Through the window, Marianne and Ania watched.
Some of the men wore the striped garb of KZ prisoners. So they were not all prisoners of war, but also prisoners from concentration camps who had been driven to the local stalags as the Russians advanced. Marianne had seen these wretched marchers on her own journey west: ghostlike lines of people stumbling through the fields, driven by black-clad SS guards, kept apart from the other refugees. Untermenschen, an SS man at one of the checkpoints had snarled when she had asked who they were, why they did not march with everyone else.
“God help us,” she murmured.
Beside her, Ania remained silent.
And in front of the stable, the Grabarek boys stood back.
When the potato-and-barley gruel was ready, Marianne carried down one pot herself, with the boys following her.
As she approached, the men rose from where they had been sitting and lying, their hunger rising off them like a smell, and the smell itself was pungent: one of unwashed bodies, sickness, and human waste.
“Put the food down here,” the tall man instructed, and behind him the men began to fall into line. Marianne and the boys did as he said and stood back.
The tall man gave a signal, and the first in line stepped forward and dipped the ladle.
“My husband was murdered by the Nazis,” Marianne said in Russian. It was what she had planned: it was important to draw connection between them, to make the men understand she was on their side. To her surprise, her voice shook. And the words felt strange and shocking on her tongue.
“He wanted to stop the war”—she paused, steeling herself—“to stop the camps, and the killing, and the madness.”
Her voice rang in her ears. The next in line took the ladle and drank hungrily, the soup catching in his beard. The tall man remained silent.
“They hanged him,” she continued. “They hanged him and all his fellow resisters. From meat hooks.” She had never said this out loud before. Instead she had closed her mind around it, divorced it from its physical reality. Suddenly, saying it here rendered it vivid: Albrecht, her tall, dignified husband, swinging, his legs kicking, the worn shoes and black socks he always wore—the line of white skin between his socks and trouser cuffs. She had never allowed herself to imagine this.
A few of the men darted glances at Marianne. There was the sound of bodies shuffling forward, soup being slurped, and her own breathing, loud in her ears. She waited for some recognition of her own suffering.
Finally the tall man spoke. He said: “The soup will not be enough.”
Marianne blinked and stared. Maybe he had not understood her Russian. An odd shame washed over her. It was as if she had stripped down and proffered herself, naked, before him—dry skin, stretch marks, raw elbows and all, in the bright sun—and he had merely looked away.
She drew herself up and swallowed. “It’s all we have.”
The man looked at her. “There is a horse.”
For a moment she did not understand.
“Where is it?” he asked. “It was here recently. Its shit stinks.”
She stared at him. He was talking about Gilda, Herr Kellerman’s horse.
This was what her soul-baring had led them to: he was suggesting they eat Gilda.
Her shame congealed into stunned, irrational fury. She had shared something sacred and essential, and this was his response.
“The horse is old,” she said, as calmly as possible. “The farmer needs her.”
The man leveled his gaze. “So do my men.”
More of them stared at her now. They were not really men, she felt with a burst of anger, but animals. They had been boiled down and stripped of anything that made them human.
“There are rations for liberated prisoners at the DP camp in Tollingen,” she said coldly.
The man said nothing for a moment. “We have had enough of camps.”
The shorter, burlier man who had first come to the door stepped forward. In an abstract way, it occurred to Marianne that he might harm her. To him, she was no better or worse than any other German. They were victims and she the agent.
But the blood beating in her head made her fierce.
“I can offer you shelter and all the food we have,” she said, crossing her arms recklessly. “But I cannot offer you the horse.” She steeled herself.
But then their focus shifted. It became clear they were not looking at her, but beyond her, toward the castle. Turning, Marianne saw Ania hurrying down the hillside with a stern, concerned expression on her face.
“Can I help with something, Frau von Lingenfels?” she called when she was close enough.
“We are hungry,” the tall man answered before Marianne could open her mouth. “We would like the horse.”
Ania slowed to a halt. “The horse?”
“Herr Kellerman’s,” Marianne said, folding her arms. “It’s not possible.”
Ania looked from Marianne to the men and back. Then she spoke slowly and reasonably. “The men are starving. There is no more soup.”
Frau Grabarek went with the group’s leader to Herr Kellerman’s to make the request herself. Kellerman did not put up a fight. He was too old and pragmatic to engage in futile argument. Gilda was decrepit and expensive to feed. He had a younger gelding he used for the harvest.
So Kellerman led the old horse up the hill, and when he reached the castle, he simply ducked his head and handed the reins to Marianne. He was not a sentimental man. He had lost the movement of his right arm in the last war, and his wife to childbirth, and his only child to scarlet fever. He offered no parting words to his horse.
Marianne had pulled herself together while she waited. The men were starving, the horse was not hers to spare. Her own strange effort to connect her suffering to theirs had been foolish. These men had no room for the suffering of others. And why should they? They had seen God knows what in recent years. They were far from home. And many had no home to return to: their villages had been destroyed, their families killed, their countries swallowed whole by the Soviets.
Herr Kellerman handed her Gilda’s reins and she accepted.
But the horse sensed menace in the great pyre the men had built before the stable and resisted for possibly the first time in her life. She pulled backward and stamped her feet.
“It’s all right,” Marianne said, although obviously it was not. She tugged at the reins and Gilda stepped forward cautiously, then stopped and strained her neck to look back at Herr Kellerman, who had owned her for some twenty years. This was how she was to be repaid for her unquestioning service.
What sort of benediction could Marianne offer? Herr Kellerman was right to turn and leave. There was nothing to say. Gilda looked wild and stupid with fear now, reduced to her most animal self. They were all in the time of animals: the men, her own frightened children hiding in the cellar, Herr Kellerman’s horse. Marianne handed the burly man the reins.
“Don’t make her wait,” she said in Russian, thankful not to have to say it in her own language.