Read The German Girl for Free Online Page B

building.
    “It’s a filthy dog they picked up in the street,” she has told our other neighbors several times. “Who knows, he may be covered in fleas.” They all think she’s crazy.
    But Tramp still greets her when he sees her. He doesn’t care that she rejects him. He has a droopy eye. He’s a bit deaf. There’s a kink in his tail. That’s why the old woman hates him. Mr. Levin rescued him and talks to him in French.
    “ Mon clochard, ” he calls him. He told me the dog used to belong to an old French woman who lived on her own like him and was found dead in La Touraine, one of the oldest apartment buildings on Morningside Drive.
    I remembered suddenly that Mom used to say, “We live in the French part of Manhattan,” in the days when she would tell me bedtime stories.
    When the janitor opened the old French lady’s door, Tramp escaped, and they couldn’t catch him. A week later, during one of his early-morning walks, Mr. Levin noticed the dog struggling up the steep steps of Morningside Park. Then Tramp sat down at his feet.
    “ Mon clochard, ” he called him, and the dog jumped for joy.
    Tramp obediently followed Mr. Levin, a stocky old man with bushy gray eyebrows, back to his apartment. From then on, he became his faithful companion. The day he introduced Tramp to me, he said very seriously, “Next year I’ll be eighty, and at that age, you count the minutes you have left. I don’t want the same thing to happen to my clochard as it did last time. The moment they break my door down to find out why I haven’t been answering, I want my dog to know the way to your home.”
    “ Mon clochard, ” I said to Tramp in my American accent, stroking him.
    Even though Mom has never let me have a pet—apart from fish, who don’t live even as long as a flower—she knows she can’t refuse to have Tramp come to live with us, because we owe it to my only friend.
    “Anna, Mr. Levin is going to live a long time yet, so don’t get your hopes up,” she told me when I insisted we’d have to look after his dog.
    To me, Mr. Levin doesn’t seem old or young. I know he’s not strong, because he walks very carefully, but his mind is still as active as mine. He has an answer for everything, and when he stares you in the eye, you really have to pay attention.
    Now Tramp doesn’t want me to leave and starts whimpering.
    “Come on, you bad-mannered dog,” Mr. Levin comforts him. “Little Miss Anna has more important things to do.”
    As he says good-bye to me at his front door, Mr. Levin touches his mezuzah. I notice a single old photograph on the wall. It shows him with his parents: a good-looking young man with a smile on his face and thick black hair. Who knows whether Mr. Levin remembers those years in his village that was then part of Poland. It was such a long time ago.
    “You’re a girl with an old soul,” he says, laying his heavy hand on my head and giving me a kiss on my brow.
    I don’t know what it means, but I take it as a compliment.
    I go into my bedroom to tell all the day’s events to Dad, who is waiting on my bedside table. Tomorrow we’ll drop off the negatives at the photo lab. I tell him about Tramp and Mr. Levin and the dinner Mom made. The only thing I don’t mention is the scare we had in the morning. I don’t want to worry him with things like that. Everything’s going to be all right, I know it.
    I feel more exhausted than ever. I can’t keep my eyes open. I find it impossible to go on talking or to switch the light off. I’m dozing off when I hear Mom come into the room and turn off my bedside lamp. The unicorns stop spinning and take a rest, just like me. Mom covers me with the purple bedspread and gives me a long, gentle kiss.
    The next morning, a ray of sunshine wakes me; I forgot to pull downthe blinds. I get up startled, and for a few seconds I wonder: Was it all a dream?
    I hear noises outside my room. Somebody is in either the living room or the kitchen. I dress as fast