“Did you ever tell your children about Rainer?” Ania asks, finally diving in.

Marianne looks at her friend. “I never told anyone.”

For a moment they are silent. The sound of the party in the next room floats through the French doors.

Ania shakes her head, looks across the room at the fireplace—the one, it strikes Marianne for the first time, that she sat in front of with Connie after the countess’s last party. A memory rises of that long-ago kiss. She can still feel its surprise and thrill.

“I’m sorry,” Ania says. “I’m sorry I was not honest with you from the beginning.”

“Ach.” Marianne waves this away. She did not come here for apologies. “We are beyond that.” She leans forward. “But now I want to know everything I did not want to know then.”

“About Rainer?” Ania asks doubtfully.

“About you,” Marianne says. “Ania Brandt. Not Ania Kellerman or Ania Grabarek.”

Ania sighs. From the other room, Marianne can hear Claire’s loud, bubbling laugh. The fire sparks and pops.

“All right,” Ania says, taking a deep breath.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

BURG LINGENFELS, OCTOBER 1991

Ania does not believe in heaven. She does not even believe in God.

It is a funny thing, though. When she looks back over the snaking trail of her life, the rises and falls and hairpin turns, the muddy sloughs where the path becomes almost invisible, she feels an urgent need to judge. To weigh the good against the evil in a manner that is, at heart, religious—to examine the small and large choices she has made that amount to her complete mark on the world.

There are actions that tilt her toward heaven: her work at the DP camp, her patience as Carsten’s wife, her various small acts of kindness on the journey west. Then there are those that tilt her toward hell: the lies she has told and perpetuated, the sacrifices she asked of her boys, the fact that she was a Nazi, not only in name but in lived reality. And in these times of moral calculation—usually at two or three A.M., lying in bed—it is those babies that tilt her into the abyss. The fact that she stood there and let them go.

There is nothing she can do about this now. Your actions are your actions. At the end of your life you have done what you have done. This is what she tried to impress upon her own children. Although probably she did not impress this on them at all. After all, actions speak louder than words.

Her boys, Anselm and Wolfgang, always knew she was pragmatic rather than good. And now that Mary has been to Burg Lingenfels, she knows this as well.

You let Frau von Lingenfels believe you were someone else? Would you ever have confessed if your husband had not shown up? Mary had been worse than angry. She had been horrified. On her last visit to the U.S., Ania had confessed all to her daughter, who had only known pieces: That Ania was married before Carsten, yes. That this first husband was still alive when she remarried, no. That she had run a year-on-the-land program, yes. That she had let her best friends believe she was someone else, no. Her mother, about whom she had, as a schoolgirl, once written an essay entitled “My Hero,” was not only a Nazi but a liar! And worse than a liar, a fake! She railed at her and Ania bore it. Mary was right. She did not try to defend herself. There was no defense. Should I leave tomorrow? she had asked.