Afterward, people throw stones through the Smeltz family’s windows. Someone paints a slash across their door. Word has gotten out. Otto does not return to school.

In fact, Ania sees him again only once. He is walking across the park, his shoulders hunched against the cold, and she is surprised at how small he looks. It gives her a funny feeling—the way his dark hair flies up like feathers in the wind, and the thinness of his legs in short pants, like delicate twigs. So Ania tells herself the story she has concocted: he is a manipulative child who forced her to disobey her father and clamped his sweaty, dirty hand over her mouth. She imagines it so carefully that it feels real.

Then one morning the Smeltz family disappears. In the middle of the night, they load up their wagon from Herr Smeltz’s shop and leave their home for the Jewish neighborhood.

On the long, boring afternoons at 34 Langebein Strasse in the days and years to follow, Ania misses her friend. And at night, she lies in her silent bedroom and attempts to recall the music his family used to play. It makes her heart ache. She knows it is her own fault the music has disappeared.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

DORTMUND, 1934

By the next time Ania runs away, Otto Smeltz has faded to no more than a whisper in her childhood memories. This time she decides to leave home for a convent, the Sisters of the Holy Sacrament. She is now twenty-three, a young woman, but under her father’s roof she is still a girl. She has finished high school with high marks and honors but is not bound for university. Herr Doktor Fortzmann does not believe in higher education for girls. He believes it is Ania’s duty to keep house for him now that her mother has died. One day she will marry and have babies, so what is the point of a higher degree?

Ania, on the other hand, is not interested in housekeeping or marriage or, for that matter, babies. She is an athletic girl with a quick, literal mind, accustomed to spending most of her time alone. In a crowd of girls, nothing about her stands out. She is of average height, has average blondish hair, and ordinary features. Her eyes are maybe a little wide set, her lips a little thin, her legs gangly. She doesn’t care. Her body is strong and healthy and in her gymnastics troop she runs faster and hurls herself higher than any of the other girls. Her steadiness of character and good citizenship make her well liked. She is always invited to the young people’s dances at the Guild Hall. But she accepts the invitations only to be polite. What is the point of romance? It seems like a distraction from the important things in life.

Which are, in order: the wider world (not Germany, but the whole planet, full of all the odd varieties of human life—she has devoured every book in Herr Doktor Fortzmann’s collection on foreign civilizations and anthropological research), science, and physical fitness (or her membership in the local Girls’ Sport Training Group, to be exact).