Leni grew up in Lübeck, in a row of kleinbürger houses beside the Trave. Smooth trees, spaced evenly all along the riverward edge of her cobbled street, arched their long boughs over the water. From her bedroom window she could see the twin spires of the Dom rising above the housetops. Her fetid back-court existence in Berlin was only a decompression lock—must be. Her way out of that fussy Biedermeier strangulation, her dues payable against better times, after the Revolution.

Franz, in play, often called her “Lenin.” There was never doubt about who was active, who passive—still she had hoped he’d grow beyond it. She has talked to psychiatrists, she knows about the German male at puberty. On their backs in the meadows and mountains, watching the sky, masturbating, yearning. Destiny waits, a darkness latent in the texture of the summer wind. Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Bürgerlichkeit as your father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row houses by the river—dress you in the gray uniform of another family man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does all this to you.

Franz loved her neurotically, masochistically, he belonged to her and believed that she would carry him on her back, away to a place where Destiny couldn’t reach. As if it were gravity. He had half-awakened one night burrowing his face into her armpit mumbling, “Your wings… oh, Leni, your wings…”

But her wings can only carry her own weight, and she hopes Ilse’s, for a while. Franz is a dead weight. Let him look for flight out at the Raketenflugplatz, where he goes to be used by the military and the cartels. Let him fly to the dead moon if he wants to… .

Ilse is awake, and crying. No food all day. They ought to try Peter’s after all. He’ll have milk. Rebecca holds out what’s left of the end crust she’s been eating. “Would she like this?”

Not much of the Jew in her. Why are half the Leftists she knows Jewish? She immediately reminds herself that Marx was one. A racial affinity for the books, the theory, a rabbinical love of loud argument… She gives the crust to her child, picks her up.

“If he comes here, tell him you haven’t seen me.”

They arrive at Peter Sachsa’s well after dark. She finds a séance just about to begin. She is immediately aware of her drab coat and cotton dress (hemline too high), her scuffed and city-dusted shoes, her lack of jewelry. More middle-class reflexes… vestiges, she hopes. But most of the women are old. The others are too dazzling. Hmm. The men look more affluent than usual. Leni spots a silver lapel-swastika here and there. Wines on the tables are the great ’20s and ’21s. Schloss Vollrads, Zeltinger, Piesporter—it is an Occasion.

The objective tonight is to get in touch with the late foreign minister Walter Rathenau. At the Gymnasium, Leni sang with the other children the charming anti-Semitic street refrain of the time: