” and hitched it to his poor long-suffering horse, Gilda, so they could have water at the castle, which was without a well. It had been five days since their last delivery.
“Carry the water,” Ania ordered her boys after Marianne filled the first pails.
“I’ll take one,” Marianne began.
“It’s better if you wait,” Ania said with an authority Marianne had not heard before. “Let them see you have help.”
Marianne stopped short. She was not accustomed to being told what to do, but the woman was right.
So the boys made their way to the stable, shouldering the heavy buckets, stepping carefully along the uneven ground. As they neared, the Russians started forward, but the tall man held up his hand, gave an order, and they fell into a neat, practiced line.