from behind me, like an animal roaring. I spun around and saw flames shooting from the doorway of the Red Cross building, where I had spent so many hours, chatted with so many matrons, elicited so many morsels, banal and fascinating.
Now there were some who said that a shower of rain intervened just as the Red Cross Center dissolved in flames, saving the cathedral, saving the rest of Nassau. I don’t remember that. In the spray of water from the hoses, in the general running about, the bang and crumble of buildings under dynamite, one by one, and most of all the gnawing panic over Thorpe—where was he, where had he gone—I didn’t notice the weather. I noticed how, in the first hint of dawn, the whole world seemed to smolder and steam, and yet the cathedral still stood, the cross reached up to heaven against a charcoal horizon. And the flames were gone.
By the time Thorpe reappeared in Nassau a week later, as if by magic, I already understood the obvious. That he had opened up my desk during the night of the Bay Street riot, as I slept away the effects of losing a pint or two of blood on a shard of window glass. That he had copied out the contents of the folded papers I kept in a special compartment at the back of the drawer, and replaced them without the slightest sign they’d been disturbed at all.
For the record, I didn’t hold it against him.
Elfriede
August 1905
(Berlin)
Daily they walk in the Tiergarten, Elfriede and Johann, because of course he must have fresh air and exercise, and so must she. Grief like this, you need something to do. Today the weather’s not so good, but still they venture out, carrying umbrellas as a precaution, or else a talisman against actual rain. (Rain mostly falls when you’ve forgotten your umbrella, isn’t that right?)
The Diet is in recess for the summer holidays, and the windows of the Reichstag wear an aspect of abandonment. Johann kicks at the gravel. Who can blame him? No friends, no family. No ponies to ride, no tennis, no woods to explore. Just a boy and his mother in the corrupt city, the hustle bustle of Berlin. Waiting for their luck to turn.
“Maybe we could visit the animals in the zoo today,” Elfriede says.
“Maybe.” Johann kicks some more gravel. He’s a tall boy, a big boy, husky like his father. He outgrows his clothes almost as soon as they’re on him. That jacket he’s wearing, the one she bought him in Rotterdam because his old jacket, the one she bought him for Easter in Florida, was ruined by the salt spray on the ship? She’ll be damned if the shoulders aren’t already straining when he leans forward to grip the handlebars of a bicycle.
“We could walk,” Elfriede says. “It’s a long walk, but that’s good exercise.”
“All right.”
Their feet crunch softly on the gravel. Nearby, a woman’s feeding the pigeons. They flock around her, hooting and fighting, dirty and overfed, and Elfriede wonders why the woman does this. The pigeons don’t need the food, clearly. Some maternal instinct, maybe? Some desire to be needed? To be the center of somebody’s universe, even if that somebody is only a bunch of dirty, mindless Berlin pigeons? To matter, that’s all.
Johann speaks suddenly, with force. “We’re not going to find them, are we?”
“What’s that? Of course we’ll find them. Why do you say that?”
“I mean they don’t want to be found. They don’t want us anymore.”
“That’s . . .” Elfriede pauses before she completes the half truth. “That’s not true, darling. They’re your sisters.”
“They’re not my real sisters,” he bursts out.
“Johann!”
“It’s true. Isn’t it?”
Those last two words turn plaintively upward. He’s making a question, not a statement of knowledge. Elfriede keeps walking, keeps marching them forward, shoes grinding into the path. From the opposite direction, a man approaches them in a pale, crumpled suit, smoking a cigarette.
“Who told you this?” Elfriede asks quietly.
“Aunt Helga said—”
“Aunt Helga. Yes, of course.” Now Elfriede stops and turns, kneels into the gravel to face her son. Above them, the clouds hold down the stifling August air. “Listen to me. It doesn’t matter what Aunt Helga said. All four of you, you are your father’s children, do you hear me, you’re all his children in God’s eyes, fair and equal, and God . . . why, God does not make mistakes, Johann. Human beings make terrible mistakes sometimes, but God does not. Those girls