Assia rolls her eyes skyward, tipping her chin up and rocking back on her wrists in the grass. “Let’s see. There’ve been so many.” She turns again toward Sylvia. “I imagine I’ve done just about everything. I’ve been curetted of course. That’s very expensive, but as safe as one can expect. You check into a nursing hospital and pay an outrageous amount, a hundred pounds or more. Once I took a shot of something with ergot in it.”

“Isn’t ergot poison?” Sylvia asks, her own eyes widening.

“Yes,” Assia says coolly. Her gray irises are almost colorless in the light. “Of course. That’s the point.”

“What do they do in the hospital?”

“They give you sedatives, things to relax you. Then they scoop it out and you’re done.”

On her hands and knees, Sylvia leans forward, putting her weight on one flattened palm and dropping her eyes toward the onions, the end of her braid dusting the surface of the soil. “I miscarried our second baby last year,” Sylvia says. “But it was so early, my doctor told me it was perfectly normal. I was only a few weeks along. It happens all the time. I got pregnant with Nicholas right away.”

“I tried the gin bath, also,” Assia continues. “My father is a doctor. So I know that there’s really no medical basis for it, it’s hardly more than an old wives’ tale, but I tried it anyway. While you sit in a very hot Epsom salts bath, you drink a quart of gin.”

“Did it work?” Sylvia asks, turning her head and flicking her braid back over her shoulder.

“It did,” Assia answers ruefully, “but it made me so sick, I think I would have had the baby orally if it hadn’t worked otherwise.”

Sylvia clears the row before her of weeds, then leans back slowly, haunches on her feet, hands on her knees. “Really, I’m amazed,” she says, beginning to stand. “Did you so dread having children that you didn’t think you might try it just once?”

Assia hesitates. “Maybe it’s partly that,” she answers carefully. “But I think it had more to do with the reasons I married.” Again, she pauses. “And the war.”

“You told me you escaped Germany,” Sylvia coaxes, picking up the bucket and hose and moving around to the other side of the onion bed.

“Yes,” Assia answers, leaning to her side for the basket. “I was very small then, only a schoolgirl. We left Berlin right before the Nürnberg laws were enacted. We had to—my mother was a German, but my father was a Russian Jew. They would have been arrested.”