Even when he broke this, it was not to unburden himself. It was to provide her with the facts. Which, after all their years living together, she never knew. Because she never asked.

So.

He had been drafted into the reserve police and sent to the east late in the war, assigned to load Jews and Slavs and other “undesirables” onto Treblinka-bound trucks. Did you know where they were going? Clotilde asked. He hesitated. Not in the beginning, but then, yes.

And once he knew, he asked to be transferred to another “less intensive” detail, and they granted his request. He became, instead, a courier of documents, shuttling sealed envelopes between army groups.

It was that easy? Clotilde asked. You just had to ask to be transferred and they did it?

He was silent for some time, his meaty hands spread on top of the hospital sheet. Yes, he said finally, at least in my case.

But he felt, at the time, that he had been selfish asking for this special treatment. That it meant someone else in his unit had to do the job of sending women and children to their deaths. So his resistance was not out of moral clarity, but out of a selfish cowardice.

What nonsense, Clotilde said. You did the right thing! The question is why didn’t everyone else? Don’t belittle it.

But her father did not concede.

He looked out the hospital window and, after that day, they never spoke of it.

There was a time when Clotilde imagined a different life for herself, one with a husband and children and her own home, maybe somewhere else. But her father was an easy man to live with, and a surprisingly good cook. She has a job she loves as a gardener in the town park. And she has her dogs. And based on what she understands of history and sees of the present, dogs are a superior species.

Clotilde remembers Burg Lingenfels as it was when she was a teenager: abandoned, graffitied, its windows broken and weeds pushing through its ancient stones. Frau von Lingenfels, the woman who owned it, had moved to the United States. And in her absence, it became a haven for vagrants and local teenagers up to no good. Clotilde was lured there one night by a migrant farm worker for an experience she doesn’t care to remember, certainly nothing the castle hadn’t seen before. After that she stayed away.

But now the castle is grand once again, inhabited by intellectuals from all over the world. The Falkenberg Institute proclaims itself to be “a site of moral inquiry.” Fellows come here to ask questions. Well, leave them to it.

Clotilde comes here not to inquire, but to follow her father’s wishes.

There is a grave in the forest behind the castle that he asked her to visit. A body he buried with his own hands. Franz Muller didn’t know much about the man—he was a Russian prisoner, released from the local stalag after the war. He had arrived at Burg Lingenfels with a band of fellow former prisoners: all hungry, weak, and diseased. And in these woods, he had come across her father. There was an altercation. And there was a woman present, a woman with whom her father had been in love. This is the difficult part, because Clotilde remembers this woman. She was beautiful, with light eyes and pale hair. She was introduced to Clotilde as her father’s future bride, and Clotilde, as an eleven-year-old, had concocted a wealth of lovely fantasies around her: this woman would become her mother and teach her to sew and buy underwear and other embarrassing girl items, maybe even give her a little brother or sister so she would no longer be alone. But then poof, the woman disappeared. No marriage, no courtship, no further mention of her. It was one of the great disappointments of Clotilde’s young life.