“Why else? I went to the farm yesterday and heard the news.”
Benita did not look well. Ania could see this. She did not have her usual rosy cheeks and neatly arranged hair. She was wearing a shabby brown cardigan. And there were dark circles under her eyes.
“Is everything all right?” Ania began, but a nurse appeared, holding the baby. Her baby. The idea was still unaccustomed. Ania regarded the swaddled creature and felt nothing.
“There she is!” Benita exclaimed. For a moment, enthusiasm restored her beauty. She was the sort of woman who lit up in the presence of an infant. Her love of Martin had always made Ania feel sorry for her own sons, both loved so much less lavishly.
“Can I hold her? Please?” Benita asked.
Ania nodded.
The nurse laid the baby in Benita’s arms.
“You’re so lucky,” she said, her eyes filling. “She’s beautiful! And you can enjoy her. No wars and bombs to protect her from, and all this . . .” She hesitated, then landed on the word: “Safety. Do you know, when Martin was a baby I was so worried he would be crushed in a bombing that I turned our icebox into a crib. I thought it would save him if the ceiling caved in—as if an icebox would have protected him!” She shifted the baby, who made a faint purring sound. “I was such a child.”
“We were all children.” Ania sighed.
“I didn’t intend to disrespect Connie, you know,” Benita announced with sudden ferocity. “If I had married Herr Muller, it would not have harmed Connie’s memory.”
“If you had—?” Ania repeated.
“We were engaged.” Benita sat back. “I thought Marianne told you.” She looked at the ceiling, and tears slid down her cheeks. How seamlessly she cried, as if she went through life filled to the brim.
Ania shook her head.
“Marianne didn’t approve.”
It required no more explanation. Benita’s will had never been a match for Marianne’s.
“So you have decided not to . . . ?” Ania ventured.
“Decided!” Benita snapped and stood up, still holding the baby. She went to the window and then turned back. “I decided nothing. But Marianne told Franz she was against it and he—it doesn’t matter. I was stupid to imagine I could be happy again.
“It’s not why I came anyway.” She adjusted the baby and wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “I came to say good-bye. After we take the boys to Salem, I am going home to Frühlinghausen.”
“To Frühlinghausen?” Ania repeated. This surprised her as much as anything else Benita had said. “To take care of your sister?”
Benita tried to smile at the baby in her arms. “It’s where I belong.”
Ania stared. Benita had always hated the town where she was born. “What does Marianne say about this?”
“She doesn’t know.”
Ania regarded this woman she knew so well and yet not at all. Their lives had become entwined during such a strange time—without context, severed from the past, before the future. A time dictated by basic needs. What did they really know of each other?
“Are you sure?” she asked, the words sounding obtuse even to her own ears.
The baby’s little hand clasped and unclasped against Benita’s neck.
“Nothing is sure, is it?” Benita said, almost dreamily. “That’s what Marianne doesn’t understand.”
The baby began to cry.
“Here.” Benita bent and placed her in Ania’s arms.
The nurse appeared in the doorway. “Do you want to feed her, Frau Kellerman? Or should I give her the bottle?”
“Feed her,” Benita said to Ania with sudden surprising authority. “Take care of her. That is the most important thing.”
“Auf Wiedersehen.” She leaned down to kiss Ania’s cheek.
“Mach’s gut,” Ania said, and caught her hand. Make it good—an old expression her own mother had used.
“You too.” Benita squeezed her fingers and brought them to her lips. And then she was gone.
“Does the baby have a name yet?” the young nurse asked after Benita left.
Ania began to shake her head no. Then a name occurred to her, first as a joke—almost a joke, and then real—a name like a talisman, the name of the strongest, stubbornest, most difficult, and wisest woman she knew.
“Marianne,” she said. “Her name is Marianne.”
The nurse smiled. “Marianne,” she repeated in her American accent. “Pretty!” She looked down at the baby, who had latched onto Ania’s breast hungrily. “Be a good girl, little Marianne.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Salem Castle, September 1950
The day the boys were scheduled to start Salem Castle Boarding School was clear and crisp and sharp edged in a way that was unusual for the region, which was known for its soft, moist air and bouts of low pressure blamed for headaches and illnesses and despair. A brisk autumn wind blew off the Alps, scattering sunlight across Lake Constance so it looked like an audience of people clapping hands.
Marianne had hired a driver for the trip. She sat in the front, straight backed, long necked, craning around every so often to remind the children of a piece of history or point out a landmark. And sitting in the back, sandwiched between Martin and the door, Benita hated her.
You think you know so much! she wanted to say. But you know nothing! You have never even been in love! It was something Benita understood after all these years of living together: Marianne, who had once seemed so intimidatingly wise, was in fact ignorant. She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history.
Since that awful day when Benita returned to their flat from Bemmelman’s, Marianne had, several times, attempted something like an apology. You know, if you would like, I could go back to Herr Muller and tell him I had no right to speak as I did, Marianne had said one evening when Benita staggered blearily out of her room at suppertime, emerging for the first time that day. Benita only stared. Did the woman really believe it was so simple? That a few well-chosen words could make everything right? Or was this simply her shrewd play for forgiveness—a way to exonerate herself without ceding the territory she had won?
No, Benita had replied. Unlike Marianne, she understood that what had happened was not caused, but exposed, by the other woman’s interference. There was a tight black cave where Franz Muller’s heart, or something more than his heart—his personhood—should be. He had lost it in the war, and there was no getting it back. There was only a careful sidestep around the place it had once lived—a dance of ignorance that she had mastered without even knowing it. And there was no going back now.