“Did I tell you my father was German?” Sylvia asks. “He emigrated as a teenager and became a professor of German language and entomology—an expert on bumblebees. He wrote a book. But he died when I was eight. My mother says he’d never seen a doctor in his life, and it turned out he had diabetes mellitus. He had an embolism after his leg was amputated for gangrene. He died a miserable death rather than show weakness.”

Assia’s lips curl in a small, private grimace. “I saw men wet themselves and swallow their tongues in fear in front of the Nazis,” she says quietly.

Their faces are suddenly washed with light, and Sylvia looks up. Above them the clouds have dissolved almost completely. She turns to Assia. “Wait just one moment,” she says, holding up a finger and jumping to her feet. She runs over to Nicky’s pram and peers in, fusses with a blanket inside. She looks up at the sky again, squinting, and walks back to where Assia sits in the grass. “I should really wake him up now so I don’t have another night like last’s, but I just can’t resist. I so rarely get any girl talk. Okay,” Sylvia says, taking a breath, “go ahead.”

“I don’t know…,” Assia says, her voice trailing. “My father got us out. Then he got us out again, in Italy. By then we had fake passports, which we used to get to Tel Aviv. But it had been too much for my mother, seeing the arrests and our neighbors disappearing, the fake names. Pig’s blood poured on our doorstep. My father got us out, but she blamed him. And he was too passive, or maybe indulgent, to argue with her. That’s how I ended up married for the first time. She talked me into marrying a man in Palestine. He was a British officer—he was her escape fantasy.”

Sylvia’s eyes are enormous, her pupils round and dark, and she drops her trowel into the red dirt. “You mean she lived through you,” she says to Assia, who is nodding her head.

“Now you see,” Assia adds.