The man shrugged. “Any of these—groups.” He said the word with obvious disdain, and she blushed more deeply, feeling the full depth of the divide between them.

“Good-bye,” she managed.

“Wait—have I upset you?” he said. “I meant no offense—it’s just my own—well, never mind.” He bowed theatrically and doffed an imaginary hat. “It was lovely to have met you, fair maiden.”

That night, Benita tossed and turned as she lay in the dingy bedroom she shared with her two brothers under the eaves of the moldering thatched roof of Gruber cottage, replaying her missed opportunity and the tantalizing possibility the man had presented. How had she let Fräulein Brebel’s Heimatabend hold her back? This had been her moment, the chance fate had offered, and she had said no! In the face of this dreadful awareness, her family’s cottage seemed particularly moldy and damp, the blankets on the bed disgustingly pilly, and the snores of her brothers as low and dumb as the grunts of sleeping swine.

For the next few days Benita sulked, spending hours on the weedy patch of grass behind the cottage, staring at the sky instead of helping her mother with the wash she took in.

Even by Frühlinghausen standards the Grubers were poor. Benita’s father, long dead, had been a mason like his father and his father before him, primarily employed by the town’s mental hospital—a dank, rambling establishment housed in a building that had once been a monastery and was in constant need of ramification. Their home was one of seven that lined the north wall of its grounds like a row of grubby barnacles. On quiet summer nights the Grubers fell asleep to the moans and cries of the disturbed inmates.

Of the three children still at home, Benita was the only one not gainfully employed. Her two brothers had found work in road construction through Hitler’s Four-Year Plan, and they were always quick to point out that Benita could find work through it as well. There was work for women. But Benita chose to assist her mother with the mending and washing instead. She did not want to commit to anything that might bind her to Frühlinghausen. Because for her real life, her real future, she would go to Berlin and find work as a typist or some such, she was sure of it, though she had never even handled a typewriter.

And Frau Gruber indulged Benita’s dream, much to her other children’s irritation. Benita was her mother’s favorite—the fifth of six and the prettiest of the girls by far. Among her siblings she was famously incompetent and lazy. Faulpelz was what her oldest sister, Lotte, called her, meaning “lazybones,” and it was not intended fondly.

The older children had each been sent to work at the age of fourteen and raised on spotty potatoes and dandelion-weed soup. Those were the desperate days, during and after the war. They begrudged Benita’s privileged status as a member of Hitler’s generation, a cohort filled with pride and idealism and, most of all, with excitement about the future.