“When did she tell you this?” she asked.

“Just this week. As if I would be happy!” Marianne stared down into her coffee and then up at Ania. “She never told you either?”

Ania shook her head.

“All this time she was lying!”

Ania hesitated. “She didn’t lie,” she said. “She just didn’t share the truth with us.”

Marianne frowned. “She concealed what she was doing. What’s the difference?”

Ania busied herself with drying dishes, feigning nonchalance. “It could be like a photograph with the faces blacked out. What you see is true; it’s just incomplete.”

“But who are people without their faces?” Marianne was impatient. “How could you know a man if you can’t see his face?”

When Rainer finally came, it was mid-July, and the weather was hot. Ania sat in the shade under the chestnut tree shelling peas. Sweat dripped down her sides and made her thighs sticky. Heat rose from the limestone of the barnyard in slippery, distorting waves.

He was halfway across before Ania saw him. She had imagined this moment so many times that the reality was strangely flat. A single burst of adrenaline shot through her, followed by something like relief.

It was clear that he was unwell. He was thinner than ever and walked with a limp. His face was waxy, and there were dark hollows beneath his eyes. His breathing was labored.

At about four meters away, he stopped.

Staring at him, Ania saw a stranger. Not someone she loved, not someone she hated. Just someone she no longer knew. It was frightening but uncomplicated.

For a long time neither of them spoke. There was the sound of his breathing, the buzz of bees in the branches, and the mild rustle of leaves.

Rainer stared at her round belly. She placed a hand over it.

“What do you want?” she asked.

Removing a dirty cloth from the pocket of his even dirtier jacket—much too hot for this weather—Rainer wiped his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut. He looked like a man who needed to lie down. He looked like a man who was dying.

And suddenly, after all the time she had spent dreading this moment, Ania knew what to do.

He opened his eyes again and regarded her. “Am I speaking to Ania Kellerman or Ania Brandt?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

MOMSEN, JULY 1950

Before Benita awoke, Marianne rose and took the train to Momsen to see Franz Muller.

No matter how many times she made this trip, the landscape remained foreign. The craggy mountains and flat green valleys dotted with cows, the patches of woods and hay huts were like something out of a fairy tale—complex, shadowy, and intricate. So unlike the wide open farmland of Weisslau. How she still missed it. Nothing could hide on the flat plain of northern Silesia—armies, visitors, weather, all were apparent from kilometers away. And Marianne felt at home with this transparence.

For a brief stretch, the Isar River ran alongside the tracks. It came down from the high mountains, fast and pale, full of some mineral that turned it a livid, almost unnatural whitish green. To Marianne, it reeked of menace. The ashes of Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Frick—those architects of Nazi horror—had been scattered along its banks. By whose decision? The random assignment of some government automaton? Or by their own wishes? Was there some symbiotic energy these men had felt? On the far side rose the jagged mountain peaks.