No matter how many times she made this trip, the landscape remained foreign. The craggy mountains and flat green valleys dotted with cows, the patches of woods and hay huts were like something out of a fairy tale—complex, shadowy, and intricate. So unlike the wide open farmland of Weisslau. How she still missed it. Nothing could hide on the flat plain of northern Silesia—armies, visitors, weather, all were apparent from kilometers away. And Marianne felt at home with this transparence.
For a brief stretch, the Isar River ran alongside the tracks. It came down from the high mountains, fast and pale, full of some mineral that turned it a livid, almost unnatural whitish green. To Marianne, it reeked of menace. The ashes of Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Frick—those architects of Nazi horror—had been scattered along its banks. By whose decision? The random assignment of some government automaton? Or by their own wishes? Was there some symbiotic energy these men had felt? On the far side rose the jagged mountain peaks.
When Marianne had first arrived in this area at the end of the war, a freshly mounded pile of earth ran alongside this river. As she rode into Momsen with Carsten Kellerman for the first time, she saw men and women scrabbling around on its banks, digging.
What are they doing? she had asked.
Looking for their people, he had answered, his eyes inscrutable.
This was the grave of hundreds of marchers, he explained, the end point for those wretched collections of prisoners driven west from concentration camps. Why? For what reasons were they marched? At that point, the war was as good as over. Everyone knew. But still the SS had marched those prisoners until they dropped from exhaustion and then shot them when they fell. So the dead had lain here until the townspeople buried them, under this pile of earth. And after capitulation, some small number of brothers and fathers and friends and cousins returned to look for their loved ones. Marianne would never forget that.
But the townspeople went about their business as if it had never happened. They fished and washed in the river and walked alongside it in the evenings. No one spoke of the prisoners they had watched stumble and die along its banks. No one erected a marker over their bones.
At Momsen station, Marianne got off. She had steeled herself for the encounter, but now that she was actually here, her hands were cold and clammy and her face felt hot. Better to be quick and done with it. The children would wonder where she was and, left to their own devices, they would certainly forget their studies. Fritz would get into trouble . . . Benita was as good as another child when it came to discipline.
Marianne had intended to confide her plan to Ania, but something had stopped her. Ania had seemed surprised to learn of Benita’s affair, but not shocked. It was clear she did not share Marianne’s moral outrage—and why should she? She had never known Connie. And from what Marianne could discern, her own husband’s life as a resister remained opaque. Ania was deeply silent on the subject. Marianne suspected marital tragedies that went beyond the man’s death. And it was her philosophy not to disturb them—what good was opening a wound that had sealed itself shut? So she let it be, though deep down, she was disappointed by Ania’s indifference. Marriage to Kellerman had put distance between them. But, unlike Franz Muller, Carsten Kellerman was a good man, at least.
In the month since Benita had announced her engagement, a stilted, awkward air had settled over their flat. Marianne and Benita skirted each other and exchanged cool, polite conversation only when necessary. Fortunately, the children were too absorbed in their own activities to notice the chill. Martin and Fritz would soon depart for the boarding school Katarina and Elisabeth attended, and they were busy roaming the hills and fields around Tollingen, enjoying their summer holiday.
But this silence in their flat could not go on forever. Even in her anger, Marianne loved her friend. Benita needed protection. She was easy prey—so fragile and romantic and readily swayed. For all Marianne knew, Muller might harbor a false sense of her fortune and believe her to be rich. After all, when he’d met her, she’d lived in a castle. And who knew what his debts were, or his prospects?
It was easy to find the shop where Herr Muller worked. There was only one coffin maker in Momsen. It sat on the first floor of a hulking, coal-smoke-stained building, still pocked with bullet holes. In the final days of the war, the local Hitler Youth and Home Guard had put up a fierce, irrational fight, losing countless lives, destroying buildings and bridges. And the mad captain in charge of this motley group was now a town councilman. Momsen was as bad as Ehrenheim, in Marianne’s view.
To the left of the shop, Marianne found a doorway with a list of names. muller, one read. So he lived here, too. Marianne could not imagine Benita calling this home. She was a woman who lived for creature comforts and pretty dresses. It bolstered Marianne’s sense of rightness to think that she was sparing her friend from such a fate.
A little girl opened the door when Marianne knocked: pale, dark haired, and unusually slim with wide, wary eyes.
“Can I help you?” the girl asked.
“Is this the shop of Franz Muller?” Marianne asked.
The girl nodded. She looked about Martin’s age. “Would you like to come in?” she asked. “Papa!” she called into the shop.
Marianne was taken aback. So the man had a daughter. It rendered him less monstrous.
The door opened into a gloomy alcove and from somewhere inside, she heard the grating of a saw, which at this moment knocked off. “Clotilde?” came a man’s voice, and heavy footfalls across the floor.
And then Franz Muller stood at the entrance. In the flesh, his face looked dismayingly ordinary, free of the darkness Marianne had attached to it in her mind’s eye.
“You can invite our visitor in—” he began, and then broke off, recognizing Marianne.
“Frau von Lingenfels,” he said in surprise. “Come in.” He held open the door. “Can I offer you something—we don’t have much here—but a cup of tea? Some biscuits?”
“That’s all right,” Marianne said. “Just a moment of your time.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “Clotilde, will you leave us? You can go upstairs and see if Grosspapa needs help.”
The girl’s dark eyes passed from her father to Marianne with curiosity. Then she grabbed her coat off a hook. “When shall I come back?”
“I will come get you,” Franz said. “Go on—but say good-bye to Frau von Lingenfels first.”
“Good-bye,” the girl said. “Please come again.”
It seemed such a curious thing to say—come again to a coffin shop? Did they have many repeat visitors? Or had she mistaken Marianne for a friend? The girl’s innocence was disarming. Marianne watched as her narrow back disappeared.
Marianne followed Herr Muller into the shop. It was a long, narrow place, with coffins lining one wall, and the planks and boards they were made of stacked high on the other—so much wood and so many supplies for preserving the dead. It was an ugly business. In the corner was a modest table and four chairs. Perhaps this was where Herr Muller sat to sell his wares to vulnerable, grief-stricken clients. This too shored up her resolve.