Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Chopin, one must be methodical about such things. Then it’s midnight, and as the notes fade a silence fills the chamber like a thousand ears listening, an audience of spirits, and Elfriede can almost—but not quite—feel that her husband and son are among them.
Two weeks later, Elfriede encounters the Englishman for the first time. An orderly pushes him in a wheeled chair along one of the paved paths in the infirmary garden, and she observes them both from the hillside above. She’s just returned from a long, solitary hike, and the mountain air fills her lungs and her limbs, and the sunlight burns her face in a primitive way. She sits among the wildflowers and wraps her arms around her legs. Below her, about the size and importance of squirrels, the orderly and the Englishman come to a stop at the top of the rectangular path, inside a patch of sun. The orderly adjusts the blanket on the Englishman’s lap and they exchange a few words, although the breeze carries their voices away from Elfriede’s ears. After a last pat to the blanket, the orderly consults a pocket watch and heads back to the infirmary building, leaving the Englishman in the sunshine.
For some time, he sits without moving. The chair’s positioned at such an angle that she can’t see his face properly, and anyway Elfriede’s a bit nearsighted, so he might be asleep or he might just be too weak to move. Still, he must be past the crisis, or they wouldn’t have left him outside like this, would they?
Judging from the proportion of man to chair, he seems to be on the tall side, if slender. Of course, Elfriede’s husband is a giant, two meters tall and almost as broad, so most men look slender in comparison. Also, this fellow’s been sick, and he’s wearing those loose blue infirmary pajamas. His hair’s been shaved, and the remaining stubble is ginger, which catches a little sun and glints. Elfriede creeps closer. The brief, vibrant season of alpine wildflowers has arrived, and the meadow’s packed with their reds and oranges and violets, their sticky sage scent, clinging to Elfriede’s dress as she slides through the grass. She just wants to see his face, that’s all. Wants to know what an Englishman looks like. In her entire sheltered life, living in the country, small villages, Berlin once to shop for her trousseau, Frankfurt and Zurich glimpsed through the window of a train, she’s never met one.
Closer and closer she creeps, and still his face evades her. They’re pointed the same direction, toward the sun, and Elfriede sees only his profile, his closed left eye. He must be asleep, recovering from his illness. His color’s good, pale but not ghostly, no sign of fever, a few freckles sprinkled across the bridge of his nose. His left hand, lying upon the gray wool blanket, is long-fingered and elegant; the right hand remains out of view.
Elfriede stretches out her leg to slide a few centimeters closer, and without opening his eyes, the Englishman speaks, clear and just loud enough. “You might as well come on over here and introduce yourself.”
“Oh! I didn’t—”
“Yes, you did.” Now he opens his eyes and turns his head to face her, squinting a little and smiling a broad, electric smile that will come, in the fullness of time, to dominate her imagination, her consciousness and her unconsciousness, her blood and bones and hair and breath. “My God,” he says, in a more subdued voice, almost inaudible over the distance between them, “you’re beautiful, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing here? You don’t look sick.” He glances cheerfully at her midsection. “Not up the duff, are you?”
He says those words—up the duff—in English, and Elfriede doesn’t understand them, so she just shakes her head. “A nervous disorder,” she calls back.
“You don’t look nervous.” He smiles at her confusion. “Never mind. I was only joking. I’m the family jester, I can’t help it. My name’s Thorpe. Wilfred Thorpe. I’d offer my hand, but I’m supposed to be keeping my germs to myself, at the present time.”
“Herr Thorpe. I’m Frau von Kleist.”
“Frau, is it? You look awfully young to be married.”
She hesitates. “I’m twenty-two.”
“As old as that?”
“And I have a little boy as well,” Elfriede adds, for no reason at all.
“Do you? Well, I won’t ask any awkward questions.” He turns his head back to the sun and closes his eyes. “Fine day, isn’t it? Won’t you come