Viola asked Henry why he was in Frankfurt. He was so easy to talk to and yet shared so little. He’d been at Tiananmen Square, he told her — still watching the pigeons, his voice matter-of-fact. He’d been in prison and then under house arrest. The Canadians had negotiated on his behalf, for his safety. His voice became faint and she bent close. His father had died during this time.

“Could you ever go back?” Viola asked, holding her arms up as she shook her cold hands.

Henry’s eyes followed her fingers as though they were wings in the sky, and he reached for them, clasping her icy hands in his as he told her no, he did not foresee it. “Nothing yet in the tea leaves,” he said, grinning.

Henry wanted to know again about Campobello and she told him of the beaches, of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s summer place which was now part of a park. Viola’s family home was now an inn. Her father was ill. He had frontal lobe dementia, something Viola never knew existed until the doctor called a family meeting. He would have to be institutionalized. It was only a matter of time, her mother had written in a letter. It was easier to be away, Viola said.

“It is nice you have a choice, Viola.”

She closed her eyes then, but there was no judgment in Henry’s voice and he held her hand tighter.

It was now late in the afternoon and they got up and walked toward the subway. Viola asked about the camp he was staying in. Henry let out a big guffaw sort of laugh, which was unlike him. He never let out more than a quiet chuckle. When he regained his composure, he told Viola his accommodations were not actually in a refugee camp. It was not what she saw in the news — the tents and jeeps, aid workers doling out bowls of rice. Viola’s naïveté was endlessly amusing to him, and to Viola herself. “Housing is perhaps a better word than camp.” He said her island view of the world was charming.

They had not discussed how Viola would come home with him. This week Ralf was away in Poland until Saturday evening. They rode the train together and both stood up as it slowed at Henry’s stop. The door had slid open and he held out his hand.

It was a tall, generic building. Henry and the two other Chinese classmates shared the small, tidy apartment. Two bedrooms, with one of them sleeping in the living room. The roommates had not been in class — away for the weekend, Henry said. Viola did not ask where.

Henry led her by the hand to a little bedroom with a mattress on the floor and a tiny table beside the bed, on it a photo of a smiling young Chinese woman holding a baby, and beside it, a black-and-white picture of a young boy and his father and mother, standing by a cow.