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Greta’s bedroom,” she said. She pointed behind me to a thin silk curtain.
    â€œDo you think we could find somewhere less out in the open?”
    â€œThese are my friends,” Françoise said. Her freckled skin grew bright with embarrassment. “They won’t mind.”
    â€œI can see,” I said. “It’s just that,” I said. I could feel the heat slipping from between us. “It’s just that I haven’t ever seen that before. Or, you know.”
    Her face brightened until it was almost brown. I could only imagine the shade of red mine now turned. She took me by my hand. Her palms felt as soft as uncooked rice.
    Back at her flat, it was as if Françoise was returning to adolescence. She was nervous, as if this was her first time as well. She turned on a softly glowing lamp. She walked over to the stovetop in the corner of her room, turned the governor on low, and lit a burner with a match. She placed a black teapot on the burner and pulled some chamomile tea from a cabinet above her stove. While I stood silent in a corner, she waited for the tea to steep, poured two cups on the countertop, and then walked over to me.
    â€œI love the smell of this tea, don’t you?” Françoise said.
    Before I could answer her, she kissed me. Her hand was clutching me. On the coarse pallet on her floor, I took Françoise’s clothes off. I was a miner seeking some long-sought vein—only after its ore was heated could the precious metal be extracted. Something different happened to Françoise than was happening to me. After I’d finished she grew as cold as the tea on her counter.
    â€œI won’t ask it again,” Françoise said. “It’s been a very long time since I asked it of someone, but with you I feel I can.”
    The room filled with the smell of tea. Until she stood and walked over to the lamp by her bed to turn it out I didn’t understand what she was asking, but then I saw: she wanted the quiet privacy of darkness. In the slick, dim room she moved beneath my fingers until she was done.
    When I woke the next morning Françoise had already left. There was no note, no sign of her. I gathered my things and returned to my flat. That night I worked my shift, and the next two, and did not see her again until the next time her band played. When they finished, she told me to meet her at her flat in an hour.
    She was in just a robe when I arrived. She had her mandolin out. She began to pick some American folk song she’d learned from her records. While she played, I had a chance to take in her flat with the lamp lit. Clothes lay upon its floor in squalor. But I soon came to learn that if we needed to leave, she always knew just where to find a blouse, a sweater. She kept a fresh tulip on her windowsill each afternoon. Years later, when the war was over, an old Dutch woman would tell me of friends who ate the tulips from their gardens when they were the only thing left to eat. But there in the serenity before the war broke out in earnest, the splash of violet or carmine or vermilion on Françoise’s windowsill lent order to her room. She may have been born cross-eyed, but Françoise as I knew her could see and see and see.
    6.
    One night Françoise invited me to the home of a couple she knew well, and whose complicated role in her life would grow clearer to me in the weeks after I met them. The Brauns lived in Delfshaven, a quiet neighborhood fifteen blocks from Françoise’s flat—236 Heemraadssingel. Their block followed a canal up from the Nieuwe Maas. Over the glassy, still surface of their canal, languid willows dipped their arms down to the water as if searching for something just below its surface.
    Inside we encountered Herr Braun, a dentist, and Frau Braun, his wife, who had been Françoise’s teacher. By the time she was sixteen, Françoise had already been at work in the brothel for a number of years. Frau