The Women in the Castle Read online

  Buoyed along by this thought, she greeted guests, checked on the liquor behind the bar, the food on the buffet. “The countess junior!” a jolly, quick-tongued cousin of Connie’s cried, wrapping a thick arm around her shoulders. “What a party! But where is your esteemed husband? And all his high-minded friends! I haven’t seen a one of those trolls for the past hour! Are they holed up in some sort of elite gathering without their old chum Jochen?”

  “No, no.” Marianne waved him off with a kiss on his cheek. But his question was a good one. Where was Albrecht? And for that matter Connie and Hans and Gerhardt Friedlander? She had not seen them for some time. Albrecht had probably pulled them into the library to review his letter. The thought irritated her. Albrecht’s sobriety—his constant ability to focus on the world beyond what was directly beneath his nose—felt like a reproach. He was right, of course. Poor Ernst vom Rath lay in some hospital bed and thousands of Jews slept out in the cold borderland. Germany was being run by a loudmouthed rabble-rouser, bent on baiting other nations to war and making life miserable for countless innocent citizens. And here they were, drinking champagne and dancing to Scott Joplin.

  In a state of defensive irritation she burst into Albrecht’s study, where, yes, there they were—all her missing guests: Albrecht and Connie, Hans and Gerhardt, Torsten Frye and the American, Sam Beverwill, and a few others, many of whom, like Connie, worked as staff officers in the Abwehr, the military intelligence office.

  “What’s this?” she said, trying to make her voice light. “A secret, serious party? The countess will not be pleased to know you’re all skulking about in the study instead of dancing.”

  “Marianne—” Albrecht said.

  “Albrecht! Let your guests come out and enjoy the evening—”

  As she spoke, she noticed a new person in their midst: a short, dark-haired man, balding, with a kind of intensity to his homely face. The energy in the room was odd; the men’s faces remained grave and unchanged by her appearance.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the new man. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

  “Pietre Grabarek.” He stepped forward and extended his hand. A Pole. Albrecht and Connie both had many contacts in the Polish National Party.

  “Marianne von Lingenfels. The wife of your sober host here,” she said, gesturing toward Albrecht.

  “Marianne—” Albrecht interjected again. “Pietre has traveled from Munich with some alarming news. This evening—”

  “Vom Rath is dead?” A chill swept over Marianne.

  “Dead.” Albrecht nodded. “But that is only part of it.”

  Marianne felt uncomfortably at the center of this small group now, all scrutinizing her reaction. This was not a position she was used to: the ignorant one.

  “It seems Goebbels has given orders for the SA to incite rioting, destruction of Jewish property. They’re throwing stones through shop windows and looting, making a sport—”

  “Not a sport—a battle! An organized attack!” the man interrupted.

  “—of destroying people’s lives.”

  “How terrible!” Marianne said. “Did Lutze condone this? What does it mean?” Lutze was the head of the police, the SA—an unpleasant man she had recently met and disliked.

  “It seems so,” Albrecht answered.

  There was a shifting of glances and bodies.

  “It’s descent into madness—Hitler is exactly the maniac we’ve suspected!” Hans exclaimed, but no one paid attention. He was a sweet, foolish boy. There are thinkers and there are actors, Connie had once said. Hans is an actor. Albrecht had balked at this dichotomy, though—so black-and-white, so reductive and unforgiving. Action should follow thought and thought should include careful deliberation. But this was not Connie’s way. He was more of an actor himself, and his views, while informed and considered, were rarely mulled over and always absolute.

  “It means shame for Germany in the eyes of the world,” Albrecht said.

  There was a general swell of affirmation.

  “And suffering,” Connie said. “It means suffering for many, many people . . .”

  Silence fell across the group as sounds of laughter and strains of the accordion filtered through the leaded windows.

  “And it means reasonable citizens must take action,” Connie continued. “We are not all thugs and villains. But we will become these, if we don’t try to make change.”

  It was a bold statement, a challenge almost, and Marianne watched it register on the men’s faces with varying results. Hans nodded dramatically, captivated. Eberhardt von Strallen, clearly disapproving of such rash talk, flicked at the lint on his lapel. Albrecht frowned thoughtfully.

  “It is our duty,” Connie said. “If we don’t work actively to defeat Hitler, it will only get worse. This man—this zealot who calls himself our leader—will ruin everything we have achieved as a united nation.” He continued, “If we don’t begin to mobilize like-minded people against him, if we don’t begin to actively enlist our contacts abroad—the English, the Americans, the French—he will draw us into a war, and worse. If you listen to the things this man says—if you really listen, and read—it’s all there in that hideous book of his, Mein Kampf; his ‘struggle’ is to turn us all into animals! Read it, really read it, know thine enemies—his vision is medieval! Worse than medieval, anarchic! That life is nothing more than a fight for resources to be waged between the races—this ‘Master Race’ he likes to speak of and the racial profiles he has devised—these are the tools he will use to divide us and conquer.”

  Marianne had heard Connie’s views before—how many times had they talked late into the night around the fire in Weisslau? Hitler was a madman and a thug, they were all in agreement. Ever since the Putsch this had been clear. Connie, as well as Albrecht, had spent a good portion of the last years assisting the victims of the National Socialists—Jews who wanted to emigrate, imprisoned Communists, artists whose works were banned. Without law, Albrecht always said, we are no better than the apes. His work was as much to uphold and strengthen the law through practice as it was to win each individual battle.

  But Connie had given up on the law, increasingly castrated as it was under the Nazis. He was a born dissenter and a believer in direct action. It was one of the things Marianne loved most about him—Connie, her childhood playmate, dearest friend, and the man she most admired, other than Albrecht, of course. He had always been an agitator, a passionate champion of what he felt was right. As children, he and Marianne had spent summers with their families at the Ostsee, and Connie had always led them on quests against injustice, plotting to reveal the hotel concierge’s unkindness to dogs or some wrongheaded parental prejudice. And usually he prevailed, through sheer force of character or single-mindedness.

  “. . . We must find ways to work against him,” Connie continued. “Not only to bring the attention of the world to his ugly aspirations, but to take action ourselves. If we sit by and judge from behind the safety of our desks, we will have only ourselves to blame. So I suggest we commit to active resistance from this day forward. To trying to steer our country from Hitler’s destructive path.”

  Connie finished. Sweat had formed around his hairline and he was out of breath.

  There were murmurs and nods among the men gathered.

  “I agree with the principle.” Albrecht spoke slowly into the swell of support. “But active collusion against our government—this government—is a dangerous thing. And we have wives and families to consider. I am not suggesting we should not, only that we think carefully—”

  “Your wives and families will support you,” Marianne interrupted, surprising herself and the rest of the room. It came out like a rebuke. Albrecht was always so measured, slow, and thoughtful. A plodding tortoise to Connie’s leaping stag.

  “All of them?” von Strallen asked wryly.

  “All of them,” Marianne repeated. Von Strallen was a chauvinist. He told his silly wife, Missy, nothing and took her nowhere
. Poor Missy, treated like a dumb fattened cow.

  “And bear the risk?” Albrecht asked gently.

  “And bear the risk,” Marianne repeated.

  “All right,” Connie said, turning his intense gaze upon her. “Then you will see to it that they are all right. You are appointed the commander of wives and children.”

  Marianne met his gaze. The commander of wives and children. She knew he did not mean to belittle her, but it smarted like a slap.

  The meeting—if that’s what it was—broke up, and with a sense of unreality, Marianne headed back to the party to resume her hostess responsibilities. Conversations rose and fell, the jazz trio played, and from the landing of the stairs someone recited Cicero in Latin.

  But outside, beyond the castle walls, terrible things were happening. Marianne could imagine Hitler’s thuggish Brownshirts swarming the streets, swaggering and shouting with their air of unchecked violence. She had seen them marching in a parade last summer in Munich. Two of the men had broken formation and rushed toward her across the sidewalk. For a moment she had stood frozen, afraid that she would be attacked: but for what? Instead they knocked down the university student beside her and kicked him as he curled into a ball, their shiny black boots hammering at his back. It had happened so fast that she simply stood. Why? What did he do? she asked a man standing beside her when the SA were gone. He did not lift his hand in a proper Heil, the man whispered as they bent to help the poor student to his feet.

  For days afterward she saw those men’s faces as they rushed at her: ordinary, middle-aged faces flattened and made stupid with violence.

  “What is it? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Mimi Armacher said, interrupting the memory. Mimi was a sweet woman, a distant cousin of Albrecht’s whom Marianne had always liked.

  “I’ve just heard—” Marianne faltered. What to call it? It was something from a less civilized time, and for which she had no vocabulary. “We’ve gotten news from Munich that there is rioting—the SA—beating people, breaking down Jewish properties—”

  “News?” Mimi repeated, as if this were the incomprehensible thing.

  “From a friend of Connie’s who’s just arrived,” Marianne explained.

  “Oh, how awful,” Mimi said, and her face fell. “In all the cities?”

  Others gathered around. Marianne was aware of Berna and Gottlieb Bruckner at the edge of the group, and Alfred Klausner: Jewish friends whose own positions here in Germany were increasingly difficult. Generations of assimilation no longer seemed to set them apart from the eastern immigrant Jews Hitler was obsessed with deporting. No one was safe.

  Marianne felt exhausted suddenly. “That’s what I understood.”

  “Destroying property?” someone asked. “At random?”

  “Jewish property,” Mimi asserted with chilling crispness. “Only Jewish properties.” She turned to Marianne. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  Marianne stared at her. “I don’t know.” She drew herself up. “Does it matter? Our government is unleashing bands of thugs.”

  “It is the beginning of the end,” the countess pronounced dramatically when she heard of the destruction that would later be referred to as Kristallnacht. “That Austrian will ruin this country.”

  With that, she went up to bed.

  Marianne envied her freedom. She herself would have to shepherd this party to its bitter end.

  As the news spread, guests with government roles or substantial properties in nearby cities took off down the hill, speeding drunkenly around curves, honking and flashing their headlights. They were followed, more soberly, by the few Jewish guests. A few voyeuristic idiots drove to the neighboring town of Ehrenheim to see how far the rioting had spread.

  By the champagne fountain, Gerhardt Friedlander argued with the Stollmeyers, a set of drunken, ruddy-faced twins who were devoted Nazis. The crowd cleared a nervous circle around them.

  “The conspiracy of world Jewry will not stop at murdering vom Rath,” one of the Stollmeyers ranted. “We must take action against them—”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Gerhardt spat. “Vom Rath was killed by a deranged seventeen-year-old, not a conspiracy.”

  “A deranged seventeen-year-old who was a Jew and a Bolshevik,” his opponent argued, “who wanted to destroy the pride and unity of the German Volk . . .”

  Marianne could not listen. This absurd Nazi blather was everywhere, ripe for adoption by the likes of the simpleminded Stollmeyers. How had those two ever made the guest list? Thank God Gerhardt was there to put them in their place.

  In the great room, the jazz trio had disappeared (back to the Berlin? had they been paid?), and some dolt tried to play a Nazi marching record on the Victrola only to be pelted with a round of hot Frikadellen from the chef’s latest offering. The gawkers who had driven to Ehrenheim returned and seemed almost disappointed to report that no, nothing was afoot. What did they expect? The town was thoroughly and pigheadedly Bavarian Catholic. It had no Jewish inhabitants or businesses.

  Undaunted by the news or the departures, the cook continued to offer delicacies: a new round of pork roasts, apple tortes, a Frankfurter Kranz. And the bartender poured drinks.

  Marianne wished the remaining guests would leave. They were all self-absorbed, and frivolous. But still the party limped along toward a slow death.

  Around midnight, she allowed herself a moment of privacy in an empty trophy room decorated by some von Lingenfels hunter of yore. Its walls were bedecked with pale, delicate skulls of deer and moldering taxidermies of boar, bears, even a wolf. A cruel room, but it would do. She would rest for five minutes. Any longer and she would never return. As she sat, the expression fell from her face and the slackness that replaced it made her feel old, a mother of small children in a suddenly savage land.

  “Aha!” A voice came from behind, and two hands fell on her shoulders before she had the chance to turn: Connie. She had thought him long gone—either back to Berlin to repair the damage or off to bed with his fiancée, a changed man with a new set of habits. But here he was. His intransigence reassured her.

  “Caught you,” he chided.

  “Oh, Connie,” she said, turning. “Should I tell them all to go home? It’s so strange to have this party when beyond it, God knows—”

  “Let them stay.” Connie sank into the chair opposite her own. “They’re too drunk to leave anyway.”

  “I suppose.” Marianne sighed. “What’s happening out there?”

  “Well,” Connie said, leaning back. “Greta von Viersdahl is impersonating a goose on the dance floor, old Herr Frickle has found a new strumpet to sit on his lap, and someone I don’t know is vomiting into the moat.”

  “Oh dear.” Marianne smiled.

  How many parties had they attended together? Too many to count since their days as children. And Connie was always an entertaining reporter—an interested observer of the human animal. It was what had forged their friendship: the aptness of his perceptions, and her own appreciation for these as a person less gifted with insight.

  “And Benita?” she could not resist asking. “Is she sleeping?”

  “She’s a good girl,” Connie answered, stretching out his legs, the firelight creating comically long shadows of his shoes. His handsome face looked tired. There were circles beneath his eyes.

  “Does that make it easier or harder for her to go to sleep?”

  Connie shrugged. “She was exhausted.”

  Marianne pulled herself more upright in the chair and stared quizzically at her friend. “What does she think? About this rioting and thuggery, about what’s happening in the world?”

  Connie rolled his head over the back of his chair to look up at her. Even exhausted, his face was strikingly handsome: the fine, clear features that had made him beautiful as a boy had never thickened or dulled. Instead they’d become sharper, and straighter—still capable of startling her with their symmetry.

  “You don’t approve of Benita,” he said. “I knew
you wouldn’t.”

  “That’s not fair, Connie—why would you think—?”

  “I know you,” he said.

  “What—am I not an open-minded, accepting person who is happy to see her friend in love?”

  Connie narrowed his eyes. “Open-minded, yes. Accepting, no. You are exacting.”

  Marianne frowned. “Well, she is young.”

  Connie laughed.

  “Will she be a partner to you? In all you do?”

  Connie sat up suddenly, and for a moment Marianne was afraid she had gone too far. But he did not storm off. He turned his chair to face her and leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “Not like you and Albrecht, no,” he said. “But there are other kinds of unions. And I love her.”

  She was surprised by the intensity of his declaration. Was there, in his assertion, an implicit criticism of her own marriage?

  “You must promise me something,” Connie said.

  “What is it?” Marianne frowned.

  He reached forward to take her hand and a shock raced through Marianne at his touch.

  “If things go wrong—and they may go wrong—you must help her. She is a simple girl and she won’t deserve whatever mess I might drag her into.” An uncharacteristically diffident, almost boyish look passed over his face. “And you must help her raise my child.”

  “Your—?” Marianne began, astonished. “She is—?”

  Connie nodded. “Will you promise me this?”

  “Connie, of course I will, you know I will, but—”

  “Is that your word?”

  Marianne studied his face, as serious as she had ever seen it, and felt a chill of premonition.