The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

Fair enough, Marianne said, though you could see uncertainty in her eyes. Bastards, Fritz swore, and was sent to his room. In Berlin, people chopped down what was left of the bombed-out Tiergarten for firewood. And in cities all over the country, people were rumored to be eating slugs and rats and other small animals. Every weekend townspeople from Tollingen and Momsen flocked to the land to beg for scraps of food.

  Here in the castle, though, they were warm and relatively well fed. They didn’t venture far from the kitchen and their small rooms above it. There was frost on the damp north wall of the great hall and ice at the bottom of the moat, but their lamps burned bright and the giant oven blazed with Herr Muller’s firewood. They took turns sitting against it, warming their backs. And everyone wore clothes on top of clothes.

  In the months since the Grabareks had arrived, life at the castle had become more comfortable and orderly. Frau Grabarek was a good cook. She knew how to turn coarse meal into palatable porridge, how to boil syrup from sugar beets, how to bargain shrewdly on the black market. She would return home from town with real wheat flour for baking, sugar, and even black tea. She was also more practical than Martin’s mother or Marianne: She made the boys chew spruce bark to ward off germs and mended the holes in Martin’s pockets and undershirts that no one else noticed. She thought to rub lanolin on Martin’s chapped cheeks, and when he developed a nagging cough, she made a poultice for his chest. She was a caretaker of regular, bodily needs. In this way, she reminded him of Frau Vortmuller from the Children’s Home, who sometimes he secretly missed.

  The Grabarek boys, Anselm and Wolfgang, were even more silent than their mother, which was fine with Martin, who grew tired of Fritz’s endless chatter. And they knew real survival skills: how to find potatoes missed in the harvest, how to trap rabbits, how to lie.

  And they knew how to split wood, which was important now that Herr Muller was gone.

  Something bad had happened the night the Russians killed Herr Kellerman’s horse. Something so terrible no one even asked what it was. In the early morning, Herr Muller had appeared at the kitchen door carrying Martin’s mother. She was like a baby in his arms, with her own wrapped around his neck and her face buried in his chest. And she was covered in blood. It was everywhere—on her hair, blouse, even her face. Martin had never seen so much blood.

  For a moment they had all stood and stared—the sight was too much to absorb—and then Marianne began to ask questions: What is this? Where have you been? Are you all right? Oh my Lord, good Lord, Mary, mother of God . . . And the girls began screaming and everything was chaos until Frau Grabarek sent the children back down to the cellar.

  When she called them upstairs, Martin’s mother had been quarantined in her room, Herr Muller was gone, and there was no sign of the bloody clothes.

  We must never speak of this, Marianne had said that night, and they were all too frightened to ask: About what? Even Elisabeth.

  The next day the Russians left. One of them had disappeared. The leader came to the castle door to ask if they had seen him, and standing in the shadows, Martin heard Frau Grabarek say, Yes, actually; I couldn’t sleep and was looking out the window at midnight; I saw a man walk down the hill. Martin was the only one to overhear the exchange.

  For the next few weeks the von Lingenfels children whispered about what had happened, but they fell silent in front of Martin, whom they seemed to regard with renewed pity. It was a pitiable thing, apparently, to be Benita’s son. Was the blood hers? And why had she been outside and not in the cellar? How had Herr Muller found her? These questions gnawed at Martin, but he did not ask them. The answers did not matter. Herr Muller had saved her. Martin was certain of this. So why had Marianne told him not to return?

  Afterward, Benita had remained upstairs for two weeks. When she came back down, she was as jumpy and tentative as she had been when they first found her in Berlin. My sweet boy, my dear boy, she would say over and over, reaching for Martin.

  On the day before Christmas, Marianne presented the children packages sent by American Quakers. They were full of fabulous items: oranges, toothbrushes, candy bars, a tin of something called Kraft cheese, and chewing gum. These were accompanied by handwritten cards from American children—pictures drawn in bright wax crayons. Martin’s card had a drawing of a fat brown-and-white cat with a red-and-white-striped bow. It read As a token of our country’s goodwill and was signed by Amy (age eight) and Roger (age six). Martin tried to imagine Amy and Roger and the box of colors they had used to create this card. He pictured them wearing crisp store-bought clothing and new shoes with thick soles and no worn-out places. He was sure they each owned their own bicycle and left food uneaten on their plates. Martin pictured this not so much with envy as with wonder—what an amazing thing to be an American!

  “Enjoy half of what is in the package, and then find someone to share the other half with,” Marianne instructed. They had received these gifts only because they were Opfers. There were not enough for all the children of Ehrenheim. And despite Marianne’s disdain for the townspeople, she did not like the inequity.

  Only Elisabeth had the courage—or the foolishness—to protest.

  “For that, you just lost half your portion,” Marianne announced. “You already have it better than most of Germany’s children.” From then on, no one complained.

  So that afternoon, while Marianne visited the DP camp and Ania prepared the Christmas stew and Benita rested, the children, minus Fritz, who was in bed with a fever, bundled into even more layers and walked to Ehrenheim, bearing their half candy bars and chewing gum sticks like the gifts of the three kings.

  “I’m going to eat mine myself,” Elisabeth announced.

  But Katarina looked so shocked that Elisabeth was forced to take this back. She was thirteen now. If it weren’t for the war, she said, if it weren’t for everything, she would be learning to play piano and reading interesting books and going to dancing school. Instead she had only the Bible and two volumes of Goethe, which she had read a million times. And she had only her “numbskull brother” to dance with. Her rant semipolitely excluded Martin and the Grabarek boys.

  Katarina and Elisabeth decided to head to the children’s center at the DP camp to share their gifts. They had visited often enough with their mother, who had begun to volunteer there, and knew some of the children. The decision was certain to please Marianne.

  “Martin, do you want to come with us?” Katarina asked.

  Martin declined. He would join Anselm and Wolfgang. He had spent enough time with the girls, who were always chattering and worrying and bickering with each other. The Grabareks, on the other hand, were silent and knowing. They shared a language of glances and nods, by which they communicated. They could walk across the fields kicking a stone back and forth, making a game of it without ever stating the rules. Martin admired their self-containment. Cut from a different cloth, Frau Vortmuller would have said. Not as a judgment, but as an observation. Martin had earned their trust through his own silence and ability to assimilate. And so they told him things about their journey west—about finding their way around the SS checkpoints and sleeping in cold Polish forests. About escaping from an overheating bomb cellar in Dresden the night of the famous bombing—the fire in the streets and the trees lit up like dancing torches, the pools of pavement melting in the heat. What was it like before, where you lived in the east? he asked them once, but they grew silent. He did not ask again.

  On this Christmas Eve, the town was quiet. Usually there were crews of locals digging and raking and clearing the remains of the porcelain factory, which the RAF had mistaken for an armaments plant, but the Americans had given everyone the day off. In the absence of the clatter and bang of reconstruction, Martin could hear new, more ordinary sounds: a baby crying, a door opening and shutting, a gutter rattling in the wind, and a whole host of some hearty, fearless species of bird chattering wildly from the branches of a bare tree.

  Martin followed the Grabareks without asking where
they were headed. He would do whatever they did—it was an unspoken understanding between them. Wolfgang was the leader. He was younger than Anselm, but stronger and bolder. And they accepted Martin only because he didn’t try to manage their activities or corral them into games the way Fritz did. When they were all together, Martin was the bridge.

  They made their way past the church, the frozen millpond, and the bombed factory, through the town square with its billboards plastered with American posters. these shameful acts: your guilt was emblazoned over photographs of dead bodies, naked, and emaciated, piled like sticks. In one, a boy stared at the camera, squatting behind a barbed-wire fence, his skeleton visible through his skin.

  The boys passed these without looking. They had already seen them. When they were first posted, Marianne had marched them all down from the castle to look. “This is what Hitler and his people did,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you his death was a tragedy.” Katarina had begun to cry, and the people walking through the square had glared in their direction. You were not supposed to stop and stare, Martin understood. To stop and stare was to admit guilt: your guilt, the sign read. You were only “You” if you were the one reading.

  But Martin wanted to look at the horrific pictures. Propaganda, the people of Ehrenheim said, but Martin believed Marianne. And in the images he saw the hugeness and menace of the world beyond what he knew—a threat and horror even larger than any he had experienced. The boy in the photograph stared at him like a face glimpsed through a sheet of pond ice. It was as if he lay beneath Martin’s own feet.

  Today he kept the brisk pace of Anselm and Wolfgang, though. They continued to the far side of town, down the narrow pedestrian passageways, past the row of fine villas once owned by Ehrenheim’s most prominent Nazis, now appropriated to house DPs. And finally back out in the countryside. The sky stretched above them, as cold and gray as the underbelly of a dead fish. They followed the road through the frozen meadows in the shadows of craggy, snow-covered mountain peaks. They were heading west toward the French zone. The border was not far. And finally Martin understood: they were going to the French camp for German prisoners of war.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?” a French guard asked when they arrived at the gate. The camp was housed in some sort of military barracks—a collection of low buildings surrounded by a chain-link fence. Wolfgang answered in German—“We are here to see our father.” Martin looked over at him, confused. no visitors except family members, the sign read.

  “The greeting area is over there.” The guard waved them through and pointed toward a stretch of fence to the right. A number of people, mostly women and children, waited there with gifts—cigarettes, potatoes, lard, and slices of salt pork, wrapped in bundles small enough to press between the links.

  Prisoners were lined up on the other side of the fence.

  “Who are you looking for?” asked a thin, long-necked prisoner in a tattered Gestapo uniform with all the insignias cut off.

  “Franz Muller,” Wolfgang answered with a glance at Anselm. Martin was filled with a combination of nerves and embarrassment. They had not seen Herr Muller since the Russian incident.

  The long-necked man called the name over his shoulder, where it was picked up by another and another until it disappeared into the barracks. Then they waited, claiming a small section of fence for themselves. On the other side, small groups of prisoners walked past with their hands buried deep in their pockets, their breath escaping in clouds. Others leaned against the building despite the cold, caps pulled low over their eyes. And then, almost miraculously, Franz Muller appeared and walked toward them, his broad, impassive face transformed by surprise. It was awkward to see him here, among this sorry lot. Behind the barbed wire, he was more intimidating now than he had been while chopping trees in their woods. Martin glanced over at Anselm and Wolfgang. But to his surprise, their eyes had already moved on, as if they were looking for someone else.

  “Here!” Martin was the first to speak. “We brought this for you.” With frozen fingers he pushed his half candy bar and tin of cheese through the fence.

  “For me?” Herr Muller asked, studying their faces.

  Martin nodded.

  “Do your mothers know you came here?”

  Martin shook his head.

  “Ah.” Muller seemed to consider this. “It was kind of you.”

  The boys stamped their feet against the cold.

  “Have you met anyone named Brandt?” Wolfgang asked, and his words were slightly breathless, as if he had pushed them out.

  Muller frowned. “I don’t think so. From where?”

  The Grabareks exchanged another glance. “The Warthegau.” Anselm answered this time.

  Muller shook his head.

  “Your father?” Martin asked, unable to stop himself.

  “No,” Wolfgang said, his tone harsh. “Our father is dead.”

  Who, then? Martin wanted to ask, but didn’t.

  Muller regarded them in silence. “Well, thank you,” he said finally. “Take care of yourselves. And your mothers. And don’t come back here.”

  On Christmas Day, the Catholic Church of Ehrenheim offered an open mass, and all the inhabitants of Burg Lingenfels traipsed down the hill through the cold. Never mind that aside from Martin’s mother, they were all Protestant.

  “Catholic, Protestant, Jewish—such nonsense,” Marianne responded when Elisabeth pointed this out. “These divisions have never caused anything but grief.” Apparently her own newfound religion existed outside of these lines.

  Tonight was different, though. The vespers service was open to all and would feature the Ehrenheim orchestra, performing together for the first time in years. “They are quite good,” Marianne conceded. “The conductor studied in Berlin as a young man. No one thought he would come back.”

  Even his mother, who never left the castle in the cold, bundled herself into an old fur coat of Marianne’s and walked down the moonlit hill with the rest of them. They made their way through the streets toward the church’s famous crooked steeple—a tall shingled spire built hundreds of years ago to point straight to the heavens but that, through some fault in its construction, instead curved slightly south. Like the German soul, Marianne joked. Aiming for heaven but stooped toward hell.

  The whole town seemed to have turned out for the gathering, shuffling up the steps of the unheated church in their warmest coats and blankets, nodding greetings. Mostly women and children and the elderly, but some men now too, as Germany’s soldiers gradually came limping home from hospitals, enemy combatant camps, and wherever else.

  Inside, the air was solemn but festive. People carried lanterns and tallow candles—a precious commodity these days—and the shadows of their flames leapt and danced across the rafters. They reminded Martin of an illustration from Frau Vortmuller’s Bible—the spirits of the damned burning in hell. Beneath the shadows, the faded frescoes on the walls were illuminated in bursts: the trailing robe of St. Paul; Jesus’s bare and bloodied legs; the stern, pinched face of an angel that Martin would have been terrified to encounter. There was a jagged hole in place of the rose window—shattered in the bombing—and outside the sky was dark and dotted with clear winter stars.

  Then the service began—a wholly foreign experience for Martin, who had attended church only a few times in his life, and never a Catholic mass. It was full of chanting in Latin, the smell of incense, and unintelligible prayers. The stone floor and walls magnified the cold, and Martin’s breath froze as soon as he opened his mouth. Slowly, the priest climbed to his pulpit and spoke. He was old and his voice echoed confusingly. “For our celebration of the Feast of Christ the King. That it would be a time of reflection on our crucified Lord, and an opportunity for us to imitate his attitude of humility . . .”

  People coughed and shifted in their seats. Martin glanced at his own family, if they could be called that. Marianne sat stick straight, brow furrowed, closely attending to each word. Beside her, Elisabeth cast h
er gaze around the congregation, taking stock of who was present. Katarina leaned against her sister for warmth. And Fritz, bending his head in apparent concentration, scratched a design into the rough fabric of his pants. The Grabarek boys, shoulder to shoulder, dark heads nearly identical, were an island unto themselves, passing something between them—a note? A pebble? It was impossible to tell. And Ania was as unreadable as always, her eyes on the minister but seeing something else inside her own head. Martin’s mother sat on his other side. Of them all, she seemed the most absorbed, gazing up into the bit of sky framed by the broken window, lips parted, eyes soft, like a woman coming face-to-face with a benevolent God. Martin reached over and took her hand. She startled, as if seeing him for the first time. But the smile that followed was like a flash of sun across a darkened field. And for once Martin felt sustained rather than terrified by his own capacity to bring her joy.

  When the priest finished, a palpable sense of relief swept through the crowd. His words had brought no one peace—penance, forgiveness, justice, sin—these were still papery abstractions that could not begin to address the everyday realities of their lives.

  Then the orchestra musicians took their places on chairs brought from their own homes and began tuning their instruments. Where had they managed to hide these over the past years? It seemed a miracle that the war would have spared anything so delicate as a harp or violin. When all were ready, the church fell silent. The bundled forms onstage sat poised with bows raised, breaths held. And the conductor, a small man wearing a battered felt hat, raised his baton. The stillness intensified, and the silence had a particular starving quality. This was why the people were here. To hear music. It had been so long.

  At once, the conductor jerked his baton upward and the orchestra gathered itself and dove in. The music, Beethoven’s Ninth, opened with a blast: violins, trumpet, an explosion loud enough to knock thought and worry from the mind. It was reminiscent of war—thundering footsteps, the rumble of tanks, the screech and crack of airplanes overhead, an exploding bomb. The audience sat at attention, gripping their seats. Something small and gentle might have lost them. Something tender and they might have begun to cry and never stopped. They were there, but they were not strong. They would do anything to protect themselves from sadness.