Above Ania, the moon is nearly full and the stars are as bright as always. Cassiopeia, Orion, Aranea . . . The names of the constellations return to her in her father’s voice. They are all in their places, a buffer against the chaos and indifference of the universe.

It is what is down here below them in the mud that is all wrong.

When Ania arrives at the lager, it is nearly three A.M. But she does not crawl into her bed. Propelled by a barely tamped-down horror, she packs her paring knife, a blood sausage, and a loaf of bread. Nothing sentimental. Only what they will need to survive. When she is done, she wakes her boys and leads them out into the dawn. Her urgency is so compelling they demand no explanation.

And so the night she delivers Heiner and Gerald to their fate becomes the morning Ania and her sons join the flow of displaced persons, severed from themselves.

CHAPTER THIRTY

FRÜHLINGHAUSEN, DECEMBER 1950

The Frühlinghausen Benita returned to was shockingly unchanged. On the surface there were amendments, of course. The mental hospital was gone, for example—the building had burned to the ground, and the patients, Benita thought with her new postwar black humor, had probably all been euthanized. There was no more foul-smelling fertilizer pit beside the cannery and no more dingy Krensig Strasse. The ancient, moldering thatched roofs had proved incendiary when a nearby stretch of train track was bombed. This was no surprise to Benita. For the last half century those cottages had been waiting for an opportunity to self-destruct.

But Frühlinghausen was still home to the same stupid people Benita had always wanted to escape. The once promising young Nazi mayor had turned into a beefy, middle-aged pig farmer with green-tinged glasses that made him look sinister. Fearless Fräulein Brebel, onetime leader of Benita’s BDM group, was now a middle-school teacher—so much for denazification! And the boys who had courted Benita were all either dead or married; running their family’s farms or working at the cannery. The stolid red-brick Catholic church Frau Gruber had dragged her children to every Sunday morning was once again well attended, its shattered stained-glass window replaced with an ugly pane of wavy yellow glass.

Of the Gruber family, only Gertrud and Lotte remained. Frau Gruber had died before the war began in earnest, and Benita’s brothers lay beside her in the town graveyard: Georg, the youngest, shot God knows where in Russia, and Hans, dead of an infection caught in a military hospital. Sophie, the second-oldest Gruber daughter, had married an American soldier and moved to a place called Kansas. This was both marvelous and galling to Benita. How could plain, quiet Sophie, who had always been so content in Frühlinghausen, have been the one to escape?

Lotte and Gertrud lived side by side in a row of new stucco cottages with matching lace curtains over the windows and tiny gardens full of practical plantings: potatoes, cabbage, carrots, and parsley. It made Benita want to cry.