The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

  Benita had been pregnant with another child when she was sent to prison, although she hadn’t known it at the time. But when she found out, the life growing inside her had been a source of comfort: Connie was dead, and Martin had been taken, but she was not alone. She had passed her days whispering prayers and rosaries and lullabies to the baby: a little sister for Martin. She felt certain it was a girl.

  And then the baby died. Lifeless, its small body huddled stubbornly inside her like a stone. She knew it was dead long before her body expelled it. The delivery was horrific. Her womb became infected, and she remained in the prison hospital until the Russian soldiers arrived.

  And while she lay there swimming in and out of fever, she had immersed herself in a strong, oddly sustaining fury at Connie. It was his fault that she was there. His fault that Martin had been taken. His fault that the baby had died. If she had not been in prison, surely the baby would still be alive. He had abandoned her for his lofty ideals and secret conspiracy—and his affairs with other women. Gigi Flagstaff, that brassy American, who had the gall to court Benita’s friendship; Margarete Vederlander, the notorious Berlin glamour girl . . . and who knew how many others? And meanwhile, Benita had miscarried one baby after another.

  She and Martin had spent countless long nights alone in their hot, unlavish flat (so different from the one she had imagined when she married), staring out at the empty city streets. Connie hadn’t sent them to the country, like the other aristocrats’ wives and children. His widowed mother did not invite them to stay with her in the drafty old Fledermann estate, and Benita was too proud to ask. Anyway, it was a horrible, formal place that would ultimately be destroyed by the Russians, his mother shot along with what staff remained. But in Berlin, Connie was always busy, always traveling. So Benita and Martin were abandoned to the roar of bombers, the endless trips to the bomb cellar, and the increasingly stark governance of the city.

  All this she resented while she lay mourning the baby in her hospital bed. And beneath this, she was angry at her own ignorance. Why had Connie left her in the dark about his work when so many other widows had known so much? Did he think she was too stupid to understand? It was the final proof of their estrangement. She had listened to the radio report on July 20, 1944, with only the faintest inkling of unease.

  Later still, Benita would be ashamed of her own oblivion. And of the rage and self-pity she had wrapped around herself during those feverish months. But at the time, it had kept her alive.

  From her pallet in the fruit cellar of Burg Lingenfels, Benita began to hear a dull thunk, repeated rhythmically. It was faint but distinct. Gray light glowed through the casement windows. It was a new day. Thursday, to be exact.

  Thursday! She realized with a start that the sound was Herr Muller’s ax. It was his last day in these woods. Next week he would be transferred to a camp in the French occupation zone. And anyway, Marianne did not want his help. This morning, he would have approached the castle from the back side of the mountain, through the woods, and not seen the prisoners. If he had seen them he would have turned around. Or if they had seen him, they would have turned him around. Or worse. They would not take kindly to the sudden appearance of an ex–German soldier, an ex-Nazi. Benita did not need rumors to tell her this.

  Gingerly, she rose to her feet. It was important she not wake Martin or the von Lingenfels girls, asleep on the pallet they had dragged downstairs. They would only get in her way. With rare clarity, Benita knew exactly what she must do: warn Herr Muller before the prisoners discovered him. She took her shoes and the paring knife she always carried and tiptoed out the door.

  Upstairs, the kitchen was empty. Marianne and Frau Grabarek had apparently gone up to their rooms. Outside the window, in the gray light, Benita could see the smoldering bonfire and the blackened carcass above it, an obscene thing. Around it the men slept, splayed out like corpses on a battlefield.

  Herr Muller’s ax was louder once she was aboveground. Pulling her cardigan close, she hurried out the kitchen door to the courtyard. On the other side was an old bakehouse with an opening for shoveling waste into the moat. She had often seen Fritz and Martin climb through it and down to the murky bottom. From there they splashed along to a ladder of footholds carved into the moat wall, then up to the meadow between the castle and the woods.

  Moving too swiftly to allow time to reconsider, Benita jogged toward it. The morning was fresh and cool, and the wild morning glories climbing along the wall were still closed. From the roof overhang, swallows began to stir, darting out in missile-like feints and swoops. They reminded her of something from her childhood—the swallows in the eaves of the asylum outbuildings; the baby birds that would fall out of their nests to the ground. One year she had tried to care for them, feeding them milk from a medicine dropper, offering them the worms she had dug. They had been so soft and fluffy and pitiful—their tiny bright eyes blinking up from her palm. It had never worked, though. One by one they died.

  Inside the bakehouse, all was dim and rotten. It had not been used in years. The opening was not difficult to find; it was not even covered. Benita dropped to her hands and knees and lowered herself through. The drop was farther than she trusted, but she closed her eyes and let go. She staggered upon impact but remained on her feet. From here it was easy to make her way through the muck to the footholds in the wall. In a moment, she had scrambled up and out. Then she was free of the castle with only a short stretch of field between her and the woods.

  Again, Benita heard the thunk of the ax.

  She did not stop to look beyond the castle to what was visible of the stable, the fire, the sleeping Russians. Instead, she ran across the shaggy grass until she reached the safety of the woods. A scramble of weeds and low brush edged the forest, prickly and sharp, but she barely noticed. She was going to save Herr Muller. It was in her power to do this. The knowledge made her palms sweat and her heart race—but also filled her with a potent determination. She had been saved so many times—by Marianne, by her neighbor Frau Kessler in Berlin, by the prison warden who kept her in the hospital instead of a concentration camp . . . even, at one time, by Connie, her knight in shining armor, who had saved her from her life. But who had she ever saved? No one. Not even her own son.

  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim light of the wood. She knew the clearing where Herr Muller worked and wound her way there at a half run, barely registering the brambles scraping her legs, tearing at her skirt.

  Not until she was almost to the clearing did Benita realize the sound of the ax had stopped. She could hear voices. She paused and strained to listen over her own ragged breath. It was Herr Muller and another man. A Russian. And the exchange did not sound friendly.

  She was too late! The thought struck her physically. It was impossible. She could not be. She would not allow it. She plowed forward into the clearing. At the center stood two men: Herr Muller and a Russian soldier with blunt, stubby features, wearing a bedraggled Red Army uniform. He spoke in a harsh, guttural voice.

  “Herr Muller!” Benita called, and both men whirled to look at her.

  “I came to tell you”—she panted—“to go back.”

  Confusion spread over Herr Muller’s face.

  The Russian grinned. “Shlyukha,” he swore. Whore.

  This word Benita knew.

  More Russian followed—words she did not understand, but she grasped their meaning from his leer. For a moment, the Russian seemed to forget about his fight with Herr Muller and moved toward her.

  Staring at his ugly, smirking face, the acne pits half covered by a growth of stringy beard, Benita felt something inside her explode and this man, advancing on her now, became not just the prisoner who had reached Herr Muller before she could, but every other man who had ever called her a whore. Every man who had ever pummeled and beaten and clawed his way into her with stinking breath and rancid sweat and rage about things for which her body had no responsibility. Of course he had reached Herr Muller firs
t! How could she have imagined herself powerful enough to intervene? She was nothing but a lump of flesh to be tossed between fighting dogs. She was half-dead already, torn up, chewed on, spat out. This was how he saw her. She could see it in his eyes.

  But it was not true! She was a mother with a son, a woman who had escaped once already. She was the wife of a resister, a friend of Marianne von Lingenfels. She was no longer little Benita Gruber—a pretty, expendable peasant girl with no money, no father, and no power. She drew herself up and spat as hard as she could at the man’s feet.

  The look on his face turned from amusement to irritation. He did not understand. He saw only her old self. With a torrent of fury sweeping through her veins, she reached into her pocket for the knife.

  Chapter Twelve

  Berlin, Late April 1945

  Benita’s first time was not the worst. The soldier had been clean, relatively speaking, and had given her food—a roll, with jelly even—and beer. He had taken the satchel of belongings she carried and steered her into the courtyard of a bombed-out building in Neukölln. She had not even made it home from the prison hospital. He chuckled and grinned and rubbed her feet like a devoted husband. Never mind that the outcome of his advance was fixed. It didn’t matter if she acquiesced. He tried to win her over anyway, which, under the circumstances, seemed tantamount to romance. When he finally pressed her against the courtyard wall, he was disgusting but not cruel, only avid and self-absorbed.

  During the second, third, and fourth times Benita came to really know revulsion. And pain—such bloody, cramping, screaming pain as she had not imagined possible outside of childbirth.

  This was still the beginning of The End, when there was fighting in the streets—blasts of machine-gun fire, skirmishes between the last terrified Wehrmacht holdouts and the Allies who had them surrounded. They fought for control of the city, block by block. But the Russians on Meerstein Strasse knew they had won. They tramped up and down the building’s staircase bedecked with stolen watches, drinking looted whiskey, searching for girls. The grandmothers on the sixth and third floors of her building hid their granddaughters in the bomb cellar and treated Benita and the other women who went outside during daylight as lepers. But Benita couldn’t remain in hiding. How would she find Martin if she was hiding in the cellar? And she didn’t have a mother or grandmother to slip her drinks of water and scraps of bread. Frau Gruber, bless her poor, stolid heart, had been dead for five years.

  You too? Four times? Six times? The Mongolians are the worst. No, the Cossacks. They broke her leg. She cannot pee. She lost her mind. Everyone talked of it. Talk, talk, talk . . . and the questions. Not from the victims, but from the old women and the men. The men, the few who remained, were the worst. They feigned sympathy and anger but really only wanted to listen, to imagine. It made her sick.

  And still there was no Martin, and no one to ask for help. Every passing day Benita felt her will to live fading. The Nazis who had taken her son had now vanished into the night. The Russians knew nothing of the stolen children and had no interest. What was another lost child in this war that had already killed so many?

  There was a soldier who “loved” Benita: a tall, skinny boy from Georgia with a wide grin. He brought her chocolate and sardines and canned peaches—delicacies his unit had raided from some local Nazi lair. He wanted her to be his wife. This she deduced from his mix of broken German and pantomime. He was a naive boy when it came to anything but killing people. He had grown up with nine siblings in an apple orchard.

  It was with his help that Benita gained access to the “captain” of the district, the only man who seemed to have any contact with the world beyond this measly corner of Berlin.

  The captain was a large, stern man from St. Petersburg—a real Red Army official, not a ragtag conscript from some country that had become a province of the Soviet Union. As a teenager, he had taken part in the October Revolution. His men were awed by this fact. He was a real Bolshevik. And the Bolsheviks, Benita understood, wanted to annihilate the Germans.

  The captain had set up shop in what had once been Mulman’s Bakery, on the ground floor of an intact building around the corner from 27 Meerstein Strasse. When Benita was presented, he rose from behind the flour-clouded counter like a general rising from behind a great desk. He had a shrewd, intelligent face. Standing before him, she felt naked and unnerved.

  Ah, he said, bowing his head when she finished explaining her search for Martin. I will make inquiries. Then he looked at Benita and her Georgian escort. It was clear that he was not a man who did favors for nothing. So this was how she became “his,” which was, in its way, a mercy.

  He was a hard man, but not a cruel one. And his affection, if it could be called that, protected Benita from the others. The Georgian was forced to retreat, tail between his legs, back to his dreams of the apple orchard.

  But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered after the news. Martin was dead. This was what the captain told her. He was among a number of “orphans” from a Nazi Children’s Home sent on the last train to Buchenwald. The captain delivered the news matter-of-factly. He was not a man to mince words, and even if he had wanted to, he did not speak enough German.

  Benita stared at him and felt the world darken around the edges. Everything she knew seemed to fall away until she was left perched on some last, invisible outcropping of solid land in a great and empty universe.

  After that, when the captain came to her, she left her body—the body that no longer meant a thing to her, that would soon turn to rot. Instead, she went to her boy, to her little Martin, and curled around his sleeping form, stroked his fine blond hair, and kissed the crown of his sweet head. She hummed the lullabies she used to sing at night when he was frightened and crawled into her bed. And she filled him with all the love he would ever need in his next life.

  That was the end of Benita Gruber, the girl who grew up at 7 Krensig and dreamed of marrying a rich man. That was the end of Benita Fledermann, Connie’s wronged wife, silly little chicken locked up in her flat, feasting on her own disappointment. The grim details of Connie’s execution, the time in prison, the miscarriage of her daughter—these were nothing compared to the loss of her son. For Benita, “The End” that Germans spoke of in the years to come boiled down to this.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Burg Lingenfels, December 1945

  Martin was too young to remember Christmas before the war. The stories Elisabeth and Katarina told sounded as improbable as fairy tales to him. Roasted goose for dinner, Glühwein, and baked Zimtsterne, oranges pierced with cloves. Packages filled with new socks, hair ribbons, chocolates, and books. Once, Elisabeth told him, her father gave her a real white rabbit in a painted cage.

  Martin was especially interested in the parties—so many people coming together in celebration, rather than fear. The only large gatherings he could remember took place in bomb cellars or rallies or on crowded, terror-filled streets.

  “We will make a fine Christmas this year,” Marianne announced on the first day of December. Never mind that it was freezing and that food, even here at the castle, was in short supply. This was her plan. On the first Sunday of Advent she was determined to bake a Stollen. Everyone was skeptical, not only on account of the rationing, but on account of never having seen Marianne bake. But she insisted. She had been setting aside flour and sugar for this purpose since September.

  So the children decorated the kitchen. The girls crafted delicate stars out of straw and bits of yarn from an unraveled sweater and hung them on freshly cut evergreen boughs.

  “Dear Lord, we thank you for all that we have when so many people have nothing. We have each other, we have food, we have our health and a roof over our heads,” Marianne had begun saying before dinner each night. This was new. Before—meaning before The End, not before the war, but certainly before she came to the castle—Marianne had not been a religious woman. Elisabeth and Katarina did not like this new piety. But Martin enjoyed the sound of Maria
nne’s voice listing the things they had to be thankful for, talking about the misery of others. It was always good to know there were people more miserable than you.

  “Do you believe in God?” he asked his mother one night as they fell asleep in their little room above the kitchen, his breath puffing out in white clouds.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and even in the dark he could sense that his question had brought tears to her eyes.

  It made him angry—her readiness to cry. She was always on the verge of tears, trembly, red eyed, and uncertain. It had been worse in the days after the Russians came, but even now it took almost nothing to set her off. Including, apparently, the mention of God.

  Martin believed in God, though. How could he not? It was unbearable to imagine there wasn’t something better out there, a divine balm for all the havoc he had seen here on earth. He believed in God not as an explanation, but as a salve—a wise, stern figure on a throne in the clouds, watching out for those below. Nice job he did for the last seven years, Elisabeth said when he admitted his belief. But it wasn’t God who caused the war and all the horror. It was people, he thought. He knew better than to argue with Elisabeth, though. God ruled only in heaven, he would have said. But apparently Elisabeth expected to see more of his hand on earth.

  Outside the temperatures reached record lows. Snot and breath and tears froze as soon as you stepped outside. All over Germany people were starving. A taste of their own medicine, the British radio declared. During the war we starved so Germans could eat—let them reap what they sowed. It was the first time Martin thought of enemy children—not just soldiers but boys and girls.