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summer dress with short sleeves. Dust billowed behind the motorcycle as it raced down Schlosserstrasse toward the Rhein, and her mother held on tighter as the front wheel disengaged from the ground for an instant and the motorcycle darted up the dike, then down the other side. Hair whipped her face, and when Emil Hesping stopped the motorcycle beneath a stand of poplars, the wide leather seat still held the warm imprint of her thighs. He let his palm rest on that imprint for a moment, and she felt a sudden heat between her thighs as though he were touching her skin. When he embraced her, she had to close her eyes against the sun and against the fear that had been with her since the day her husband had left for the Russian front—the fear that Leo would not return alive.
    “We skidded … on the way back … the other side of the dike.” Trudi saw Emil Hesping get up, awkwardly, from the rough road, brush the dust from his arms, and stagger past the fallen motorcycleto where her mother had been flung. Her face was scratched. Blood rose around the fragments of gravel embedded in her knee and streamed down her calf into her white sandal.
    “The same knee.” Her mother laughed that wild laugh. “The same knee as your father’s. It happened to him, too. That day.” She snatched Trudi into her arms and settled her in the curve of her waist and belly like a much younger child. “Because of me,” she chanted and rocked her daughter as if to make up for all the days she hadn’t rocked her as an infant, “because of me he got hurt.…”
    “Gertrud?” Leo Montag’s shadow sloped into the opening between the beams. Between his boots, sun glinted on the frozen grass. “Gertrud?” he called. “Trudi?”
    Before Trudi could answer, her mother laid one finger against Trudi’s lips. Her breath felt warm against Trudi’s face. Carefully, the girl skimmed her fingers across her mother’s knee. It was smooth; the skin had closed across the tiny wounds like the surface of the river after you toss stones into the waves. Only you knew they were there.
    Unless you told.

two

1918-1919
    T HAT DAY T RUDI’S FATHER DID NOT OPEN THE PAY-LIBRARY . I NSTEAD, HE borrowed the Abramowitzs’ Mercedes. Its back had windows and looked so much like a coach that you almost expected to see horses harnessed to it, but the front of the car was open, with tufted seats and a steering wheel on a long, angled shaft. While Frau Abramowitz read Trudi the fairy tale of the devil with the three golden hairs and fed her
Brötchen
with Dutch cheese, Leo Montag settled his wife in the closed compartment of the car with a blanket and two pillows from their bed, which she would pluck apart, filling the compartment with feathers that would cling to her green coat and hat like snowflakes by the time they’d reach Grafenberg, where she was to stay for nearly seven weeks.
    It was snowing real snow when Trudi was finally allowed to visit her mother. She’d been in the Grafenberg forest before—it was a popular hiking area—but she’d only seen the high walls of the asylum from a distance. This time, though, she and her father walked up to the wall, close enough to see the shards of glass in the mortar along the top edge. Sharp and pointed, they could tear up your hands if you tried to escape. Trudi dug her hands deeply into the fur muff thatmatched the rabbit trim around her bonnet and on the collar of her coat. She wondered if anyone had climbed across this wall. Maybe the Kaiser had climbed across a wall like this in his fancy uniform when he’d escaped from Germany. But what if countries had even higher walls around them?
    A few days earlier her father had told her that the Kaiser had resigned and fled the country. “He’s in Holland,” her father had said. “Now we’ll have peace.” Trudi had seen pictures of the Kaiser: his mouth looked vain beneath the fancy mustache, and he wore a shiny helmet with a stiff, glittering bird—the size of a