I look down, trying to focus on cleaning the plates in front of me. When we finish the washing, and after we wipe the dishes dry and pin the dresses on a clothesline, Hannelore grabs my hand.
“They’re still doing the fence; there’s enough time!” she exclaims. “I can still show you my dolls, and we can draw pictures.”
Across the yard, Josef sees us heading back toward the house. He raises his eyebrows, asking if I’m okay, and I wave that I am. But then he points to his wrist, as if he were wearing a wristwatch, though he isn’t, to say we shouldn’t stay much longer. Everyone at Foehrenwald is waiting for supplies.
Back upstairs, in the bedroom with sawdust floors and wooden beams across the ceiling, I sit where Hannelore directs me and obediently take the doll she hands me. The scene she wants to enact is a schoolhouse, her playing teacher to the dolls’ students. Some of the details she makes up are funny, but she gets a lot of it right. Frau W?lflin must have been trying to prepare her for school.
After she’s made all the students sing a song and take an exam, and I’ve run a pretend spelling bee, Hannelore says it’s time to put the dolls away and asks if I’d like to draw pictures.
“I don’t think I have time,” I tell her regretfully. “My friend said we needed to leave soon. But thank you for spending the morning with me.”
She purses her lips. “I can still give you a picture. I drew one of you while you were sleeping.”
I smile. “You little spy!”
“I wasn’t drawing it while I was watching you. I drew it while we were eating breakfast. I couldn’t get your face right because it was hidden by the pillow, but Josef said it’s okay.”
“Well, I would love to see it.”
She fetches the sheet of paper from the top of her bureau and hands it to me, picking up a doll to change its clothes while I admire the drawing. It’s a group of people, standing in front of what I recognize is the farmhouse we’re staying in.
“It’s a lovely picture. Tell me about it. This is you?” I point to the smallest figure. “And this is me and Josef, and these two on the other side must be your parents.”
“Stiefmutter and Stiefvater,” she says.
“Silly,” I say. “They can’t both be your stepparents.”
“They are.”
I shake my head, certain she’s just misunderstood the term. “Is your mother married to your stepfather, or is your father married to your stepmother?”
She looks back down at her doll, rebuttoning a pinafore over the dress. “Mommy’s not here. She said she would be back for me later.”
“Where is your mommy now?”
Hannelore adjusts the pinafore again, longer than she needs to, and suddenly she looks much older than eight. “I don’t know where she is. She hasn’t come back yet. I couldn’t talk about her before, but Stiefmutter says now I am allowed to because the Nazis lost.”
I swallow hard. “Did your mother leave you because it was safer? Is that what she said?”
“Yes. She didn’t want anyone to take me. And I have light hair, so I’d be easy to hide.”
Is this what we should have done with Abek? Beg a childless couple to keep him safe? If we’d done that, would I have been able to knock on their door now and find him in a cozy attic bedroom decorated with his drawings?
“I have a photograph,” Hannelore says. She’s gone back to the bureau, opening up the bottom drawer and taking out a box. From it she removes a book, and she’s now riffling through the pages, pulling out photographs hidden between them. “I don’t remember her very well, but she was so pretty I think she could have been a film star. Don’t you?”
She hands me the photograph. “She’s very beautiful,” I agree, looking at the young woman with big eyes.
“Her name is Inge. Isn’t that a pretty name?”
My voice cracks. “Very pretty.” I suddenly don’t want to hold the photograph anymore, hastily handing it back to Hannelore, only vaguely aware that I might be scaring a little girl.
“Hannelore, it’s been very nice playing with you, but I should probably go.”
“Nobody said we had to stop.”
“I know, but—my friend, he wanted to start early, and we have a long trip!”
I’m on my feet, moving quickly toward the door, down the stairs, grabbing my bag from the foot of the stairs,