Without Benita and the children, the flat in Tollingen was too quiet. No more Fritz scuffing the baseboards in the hallway, no more piles of shoes by the door, no more Martin lying on the sunlit parquet with his books. And no more scent of Benita’s coffee in the morning or eau de gardenia perfume wafting from her bedroom at night. No more strains of sentimental music drifting down the hall from her precious Victrola, though the player was still there. Theoretically, Marianne could have listened to a record. She herself had given the Victrola to Benita, but it wasn’t in Marianne’s nature to select an album, place it on the turntable, and play. Some innate self-consciousness, or even an inexplicable anxiety, held her back. One evening, she went to the shelf and hesitantly flipped through the collection of records—almost all were unfamiliar names and faces—until she landed on Benny Goodman. She knew who he was. But when the needle touched the record, the notes that blared forth were startlingly loud and by the time she had managed to adjust the volume, she was too jarred, too caught, really—a person mucking about in someone else’s business—to want to hear more.
Now there was only the light tap of her own house shoes as she walked through the flat. For dinner she ate a roll spread with jam or butter and a thin slice of ham. Instead of using the wide kitchen table, she ate at her desk—a grand, polished Biedermeier she had inherited from one of the von Lingenfels cousins. She had moved it into the middle of the parlor, where she could look out the bay windows to the town square below and write letters to the children—one each night.
The desk was her new home. And from behind it she threw herself into a fresh project: documenting a history of the German Resistance. Every day she drafted plans, wrote lists, and took notes. She wrote to old friends and acquaintances, asking for journals and photographs, copies of their letters. She organized Albrecht’s papers but was too restless, too unsettled, to actually read them.
Benita had returned to the town where she was born, where Connie had “discovered” her. Beyond this, Marianne knew nothing about the place. She had written to Benita asking how she was and when she would be back, but received no response. Marianne’s last image of the girl, sitting on the lap of some loutish Biergarten youth, was a horrible one.
Alone in the flat with no one to distract her, Marianne was left to deliberate over Benita’s departure. She had overstepped. She should not have gone to see Franz Muller. She had allowed her own sense of betrayal to influence her actions. And when she had tried to apologize, something in her apology fell short.
In their letters from school, the children asked why Benita had moved. Only Martin was silent on the subject. So far, he had written two dutiful little letters detailing his life: early-morning chapel and cold showers and endless math. Obviously, he wrote to his mother, too. What did she tell him of her decision to return to Frühlinghausen, a place she had only ever spoken of with scorn? Marianne was afraid to ask.
She began to compose another letter to Benita, one that sought to offer a more complete apology. But where to begin? Our flat feels empty without you. The flowers on the balcony have shriveled without your care and when I noticed, I soused them and now they look both shriveled and waterlogged, if that is possible. Herr Dressler asks after you every day when I walk past his flat.
I owe you an apology, she wrote, and crossed it out.
I was wrong to intervene in your plans to marry and I am sorry, she wrote instead. If you would like, I will return to Herr Muller and apologize myself. I did what I thought was right, at the expense of your happiness. I see now that it was not my place. This did not sound right either. Too implicitly scolding. Too righteous.
The truth was that Marianne had misunderstood their relationship. She had imagined Benita’s affair with Franz to be a mere diversion, a flight of fancy. She had not grasped how fundamental it was to Benita’s happiness. If she had known . . . then what? Should she have applauded the choice? An ex-Nazi for a resister’s wife? She could never celebrate this. But she had been wrong to interfere. This was what she needed to convey.
But it was so hard to say both what was true and also what was required! At her desk in the lonely parlor, a thick, doldrumy feeling threatened to descend on Marianne. Through her friendship with Benita, she found herself dragged into the quagmire of complexity. Don’t overcomplicate, she had always advised Albrecht. There is a right and a wrong in every situation, and it is our job to extract it.
She stood abruptly and shook her head, capped the pen and folded the letter. She would finish it later.
A warm breeze blew through the open window. It was an unseasonably warm fall day. The kind of day in which late field poppies bloomed and bees worked frantically to finish their work for the season. Years ago, she would have been preparing for the countess’s party—ordering wine and champagne, cakes and cuts of meat. The thought made her want to climb the hill to Burg Lingenfels. She had not visited the castle in ages, not since they had boarded it up.
It was strange to climb the hill alone, no children running alongside her gathering flowers, throwing stalks of wheat, no Benita trailing behind, stopping every so often to rest. But the sunshine and Herr Kellerman’s new herd of cows grazing on the hill went a long way toward dispelling Marianne’s loneliness. What shall we do with the castle? she asked Albrecht as she walked. Give it to the state, she imagined him saying, his voice unusually clear in her head. His answer was easy to guess: he was too much the aristocrat to suggest selling it. The very thought made her laugh. Albrecht von Lingenfels, intellectual, revolutionary, hero, yes . . . but a terrible businessman.
And then there it was—squat, yellow, and impervious. On this day, Marianne felt only pleasure at the castle’s intransigence. It was like a steady friend. She quickened her pace. Here was the old linden. Here was her favorite patch of stone wall. Here was the footbridge, and the grand opening, like a wide dark mouth. She tracked around the side to the smaller bridge that led to the kitchen and stopped short.
There were voices coming from within. Marianne could not make them out clearly, but one belonged to a woman. Arguing. She froze and listened. It was Ania.