to New York, who cried and cried for Mutti’s fragrant, loving arms, while Ursula remained dry-eyed and comforted them. But eventually the younger ones dried their tears, they called for Mutti less and less, and by the time they were settled in a little villa outside Paris, near a village on the Marne river where Maman’s uncle still lived—Nurse said she was not their nurse anymore, but Maman—only Ursula stayed awake in her bed at night and remembered all the little details of Mutti, her smile and her kisses, her patient instruction at the piano, her pale hair that felt like silk against your cheek. Only Ursula gazed upon the painting of the Madonna in the village church and thought of Mutti. Only Ursula recalled the beach and the picnics, the magical man with the ginger hair and the gigantic laugh who swung you up screaming in the air and caught you just before you dunked in the water. Mr. Thorpe. She even remembered his name.
Maybe if Maman had been less drunk, if she had spent less time sick in her bed or else out all night, sometimes all the next day or even several days together, Ursula might have forgotten Mutti, instead of holding the little shards of memory close to her heart and turning them over and over, examining each tiny facet, each glint, each inclusion. But what other comfort did she have? Only God and her great-uncle, who was old and not well himself. When he died—this was maybe a year or so before the Great War started, when Ursula was twelve years old—Maman moved them all into Paris itself, a few grubby rooms on the top floor of a building in the Montparnasse, where there was little food, less heat, and almost no money at all.
But isn’t this how Ursula became what she is today? Those lean days in wartime Paris, scrounging for food and knowledge. This morning, as Ursula forces her body out of bed, the dark, frozen air brings back the memory of those nights in Paris, huddled under a moth-eaten blanket with her sisters. The days in Paris, helping out Madame Pistou at the boulangerie around the corner, shaping the dough into endless loaves, in order to earn some bread for them to eat. The stinking gutters, the wounded soldiers hobbling down the street with their stricken faces.
Now it’s a different war, different soldiers, but the cold and the hunger and the despair are as familiar to her as her own raw fingers, as her own reflection in the scrap of mirror above the washstand. Outside the window, rimmed in frost, Berlin staggers to its feet and begins another day. At nine o’clock, an elderly woman wearing a plain blue headscarf will be waiting on a certain bench in the Tiergarten, feeding pigeons from a bag of crumbs. Ursula must be there to meet her.
Still, as Ursula slips past the doorway of the boardinghouse and into the frigid morning, she can’t shake the image of Mutti from her head. She realizes that she was actually dreaming of Mutti—bits and pieces of that dream return to her now, or rather impressions of the dream—and that was why she had woken this way, whispering Mutti, Mutti. Now, to be fair, Ursula thought of Mutti often anyway. Mutti made a shrine in Ursula’s imagination. Maman was dead and unlamented—she had died just before the end of the war, simply collapsed on the stairs one midnight—but Ursula had always nursed the idea that Mutti remained alive, golden and glowing, in some distant and happy home somewhere.
Indeed, that was why Ursula had left France and taken the girls to Germany after the war. They had gone in search of Mutti, had tracked down some woman whose name appeared occasionally in the letters Maman had left behind. Helga von Kleist turned out to be a very grand lady who lived in an enormous, baroque schloss in Westphalia. She told Ursula she had no idea who this Mutti could possibly be, but that their Maman had been a prostitute in the village many years ago, and she had given Maman money to take her immoral ways elsewhere and start a new life. She had actually offered Ursula money to do the same but Ursula had proudly refused. She had gone to Berlin instead and become a waitress to support her sisters, in a café frequented by artists and philosophers, some of whom she slept with, some of whom painted her