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Maud had not played for years. Perhaps it saddened her by bringing back memories of Walter: they had always played and sung together, and she had often told the children how she had tried, and failed, to teach him to play ragtime. But she no longer told that story, and Carla suspected that nowadays the piano made Maud think of Joachim Koch, the young officer who had come to her for piano lessons, whom she had deceived and seduced, and whom Carla and Ada had killed in the kitchen. Carla herself was not able to shut out the recollection of that nightmare evening, especially getting rid of the body. She did not regret it--they had done the right thing--but, all the same, she would have preferred to forget it.
However, Maud at last agreed to play "Silent Night" for them all to sing along. Werner, Ada, Erik, and the three children, Rebecca, Walli, and the new baby, Lili, gathered around the old Steinway in the drawing room. Carla put a candle on the piano, and studied the faces of her family in its moving shadows as they sang the familiar German carol.
Walli, in Werner's arms, would be four years old in a few weeks' time, and he tried to sing along, alertly guessing the words and the melody. He had the Oriental eyes of his rapist father; Carla had decided that her revenge would be to raise a son who treated women with tenderness and respect.
Erik sang the words of the hymn sincerely. He supported the Soviet regime as blindly as he had supported the Nazis. Carla had at first been baffled and infuriated, but now she saw a sad logic to it. Erik was one of those inadequate people who were so scared by life that they preferred to live under harsh authority, to be told what to do and what to think by a government that allowed no dissent. They were foolish and dangerous, but there were an awful lot of them.
Carla gazed fondly at her husband, still handsome at thirty. She recalled kissing him, and more, in the front of his sexy car, parked in the Grunewald, when she was nineteen. She still liked kissing him.
When she thought over the time that had passed since then, she had a thousand regrets, but the biggest was her father's death. She missed him constantly and still cried when she remembered him lying in the hall, beaten so cruelly that he did not live until the doctor arrived.
But everyone had to die, and Father had given his life for the sake of a better world. If more Germans had had his courage the Nazis would not have triumphed. She wanted to do all the things he had done: to raise her children well, to make a difference to her country's politics, to love and be loved. Most of all, when she died, she wanted her children to be able to say, as she said of her father, that her life had meant something, and that the world was a better place for it.
The carol came to an end; Maud held the final chord; and little Walli leaned forward and blew the candle out.
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