“Here,” said Katarina, the younger of the two, as she dipped a cup into the bucket and extended it to Benita. “It’s delicious.” She had a sweet, shy manner about her, with long, thick eyelashes and awkward coltish limbs.
“Where is Martin?” the older girl, Elisabeth, asked. She was the sharper of the two in both look and tone.
“Out in the courtyard—you didn’t see him?” Benita sprang up to look. The puddle was now abandoned. “He was with Fritz, playing—”
She started toward the door but was stopped by Marianne.
“Let him be,” Marianne commanded. “It’s good for a boy to be free.” Taking in Benita’s face, she softened her voice. “All is very safe here, Benita. Really.”
In her room, Benita pulled on the battered brassiere and the vest that she had washed and worn so many times its seams were nearly gone, the drops of blood across the belly now faded to innocent-looking brown splotches. She found a washbasin and a pitcher of water on an otherwise empty shelf. She splashed some on her face and pulled back her poor brittle hair, knotting it at the nape of her neck.
There was a loud rap on the door. “I’m leaving shoes here for you,” Marianne’s voice said. “See if they fit.”
Benita’s own were a badly worn pair of boots she had stolen from a bombed-out flat that she had joined the women of her building in combing through. No one asked what had become of its inhabitants—lying dead under the rubble of the bombing or safe in the countryside or killed in a concentration camp. The shoes had been cheap to begin with and were now nearly worn through.
Benita waited until Marianne’s footsteps receded to retrieve the new boots. They were certainly the finest she had ever come into contact with: dark green, barely worn, with an elegant, distinguished heel. The leather was soft and smooth, and against it, her finger felt monstrously chapped. They were too fine for a woman with such hands, the kind of boots she had once dreamed of wearing. It seemed a cruel joke that this would be that day. Be careful what you wish for, they seemed to taunt. She could not put them on.
When she emerged, dressed, Martin sat at the kitchen table between Elisabeth and Katarina. His mouth was stained with raspberry juice, his eyes round at the sight of so much food.
“Ah, that’s better!” Marianne said of the clean white shirt and wool skirt Benita now wore. “The shoes didn’t fit?”
“No,” Benita lied.
Suddenly there was a gurgling sound from Martin, and the little boy’s face turned red.
On either side of him the girls blanched.
“Oh!” Benita exclaimed, feeling his shame as if it were her own. Of course his poor belly was not used to all this fruit. He had probably eaten God knows how many bowls of porridge, and now the berries, and whatever else. The stink was putrid—full of the bile of a dysfunctional gut.
“Poor boy,” Marianne said. “We should not have fed you so much!” She held out a hand to him, taking charge in her usual calm, competent way. “We will have to find you a new pair of pants.”
Slowly, humiliatingly, Martin rose, the back of his pants stained and the stench growing worse.
“Come.” Marianne nicked her head. “I know just the thing.
“Benita,” she added over her shoulder, “would you give that pot a stir?”
Benita nodded and watched as Marianne disappeared with her son.
Chapter Two
Thuringia, Late May 1945
In the Children’s Home, Martin Constantine Fledermann was not Martin’s name. He was Martin Schmidt, just as Berthold von Stauffenberg was Berthold Meister and Liesel Stravitsky was Liesel Falkman, and so on. All the children were given good, ordinary German names. And the shameful thing was that Martin had almost forgotten he was a Fledermann.
There were many things he had forgotten in the Children’s Home. His father, for example: the shadowy figure Marianne later referred to as a hero and his mother never mentioned. And life before the war, before air-raid sirens and nights spent in the cellar, before the deafening roar of low-flying bomber planes.
But there were things he remembered in the home, too. How he’d arrived, for instance. A long train trip on a military transport, the pockmarked face of his SS chaperone, and the salty, tangy taste of dried meat on his tongue—it was the first time he had ever tasted such a thing, warm and a little gritty from its home in the SS man’s pocket. He had thrown up afterward, holding his head out the window of the moving train so that the vomit spewed back in his face.
He also remembered the sunny flat in Berlin, air thick with dust motes, and the view over shady, elegant Meerstein Strasse, with its pale stucco buildings and café on the corner. And the warmth of his mother’s body curled against his at night in bed. The cameo pendant that hung in the hollow of her throat. The words of the song she would sing to him—Kommt ein Vogel geflogen, setzt sich nieder auf mein’ Fuss, hat ein Zettel im Schnabel von der Mutter ein’ Gruss. “A little bird comes flying, sits down on my foot, has a letter in its beak, from my mother a kiss.” But at the Children’s Home there was no bird, no letter, and no kiss.
The home was not all bad, though. It was a cozy stucco house outside a village in the foothills of the mountains. It had a pleasant garden full of fruit trees and flowers, a broken fountain, and a high brick wall. The children were not allowed to leave.
Frau Vortmuller, the potato-faced grandmother in charge of the place, was not unkind. She was firm and orderly and saw to it that her charges were bathed and clothed and fed. Every night, she played the recorder for them: sorrowful folk ballads about poor millers’ daughters and princes, witches and resourceful, neglected youngest sons. These were sweeter, softer melodies than the Nazi-endorsed songs the children learned from Herr Stulper, who supervised their reeducation. He taught them “The Rotten Bones Are Trembling,” “The Horst Wessel Song,” and “Germany Awake,” all full of verses about blood, slavery, and revenge; politics and war.