The Women in the Castle

by Jessica Shattuck

  “I don’t mean that,” Franz interjected, his voice harsh.

  Benita sat back.

  “You are the wife of a resister. You deserve a man who has done better with his life.”

  Benita stiffened. This was not a term Benita had ever used: resister, referring to Connie and Albrecht and the others. It was Marianne’s word. “Why do you say this?” she asked, reaching across the table for his hand. “Did Marianne say something to you? Did she come here—”

  Franz looked away, and his voice was tired. “It’s the truth.”

  “According to who?” Benita demanded. “According to Marianne? She came here, didn’t she? She talked to you! Look me in the eye and tell me she didn’t!”

  “This is not about Marianne,” Franz said. “It doesn’t matter what she did.”

  “How dare she! She came here and talked to you behind my back! As if I were a child—smaller than a child, a toy—something to move around as she likes! She never liked you.” She lowered her voice to something like a hiss. “She blames you for that dead Russian in the woods, and you know what? I would kill him again if I had to! Just to show her it was me who did it—”

  “Benita—”

  “It’s true, Franz. You know that. She doesn’t understand—she sees everything through her principles and ideas. And it doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter what she thinks! What about you? Aren’t you happy when we are together? Don’t I make you happy?” She paused. “Connie is dead!” It came out harshly, catching in her throat. She was aware that her voice had risen but didn’t care. Let all the sheeplike patrons of Bemmelman’s be shocked. Let them whisper and avert their eyes. “But we are alive! And we have suffered, too! Don’t we deserve this happiness?”

  “Deserve?” Franz asked quietly, his eyes remote. “I don’t deserve anything, Benita.”

  “You had to leave your family! You had to march into the east and nearly starve and freeze, and God knows what else—and now it’s over! The war is over! And finally we can begin something new!”

  “Stop!” Franz commanded. “You can’t say this! Your husband, Marianne’s husband, they died for something they knew was right—and the rest of us followed along, did as we were told, and looked away. I can’t erase that—I can’t just begin again—”

  “Why not? Is there any other choice?”

  Dishes clinked and voices murmured around them. The cash register chimed. Someone laughed.

  “There are always choices.” Franz looked at her. “I can choose to let you go. You can begin a new life.”

  “But I don’t want to begin a new life.” Benita was crying now. “Not without you. I don’t care what you did! It doesn’t matter! I would love you if you were Hitler himself!”

  Franz stared at her and his face was a stranger’s.

  “You have no shame, Benita,” he said finally. “And for me, shame is the only right way to live.”

  Benita sat back.

  This was the end. Her own stupid words repeated in her head. In the silence, Benita could see the future: no pleasant homey flat with flowers in the window and a place for Clotilde and Martin to study; no wide, soft bed to sleep in; no lovemaking; no new, ordinary, from-scratch life, full of simple things like cooking and marketing and Sunday walks along the river. No mornings of sunshine and coffee and growing old together.

  For Franz there was only the motion of these things. His soul was already in hell. It was not Marianne who had come between them, but the past.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Momsen, August 1950

  When Ania’s water broke, the convent hospital in Ehrenheim was still under construction. So Carsten drove her to the American military hospital outside of Momsen. It was nearly empty. And as soon as he handed her off to the nurses, he turned around and drove home.

  Then Ania could moan and clutch her belly and stop gritting her teeth. The nurses were kind, albeit alarmed. They were young American girls trained to bind wounds and dress amputations, not deliver babies. The doctor arrived and proclaimed it too late to induce the “twilight sleep,” and the nurses squeezed her hands and smoothed her forehead in terrified support. But Ania was not concerned. She had already delivered two babies without such interventions—she knew only that she wanted to return home as quickly as possible. She had secrets to keep.

  Improbably, she had managed to keep Rainer hidden. Like some awful Rapunzel, he was locked in the castle, only he was free to come and go as he pleased. From the moment Ania saw him, she had understood what he wanted. It was not exposure or revenge. For all his anger and despair, he did not wish to destroy the life she had created for their sons. He wanted to see his boys. He was deathly ill and, like a shamed and beaten animal, he was looking for a safe place to die.

  Burg Lingenfels was closed down. Last fall, Carsten had boarded the windows as she and Marianne had covered what little furniture remained. They had planned to reopen it this summer, but then had not. Marianne was busy with her new project—sorting Albrecht’s papers—and traveling a great deal. And last year, the local teenagers had used the empty castle to get into trouble. It was better to keep it shut up. There were only mice and swallows nesting in the stone walls, water rats and frogs burrowing into the chinks of the moat. No one went there except for Wolfgang, whom Carsten had tasked with checking on it from time to time.

  Ania had been forced to involve her boys in their father’s return. Ever dutiful, but simmering with resentment, they had half walked, half carried Rainer up the hill from the Kellerman farm. Wolfgang had arranged a straw pallet in the castle’s kitchen, along with a supply of water to drink. Anselm brought him a plate of food every night—he barely ate. Presumably, while she lay here giving birth to this new baby, her boys tended to their father—locked in some weird reversal with the man who had never cared for them.

  Ania’s contractions sped forward until the pain was as constant as her heartbeat—rhythmic and all consuming, it obliterated worry. She was almost grateful. Rainer would be discovered or not. Her boys would tend to him or leave him for the ravens. Their life would explode or continue on the trajectory she had wrestled it onto. There was nothing she could do.

  The baby came fast. In thirty violent minutes Ania pushed her out. Even four weeks early, she was as plump and smooth faced as an Eskimo. With her round dark eyes, she regarded the world impassively and then fell asleep. This was, apparently, what a child of Carsten’s was like. Or maybe this was simply a baby of peacetime: satisfied, round cheeked, and enigmatic. Swaddled in U.S. Army–issue blankets, she seemed to belong to some promising international future rather than a defeated Germany.

  Ania handed her to the nurse and attempted to rise to her feet.

  “No, no,” the nurse protested in alarm. “Rest now, because you’ll need your strength when you go home.” What did she know?

  The nurses plied her with glasses of lukewarm water and sleeping pills. Carsten would not return for her until morning anyway.

  Ania did not want to see the baby. So she took the pills they offered and drifted in and out of a thick, dreamless sleep, waking now and then to stare through the window at the courtyard, the bleached white paths across the grass like a crisscross of bones.

  The next morning, she woke to find Benita sitting at the foot of her bed.

  It took Ania a moment to remember where she was.

  “Benita,” she managed to say. “Did you come to see me?” The idea seemed incredible. She had not seen Benita for so long—possibly not since the wedding.

  “Why else? I went to the farm yesterday and heard the news.”

  Benita did not look well. Ania could see this. She did not have her usual rosy cheeks and neatly arranged hair. She was wearing a shabby brown cardigan. And there were dark circles under her eyes.

  “Is everything all right?” Ania began, but a nurse appeared, holding the baby. Her baby. The idea was still unaccustomed. Ania regarded the swaddled creature and felt nothing.

  “There she is!”
Benita exclaimed. For a moment, enthusiasm restored her beauty. She was the sort of woman who lit up in the presence of an infant. Her love of Martin had always made Ania feel sorry for her own sons, both loved so much less lavishly.

  “Can I hold her? Please?” Benita asked.

  Ania nodded.

  The nurse laid the baby in Benita’s arms.

  “You’re so lucky,” she said, her eyes filling. “She’s beautiful! And you can enjoy her. No wars and bombs to protect her from, and all this . . .” She hesitated, then landed on the word: “Safety. Do you know, when Martin was a baby I was so worried he would be crushed in a bombing that I turned our icebox into a crib. I thought it would save him if the ceiling caved in—as if an icebox would have protected him!” She shifted the baby, who made a faint purring sound. “I was such a child.”

  “We were all children.” Ania sighed.

  “I didn’t intend to disrespect Connie, you know,” Benita announced with sudden ferocity. “If I had married Herr Muller, it would not have harmed Connie’s memory.”

  “If you had—?” Ania repeated.

  “We were engaged.” Benita sat back. “I thought Marianne told you.” She looked at the ceiling, and tears slid down her cheeks. How seamlessly she cried, as if she went through life filled to the brim.

  Ania shook her head.

  “Marianne didn’t approve.”

  It required no more explanation. Benita’s will had never been a match for Marianne’s.

  “So you have decided not to . . . ?” Ania ventured.

  “Decided!” Benita snapped and stood up, still holding the baby. She went to the window and then turned back. “I decided nothing. But Marianne told Franz she was against it and he—it doesn’t matter. I was stupid to imagine I could be happy again.

  “It’s not why I came anyway.” She adjusted the baby and wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “I came to say good-bye. After we take the boys to Salem, I am going home to Frühlinghausen.”

  “To Frühlinghausen?” Ania repeated. This surprised her as much as anything else Benita had said. “To take care of your sister?”

  Benita tried to smile at the baby in her arms. “It’s where I belong.”

  Ania stared. Benita had always hated the town where she was born. “What does Marianne say about this?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  Ania regarded this woman she knew so well and yet not at all. Their lives had become entwined during such a strange time—without context, severed from the past, before the future. A time dictated by basic needs. What did they really know of each other?

  “Are you sure?” she asked, the words sounding obtuse even to her own ears.

  The baby’s little hand clasped and unclasped against Benita’s neck.

  “Nothing is sure, is it?” Benita said, almost dreamily. “That’s what Marianne doesn’t understand.”

  The baby began to cry.

  “Here.” Benita bent and placed her in Ania’s arms.

  The nurse appeared in the doorway. “Do you want to feed her, Frau Kellerman? Or should I give her the bottle?”

  “Feed her,” Benita said to Ania with sudden surprising authority. “Take care of her. That is the most important thing.”

  “Auf Wiedersehen.” She leaned down to kiss Ania’s cheek.

  “Mach’s gut,” Ania said, and caught her hand. Make it good—an old expression her own mother had used.

  “You too.” Benita squeezed her fingers and brought them to her lips. And then she was gone.

  “Does the baby have a name yet?” the young nurse asked after Benita left.

  Ania began to shake her head no. Then a name occurred to her, first as a joke—almost a joke, and then real—a name like a talisman, the name of the strongest, stubbornest, most difficult, and wisest woman she knew.

  “Marianne,” she said. “Her name is Marianne.”

  The nurse smiled. “Marianne,” she repeated in her American accent. “Pretty!” She looked down at the baby, who had latched onto Ania’s breast hungrily. “Be a good girl, little Marianne.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Salem Castle, September 1950

  The day the boys were scheduled to start Salem Castle Boarding School was clear and crisp and sharp edged in a way that was unusual for the region, which was known for its soft, moist air and bouts of low pressure blamed for headaches and illnesses and despair. A brisk autumn wind blew off the Alps, scattering sunlight across Lake Constance so it looked like an audience of people clapping hands.

  Marianne had hired a driver for the trip. She sat in the front, straight backed, long necked, craning around every so often to remind the children of a piece of history or point out a landmark. And sitting in the back, sandwiched between Martin and the door, Benita hated her.

  You think you know so much! she wanted to say. But you know nothing! You have never even been in love! It was something Benita understood after all these years of living together: Marianne, who had once seemed so intimidatingly wise, was in fact ignorant. She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history.

  Since that awful day when Benita returned to their flat from Bemmelman’s, Marianne had, several times, attempted something like an apology. You know, if you would like, I could go back to Herr Muller and tell him I had no right to speak as I did, Marianne had said one evening when Benita staggered blearily out of her room at suppertime, emerging for the first time that day. Benita only stared. Did the woman really believe it was so simple? That a few well-chosen words could make everything right? Or was this simply her shrewd play for forgiveness—a way to exonerate herself without ceding the territory she had won?

  No, Benita had replied. Unlike Marianne, she understood that what had happened was not caused, but exposed, by the other woman’s interference. There was a tight black cave where Franz Muller’s heart, or something more than his heart—his personhood—should be. He had lost it in the war, and there was no getting it back. There was only a careful sidestep around the place it had once lived—a dance of ignorance that she had mastered without even knowing it. And there was no going back now.

  Marianne was elated by the fact that finally all their children, Martin included, would be settled at the fine German boarding school that Albrecht and Connie and their fathers before them had attended. Salem was a school remarkably untarnished by affiliation with the Nazis—attended by the aristocracy, founded by a Jew. Marianne believed anything could be solved by a good education. Look at the vast ignorance of the Nazis! she liked to exclaim. If only they had understood music and art, if they had read Kant and Goethe and listened to Mozart instead of burning books, the world might have been spared. Benita understood but did not agree. Look at that hate-mongering huckster Goebbels—he was a doctor of philosophy!

  In the back of the car, Fritz and Katarina argued fiercely. Elisabeth rested her head against the window and feigned an air of hassled sophistication. Martin, absorbing his mother’s despair, was silent. For his sake, Benita tried to rouse herself. “Do you suppose they’ll give you a hot supper tonight?”

  “It’s never a hot supper on the first night,” Elisabeth informed them, rousing herself enough to answer. “Dried fish, smoked ham, brown bread.” She wrinkled her nose. “I hope you aren’t too hungry.”

  As they rounded the final bend in the road, Salem Castle sprang into view, its angular red roofs and white walls rising from the fields like an elegant minicity.

  Fritz let out a whoop and Elisabeth a theatrical sigh of relief.

  “Aha.” Marianne turned around and beamed. “You see, Martin? Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Martin nodded, but his face remained somber.

  “Welcome,” Marianne said grandly, turning to face forward again, “to your new home.”


  Benita placed her hand on her son’s leg and squeezed, but being a young man now, he moved it away.

  At the castle entrance, there was a throng of students, attendants, prefects, and other foreboding-looking officials giving orders. Fine pieces of luggage, instrument cases, and steamer trunks were piled in small mountains. The von Lingenfelses were immediately absorbed into the scene—Elisabeth and Katarina calling out to friends, Marianne greeting teachers; even Fritz appeared at home, scrambling toward some coveted position in the crush.

  Martin and Benita alone stood beside the car.

  “Come along, come along.” Marianne strode over, seeing their inaction. “The bellboys will unload.” Benita and Martin followed her through the sea of bright young people, a whole eager generation of Germans. They would be spared their parents’ sins, as Adenauer promised. No one even spoke of the war, the concentration camps, the millions of murders. The parents themselves looked relieved, if skeptical. They were signing their young over to an institution—one that was venerable, sanctified, and thoroughly vetted, but they understood the perils of indoctrination. Even Marianne, for all her bluster, was not immune to doubt. Benita detected strain beneath her show of cheer. All three of her children would now be out of the house. Any mother would feel the smart.

  Benita, on the other hand, felt oddly empty and cried out. She had resigned herself ages ago to this peculiar aristocratic fate: Her boy—her baby—would be swallowed whole by this austere castle, occupied for centuries by the class of people her own humble peasant family had toiled to serve. He was to be admitted, completely, into their ranks. This was progress, wasn’t it? Even if it created distance between them.

  “Here he is,” Marianne called out to an officious young prefect, pointing at Martin. “Martin Constantine Fledermann.” The full name was jarring—Benita never used it. “Ah.” The prefect introduced himself in the clipped manner of an ex–Hitler Youth. “Follow me to your quarters,” he instructed. And for a moment it seemed this would be their good-bye.