On most Friday afternoons some of the students ate lunch at a cheap Yugoslavian restaurant near the school. Henry was the only Chinese student who ever joined them. After, they would walk together to the subway, the U-Bahn. It was always Mary, Viola, and Farzad who would walk together, but these days Farzad and Kwan-Sun had been walking in the other direction, holding hands.

Henry began to wait and walk with Mary and Viola. He and Mary would board the train on the left and Viola would take the one on the right to the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, and then take the S-Bahn commuter train to Darmstadt, back to the empty apartment. Ralf would be home on the weekends and they’d eat and then ride his motorcycle through the countryside. He knew she was homesick and hoped the adventures would cure her. He would take her to medieval castles in the hills and as they’d climb the turrets he’d tousle her hair and tell her she was gorgeous.

Ralf never approved of her housekeeping. He’d unpack his suitcase and then vacuum. It wasn’t a criticism; it was how he relaxed. You had to stay on top of the dust, he’d comment. And then he’d tie her to the bed and take a feather duster to her, from her toes, up her legs, over her breasts, her face, feathers soft on her eyelashes. And he’d pack again on a Sunday evening, gone before she awoke, alone.

The day she went back to Henry’s apartment they’d been swarmed by an army of pigeons in the park. They had gone back to the park after lunch, just the two of them. The pigeons of Frankfurt were nasty and knew no discretion. They didn’t wait quietly for crumbs but hopped and leapt about in a frenzy, even the maimed birds, things with one eye, one leg, bald heads.

She wondered how they got their injuries and Henry laughed. “What is significant is how they survive them.” He joked they were ancestors of war birds — while the bomb-flattened Zentrum of Frankfurt might be nothing more than a replica, the pigeons carried the DNA of the survivors. They could withstand an apocalypse now. There were pigeons in China, he told her. But having pets was now considered bourgeois. “They are not in the parks like this,” he said.

Henry always wanted more stories of Campobello Island, and she told him it was near Maine, near Passamaquoddy Bay — it was easy to talk about the geography. Her hands fluttered in front of her face, in front of her breasts, up over her head, as she drew him a map in the air. She told him of Ben and the goats, and the summer market where they worked together. “He thinks if his father had been a farmer and not a combat photographer, he wouldn’t have died. I went away to university, but I came home every holiday, every summer. The autumn after I graduated I went to Saigon. I went because I saw his father’s photos. They spoke to me. Ben said I’d never come back. And I haven’t. The island felt as though it was growing smaller every day.”