No, Martin agreed, he couldn’t. But this is at the bottom of the list of things he can’t imagine: Auschwitz, Treblinka, believing in Hitler, the mother of a fatherless boy committing suicide. And there are actually whole swaths of his own experience that he can’t imagine: living in an orphanage for children of traitors, spending nights in bomb shelters, reclaiming his mother from some rats’ nest of Russian soldiers . . .

Anyway, he likes Mary, and he feels connected to her through this place. They are both products of the same mess.

He runs a finger down her brow and nose, coming to rest on her lips.

Her eyes fly open, and her look of surprise makes him laugh.

“Oh my God,” she says, sitting bolt upright. “I hope my mother isn’t awake yet.”

“You make me feel so young.” Martin laughs. “I haven’t worried about anyone’s mother since I was seventeen.”

“Ha!” Mary fumbles with the sheet, tucking it awkwardly around her body, stripping it from him as she stands. “Sorry!” She blushes.

But Martin is too old to be ashamed of his nakedness. “Here.” He hands her a pair of gold hoop earrings from beside the bed.

“You look as though you do this every day,” she says. “Sleep with a weirdly connected stranger in a castle where you spent a traumatic childhood,” she clarifies.

“Not every day.”

“Every other,” Mary says, smiling.

And looking at her—this middle-aged American daughter of Carsten and Ania’s, standing naked on the ancient stone floor of Burg Lingenfels—Martin is filled with an unfamiliar, buoyant happiness.

There is a farewell breakfast this morning in the great hall, after which the guests will disperse: Mary to drive Ania the two hours back to her retirement home on Lake Constance (“Can you persuade her to move to America to live near me?” she had begged Martin last night); Marianne to the hospital in Munich for tests. The woman has the constitution of an ox, but her fainting spell should be fully evaluated, Fritz and Martin together insisted.

Martin himself will go north. First to Frühlinghausen to visit his mother’s grave and his aunt Gertrud, the one member of Benita’s family with whom he is still in touch. After Frühlinghausen, he has one more stop: to visit Liesel “Falkman,” his long-lost friend. For years as a boy, he dreamed of her, though he never spoke of this. And then, before coming here, he tracked her down and wrote to her, and she wrote back. Of course she remembers him, although she tries not to think about that time much. She spent the rest of her childhood, such as it was, living with her aunt in the flat where he and Marianne had left her—in a part of Berlin that ended up behind the wall, in the east. Now that Germany is one again, she has moved to Hamburg. She is an accountant with two grown children, long ago divorced.

At first he was dismayed by these details. What did this ordinary life have to do with the fierce, intelligent Liesel of his youth? But he has bucked his tendency to avoid possible disappointment and booked his return flight out of Hamburg. He has made a reservation at the Hotel Atlantic for them to have lunch.