Which explained why, at the start of her marriage, she found herself undeniably pregnant. Five months along, the village doctor confirmed with unsubtle amusement. Herr Kellerman will certainly be pleased. He grinned.
But Ania was not amused. Denial had shielded her from the fact for as long as possible—her cycles had been irregular since the war and she had convinced herself she was too old to have children. Meanwhile, her belly grew round and she was hungry all the time. There was a flush of fat on her cheeks. Her pregnancy was too far along to escape.
Even so, she tried. She rode the wagon over rutted fields, scrambled up ladders and jumped down from the odd places the hens laid eggs, initiated a rigid program of bitter teas and scalding baths. She did not tell Carsten the news. But the baby was stubborn. It clung to her like a barnacle; she imagined its tiny fists grasping the soft tissue of her womb. It was determined to survive.
When she finally told Carsten, he was both delighted and embarrassed. He never spoke of the pregnancy by name and made no changes to their daily life—except for the conjugal visits, which immediately ceased. Ania did not tell anyone else. Let Carsten and Doktor Schrenke, the old gossip, spread the word.
In the evenings, Carsten liked to sit with her in the parlor—an uncomfortable, dark room with nothing but the fire in the brazier to recommend it. They listened to the news on the radio and he forced himself to read the Bible, self-imposed penance for a man who never went to church. As he read, his lips shaped the words. Ania sat beside him in the reclining armchair he had given her as a wedding present, darning socks and half hearing the news.
Sometimes Wolfgang ventured into their little cocoon with a question about schoolwork. Unlike his brother, he was a terrible student. He hunched over his books like a man flinching from a blow. The softer subjects were of particular difficulty—the vague but cautionary parables of history, the dense imaginative formulations of literature. He could not wait to work full-time on the farm and genuinely enjoyed making the rounds with his stepfather, learning how to stack the baled hay, when to hose down the pigs, where to reinforce a fence. He didn’t even mind Carsten’s finicky and exacting commands. Next fall his official apprenticeship was set to begin. Yet Ania always felt a twinge of sorrow at the sight of his dark head bowed over his schoolwork.
He was her mistake, poor child, born at a time when only wickedness was being ushered into the world. He was the product of her hungry, ration-fed womb and thin, insufficient breast milk. As a young mother, she had not had time to care for him. When he was sick with scarlet fever as a toddler, she had tied him to the bedpost on a leash to quarantine him. Carsten’s farm was her way of making amends.
“Here is something for you,” Carsten said from his armchair one evening, extending an envelope with Frau Ania Kellerman written across the front. The baby hiccupped in her belly.
“Thank you,” Ania said, her heart suddenly pounding. She did not recognize the address—a street in Momsen. But the name—R. Brandt—took her breath away.
She sat rigidly still, terrified that Carsten would ask her about its sender. The torrent of chemicals in her womb made the hiccupping stop.
Thankfully, Carsten was engrossed in a seed catalog.
Ania resumed her mending. The minutes sagged. The pages of Carsten’s magazine rustled. It was weaning season, and outside the mother cows bellowed for their calves. Across the pasture, in the barn, the calves cried back.
When enough time had finally elapsed, Ania excused herself.
Behind the closed door of her room, she tore open the envelope.
Inside was a thin sheet of airmail paper, the script written in a shaky but familiar hand.
Ania? it read. Do I recognize you?
Yours, as always,
Rainer
The words swam before her eyes. She tried to focus on the uneven ink, the fussy elegance of the A and the D—a kind of pidgin Old German script he had taught himself. After everything, apparently, this pretense remained.
From where had he emerged? Missing, presumed dead. This was what she had found at the Red Cross office. Dead, she had thought. After all, she knew the Warthegau. And she knew Rainer, or at least she once had.
But here he was, on this scrap of paper, slipping into her life.
The truth will out, her father had always said. Though, so far, in Ania’s experience, this was not quite right. The truth was in God’s hands. Or the devil’s, more likely. The very word truth seemed quaint. Where had it been hiding during the reign of obedience, pride, and duty?
Ania lay on her bed and counted the rows of tiny flowers on the curtains to still the chaos in her head. But it seeped through. In her mind, doors banged open and shut. The stench of mud defrosting in the spring, the long blank horizon of the east. The cruelty of boys playing games in the cold. A baby’s hand absently pulling at her ear. Beneath this were other, softer pieces. Rainer, not as the man she had last seen, but as a boy, sitting on the horsehair sofa in her father’s waiting room, waiting for his own prematurely aged father to emerge with a new round of pills. Already he had been the man of the house. Dark haired and dark eyed, his feet barely reaching the floor, still he was in charge.
She rose abruptly and went to the desk. She had to write back. If there was one thing she had learned, it was that you had to act. To rise up and meet obstacles thrown in your path. To sit and wait was death.
She pulled a sheet of airmail paper from her desk.
I’m afraid you are mistaken, she wrote. I know no one by the names of Ania or Rainer Brandt. Best of luck.
For a long moment she sat, staring at the words and at the once intimate name, Brandt. Then she sealed the envelope and tiptoed down the hall to the room her boys shared. She stood before their door and listened. She could hear their voices within—Anselm’s low murmur, Wolfgang’s faster, more heated tone. What would they make of the news? Her boys, for whom she had done too little and from whom she had asked so much—total faith, total amnesia, total forgiveness.
Something made her hesitate. As she stood in the darkness, a new intention formed. She would shoulder this new uncertainty alone. It was hers, after all. So she listened a moment more, allowing her courage to be bolstered by the trappings of this ordinary life she had arranged: homework, supper, chores, bed.
Then, moving swiftly and quietly, she turned and went back down the hall.
Chapter Nineteen
Tollingen, June 1950