Now it’s a different war, different soldiers, but the cold and the hunger and the despair are as familiar to her as her own raw fingers, as her own reflection in the scrap of mirror above the washstand. Outside the window, rimmed in frost, Berlin staggers to its feet and begins another day. At nine o’clock, an elderly woman wearing a plain blue headscarf will be waiting on a certain bench in the Tiergarten, feeding pigeons from a bag of crumbs. Ursula must be there to meet her.

Still, as Ursula slips past the doorway of the boardinghouse and into the frigid morning, she can’t shake the image of Mutti from her head. She realizes that she was actually dreaming of Mutti—bits and pieces of that dream return to her now, or rather impressions of the dream—and that was why she had woken this way, whispering Mutti, Mutti. Now, to be fair, Ursula thought of Mutti often anyway. Mutti made a shrine in Ursula’s imagination. Maman was dead and unlamented—she had died just before the end of the war, simply collapsed on the stairs one midnight—but Ursula had always nursed the idea that Mutti remained alive, golden and glowing, in some distant and happy home somewhere.

Indeed, that was why Ursula had left France and taken the girls to Germany after the war. They had gone in search of Mutti, had tracked down some woman whose name appeared occasionally in the letters Maman had left behind. Helga von Kleist turned out to be a very grand lady who lived in an enormous, baroque schloss in Westphalia. She told Ursula she had no idea who this Mutti could possibly be, but that their Maman had been a prostitute in the village many years ago, and she had given Maman money to take her immoral ways elsewhere and start a new life. She had actually offered Ursula money to do the same but Ursula had proudly refused. She had gone to Berlin instead and become a waitress to support her sisters, in a café frequented by artists and philosophers, some of whom she slept with, some of whom painted her or put her in their stories, an interesting bohemian existence. She learned how to draw and sold her illustrations to magazines and newspapers. Her sisters grew up and went to school (Ursula paid the fees) and married, and all the while Ursula never stopped looking for Mutti in the face of every woman she served at the café, every woman on a bus or at a shop or on the street itself.