The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

  “Thank you,” Marianne said, surprised at her own relief.

  And so they waited. It was a curiously intimate thing. They did not speak, but there was solidarity in their silence. Until this moment, Marianne had felt only a sense of unease about the Grabarek boys. Their reticence made them seem shifty. They were so unlike the boys she was familiar with—the bright, boisterous children of the German aristocracy. Despite Fritz’s best efforts, Anselm and Wolfgang did not play. Instead, they followed their mother like silent, restive Dobermans.

  The knock, when it came, was firm but not belligerent. They were only men, only Russians, Marianne reminded herself, as she had reminded her girls. Human beings, wronged by the same regime that murdered Albrecht and Connie.

  She wrestled the heavy front door open, and two men stood before her. One was tall with skin stretched over his cheekbones like the thin layer of fat on the surface of boiled milk, the other short and healthier, with a beard and bright uneasy eyes. The tall one had a blanket over his shoulders, despite the warmth of the day.

  “We need food,” he said, in a rough approximation of German, his voice much lower than seemed possible from a man so thin. His pants were too short, and beneath them his bare feet were caked with dirt. “And water,” he added. Behind him, the rest of the men assembled at the mouth of the bridge over the moat. At the front of the line were the more robust-looking prisoners, and behind, still arriving, a collection of sorrier souls, emaciated and close shorn, with wide, haunted eyes. A mix of newer arrivals and those who had been held in the stalag by the Nazis for God knows how long. There were maybe fifty in total, all silent, and all staring at her.

  “I speak Russian,” Marianne said in Russian. “You are Russians, no?”

  The tall man looked at her without blinking. Neither he nor his partner evidenced the surprise or enthusiasm that usually greeted this announcement. “Most of us,” the man said, speaking Russian now. “We need food and water and a place to rest.”

  “I will bring it to you,” she said. “And there is space and straw in the stable for you to rest.”

  The shorter man nicked his head toward the castle and spoke in a low, guttural dialect. The tall man translated. “How many people live here?”

  “The beds are full,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “But the stable has room. We will bring you food.”

  “And water,” the tall man said.

  “And water,” Marianne repeated.

  Only after she shut the door did she realize her hands were trembling.

  In the kitchen, Ania and her boys had already begun paring potatoes. “We can cook these together with the barley and carrots,” Ania said. “It will thicken with a handful of bread.”

  Marianne nodded, grateful for the woman’s calm. And the fact that she actually knew how to cook. In the week since she had come, the castle had already benefited from her competence. She knew how to grind spoonfuls of rapeseed into oil, darn stockings, pickle the vegetables to last through winter, and preserve fruit. And she had taken over meal preparation, to Marianne’s relief. It had been so long since she had shared responsibility. Benita had been sick and had never seemed a real grown-up anyway. And it had been ages—a lifetime—since Marianne shared a household with Frau Gerstler in Weisslau.

  While Frau Grabarek—Ania, as Marianne had begun to think of her—chopped and cooked, Marianne filled buckets and pots with water from the cistern, which was troublingly low. Once a week, Herr Kellerman filled his “water wagon” and hitched it to his poor long-suffering horse, Gilda, so they could have water at the castle, which was without a well. It had been five days since their last delivery.

  “Carry the water,” Ania ordered her boys after Marianne filled the first pails.

  “I’ll take one,” Marianne began.

  “It’s better if you wait,” Ania said with an authority Marianne had not heard before. “Let them see you have help.”

  Marianne stopped short. She was not accustomed to being told what to do, but the woman was right.

  So the boys made their way to the stable, shouldering the heavy buckets, stepping carefully along the uneven ground. As they neared, the Russians started forward, but the tall man held up his hand, gave an order, and they fell into a neat, practiced line.

  Through the window, Marianne and Ania watched.

  Some of the men wore the striped garb of KZ prisoners. So they were not all prisoners of war, but also prisoners from concentration camps who had been driven to the local stalags as the Russians advanced. Marianne had seen these wretched marchers on her own journey west: ghostlike lines of people stumbling through the fields, driven by black-clad SS guards, kept apart from the other refugees. Untermenschen, an SS man at one of the checkpoints had snarled when she had asked who they were, why they did not march with everyone else.

  “God help us,” she murmured.

  Beside her, Ania remained silent.

  And in front of the stable, the Grabarek boys stood back.

  When the potato-and-barley gruel was ready, Marianne carried down one pot herself, with the boys following her.

  As she approached, the men rose from where they had been sitting and lying, their hunger rising off them like a smell, and the smell itself was pungent: one of unwashed bodies, sickness, and human waste.

  “Put the food down here,” the tall man instructed, and behind him the men began to fall into line. Marianne and the boys did as he said and stood back.

  The tall man gave a signal, and the first in line stepped forward and dipped the ladle.

  “My husband was murdered by the Nazis,” Marianne said in Russian. It was what she had planned: it was important to draw connection between them, to make the men understand she was on their side. To her surprise, her voice shook. And the words felt strange and shocking on her tongue.

  “He wanted to stop the war”—she paused, steeling herself—“to stop the camps, and the killing, and the madness.”

  Her voice rang in her ears. The next in line took the ladle and drank hungrily, the soup catching in his beard. The tall man remained silent.

  “They hanged him,” she continued. “They hanged him and all his fellow resisters. From meat hooks.” She had never said this out loud before. Instead she had closed her mind around it, divorced it from its physical reality. Suddenly, saying it here rendered it vivid: Albrecht, her tall, dignified husband, swinging, his legs kicking, the worn shoes and black socks he always wore—the line of white skin between his socks and trouser cuffs. She had never allowed herself to imagine this.

  A few of the men darted glances at Marianne. There was the sound of bodies shuffling forward, soup being slurped, and her own breathing, loud in her ears. She waited for some recognition of her own suffering.

  Finally the tall man spoke. He said: “The soup will not be enough.”

  Marianne blinked and stared. Maybe he had not understood her Russian. An odd shame washed over her. It was as if she had stripped down and proffered herself, naked, before him—dry skin, stretch marks, raw elbows and all, in the bright sun—and he had merely looked away.

  She drew herself up and swallowed. “It’s all we have.”

  The man looked at her. “There is a horse.”

  For a moment she did not understand.

  “Where is it?” he asked. “It was here recently. Its shit stinks.”

  She stared at him. He was talking about Gilda, Herr Kellerman’s horse.

  This was what her soul-baring had led them to: he was suggesting they eat Gilda.

  Her shame congealed into stunned, irrational fury. She had shared something sacred and essential, and this was his response.

  “The horse is old,” she said, as calmly as possible. “The farmer needs her.”

  The man leveled his gaze. “So do my men.”

  More of them stared at her now. They were not really men, she felt with a burst of anger, but animals. They had been boiled down and stripped of anything that made them human.

&nbs
p; “There are rations for liberated prisoners at the DP camp in Tollingen,” she said coldly.

  The man said nothing for a moment. “We have had enough of camps.”

  The shorter, burlier man who had first come to the door stepped forward. In an abstract way, it occurred to Marianne that he might harm her. To him, she was no better or worse than any other German. They were victims and she the agent.

  But the blood beating in her head made her fierce.

  “I can offer you shelter and all the food we have,” she said, crossing her arms recklessly. “But I cannot offer you the horse.” She steeled herself.

  But then their focus shifted. It became clear they were not looking at her, but beyond her, toward the castle. Turning, Marianne saw Ania hurrying down the hillside with a stern, concerned expression on her face.

  “Can I help with something, Frau von Lingenfels?” she called when she was close enough.

  “We are hungry,” the tall man answered before Marianne could open her mouth. “We would like the horse.”

  Ania slowed to a halt. “The horse?”

  “Herr Kellerman’s,” Marianne said, folding her arms. “It’s not possible.”

  Ania looked from Marianne to the men and back. Then she spoke slowly and reasonably. “The men are starving. There is no more soup.”

  Frau Grabarek went with the group’s leader to Herr Kellerman’s to make the request herself. Kellerman did not put up a fight. He was too old and pragmatic to engage in futile argument. Gilda was decrepit and expensive to feed. He had a younger gelding he used for the harvest.

  So Kellerman led the old horse up the hill, and when he reached the castle, he simply ducked his head and handed the reins to Marianne. He was not a sentimental man. He had lost the movement of his right arm in the last war, and his wife to childbirth, and his only child to scarlet fever. He offered no parting words to his horse.

  Marianne had pulled herself together while she waited. The men were starving, the horse was not hers to spare. Her own strange effort to connect her suffering to theirs had been foolish. These men had no room for the suffering of others. And why should they? They had seen God knows what in recent years. They were far from home. And many had no home to return to: their villages had been destroyed, their families killed, their countries swallowed whole by the Soviets.

  Herr Kellerman handed her Gilda’s reins and she accepted.

  But the horse sensed menace in the great pyre the men had built before the stable and resisted for possibly the first time in her life. She pulled backward and stamped her feet.

  “It’s all right,” Marianne said, although obviously it was not. She tugged at the reins and Gilda stepped forward cautiously, then stopped and strained her neck to look back at Herr Kellerman, who had owned her for some twenty years. This was how she was to be repaid for her unquestioning service.

  What sort of benediction could Marianne offer? Herr Kellerman was right to turn and leave. There was nothing to say. Gilda looked wild and stupid with fear now, reduced to her most animal self. They were all in the time of animals: the men, her own frightened children hiding in the cellar, Herr Kellerman’s horse. Marianne handed the burly man the reins.

  “Don’t make her wait,” she said in Russian, thankful not to have to say it in her own language.

  All night the fire crackled and spat. Sparks sprayed toward the sky. As the moon rose, the men began to sing—a rollicking, boisterous song with an unfamiliar rhythm and tone that drowned out the echo of the horse’s weird, horrible screams.

  In the corner of the kitchen, Katarina and Elisabeth sat clutching each other, crying. Benita was a bundle of exposed nerves, sewing a hem into an old pair of Fritz’s pants so they might fit Martin, stitching, restitching, and then ripping the stitches out. Fritz stood at the window, watching, spellbound and horrified. Somehow Martin slept.

  “The men will soon come looking for schnapps,” Ania said. She and Marianne exchanged a glance.

  “Why don’t you sleep in the cellar tonight,” Marianne suggested to Benita and the girls. “We can bring down the pallets.”

  And so it was decided—everyone would go down except for Marianne and the Grabareks, who would keep watch upstairs. Only Fritz protested, halfheartedly. Marianne could see that he was fighting back tears. For the first time in ages, she wanted to hug him to her and kiss his head—her little boy, Albrecht’s son—he was only eight years old. Instead she said, as gently as possible, “Go on with them, Fritz, there’s no point in staying up.”

  And when all were settled in the fruit cellar, which had a door that could be locked, she and Ania sat in the darkened kitchen and waited, listening to the singing and the fire and the occasional shouts.

  When the men came to the door, as predicted, the women answered it together and handed over the last of the Weisslau plum schnapps. Already men were passed out on the cobbles and retching in the corners on all fours. Gilda’s body looked obscene, legs tied to the spit, head hanging unnaturally, abdomen blackened and hacked.

  Schnapps in hand, the men retreated, and the women once again sat in the dark. Despite everything—the horse, the men, the raw exposure of her own emotions—a weird peace descended on Marianne. In this mysterious, pragmatic woman beside her, she had found a partner. And for the moment, this was enough.

  When she finally slept, Marianne dreamed of the Polish laborers. All day they had stirred in the crevices of her mind, rattling tinnily in the corners where she had buried them. Now they marched forward like a ghostly jury in her sleep.

  There had been maybe twenty of them, assigned to live on the estate in Weisslau when all the local boys and men who usually worked the fields had been sent to the front. They were from farther east, a part of Poland that had become the General Government, Polish citizens deemed unfit for Germanization. So in the parlance of the Nazis, they were to provide labor to the master race. A lot of Nazi garbage. But the von Lingenfelses had not refused their services. How else was the farm to be worked? And to refuse would have thrown suspicion onto Albrecht’s activities.

  Provisional quarters were erected in the old pigsty. Marianne recalled a delivery of cots, some tables requisitioned from the old servant’s kitchen and the appearance of barbed wire across the windows.

  The laborers wore P for Polen, or “Polish worker,” stitched onto their ragged uniforms. They reported to Roland Zeppel, the farm overseer. Untermenschen, he called them. “Underpeople”—the Nazi term for non-Aryans—the Gypsies, Slavs, and Jews at the bottom of the lot. They are people, too, Marianne had said when she heard him use the word. You must treat them with dignity. Roland Zeppel whipped out a Nazi pamphlet about managing foreign laborers. “Do not confuse Polish workers with Germans. They are not allowed at the table. Fraternizing is punishable by law.”

  Marianne glared at him.

  She had never liked the man. He had been a member of the party from the beginning, and even before that, he was not well liked. He had no skills or smarts or education to distinguish him, which made him just the sort to be taken with the notion that he belonged to a master race. But despite Marianne’s objections, Albrecht did not fire him. He had known Roland since childhood; they had gone to the same grade school in Weisslau, played in the same football matches, danced at the same town dances. For Albrecht, this connection was larger than the man’s politics. He was loyal to Herr Zeppel, and Herr Zeppel was loyal to him.

  And so, with this man at the helm, their beloved estate became part of a system that had introduced slaves overnight. Suddenly Roland Zeppel carried a pistol and commanded twenty men from a different part of the continent. Marianne saw it as another piece of Nazi ugliness. Yet in her own day-to-day existence she had accepted it. She sent extra blankets when the weather grew cold and ensured the men had enough soup and potatoes, but still, she benefited from their work.

  And now, lying in her cot at Burg Lingenfels with the Russians gathered outside, Marianne realized that she could not remember the faces or na
mes of any of those Polish laborers. Unlike the local boys and men who had toiled in the fields before the war, she knew nothing about where those men had come from. Chelmno camp, yes. But who they were beyond this, whether they had families, what sort of lives they had left behind, she had never bothered to ask.

  When the Red Army arrived in Weisslau, she had liberated the laborers. She had given each bread and potatoes and a small handout of what reichsmarks she had left, but she did not find out where they would go after this.

  On neighboring estates, there were laborers who killed their landowners and overseers after the Russians arrived. Revenge was their first action upon being freed, and the Russians didn’t care. They had their own agenda of revenge. The Weisslau workers did not come for Marianne. But Roland Zeppel hid in his sister’s attic for days.

  Remembering this made Marianne sit bolt upright in her cot. Zeppel had held the pistol, but it was her farm that both he and the laborers worked.

  Outside the castle, the Russians began to sing again. This time it was a strange, unearthly song full of heartache and low, atonal notes. Something about the Volga River, the tapestry of time and the bright thread of suffering that ran through it. It was a kind of collective keening—a primal, soldiering sorrow rising from their souls.

  Marianne lay on her narrow cot and listened in the dark.

  Chapter Eleven

  Burg Lingenfels, August 1945

  When Benita awoke, she confused the cellar walls with her prison cell. How had she ended up back here? Horror flashed to the roots of her hair, the ends of her toes. To be back in prison meant she had lost Martin.

  But no, here he was, his warm body curled beside hers.

  She reoriented herself: she was in the west, the countryside, with Marianne, at Burg Lingenfels.

  Yesterday a gang of Russian prisoners had descended on them. They were not as terrifying as the dream. She wrapped her arms around her sleeping boy and said a silent, involuntary prayer of thanks for his young life.