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know how far he thought he was going, but he wouldn’t step down, and the train rolled slowly down the mountain between banks of still white.
    He didn’t have his passport, so he got off the second train just before the Gotthard.
    The night they married was also the first night they made love. Lucia remembered so clearly how she anticipated glory at last, and what she got was comfort, which was nowhere near enough.
    Müller surrounded her body with his, was infinitely patient, was considerate and gentle, was absorbed in her beauty, which was, in the circumstances, of very little interest to her. She wanted to be shocked and excited, but he was always waiting for her.
    Her parents did not seem to mind that she was leaving Italy. Her mother was making sharp little jokes about the “interests of the state” nowadays, and how Mussolini wouldn’t allow pictures of women too thin or too wiry to bear babies; “It’s an offense to be smart,” she said. “Think of that.” Her father’s authority had grown a little dusty. He said he wished he’d been a proper captain of industry, which required inheritance, and not a moneylender, which kept you a kind of omnipotent clerk. It was important that someone do what you did; but you did not matter in particular.
    Lucia, in the next few years, had all too much time to think. She wondered if her parents would have had the same easy tolerance if she had presented some carpet man from Turkey, an ironworker from Lille, a peasant from the Alsace; she wondered if they would still have been glad for her to go. She at least produced an accountant who might have ambitions, and a Swiss who could get her out of the flag-ridden streets and the thuggish countryside and keep her safe.
    So Lucia Rossi went to live with Hans Peter Müller in a small town in Bavaria. He was the accountant in a firm that made buttons.
    He knew things. He knew about bone and horn and glass and Bakelite and brass and the knock-on pricing differential between hole and shank. He talked about such things. He once explained to her, when she’d run out of ways to stop him, that it took phenol and formaldehyde to make Bakelite.
    She had every reason to resent him. He remained such a ruthlessly kind man. She woke up beside him, and he was kind. She drank coffee with someone sweet and generous. And when he finally walked down the garden path to go to work, checking the five flowering shrubs, then she’d go deep into the house, the inner rooms, and she learned to bellow into the corners without making a sound, her face red, her cheeks out, not even the sound of breathing.
    She’d have coffee again, and read the social columns: Bella Fromm, she remembered, in the
Vossische Zeitung
. She started to be able to remember all the dinners and musicales and galas and picnics Bella went to, not just imagine them. There weren’t many galas in their small town.
    And it was a town so small that nobody looked directly at anyone else; everything was a rumor. The mayor shot himself and everyone said the police made him do it, but they didn’t know if he was a crook or a pervert or Hitler’s best friend or all three. Everyone resented everything—the price of meat because everything had to be sent to Berlin, the fact that you couldn’t get asparagus in tins. Lucia learned something. In small places, it isn’t that people know everything about you, because that would be tolerable. Each of them makes you up and sticks to his story, and each of them has a slightly different version.
    She had to get out, obviously. But she couldn’t simply run. She was a wife, and as such had a proper place, guaranteed by papers. She was a foreigner, too. Her parents did not want her back in the muddle of fascist Italy. She thought perhaps she could find herself a lover, pick someone out of the main street, someone from the button factory or the butcher’s shop.
    She decided, instead, on art.
    The Herr Doktor Professor liked to talk about Siennese