Ania’s next transgression is more complicated.

The chancellor of Germany has encouraged citizens in the Ruhr to engage in acts of passive resistance against the occupiers. The girls’ troops at the Munich Gymnastics Installation carry signs proclaiming WE DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR SERFS. Workers at the steel and iron plants are on strike. In the south, there are violent clashes between Communists and right-wing Freikorps militias. Maybe Ania is influenced by all this protest. Or maybe she has simply reached the age of rebellion.

On the first Sunday of Lent, Ania is supposed to accompany her father to visit her grandmother and aunt. It is a tradition, like most in the Fortzmann household, that Ania hates. Aunt Gudrun believes it is her singular responsibility to mold Ania into a proper young woman. Since her mother has decided to become a useless invalid, Gudrun teaches Ania to wash and scrub and “learn household responsibilities” and to sit absolutely straight and silent while the adults eat. So Ania is forced to perch on her aunt’s horsehair sofa and nibble digestive biscuits while the adults eat slices of cream-topped gooseberry tart. The oppressive ticktock of the clock, the sour air of the room, and the dry, shaggy bits of skin that hang from Grossmutter’s face all make Ania think, in an oppressive, suffocating way, of death.

So, on this particular afternoon, when the time comes to leave for Gudrun’s, she hides beneath the weeping willow in the back of the Fortzmanns’ garden. Its branches hang to the ground and provide a thick, leafy cover.

The smooth patch of dirt here is one of Ania’s favorite places. She loves the smell of the garden wall’s decaying stucco, the damp ground, her own warm hands after playing with the twigs and leaves and worms. She hides things under the willow’s branches. For instance, the cheap novel she found on a park bench that she knows her father would disapprove of—too modern, too sensational. He believes in reading only the Bible and Schiller. Even Goethe is too liberal for him. Ania has also hidden the candy she pilfered from her class graduation party, a snake skeleton, and a colorful mosaic brooch she stole from her mother’s dresser three months ago.

Why is this willow here in the Fortzmanns’ orderly suburban garden? There is no pond, no stream, no river to quench its thirst. The tree is a leftover, someone told her once—maybe Frau Richter, who is, at heart, a romantic, or her uncle Dierck, who is young and bad and recently ran off to find work on a ship. The tree is left over from a time when the whole neighborhood was marshland, dotted with ponds and sloughs and great waterbirds. Its bent, grief-stricken shape is a product of its longing. While Ania lies under its grand draping branches she feels that same longing—her own cells thirst for the disappeared body of water, her ears fill with the ghostly burble of an extinct stream.

On this particular Sunday, Ania does not go into hiding alone. She is accompanied by her best friend and neighbor, Otto Smeltz. When she hears Frau Richter calling, she grabs his hand and squeezes it.