Lieselotte pointed to a shape at the back. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Careful how you step.’ She walked over and pulled away the dust sheet which Mutti had wrapped around it. ‘Help me. It’s too heavy to carry by myself.’

She lifted one side and Bette stepped forward and took the other. They sidled out of the space, and through the attic door.

‘Sideways down the stairs,’ Lieselotte said. ‘One at a time.’

Step by step, to their landing.

‘You stand guard,’ Bette said. ‘I’ll fetch the records and lock up.’

She left Lieselotte on the landing, ran up the stairs to the attic. The records were in a box with a handle. Mutti used to dust them each week, taking out the black shellac discs and wiping them with a damp cloth. The holder was heavy and Bette knew the records would break if she dropped it. She flipped it open. Mutti had organised the music into sections. Ballet, dance, folk. Lieder, opera, orchestral. Each in alphabetical order, artist or composer, concerto or symphony. She lifted out the ballet and opera, the orchestral and lieder, and stacked them against the wall. The container was lighter now, and she could lift it. She locked the attic and heaved the box, a step at a time, to her landing, into their hallway, and the sitting room, two hands on the handle, careful with your back, Bettelein, use your thighs. Then she and Lieselotte carried the gramophone and placed it on the table between the window frames, where it always used to sit.

‘Now what?’ Bette said.

‘Now we see if it works. You can choose the music.’

Lieselotte took out the handle and wound it up, checked the needle and blew on it, like Mutti did, for the dust. Neither she nor Lieselotte had been allowed to use the gramophone in case they scratched the records or put them back in the wrong place. Bette bit her lip. Everything they did spoke of Mutti. She lived in them still, filling her dressing gown with her smell, their bed with her shape. Sometimes Bette saw her in the cracked mirror in the bathroom or glimpsed her in the street. She had found Mutti’s mother-of-pearl hairbrush which she’d hidden from the Russians, and used it every day, her hair rising with her mother’s static. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

She plucked out a disc. ‘Bimbambulla’. It had been a favourite. A foxtrot. Mutti said that after their performance, the corps de ballet would go to a cabaret, or to the Theater des Westens, watch Josephine Baker. Can you imagine, Bette? A negro? In Berlin? Ach, damals…! Sometimes the principal ballerinas came too. That was before, she always said, before That Man. Bette wiped her sleeve around the record, lifted the arm, placed the disc on the turntable, lowered the needle and waited. There was a moment of crackle before the music started.