In Ania’s mind, she saw Carsten’s farm as it had been when she first arrived. The dark washroom with its always-chilly flagstone floor, the toilet at the end of the hall that dropped refuse down a long pipe into a pit.
“If I could have lived somewhere else, I would have,” Ania said with a sigh. “If we had had the money to tear it down and build a new house, we would have. To me, old things are work. Not romance.”
“Well, they’re not romance to me, either,” Mary said.
Outside the window, American life flew by—the giant cars, the eclectic, colorful signs for gyms and clothing stores and fast-food restaurants, supermarkets and gas stations with inflatable balloon figures bobbing goofily in the wind. As well as the boarded-up concrete bunkers of obsolete supermarket chains, failed Chinese food shops and electronics outlets, left standing like rotten teeth in an otherwise healthy smile. It didn’t matter. There was room for everything. It was a free country. The past was nothing to be ashamed of here.
In Germany, Ania lived in a retirement home, near Lake Constance. It was not far from Carsten’s farm or Burg Lingenfels—an hour by car, maybe—but she never went back. For ten years, after Carsten died, Wolfgang had worked the farm with minimal success. Their plot of land was too small to compete with the vast farming conglomerates Germany had established in the former east. Hitler’s Lebensraum aims achieved, this time in peace. So Wolfgang had sold the farm and moved north, near Lübeck, where he ran a farm equipment dealership.
At the front door of the bland, modern condominium in Newton where Mary lived since her divorce, there was a large manila envelope.
Mary glanced at the sender and tucked it under her arm as she turned her key. She looked discouraged. Ania felt a pang of guilt. She had hurt her daughter’s feelings. And over what? There was no purpose to this disagreement. She was an old woman. And her point of view was more dead, more irrelevant than the house.
The door swung open and sounds of children’s exuberant playing came from upstairs. “Helloo-oo,” Mary called out, tossing the package on the front hall table.
Martin Fledermann. Ania caught the name on the corner of the envelope and felt a rush of adrenaline.
“You are in touch with Martin?” she asked.
“It’s for you,” Mary said over her shoulder as she walked up the steps to the family room. “But don’t open it now—I want to show you.”
Ania stared at the package, absorbing this development. A package for her from Martin Fledermann, the tall, handsome, successful man whose nose she had once wiped, whose brow she had mopped when he was sick, whose little pants and shirts and sweaters she had mended and hemmed and layered on his body to make sure he was warm enough for the long walk to school. He was now a university professor here in America.
“Mama!” Mary’s six-year-old son, Gabriel, cried, flying across the floor and into his mother’s arms, wrapping his skinny, pajama-clad legs around hers, and burying his face in her belly. It was wonderful how free today’s children were, that a boy would offer such an affectionate, unregulated greeting.
“Can I order a pizza?” Sarah, Gabriel’s more even-tempered nine-year-old sister, asked from around the corner.
“Yes! Pizza, pizza, pizza!” Gabriel echoed, releasing his mother and bouncing in excitement. “I love pizza!”
“Did you get the chance to defrost that soup?” Mary called to Perla, the young woman who picked the children up from school and spent the afternoon with them. Mary was a lawyer for some sort of American nonprofit devoted to protecting the rights of immigrants. The relevance of her work as the daughter of a Nazi was not lost on Ania. What an amazing country this was.
“I make it in the freedgerator but eets not soft yet—” Perla replied, and her light, soft-voweled voice trilled on, accompanied by fervent, excited interruptions from Gabriel and dotted with questions from Mary’s lower, flatter tone.
Ania’s eyes drifted back to the package. She had hoped Martin would drive down from New Hampshire to see her, but the “timing had not worked” for such a reunion, and she had tried to conceal her disappointment. He was the one person she had remained in touch with from the castle. But now here was this package—whatever it might be. It pleased her to think that he had made the effort to send her something, and that he and Mary had spoken about it. They were children from two different chapters of her life, in touch only because she had introduced them. By the time Mary was born, Martin was nearly a teenager, away at boarding school.
“Hi, Omi,” Gabriel said from the top step, and Ania realized she had missed his greeting the first time. At his mother’s prodding, surely, from the way she stood beside him, one hand on his small shoulder.
“Ah! Hello, my child!” Ania said in her brightest language-school English, clapping her hands together.
“Hello.” Gabriel became suddenly shy, rolling his head against his mother’s hip, bending one leg so he could grab his ankle. He was an unfamiliar specimen to Ania—an exotic hothouse flower from this time of plenty. She found him both vexing and lovely.
“Did you finish the puzzle?” she asked, selecting her words carefully. For many years now, she had squeezed into a tiny desk at the local elementary school for night classes in English so she might learn the language that would be her grandchildren’s. But now when she needed them, the words seemed buried in quicksand.
Gabriel shook his head a little sadly. “It’s too hard for me.”
“No,” Ania said. “That cannot be. Come show your omi.”
The boy did not move from his mother’s side. He was a perceptive child and seemed to understand that he owed his grandmother some particular respect or delicacy. But he was not a natural pleaser. He lived in his own world with its own prescriptions and edicts, which he was not in the habit of amending. Ania could see this sort of thing now, in the luxury of her old age. How her own children had been, what they had loved and hated . . . there had been no time for such reflections when they were young. It gave her a pang of sadness, looking at Gabriel here, and knowing him this well.
“Go on,” his mother said, giving him a little push. “I bet Omi can help you.”
And so Ania extended her hand and tried, with her smile, to show him she understood his reluctance and did not hold it against him, that she was not actually scary even though she was so old. But he did not look up at her. He took her cool fingers in his own warm hand and pulled her across the floor like a burden.