Martin complied. From here, one could see down to a short, T-shaped dock, sticking like a cross into the water. The sun on the rocks was strong and bright.

Marianne lowered herself into the armchair opposite Martin, which looked as uncomfortable as his. Comfort, it seemed, was no more relevant to Marianne now than it had been when she was young.

“So how are you, Marianne?” Martin said, trying to strike a jovial tone.

“Oh, Martin,” she said, sighing. “As well as possible for a person of my age. I am a lucky woman.”

“Not old at all,” Martin responded, aware as soon as he said it that she would find the statement ridiculous. “You look marvelous.”

“Thank you.” Marianne bobbed her head patiently. “And what of you, Martin Fledermann?” She smiled. “It was New York, I think, where I saw you last, no?”

“Yes, it was,” Martin said, the day coming clear in his own head with her prompting. He had gone to see her in some big, featureless building on the Upper East Side where she had been living at the time. They drank tea and ate buttered Pfefferkuchen and looked out over the city through a drafty picture window, surrounded by all the old things—dark Biedermeier armoires and claw-footed tables, thick white embroidered curtains, and the dusty needlepoint portrait of Grossmutter von Lingenfels. Martin had just divorced his second wife, a subject he had been preoccupied with not discussing and that now loomed over the memory as if in fact she had been there—a lovely, sorrowful presence, full of reproach. The rest of the visit, what he and Marianne had discussed, how she had looked, was obliterated from his mind.

“You were working on something—a book—I can’t remember the subject now.”

“Ah yes, right.” Martin nodded. “I’m still working on it.”

“Still?” Marianne raised her eyebrows. “The same book?”

“The same book,” Martin tried to say with self-deprecating humor, but it came out sounding bitter. The truth was that the book had become the bane of his existence. He had begun his career as a professor with a burst of glory—a lauded first book about postwar anti-Fascist architecture, various academic prizes, and tenure at a well-regarded American university. But then he was gripped by a crippling stiflement. He was meant to write a book that came to terms with something larger than the architecture of renewal. He was meant to write a book that would, in some way, relate to his father, the hero and resister. But that book refused to come.

He leaned back and was rewarded with a stab of broken wicker into his spine.

“That is a long time.” Marianne frowned, studying him.

A probing silence threatened.

“How did you come to this place?” Martin asked. “It’s so . . .” He searched for the word—primal presented itself, but Marianne was too German—he was too German—to use the word without discomfort. “Obscure,” he filled in.

Marianne laughed. “It was difficult for you to find, I think.”