CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

BURG LINGENFELS, OCTOBER 1950

Without Benita and the children, the flat in Tollingen was too quiet. No more Fritz scuffing the baseboards in the hallway, no more piles of shoes by the door, no more Martin lying on the sunlit parquet with his books. And no more scent of Benita’s coffee in the morning or eau de gardenia perfume wafting from her bedroom at night. No more strains of sentimental music drifting down the hall from her precious Victrola, though the player was still there. Theoretically, Marianne could have listened to a record. She herself had given the Victrola to Benita, but it wasn’t in Marianne’s nature to select an album, place it on the turntable, and play. Some innate self-consciousness, or even an inexplicable anxiety, held her back. One evening, she went to the shelf and hesitantly flipped through the collection of records—almost all were unfamiliar names and faces—until she landed on Benny Goodman. She knew who he was. But when the needle touched the record, the notes that blared forth were startlingly loud and by the time she had managed to adjust the volume, she was too jarred, too caught, really—a person mucking about in someone else’s business—to want to hear more.

Now there was only the light tap of her own house shoes as she walked through the flat. For dinner she ate a roll spread with jam or butter and a thin slice of ham. Instead of using the wide kitchen table, she ate at her desk—a grand, polished Biedermeier she had inherited from one of the von Lingenfels cousins. She had moved it into the middle of the parlor, where she could look out the bay windows to the town square below and write letters to the children—one each night.

The desk was her new home. And from behind it she threw herself into a fresh project: documenting a history of the German Resistance. Every day she drafted plans, wrote lists, and took notes. She wrote to old friends and acquaintances, asking for journals and photographs, copies of their letters. She organized Albrecht’s papers but was too restless, too unsettled, to actually read them.

Benita had returned to the town where she was born, where Connie had “discovered” her. Beyond this, Marianne knew nothing about the place. She had written to Benita asking how she was and when she would be back, but received no response. Marianne’s last image of the girl, sitting on the lap of some loutish Biergarten youth, was a horrible one.

Alone in the flat with no one to distract her, Marianne was left to deliberate over Benita’s departure. She had overstepped. She should not have gone to see Franz Muller. She had allowed her own sense of betrayal to influence her actions. And when she had tried to apologize, something in her apology fell short.

In their letters from school, the children asked why Benita had moved. Only Martin was silent on the subject. So far, he had written two dutiful little letters detailing his life: early-morning chapel and cold showers and endless math. Obviously, he wrote to his mother, too. What did she tell him of her decision to return to Frühlinghausen, a place she had only ever spoken of with scorn? Marianne was afraid to ask.