The other Ania wants to go to the shelter. It is not far, and they are exhausted. Obviously, the bombing is over. If there are no fires on the block, she suggests, they should sleep there while they can.

Ania is not so sure. Fire has always scared her. How many nights have they spent in open fields and meadows in much colder, harsher weather? Wouldn’t it be better to walk an hour or so and get away from the city?

In the end, the other Ania prevails. Her fatigue is like a yellow stamp across her face. During their debate, Pietre lays on the ground at her feet and, even amid the chaos, falls asleep. Ania lifts him—he is shockingly light for a boy of eight years.

They find the church untouched by the bombs. Others have made the same calculation and are already settling in for the night. The bombing is over, and if the fire spreads, they will leave. There are about forty people, mostly women. On one side of Ania is a woman with three small children, on the bench across from her, a group of three feral-looking teenage girls speaking Lithuanian and a dignified, elderly couple with their daughter and newborn grandchild.

They have barely settled in when the astonishing roar of an entire bomb squadron descends. There was no siren, or alarm of any kind this time, but the sound is unmistakable, and directly overhead. People startle and sit upright on their beds. Only Pietre— is something wrong with him?—continues to lie still. Before they have time to consider, there are explosions—tremendous, everywhere, one indistinguishable from the next. The church shakes and blasts of dust escape from the old beams and girders. The women stare at one another. It is too loud to speak. The explosions seem to go on and on—a sea of sound and tremors, chunks of plaster fall around them. Has the church itself been hit? Will it collapse and bury them all under a pile of rubble? The questions are too horrible to consider. Ania holds her boys and the other Ania holds Pietre, and with her face buried in Wolfgang’s hair, Ania tries to fill her mind with the sort of thoughts she would like to die thinking. How when Anselm was a toddler, just learning to walk, and they were living in the lager in the south, they would visit the horses at the end of the road, his little hand reaching out, frightened but brave, to feel the softness of the giant animals’ muzzles. Or the trip she took with the group of girls from her gymnasium to see the great cathedral in Aachen—how they had laughed, drinking beer and eating chocolate below the eaves of the funny little inn where they had stayed.

It is too loud to talk, but she tries to anyway—Think of happy things, she tells her boys, think of the time we went sledding in the Sauerland, but she is not sure they were even old enough to remember this. Happy memories of the last few years do not present themselves readily to her, and her boys stare with wide, unreadable eyes. Thank goodness they can’t hear her because she has nothing to offer them.