“This is not about Marianne,” Franz said. “It doesn’t matter what she did.”
“How dare she! She came here and talked to you behind my back! As if I were a child—smaller than a child, a toy—something to move around as she likes! She never liked you.” She lowered her voice to something like a hiss. “She blames you for that dead Russian in the woods, and you know what? I would kill him again if I had to! Just to show her it was me who did it—”
“Benita—”
“It’s true, Franz. You know that. She doesn’t understand—she sees everything through her principles and ideas. And it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter what she thinks! What about you? Aren’t you happy when we are together? Don’t I make you happy?” She paused. “Connie is dead!” It came out harshly, catching in her throat. She was aware that her voice had risen but didn’t care. Let all the sheeplike patrons of Bemmelman’s be shocked. Let them whisper and avert their eyes. “But we are alive! And we have suffered, too! Don’t we deserve this happiness?”
“Deserve?” Franz asked quietly, his eyes remote. “I don’t deserve anything, Benita.”
“You had to leave your family! You had to march into the east and nearly starve and freeze, and God knows what else—and now it’s over! The war is over! And finally we can begin something new!”
“Stop!” Franz commanded. “You can’t say this! Your husband, Marianne’s husband, they died for something they knew was right—and the rest of us followed along, did as we were told, and looked away. I can’t erase that—I can’t just begin again—”
“Why not? Is there any other choice?”
Dishes clinked and voices murmured around them. The cash register chimed. Someone laughed.
“There are always choices.” Franz looked at her. “I can choose to let you go. You can begin a new life.”
“But I don’t want to begin a new life.” Benita was crying now. “Not without you. I don’t care what you did! It doesn’t matter! I would love you if you were Hitler himself!”
Franz stared at her and his face was a stranger’s.
“You have no shame, Benita,” he said finally. “And for me, shame is the only right way to live.”
Benita sat back.
This was the end. Her own stupid words repeated in her head. In the silence, Benita could see the future: no pleasant homey flat with flowers in the window and a place for Clotilde and Martin to study; no wide, soft bed to sleep in; no lovemaking; no new, ordinary, from-scratch life, full of simple things like cooking and marketing and Sunday walks along the river. No mornings of sunshine and coffee and growing old together.
For Franz there was only the motion of these things. His soul was already in hell. It was not Marianne who had come between them, but the past.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Momsen, August 1950
When Ania’s water broke, the convent hospital in Ehrenheim was still under construction. So Carsten drove her to the American military hospital outside of Momsen. It was nearly empty. And as soon as he handed her off to the nurses, he turned around and drove home.
Then Ania could moan and clutch her belly and stop gritting her teeth. The nurses were kind, albeit alarmed. They were young American girls trained to bind wounds and dress amputations, not deliver babies. The doctor arrived and proclaimed it too late to induce the “twilight sleep,” and the nurses squeezed her hands and smoothed her forehead in terrified support. But Ania was not concerned. She had already delivered two babies without such interventions—she knew only that she wanted to return home as quickly as possible. She had secrets to keep.
Improbably, she had managed to keep Rainer hidden. Like some awful Rapunzel, he was locked in the castle, only he was free to come and go as he pleased. From the moment Ania saw him, she had understood what he wanted. It was not exposure or revenge. For all his anger and despair, he did not wish to destroy the life she had created for their sons. He wanted to see his boys. He was deathly ill and, like a shamed and beaten animal, he was looking for a safe place to die.
Burg Lingenfels was closed down. Last fall, Carsten had boarded the windows as she and Marianne had covered what little furniture remained. They had planned to reopen it this summer, but then had not. Marianne was busy with her new project—sorting Albrecht’s papers—and traveling a great deal. And last year, the local teenagers had used the empty castle to get into trouble. It was better to keep it shut up. There were only mice and swallows nesting in the stone walls, water rats and frogs burrowing into the chinks of the moat. No one went there except for Wolfgang, whom Carsten had tasked with checking on it from time to time.
Ania had been forced to involve her boys in their father’s return. Ever dutiful, but simmering with resentment, they had half walked, half carried Rainer up the hill from the Kellerman farm. Wolfgang had arranged a straw pallet in the castle’s kitchen, along with a supply of water to drink. Anselm brought him a plate of food every night—he barely ate. Presumably, while she lay here giving birth to this new baby, her boys tended to their father—locked in some weird reversal with the man who had never cared for them.
Ania’s contractions sped forward until the pain was as constant as her heartbeat—rhythmic and all consuming, it obliterated worry. She was almost grateful. Rainer would be discovered or not. Her boys would tend to him or leave him for the ravens. Their life would explode or continue on the trajectory she had wrestled it onto. There was nothing she could do.
The baby came fast. In thirty violent minutes Ania pushed her out. Even four weeks early, she was as plump and smooth faced as an Eskimo. With her round dark eyes, she regarded the world impassively and then fell asleep. This was, apparently, what a child of Carsten’s was like. Or maybe this was simply a baby of peacetime: satisfied, round cheeked, and enigmatic. Swaddled in U.S. Army–issue blankets, she seemed to belong to some promising international future rather than a defeated Germany.
Ania handed her to the nurse and attempted to rise to her feet.
“No, no,” the nurse protested in alarm. “Rest now, because you’ll need your strength when you go home.” What did she know?
The nurses plied her with glasses of lukewarm water and sleeping pills. Carsten would not return for her until morning anyway.
Ania did not want to see the baby. So she took the pills they offered and drifted in and out of a thick, dreamless sleep, waking now and then to stare through the window at the courtyard, the bleached white paths across the grass like a crisscross of bones.
The next morning, she woke to find Benita sitting at the foot of her bed.
It took Ania a moment to remember where she was.
“Benita,” she managed to say. “Did you come to see me?” The idea seemed incredible. She had not seen Benita for so long—possibly not since the wedding.