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No humming. We can’t see any track workers, either. You can’t escape a train by jumping into the river; it’s too shallow at this point, and full of large stones. But over there, on the other side, there are the prettiest wild flowers and a spot that no one else knows about. When we reach it I undress and paddle in the river. Johannes shouts something at me; he’s tinkering with his camera. I shout back that he should join me, it’s lovely in the water, but he doesn’t hear me.
    We don’t get home until evening. Frieda’s grumbling, wondering where I’ve been all this time. “I could have done with her help,” she says. Then she smiles and says, “Why doesn’t she just go and fetch me some chives from the garden?” I dash out.
    For dinner there’s black bread with butter, thin slices of hard-boiled egg sprinkled with chives, and salad with a dressing of oil, vinegar, water, and sugar. Dressing is a word we’ve learned only recently. Siegfried gets a fried schnitzel as well. We’re sitting at thetable in the yard, among the flower tubs, when Siegfried says that he’s really looking forward to seeing Hartmut. He would have been quite happy to disappear back then, too; he only stayed because it would have broken his mother’s heart. That’s how he puts it. Frieda doesn’t stir. Marianne looks from one to the other. Perhaps she’s wondering what to say, but in the end decides it would be better to keep quiet. They’ll be here tomorrow, the Westerners, from Rosenheim, from Bavaria.
    I decide I will go back to my mother’s after all, to fetch my suitcase. In it are some clothes I’d like to wear when our visitors are here. I’ve heard that they make fun of us over there; I can’t get that magazine cover out of my head; the one with the picture of a girl holding a cucumber and saying “my first banana.” It’s still a lovely, bright summer’s evening, but there’s a distinct chill drifting up from the river. I borrow a scarf from Marianne, tell Johannes I might be back late, and set off.
    When I get there, my grandparents are sitting on the bench outside the house. I stop to talk, but I don’t go into any detail. Then I ask about my father, Ulrich, the eldest of their four sons. So it’s true, he is going to marry this Nastja, a nineteen-year-old. My grandmother asks whether I’m going to move back in, now that the house is being renovated. “We’re even getting a flush toilet,” she says. And the old washhouse is being converted into a toolshed. My grandmother used to do the laundry there once a week. It was so hot that the steam rose to the ceiling in huge clouds before dripping back down. The laundry tub was almost the size of my grandmother. She would stir the washing with a long wooden paddle, first to the left, then to the right, until it was clean. The dirtiest items were scrubbed on the washboard.
    Mom is going to have her own bathroom with a shower. The old boiler and the tub where we’d have a bath every Friday, one afterthe other, are being ripped out. The small room behind my grandparents’ kitchen is going to be a guest room. It’s awkward for all of them that Mom’s still living here. We had our own house for a few years, over in the new part of the village. I was ten when we moved in, and before then we’d lived here, with my grandparents. I had a lovely, bright room on the second floor, a fold-down bed, blue-and-white-checked curtains, and lilac wallpaper with a flower pattern. The living room had an open hearth where we’d light a fire every day around Christmastime. It was a brand-new house and Dad had built it himself.
    After the divorce, when Dad disappeared to the Soviet Union for good, we stayed on there. I was thirteen, Mom was thirty-three. But six months later we packed our things into boxes and Grandma got our old rooms ready again. We couldn’t keep the house without Dad’s income. My mother sold it.
    I chose the attic bedroom at my grandparents’. I was on