On this cold December day, Frühlinghausen was the opposite of this. From the train station, Lotte and Gertrud took them directly to the cemetery. They wanted to show Martin his mother’s plot before the service and the burial, scheduled for the following day. Probably because he was expected to pay for it was Marianne’s uncharitable thought.

Should she be buried here in Frühlinghausen? Lotte had asked Marianne during their one telephone conversation. Where else? Not beside Connie, whose remains had been disposed of as a traitor’s—buried in some pit or burned in a Nazi crematory. No one had ever been told exactly where. Marianne felt revulsion toward the whole endeavor of burial. Bodies, so precious in life, then suddenly in death so awkward and full of horror. She would be cremated and have her ashes scattered at the castle. None of this delicate balance between earthly preservation and rot.

The sisters had hired a local farmer with a wagon to take them to the graveyard, and they rode in silence. Marianne squeezed Martin’s hand as the horse jerked over the cobblestones.

The cemetery was a humble place at the very edge of town, enclosed by an ugly new cement wall. At one end, it was bordered by fields, plowed and turned, nothing but dirt clods at this time of year, stretching toward the horizon. At the other sat the last of a row of grubby brick cottages. Two boys kicked a soccer ball in the backyard, bouncing it off the cemetery wall. Otherwise there was only the sound of wind blowing across the fields and the caw of a raven from above. The wagon driver grinned and nodded as they climbed down as if they were off to a party.

The graves were elevated in the traditional way—small, coffin-sized plots bordered by stone, planted with flowers, all scraggly and dead. Lotte led them to the spot already dug out for Benita, beside her mother: ILSE GRUBER, 1880–1940. Marianne blinked tears back fiercely. This was not the time and place to cry. She was aware of Martin, standing still as a statue beside her.

“It’s a nice place,” Lotte asserted crisply. “People take care of the graves. Gertrud and I come once a week to visit Mother and our brothers, so we will be here often. This is a yellow rosebush.” She pointed at a trimmed stalk, tied up for winter. “And here we plant pansies and lavender; the ivy is good too because it covers so much . . .” The subject of the flowers made her talkative, but Marianne only half listened. This was where Benita would lie, returned to the roots she had tried so hard to leave behind, and a part of her life that Marianne had never known. But what had she known? Very little, maybe. Not of Benita and her love affair, or of Ania, who was not Ania, and with whom she had not spoken since that day in the castle. Standing at the grave, Marianne was suddenly aware of her own blindness; her dearest friends were like dreams she had woken from. How had she missed so much?