“There is so much gray between the black and the white . . . and this is where most of us live, trying—”
Marianne loses her place. Trying what? Confusion presses in on her. Not just of the moment, the words, but the greater confusion of life itself—the whole murky, impulsive side of human interaction, the tangled knots of influence and emotion. A vast, primordial soup she has spent her life trying to negate.
“—trying, but so often failing, to bend toward the light.”
Marianne can feel her tongue dry in her mouth. The world grows dim, and there is an odd buzzing sound. She meets the eyes of the Chinese scholar she was introduced to last night. What does she know of him? Of his experience? The world is too vast to know in all its corners.
Then, all at once, her knees give out.
Her vision goes before her consciousness.
But she can feel, suddenly, a strong pair of arms, catching her, holding her up. “I’m sorry,” she says, or tries to say.
“Shhhh . . .” She recognizes Martin’s voice. “We need our heroes. No more apologies.”
Then all is quiet.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Burg Lingenfels, October 1991
Martin wakes in bed next to Mary. He can’t think of her as Marianne, which is what she would like to be called. Mary, it turns out, is a nickname she has always disliked.
Last night, when Marianne revived, the castle was filled with jubilant relief. Thank God! Imagine if she had died, right there on the castle floor, killed by the effort of straying beyond the clarity that has defined her life. When her eyes opened, even stoic Ania wept with relief. And the party that followed was a real bash. The Sophie Scholl scholar played the fiddle, and a Russian philosopher taught a group of guests to dance the barynya. And the food was excellent: delicate white trout, new potatoes, and “homegrown” carrots from the castle kitchen garden, now a vast organic nursery. For dessert, Martin’s favorite: fluffy, shredded pancakes known as Kaiserschmarnn, a local specialty. And of course lots of champagne. Mary and Martin were among the last guests to depart.
Mary is not the sort of woman Martin usually pursues. She is a little scattered and too modern, really. He is generally drawn to cool, steady women with unrufflable feathers. But there is, underneath her disorganized charm, a kind of emotional steadiness. And she has a good sense of humor, which is a surprise coming from the daughter of Ania and Carsten Kellerman, whom Martin remembers as a German version of American Gothic.
Though apparently, what did he know?
Mary shared her mother’s revelations with him last night. A secret past, a Nazi husband still alive when she married Carsten. It is to Marianne’s credit, Martin supposes, that she never told him any of this. It is possible that in his usual sidestepping way, he never really asked her why she and Ania fell so completely out of touch. Like many members of his generation, he has made a career of avoiding difficult questions.
“Can you imagine?” Mary asked as they lay side by side. “My mother was nursing one husband by day and sleeping with another at night.”
No, Martin agreed, he couldn’t. But this is at the bottom of the list of things he can’t imagine: Auschwitz, Treblinka, believing in Hitler, the mother of a fatherless boy committing suicide. And there are actually whole swaths of his own experience that he can’t imagine: living in an orphanage for children of traitors, spending nights in bomb shelters, reclaiming his mother from some rats’ nest of Russian soldiers . . .
Anyway, he likes Mary, and he feels connected to her through this place. They are both products of the same mess.
He runs a finger down her brow and nose, coming to rest on her lips.
Her eyes fly open, and her look of surprise makes him laugh.
“Oh my God,” she says, sitting bolt upright. “I hope my mother isn’t awake yet.”
“You make me feel so young.” Martin laughs. “I haven’t worried about anyone’s mother since I was seventeen.”
“Ha!” Mary fumbles with the sheet, tucking it awkwardly around her body, stripping it from him as she stands. “Sorry!” She blushes.
But Martin is too old to be ashamed of his nakedness. “Here.” He hands her a pair of gold hoop earrings from beside the bed.
“You look as though you do this every day,” she says. “Sleep with a weirdly connected stranger in a castle where you spent a traumatic childhood,” she clarifies.
“Not every day.”
“Every other,” Mary says, smiling.
And looking at her—this middle-aged American daughter of Carsten and Ania’s, standing naked on the ancient stone floor of Burg Lingenfels—Martin is filled with an unfamiliar, buoyant happiness.
There is a farewell breakfast this morning in the great hall, after which the guests will disperse: Mary to drive Ania the two hours back to her retirement home on Lake Constance (“Can you persuade her to move to America to live near me?” she had begged Martin last night); Marianne to the hospital in Munich for tests. The woman has the constitution of an ox, but her fainting spell should be fully evaluated, Fritz and Martin together insisted.
Martin himself will go north. First to Frühlinghausen to visit his mother’s grave and his aunt Gertrud, the one member of Benita’s family with whom he is still in touch. After Frühlinghausen, he has one more stop: to visit Liesel “Falkman,” his long-lost friend. For years as a boy, he dreamed of her, though he never spoke of this. And then, before coming here, he tracked her down and wrote to her, and she wrote back. Of course she remembers him, although she tries not to think about that time much. She spent the rest of her childhood, such as it was, living with her aunt in the flat where he and Marianne had left her—in a part of Berlin that ended up behind the wall, in the east. Now that Germany is one again, she has moved to Hamburg. She is an accountant with two grown children, long ago divorced.
At first he was dismayed by these details. What did this ordinary life have to do with the fierce, intelligent Liesel of his youth? But he has bucked his tendency to avoid possible disappointment and booked his return flight out of Hamburg. He has made a reservation at the Hotel Atlantic for them to have lunch.
On his way down to the breakfast, Martin pauses on the landing. The Sophie Scholl scholar and Russian philosopher are listening to Claire, who is waving her arms, holding forth. And Mary, who has beaten him downstairs, sits with her mother, talking to Fritz. There is warmth between them, and Ania looks happy, or as happy as she can with her tragic face.