He sighed too and rolled away from me, staring at the wall again.

“It’s just not right,” he murmured. “It’s just not right.”

I agreed, but as I left his apartment, I was only grateful that Henry didn’t know the half of it.

13

Sofie

Berlin, Germany
1933

A few days after the election results were announced, I took the children to visit Jürgen’s great-aunt Adele. As I opened the gate between our courtyards, Laura was on my hip, chewing on her fist and drooling all over my shoulder. Georg ran ahead, stopping to inspect some chamomile blossoming along the edge of a garden bed. He bent to pick a bunch, then, clutching the stems tightly in his chubby fist, toddled along in front of me, making a beeline for the entrance to Adele’s apartment. When we found her setting up morning tea at the eat-in table in her kitchen, Georg ran toward her to show her the flowers.

“Oma!” he greeted her. Georg had seen Adele most every day of his life—but every time we stepped into her house, he seemed surprised to find her there. “Flower. Blue flower.”

“These are white flowers, Georg,” she said. Adele made a great show of taking the makeshift posy and inhaling the scent as if it were a rose. She rested the bouquet on the table, then scooped my daughter from my hip and promptly pressed a hard ginger cookie into her hand. “Chew on that. It’ll help with those sore gums.”

I had no idea how old Adele was. She said it was impolite to ask, and if anyone tried to, she refused to answer. She was Jürgen’s late grandmother’s eldest sister, and he guessed that she was in her late seventies or maybe early eighties. Adele religiously wore a hat outside even in the winter, and her face was surprisingly smooth. Her long white hair was invariably wound into a bun or, for special occasions, elaborate braids.

Like Mayim, she was a part of the circle of our little family. Adele adored Mayim and Jürgen, and she all but worshipped my children. Her feelings for me were obviously more complicated.

“Why Sofie?” I overheard her ask Jürgen when he and I first started dating. “She’s spoiled. Shallow.”

“She’s wonderful,” Jürgen said simply, and although that warmed me, the knowledge that Adele did not approve of our relationship hung over our courtship in the early years.

Jürgen was seven when his family home in Freiburg was bombed in the dying days of the Great War. His parents and infant sister, Ilsa, perished. Adele was in Berlin, on the other side of Germany, grieving the loss of her own family—both of her sons and her beloved husband, Alfred, were all killed at the front. “Three miserable telegrams over three miserable months, and then I was alone,” she told me.