On his way down to the breakfast, Martin pauses on the landing. The Sophie Scholl scholar and Russian philosopher are listening to Claire, who is waving her arms, holding forth. And Mary, who has beaten him downstairs, sits with her mother, talking to Fritz. There is warmth between them, and Ania looks happy, or as happy as she can with her tragic face.

Marianne presides from the wheelchair she has been relegated to while her granddaughter scrambles around on her lap. She looks smaller than usual, and tired: some spark of righteousness has been extinguished. But all the same, from her seat at the center she emanates Marianne-ness.

The great hall itself is just as Martin remembers it from childhood—cavernous, dim, and chilly. And standing here, he feels the chafing layers of time, the inscrutable ghost of himself as a little boy colliding with the shifty construct of himself as a middle-aged man. And all around, he feels the press of other, lesser-known ghosts: Marianne as a young woman; his mother as a bride-to-be; the Nazi occupiers with their shiny leather boots; the harvest party’s ill-fated Jewish guests; the frightened townspeople hiding from the Americans; centuries of gouty princes and counts and long-suffering servants. They all seem to be climbing these steps. And their movements have an urgent restlessness.

Through this, Martin hears Marianne’s voice. “Here he is,” she is saying. “My favorite guest.”

Martin looks around.

“Martin Fledermann,” she says as if they are the only two people in the hall.

He feels the force of her love for him and it makes him proud. Smiling back, he approaches, holding out his hand.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

BURG LINGENFELS, 1991

Clotilde Muller likes to walk her dogs on the grounds of the Falkenberg Institute. Not only because it is beautiful but because it makes her feel close to her father now that he is dead. She can imagine him hacking away at the thicket of trees in the once unruly woods, now a carefully maintained park crisscrossed by well-signed gravel paths. She had been coming here for years before she learned of the time her father had spent at the castle chopping wood.

To be fair, Clotilde did not ask him many questions. She is a woman of few words, and Franz Muller was a man of even fewer. All a question gets is an answer, and in her experience you don’t always want those. As a gardener, she knows that if you turn over a rock, you will find worms and potato bugs. Sometimes even a snake. And as a German, she knows that if you start poking through a shoebox of photographs, you’ll find Nazi uniforms and swastikas and children with their arms raised in Heil Hitler salutes.

And then what? Does that help you love the cranky old father whose laundry and dentures and toilet bowl you have to clean? To treasure the grandparent whose dementia already tests your patience? Clotilde knows she was lucky in this regard. Her father was kind and mild-mannered and easy to get along with until the end. And his silence was a gift.