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was sixteen, and regal. It came to me that it could not have been Anneliese who had jumped from the Kleiderschrank and loosened the ceiling plaster down below. She was tall, an inheritance from her father, and like him she gave out a formal strictness. She was hardly like a child at all; her hair was wound in braids on either side of her head, revealing tidy pink ears. In each lobe a bright dot glittered. Braided and earringed, she looked authoritative and amazingly foreign. She was almost formidable, and the three boys seemed more afraid of her than of their mother. They obeyed Professor Mitwisser, and they obeyed Anneliese. But when Mrs. Mitwisser appealed to them—usually it was to beg them to take charge of Waltraut—they laughed and ran away. "American savages!" Professor Mitwisser roared at them. " Rote Indianer! "
    I too was careful to obey Anneliese. I felt my fate was in her hands: she alone, so far, had troubled to acknowledge my status as more than an intruder. The three boys never spoke to me, nor I to them. They flew past me, heaving bundles into the vestibule, where a growing mound of objects awaited the movers. But my dependence on Anneliese went beyond her occasional command. She was the sole source of my understanding, incomplete as it was, of the annals of her family. I was startled to learn that timid Mrs. Mitwisser, whose eyelids were so red, and whose thin nostrils trembled like a rabbit's, had held a senior fellowship at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.
    "They threw her out," Anneliese explained, "and they threw papa out of the University. The Quakers brought us over, that's why we're here. Mama says they saved us. Papa says sometimes mama acts as if she doesn't like being saved. But anyhow there was a mistake."
    The mistake was comical. In their good-hearted intent to rescue a family of refugees, the Board of the Hudson Valley Friends College had requested its provost to invite Professor Rudolf Mitwisser, the well-known German specialist in the history of religion, to teach several seminars on the Charismites, a sixteenth-century mystical Christian sect, an offshoot of the Pneuma Brethren of northeastern Bavaria. The Board, businessmen mainly, had confused the Charismites—famous for their emphasis on the Spirit Within, akin to the Friends' Inner Light—with the Karaites.
    I asked Anneliese who the Karaites were.
    "Oh, they're just papa's people. But it didn't matter about the mistake, the Board got us out and gave papa the job. He didn't mind about the Charismites. And they rented this house for us. Here, look, I sent Gerhardt for the rope you're going to need."
    She handed me a scissors and a rough hairy coil. I had been packing books all that day, as she had directed me to do. There were thirty-two boxes filled with Professor Mitwisser's strange indecipherable volumes, and in order to cram as many books as possible into each container I had arranged them in rows and towers, meticulously, according to their sizes and shapes. The rope scored and burned my palms as I tied the boxes shut.
    Half an hour later Anneliese informed me that her father was not pleased, and after a moment he arrived to tell me so himself. His hands, with their great workman's thumbs, were soot-blackened. He had been sorting papers stored in the coal bin, he said; his eyebrows stood up furiously, like a forest of sooty straws.
    "Why am I interrupted by such nonsense? Anneliese! This is how an intelligent creature organizes scholarship? By how tall and how short?"
    I protested, "I had to make the books fit in the boxes."
    "They must fit by idea, by logic. Ach, what cataclysm, what foolishness. You disrupt an entire library, Fräulein! And you, Anneliese, you permitted this?"
    I was helpless: the books were in German and in what I supposed was Hebrew. There were other languages I could not recognize. I saw then that it would not always be safe to take orders from Anneliese; she was not above falling into error and