All night the fire crackled and spat. Sparks sprayed toward the sky. As the moon rose, the men began to sing—a rollicking, boisterous song with an unfamiliar rhythm and tone that drowned out the echo of the horse’s weird, horrible screams.
In the corner of the kitchen, Katarina and Elisabeth sat clutching each other, crying. Benita was a bundle of exposed nerves, sewing a hem into an old pair of Fritz’s pants so they might fit Martin, stitching, restitching, and then ripping the stitches out. Fritz stood at the window, watching, spellbound and horrified. Somehow Martin slept.
“The men will soon come looking for schnapps,” Ania said. She and Marianne exchanged a glance.
“Why don’t you sleep in the cellar tonight,” Marianne suggested to Benita and the girls. “We can bring down the pallets.”
And so it was decided—everyone would go down except for Marianne and the Grabareks, who would keep watch upstairs. Only Fritz protested, halfheartedly. Marianne could see that he was fighting back tears. For the first time in ages, she wanted to hug him to her and kiss his head—her little boy, Albrecht’s son—he was only eight years old. Instead she said, as gently as possible, “Go on with them, Fritz, there’s no point in staying up.”
And when all were settled in the fruit cellar, which had a door that could be locked, she and Ania sat in the darkened kitchen and waited, listening to the singing and the fire and the occasional shouts.
When the men came to the door, as predicted, the women answered it together and handed over the last of the Weisslau plum schnapps. Already men were passed out on the cobbles and retching in the corners on all fours. Gilda’s body looked obscene, legs tied to the spit, head hanging unnaturally, abdomen blackened and hacked.
Schnapps in hand, the men retreated, and the women once again sat in the dark. Despite everything—the horse, the men, the raw exposure of her own emotions—a weird peace descended on Marianne. In this mysterious, pragmatic woman beside her, she had found a partner. And for the moment, this was enough.
When she finally slept, Marianne dreamed of the Polish laborers. All day they had stirred in the crevices of her mind, rattling tinnily in the corners where she had buried them. Now they marched forward like a ghostly jury in her sleep.
There had been maybe twenty of them, assigned to live on the estate in Weisslau when all the local boys and men who usually worked the fields had been sent to the front. They were from farther east, a part of Poland that had become the General Government, Polish citizens deemed unfit for Germanization. So in the parlance of the Nazis, they were to provide labor to the master race. A lot of Nazi garbage. But the von Lingenfelses had not refused their services. How else was the farm to be worked? And to refuse would have thrown suspicion onto Albrecht’s activities.
Provisional quarters were erected in the old pigsty. Marianne recalled a delivery of cots, some tables requisitioned from the old servant’s kitchen and the appearance of barbed wire across the windows.
The laborers wore P for Polen, or “Polish worker,” stitched onto their ragged uniforms. They reported to Roland Zeppel, the farm overseer. Untermenschen, he called them. “Underpeople”—the Nazi term for non-Aryans—the Gypsies, Slavs, and Jews at the bottom of the lot. They are people, too, Marianne had said when she heard him use the word. You must treat them with dignity. Roland Zeppel whipped out a Nazi pamphlet about managing foreign laborers. “Do not confuse Polish workers with Germans. They are not allowed at the table. Fraternizing is punishable by law.”
Marianne glared at him.
She had never liked the man. He had been a member of the party from the beginning, and even before that, he was not well liked. He had no skills or smarts or education to distinguish him, which made him just the sort to be taken with the notion that he belonged to a master race. But despite Marianne’s objections, Albrecht did not fire him. He had known Roland since childhood; they had gone to the same grade school in Weisslau, played in the same football matches, danced at the same town dances. For Albrecht, this connection was larger than the man’s politics. He was loyal to Herr Zeppel, and Herr Zeppel was loyal to him.
And so, with this man at the helm, their beloved estate became part of a system that had introduced slaves overnight. Suddenly Roland Zeppel carried a pistol and commanded twenty men from a different part of the continent. Marianne saw it as another piece of Nazi ugliness. Yet in her own day-to-day existence she had accepted it. She sent extra blankets when the weather grew cold and ensured the men had enough soup and potatoes, but still, she benefited from their work.
And now, lying in her cot at Burg Lingenfels with the Russians gathered outside, Marianne realized that she could not remember the faces or names of any of those Polish laborers. Unlike the local boys and men who had toiled in the fields before the war, she knew nothing about where those men had come from. Chelmno camp, yes. But who they were beyond this, whether they had families, what sort of lives they had left behind, she had never bothered to ask.
When the Red Army arrived in Weisslau, she had liberated the laborers. She had given each bread and potatoes and a small handout of what reichsmarks she had left, but she did not find out where they would go after this.
On neighboring estates, there were laborers who killed their landowners and overseers after the Russians arrived. Revenge was their first action upon being freed, and the Russians didn’t care. They had their own agenda of revenge. The Weisslau workers did not come for Marianne. But Roland Zeppel hid in his sister’s attic for days.
Remembering this made Marianne sit bolt upright in her cot. Zeppel had held the pistol, but it was her farm that both he and the laborers worked.
Outside the castle, the Russians began to sing again. This time it was a strange, unearthly song full of heartache and low, atonal notes. Something about the Volga River, the tapestry of time and the bright thread of suffering that ran through it. It was a kind of collective keening—a primal, soldiering sorrow rising from their souls.
Marianne lay on her narrow cot and listened in the dark.
Chapter Eleven
Burg Lingenfels, August 1945
When Benita awoke, she confused the cellar walls with her prison cell. How had she ended up back here? Horror flashed to the roots of her hair, the ends of her toes. To be back in prison meant she had lost Martin.
But no, here he was, his warm body curled beside hers.
She reoriented herself: she was in the west, the countryside, with Marianne, at Burg Lingenfels.