We live in the middle of nowhere, Albrecht! Marianne had complained when he suggested packing up their prized possessions. It’s not as if any army will bother with Weisslau.

But Albrecht was right. The Russians had marched right through the town, determined to avenge their losses, taking everything from bicycles to grandfather clocks to Grossmutter von Lingenfels’s maudlin needlepoints. Collateral for the toll the war had exacted—as if loot could bring back their dead.

You finally have your way with it all, Fräulein Communist, Marianne imagined Albrecht saying at the sight of the shredded Communion dress. It was their little joke. She had liked to proclaim fancy clothing and fine table settings bourgeois banalities—distractions from the real fineries of human life: music and poetry, theater and art . . .

Which was itself a foolish, bourgeois statement. The war had made this clear. Music, poetry, and art were luxuries, too. Everything was a distraction from the basic struggle between life and death.

What Albrecht had not understood, though, when he packed their trunk, was that the culture that had given birth to these precious objects and endowed them with value would be so thoroughly self-immolated that its assignations were no longer valid. What was the point of a Chinese silk pinafore sewn by Weisslau’s finest tailor when you didn’t even have a pair of shoes? Or a Meissen china tea service, transported without so much as one chipped plate, when there was no tea, no bread, no table to eat at? He had anticipated disaster but not lived to see its depths.

“Mama!” The washroom door flew open and Katarina appeared. “The American leader is here.”

“The American leader” was how the children referred to Lieutenant Peterman, the man in charge of rebuilding Ehrenheim and its surrounding area. He had been kind to the von Lingenfelses since their arrival, and he treated Marianne with a certain nervous respect based on his belief that she was descended from royalty (she was not) and that her husband had been a friend of the American general Patton (a vast exaggeration, as Albrecht had never even met the man). Marianne had not planted either of these ideas, but she didn’t go out of her way to correct them. Peterman was a useful ally. She had enlisted his help in her search for fellow widows of resisters, the women and children she had sworn so passionately to protect at the countess’s long-ago harvest party. The commander of wives and children, Connie had called her. The words had seemed demeaning to her at the time—an exclusion from the real business of conspiring, a reminder that she was, in the end, a woman, and therefore relegated to the work of picking up the pieces. But in the years since, she had come to understand his words differently: she was the last man standing, the decoy left holding the key.

Though what she was supposed to do with it remained opaque.

At the very least she could honor her promise and do her best to look out for the wives of the men present in the room that night.