In the moment, though, he was simply buoyed along.

The walk home was magical. No one was glum. For this Christmas night they were lifted from the damning particularities of their own lives and invited to be a small piece of eternity.

PART II

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

TOLLINGEN, MAY 1950

Benita loved the flat she and Marianne had moved to in Tollingen, which was practically a city compared to Ehrenheim. It was on the town square, in a gracious turn-of-the-century building somehow left intact by the war. Now, a Danish businessman owned it, and he had polished the honey-colored floors to a sleek, postwar shine, plastered over shell wounds in the façade, and rented the apartments to the town’s most established citizens. Their flat was full of light and space and the air of aristocratic elegance that Benita had once imagined for herself.

Tollingen had come back to life since the war. After years of hunger and shortages, the storefronts once again advertised sewing needles, matches, oranges, and stylish shoes. The bakery windows displayed fresh loaves of bread. The pharmacy shelves were stocked with creams and medicines.

“Oh, but we Germans can work, can’t we?” Marianne liked to say as she observed the new plenty. “Give us a task and we’ll complete it—and waste no time looking back.” She said it with a sort of Marianne dryness, as if it were actually a fault, and one for which she condemned her countrymen. Benita did not understand this. So the Germans were hard workers! So they did not look back! Given the circumstances, why would they? And anyway, wasn’t Marianne one of them?

But, deep down, there was a part of her that appreciated Marianne’s scorn for German industry. Benita’s own dreamy laziness had always been held over her head as a moral failing, and here was Marianne, a hard worker and moral example in all ways, turning the table, imbuing her sloth and imagination with a kind of virtue.

On this particular morning, Benita, Marianne, and the children—Elisabeth, now eighteen; Katarina, sixteen; Fritz, thirteen; and Martin, who, at eleven, was still her baby—were all headed to Ania’s wedding. Ania was to marry Carsten Kellerman, a match that pleased Marianne and depressed Benita. For the rest of her life, poor Ania, thirty years Kellerman’s junior, would have to lie beside his club foot, breathing in his stench of cabbage and tooth rot. Is it what you want? she had asked Ania when she first heard the news. Of course, Ania answered. Carsten is a good man, and my boys can help with the farm. “Can help with” Benita understood to be a euphemism for “inherit.” Herr Kellerman had no children, and Ania Grabarek was a pragmatic woman. She was marrying to create a decent future for her sons.

Marianne, on the other hand, delighted in the match. Herr Kellerman had been a loyal neighbor and the caretaker of Burg Lingenfels ever since she had first arrived. And, furthermore, he had never been a Nazi, which, in Marianne’s opinion, automatically made him good. The fact that he was old and taciturn and unattractive was of no consequence to her when compared to his loyalty and sound politics.