“I never meant to hurt you. Oh, Gerhard. It wasn’t that I didn’t—that I didn’t want to. I was sick. I was afraid, I was terrified of having more children, of facing all that blackness again. I wanted you to comfort me, to understand my fear. And instead you walked away from me. I still remember the sound of that door as it closed behind you.”

“What else was I supposed to do?”

“To hold me! To comfort me!”

“What, you thought I could hold my wife in my arms without making love to her? After all those months like a monk? I’m only a man, Elfriede. Anyway, I thought you must loathe my touch.”

Somewhere inside Elfriede’s head, a voice clamors in fury: But it wasn’t about you, Gerhard. Why must everything be about you? But the voice is a small one, just a last gasp of anger that dies away gently. The rest is pity. A pity she can’t articulate, of course, because how for God’s sake do you express pity for Gerhard von Kleist? She wears her pity on her face, in her eyes, as she gazes at her husband.

He shifts his feet and looks to the side. “Well? And now? Are you still afraid?”

Again, Wilfred’s hair, Wilfred’s face, which she cannot quite see. How’s this possible, that his features are blurred in her memory? She can see one of them at a time, yes, his thin, plain cheeks and those eyelashes around his eyes of alpine blue. His long nose, the sharpness of his jaw, all of these dear things, one by one, each feature disappearing when she finds the next. Yet the sense of him remains in utmost clarity. The beat of him thunders in her chest. She shuts her eyes and pushes, pushes, thrusts him away, but it’s like trying to dislodge a pillar that holds up your roof, and Elfriede is not Samson. “I don’t know,” she says.

“Elfriede, look at me.”

She opens her eyes again.

“I must know. I must know if you’re well again. I must understand what you mean by returning.”

“I mean to—well, to return. To be Johann’s mother. To be your wife.”

“But what does that mean, Elfriede?” He pulls her elbows, pulls her even closer. “Listen to me. There, in that carriage. I thought to myself—it was all I could think—he’s so lonely, a small boy among grownups. He needs brothers and sisters. He needs a family, a mother and a father who will fill his nursery.”

“Gerhard, enough. Let’s not talk about this yet. We’ll wait until you’re well again—”