“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.