She smiled at him, and for the first time her words, her smile had any direction. For the first time, in addition to the pale eyes, the colour of mackerel freshly caught, he noticed the rest of Hildegard’s face. She had the golden, shining face of the young German girls. She had the sleek, shining hair. Walking upstairs her voice became excited, breathless, mounting with the climb. On her chin the delicate traces of sweat. She was very firm, a golden brown. It was as if her whole body had suddenly formed emphatically and irrevocably out of the hitherto vague impressions of Hildegard drinking soup in the evening, Hildegard bending over a book, soothing her mother, scolding her uncle.

Thank you, he said. At the weekend.

It would be good also for his conversation, she said.

Walking through beech trees her voice glistened. There was a green and gold of beech trees, and the expectation of a late Saturday morning. He listened to her voice, without interpreting the words, choosing to enjoy the tone. That was the benefit of half grasping a foreign tongue, you could reject the implication of words for their shape and cadence. Just as the trees, in walking, bathed by the stream of Hildegard’s voice, stood less for tree than for a suggestion of light, of colour, into which his own thought intruded, confusing the trajectory of a word with the bright, boughward leaping of a squirrel.

He wanted to speak to Hildegard of this, if he could, in so many words. But you couldn’t. It was not so much the barrier of words. He looked at her pale, unseeing eyes, as she pointed to objects of interest, interspersed between the more subjective details of her own life. She moved as firmly as her voice. She had changed for Saturday into one of the harsh blue Prussian dresses worn by the little girls for school. It brought her closer, physically, the contact of arm, an encounter of warm breath, the swaying of a blue skirt. But she remained a creature of words and decisions, turning him to shadow at her side.

She was glad he had come, she said, because he was someone she could talk to, she had need of a friend, she had a great many difficulties to face. Her arm on the back of his hand brushed him back to consciousness. Her skin was as warm as a flint. If he were to take the arm in his hand, if he were to hold it against his face, he felt sure that the arm of Hildegard Fiesel would have the warm, pungent smell of a struck flint. But she went on walking quickly, swinging her arm. Their feet shuffled through the dead leaves. There was her mother, she said, she was fond of Mutti, but Mutti did not understand, Mutti lived still in the pre-difficulty age, before the War. She would not understand that to work was a necessity, something to be borne for this reason, even when a Dr Rosenheim. Her words began to come too quickly. Growing excited, her nostrils twitched, filling him with a misgiving that was both a physical uneasiness and distaste for someone else’s problem. Rosenheim employed her, Rosenheim was filthy, she said, a Jew, no one but a Jew would take advantage of situations. Her breasts struggled with emotion under the tight blue dress. They would change the conversation, she said, anyone who was not a German, anyone who had not suffered in the War, would not, after all, understand.