I pulled the blanket back down and sat up. Jürgen sat up too, and we stared at each other in the dim light. He pinched the bridge of his nose, squinting as if he were in physical pain.
“Where else can we have the conversation, Sofie?” he mouthed. I started to cry, and he reached to cup my cheek. “We have to talk about this.”
I pressed my mouth against his ear and whispered tearfully, “But maybe not when we’re so tired and emotional. Maybe not when we’re both half-drunk.”
He sighed as he nodded, and we stretched out side by side, staring up at the roof. Neither one of us slept much.
At breakfast the next morning, Jürgen and I sat with Lydia and Karl. I saw the tight smile she pinned to her face when she glanced at the medal, already fixed around Jürgen’s neck. Her gaze immediately skimmed to Karl’s bare neck, and she pursed her lips. Otto and Helene soon joined us. Otto was wearing his Knight’s Cross around his neck, a matching pair with Helene’s Mother’s Cross.
The chefs had prepared a celebratory breakfast for us all—thick slices of salty wild boar bacon, heavy rye bread spread thick with cultured butter. Best of all was the coffee—real coffee, the first I’d had in years, as it had been impossible to find in Berlin during the war. I drank the first cup so fast, I scalded the roof of my mouth.
“Yesterday was an especially successful day with the rockets,” Otto announced, beaming as he devoured his meal. “One of the V-2s we launched from Zeeland landed on a cinema in Antwerp. It was completely full at the time! Our early intelligence suggests five hundred enemies may have been destroyed.”
A resounding cheer went up from the breakfast diners, but I was doing the calculation in my mind—an ordinary Thursday afternoon. A cinema, for God’s sakes. A cinema couldn’t possibly have been full of soldiers. Why are we celebrating the death of hundreds of civilians? I clapped even though I felt sick.
I looked at Jürgen. He cheered with the rest of them, but his eyes were hollow, as if part of him had already died.
“We need to stop here for the night,” Jürgen said abruptly. At breakfast, he asked Lydia if our children could stay at her home for a few extra nights so he and I could share some extra time together. Now we were midway through the five-hour drive from Castle Varlar to his villa in Nordhausen and I was startled at the sudden change in plans.
“Why? Are you unwell?”
He ignored me, turning the car into the parking lot of an historic, stone-walled hotel in Kassel. Something about his steely silence warned me to leave the question hanging, so I didn’t ask again.
Soon, we were alone, with black-washed wooden floorboards beneath our feet and exposed beams across the sloped ceiling above us. A large bed sat in the center of the room, with soft white pillows and layers of thick blankets. Huge, wood-framed windows washed the room in silver-blue light, reflected off the snow on a nearby rooftop. On any other day, at any other stage of my life, I’d have been delighted by the scene.
“They will bring dinner for us later,” Jürgen said, as he sat on the bed and stretched his legs out. He patted the mattress beside him and added gently, “Come here, my love.”
“Why did you do this?” I asked, as I crawled up onto the bed next to him. He immediately pulled me close, and I reclined, my ear to his chest.
“A random room in a random hotel that even I didn’t know I was going to book seemed our best chance at privacy.”
“What if the room has a listening device?”
“They can’t have one in every room in the country, and even if they do, I checked in under a false name.”
We sat for a while as I pondered the risk calculation, too accustomed by then to assuming no space was safe for me to speak freely. I listened to the slow breaths of my husband and the beating of his heart beneath my ear. After a while, he whispered, “There is a sign above the gate at the Buchenwald camp. Jedem das Seine.” Roughly, To Each What He Deserves.
“I think about that every day. The people inside those gates have done nothing to deserve their fate. I always thought that hell was a myth. It made good sense that the church would come up with a lie like that—eternal damnation is a strong motivation to convince people to comply. But now I understand that hell is not an abstract concept. It’s real, but it’s not about pitchforks or rivers of lava. Hell is simply the place where hope is lost.” He sighed heavily. “Sofie, even my villa is haunted.”
“Haunted?”