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old lover. This was her limbo, trapped somewhere between reality and fiction. Why? Ruth studied her behavior while keeping her thoughts to herself. Recognizing the same defense mechanisms she’d seen her use as a girl.
    One morning, when Gerta was nine and a student at the Queen Charlotte School, her teacher punished her by not allowing her to go and play outside. She pretended that she didn’t care, as if she had always disliked having to go outdoors anyway. When Frau Hellen announced that her punishment was over, she stood her ground. For an entire year she remained indoors, reading alone at her desk, not wanting to grant the teacher the satisfaction of believing she had wounded Gerta. It wasn’t that she was proud, just different. She never dealt well with being Jewish. Inventing stories about where she came from, like Moses saved from the water, or that she was the daughter of Norwegian whalers or pirates or, based on the novel she was reading, that her brothers formed part of King Arthur’s Round Table, or that she had a star…
    But there were other sorts of dreams, of course there were. There was the lake, the table covered in linen, a vase with tulips, John Reed’s book, and a pistol. That was a whole other story.
    Once, as she was leaving the doctor’s office, she sensed someone walking behind her, but when she turned around to look, there was no one there, just a bunch of trees and streets. She kept walking from the Porte d’Orleans, through that area of vacant lands, and past Boulevard Jourdan, with a feeling of uneasiness at her back, as if she could hear a light squeaking of rubber soles. Every now and again a gust of wind would come, rustling up the papers and leaves, almost taking her and her scant 110 pounds with it as well. Bundled up in her coat and gray beret, she walked, eyeing the windows of the closed storefronts, seeing no one’s reflection but her own. October and its shadows of longing.
    She was thin, mostly due to fatigue. She slept poorly, burdened by a flood of blurry memories. It seemed centuries had passed since she abandoned Leipzig, yet she still hadn’t found her place in this city.
    â€œI know that one day I arrived in Paris,” she would tell René Spitz in his office one afternoon when she decided to change her medical coat for the couch. “I know that for a while I lived at other people’s expense, doing what others did, thinking what others thought.” It was true. The reoccurring feeling that bothered her most was living a life that wasn’t hers. But which was hers? She’d look at herself apprehensively in the bathroom mirror, staring at each of her features, as if at any given moment she could undergo a transformation with the fear that she’d no longer recognize herself. Until one day the change happened. She grabbed onto the sink with both hands, stuck her head beneath the faucet for a few minutes, and then shook her head to the sides like a dog in the rain. Afterward, she returned to studying herself in the mirror. Then, with the utmost care, she covered her hair, strand by strand, with red henna clay, using her fingers to comb it all back. She liked the color of dried blood.
    â€œYou look like a raccoon,” Ruth said when she came home and found Gerta underneath a pile of blankets. Her red hair made her face appear harder and thinner.
    Inside her house, she never hesitated to display who she really was. But outside, at the café gatherings, she became someone else. Dividing yourself in two, that was the first rule of survival: knowing how to differentiate exterior life from interior suffering. It was something she learned to do from an early age, in the same manner she learned how to express herself well in German at school and go home afterward and speak in Yiddish. By the end of the day, all curled up in her pajamas with a book, Gerta was nothing more than a pilgrim before the walls of a foreign city. On