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views of farmlands and a distant steeple. Sonic booms from American aircraft thundered frequently overhead. At John’s urging, the familycultivated the habits of the Bavarian people. Every morning at half past eight Judy’s mother hung the featherbeds out the windows to air. On weekends they ate their largest meal at noon, often after a brisk hike at Jägerkamp or Miesing. Around the supper table John frequently enthused about the fine healthy practices of the Germans, such as playing sports well into adulthood and not being nosy about their neighbors.
    When they first moved into the home, the garden was in full bloom: bright red poppies, the purple globes of thistle, delicate and poisonous cups of foxglove, bleeding heart blossoms hanging on a stalk like a string of predictions. Blueberries burst ripe on the bushes, and Judy liked to eat them as she played, imagining herself to be a caveman’s child traveling through a wild land never before seen by human beings. Her own Eden, a child’s Eden with no lurking specter of defilement, no serpent watching her; she slipped the slender cups of foxglove over her fingers, licked the backs of poppy and nasturtium petals to make designs on her bare legs. Her sandals slouched in the dirt beside the hens-and-chicks that lined the rock garden, the plants swollen with rain and primeval as her fantasies.
    At breakfast her mother served her a hard roll from the market and a soft-boiled egg in a leaf-green eggcup. She hung out the featherbeds and lined the birdcage with page four of the Stars and Stripes. She tapped the cat’s bowl five times on the back porch and then walked Judy to the bus stop one mile away.
    At the new school nothing was familiar. Judy could not write in the impeccably tidy rounded hand with its looping G ’s and calligraphic H ’s. She spoke no German, could not read music, knew no prayers. At reading time the class read moral tales from Der Struwwelpeter, a large flat book on whose cover a pigeon-chested boy stared outward with a hollowexpression, his fingernails grown to hideous claws, his yellow hair like steel wool. A billowing red shirt and green tights clad his stumpy body. She could not understand the poem about him, and was glad.
    As cooler weather crept in, the blueberry bushes turned a flaming red. The bleeding hearts shriveled, and the remaining plants revealed their skeletons: the dry rattling husks of the poppies, the fragile mother-of-pearl leaves of the bony beige Silbertaschen. Only the chrysanthemums remained, their slim white petals bursting like fireworks from a tight little but ton of a head, the last flower before winter. Judy was largely bored, and so often her mother sent her to play at the home of a German girl, Daniela, their nearest neighbor a few lots away.
    They didn’t speak the same language. That was part of the problem, although Judy doubted she and Daniela would have been friends in any tongue. The girl was overbearing and precociously athletic, while Judy frequently missed any ball rolled to her in kickball and felt her bladder seize at the very thought of climbing a rope. Daniela’s idea of fun was to demonstrate a gymnastic trick and encourage Judy to try it, and then, when she failed, to jeer at her in the universal language of mockery. She was the baby of her family, with an older sister and brother who rolled their eyes at her outbursts in a way Judy could not. By October Judy had given up on Daniela and, when forced to play at her house, walked straight around back to the barn and hung out with the girl’s older brother, Rudi, who spoke serviceable English. Sometimes she did her homework in the barn, and as she worked he helped her untangle the incomprehensible words before her.
    “Der Struwwelpeter!” Rudi exclaimed one day, when she pulled out the text and her copybook. “A terrible book!”
    Judy smiled broadly with relief. So she wasn’t alone in detesting the thing. “Did you have to read it?”
    “Of course.