Martin did recognize them, though, thank God, because Marianne never would have identified the two drab, middle-aged ladies waiting on the platform as Benita’s sisters. One was tall and square jawed and wore incongruously peaky cat-eye glasses. Her graying hair was tucked into several neat but unartful rolls. The other was medium height and softer in appearance, with a wide, doughy face and bright blue eyes. Neither looked anything like Benita. Where had she come from?
“Tante Lotte? Tante Gertrud?” Martin asked, approaching the women with childish uncertainty. The taller of the two nodded. But she offered no smile, no warm greeting, no expression of condolence—only a grim nod and a handshake—one for Martin and one for Marianne. At least the dough-faced sister, who introduced herself as Gertrud, gave Martin an awkward pat on the shoulder. Marianne felt sorrow for her dead friend—how could a woman who had so loved beauty and fine things have lived here with these stark sisters, in this ugly place?
A memory rose to the surface: a day in the early summer, shortly before they had moved from Burg Lingenfels. She and Benita and Ania and all the children had taken a picnic out to the hillside—an old tablecloth from Weisslau, embroidered by Albrecht’s grandmother, a basket of cold meatballs and potato salad, pickles, fresh plums, a thermos of coffee, and Ania’s butter cake with raisins. The hayfield buzzed with insects and meadowlarks and smelled of hot grass and flowering nettles. Below them a field of rapeseed bloomed a brilliant, otherworldly yellow. The air above shimmered with heat. Marianne had brought a camera, the first one she had ever owned, and snapped pictures of the children running helter-skelter. This is what we live for, isn’t it? Benita had said, her face flushed with happiness.
On this cold December day, Frühlinghausen was the opposite of this. From the train station, Lotte and Gertrud took them directly to the cemetery. They wanted to show Martin his mother’s plot before the service and the burial, scheduled for the following day. Probably because he was expected to pay for it was Marianne’s uncharitable thought.
Should she be buried here in Frühlinghausen? Lotte had asked Marianne during their one telephone conversation. Where else? Not beside Connie, whose remains had been disposed of as a traitor’s—buried in some pit or burned in a Nazi crematory. No one had ever been told exactly where. Marianne felt revulsion toward the whole endeavor of burial. Bodies, so precious in life, then suddenly in death so awkward and full of horror. She would be cremated and have her ashes scattered at the castle. None of this delicate balance between earthly preservation and rot.
The sisters had hired a local farmer with a wagon to take them to the graveyard, and they rode in silence. Marianne squeezed Martin’s hand as the horse jerked over the cobblestones.
The cemetery was a humble place at the very edge of town, enclosed by an ugly new cement wall. At one end, it was bordered by fields, plowed and turned, nothing but dirt clods at this time of year, stretching toward the horizon. At the other sat the last of a row of grubby brick cottages. Two boys kicked a soccer ball in the backyard, bouncing it off the cemetery wall. Otherwise there was only the sound of wind blowing across the fields and the caw of a raven from above. The wagon driver grinned and nodded as they climbed down as if they were off to a party.
The graves were elevated in the traditional way—small, coffin-sized plots bordered by stone, planted with flowers, all scraggly and dead. Lotte led them to the spot already dug out for Benita, beside her mother: ilse gruber, 1880–1940. Marianne blinked tears back fiercely. This was not the time and place to cry. She was aware of Martin, standing still as a statue beside her.
“It’s a nice place,” Lotte asserted crisply. “People take care of the graves. Gertrud and I come once a week to visit Mother and our brothers, so we will be here often. This is a yellow rosebush.” She pointed at a trimmed stalk, tied up for winter. “And here we plant pansies and lavender; the ivy is good too because it covers so much . . .” The subject of the flowers made her talkative, but Marianne only half listened. This was where Benita would lie, returned to the roots she had tried so hard to leave behind, and a part of her life that Marianne had never known. But what had she known? Very little, maybe. Not of Benita and her love affair, or of Ania, who was not Ania, and with whom she had not spoken since that day in the castle. Standing at the grave, Marianne was suddenly aware of her own blindness; her dearest friends were like dreams she had woken from. How had she missed so much?
“What’s that?” Martin asked, bringing her back to the present moment. He pointed at a small cart beside a pile of dirt.
“Turnover,” Lotte said, following his hand. “Every thirty years they dig up the graves to make room for new ones.”
“Oh.” Martin nodded, but his eyes looked shocked.
“If there is a marker, they will preserve it, of course,” Lotte continued in her matter-of-fact way. “But often with the old graves there is none.” She sniffed. “It keeps the cemetery”—she searched for the word—“fresh; no grave is forgotten, because no one here has been dead for more than thirty years.”
Marianne stared. She thought of her own family plot in Pomerania with its ancient graves—her grandparents and great-grandparents and their parents before them, in the shade of a giant chestnut tree, and of the von Lingenfels cemetery in Weisslau, with its plots dating back to the eighteenth century. Certainly there was no one left to tend these. Did the Poles, who had taken their land, roll the graveyard right into the wheat field beside it? Apparently, this was the new way—a rapid turnover of bodies.
“And after thirty years?” Marianne asked. “No one is remembered?”
Lotte stared at her with a blank expression. “Remembered, maybe, but not tended. Not maintained.”
Later, after the funeral and after Marianne had brought Martin back to school, she returned to Tollingen. No one was there to greet her. She walked from the train station to the town square and stared up at her flat. Its windows looked dark and sad in the shadow of evening, and she could not bring herself to go inside.