“Then I will pick you up at half eight,” he said. “At—?”

“Seven Krensig,” she said, cringing at the thought of him seeing the Gruber cottage. “But eight o’clock would be better,” she added, beginning her new strategy as obstacle maker.

“Aha!” He looked satisfyingly surprised.

Benita stood a little straighter and held the bag with less of an apologetic tilt to her shoulders.

“Eight o’clock then,” he said with a bow.

That evening, in preparation for dinner, Benita luxuriated in a hot bath. The Grubers still relied on the old-fashioned assemblage of water heated on the stove and schlepped across the kitchen to a tub that sat behind a makeshift screen. Frau Gruber, as excited as Benita herself, had suggested the bath and put aside her own work to prepare it. Her mother was, in fact, gripped by such nervous energy that it calmed Benita.

She ran a comb through her hair and shook off Frau Gruber’s offers to plait and wrap it around her head in her usual Sunday style and instead pinned it into a more modern, American fashion with three rolls at the base of her skull. Benita’s younger brother made a racket knocking on the bedroom door and singing old love ballads in a falsetto.

When eight o’clock finally arrived, Benita wore her finest dress—a blue-and-red-flowered dirndl that had originally belonged to her sister—and her too-small Sunday shoes. She sat pretending to be engrossed in her needlepointing as her mother arranged a plate of cookies and uncorked the plum schnapps in an embarrassing display of ingratiation. By a quarter past the hour, when Staff Officer Martin Constantine Fledermann finally knocked, Benita had already experienced and overcome her nervousness, and she greeted him coolly.

“Staff Officer Fledermann,” she said, glancing at the clock. “I wondered if you’d been caught by one of Herr Schulte’s dogs.” Frau Gruber’s mouth dropped open at her impertinence.

“They tried,” he replied with a smile, “but I was too quick. Call me Connie, please.”

With no further back-and-forth, and certainly without partaking in pleasantries, cookies, or schnapps, Benita and Connie took their leave.

Outside the cottage the moon was bright and Connie’s Horch sport car gleamed like an object from another world. She detected the strong smell of winter thaw—the hay that had covered the vegetable garden all season was thick with mildew and hoarfrost, a trace of dead animal. But over this the fresh, clean spring fragrance of the early blooming bloodroot and snow roses. And stepping through the door that Connie held open for her, Benita could barely believe her good fortune.

“To the Golden Onion?” he asked in a way that mocked the place and all its provincial pretensions even as he suggested it.

“Of course.” She smiled, in keeping with his tone, as if they were not two strangers pursuing some staid courtship ritual in a small town in an obscure corner of the Reich, but rather sophisticated, worldly lovers, known intimately to each other already and playing a game of pretend: Pretend we are two rubes in the backwaters of the empire, meeting for the first time. Pretend we know nothing of who we are or where we are headed. Pretend the conclusion of this chance encounter has not already been foretold.