Martin lay curled beside her on the thin mattress, his blond hair spread fanlike on the pillow, his sweet, perfectly formed features made fragile by sleep. He was such a handsome boy—beautiful, really. Even more so than Connie had been. And seeing him there, under the blanket (and to have not one but two blankets and two mattresses), Benita was seized with an urge to gather him up and press her face into the soft skin of his neck, to breathe in the smell of boy and youth and sleep. She wanted, almost, to consume him—this best, most perfect piece of herself. She wanted to become him and in so doing become herself again. Benita Gruber, town beauty, innocent nineteen-year-old, a girl out of a silhouette.
But she let him sleep. His breath stirred the fuzzy threads of the blanket. He shuddered as she watched. What haunted his dreams? The blare of bomb sirens and the screech of planes over Berlin? The dead bodies they had stepped over in the rubble? Or God knows what from the “Children’s Home” the Gestapo had sent him to after Benita was imprisoned. She had never seen it. It was Marianne who had—miraculously—found Martin when Benita had given him up for dead. It was a typical Nazi establishment, Marianne had said of the home, lots of marching and no learning. Being Marianne, she focused on the ideology and not the creature comforts of the place. Was there enough to eat? Were the caretakers kind? Had there been time to play? These questions remained unanswered. But Marianne had found Martin and returned him to Benita, and for that Benita owed her everything.
She must have drifted off again because when she next opened her eyes, the room was empty. Benita sat with a start. Where was Martin? The blood raced to her head and then away. Surely he was all right. The war was over. They were not in Berlin anymore, they were at Burg Lingenfels, in the American zone, and it was safe here. They were under Marianne’s care.
But still, he had been taken from her once. She couldn’t survive it again.
Benita pulled a skirt over her nightgown and raced down the dark stone hall. Breathlessly, she found her way to the kitchen. It was empty. No sign of Martin, or anyone. Then she spotted movement outside the window. Two little figures—Fritz, Marianne’s boy, and Martin, crouched in the courtyard, poking sticks into a puddle. Relief flooded through her.
Thank you, thank you, dear God, for protecting my son . . . the prayer was involuntary, a nervous remnant of her Catholic upbringing. The religious pleas of her youth had returned to her in prison and served as an anchor in the endless sea of silence. Without them, she was sure her mind would have drifted away. She did not believe in them, but still, they had saved her—not God, just the words.
She knew she was lucky to have been sent to prison and not a concentration camp after Connie was executed for his role in the assassination plot. Ultimately, this was how all her yearning for nobility and a good marriage had paid off: as the wife of a traitor with a noble Prussian bloodline, she had received solitary confinement rather than death. She could recognize, if not yet laugh at, the grim humor of this. But the blankness that had entered her during that time lingered. She had spent too many hours staring at the ceiling, the backs of her hands, the corner of her cell where the paint was chipped. It was only for Martin’s sake that she now tried to overcome this.
As Benita stood watching the boys, Marianne banged into the kitchen, pulling a small cart of carrots and cabbages and even raspberries, which Benita had not seen in years. “God bless Herr Kellerman for keeping up the garden,” Marianne exclaimed. “There are not many men who were seeding potatoes and carrots last spring—and certainly not on someone else’s property.” She was flushed, and her hair formed a frizzy halo around her head. “Benita! How did you sleep, my poor dear? Have a bowl of porridge.” She gestured at a pot on the stove.
“Thank you,” Benita said.
Marianne was already removing a bowl from the cupboard—fine china, blue-and-white Meissen. “I can’t say it’s tasty, but it’s edible.” She plopped a helping into the bowl and set it on the table. “Sit. You are meant to eat and rest.”
So Benita sat.
She watched Marianne empty the cart, a whirlwind of vigorous, chaotic activity. The war had not changed her as much as it had everyone else. She was still an enigma to Benita, a woman capable of tracking Martin to some obscure Nazi hideaway but incapable of managing her own hair. When Benita first married Connie, she had marveled at the woman’s paradoxes. Marianne loved to entertain but cared nothing about food or fashion. She would slave away preparing the house for a fabulous party only to come down wearing last year’s dowdy dress. She would invite the most distinguished members of the Foreign Office and intelligence corps to dinner and then serve her cook’s homely Sauerbraten and Wildschweingulasch. She was an abstracted, disorganized mother to her children but an organized and efficient manager of adults.
She was not a beauty with her strong, almost mannish features and high cheekbones (a falcon face, Benita had once said to Connie and been thoroughly scolded). But she was compelling, and in moments, her face achieved a kind of graceful symmetry that was striking. It was a face you could not easily forget.
At the salons and weekend parties Marianne and Albrecht hosted in the beginning of the war, Benita had watched the handsome barons and counts and noble youths of Germany’s most aristocratic families hang on Marianne’s every word. They had jousted playfully in a style of speaking that made Benita feel stupid. Were they joking or serious? Teasing her or mocking one another? In the presence of Connie’s fancy friends, Benita had found language an obstacle rather than a bridge to connection, but for Marianne it seemed a smooth and direct road that always rose to meet her feet.
“Why, you’re still in your nightclothes!” Marianne exclaimed, glancing up from the vegetables she was unloading. “Did you find the clothing I left in your room?”
Benita blushed. She had risen in such haste and completely forgotten to dress. “I’m sorry—I was rushing.”
“Sorry! Posh. Nothing to be sorry for. It just doesn’t seem like you. But then of course no one can be expected to be like themselves anymore, can they?” Marianne lifted the cart by its handles and pushed it back out the kitchen door. “As long as you have what you need.”
At that moment, Marianne’s two daughters appeared in the doorway, carrying a bucket between them.
“Just in time,” Marianne cried. “We have milk for you, Tante Benita!”
Benita was not sure which surprised her more—the presence of milk or the title Tante, “aunt.” Somehow lowly Benita Gruber, last of a long line of toiling Westphalian peasants, had become Tante to the von Lingenfels girls.
“Say hello, girls, and introduce yourselves,” Marianne instructed.
The girls approached—dark haired and tall, maybe ten and twelve. Katarina and Elisabeth. And Benita remembered their two little heads peering down at the guests from the landing on the stairs at the countess’s party. She had wished so fervently to have a daughter like them, a sweet girl to dress in dirndls and christen in delicate, frothy white. It seemed quaint now—an innocent dream. Who would want to introduce a girl to this world? Thank God Martin was a boy.