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seventeen-year-old girl who was too delicate to attend school, she could sit for hours without wincing, wielding her needle as if her life depended on it. Shehad made twice as many mittens and caps as I had, and not once had she complained.
    I was too tired even to sleep. Shutting my eyes, I tried to recollect that magical evening when I’d sat beside Mademoiselle and beheld another tragedy unspooling before me. I desperately needed to conjure up the memory of her scent on my hands, to see her smile and hear her laughter, as she confided her aspiration.
    Women with secrets must also be friends, oui ?
    But she had faded and become a memento—inanimate, sepia tinted. As lifeless as amber.
    I had lost her.
    All that remained was this endless drudgery and daily fear, and the fragile hope that somehow, someday, the war would finally come to an end and life would begin anew.
    MUTTI DEPARTED FOR THE FRONT IN EARLY 1918 , after urgent word arrived that Colonel von Losch had been wounded. As promised, she dispatched Liesel and me to Berlin.
    At last, I was back in the city I loved, though I’d only experienced it through outings with Mutti. But Berlin was not lively; it was no longer the fastest city in the world. Everywhere I looked it was deflated and grim, the streets deserted save for old people and black-clad widows clutching tattered shawls, scavenging in the trash heaps or trapping stray cats.
    Oma was insulated from the suffering. Uncle Willi still turned a decent profit with his munitions factory, paid by the kaiser himself, and the upscale Felsing residence with its chandeliers and velvet drapes was much the same as I remembered from my childhood, a pantheon to our familial industriousness.
    “When did you become so beautiful?” my grandmother asked, peering through her spectacles at me. “You look like no one else in our family, mein Lieber .”
    “I look like Mutti,” I said. We were in her upstairs boudoir—she stillused the word “boudoir,” peppering her conversation with French phrases, though we were supposed to despise France and every other nation that wasn’t our ally. “I have her hair and eyes—”
    “Not her eyes.” Oma’s smile hollowed her face, her bracelets chattering on her bony wrists. “You don’t have our eyes at all. Yours are more wide spaced and heavy lidded. No, much as I hate to say it, those are your father’s eyes. And his forehead. He was handsome, your father. You probably don’t remember him, but he was quite attractive in a robust manner. But a Dietrich —” She puffed out her sunken cheeks. “The name says it all. Skeleton key. He was like one, too, fitting every lock without opening a single door. He wasn’t right for Josephine. We tried to tell her, but charity and advice are two things she’s never been capable of accepting.”
    I avoided the mention of my father. He was indeed a shadow, an icon whom Mutti had set on a permanent pedestal. His photograph had hung prominently in our flat, edged in gilded rococo homage, but I’d never seen anything but a florid man I didn’t know. I preferred instead to explore Oma’s private room, with its clutter of perfume bottles, enameled gewgaws, and faux Fabergé eggs. A full-length looking glass occupied a corner, festooned with scarves and hats. Looking into a mirror wasn’t something I’d done much of these days. Mutti had turned all the mirrors in Dessau to face the wall in honor of our dead.
    Now, I beheld my reflection: thin, with my dress drooping like a misshapen sack on my diminished frame, but taller than I seemed to recall, and . . .
    I inched closer.
    Was I beautiful? I saw the face I’d always known, shaped by the deprivation of war: my cheeks drawn, my skin pale, and my lips chapped. I hadn’t worn my hair loose during the day since the war began—another sign of respect which Mutti insisted on—and at night, I was often too weary to unwind it. Now, I reached up and loosened my braids, letting my hair