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pigeon—on top, its wings spread to keep from toppling off.
    A guard dressed like a soldier opened the gate. His neck bulged, and his fingers were stained from tobacco. In his glance Trudi recognized that flash of curiosity she’d encountered before in strangers, but today it made her feel prickly, that curiosity, made her feel that she should be inside these walls where they locked up people who were different. In the eyes of the guard—she knew for certain—she was different, and it was a knowledge that would torment her from that day forward and fuel her longing to grow and take revenge on those who spurned her.
    As the guard motioned toward the largest of the buildings, Trudi hesitated, but her father took her by the shoulders, and the guard shut the gate immediately behind them as if to keep them there. She had wanted to bring her mother’s birthday presents—a thick bathrobe and fur boots—but her father hadn’t let her though the birthday was only two days away.
    “It’s dangerous,” he’d said. “We’ll celebrate when she comes home.”
    His family had a history of disasters from celebrating special occasions too early: his Aunt Mechthild had drowned in the Rhein when her grandfather’s birthday picnic was held one day early; a cousin, Willi, had been injured in a train crash after celebrating his parents’ silver anniversary a week early; and his sister, Helene, had broken her arm when she opened a confirmation gift three days too soon.
    In the lobby, which smelled of cinnamon and candles, Trudi’s father wiped her nose and unbuttoned her coat. A friendly nurse with loud shoes led them down a corridor and through a smaller set of gates that also locked behind them. Trudi’s mother stood waiting in a room with white chairs, all lined up along the walls. Her elbows angledas if she were carrying something fragile in her empty hands, she walked toward them, her eyes faded, and all at once Trudi no longer minded being inside these gates; she had missed her mother so fiercely that any place would be good, as long as she could be with both parents. Her mother smelled like the lobby. In front of Trudi she dropped to her knees and brought both palms against Trudi’s cheeks as if to memorize the shape of her face.
    A few other families were visiting patients, and Leo Montag led his wife and daughter into a corner, where he arranged three chairs in a triangle that separated them from the others in the room. Only then did he embrace his wife and touch her forehead with his lips. Her hair was braided in a way Trudi had not seen on her before—starting at her temples in tight coils that puckered her skin as though someone who didn’t know her well had braided it for her.
    Her mother wore those braids the following week when she was permitted to return home, and she smiled her weary hospital smile when Trudi untied the ribbons and brushed her hair until it crackled and floated on her shoulders like angels’ hair. Though it wasn’t silver like the angels’ hair you drape over the branches of your Christmas tree, its dark mass took in strands of light with each brush stroke. At first, her mother slept much of each day as if gathering reservoirs of strength for any movement she might have to make, but by Christmas, when Leo lit the beeswax candles on the pine tree in the living room, she looked much more like the mother Trudi remembered.
    They ate carp in beer sauce and the white veal sausage that the butcher made only from mid-December till Christmas. When Trudi sang two songs and recited one poem, her mother kept applauding until Trudi felt so flustered that she trapped her mother’s hands between hers to make them stop.
    They opened their gifts which were arranged on the round wicker table, beginning with the package from America: Aunt Helene had sent silver napkin rings with matching spoons and a
Hampelmann—
jumping jack. When Trudi opened her largest present from her parents—a porcelain baby doll with