Dear Benita, whose dreaminess and impracticality had been a reminder of all that was beautiful and light. She had always made Ania laugh. Was it the end of her affair with Herr Muller that had killed her? She had seemed so distraught on that day in the hospital . . . It would be like Benita to die for love. But Ania had no one to ask.
In her solitary sadness, she hung pine branches and oranges pierced with cloves across their foyer the way Benita had taught her. They lent the house an air of spicy sweetness. And when Ania walked beneath them with the baby, little Mary craned her neck to see these ordinary objects that bobbed and glimmered in the dark, made beautiful by their suspension.
This morning, as Ania sits on the stone wall, the castle begins to stir with life. A man opens red sun umbrellas on a new, attractive rooftop terrace. Someone tugs back curtains across the plate glass windows on the first floor. It is good to see the castle in its new life; it has become such a useful, democratic place, housing all these well-meaning people from every corner of the world. They are trying to understand all sorts of complicated things: what makes humans cruel or kind, and how we might all live together in peace. Ania appreciates their efforts, although she is skeptical that they will ever find an answer. Hitler always said there were too many people on earth. Too many people in Germany—such a small country, so many people . . . But then of course it turned out his answer to this was not a solution, but a symptom of the disease. He was the rat in the maze that begins to eat the others.
Ania is about to rise and head back toward the castle when she sees a form approaching. A woman, her hair blowing upward in the wind. Mary.
Ania lifts her arms in a wave. Mary’s hands are shoved deep inside the pockets of her jacket—stiff looking with a collar and a waxy, rubberized sheen. An odd garment, designed for some specific circumstance but worn generally—like those pants with all the pockets and loops and strings attached, or the slick clothes Ania always associated with gymnastics that are now worn for anything that involves movement—grown men ride bicycles in slippery, skintight garments. Ania is too old to understand such things.
“Couldn’t go back to sleep,” Mary says when she is closer. “I miss the kids.”
The children—the idea of them belongs to another world, another life. It takes Ania a moment to register her daughter’s meaning.
“They will survive,” she says. “But of course you do.”
Mary sighs and sits on the wall beside her mother.
“It’s a beautiful view,” she says. “I forgot how beautiful it is here, in this part of the world.”
Ania too has forgotten. Impulsively, she links her arm through Mary’s. It is the sort of gesture she has not made since their fight.
To her relief, Mary gives it a squeeze. It brings tears to her eyes.
“I don’t deserve you,” Ania says. “I did so many things wrong. I lived my life wrong.”
“But you know now—” Mary says, turning to her. “You take responsibility for your mistakes. You ask for forgiveness—”
Ania starts in such a way that she nearly falls. “Forgiveness! God forbid!” She crosses herself, the gesture coming to her across the years. “I would never ask for that.”
Mary is quiet. “You admit,” she says finally. “That counts for something.”
“Does it?” Ania asks.
“I think so,” Mary says.
Ania would like to ask: In what sort of calculation? She can see it is important to Mary to believe this. She is an American after all; she has been swept up in the culture of talk—of belief in psychotherapy and confession, of television shows in which people reclaim their innocence through voicing their regrets.
In Ania’s view, no talk in the world can change the past.
If Mary knew about those babies, she would know that taking responsibility doesn’t matter. It can’t bring them back. It can’t return them to their lives, to their parents. And there is no atonement for all the lies Ania told herself instead of acting—that the babies were going to an orphanage, or foster families, or God knows what other acceptable end, even as she hung her head over the latrine and threw up. This is what Ania will pay for: not only her inaction, but her self-deception, for narrating away evil while staring it in the face. How can she tell her daughter this?
Instead she squeezes Mary’s arm and appreciates her kindness. Her understanding. This is why people have children, even when they believe the world is going to hell, even when life is nothing but uncertainty. In hopes of being understood.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Burg Lingenfels, October 1991
Marianne sits at the desk in the strange visiting-dignitary bedroom she has been assigned and tries to prepare her speech. Not a “speech,” just “remarks,” Claire corrected her. Nothing too complicated. She wonders whether Claire is nervous about what she will say. After all, the book is Claire’s narrative, but the life is still hers.
Before she left home, Marianne prepared some funny anecdotes from her time in the resistance, a few cautionary parables, a recognition of contemporary resisters around the world. But now what she wrote seems grandiose, full of overblown rhetoric.
She and Ania spent hours talking in the library last night. Ania’s life is three-dimensional now—no, not merely three-dimensional, but three faced. Ania Fortzmann, Ania Brandt, Ania Grabarek—why did Marianne never know of these? In her mind, these faces are no longer broken into good or bad, true or false. They have been laid bare, a collection of choices and circumstances.
Why didn’t you try to tell me all this after Rainer died? Marianne asked her friend. Why didn’t you explain yourself?
Because you wouldn’t have cared, Ania said. And you were right.
Marianne did not protest. She saw herself that day in the castle, standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at Ania and the dying man. She had not been interested in knowledge. It was too close to the war, to Albrecht’s death, to all the deaths. Knowledge would have been too much to stomach.
Benita’s life also has become more whole to Marianne on this trip. Spending time with Martin brings his mother back. He is compelling in the same way Benita was: not just his handsomeness, but something more intangible. His aura, the New Age word comes to Marianne’s mind. Marianne has always scoffed at the idea of such vagaries, but here, against the backdrop of this ancient castle, in this last chapter of her life, the idea of an “aura” or an “energy” feels true and important, as real as action, the gold standard around which she has built her life. This is why people were drawn to Benita, why Connie fell in love with her.
There is a light knock on the door, and before she turns, a child rushes in, followed by her son, Fritz. “Omi!” the little girl calls, her curly hair flying behind her in a wild mop. Nicola, Fritz’s youngest—a little girl as exuberant and incautious as her father was as a child. Of all her grandchildren, Marianne loves her best.
“Nicola,” Marianne exclaims, “what a nice surprise!”