Ania learned of her friend’s death from Martin. He sent a brief note stating the time and place of the funeral, which, by the time she received the information, had already passed.

Sitting in the parlor of the drafty old farmhouse with Carsten, Ania dropped the letter to her lap.

“Eh?” Carsten asked from his chair, startled by the abruptness of her movement.

The fire glowed in the coal stove, the baby purred, asleep in Ania’s arms. “Benita is dead,” she managed to say.

Her husband’s eyes widened. “How?”

Ania shook her head. Her body felt light with shock.

“She was a fine one,” Carsten said, shaking his own head. And the pronouncement seemed not so much an observation as an analysis. A fine one. Too fine for this time of rough, animal realities and ugliness.

Dear Benita, whose dreaminess and impracticality had been a reminder of all that was beautiful and light. She had always made Ania laugh. Was it the end of her affair with Herr Muller that had killed her? She had seemed so distraught on that day in the hospital . . . It would be like Benita to die for love. But Ania had no one to ask.

In her solitary sadness, she hung pine branches and oranges pierced with cloves across their foyer the way Benita had taught her. They lent the house an air of spicy sweetness. And when Ania walked beneath them with the baby, little Mary craned her neck to see these ordinary objects that bobbed and glimmered in the dark, made beautiful by their suspension.

This morning, as Ania sits on the stone wall, the castle begins to stir with life. A man opens red sun umbrellas on a new, attractive rooftop terrace. Someone tugs back curtains across the plate glass windows on the first floor. It is good to see the castle in its new life; it has become such a useful, democratic place, housing all these well-meaning people from every corner of the world. They are trying to understand all sorts of complicated things: what makes humans cruel or kind, and how we might all live together in peace. Ania appreciates their efforts, although she is skeptical that they will ever find an answer. Hitler always said there were too many people on earth. Too many people in Germany—such a small country, so many people . . . But then of course it turned out his answer to this was not a solution, but a symptom of the disease. He was the rat in the maze that begins to eat the others.

Ania is about to rise and head back toward the castle when she sees a form approaching. A woman, her hair blowing upward in the wind. Mary.

Ania lifts her arms in a wave. Mary’s hands are shoved deep inside the pockets of her jacket—stiff looking with a collar and a waxy, rubberized sheen. An odd garment, designed for some specific circumstance but worn generally—like those pants with all the pockets and loops and strings attached, or the slick clothes Ania always associated with gymnastics that are now worn for anything that involves movement—grown men ride bicycles in slippery, skintight garments. Ania is too old to understand such things.