You let Frau von Lingenfels believe you were someone else? Would you ever have confessed if your husband had not shown up? Mary had been worse than angry. She had been horrified. On her last visit to the U.S., Ania had confessed all to her daughter, who had only known pieces: That Ania was married before Carsten, yes. That this first husband was still alive when she remarried, no. That she had run a year-on-the-land program, yes. That she had let her best friends believe she was someone else, no. Her mother, about whom she had, as a schoolgirl, once written an essay entitled “My Hero,” was not only a Nazi but a liar! And worse than a liar, a fake! She railed at her and Ania bore it. Mary was right. She did not try to defend herself. There was no defense. Should I leave tomorrow? she had asked.
That’s not the point! Mary had said. As if there actually were a point.
They had not spoken for days.
Then slowly, somehow, Mary forgave her. You did what you had to do to survive. Somehow, Ania still has her daughter’s love if not her respect. There is a new distance between them, which makes her sad. But it is, after all, less punishment than she deserves.
Burg Lingenfels is smaller than Ania remembers it. In her mind, it has become giant, a castle fit for Sleeping Beauty with great forbidding halls and acres of freezing, closed-off rooms.
Ania wakes early, before breakfast is served, according to the small leather-bound handbook beside her bed. A guide to help visitors navigate was how the guest-and-fellow coordinator phrased it, as if she and Mary were ships charting their way across an unfamiliar sea. It irritated her, this way of speaking. She is a true farmwife in the end. So many years of living with Carsten made her wary of fancy talk. Or maybe it is her experience as a Nazi that made her suspicious of metaphor, euphemism, and figures of speech.
On the bed beside hers Mary is asleep, snoring gently, her dark hair a mess on the pillow. Ania feels a swell of tenderness for her tired daughter. This is meant to be a vacation for her, not all tending to her mother’s needs. The poor girl (she will always be a girl to Ania) deserves rest—all that endless child care after long days at the office. All that keeping up with schedules, lessons, and appointments, the self-imposed stresses of modern life.
Ania swings her legs off the bed and reaches for her cane. With effort, she rises and makes her way to the bathroom, where her face in the mirror is, even now, after so many years, a surprise. When she thinks of herself, she doesn’t think of all these wrinkles, all this gray. Never mind. She splashes water on her face and neck and combs her hair. Then, careful to be quiet, she reenters the bedroom and fumbles over the clothing draped on the chair.
“Mother?” Mary’s sleepy voice comes from the other bed.
“Shhhh,” Ania says. “It’s early. Go back to sleep.”
“Do you need help?” Mary asks, sitting.
“No, no,” Ania says, more crossly than she intends. “What do you think I do at home?”
“All right,” Mary mumbles, and lies back down.
Outside, the sky is turning pink. Long, wavy arms of sunlight reach across the hillside, which is more naked than it used to be. All farmland now, where before it was forest. Germany has become the agricultural wonder Hitler always imagined, every meter planted with crops or windmills or endless flats of solar panels that stretch out alongside the highways. No scrap of wasted space. Even the patches of woods serve as sound barriers to shield towns against the roar of the autobahn, or screens to mask gravel mines or irrigation.
Ania lets herself out through the new, elegant front door and starts down the smoothly paved drive.
The closest section of forest behind the castle remains. Spiky peaks of the pines rise like a mountain range at the edge of the meadow. From here it looks just as it always did. Ania would like to cross the uneven grass and enter, but she doesn’t trust her footing on the rutted earth, so she sits on the stone wall beside the road and remembers.
These woods are where she and her boys buried Rainer. They wrapped his wasted body in a sheet and carried it from the castle, light as a child’s. Ania felt nothing but relief. He was no longer her husband but her secret, a man who had made the wrong choice at every turn. And she had made her own bad choice in him. He was the second great mistake of her life. Her first was believing in Hitler. And in the awkward, distinctly human weight of Rainer’s body—the cold, lifeless shoulder bumping against her leg with every step—she felt the extremity of her bad judgment.
The grave was shallow, the earth was nearly frozen, and when Rainer’s body lay at the bottom, Ania and her boys paused by unspoken agreement. She did not pray: What would she have prayed for? And from whom? A God she was certain did not exist? If there was a hell, Rainer was bound for it.
But as she stood, she willed herself to remember the boy she had befriended so many years ago in her father’s waiting room. The boy who had walked his own sickly father to Doktor Fortzmann’s once a week for treatment, who had allowed the old man to lean heavily on his narrow shoulders, offering him sips of water from a canteen he had thought to pack. He was a good son. And in the beginning, he had been a good husband: considerate, enthusiastic, dutiful. He had been steady in his love—so utterly convinced from an early age that she was meant to be his wife.
And as they stood above his lifeless body, it occurred to Ania that the darkness in him was her fault. She had never returned his passion. She had never loved him enough. Maybe his sins as well as her own rested on her back.
Beside her, Wolfgang toed the earth sullenly. Anselm was more inscrutable, face bowed, hands deep in his pockets. She could not ask him what he was thinking; there was too much water under the bridge. But still there was a solace in their togetherness. If she had taught her boys one thing, it was silence—they could navigate its shoals and currents like born sailors. And in its open waters, they met one another—three ships blinking their lights across the darkness, communicating without language, enough to say, I know you, we come from the same country.
It was two weeks later that Ania learned of Benita’s death.
And with this death, she was alone in her mourning. Her sons had always kept their distance from the beautiful young mother in their midst. And Marianne, who surely shared her grief, would never speak to her again.
Ania learned of her friend’s death from Martin. He sent a brief note stating the time and place of the funeral, which, by the time she received the information, had already passed.
Sitting in the parlor of the drafty old farmhouse with Carsten, Ania dropped the letter to her lap.
“Eh?” Carsten asked from his chair, startled by the abruptness of her movement.
The fire glowed in the coal stove, the baby purred, asleep in Ania’s arms. “Benita is dead,” she managed to say.
Her husband’s eyes widened. “How?”
Ania shook her head. Her body felt light with shock.
“She was a fine one,” Carsten said, shaking his own head. And the pronouncement seemed not so much an observation as an analysis. A fine one. Too fine for this time of rough, animal realities and ugliness.