Elfriede answers coolly. “I might ask the same of you, Nurse. How did my son come to be wandering alone outside at night?”
Nurse comes up straight and indignant. “He’s been very naughty. Now give him to me before you kill him, if you haven’t already.”
The woman holds out her arms. In the feeble light, Elfriede can’t see her face, but she knows the shape of that head, the shade of those blond braids. Johann stirs and lifts his head. “Nurse!” he cries, stretching his hands toward hers. “I found my private!”
“Have you, now,” Nurse says. She thrusts again with her outstretched arms. “Frau von Kleist. You must give him to me at once.”
“I don’t—”
“You must. Haven’t you hurt him enough already?”
Fury seizes Elfriede. The insolence! she thinks. I ought to dismiss her on the spot, I ought to slap her, how dare she.
And yet. Isn’t she perfectly correct? Isn’t that why Elfriede’s fury is so fierce? Nurse is right. Elfriede’s crawling with germs. Possibly she has already transmitted the fatal bacterium to her child. And it’s true, God knows, she’s hurt Johann enough already. What boy can recover from a mother’s abandonment? His arms reach to Nurse and he whimpers with longing.
Elfriede presses her lips to Johann’s hair. “I’ll see you again soon, my love,” she says, and she hands him carefully into Nurse’s arms. As she does, a puff of air strikes her nose, the scent of schnapps.
Inside the house again. Elfriede wastes no time leaping up the stairs—not for nothing has she walked the mountains of Switzerland for the past two years, three thousand meters of altitude—and down the corridor to Gerhard’s bedroom. The lights are now ablaze. Her sister-in-law appears like a phantom in a dressing gown.
“Come at once,” she snaps, and turns back into the room.
Elfriede, terrified but unrepentant, follows Ulrika into the master’s bedroom. But Gerhard is not dead. The opposite. He’s awake, the fever ebbs. He spies her in the doorway and lifts his head, calling her name like a man risen from the dead.
Lulu
December 1941
(The Bahamas)
We all have a dream, don’t we? And I don’t mean some dream for the future, some grand desire of the heart. I mean that dream that comes to you in the dark of night. I mean that dream that visits and revisits, unbidden, crawling out from your subconscious while you sleep, the one that knows exactly how to make you scream. Mine goes like this.
I’m in some cheap room in some clapboard house in some hot, dusty prairie town in the middle of America someplace, I don’t know exactly where, and I need to catch the next train out. The only train out. The trouble is, I can’t seem to leave the room. My fingers won’t button my blouse. My clothes won’t stay in my suitcase. My hairbrush, my toothbrush, my lipstick—they go missing, time and again, so I have to go looking, and I can’t find them. The room gets smaller and hotter. The clock ticks faster. The train approaches. And while I’m making these agonizing preparations that must be done, cannot be done, I’ve got to move silently, create not the smallest noise, because a stranger’s passed out drunk on the metal bed against the wall, and he’s going to wake up any second, any second, any second, goddamn, somebody get me out of here, somebody drag me out of this room, this scene, this dream I know is a dream, goddamn, it’s just a dream but I can’t get out, can’t wake, stuck here forever like a black fly in a jar, he’s going to wake, any second, any second.
Thump, thump.
Mother Mary, no. Don’t wake him up.
Thump, thump.
BE QUIET, FOR GOD’S SAKE, STOP THAT THUMPING, YOU’LL WAKE HIM UP!
Thump, thump. Dragging me outside myself, outside this sticky, dusty, terrible scene in my head. Thump, thump.
A voice. Miss Lulu? Miss Lulu? You sleeping still?
Eyes fly open. Small, white room. No prairie, no train, no stranger passed out drunk in a bed. Unless that stranger was me.
From the rear patio of my little bungalow on Cable Beach, I sat and watched the Hog Island lighthouse rising from the turquoise sea, so white and tranquil that you simply couldn’t believe the entire world was now at war.
I remember the patio was paved in this quaint mixture of crushed seashells and concrete. There’s a name for it, I believe, but I’ve since forgotten. Never mind. I liked the way it felt on my bare feet, the way there