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painting, about Beccafiumi and the Roman career of Il Sodoma, and about Meissen porcelain. He knew everything about Meissen, and passed it on. He also insisted that the Nazis were excellent persons because they would bring back the Kaiser, and the glorious great estates, and there would again be a shining culture all through Germany.
    Lucia thought she knew better. Lucia said nothing.
    The Herr Doktor Professor was a bit of a footnote to the human race, insistent on every one of his three degrees, a belly trailed with vines of stuck hair, limbs like badly rolled cigarettes to hold the belly up, the perfect antidote if your husband is Adonis. She found herself an appetite surrounded by lard. She could rely on his selfishness, a grunting, sweating, demanding person, a man so wedded to the importance of what he’d read twenty years ago that he’d shout out abstract, compound nouns as he came.
    She learned what he had to teach: how the making of porcelain had once been an occult wonder; how Meissen loved the arcane too much and almost went bankrupt guarding a secret that everyone else had already guessed; and how Heinrich Kühn threw out the alchemists, cut out the jargon, and let in the bracing, progressive, scientific air of the nineteenth century. The Herr Doktor Professor dearly loved a reformer like Kühn, the more violent, the better. Somehow in his mind everything circled back so simply to the glories of National Socialism, so nothing in particular did, so it did not seem to matter.
    She did see flags, banners, slogans, prisoners, and houses that were empty. But what she remembered mostly was lectures on how well Meissen did when Germany was strong and united, or at least without customs barriers, and what a lesson that was for the modern state; and she remembered waiting, as she listened, for the good doctor to pounce on her breasts.
    He said it was good they were both married, made them free. “You don’t have to explain yourself,” he said. He was always on his mettle to keep her happy, by books, by talking about glory, by fucking her fast and rough, and most of all by allowing her to expect and anticipate, which kept her in a state of constant excitement much more than the actual touch of his sausage fingers, or his unusually rough skin.
    She didn’t want to come alive this way. She knew she’d depend on him.
    He carried about with him the odd vegetable smell of old, deep dirt. He talked about personality and genius, about style and temperament, about the variation between pulls of a particular design and in their decoration. He talked about paste upon paste, and shaded flowers, as he held her by her hair.
    Then she was pregnant.
    There was a neat, blond man called Müller, rather tall, and a stubby little professor who was rather dark. There would not be any ambiguity about the father of her child. She simply decided that it could only be Müller’s. She wouldn’t let herself think anything else.
    The professor liked to feel her belly as it grew, pressing and scratching. Müller attended to her, gently and calmly and on the exact timetable of the hours he could spare from his work.
    And Nicholas was born: undoubtedly the child of Hans Peter Müller.
    At the beginning, Nicholas was her portable lover. She loved the connection of having him suckle at her breast; she only stopped when he was already three. She loved his company, his utter absorption in her face, his willingness to be always at her disposal.
    Hans Peter Müller, she decided, saw the boy as nothing more than the appropriate result of a marriage. But she was busy with the professor, and she never saw Müller playing football with his small, unsteady son, or teaching him how to pick berries on a hot afternoon, or easing him into the run of the river to swim. She was not interested in Müller’s emotions, which she had long ago decided did not count, so she missed the wild and generous look in his eyes when he saw his boy.
    However, she still needed