That’s not the point! Mary had said. As if there actually were a point.

They had not spoken for days.

Then slowly, somehow, Mary forgave her. You did what you had to do to survive. Somehow, Ania still has her daughter’s love if not her respect. There is a new distance between them, which makes her sad. But it is, after all, less punishment than she deserves.

Burg Lingenfels is smaller than Ania remembers it. In her mind, it has become giant, a castle fit for Sleeping Beauty with great forbidding halls and acres of freezing, closed-off rooms.

Ania wakes early, before breakfast is served, according to the small leather-bound handbook beside her bed. A guide to help visitors navigate was how the guest-and-fellow coordinator phrased it, as if she and Mary were ships charting their way across an unfamiliar sea. It irritated her, this way of speaking. She is a true farmwife in the end. So many years of living with Carsten made her wary of fancy talk. Or maybe it is her experience as a Nazi that made her suspicious of metaphor, euphemism, and figures of speech.

On the bed beside hers Mary is asleep, snoring gently, her dark hair a mess on the pillow. Ania feels a swell of tenderness for her tired daughter. This is meant to be a vacation for her, not all tending to her mother’s needs. The poor girl (she will always be a girl to Ania) deserves rest—all that endless child care after long days at the office. All that keeping up with schedules, lessons, and appointments, the self-imposed stresses of modern life.

Ania swings her legs off the bed and reaches for her cane. With effort, she rises and makes her way to the bathroom, where her face in the mirror is, even now, after so many years, a surprise. When she thinks of herself, she doesn’t think of all these wrinkles, all this gray. Never mind. She splashes water on her face and neck and combs her hair. Then, careful to be quiet, she reenters the bedroom and fumbles over the clothing draped on the chair.

“Mother?” Mary’s sleepy voice comes from the other bed.

“Shhhh,” Ania says. “It’s early. Go back to sleep.”

“Do you need help?” Mary asks, sitting.

“No, no,” Ania says, more crossly than she intends. “What do you think I do at home?”

“All right,” Mary mumbles, and lies back down.

Outside, the sky is turning pink. Long, wavy arms of sunlight reach across the hillside, which is more naked than it used to be. All farmland now, where before it was forest. Germany has become the agricultural wonder Hitler always imagined, every meter planted with crops or windmills or endless flats of solar panels that stretch out alongside the highways. No scrap of wasted space. Even the patches of woods serve as sound barriers to shield towns against the roar of the autobahn, or screens to mask gravel mines or irrigation.

Ania lets herself out through the new, elegant front door and starts down the smoothly paved drive.