Marianne dreamed of them that night, the mothers and children walking into the woods. And the men, her own neighbors and peers, her fellow countrymen, marching them. This was what all Hitler’s frightening rants amounted to: ordinary, middle-aged men marching mothers and children into forests to be killed.
For so long Marianne and Albrecht and many of their friends had known Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people’s most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country. They had watched him make a masterwork of scapegoating Jews for Germany’s fall from power and persuade his followers that enlightenment, humanity, and tolerance were weaknesses—“Jewish” ideas that led to defeat. They had wrung their hands over his dangerous conflations, his fervor, and his lack of humanity. But Freddy Lederer’s account was something new to Marianne. She lay in bed that night and knew Connie was right. Hitler must die.
For Albrecht, though, the answer still lay in the pursuit of justice. He too was deeply affected by Freddy’s report. He redoubled his efforts to assist Jews in their attempts to escape, and to bring Nazi horrors like the one Freddy described to the attention of the British and the Americans, who he believed were the only hope for defeating Hitler. He was a religious person—much more so than Marianne—and he grappled with his faith. He lost sleep and barely ate. But he still believed the answer was to judge the man in the court of law. Only when we prove that international law and the human rights of all mankind are greater than any villain can we vanquish evil. He remained steadfast in this belief.
But this is impossible, Albrecht! Marianne argued. How are you to bring Hitler to a court of law? All of Germany would have to rise up against him.
With the support of the outside world, he would say. And with time . . .
He was a dreamer, though, Marianne felt. There was no time. And all of Germany would never rise up. They were too steeped in Hitler’s rhetoric, too cowardly, too implicated in the horrors of his war to reject him.
Two weeks after his visit to Weisslau, Freddy hanged himself.
It was not until the news of the extermination camps reached Albrecht—not the rumors, but the undeniable firsthand accounts he had access to through his work in the Abwehr—that he agreed. Assassination was the only way.
Downstairs, Marianne sank into the cool leather of the chair at her husband’s desk with the intention of going through their accounts. She had taken over the bookkeeping when Albrecht’s work in government—and more important, in the resistance—became too demanding. Sitting here, at this great desk, where he had drawn up many plans and documents, Marianne was struck, as if for the first time, by the possibility that their plot might fail.
Outside the window, she caught a flash of black flapping across the lawn, followed by a brown-gray blur, which resolved itself into a cat chasing a crow. As she watched, the cat managed to bring one outstretched paw down on the bird’s wing. The crow half flew, half jumped forward, wing crooked at an alarming angle, and the cat, satisfied with the damage, turned and streaked back into the bushes. The bird staggered and flapped. It began to utter a throaty, guttural sound. Three other crows flew down from the treetops and stood at a respectful distance, watching, heads cocked, as it hobbled before them with its terrible trailing wing spread out as evidence.
Then, as if they’d passed judgment and found their comrade beyond hope, they flew away.
The sight was at once horrifying and addictive; Marianne could not avert her eyes. It was just the two of them now, though the crow did not know she watched. She stood frozen at the window with a hard, knotted feeling in her chest. If the cat returned, she would open the window and shoo it away—or go outside and throw a rock. But it didn’t. It was content to leave the bird to die.
Marianne was not a believer in signs and portents. These were the recourse of the powerless. But all the same, in that instant, she had the clearest sense the coup had failed. In the end it will hang on chance, Albrecht had said when she last saw him. She had nodded but had not understood it in her heart. She had never really allowed herself to consider the opposite of success. She had believed, almost superstitiously, that to admit doubt would invite failure, and to imagine success would bring it about. And her imagination was docile. It conjured what she told it to, no more, no less. She did not imagine crevasses and hidden boulders when the children skied; she did not picture an accident when Albrecht drove too fast. It was part of what made her confident rather than anxious. It was part of what made her an optimist.
She had pushed Albrecht to support the plan and championed taking action almost from the start. Inaction was impossible. Once you knew—really knew—of the women and children being shot in the woods, of the shower rooms constructed for the sole purpose of killing, how could you not act? But now, here was the obvious reason she had repressed: the cost. If the plan failed, all that she cherished would be lost.
Somehow Marianne managed to get through the afternoon, a blind woman fumbling her way down a familiar path. She filled out the ledger with the number of pigs born in the last month and the bushels of wheat harvested. She presided over tea. If the conspirators were intercepted, what would happen? Arrest? Imprisonment? Death? Albrecht’s connection would surely be discovered. How could it not? He had hosted the plan’s primary actors on many occasions and was a known critic of the Nazis. Of course, they had been careful—last month they had burned letters and buried notebooks and plans. Even the guestbook of Weisslau had been “lost.” But there were countless threads to implicate him.
Meanwhile, outside, the crow staggered around in the dark margin of shadow between the woods and the lawn. Its wing dragged, its shiny eye blinked. She did not want the children to see it. Don’t look, don’t look, she told herself, but her eyes were helplessly drawn to where it hunched, damaged wing extended like a cape.
Before supper, Frau Gerstler, the cook, entered the study with a stricken look on her face: “Our Führer has been injured! Our dear Führer! Assassins have made an attempt on his life, but praise God, he has only been hurt.”
Marianne clutched the arms of the chair to steady herself. It was less a shock than a confirmation.
“Our Führer, our Führer,” Frau Gerstler cried. “Thank God he has survived!” Almost as if he were her own son or husband.
“What is it? What happened?” the children clamored around her, drawn by instinct from wherever they had been playing.
“Frau Gerstler has heard rumors,” Marianne said, amazed she was able to speak.
“The Führer?” Fritz persisted. “Did she say he was almost killed?”
“Don’t eavesdrop on adult conversation,” Marianne snapped, drawing courage from the sound of her own voice.
“Frau Gerstler,” Marianne said when the children retreated in confusion, “I would appreciate it if you kept such rumors out of our house.”
“But, madam,” Frau Gerstler said, “it is on the radio.”
After that, there was no possible excuse for turning off the radio. Hitler himself was expected, at any moment, to give a speech.
The urgency forced Marianne to calm the storm inside her head. She had to be careful. From now on, every movement she made would be suspect. Frau Gerstler loved the family, but she did not love them so much that she wouldn’t inform on them if the Gestapo asked.
So they listened to the broadcast as a group, Frau Gerstler at their center, wringing her hands and shaking her head. Fritz too could barely contain himself, his eyes bright with anger and astonishment. But Marianne was too distracted to be rattled by her son’s ignorance. The girls listened with less fervor. Elisabeth rolled her eyes at the hysterical tone of the announcer behind Frau Gerstler’s back. Katarina sat quietly beside her mother, looking up from time to time with wide, perceptive eyes, trying to read her face.
When Hitler spoke, his voice was as absurd as always, but this time tinged with a special, bellicose fury:
The claim by these usurpers that I am no longer
alive is at this very moment proven false, for here I am talking to you, my dear fellow countrymen. The circle which these usurpers represent is very small. It has nothing to do with the German armed forces, and above all nothing to do with the German army. It is a very small clique composed of criminal elements which will now be mercilessly exterminated . . .
The word exterminated repeated itself in Marianne’s ears. There would be executions, certainly. Claus von Stauffenberg. Ludwig Beck. And Connie. Connie! There was no way he could escape. He was too central to the plot. She held her hands together in her lap so no one could see them shake.
But what of Albrecht? What of the children and Weisslau? What of herself? She had to remain calm and think straight. Albrecht had many powerful friends, even among Hitler’s regime. It was possible this would help. And she had heard nothing from him yet. So she would need, first of all, to wait. They had discussed what she should do in the case of his arrest, but until she had confirmation, she must carry on as normal.
Somehow she managed to get the children to bed that night.
Then, unable to help herself, she looked out the window for the crow in the semidark. The sun sank late this time of year; it was nearly ten and still the meadow glowed. The patch of woods beyond was enveloped in black. At the edge, a form distinguished itself. Still broken, still hobbling, no better, no worse.
Marianne pulled on her boots and jacket and quietly let herself out. There it was. As the door closed, the crow stopped. Her eyes adjusted to the dark. She approached quietly, and it remained still until she was a meter away. Then it swelled up, puffed its feathers, and seemed to sigh without lifting its head from its chest. It blinked, and its beak glinted faintly in the dark. The wing was beyond repair; a bit of bone protruded from the black feathers, which were stripped away by the cat’s claws, revealing a patch of bluish, reptilian skin.
They stood for some time together. It observed her with wariness, even intelligence. Wind rustled the trees. Marianne hunched inside her jacket, chilly despite the night’s warmth. The bird would die here alone in the darkness. Would it gradually starve? Or would the cat return to finish it off? Or some other night creature—a fox or weasel or barn owl?
She did not want to leave it.
You are not alone, she thought. Don’t be afraid. You are beloved. And the words filled her mind, big enough to transcend and spread out into the night. Marianne was not a religious person, but she felt the presence of something divine. The bird was an angel. The bird was Albrecht.
No, she realized with star-bright clarity: it was Connie.
She spread her coat on the grass and lay down beside it, and at some point she drifted off to sleep. When she woke in the first gray light of dawn, the bird was gone and Connie was dead.
Chapter Six
Burg Lingenfels, July 1945
Lying in her cot at Burg Lingenfels, Benita did not open Connie’s letter. Through her sickness, its presence on the bedside table exerted a ghoulish force. In her dreams, she would try to read it, but the words swam before her eyes, long and ponderous, so obscure as to be incomprehensible, or worse, dull. No sense would shake from its folds. And Connie himself hovered at the periphery of her sleep. She saw him across a crowded party or at the end of a hall, or even in the shadows here in her room, but it was impossible to connect. He would be engrossed in conversation with a colleague, or flirting with another woman, or simply slip out of her sight as she approached. When she woke, sweaty with fever, rattled by stress, she wanted nothing to do with his letter and blamed it for her nightmares. I love you, I’m sorry . . . It didn’t matter what he said. Their marriage was what it was—and now it was over. Connie was dead.
“Can you put this away somewhere?” Benita asked Elisabeth one night when the girl came to deliver her evening soup in Marianne’s place.
“Where?” Elisabeth asked. She was a stolid, literal girl and did not seem surprised.
Benita cast her eyes around the bare room. “Anywhere that I don’t have to see it,” she answered.
So Elisabeth stuck it in the chest of drawers that housed Benita’s few possessions. And after that, Benita’s sleep improved.
Benita had been sick for three weeks when she woke to find a strange man in her room. Her first thought was of what she must look like. The edges of her mouth were dry and cracked, and her nightgown sweat-stained. The sheets lay twisted at her feet. She scrambled to cover herself and became light-headed with the effort.
Marianne, who had come in with the stranger, was wrestling open the ancient window and made no move to assist her. “This is Herr Muller,” she said, turning back to Benita, who remained huddled on the cot. “He has come to help around the castle today, and I thought he could begin by taking you outside. The sun will do you good.”
Benita stared at Marianne. “Could I—” She clutched the open neck of her nightgown. “Could I have a minute first to dress?”
“Ah! Of course!” Marianne said. “Herr Muller, would you give us a moment?”
It was so like Marianne to act first and then think. Even in the daze of sickness, Benita recognized this. Marianne had no patience for mundane concerns like appearance or propriety.
“Who is he?” Benita managed to ask as Marianne helped her tug a pair of trousers on under her nightdress.
“A prisoner,” Marianne said brusquely. “Someone the Americans sent.” Her tone forbade more questions. A German. But Benita had already recognized this.
When he reentered the room, head slightly bowed and eyes averted, Benita felt a wave of shame. He was a good-looking man, too thin for his large frame, with a bold, strong-featured face and a square forehead. He seemed to understand her embarrassment. It confirmed that she was right to feel self-conscious. Sickness and the war had made her ugly and broken-down.
But when he lifted her—easily, as if she were an armload of feather ticking—she felt unaccustomedly feminine. The gingerness of his touch, the careful placement of his hand so that it would not brush against her breast, the heat of his forearm under her thighs brought something dormant in her to life. As her light, hot head bounced against his shoulder, she was filled with a sense of relief. His manner projected competence. In his arms she felt like a baby picked up and collected by its mother, purring with the pleasure of being held. To her embarrassment, her eyes filled with tears.
“Are you all right?” he asked as he navigated the curving stone stairs, and she nodded, unable to speak.
Outside, he laid her on a straw mattress underneath the chestnut tree. The sun was beautiful and dappled, and the breeze brushed across her cheek like a breath, lifting her shorn hair from her scalp. She was not chilled and aching or struggling for breath, and she was filled with wonder at her own painlessness.
“Is this a good place?” the man asked, bringing her back to the moment.
“Thank you,” she managed to say, nodding.
His eyes glanced up at hers then—shockingly blue, like one of those eerie northern dogs, light rather than the deepwater blue of Connie’s. And something like recognition, only sharper, passed between them.
Why are you here? she wanted to ask, but then Martin came running—her sweet, lovely boy, his cheeks pink from play, his forehead sweaty. He crouched before her and she lifted a hand to his face, the beautiful child she had lost and found. And she forgot all about the man who had just carried her down.
For the next few weeks, Herr Muller helped Benita downstairs every time he came to the castle—first carrying her and then, as her strength returned, supporting her as she walked. He was not a talker, but she questioned him anyway. He was from Braunschweig, a city not far from where she had grown up, which perhaps explained his familiarity. Before the war he had been a carpenter. He had a daughter and a father still living in the home he had left.
And your wife? she asked, knowing she was being forward.
His wife was dead.
Mostly they proceeded in silence, which Benita did not feel pressured to fill. S
he found his quiet steadiness comforting. He reminded her of the men of Frühlinghausen, men who worked with their hands and ate dinner in silence. Men like her father, a quiet hulking presence in her childhood, falling asleep in his chair after dinner with his red hands splayed like slabs of meat on his knees. She had spent her girlhood scheming to escape such men, but now, in Herr Muller’s presence, she found she missed the way they made her feel.
As she regained her strength, she began taking short trips around the castle, to the stables, the bakehouse, the kitchen garden. It had been so long since she’d been free to walk where she wanted. The openness of the countryside, the smell of summer grasses, the clouds of dust on the road were all suddenly beautiful to her. The war had quashed any romantic notions she once held of the city.
On one of these walks, she came across Herr Muller piling split wood under the eave of a dilapidated outbuilding that had once been the castle brewery.
“Frau Fledermann,” he said, straightening. “Are you well enough to walk all this way? On your own?”
“Of course!” she said through her breathlessness. It had, in fact, been a little far.
“Ah.” Muller looked uncertain. He mopped the sweat off his brow. “Here,” he said, leveling the stack of logs in the wheelbarrow and spreading his jacket over the top. “Sit a minute and catch your breath.”
Light-headed, Benita complied. She could feel the sweat running under her arms and standing at the edge of her hairline. The barrow was in the shade of the building and beyond this, the sun was hot. Two huge dragonflies hung and swooped, attached head to tail, across this boundary of shadow and light.
Muller regarded Benita with concern. His pose struck her as clownish—this large man, peering at her so tentatively.
The Women in the Castle Page 8
