“I brought her with me. Angela is sick,” Fritz explains, crossing the room and bending to kiss his mother. “She promised to be quiet—isn’t that right?” He turns to his daughter. “Quiet as a mouse during Omi’s speech.”
“Like a mouse,” Nicola proclaims, scrunching her face into an approximation of mouseness and tiptoeing delightedly around the room.
“Oh, be however you want,” Marianne says, wishing there was no speech, and no party to attend.
“Aha! Here it is!” Fritz exclaims, catching sight of the hardcover lying on the desk beside her. “Do I finally get a copy of the book about my famous mother?” He lifts it and begins reading the back, which is full of airy quotes from academics and journalists.
For a moment, in his concentration, he reminds her of Albrecht. Tall, slightly stoop shouldered, holding the book at arm’s length.
“Oh, Fritzl,” Marianne says, reverting to his childhood nickname. “I am your mother. You don’t need that book.”
Marianne goes downstairs to the reception in a combination of panic and mental haze. The visit from Fritz and Nicola has kept her from any further preparing of what she would like to say. Though she suspects it was not going to come clear anyway.
Despite Alice’s entreaties, Marianne has not changed her clothes. She wears her beige cardigan and pleated khakis, a pair of horrible, comfortable walking shoes. It doesn’t matter. Of this much she is certain, at least.
When she enters the room, she is startled to see so many people. There must be two hundred in attendance, fellows, academics from Humboldt and the Free University, contacts of Claire’s and the director’s, and then—dear God, she has almost forgotten—those she invited herself: old Eberhardt von Strallen and his middle-aged daughter, Irmgard Teitelman, Mamie Kaltenbrunner, Peter Weber—they have come all the way from Hamburg!—old, long-lost friends. And is that one of the von Oberst children, now a middle-aged man? She recognizes the distinctive forward-jutting chin.
“There you are!” Martin says, appearing beside her to take her elbow and steer her toward her seat. He does not seem fazed by her appearance. His aura may resemble his mother’s, but his manners and charm are all Connie Fledermann. Marianne reaches up and pats his hand.
When she is settled, the director rises and moves to the podium. “I am so proud to be here, to be part of this celebration of an important book by a past fellow of the Falkenberg Institute. A book that examines the very essence of resistance and moral clarity. What does it take for a person to be able to recognize evil as it unfolds? To see with foresight and acuity . . .”
Marianne listens uncomfortably.
When he finishes, Claire rises and takes the stage. She looks more serious today, in a black dress and funny, dark-rimmed glasses, a string of bright red Chinese beads around her neck.
“It has been my great good fortune to be a transcriber to this marvelous and heroic woman—a woman whose courage and moral backbone stayed stick straight in a time when most others bent, a woman in a world whose intellectual and political circles were dominated by men . . .”
The words make Marianne squirm. She thinks of all those in the audience, whom she has known in so many different places and at so many different crossroads of her life. Certainly she has not always been so infallible.
“I would like to invite Marianne forward to offer a few words,” Claire says. For a long moment, and with a sense of growing panic, Marianne remains frozen in her seat.
But then Martin is standing before her, offering his arm. He has come all the way from America to Burg Lingenfels at her request. She allows him to lead her up to the podium.
The audience looks at her expectantly.
And as Marianne stares back, more faces become clear: a von Kreisberg cousin whose name she can’t remember, but whose mother hosted her and the children on their flight from Weisslau, and there, beside him, the kind librarian from the Document Center, and standing against the wall, two childhood girlfriends of Elisabeth’s.
“When will she talk?” Nicola’s four-year-old voice says from the back of the room, where Fritz holds her in his arms. A few audience members laugh.
Marianne takes a deep breath. She must say something. But an apology is all that comes to mind. She is not sure for what.
“You would think . . .” she says finally, and her voice sounds foreign to her own ears. “You would think from this introduction that I must be a very wonderful person.” There is more laughter. The audience is relieved that she has opened her mouth. “And that I must have answers and secrets of how to be good and . . . how to see evil and resist it, and everything else Claire said.”
Outside, a crow squawks from the parapet.
“Instead,” Marianne continues, “I look out at you and I see so many familiar faces—so many people I have known and not known, so many people I have lost . . . And I see, most of all, my own blind spots.”
The audience is very quiet. In the front row, Claire looks anxious.
And as Marianne stands, gripping the podium, her eyes find Ania, sitting in the front row, between her daughter and Martin. She is so small—such a tiny person. How is it that in all those years Marianne never noticed this? And her face, her dear face, so deeply lined and etched with grooves and wrinkles, the bed of a violent river.
Ania returns her gaze. And as the silence grows, she nods, ever so slightly, as if to say, Go on, continue. I am here, no matter what you say.
A memory rises in Marianne’s mind: That night, so many years ago, when she and Ania waited together while the Russians feasted. The dark, uneasy quiet of the castle, the flickering shadows of the fire, and, outside, the suspended carcass of Gilda’s body. She can hear the crackle of sparks and the strange sounds of the men’s voices gathering into a low and otherworldly song. How grateful she had been to have Ania beside her—a fellow adult and human being, connected not through allegiance to any group or party or particular way of thinking but through the reality of the moment, through their shared will to get through the next hours, the next day, and the one afterward, and through their shared determination to keep their children safe.
It is the great regret of her life that she lost this—no, that she forsook it. And that she lost Benita, too—her sweet, flawed friend, fellow widow and human being, whom Marianne can see now that she, in her own way, betrayed.
“I want to say,” she begins again, “I want to say that I have not always tried hard enough to know. That this ‘moral compass’ Claire talks about may not have been as helpful in my own personal life as it was in the wider political context. Sometimes it is easier to see clearly from a distance. And what is up close—what is up close”—she falters—“is harder to make out.”
In the audience someone coughs.