Adlon Hotel on Unter den Linden, a slight figure in a hat, gloves, a cane hooked over his arm. Then he was on the deck of a river steamer, at the ship’s rail, his face turned slightly away. She stared at these photographs, but what did she see? Not him, not really. She could not see the Russian in him, the music lover, the owner of a faithful dog, could not hear his “Natusya” or know if he loved her, if he’d had time before he died to feel anything for her. But always she gave the impassive face of Alfred a kiss. One kiss for each image.
After leaving the North Sea resort, she and Beatriz went to Bad Schandau, where they met Beatriz’s friend Sophie Brecht. A week later, Sophie drove them through Bavaria in her open Daimler-Benz. At restaurants along the way they compensated for the spa’s meager diet with Spätzle and lamb chops, roast beef with sauerkraut, strudel, potatoes in cream, brioche, custard-filled pastries, while men in lederhosen and women in dirndls sang folk tunes and played the zither and the hurdy-gurdy. In the evenings, in their rooms at a Gasthaus or a hotel, Sophie, who had three sons, liked to comb out Natalia’s braids. So fine, so silky, she said, scrunching Natalia’s hair into bunches on either side of her head and calling Beatriz to look. “See how pretty she looks with short hair? It emphasizes her eyes and her delicate bone structure, don’t you think?”
“What are you doing to my daughter?” Beatriz said. “You’re making her grow up too fast.”
“She will grow up,” Sophie said. “Whether you like it or not.”
“Don’t tell me,” Beatriz said.
The next day, her mother and Sophie took her to a beauty salon. Natalia saw her severed braids coiled on a glass tray and almost wept, but then, when her hair was shampooed, dried, and brushed, she began to like it, the way it fell against her face, the lightness.
* * *
Since March, she and Beatriz had been to Paris, where it rained every day, and to Vienna, and last month they’d gone on a walking tour to the Harz Mountains that had almost ended in disaster. Natalia learned to book hotel rooms, exchange foreign currency, rinse out clothes in hotel handbasins. Beatriz traveled with an extensive wardrobe. For her, every trip began at the exclusive little dress shops on Kurfürstendamm and Leipziger Strasse, where salesclerks greeted them effusively and said what everyone said: Frau Faber, how is it possible you have a grown daughter? They were invited to sit on Louis Quinze chairs while models paraded past in gowns with airy handkerchief hems, bias-cut jersey afternoon dresses, afternoon dresses in Chinese silk, cobweb-fine lace shawls. The models were disdainful and thin as paper dolls from living on nothing but black coffee and cigarettes. A form of penance? More a necessity of survival, Natalia imagined. The nuns at the convent fasted on holy days and sometimes in class felt faint and weak, and once Sister Monica had fainted while writing on the chalkboard, and a nursing sister had come with the cook’s helper and carried her out of the room. In the season of Lent, Natalia too had skipped lunch and had eaten only a little soup for supper. Alone in the dormitory washroom, she had bitten her arm hard enough to leave teeth marks but not hard enough to draw blood. The pain, although slight, brought her closer to the saints, she believed. It interested her for a short time, this practice, and then she gave it up, just as she’d given up the sour little candies that she remembered the nuns doling out as a treat on Sunday afternoons.
* * *
Today they were departing for Lake Hévíz, in Hungary, where Beatriz would undergo treatments at a health spa, after which she hoped to spend a few days in Budapest before heading south to the Dalmatian coast. Benno had been taken to Erich Saltzman’s apartment in Grunewald. Hildegard and Trudy had prepared the villa for their absence, closing the shutters on the downstairs windows, draping the sofas in dust sheets, and disposing of all the perishable food in the kitchen. Yesterday Hildegard had taken the train to Hamburg, where she was to stay with a sister, and Trudy was already in Poland, visiting family. No one remained to press Natalia against a starched apron front and say: Auf Wiedersehen, viel Glück!
Beatriz came downstairs and went to the mirror over the