She said, I cannot talk to you.

We don’t have to talk about the trial, I said.

I cannot talk about it with journalists, she said.

I understand, I said. Well, I’m taking the bus back to town.

And then, surprisingly, she said, I have my car. Come. I will give you a ride.

This is how I came to know her. She liked people and wanted to know them and was prudent but generous. Later she would tell me that as the trial had dragged on, and she saw me day after day in the public gallery, she had experienced my presence as hopeful when it sometimes seemed that the world no longer cared. Or worse, when it scorned the work.

But that day in the privacy of her car, I asked her why she had come to work in The Hague.

She remembered, she said, when her war was over, when she was twelve, coming back to a flattened Hamburg and seeing only the spire of St. Nicholas Church still standing. Her home was gone, her father’s cobbler shop, her mother’s bank, everything destroyed in Operation Gomorrah. At first, while they were setting up schools, her parents taught her at home. They told her about the concentration camps and the transports. They told her about the woman they had hidden in their attic who Karla thought was a distant cousin but was, in fact, a former customer of her father’s. They had managed to keep her alive through the war.

In law school Karla fell passionately in love with Raphael, a survivor ten years her senior. For two years they were inseparable. He had been one of twelve people who showed up at the first meeting to rebuild the temple on Kielort Street. But he died suddenly, of a hemorrhagic stroke. Her beautiful Raphael, just gone. She was twenty-three years old and she was numb. After surviving so much, how could he die?

One must take things as they come, said her soft-spoken father, using the old German saying that she had heard since childhood: Man muss die Dinge nehmen, wie sie kommen.

When Karla met Andro, a quiet, ironic, rueful history professor from a region that had suffered war for centuries, she allowed him to love her. Andro was born in Croatia and educated in Hamburg. He loved music, the Beatles, opera. He had an academic’s soft hands and mild slouch. He was lean with a small, rounded stomach. There was a deep furrow between his eyebrows not from worry but from concentration. He favoured two grey cardigans. He loved Karla, her ambition and confidence. The first time they had coffee together she told him she wanted no children. She wanted to pursue international banking law. Over their years together Andro’s fascination for Karla did not wane. Her international work contrasted favourably with his own long days in libraries. She became expert in untangling secret accounts and tax evasion and businesses disguised inside hidden corporations all over the world. She joked, I am like an archaeologist brushing away layers of dust.