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— living rooms, bedrooms, studies — the walls betrayed the decorating tastes of their now departed inhabitants, mosaics of greens and blues, walls papered or painted. Streets, too, had been ripped apart by explosions; big craters cut through stones and sand, through the granite blocks of pavements. Some of the streets led to neighbourhoods that no longer existed, deserted valleys in between mountains of debris. Smooth, steel tramway tracks still cut through them, ending in the piles of rubble, disappearing in grass and weeds.
    â€œThat’s nothing,” her parents told her. In 1945, when they arrived, it frightened them to walk past the abandoned shells of walls, of houses gutted and burnt. The city was empty, so terribly empty that for months after they would fight tears at the sight of a child in the street, the first, fragile promise of permanence. By the time Anna was born, the Baroque houses of the Old Market Square had been restored, their façades painted white, beige and pale yellow. By the time her parents took her for walks by the Gothic Town Hall with its brightly painted sundial or the majestic towers of the Cathedral on the Oder Island, it was almost possible to believe that the war had passed them by.
    â€œWhen did you leave Breslau?” she asked William that evening.
    â€œIn 1945, in January,” he said. “I was five. But we came to Canada before I turned seven.”
    The walnut panelled room of the Faculty Club was beginning to grow too noisy and too hot. Anna could feel people pushing her from behind, murmuring their apologies and moving on. She had to strain her ears to separate his voice from the noise around her.
    The thought that he was German, even if his German childhood might be nothing more than a few memories of the war, cautioned her to be careful of the things she said. She didn’t want him to think she was expecting expressions of guilt, feelings of contrition for the crimes of another generation. But in truth she was. She needed to put him in a safe zone, for she was already aware of how much he could mean to her.
    â€œI don’t really remember much,” he said.
    Later she was to learn that it wasn’t true. All she had to do was to discover the right question. But at that time she didn’t know about Käthe, did not know that she should have asked him about his mother.
    And yet, even then, he did remember something. In his Breslau street, as in the Wroclaw street she grew up on, there was a row of acacia trees, covered in pale white flowers. In the spring the whole street looked as if it were sprinkled with creamy snow. When he sucked the tips of the flowers they gave up a faint taste of sweetness and wilted under his fingers.
    â€œNothing else?” she asked. He must have heard the disappointment in her voice for he told her of the long wait for the train that was to take his mother and him out of the city, the smell of heavy coats, of sweat, the suffocating feeling of having nowhere to escape to. “I’ve never been so afraid in my life,” he said. “And I don’t think I ever will be again.”
    He had calmed himself by staring at the spirals and mazes of cracks on the ivory tiles lining the tunnel of Breslau
Hauptbahnhof.
Every single one of them different. He had traced these cracks with his finger, the little cells and cobwebs made by the frost and the pounding pressure of heavy trains passing above.
    â€œHave you ever gone back?” Her throat was dry and her voice came out trembling, losing its self-assurance.
    In 1975 or 76, he wasn’t quite sure of the year, he had toured Poland with the McGill student choir and Wroclaw was one of the stops.
Wratislavia Cantans
, he remembered the name of the festival. Had had a beer near the Wroclaw Town Hall and watched the crowds. The women were gorgeous. He liked the way they walked, their bodies swaying in a rhythm almost forgottenon this side of the Atlantic. And