When Marianne awoke some hours later, she was hungry and filled with a sense of resolve. It was nearly eight a.m. Fritz and Martin had already left for school. Benita was sitting stiffly at the parlor table, making one of those hideous stuffed dolls that had become her hobby of late. When Marianne entered, she looked up and her face was pale, her eyes swollen from crying.
“Marianne—” she began. “I’m sorry I never told you before—I couldn’t sleep. I—”
“Never mind.” Marianne cut her off. “I cannot give you my blessing to marry Herr Muller,” she continued. “I have thought about it and it is not right.”
Benita regarded her with a plaintive face. “Why? Because he was a Nazi? But everyone was a Nazi. He is a good man—”
“Because it isn’t right that you should marry someone who worked for everything your husband died fighting against!” Marianne could hear her own shrillness.
Benita began to cry. She looked childish and delicate in her distress. It made Marianne feel old. Here she was, cast again as the stable, unemotional foil to Benita’s damsel in distress.
“Do you even know what he did in the war?” Marianne asked. “Do you talk about it?”
Benita wiped her eyes. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“He was in the Orpo. You know that much, don’t you?” she demanded. “But do you know what they did there, in the east?”
Hastily, Benita rose and moved to the window. When she turned again, her face was illuminated by a new desperation. “Don’t you ever want to put it away, Marianne? To be done with it? I don’t want to know what they did. I don’t want to look over my shoulder forever. It was a horrible time. And now it is past!”
Marianne stared at her. It was so selfish and cowardly! It made her blood boil. Benita was always looking out for her own interest, her own comfort. “You think the past is like one of your dolls? That you can just—tear it up and begin over again? Like that! And you are the wife of a hero! A man who died to make the past a little less horrible than it is. Don’t you think you owe him at least a little respect?”
Now Benita began to cry in earnest. Her shoulders shook, and ugly, sputtering sobs escaped from her throat.
“Do what you want.” Marianne sighed. “But I won’t let you draw Martin into this.”
At this, Benita looked up. She reached into her pocket for a handkerchief and blew her nose.
“Think it through,” Marianne said, softening slightly. “It is easy to mistake—”
Benita interrupted. “You are cruel, Marianne. Connie always said so, but I never saw it.” She looked directly at her. “But now I can see it.”
All day, Marianne felt the words like an ache. When would Connie have said this? It was a betrayal. Tough, she could imagine him saying. Discerning. Even hard. But not cruel. It was an arrow to her heart.
“Katarina,” she asked when the girl came to say good night, “do you think of me as cruel?”
Katarina’s dark eyes blinked in surprise. It was not like her mother to ask such a thing. “Cruel?” she repeated. The word shocked her: she was a true von Lingenfels. “Of course not! Why do you ask?”
Marianne sighed. “Maybe we are all cruel sometimes without intending to be.”
“Not you,” Katarina said, with such earnestness it made Marianne smile.
“Even me.” Marianne put an arm around her daughter and rested her cheek against the girl’s side. Despite everything, she was still only a child.
Marianne longed for the reassuring voice of an adult. She would ask Ania when she saw her next.
Chapter Twenty
Ehrenheim, June 1950
Ania received another letter the following Saturday. This time it was not delivered by the mailman but by Frau Metzger, the woman who brought their cheese.
“From a man,” Frau Metzger said with a coquettish smile, pulling the crinkly envelope from her bag. “He came to the market last week.”
Ania stared.
“Well?” Frau Metzger grinned. “Aren’t you going to open it? . . . Or maybe you already know who it was.” The woman winked.
“Of course not,” Ania said.
“Ah.” Frau Metzger sighed, obviously disappointed. “He did not look well. Recently back from the east.”
“Hmm.” Ania frowned in an approximation of confusion. “Thank you very much.”
This time there was no return address.
I forgive you. You did what you felt was best. But you are not finished with me yet.
The letter, if it could be called that, was wrapped around a photograph. A young man and woman wearing formal clothing, standing side by side at the bottom of an imposing set of steps. Wind blew at their hair and lifted the woman’s skirt. The man gazed off to the side as the woman smiled bravely in a manner that was as openly uncertain as it was direct.
And Ania was there, with the wind blowing in her ears and her best shoes pinching her toes and a sense of great import leading her, irrationally, toward giddiness. She was like a person jumping from an airplane, experiencing the lightness of commitment to an unchangeable path. It was like remembering a character from one of the novels she had read in her youth.
Ania set down the photograph. Outside, the afternoon sun yellowed, and bits of dried linden blew in the wind. It was time to prepare Carsten’s coffee and send Wolfgang out to the field with it. In the pasture, the bereaved mother cows bellowed for their babies still. They were not finished mourning yet.
The next day, Ania visited the return address from the first letter. The trip required a bus, a train, and a long walk. Ania left Inge, the house apprentice, in charge of supper, afternoon coffee, the wash, the cucumber pickling, and tending the garden—and set off.
It was an uncomfortable journey for a woman six months pregnant. On account of the heat, her swollen feet, and the sharp pain that shot up her spine, Ania had little time to think en route. So when she arrived in front of 19 Mauer Strasse, she was filled with a sense of shock. It was a real place, with real windows, and a real door. There was a front bell and a list of names beside it: a rooming house. The neighborhood was shabby; it stank of urine and cabbage soup.
An older man emerged from the door of the building as she stood there. Not Rainer, but certainly someone who had fallen on hard times. He scowled at her with blind resentment.
“Nha?” he said rudely. “Does it look good enough for you?” It took her a second to realize that he mistook her for someone looking for a place to stay.
Ania squared her shoulders and mounted the steps.
A hard-looking old woman came to the door. “No children allowed here,” she said, looking pointedly at Ania’s belly.
“No, no—I’m not looking to stay,” Ania said. “I’m looking for someone—”
The woman’s frown deepened. She had small, scrutinizing eyes. “I’m not an information service,” she snapped.
“I’m looking for a man—” Ania withdrew the envelope with the return address and showed it to her.