“You know not to play on those beams now,” Marianne said. “I think we need not concern your mother with this so long as you promise to be more careful. And”—she raised her eyebrows—“promise not to let Fritz get you into trouble—he can be a real gypsy.”

“I won’t,” Martin said, his voice earnest and childlike. She forgot just how young he was sometimes. “I promise.”

Martin was not easily brought to tears. She had seen this much when he said good-bye to the little girl from the Children’s Home: Liesel Stravitsky. It was obvious he had loved her. But when they found her family, such as it was—a beleaguered aunt with three small children, her father dead, her mother last known to be in Auschwitz—Marianne’s own eyes had not stayed dry. The poor girl had thrown her arms around Martin and bawled as if her little heart would break, but he had remained stoic.

Marianne tied the last strip of silk around the cut. “Why don’t you sit in the kitchen and help Elisabeth and Katarina shell the peas?”

Martin opened his mouth as if to speak.

“What is it?” she asked, placing a hand on his other, unhurt and chasteningly bony knee.

“When will I be able to see her?” he asked. “My mother?”

“Soon,” Marianne said. “I promise.”

Benita had fallen sick with diphtheria a week after arriving at Burg Lingenfels. They said this was what happened sometimes: as soon as one made it to safety, illness set in. Marianne and her children had been inoculated at the English hospital in Braunschweig. As the wife and children of Albrecht von Lingenfels, they were classified as Opfer des Faschismus—“Victims of Fascism”—and treated well by the British authorities, who had waved their cart past the long line of fellow refugees queued at the border between zones. They were a wretched lot, mostly old people, women, and children fleeing from the east. It made Marianne feel guilty. What right to special treatment did she and her children have? They were lucky enough to have a wagon and a horse to pull it.

Benita, on the other hand, had received none of these advantages. She had not advocated for herself as the widow of Connie Fledermann, an active resister and a man executed by the Nazis. Though to be fair, it was different in Russian-occupied Berlin. A German was a German to most Russians. So she was simply a German widow, and a beautiful one at that, which had not worked to her benefit. Marianne would never forget the leering soldiers around the table in the flat on Meerstein Strasse or the horrible little bedroom with the closed windows and stink of sex. She had arrived too late. She had promised Connie that she would protect his wife and child, and she had failed.

Once Martin was safely settled in the kitchen, Marianne washed the bloodied rags that had once been Elisabeth’s Communion dress. This had arrived last week in a giant sea trunk that was delivered, improbably, on the back of an American army mail truck. Her heart twisted when she saw the trunk. Albrecht had insisted, years ago, that they pack it up and send it to his cousins in Geneva for safekeeping—a gift from a foresighted dead man.