Bette watched from the window as her sister turned the corner. There were a few hours to kill before she returned, and although Greta’s prattling was getting on her nerves, her company was better than nothing and she knew things, like how you get rid of a baby. Bette took the spare front door key from the hook and left the apartment. The steps were still damaged and the plaster not repaired, but she had got used to that, and the people who lived in the Müllers’ old apartment swept the staircase once a day so the loose stones had gone. She’d slipped on them more than once. She crossed the courtyard, knocked on the Webers’ door. There was laughter inside, a man’s voice. Footsteps, the door opened. Frau Weber blinked at Bette, as if she’d been expecting someone else. Her hair was dishevelled, her face flushed.

‘Not now, Bette,’ she said. ‘You can’t play with Greta now.’ She looked behind her. ‘Greta’s vati has come back.’

Greta never talked about her father.

‘Oh,’ she said, not sure what to say. ‘When can she play?’

‘I don’t know.’ Frau Weber shut the door with force and Bette wondered what she had said that was so wrong or rude.

Bette climbed back up the stairs to their apartment, and into Mutti’s room. The soft ghost of her mother was there, breathing in the silk coverlet on her bed, smiling at the colours on the wall, lounging on her bedroom chair. Her perfumes were lined in order of size on one side of her dressing table, her vanity set on the other. Bette had taken her mother’s brush, so the mirror and comb were all that was left. She liked Mutti’s bedroom, its calm and comfort. It had been a haven when the Ivans hung around, their unwashed stink and foul smoke clinging to the walls in the rest of the apartment and woven into the fabrics. She sat on the stool. The dressing table was dusty, needed a wipe. She wrote Mutti in the motes, rubbed her sleeve across the top, wiped it away.