I sensed in his voice an agitation that surpassed my own. And while he kept me there with his trivial questions which he brought out with a great struggle (he even asked my age) he only made me wilder and himself more confused, so that, in the end, when he did come, he was not in the least prepared for what he found. I had identified Ivan as the child he had seen at the Hendersons’ and he thought he was being summoned to another epileptic fit. For a moment I was not sure that he would come at all. He sat staring at me, moving his lips. He had a repulsive face, flabby, blotched, and dissolute. The crescents of dark flesh under his eyes were distended and the eyes themselves were bloodshot, filmy, and of a color akin to auburn. His lips, tumid and wet, worked slowly over what his eyes saw as if, once the object were removed, he would still be able to recall it by running his tongue over his lips which had mouthed it and shaped its secret formula. He had had, I had heard, several attacks of jaundice and his skin was permanently stained to so dark a color that it resembled sunburn.

At last he rose with a convulsive jerk. “Will I need my stethoscope?”

Thinking he spoke to me, I said, “Why, I should think so, sir!”

He laughed self-consciously. “I talk to myself. It is the privilege of an old man.” And abruptly he pinched my chin between his thumb and forefinger.

Ivan’s illness was diagnosed as bronchitis. The doctor prescribed mustard poultices and a benzoin kettle. “Keep him well covered up and put on the mustard as hot as he can stand it. It’s not a bad attack and the fever isn’t high. Call me if he seems to fail, but he won’t, he’ll be all right, quite all right.”

He left some sleeping powders with us and these we gave Ivan every eight hours so that for several days we kept him asleep save when we woke him to pour a little water or broth down his parched throat. We made a tent of an old sheet and kept a pot of benzoin bubbling on a kerosene stove beside his bed. He was never himself but muttered and groaned and stared at us without recognition. His bright cheeks blazed under my fingers as I tried to stroke away the illness that racked him, hooped his body with a cough and cast it down, gasping.

My mother remained in the kitchen, sleeping on the floor occasionally, but for the most part making feather-stitched pot-holders. As she worked, she sang Fräulein Lili’s song in a soft but penetrating voice, over and over again until I begged her, bursting into tears, to cease. And when she did not, Mrs. Henderson laid her hand on mine and shook her head.