All the way back to the lager, Ania thinks of the boys. Of horrible Heiner and kind Gerald and the fact that she is the one who delivered them to that place. She thinks of Gerald’s unwitting mother, in some drab apartment, missing her son. And she thinks of Otto Smeltz, the first boy she betrayed. She is no better than those SS men with the babies. All these years she has been putting one foot before the other, imagining herself a good person, a good mother, someone laboring for a just cause.
And she thinks of the woman hanging from the cart, the way she fell, slumped at the waist like a rag doll. When she crawled to her knees and looked out toward Ania, her face was empty, filled only with pain and the most basic remnant of life. But once, it had been the face of a mother or wife. Possibly of a sister or an aunt or a best friend. And underneath the layers of time, the face of someone’s child, a girl some mother diapered and fed and held.
Above Ania, the moon is nearly full and the stars are as bright as always. Cassiopeia, Orion, Arachne . . . The names of the constellations return to her in her father’s voice. They are all in their places, a buffer against the chaos and indifference of the universe.
It is what is down here below them in the mud that is all wrong.
When Ania arrives at the lager, it is nearly three a.m. But she does not crawl into her bed. Propelled by a barely tamped-down horror, she packs her paring knife, a blood sausage, and a loaf of bread. Nothing sentimental. Only what they will need to survive. When she is done, she wakes her boys and leads them out into the dawn. Her urgency is so compelling they demand no explanation.
And so the night she delivers Heiner and Gerald to their fate becomes the morning Ania and her sons join the flow of displaced persons, severed from themselves.
Chapter Thirty
Frühlinghausen, December 1950
The Frühlinghausen Benita returned to was shockingly unchanged. On the surface there were amendments, of course. The mental hospital was gone, for example—the building had burned to the ground, and the patients, Benita thought with her new postwar black humor, had probably all been euthanized. There was no more foul-smelling fertilizer pit beside the cannery and no more dingy Krensig Strasse. The ancient, moldering thatched roofs had proved incendiary when a nearby stretch of train track was bombed. This was no surprise to Benita. For the last half century those cottages had been waiting for an opportunity to self-destruct.
But Frühlinghausen was still home to the same stupid people Benita had always wanted to escape. The once promising young Nazi mayor had turned into a beefy, middle-aged pig farmer with green-tinged glasses that made him look sinister. Fearless Fr?ulein Brebel, onetime leader of Benita’s BDM group, was now a middle-school teacher—so much for denazification! And the boys who had courted Benita were all either dead or married; running their family’s farms or working at the cannery. The stolid redbrick Catholic church Frau Gruber had dragged her children to every Sunday morning was once again well attended, its shattered stained-glass window replaced with an ugly pane of wavy yellow glass.
Of the Gruber family, only Gertrud and Lotte remained. Frau Gruber had died before the war began in earnest, and Benita’s brothers lay beside her in the town graveyard: Georg, the youngest, shot God knows where in Russia, and Hans, dead of an infection caught in a military hospital. Sophie, the second-oldest Gruber daughter, had married an American soldier and moved to a place called Kansas. This was both marvelous and galling to Benita. How could plain, quiet Sophie, who had always been so content in Frühlinghausen, have been the one to escape?
Lotte and Gertrud lived side by side in a row of new stucco cottages with matching lace curtains over the windows and tiny gardens full of practical plantings: potatoes, cabbage, carrots, and parsley. It made Benita want to cry.
“Tired of life in the castle?” Lotte said with a smirk when Benita first stepped off the train.
Gertrud was kinder. “Mother would be happy that you came back.”
But unfortunately Benita was staying with Lotte, whose children had already left home. Her daughter had married the local butcher, and her son was studying in Braunschweig to become a government clerk. The Grubers (now Freiholzes, thanks to Lotte’s unpleasant husband, Gephardt) were moving up in the world. Benita found this a good joke. But there was no one to share it with.
The beginning of December marked three months since Benita had been back. Lotte, who was always prickly, was now downright peevish. Whether this was because of Benita’s continued presence or Gephardt’s prolonged absence was impossible to know. Gephardt had gone south to see his ailing mother shortly after Benita’s arrival, and for the last two weeks Lotte had eagerly awaited his return. Maybe the delay brought to mind the long years she had spent raising children while he did God knows what in a Siberian labor camp. Or maybe the constant effort of preparing a hot dinner in expectation set her on edge. Benita slunk around the house like a person trying not to wake a sleeping baby. But even so, she managed to get on Lotte’s nerves.
“Benita,” Lotte said when Benita let herself into the cottage one afternoon, “have you thought about applying for a job at Weseman’s?”
Benita had not even unwrapped her scarf.
Weseman’s had opened recently—a narrow grocery with no windows and a heavy smell of cigarette smoke, long shelves of canned and packaged goods. These were not in high demand in Frühlinghausen, where almost everyone still grew their own produce, canned their own fruit, and bought their meat from the butcher. Benita had set foot inside the place exactly once.
“Lotte, let poor Benita catch her breath,” Gertrud chided from the table where she sat cracking nuts for Christmas cookies.
“Isn’t that what she was just doing? Strolling around in the fresh air?”
“It’s all right,” Benita said, shedding her coat. She knew better than to bristle at Lotte’s barbs. “Are they looking for someone?”
“I should think so—I heard Trude complaining about the long hours—dawn till dusk and no one to fill in besides her and Horst. Apparently she never sees him anymore—though I don’t know if that’s really much to complain about.” Lotte slipped into an imitation of a man with a stiff back and pained face. Lotte had once been the class cutup, a brash, big-boned, and funny girl everyone was slightly afraid of, and she maintained a little of this demeanor as an adult.
“Lot-te,” Gertrud chided. “Horst is a nice man.”