“Here he is,” Marianne called out to an officious young prefect, pointing at Martin. “Martin Constantine Fledermann.” The full name was jarring—Benita never used it. “Ah.” The prefect introduced himself in the clipped manner of an ex–Hitler Youth. “Follow me to your quarters,” he instructed. And for a moment it seemed this would be their good-bye.

But then Martin turned and embraced his mother with all the fierceness of a younger child. “Good-bye, Mama,” he said as Benita held him. And the word filled her with happiness. Mama. If nothing else, she had given birth to him.

Benita and Marianne were silent on the drive to the inn. Marianne knitted, her needles tapping. She had learned this skill in the last few years from Ania and approached it as if it were a quaint, mildly entertaining art form rather than a tiresome matter of necessity, which it had always been in the Gruber household.

The inn was shabby—an ugly, half-timbered house with a crooked roof and narrow yellow-glass windows on the ground floor. “I’ll have dinner sent up,” Marianne announced. “You can join me if you wish.”

Benita demurred. She was happy to be left alone. And anyway, she was not hungry.

They parted at the bottom of the stairs.

But once Benita closed the little slanted door to her room under the eaves and saw the plain wooden cross mounted on the wall, the brown shaded lamp and worn coverlet, she knew she would die if she sat down.

So instead, she descended the stairs and walked through the dingy foyer and out onto the street. The inn was located on a narrow pedestrian throughway, and people walked past, shuttling children home to supper, carrying marketing sacks. Benita felt raw and exposed. She was stripped of the love she had wrapped around her like a protective cloak. No more Franz. No more Martin. Suddenly, she saw everything in its harsh, naked state. She felt the pulse of the lives lived inside the mean little houses she passed: selfish or generous, kind or unkind, ugly or tolerable, almost all of them sad. And she saw the histories of the people passing by like x-rays stamped on their faces—ugly, mutinous tracings of dark and light: a woman who had ratted out a neighbor, a man who had shot children, a soldier who had held his dying friend in his arms. Yet here they were, carrying groceries, holding children’s hands, turning their collars up against the wind. As if their moments of truth—the decisions by which they would be judged and would judge themselves—hadn’t already come and passed. What a sham this new German present was! An irrelevant time—a mad scramble to cast votes after the verdict had already been reached.

From behind the inn’s gate, there was the dull thud of a beer stein knocking against another, a clatter and an outburst of scolding. Benita turned her feet toward the noise and discovered a meager Biergarten behind a stone wall, long roughly hewn tables arranged over gravel. It was nearly empty: a group of older men sat in the corner, another group stood at the bar. The heavy smell of stale cigarette smoke hung in the air. Benita sat at the end of an empty table and ordered a schnapps.