At last, near dawn, the golem returned with mud on her bare feet and her hair wringing wet. She leapt over the wall as if she were a deer and landed in an overgrown bed of ivy. When she saw Lea, she was embarrassed to appear as a wild creature, hands patchy with river silt, nearly flying into the garden. She came to sit beside Lea on the bench. The hem of her dress was wet; it was the same dress the housemaid had worn before she’d run away, but Marianne had kept her clothes starched and pressed, and now the fabric was streaked with mud.

“You should be asleep,” Ava told Lea.

“So should you.”

“But here we are.”

“I won’t ask you where you’ve been,” Lea said.

Good. Ava was surprised by her own thoughts. I won’t tell you.

“But I need you to save my mother,” Lea went on. “We must go back to Berlin.”

It was impossible. Ava was made to do as she was told and she had been told to keep Lea safe. “I must do as your mother instructed.”

“Would you do anything my mother told you?”

“I’m here to keep you safe” was all Ava would say.

Here because you have to be, Lea thought. Because you are a slave and I am your burden. I am your duty and nothing more. We are yoked together and we’d best not speak about it, or look into each other’s eyes, in case we find that nothing at all is there.

The golem knew that Lea’s neighborhood in Berlin had been emptied of Jewish residents. Thousands had been sent east to Poland to the killing camps, Hanni Kohn among them. Soon after they had left for France, on an ordinary afternoon, the soldiers came. Bobeshi had been shot as she lay in her bed; she’d been too infirm to be taken from the apartment, too much trouble, too unimportant, not a person, not a soul, not a woman who spoke to God as she was murdered, turning to the angel in the black coat when he came to offer her comfort and take her in his arms.

“There’s nothing to go back to,” Ava said.