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stretching out in an ocean stream of talk. Their own endless stop-and-go.

Chapter
3
No More Fairy Tales
    And what of this could Frau Direktor put in a cryptic letter to that eons-distant friend? The letter might get there, or it might not. A child might arrive safely with Max or Madame — or might not. For in a few short days their world had changed. Almost overnight, it seemed, the clinic staff had struck camp. No rattle of work in the kitchen or footsteps in the halls. Kurt, their silent giant of an orderly, who for years attended the children in every conceivable way — from discovering the whereabouts of a lost sock to fetching the special glue to mend the broken arm of a doll — simply stopped coming to work. Hanna, their hook-nosed nurse, who could coax a thermometer into a chattering, feverish mouth, cure a case of rampant diarrhea, or find the right salve for a bruised knee — now she was gone. Their cook, with the face of a boiled lobster, and her Serbian dishwasher, with arms mottled from the suds — one who prepared and cleaned up an endless cycle of despoiled meals and the other who always found the special treat each child secretly loved (from a mandarin orange to an anchovy) but never told anyone, placing the dainty on the tray with a wink and a nod — they too were gone.
    And the clinic’s giggling imp of a chambermaid — good, thorough Petra — who made sixteen beds a day, who washed the wetted sheets and soiled clothes, who swept the floors and straightened the rooms, putting a hundred tin soldiers back in their box without losing the one-legged infantryman under the dresser, and who always placed the stuffed tiger on the pillow just so …
    All gone,
    Flown up into a winter sky like sharp little chimney swifts who feel an earthquake coming in their thin bird bones,- hovering over the earth until the tremors subside and it is once more safe to land. Marie’s fears were coming true despite all their efforts to understand. Soon to be put in a box and sent home. All the children sensed it.
Where's Kurt? I wanna
see
Hanna, Petra, are you there?
    And it struck them now, like a slap in the face
—
that their maid had never been merely a housekeeper, their cook merely a préparer of food, or their nurse the fetcher of clean bedpans, but the nimble fingers and willing backs that allowed the directorial “brains” to float above the daily cares. Abandoned now to the chosen elite, the clinic had become a leaden weight.
    Especially when the place was unkempt and there was no time to clean it, with mouths to feed and no hands to cook, when they felt lost and tired and too weak to care.
    Even crazy children knew. Their clinic was doomed.
    After a few days without support staff, Frau Direktor, Madame, and Max — consumed with cooking and cleaning — faced the brutal fact that three adults could not manage a dozen troubled children (nearly all of them prone to fits and rages) when housekeeping was thrown in too. You could tend to the furies or make the beds. Not both.
    Maximilian had missed shaving a spot on his chin several days running, giving him the appearance of someone sporting a new and bizarre style of beard. Bits of food clung to Madame Le Boyaus clothes, and she had torn her dress. In addition to cooking, she’d been changing the sheets of the chronic bed wetters — sometimes more than three times a day — later crawling about on her hands and knees to straighten the rooms.
    Then one morning Petra the housekeeper appeared on their front doorstep as if to save them, “I’m back,” she said simply. “I missed Marie.” And with no further fuss, Petra, that good, thorough girl, went quietly to her tasks as if nothing had happened. But still, the daily routine — wash, cook, clean — was grinding them down. And so the accumulation of their errors began. First casting off one minor chore and then another. Telling