“What’s that?” Martin asked, bringing her back to the present moment. He pointed at a small cart beside a pile of dirt.

“Turnover,” Lotte said, following his hand. “Every thirty years they dig up the graves to make room for new ones.”

“Oh.” Martin nodded, but his eyes looked shocked.

“If there is a marker, they will preserve it, of course,” Lotte continued in her matter-of-fact way. “But often with the old graves there is none.” She sniffed. “It keeps the cemetery”—she searched for the word—“fresh; no grave is forgotten, because no one here has been dead for more than thirty years.”

Marianne stared. She thought of her own family plot in Pomerania with its ancient graves—her grandparents and great-grandparents and their parents before them, in the shade of a giant chestnut tree, and of the von Lingenfels cemetery in Weisslau, with its plots dating back to the eighteenth century. Certainly there was no one left to tend these. Did the Poles, who had taken their land, roll the graveyard right into the wheat field beside it? Apparently, this was the new way—a rapid turnover of bodies.

“And after thirty years?” Marianne asked. “No one is remembered?”

Lotte stared at her with a blank expression. “Remembered, maybe, but not tended. Not maintained.”

Later, after the funeral and after Marianne had brought Martin back to school, she returned to Tollingen. No one was there to greet her. She walked from the train station to the town square and stared up at her flat. Its windows looked dark and sad in the shadow of evening, and she could not bring herself to go inside.

Behind her, in the square, the Wild Boar began setting its outdoor tables. Mothers pulled their children home to supper, shop workers closed shutters, lovers strolled hand in hand. And there were men on the streets again, smoking cigarettes and hurrying home to their families, happily returned to everyday life. She felt a pang of sadness for Albrecht, for Connie, for all those who had not lived to see this new life.

She could not go upstairs to the kitchen she had once shared with Benita and make herself a lonely egg and toast. She could not sit in the twilit parlor and sort through Albrecht’s papers. She could not pass by all those empty rooms—Benita’s, Martin’s, her own children’s. And she could not go visit Ania, sit in her warm kitchen, remember Benita together, and be comforted.

Marianne left her bag behind the stairs in the foyer and walked toward the river at the edge of town. At least she could sit here and mourn, among the bones of all the poor souls who had died on its banks. She could lie on the grass and look at the stars and be lulled by the rush of the river’s poisons. But as she neared the riverbank, she realized she was not alone. A figure, half obscured by shadow, stood with his back to the water, swaying a little on his toes. His lips moved slightly, and she could hear his low, murmuring voice, speaking a language she did not understand. Eventually his words came to an end.