Marianne presides from the wheelchair she has been relegated to while her granddaughter scrambles around on her lap. She looks smaller than usual, and tired: some spark of righteousness has been extinguished. But all the same, from her seat at the center she emanates Marianne-ness.
The great hall itself is just as Martin remembers it from childhood—cavernous, dim, and chilly. And standing here, he feels the chafing layers of time, the inscrutable ghost of himself as a little boy colliding with the shifty construct of himself as a middle-aged man. And all around, he feels the press of other, lesser-known ghosts: Marianne as a young woman; his mother as a bride-to-be; the Nazi occupiers with their shiny leather boots; the harvest party’s ill-fated Jewish guests; the frightened townspeople hiding from the Americans; centuries of gouty princes and counts and long-suffering servants. They all seem to be climbing these steps. And their movements have an urgent restlessness.
Through this, Martin hears Marianne’s voice. “Here he is,” she is saying. “My favorite guest.”
Martin looks around.
“Martin Fledermann,” she says as if they are the only two people in the hall.
He feels the force of her love for him and it makes him proud. Smiling back, he approaches, holding out his hand.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Burg Lingenfels, 1991
Clotilde Muller likes to walk her dogs on the grounds of the Falkenberg Institute. Not only because it is beautiful but because it makes her feel close to her father now that he is dead. She can imagine him hacking away at the thicket of trees in the once unruly woods, now a carefully maintained park crisscrossed by well-signed gravel paths. She had been coming here for years before she learned of the time her father had spent at the castle chopping wood.
To be fair, Clotilde did not ask him many questions. She is a woman of few words, and Franz Muller was a man of even fewer. All a question gets is an answer, and in her experience you don’t always want those. As a gardener, she knows that if you turn over a rock, you will find worms and potato bugs. Sometimes even a snake. And as a German, she knows that if you start poking through a shoebox of photographs, you’ll find Nazi uniforms and swastikas and children with their arms raised in Heil Hitler salutes.
And then what? Does that help you love the cranky old father whose laundry and dentures and toilet bowl you have to clean? To treasure the grandparent whose dementia already tests your patience? Clotilde knows she was lucky in this regard. Her father was kind and mild-mannered and easy to get along with until the end. And his silence was a gift.
Even when he broke this, it was not to unburden himself. It was to provide her with the facts. Which, after all their years living together, she never knew. Because she never asked.
So.
He had been drafted into the reserve police and sent to the east late in the war, assigned to load Jews and Slavs and other “undesirables” onto Treblinka-bound trucks. Did you know where they were going? Clotilde asked. He hesitated. Not in the beginning, but then, yes.
And once he knew, he asked to be transferred to another “less intensive” detail, and they granted his request. He became, instead, a courier of documents, shuttling sealed envelopes between army groups.
It was that easy? Clotilde asked. You just had to ask to be transferred and they did it?
He was silent for some time, his meaty hands spread on top of the hospital sheet. Yes, he said finally, at least in my case.
But he felt, at the time, that he had been selfish asking for this special treatment. That it meant someone else in his unit had to do the job of sending women and children to their deaths. So his resistance was not out of moral clarity, but out of a selfish cowardice.
What nonsense, Clotilde said. You did the right thing! The question is why didn’t everyone else? Don’t belittle it.
But her father did not concede.
He looked out the hospital window and, after that day, they never spoke of it.
There was a time when Clotilde imagined a different life for herself, one with a husband and children and her own home, maybe somewhere else. But her father was an easy man to live with, and a surprisingly good cook. She has a job she loves as a gardener in the town park. And she has her dogs. And based on what she understands of history and sees of the present, dogs are a superior species.
Clotilde remembers Burg Lingenfels as it was when she was a teenager: abandoned, graffitied, its windows broken and weeds pushing through its ancient stones. Frau von Lingenfels, the woman who owned it, had moved to the United States. And in her absence, it became a haven for vagrants and local teenagers up to no good. Clotilde was lured there one night by a migrant farm worker for an experience she doesn’t care to remember, certainly nothing the castle hadn’t seen before. After that she stayed away.
But now the castle is grand once again, inhabited by intellectuals from all over the world. The Falkenberg Institute proclaims itself to be “a site of moral inquiry.” Fellows come here to ask questions. Well, leave them to it.
Clotilde comes here not to inquire, but to follow her father’s wishes.
There is a grave in the forest behind the castle that he asked her to visit. A body he buried with his own hands. Franz Muller didn’t know much about the man—he was a Russian prisoner, released from the local stalag after the war. He had arrived at Burg Lingenfels with a band of fellow former prisoners: all hungry, weak, and diseased. And in these woods, he had come across her father. There was an altercation. And there was a woman present, a woman with whom her father had been in love. This is the difficult part, because Clotilde remembers this woman. She was beautiful, with light eyes and pale hair. She was introduced to Clotilde as her father’s future bride, and Clotilde, as an eleven-year-old, had concocted a wealth of lovely fantasies around her: this woman would become her mother and teach her to sew and buy underwear and other embarrassing girl items, maybe even give her a little brother or sister so she would no longer be alone. But then poof, the woman disappeared. No marriage, no courtship, no further mention of her. It was one of the great disappointments of Clotilde’s young life.
Anyway, this woman, Benita Fledermann was her name, somehow came across Clotilde’s father and this Russian. And something happened: the man attacked her or she attacked him, and the man was killed. You killed him? Clotilde had asked her father, who nodded solemnly. But he had never been a good liar. Or she killed him? Clotilde had pressed. It doesn’t matter, he answered. We killed him.
This was a crime punishable by death—the murder of a former enemy combatant, a violation of the cease-fire. So Franz buried the man. And the time being what it was, no one came looking. No one even noticed he was gone.