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hadn’t learned how to manage. For even infants understand the rotten, instinctive truth: that no pain ever takes full leave of its person. That pain is greedy and doesn’t give ground. That a body remembers what hurts it and how. Old pains get swallowed by new pains. But newer pains always follow suit.
    “W HAT ’ S THE PURPOSE OF pain?” Anna asked Doktor Messerli. It was a question that had skimmed the air around herfor years like a ghost that trolls the attic of a house it is forever damned to spook.
    “It’s instructive. It warns of impending events. Pain precedes change. It is a tool.” She spoke in textbook phrases. Anna was suspicious of these answers. Doktor Messerli arced a single eyebrow. “Do you not believe me?”
    Anna arced an eyebrow back.
No. I don’t.
    A NNA PULLED SHUT THE door to her daughter’s room and went downstairs to make coffee. The house on Rosenweg was, by American standards, small. The Benzes were five people residing in what amounted to just over 1,300 square feet of livable space. There were two upstairs bedrooms, each not much bigger than an oversized closet—a shared room for the boys and a room for Polly. The attic encompassed the rest of the second floor. Everything else was downstairs: the kitchen, the bathroom, the den with its tiny dining nook, Bruno’s study, and the bedroom Anna and Bruno shared. Beneath it all lay a cold concrete basement. It was cramped quarters.
    Anna descended the stairs as quietly as she could. Their house was old, and the steps creaked and groaned under anyone’s weight. Anna was always conscious of the noise she made, for Bruno, when disturbed from his silences, often became intemperate and took easy offense at everyday, benign occurrences. Anna had learned to tiptoe and step slowly.
    Their kitchen was small, narrow, and tucked up. There was hardly room for a countertop, much less a microwave, and their refrigerator was only slightly larger than ones found in college dormitories. Anna made the rounds of marketing twice a week at least. That was Anna’s Saturday afternoon plan. Allweek she had been occupied and let the shopping slip. Their pantries were almost entirely bare.
    “A MODERN WOMAN NEEDN ’ T live a life so circumscribed. A modern woman needn’t be so unhappy. You should go more places and do more things.” Doktor Messerli’s voice didn’t hide its impatience.
    Anna felt scolded but didn’t offer a retort.
    S HE CARRIED HER COFFEE into the den. Her German books and all of her notes from the previous night were still scattered on the dining table like clothes cast off and tossed across a bed. The window in the den opened to face the barn of their neighbors, Hans and Margrith Tschäppät. An elderly couple, Hans and Margrith had lived in Dietlikon their entire lives. Hans was a kind and jolly farmer who would wave at Anna from his tractor when they passed each other going up or down the hill behind Anna and Bruno’s house. Hans would give Anna jars of
Honig
cultivated by his own bees and twice a year he pruned their apple trees. Margrith, too, was nice. But she was also extremely perceptive, and Anna couldn’t help but feel she always knew more about her than Anna would like her to. Anna had never caught her staring through their open windows or peeking into the Benzes’ trash bin. It was something instead in the questions she asked, and the keen-eyed way she asked them, neighborly though they might seem:
Wohin gehen Sie, Frau Benz? Woher kommen Sie?
The past Wednesday afternoon, in fact, Margrith caught Anna as she was coming off the train, fresh from Archie’s bed. Anna’s hair was in snarlsand her makeup lost to perspiration.
Grüezi, Frau Benz; woher kommen Sie?
she asked.
    Just coming back from my German lesson, Frau Tschäppät,
Anna replied, and then each continued on in the direction she was headed before they spoke. This early in the morning Margrith and Hans’s windows were still dark. The Saturday sun had not yet