“Couldn’t go back to sleep,” Mary says when she is closer. “I miss the kids.”

The children—the idea of them belongs to another world, another life. It takes Ania a moment to register her daughter’s meaning.

“They will survive,” she says. “But of course you do.”

Mary sighs and sits on the wall beside her mother.

“It’s a beautiful view,” she says. “I forgot how beautiful it is here, in this part of the world.”

Ania too has forgotten. Impulsively, she links her arm through Mary’s. It is the sort of gesture she has not made since their fight.

To her relief, Mary gives it a squeeze. It brings tears to her eyes.

“I don’t deserve you,” Ania says. “I did so many things wrong. I lived my life wrong.”

“But you know now—” Mary says, turning to her. “You take responsibility for your mistakes. You ask for forgiveness—”

Ania starts in such a way that she nearly falls. “Forgiveness! God forbid!” She crosses herself, the gesture coming to her across the years. “I would never ask for that.”

Mary is quiet. “You admit,” she says finally. “That counts for something.”

“Does it?” Ania asks.

“I think so,” Mary says.

Ania would like to ask: In what sort of calculation? She can see it is important to Mary to believe this. She is an American after all; she has been swept up in the culture of talk—of belief in psychotherapy and confession, of television shows in which people reclaim their innocence through voicing their regrets.

In Ania’s view, no talk in the world can change the past.

If Mary knew about those babies, she would know that taking responsibility doesn’t matter. It can’t bring them back. It can’t return them to their lives, to their parents. And there is no atonement for all the lies Ania told herself instead of acting—that the babies were going to an orphanage, or foster families, or God knows what other acceptable end, even as she hung her head over the latrine and threw up. This is what Ania will pay for: not only her inaction, but her self-deception, for narrating away evil while staring it in the face. How can she tell her daughter this?

Instead she squeezes Mary’s arm and appreciates her kindness. Her understanding. This is why people have children, even when they believe the world is going to hell, even when life is nothing but uncertainty. In hopes of being understood.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

BURG LINGENFELS, OCTOBER 1991

Marianne sits at the desk in the strange visiting-dignitary bedroom she has been assigned and tries to prepare her speech. Not a “speech,” just “remarks,” Claire corrected her. Nothing too complicated. She wonders whether Claire is nervous about what she will say. After all, the book is Claire’s narrative, but the life is still hers.

Before she left home, Marianne prepared some funny anecdotes from her time in the resistance, a few cautionary parables, a recognition of contemporary resisters around the world. But now what she wrote seems grandiose, full of overblown rhetoric.