Marianne was elated by the fact that finally all their children, Martin included, would be settled at the fine German boarding school that Albrecht and Connie and their fathers before them had attended. Salem was a school remarkably untarnished by affiliation with the Nazis—attended by the aristocracy, founded by a Jew. Marianne believed anything could be solved by a good education. Look at the vast ignorance of the Nazis! she liked to exclaim. If only they had understood music and art, if they had read Kant and Goethe and listened to Mozart instead of burning books, the world might have been spared. Benita understood but did not agree. Look at that hate-mongering huckster Goebbels—he was a doctor of philosophy!
In the back of the car, Fritz and Katarina argued fiercely. Elisabeth rested her head against the window and feigned an air of hassled sophistication. Martin, absorbing his mother’s despair, was silent. For his sake, Benita tried to rouse herself. “Do you suppose they’ll give you a hot supper tonight?”
“It’s never a hot supper on the first night,” Elisabeth informed them, rousing herself enough to answer. “Dried fish, smoked ham, brown bread.” She wrinkled her nose. “I hope you aren’t too hungry.”
As they rounded the final bend in the road, Salem Castle sprang into view, its angular red roofs and white walls rising from the fields like an elegant minicity.
Fritz let out a whoop and Elisabeth a theatrical sigh of relief.
“Aha.” Marianne turned around and beamed. “You see, Martin? Isn’t it beautiful?”
Martin nodded, but his face remained somber.
“Welcome,” Marianne said grandly, turning to face forward again, “to your new home.”
Benita placed her hand on her son’s leg and squeezed, but being a young man now, he moved it away.
At the castle entrance, there was a throng of students, attendants, prefects, and other foreboding-looking officials giving orders. Fine pieces of luggage, instrument cases, and steamer trunks were piled in small mountains. The von Lingenfelses were immediately absorbed into the scene—Elisabeth and Katarina calling out to friends, Marianne greeting teachers; even Fritz appeared at home, scrambling toward some coveted position in the crush.
Martin and Benita alone stood beside the car.
“Come along, come along.” Marianne strode over, seeing their inaction. “The bellboys will unload.” Benita and Martin followed her through the sea of bright young people, a whole eager generation of Germans. They would be spared their parents’ sins, as Adenauer promised. No one even spoke of the war, the concentration camps, the millions of murders. The parents themselves looked relieved, if skeptical. They were signing their young over to an institution—one that was venerable, sanctified, and thoroughly vetted, but they understood the perils of indoctrination. Even Marianne, for all her bluster, was not immune to doubt. Benita detected strain beneath her show of cheer. All three of her children would now be out of the house. Any mother would feel the smart.
Benita, on the other hand, felt oddly empty and cried out. She had resigned herself ages ago to this peculiar aristocratic fate: Her boy—her baby—would be swallowed whole by this austere castle, occupied for centuries by the class of people her own humble peasant family had toiled to serve. He was to be admitted, completely, into their ranks. This was progress, wasn’t it? Even if it created distance between them.
“Here he is,” Marianne called out to an officious young prefect, pointing at Martin. “Martin Constantine Fledermann.” The full name was jarring—Benita never used it. “Ah.” The prefect introduced himself in the clipped manner of an ex–Hitler Youth. “Follow me to your quarters,” he instructed. And for a moment it seemed this would be their good-bye.
But then Martin turned and embraced his mother with all the fierceness of a younger child. “Good-bye, Mama,” he said as Benita held him. And the word filled her with happiness. Mama. If nothing else, she had given birth to him.
Benita and Marianne were silent on the drive to the inn. Marianne knitted, her needles tapping. She had learned this skill in the last few years from Ania and approached it as if it were a quaint, mildly entertaining art form rather than a tiresome matter of necessity, which it had always been in the Gruber household.
The inn was shabby—an ugly, half-timbered house with a crooked roof and narrow yellow-glass windows on the ground floor. “I’ll have dinner sent up,” Marianne announced. “You can join me if you wish.”
Benita demurred. She was happy to be left alone. And anyway, she was not hungry.
They parted at the bottom of the stairs.
But once Benita closed the little slanted door to her room under the eaves and saw the plain wooden cross mounted on the wall, the brown shaded lamp and worn coverlet, she knew she would die if she sat down.
So instead, she descended the stairs and walked through the dingy foyer and out onto the street. The inn was located on a narrow pedestrian throughway, and people walked past, shuttling children home to supper, carrying marketing sacks. Benita felt raw and exposed. She was stripped of the love she had wrapped around her like a protective cloak. No more Franz. No more Martin. Suddenly, she saw everything in its harsh, naked state. She felt the pulse of the lives lived inside the mean little houses she passed: selfish or generous, kind or unkind, ugly or tolerable, almost all of them sad. And she saw the histories of the people passing by like x-rays stamped on their faces—ugly, mutinous tracings of dark and light: a woman who had ratted out a neighbor, a man who had shot children, a soldier who had held his dying friend in his arms. Yet here they were, carrying groceries, holding children’s hands, turning their collars up against the wind. As if their moments of truth—the decisions by which they would be judged and would judge themselves—hadn’t already come and passed. What a sham this new German present was! An irrelevant time—a mad scramble to cast votes after the verdict had already been reached.